Jan 30
2025
“Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery”—Deep beneath the earth, the dragon is rising!
Posted by: Mary Duffy | Comments (19)
We’re proud to announce that Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery, 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” app. It’s 30% off until February 6th!
Deep beneath the earth, the dragon is rising! Quest into mysterious underground caverns and forests to learn magical secrets, draw strength from friends and family, secure alliances that can save your home, and carry on the heroic legacy of Stronghold!
Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is an interactive fantasy novel by Amy Griswold where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—380,000 words and hundreds of choices—without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You’re the grandchild of your town’s legendary heroic leader, and everyone’s always expected great things from you. So when you began to study sorcery, you intended to prove them all right—until your magical experiments disturbed a sleeping dragon in the depths of the mountain caves. Now you’ll have to discover something even more powerful if you’re going to save your town and help your family’s legacy endure for generations to come.
Delve deep into ancient caverns to find more fuel for your sorcery—along with unexpected allies and places for secure fortified camps. But there are also fragile wonders beneath the earth: will your efforts to protect your town threaten the dryads and treasures in the caverns? Learn mystic lore to strengthen your fight against the dragon—alchemy, magic, or even the knot-work enchantments of goblins and spiders—or raise an army from among your loyal townsfolk and allies. Or maybe, just maybe, you can bargain with the dragon—if you dare.
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay or straight.
• Continue the saga of the town founded in Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, and see the effects of your actions two generations later.
• Marry a spouse (or two), or form a new family with a sworn sibling.
• Explore vast underground caverns to unearth secrets and treasures.
• Reconcile with your grandparent and uphold their position in your town – or convince everyone to defy authority and claim leadership yourself!
• Rebuild an ancient tower into the perfect workshop for mastering sorcery!
• Fight goblins, spiders, and dryads – or make them your allies against the dragon.
• Bond with your friends: help them make difficult decisions, influence their views on important issues, and play matchmaker for them!
How long can your stronghold stand against the dragon’s wrath?
We hope you enjoy playing Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery. 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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Sounds awesome and congratulation
Congratulations!
Perhaps my favorite thing about Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is how well it captures so much of what I enjoyed about Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, while still offering something very different.
A Hero’s Fate covers a series of episodes in the PC’s life from young adulthood to old age as they found a town and shape its character as it grows. Caverns of Sorcery has a more defined storyline, and takes place over the course of a few months. Yet even as the focus shifts to exploring caves, learning magic, and dealing with a dragon, Caverns of Sorcery continues its predecessor’s exploration of the privileges and obligations that come with being part of a community, and how personal ambitions and relationships fit in.
You don’t need to have played A Hero’s Fate to appreciate this game, but if you did, you’ll enjoy getting to revisit your previous character’s legacy, while going deeper (literally!) into the setting, the magic system, and the cultures of other sapient races than A Hero’s Fate ever did. There’s also a great new cast of characters to romance or befriend.
It’s a pleasure to have something new to read from Amy Griswold, and I hope Caverns of Sorcery will have all the success it deserves.
Does this game include management challenges?
I didn’t play Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate because I’m embarrassingly bad at management games, but that story and this one both sound fun and interesting, and I’d like to give this one a try if it doesn’t require a balancing act.
A Hero’s Fate really isn’t super management-heavy. You do have to make some basic decisions about economic and cultural priorities and defense, but it’s always in the spirit of a story about nurturing the growth of community, not a nitpicky numbers game.
Caverns of Sorcery has almost no management elements. You do get to make some decisions about what resources to collect to develop your magic and how to put them to use, but that’s really it.