Tobias Reithmeier

Gamebook

The Crypt Under the Thorn

Beneath an old thorn tree lies a crypt, and whoever climbs down the steps meets a goblin. Two chapters, two endings, played through in a few minutes. Skill, stamina and luck are rolled at the start; after that, choices and dice decide, and losing a fight ends the story. Your progress stays in the browser, so taking a break costs nothing.

Next to the game stands the book's Markdown source, read-only and always at the passage the story has reached. You can watch which lines produced the paragraph you are reading. The book is the tutorial example from the open-source project story-weaver.

What this book is written in

This book is written in Story Weaver, the language I built for adventure gamebooks: Markdown for the syntax, narrative logic in the spirit of ink, rules after the gamebooks of the 1980s. The book itself stays a readable text file, and turning it into a game is left to the display. The project is open on GitHub (MPL-2.0); what runs here is a frozen build.

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