Interview of Julian Egelstaff (cont')

RG: The "everyman" concept was quite common in the movies of the fifties. The concept that the main character possessed qualities that every person could see in themselves yet qualities that were hard to find in just one person. Is this why Lone Wolf is so popular? As a character he is morally upstanding and "good."

JE: Well, I really don't think Lone Wolf is an everyman. He's not popular because he's upstanding and good. He's really not that good in a lot of ways. As someone pointed out on Kaiwisdom a while back, at Gorn Cove, you can have a jolly old time slaughtering the village guard and half the village too! I think Lone Wolf is popular because of his strength and determination, his drive against the adversity in his life. Those are just the things that attracted me to the character: he was a powerful loaner, essentially. I do think those are the most attractive qualities in him, since he isn't always a picture of goodness. Yes, he does represent the forces of good in Magnamund; he is the front man in the fight against evil but the neatest things about him--what I think comes out in the discussions I've seen online--are his cool powers, and the way the character is always the guy who gets things done. He's a leader. He's the one upon whom the fate of all rests, so it's cool to play that role. That's the essential draw of the character.

The moral aspects that come out in the course of the overall story arc, those higher philosophical ideals of the Kai, restoring them to their former glory, loyalty to Sommerlund and Lone Wolf's friends, those are secondary to the basic thrill of being in the middle of the action, AND, the believability of the world in which it takes place.

Joe did a great thing by making Magnamund so rich and detailed. By doing so, he created a setting which you cared about. So when you're off to retrieve the Lorestone of Varetta, you care about the outcome. The story is involved enough that you can feel (I know I did) as if your actions matter. So when you combine the coolness of being the guy on who's shoulders rests the fate of the universe, with a universe you tangibly want to save, you have a really compelling package that's easy to get right into.

(That being said, I do think an essential part of the backstory, the world, is the Kai themselves. After all, Lone Wolf carries the torch of the Kai for twelve books so that he can restore the order and so the goodness of the Kai and the fact they do stand on the side of what's right is important and a valuable feature of the character, but it's not the essential thing.)

RG: I see... Without a doubt, Joe has created a believable world--one that takes us wherever our heart desires. Do you think Lone Wolf would have been more/less successful had it not been stylized into a gamebook format?

JE: Less successful, by far! Joe had created a role playing world. He says this in a couple places, that Magnamund was the world he created for his AD&D campaigns. The strengths of the series, the compelling character, and the believable world, are all powerful precisely because the reader assumes the role. Lone Wolf was designed as a role playing experience. I always felt the stories were good enough to work as novels on their own and I was intrigued by the Legends series when it came out though personally I shied away from them, since I was still too into the character myself to read some alternate telling of the stories that I knew as things I had done myself.

The Legends books have a much more fleshed out world. The cool things about the world in the Lone Wolf gamebooks are the sort of tourist-like details: the things you "experience" yourself. Things like the Baknar oil, or the sewers in Barrakeesh--the little details here and there and the big things that you see for yourself like the Maakengorge and the Danarg. But in the Legends books, the world is much more philosophical. The good versus evil issues are much more prevalent. That's necessary to make a fully fleshed novel. You couldn't just take Lone Wolf book 1, or any book and change the "you" to "he" and take out the passage numbers, pick a path through and write it as a novel. It would be totally uninteresting. I think the fact that the stories appeared in the Legends books is testimony to the fact the "Legends" of Lone Wolf are compelling enough stories to work in a format other than as a gamebook. But the gamebooks themselves are, I think, quite carefully tailored to work as gamebooks, and wouldn't work in other formats.

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