Gamebook
Brüder dunklen Rufes
This book is in German only. It is the one gamebook here without a second language, so the story below plays in German whichever language you are reading the site in. Everything on this page is in English; the book is not.
Seven wagons are to reach Graufurt, and the middleman handing out the job makes no secret of what he cares about: the cargo. The ten drivers he does not count when he pays. The evening before departure a man in a patchwork coat sits down at your table, knows what lies on the second wagon, and has an idea about what to do with it on the road. A prologue and a first act, 69 passages, three endings, roughly 20 to 40 minutes.
Dice decide two fights, a chase after a stolen wagon, and two nights on watch where cold and tiredness wear the character sheet down. Beside stamina and skill the book also counts the wagons still rolling and the reputation you earn on the first night. The act ends at a fork in the road rather than at a resolution. The save stays in the browser, so you can stop whenever you like.
The adventure is not mine. It comes from episode 47 of the tabletop-roleplaying podcast Over the Hills, "Adventure Docs 1: Brüder dunklen Rufes", in which Vaylan presents a starter adventure for fantasy groups and Lubo takes it apart. What stands here is my own wording for a gamebook; the idea is theirs.
Where this book comes from
ADVENTURE DOCS is a format on Over the Hills: one host presents a short adventure for other people to run, the other listens closely and objects. Episode 47 of 17 July 2026 was the prototype, and it carried a setup that makes a good gamebook - a job that smells of betrayal from the first page, and a second voice offering you exactly that. What I took across is the setup, not the wording: no sentence of the episode appears in this book, and I claim nothing in their text.
It is written in Story Weaver, my own language for gamebooks: Markdown for syntax, narrative logic borrowed from ink, rules borrowed from the gamebooks of the 1980s. Beside the game sits the book's Markdown source, read-only, always at the passage the story is standing in. The project is open on GitHub (MPL-2.0); what runs here is a frozen build.
More from the gamebook shelf
The Crypt Under the Thorn
The starter adventure: one crypt, one goblin, two endings. Done in a few minutes.
The House Behind the Moor
A house on the moor, a fear score, four endings. Richer, and shows every corner of the framework.
The Intercept
Bletchley Park: a part of the Bombe is missing, Harris asks the questions, and the game remembers whether you lie. 14 endings. By inkle.
Story Weaver
The language these books are written in: Markdown syntax, semantics inspired by ink, rules from the gamebooks of the 1980s.