When did Gnaag become Archlord?

[allure]

There's a line in the Lone Wolf wiki Timeline article which suggests that Joe Dever was inconsistent on this point. It says the year is either MS 5058 or MS 5060:

The Jungle of Horrors, The Story So Far: "In the Darklord city of Helgedad a civil war has raged for five years following your defeat of Haakon, Archlord of the Black City. Now, a new lord sits upon the throne of Helgedad—Darklord Gnaag of Mozgôar."

And

In The Tellings, it is implied that Gnaag became Archlord shortly before Lone Wolf began the Magnakai quest, i.e. in MS 5058. This is inconsistent with the timeline given in The Jungle of Horrors.

I'm wondering if anyone can see a way to resolve this inconsistency.

[Black Cat]

The convention when problems like this arise is that the info in the gamebooks have precedence over what is written in the Legends. If something is written in the Legends that doesn't contradict what is written in the gamebooks, then the info is good but it's clearly not the case here.

[egel]

I have a slightly different perspective on this, which is that this information may not be contradictory. In a gamebook, you get first-person information. So at the time of the start of the Jungle of Horrors, news reached Dessi that Darkland had been in civil war for 5 years and Gnaag is the new Archlord. The novel describes exactly how this happened, but this information may have arrived to Dessi distorted, incomplete... Actually, Darkland is a difficult country for the rest of Magnamund to understand and find out about, a normal person can't get into it. There were no witnesses to the civil war by normal people... just some information that got out of Darkland, it's incomplete, distorted...

[allure]

Jul 4, 2024 15:21:15 GMT egel said:

I have a slightly different perspective on this, which is that this information may not be contradictory. In a gamebook, you get first-person information. So at the time of the start of the Jungle of Horrors, news reached Dessi that Darkland had been in civil war for 5 years and Gnaag is the new Archlord. The novel describes exactly how this happened, but this information may have arrived to Dessi distorted, incomplete... Actually, Darkland is a difficult country for the rest of Magnamund to understand and find out about, a normal person can't get into it. There were no witnesses to the civil war by normal people... just some information that got out of Darkland, it's incomplete, distorted...

Clever, but this shouldn't work - Lone Wolf himself went to Dessi, and he knew, so he must've carried the news with him. Therefore the latest Dessi should have known was when Lone Wolf first visited, and that happened by Castle Death.