The Romans call you many names. A slave. A gladiator. A champion. Who and what will you be? You decide. Conquer the arena, navigate petty Roman politics and etch your name in the annals of Rome! Or die trying. It’s 25% off until January 24th!
Gladiator: Road to the Colosseum is a 220,000 word interactive novel by Foong Yi Zhuan, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
• Play as male or female; gay or straight.
• Battles against slaves, gladiators and even wild animals!
• Manage relationships with your friends and enemies, rig a vote or poison a foe!
• Navigate the complicated (and petty) politics of the Roman Senators.
• Unique character tracking system and story that makes each playthrough different!
• Find love amidst the madness of the arena, even in the most desperate of places!
• Fight your way to the Colosseum, through the greatest games the world has ever seen!
Fight for your freedom and etch your name in the annals of Rome!
Foong Yi Zhuan developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.
We’re proud to announce that Chronicon Apocalyptica, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the Choice of Games Omnibus app. It’s 33% off until January 18th!
Battle Norse raiders, ghosts, and changelings to save medieval England! But beware, if the elves can capture the Book you hold, the world will end.
Chronicon Apocalyptica is a 250,000-word interactive medieval fantasy novel by Robert Davis. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You are an Anglo-Saxon scribe in the year 1000. You hold a Book of secrets written generations ago, including this prophecy: “When Æthelred II is King, he shall not be King, but there shall be an elven changeling in his stead. Should it gain this book and its ink, the world he shall rend asunder.”
The witan advisors to Æthelred have tasked you with a secret mission to research whether the Book is true. Build an unlikely party of adventurers: a nun, a holy warrior, a bard, a beekeeper, and his bee, each with a mysterious past. Judge a witch trial, infiltrate the magical land of the elves, and even travel through time on your quest to extract fact from fiction.
Lovers of England’s mythic history will delight as you meet Excalibur, the Green Children of Woolpit, and the Tremulous Hand, a creepy disembodied hand with a predilection for parchment. Put your analytical, investigative, and storytelling skills to the test as you decide where your loyalties lie: to the church, the crown, or the people of England.
Will you uncover the secret at the heart of English history, or succumb to the evil of the most deadly book ever created?
• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
• Discover rare sources, excavate ruins, and collect local legends.
• Fight the forces of darkness, or outwit them with your sharp intelligence.
• Explore decaying strongholds, funeral barrows, and even time itself.
• Choose romance or rivalry with your greatest foe.
• Determine who sits on the English throne.
We hope you enjoy playing Chronicon Apocalyptica. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
Battle Norse raiders, ghosts, and changelings to save medieval England! But beware, if the elves can capture the Book you hold, the world will end. Chronicon Apocalyptica is a 250,000-word interactive medieval fantasy novel by Robert Davis, author of Broadway: 1849. I sat down with Robert to talk about medieval fantasy, and the joy and challenges of writing it. Chronicon Apocalyptica releases this Thursday, January 10th.
This is a huge departure from Broadway: 1849, your first game with us. Tell me about what led you to develop Chronicon Apocalyptica and why it’s so different.
To be honest, I have no idea where Chronicon came from! There was this one week I was reading the Venerable Bede, playing a board game where you are a gnomish librarian, and listening to a podcast about medieval mysteries, and, at some point, I thought, “all this should be in a game.”
Broadway was modeled on nineteenth century melodrama. Chronicon Apocalyptica (“The Chronicle of the Apocalypse”) is much much weirder. Taking place in the year 1000, it has labyrinthine mysteries and heaps of possibilities, because I see history as a really twisted, rambling place. I mean, in one game you have to keep your theatre afloat during a critical season, and, in the other, you have to fact-check a seemingly sentient book and keep the world from ending while writing impeccable scholarship.
I think the working title for this game was “Anglo-Saxon,” but we honed in on what the crux of the story was: the Book. Tell me a little about what delving into this world of Anglo-Saxons was like.
There was a point when I was doing research for the game when I was like, “I want to date the year 1000.” Anglo-Saxon period gets called the “dark ages” so often that one just assumes not much happened, but I found that, actually, the years between 800-1000 was a time of vibrant change. You had a warrior queen tearing up kingdoms, the church more or less inventing modern scholarship, and the crown constantly struggling with the people we call the Vikings. Getting into this world, and the world of a medieval abbey, was endlessly fascinating. You have NO idea how cool book-making and scriptoria were!
