Category Archives: Interactive Fiction

So one of the joys of releasing texts into the Creative Commons is seeing how other people adapt them. When I wrote Suddenly an Ogre, I wrote it as a gamebook teaching the basic moves of Dungeon World. I thought others might like to adapt it to different game systems. I was shocked and pleased when Infinite Zone ported it to the Nintendo Switch instead. They’ve removed the mechanics elements to focus on the story; e.g., removing text like “You roll ⚃ ⚁ +1=7. Defy Danger—You stumble, hesitate, or flinch: the GM will offer you a worse outcome, hard bargain, […]

In Emily Short’s classic blog post “Small Scale Structures in CYOA,” she wrote about local structures (as opposed to narrative structures that describe the entire work). She was interested in structures that could use stats, as in Choice of Games or Twine games. I instead want to concentrate on the traditional finite-state machines that are CYOA stories. The only variable is the page you are on or the number of the block you are in. I’ll use lightly-edited screenshots from Twine from my game, A New Life in Auspele, to […]

This afternoon I’ve been enjoying playing J.J Flash’s new implementation of Colossal Cave Adventure 101*, a hack of my streamlined and randomized take on the original Adventure game. You can now play Advent 101 in your web browser! My key innovation to Crowther & Wood’s adventure was heretical: I randomized the map. Heretical because the original map was a faithful simulation of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. But the random map makes the game more replayable. While the ways to overcome each obstacle are the same from game to game, and resemble the […]

A New Life in Auspele is a Twine choose-your-way game that you can play in your web browser: A humble goatherder, you are leaving home for the town of Auspele to make a new life for yourself. But Auspele is in turmoil—a young queen has just ascended to the throne, and strange forces are at work. And you’re not quite what you seem either, if you can find the right allies to help you realize your talent. This is a 43,000-word interactive book, where your choices will guide you through a […]

About one out of four Americans (24%) have ever read any gamebooks (“such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or solitaire RPG adventures such as the Tunnels & Trolls series”), up from 20% in 2019. Here are the most common themes people mentioned when describing their experiences— Slightly more Americans (28%) have ever “played any text adventures or interactive fiction games on a computer, tablet or smartphone, such as Choice of Games, Infocom, or Twine games.” This is also up from 20% in 2019. Reading of gamebooks […]

House of Danger is a nostalgic updating of the original Choose Your Own Adventure® book as a mainstream card game. Two decks—one with locations, one with items—are divided into five “chapters”, so that you can play the game a chapter at a time over multiple sessions. Another advantage of arranging the deck in chapters is that you don’t have to search through as many cards (ironically, since the books never used chapters). In Choose Your Own Adventure® books, unlike Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and others, all you need to track is […]

Suddenly an Ogre is a short gamebook using the Dungeon World system. Most choices that you make correspond to Basic Moves of the game. This gives you an opportunity to experience a bit of gameplay without a GM. The title is an homage to the essay “Suddenly Ogres: What to do on Spout Lore and Discern Realities misses” by Vasiliy Shapovalov. Published using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. You are encouraged to adapt this for your game system of choice. Comments and suggestions welcome, directly […]

“I played it two times, once I died and once I ended the game in Blackhill, living happily ever after. I had great fun both times. I really liked the adventures you told.” – Aleksandar Saranac Winner of Best Dungeon Crawl in the 2018 Solitaire Print-and-Play Contest. A modern alternative to the great gamebooks of the 1980s, Hero’s Arc: Under the Blood-Red Mountain is a 99-section, 16,000-word gamebook. You pick the path, and your decisions shape the story. Unlike many classic gamebooks, Hero’s Arc has story arcs, so losing a […]

Last week I wrote about micro-RPGs. This week we take a look at one of my own such systems, for the gamebook Hero’s Arc: Under the Blood-Red Mountain, winner of Best Dungeon Crawl in the 2018 Solitaire Print-and-Play Contest. You are the hero of this story, making decisions that will shape your fortunes. Unlike a conventional book, you don’t read this sequentially – most numbered sections will provide you with a choice to make: depending on your choice, you will continue reading a different section. Creating Your Character To begin, […]

The very first published role-playing game was the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, with its three 36- to 40-page booklets (Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures) presenting the idea that RPGs should go big. Of course, the second RPG was Tunnels & Trolls, which fit everything into one 42-page booklet. Still the belief has been that RPGs need to go big, with the average length of main books about 250,000 words. So it may surprise you to learn that RPGs can be less than 0.1% that […]

When I learnt Rick Loomis passed away, I pulled out my copy of his Buffalo Castle, the first solitaire RPG adventure. I played a lot more solitaire RPGs than in-person, and I have Rick to thank for that. (I met Rick once, at a convention, of course.) You can play along with me: Play along! I created a character. Key thing to note when you do: “Constitution” is what you will probably think of as health or hp. “Hit points” in T&T are for each round of combat: “The hit […]

One out of five adult Americans with online access (90% of the population) have ever read any gamebooks, such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or solitaire RPG adventures such as the Tunnels & Trolls series. These books definitely reflect the 1980s, when publication peaked: those 35-44 years old (kids in the 1980s) are most likely to have ever read a gamebook (39%), compared to just 18% of those 45-54 years old and 30% of those under 25. While classic gamebook lines are being relaunched (e.g., Endless […]