Gamebook
The House Behind the Moor
The car gives out in the rain, eighteen miles past the last village, and the only light anywhere burns in a house behind the moor. Four chapters, 48 passages, four endings, roughly 15 to 30 minutes to play. Dice settle fights and tests, and alongside stamina there is a fear score to watch: let it climb too high and the story ends. Your progress stays in the browser, so you can stop at any point.
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 comes 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.
More from the gamebook shelf
The Crypt Under the Thorn
The starter adventure: one crypt, one goblin, two endings. Done in a few minutes.
Brüder dunklen Rufes
Seven wagons, ten drivers, a man in a patchwork coat with a better offer. The longest of the books, retold from the Over the Hills podcast. German only.
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.