A significant portion of the game takes place in medieval libraries. There was an often-repeated line that scribes wrote, “Three fingers write, the whole body labors,” because the process of writing a book was such painstaking work. Here were these monks, nuns, and scholars stooped over a parchment in the cold and bad light writing until their muscles ached, often as part of their religious devotion. They wrote and copied works ranging from biblical commentary to astronomical computation and history to books of riddles. I wanted this game to show off the period in all its fun, pain, and eccentricity.
What were some of the design challenges this time around? Or did you find your second game easier to write in some ways?
Chronicon is more ambitious, with more plot points, more characters, and more possible paths than Broadway. That was definitely harder to design, and I blame it entirely on Choice of Games! While writing, I was inspired by two games: The Superlatives, which has the best, most perfectly-balanced team I’ve come across. I wanted to do something like that, but I had no idea how complicated having a group of four or five characters with their own backstories, objectives, and interests would be. That took a lot of planning and figuring out. The second game was Heart of the House, which I think is the best haunted house story in a long time. I am amazed at how the story always keeps the answers one step ahead of you. You think you get it, but the more you press on, the more complicated it becomes and you realize you actually have no idea what’s going on, but in a good way. That’s what I tried to do.
Finally, I think, in doing both games, the editors and beta testers essentially gave me a master class in choice design and managing story arcs to make a compelling, playable game. I would ultimately say that after writing two games, I FINALLY “get” how to write one.
This game combines myth, reality, history, religion, and the supernatural. Quite a heady mix.
My ideal story is one that combines fantasy, horror, and hardcore history. I hope Chronicon does just that. Almost everything in it is accurate to the time period, down to the titles of books and many of the peripheral characters. I do take liberties (there are some historical figures who must be rolling in their graves) but I tried to evoke a sense of what living at this time was like. With ghosts, elves, and witches.
Do you have a favorite NPC?
My first thought is Blædswith because she is a vengeance-driven Joan of Arc, but, in all honesty, it is the Tremulous Hand. I won’t say more because of spoilers, but what’s better than a disembodied hand on a mission?
And what are you working on next?
I’m working on a novel about 1849 and I’d love to do a third game, maybe a Western.
Lead a mercenary company seeking fame and fortune. Be honorable and help defend the kingdom or take contracts to those who pay the most. Rise to the top of the mercenary chain in this medieval story based around the events of The Great Tournament. It’s 25% off until January 4th!
Life of a Mercenary is a 338,000 word interactive fantasy novel by Philip Kempton, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
• Play as male or female mercenary.
• An open world adventure taking place in a medieval setting.
• Unique combat and leveling system makes every game unique.
• Multiple story lines, hidden quests, and endings.
• Checkpoint system allows you to save your progress and restore to a previous point
• Choose to be an honorable or fight for whoever pays the most gold.
• Participate in war campaigns helping other nations fight off enemies.
Philip Kempton developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.
We’re proud to announce that Tower Behind the Moon, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the Choice of Games Omnibus app. It’s 30% off until December 27th!
You are the greatest magician in the Sublunar World. It is not enough. As a rare Conjunction approaches, immortality is within reach. But the gods have noticed you trying to unlock the doors of heaven. Some demand you ascend–or else–while others plot your destruction. There are only two paths for you now, archmage: immortality or annihilation.
Tower Behind the Moon is a 400,000-word interactive epic fantasy novel by Kyle Marquis, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transcend your mortal state one month from now, in the tower where your magic is strongest. Miss this celestial conjunction and you will die. As you prepare for your ascension, however, you battle increasing dangers.
Your tower is your sanctum, but also a target for enemies you’ve made over a lifetime of treasure hunting, sorcery, and war. Angels and demons haunt your workshop while mortal princes demand favors and concessions. Your servants–themselves half-gods or more–fight for your attention and scheme to claim the tower for themselves. And the wretched shade of your mentor, who failed to ascend, hints that something out of your past plans to destroy your future.
You hold the keys to heaven, hell, and the outer darkness. You just need to find the door.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary, gay, straight, bi, or ace.
• Choose from five different magical paths, each with unique servants and spells.
