The Voyage of the Moonstone

Lone Wolf #21

by Joe Dever, Brian Williams (Illustrator)

The Moonstone is a legendary artefact that was created by the godlike Shianti. It contains the might of all their magic and wisdom, the sum of their divine knowledge. Lone Wolf - Supreme Master of the Kai - has succeeded in retrieving it from the clutches of Naar, the King of the Darkness.Now the Moonstone must be returned to its creators who are exiled upon the remote Isle of Lorn in southern Magnamund. Someone must take the fabled artefact to the Shianti and Lone Wolf has chosen you, the most promising warrior, among the ranks of the New Order Kai, to carry out this vital mission. Armed with the special weapons and skills of a Grand Master, you embark upon a secret voyage to the distant Isle of Lorn. However, your mission becomes a life and death struggle when you encounter intrigue and danger en route.

Genres: Fantasy, Gamebooks, Fiction, Role Playing Games, Gaming, Childrens

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Joe Dever was an award-winning British fantasist and game designer. Originally a musician, Dever became the first British winner of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Championship of America in 1982.

He created the fictional world of Magnamund as a setting for his Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. In 1984 he released the first book of the Lone Wolf series of young-adult gamebooks, and the series has since sold over 10.2 million copies worldwide. He experienced difficulty with his publishers as the game books market began to contract in 1995, until publication ceased in 1998 before the final four books (numbers 29-32) were released. Since 2003, however, the series has enjoyed a strong revival of interest in France, Italy, and Spain following the re-release of the gamebook series in these countries.

From 1996 onwards, Dever was involved in the production of several successful computer and console games. He also contributed to a Dungeons & Dragons-style role playing game for Lone Wolf published by Mongoose Publishing (UK) in 2004. Currently he is Lead Designer of a Lone Wolf computer game, and he is writing the final books in the Lone Wolf series. No official publication schedule exists for these works.

Reviews

[Christopher John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classic high fantasy escapism... I read/played it on an app.

See - I like beach reading in the summer too.

[Dhana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joe Dever's Lone Wolf gamebooks were a consistent presence during my formative years and have had a big influence on my reading and gaming interests. I first started reading them in 1989 and continued to do so until 1999. With the resurgence of new Lone Wolf material in recent years, I've decided to revisit these nostalgic gems of my youth.

Book 21: The Voyage of the Moonstone
(published 1994, first read 1994)

Story: 3/5
Game: 3/5
Replayability: 2/5

[Stefano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non mi aspettavo la terza saga del filone di Lupo Solitario, anche se qui si è un suo discepolo e non il Supremo Maestro. Storia più narrativa e meno "giocata" delle saghe precedenti, ma piacevole.

[Rachel Redhead · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the triumph of the Grand Master series the series takes a strange turn, Lone Wolf, the central character of the last twenty game books, is not the protagonist anymore, I the reader am, or at least a fictionalized version of me who is now a newly promoted Kai Grand Master, with a Kai name too, Moonfire, according to the name generation page. Maybe this was a ploy to try and connect more to the readership, to give us a more personal stake in the book so we engage more and are more invested in this New Order series. Anyway the storyline is not the most complicated of plots, it's a simple deliver the parcel mission, with some twists and turns along the way. There's some tension and mandatory combat sequences but thankfully none of the tedious logic puzzles that slowed down previous books. One or two over the whole range is more than enough, two in one book is just annoying. Anyway the simple storyline and lower-scale of the encounters takes away from the storyline, I found myself thinking back to previous books too and drawing parallels to scenes in them, which isn't good when you want your reader focused there and then on the storyline in front of them. Anyway, Moonfire made it safely to the end of the book, so that's something.

[Jonathan Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful read, but a difficult adventure. I almost wish Joe Dever hadn't capped the healing possible from the Curing Discipline because there's a lot of damage you can suffer even without the deadly combats.

It's refreshing that using the same five starting disciplines used in Flight from the Dark is not necessarily a winning strategy here. The four Grand Master Disciplines unique to the New Order Kai are an interesting addition, and it's exciting to be a New Order Kai Grand Master, especially given the relationship established between your character and Lone Wolf (set up in the Story So Far section).

I also recommend it on the Lone Wolf - New Order app on Android. The developer did a wonderful job making a usable interface for the game books. I hope that the Dever estate and Holmgard Press will hire the developer to bring the new editions of the books to the same app.

[Mathew Walls · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was never hugely keen on this one as a child because the new protagonist made it "not a real Lone Wolf book", but now I think it's one of the better ones. Effectively resetting the player character does a lot to address the balance issues. It's still got balance issues, of course, but it's not taking the piss like most of the Grand Master series. It's also more of a game and less of a novel than most of the Grand Master series. It doesn't have the freedom of choice that the really good ones (like Flight from the Dark or Castle Death) so it's not perfect by any stretch, but it does have some meaningful choices and at least offers the illusion of choice the first time through. Unlike a lot of the "journey to a place" books in this series, it's not divided into two sections, so it avoids the problem a lot of them have of the second part being a bit of a letdown. It's all journey and it moves at a good pace the whole way. It also sets up some stuff that will presumably pay off down the line, which I always appreciate.

I only had two of the New Order books as a child (this one and Rune War) and since I never liked either of them as much as the earlier books and I'd never read them out of sequence I'm not really familiar with the New Order series at all. So I don't know if they follow then pattern established right from the beginning where the first couple of books in a new series (Kai, Magnakai, Grand Master) are great and the later ones are a bit shit. But at least for now we are off to a good start.

I do have to say though, the new Disciplines are shiiiiiiiit. They're all basically an existing Discipline but worse. Herbmastery is Deliverance but worse. Bardsmanship is Assimilance but worse. Astrology is Telegnosis but (somehow) way worse. Elementalism isn't bad, but it is extremely redundant. The magic skills (Kai-alchemy and Magi-magic) were, in my opinion, a bad addition in the Grand Master series as the former is way too useful (or would be if you could use it whenever it would actually be helpful - and when is shooting lightning out of your hand not useful?) and the latter is barely used at all. Elementalism just compounds this problem by marginalising Magi-magic even further and creating more situations where you think "Wait, why can't I just use magic here?"

Astrology really is the worst though and exists only as a trap for beginners. You assume it must have some value but it really doesn't. There's one check for it in the entire book and it does literally nothing.