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case file 07 / 15 · 2026

Lone Wolf

The Lone Wolf gamebooks, played in the browser.

live Live at lonewolf.spencermcw.com; the source is private checked 2026-11-13 [1]

visit site (opens in a new tab)

A gamified reader for the first two of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf gamebooks, Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water, built on Project Aon's Internet Editions. The text and Gary Chalk's illustrations are shown unaltered; the game keeps the Action Chart and handles the random numbers, combat, inventory limits, meals and healing.

what it does

  • Books 1 and 2, Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water, are playable from start to finish. [2]
  • Character creation, the section reader, combat, the Action Chart, a journal, the map, and a codex of the rules and credits. [6]
  • The game handles the Action Chart, random numbers, combat, inventory limits, meals and healing; the reader only chooses. [2]
  • A hero who completes a book can continue into the next, carrying over what that book's rules allow. [2]
  • Progress saves itself in the browser. [2]
What it is
Client-side web game: a rules engine beside the unaltered text of the Lone Wolf gamebooks
Stack
engine TypeScript · its own rules engine [2]
client Vue 3 · Pinia · Vue Router · Vite [3]
tests Vitest [3]
Tags
  • TypeScript
  • Vue
  • Game
  • Gamebook
Links
visit site (opens in a new tab)
Project Aon >> the Internet Editions the text and illustrations come from, under the Project Aon License
  • 2 playable books [2]
  • 350 sections in each book [4]
  • 400 seeded games per book in the fuzz test [5]
  • 5 commits [6]

  1. The text is never rewritten: an extractor turns Project Aon's HTML into structured blocks and changes only link targets, and a test checks that every section's text is identical to the source. [2]

  2. The rules live beside the text, keyed by section and by choice or combat: gates on disciplines, items and gold, random-number outcomes, loot, ENDURANCE effects, combat modifiers, evasion and round limits. A validator fails if any mechanic phrase in the text has no matching rule. [2]

  3. Where the text is ambiguous, the game makes a ruling and shows it in the section. [2]

  4. A fuzz test plays 400 seeded games of each book and fails if any of them soft-locks; another checks that each book can be won. [5]

  5. The black-and-white book art is drawn as ink through an SVG filter (luminance becomes alpha), so it sits on the parchment under any opacity or transform. [1]

$ git log --reverse
  1. First commit: Book 1, Flight from the Dark, with rules for all 350 sections [6]
  2. Book 2, Fire on the Water, and continuing a hero from Book 1 [6]

Every marked line above points at one of these: repositories and their docs, registries, live sites and screenshots. Nothing is inferred past what they show.

  1. [1] lonewolf.spencermcw.com (answers 200) lonewolf.spencermcw.com 2026-11-13
  2. [2] Lone Wolf README.md (private repository) 2026-11-13
  3. [3] package.json 2026-11-13
  4. [4] public/content/lw/01fftd and 02fotw: each book's extracted sections 2026-11-13
  5. [5] tests/fuzz.test.ts and tests/completable.test.ts 2026-11-13
  6. [6] Commit history, main at f376319 2026-11-13