• Travel from the forgotten castles of the underworld to heaven’s crooked back-alleys.
• Face mad dragons, ruthless angels, cultists, and whole kingdoms of the dead.
• Be dreadful and monstrous, or subtle and ruthless.
• Uncover the true history of your tower, your mentor, and your long-lost adventuring companions.
• Maintain your humanity or abandon the fetters of reason.
• Comfort the afflicted or vaporize the annoying.
• Dare to seek love at the end of your mortal existence.
• Become a demon, a god, an undead lich, a shining immortal, or a living continent–if you succeed.
Your weapon: magic. Your enemy: the gods. Your goal: immortality.
We hope you enjoy playing Tower Behind the Moon. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
We’re happy to announce that The Aether: Life as a God, is now available on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux. (It’s still available on iOS and Android, too.) It’s 34% off on Steam until December 25th!
Create a mortal race to worship you and grow your strength. Guide them in their daily lives and help them grow. The power you collect will grow your mind and body. Dabble in the affairs of other gods or seek to destroy them and steal their power.
The Aether: Life as a God is a 60,000 word interactive fantasy novel by A. Reddwolf, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
• Create a custom mortal race.
• Engage in mortal affairs.
• Travel the Aether and steal power from lesser beings.
• Dabble in political affairs at The Court of Gods.
• Battle other gods in epic one one one conflicts.
• Complete unique quests and events with impactful outcomes.
You are the greatest magician in the Sublunar World. It is not enough. As a rare Conjunction approaches, immortality is within reach. But the gods have noticed you trying to unlock the doors of heaven. Some demand you ascend–or else–while others plot your destruction. There are only two paths for you now, archmage: immortality or annihilation.Tower Behind the Moon, is a 400,000-word interactive epic fantasy novel by Kyle Marquis, author of Empyrean and Silverworld. I sat down with Kyle to learn more about his evolution as a writer for Choice of Games. Tower Behind the Moon releases this Thursday, December 20th.
We’ve talked a little about Tower Behind the Moon in your Silverworld interview, but now that it’s complete, tell me a little more about this world. It’s an extremely elaborate fantasy with wizards, mages, lords, gods, monsters, angels, hedge-witches, warlocks, bards, dragons, castellans…it’s a lot.
One thing I wanted to do with Tower is take well-established setting assumptions and show them from a different perspective. Tower‘s Sublunar World has a lot going on, but the elements are familiar to any reader of fantasy: wizards and dragons and angels, all the big hits. In Tower, it’s your perspective that changes. You’re an archmage. Those world-shaking powers aren’t like narrative engines or forces of nature: they’re companions, rivals, even nuisances. On several occasions your peers casually throw regular people into what, in a “normal” fantasy, would be world-altering quests. I wanted to inject some wonder back into classic fantasy by offering players the perspective of someone who drives that wonder, rather than someone who marvels at it.
Who was your favorite NPC to write? I am a sucker for the monster.
Everybody loves that sassy golem! (Or skeleton if you’re a necromancer or elemental if you’re a summoner, etc.–the sassiness remains constant.) But I most enjoyed the juxtaposition of your apprentice (ambitious, arrogant, occasionally selfish and greedy but also self-conscious and frightened) and your mentor, who failed to ascend and now follows you around as a self-pitying ghost. You’re in the middle of these two character arcs, both as important as yours and both reflections of your own ambitions. You have the opportunity to shape the destinies of both magicians, but your actions don’t take place in a vacuum; constrained by circumstance, you may end up sacrificing one or both. There’s a sort of madness to the magicians in Tower, a hunger for power and prestige that the player can’t help but notice–because your fellow magicians never seem to notice their own motivations.
This makes the third of three very long games with us:Empyrean, Silverworld, and now Tower, all published in the last two years. Your fourth game with us will be Pon Para and the Great Southern Labyrinth, which depending on how long beta takes might land in late spring of 2019. That’s got to make you our most prolific writer at this point, certainly in terms of speed. But I’m interested also in the different worlds and tropes you’re exploring in each game.
When I was a kid, I read and watched a lot of formulaic, imitative stuff. I loved it, of course, and often I still do, but even as a kid I could see how the tropes I loved (the flying aces and cyberpunk cities that fueled Empyrean, the lost kingdoms that inspired Silverworld, etc.) were in service of…nothing. The writers didn’t really have anything to say about the tropes they used. I’m not saying that every story needs to be “about” something, but I grew up on so much surface-level entertainment that as I started to find my own voice and write my own stories, one of my goals was to return to the trope-heavy stuff I grew up with and, sort of, “fill it up” with things that matter to me. Empyrean and Silverworld were more overtly political, I think–Empyrean was an attempt to get the punk back in [whatever]punk fiction and tell a story about exploitation and resistance; Silverworld is about colonization and the excuses people make for greed. Tower is, I think, less social, more personal; it’s about wealthy and educated people (magicians, in this case) behaving in ways that aren’t only “bad,” but that are really incomprehensible–even to them. Tower surrounds the player with people who, despite all their power and knowledge, are doing what they’re “supposed to do,” bickering for scraps of magic and betraying each-other to the admiration of their peers.
It’s also got a very cool scene where you fight a bunch of dinosaur ghosts on a bridge with a bone sword. I actually do love all these tropes.
I feel like we’re getting to the point where our readers can feel what makes a Kyle Marquis game a Kyle Marquis game. But do you have any personal favorites in the rest of the Choice of Games catalog? Recent games?
I loved Katherine Nehring’s Grand Academy for Future Villains, which definitely felt like someone else taking loved, but well-used, tropes, and filling them up with personal significance. And I, Cyborg is brilliantly written–I mean, the whole story is great, but just at the level of the individual sentence, there’s so much craft there; Tracy Canfield manages a light and charming tone, reminiscent of the best Infocom games, while still maintaining tension and excitement through the entire narrative. One of these days I plan to make a deep dive into the “fantasy of manners” genre, which is this obscure little sub-genre in regular fiction, but which seems to be one of the most successful and popular parts of the Choice of Games catalog.
You’re kind of a DnD-ish fellow. You’ve got this project Hex a Day?
Every day, a new location-based idea seed for tabletop fantasy games! I also have dungeons and whole adventure modules on my Patreon. A lot of RPG writing is interesting, but not immediately useful for people who have games to run that night; I wanted to provide ideas that people can use almost right away. Also, the best ideas end up in my interactive fiction–Tower has a few scenes that began as hex-map locations, especially when you journey into the underworld in Chapter 5.
And now Pon Para is coming up next. This is actually a trilogy, right? Which you’ve nearly finished the first part of.
Pon Para is a Bronze Age fantasy adventure. It’s a sprawling heroic journey that takes the player from haunted northern forests to monster-haunted islands and out to a desert empire inspired by ancient Persia, all while trying to uncover the history of a still more ancient civilization that hold the key to saving a (literally!) dissolving world.
We’re proud to announce that 7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the Choice of Games Omnibus app. It’s 33% off until December 21th!
Fight for what’s right—as an up and coming pirate! Battle slavers, sea monsters, and your own corrupt government to become a hero of the high seas. But will you betray your own crew for wealth and power?
7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact is a 200,000-word interactive adventure novel by Danielle Lauzon, set in the world of the table-top role playing game 7th Sea. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Looking for adventure at sea? You’ll get more than you bargained for when you end up joining a pirate crew. These pirates are known among sailors for having their own moral code, one that is now yours. You’ll have the chance to rescue prisoners, uncover a secret plot, and even build a navy to liberate an island fort full of slaves.
But you’ll also be tempted to break your pirate bonds to seek your own gain. Would you still free the slaves if you could take out your own rivals instead? How far will you go to save your friends? And when you uncover corruption in your homeland, will you choose villainy or vengeance?
Earn your crew’s loyalty and they might make you their captain, but get careless and you might have to walk the plank!
• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, straight, bi, asexual, or poly.
• Choose from three different nations as your homeland, with distinct stories for each.
• Romance other pirate captains, or compete with them as your rivals.
• Fight for good, or work for evil.
• Lead a rescue, uncover a secret plot, and defeat tyranny.
• Visit various island nations to win them to your side and build a navy.
If it’s the pirate’s life for you, what will you sacrifice for freedom?
We hope you enjoy playing 7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
Fight for what’s right—as an up and coming pirate! Battle slavers, sea monsters, and your own corrupt government to become a hero of the high seas. But will you betray your own crew for wealth and power? 7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact is a 200,000-word interactive adventure novel by Danielle Lauzon, set in the world of the table-top role playing game 7th Sea. I sat down with Danielle to talk about the unique challenges of adapting material for Choice of Games. 7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact releases this Thursday, December 13th.
I usually begin author interviews by asking something like “how did you develop this world” but in this instance, 7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact, is sprung from a table-top rpg. Tell me a little about that and your background writing for 7th Sea.
7th Sea was originally published in 1999 by AEG. The game was designed by John Wick while he worked there. At that time, the game was innovative as a game that showed diversity in its writing, such as women doing swashbuckling and adventuring, despite its roots in 17th century Europe. In 2016, John released a 2nd Edition after regaining the rights from AEG. I joined the team shortly after its release to help develop the many supplements unlocked during the Kickstarter campaign.
Moving forward in the 2nd edition, we wanted to take those 16 year old innovations and push them forward even further. We endeavored to hire subject matter experts, and people with close ties to the real world locations we were bringing into the game world. And while Theah isn’t actually 17th century Europe, etc., there’s enough real world nods for our history buffs. Writing for 7th Sea as a property has made me dig into historical minutia I’ve never encountered before, and writing this novel was no different. I’ve learned so much, which is pretty amazing.
This is actually the second table-top game that’s been adapted for us, Choice of the Petal Throne being a Tekumel game. What is it like working within an established world? Did you feel many constraints?
Honestly, I have been so immersed in creating the setting for 7th Sea, that writing this game felt like second nature. The biggest constraints I felt were that we wanted to have a non-magical story for our first Choice of Games game, and ignoring the magical parts of the world was very difficult. Otherwise, the parallels built into 7th Sea with our own world made it very easy to write as I was able to pull a lot of information and inspiration from real world locations and events.
This is your first time writing interactive fiction but not your first time writing an RPG. What did you feel were the differences in concretizing a set of options for a player as opposed to writing like a more open-ended campaign?
Running a game of 7th Sea is pretty free form. I spent a lot of time considering options in 7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact as challenges I’d throw at the players, then knowing my players, thinking of what they would want to do in those situations. It was interesting to consider multiple options for the same action or consider various ways to approach a situation. I never do that in RPG campaign planning, but now I want to incorporate that kind of logic when designing a campaign for play at home.
One thing that I got stuck on a bit was translating the 7th Sea game stats to Choice of Games. In the table-top RPG, those stats are open to interpretation and as long as the story makes sense you could really roll anything to accomplish a goal. Making those more static so that players could reasonably predict which stat would be used for each choice made me really think about what goes into those stats and what they really mean when describing your Hero.
What’s more fun than piracy? How much did you enjoy writing these swashbuckling scenes?
I can’t think of much I’d consider more fun that piracy, except maybe space piracy. Writing adventure scenes is a bit out of my wheelhouse when it comes to writing, so stretching my creativity into these scenes was fun if sometimes nerve wracking. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
And what are you working on next?
Well, I’m still making table-top RPGs over on the other side of the fence. I have been considering writing another Choice of Games novel that is in it’s own unique universe (maybe space pirates). And maybe if the IP licensing stars align properly, a sequel to A Pirate’s Pact.
We’re proud to announce that Death Collector, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the Choice of Games Omnibus app. It’s 33% off until December 13th!
Sever and preserve the tongues of the dying to steal their stories! Whether you gather their tales and memories for the greater good, or use what you learn to become one of the elite who decide what to call “History” is up to you.
Death Collector is a 300,000 word interactive fantasy novel by Jordan Reyne, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
As a Death Collector, your job is to visit the dying and harvest their stories by cutting out their tongues. Whether you seek fame, fortune, love, or renown, you’ll find playing Death is more than just a job. Will you be able to stomach the gore-work that is cutting the tales of the dead from their mouths, or will you find out how the Ministry disposes of their workers?
• Play as male, female, or non-binary; gay, or straight.
• Learn to kill with style and professionalism, or to plunder information you were never meant to know.
• Join the elite ranks of the Board, or reveal the rot at the center of the system and lead a revolution.
• Get to know your cloak—a weird, organic entity that can render you invisible.
The wages of Death are yours for the taking!
We hope you enjoy playing Death Collector. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
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