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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.

Choice of Games editor Mary Duffy sat down with author Amy Griswold to talk about the upcoming game and some of her other works. Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery releases Thursday, January 30th—you can wishlist it on Steam today, it really helps, even if you don’t plan to purchase it on Steam. 

We’re returning to the world of Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate. This is something of an indirect sequel, right?

Yes, it’s a chance to revisit the town founded in Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate with a new generation of characters facing new challenges. The influence of your town’s founding hero determines the starting situation of your town and the personality of your grandparent, the town’s current leader. But for players who want to jump in without playing the first game, there’s the option to choose a preset backstory or make detailed choices about your town’s history when you begin the game.

How was it for you picking back up the threads of the Stronghold universe?

I really enjoyed revisiting the world of Stronghold and getting to explore some corners of it in more detail. In Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, the goblins are mostly seen at a distance, and the dryads are enigmatic forest protectors. Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery takes a closer look at both goblins and dryads, with befriendable (and romanceable) goblin and dryad NPC companions. It was also interesting to write a game primarily focused on sorcery. In Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, it’s possible to never engage with the lost magic of your ancestors at all. In Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery, the player character and their friends Corbin, Zoe, and Fox are all sorcerers, and “I use sorcery!” is the obvious way to approach a lot of problems. This required making the magical system more complex and varied, with options to focus on the knotwork of goblins and dryads or the experimental science of alchemy as well as rediscovering your ancestors’ lost arts.

Between these two games you published The Play’s the Thing with us, which is a fantastic game, and a fantastically different setting. Tell me a bit about the inspiration there, because within the Amy Griswold canon we’ve also got one of my all time favorite games, The Eagle’s Heir, which is a wonderful Napoleonic alt-history. You seem adept at jumping around in genre.

I like changes of pace. The Play’s the Thing was a fabulous chance to play with a bunch of dramatic tropes that would probably be over the top in a Stronghold game — wicked rulers, troubled heirs, long-lost siblings, and a deadly curse! plus a dancing bear! — while at the same time exploring what it’s like to try to make art that means something while the world is falling apart around you. The Eagle’s Heir is a swashbuckling steampunk adventure with airship racing and dastardly plots, but it’s also about how personal choices can shape political change. And both Stronghold games are fantasy adventures built around the tropes of classic tabletop games, and are also about how your choices influence other people in a small community. To me, the Choice of Games format is well suited to games that let players soak up the atmosphere of a particular genre, while at the same time exploring the reasons why choices and stories matter.

What surprised you most about the writing of Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery?

I kept finding edge cases carried over from A Hero’s Fate that I had forgotten were possible and needed to be accounted for. What happens if the original player character has no children (biological or adopted) and no nephew, and then chooses a protégé as their heir, and then their protégé dies, leaving no one the right age alive to be the grandparent of the player character in Caverns of Sorcery? Etc.

There’s a dragon in this game. Choice of Games is a dragon-heavy publisher. Please say a bit about your dragon.

Dragons are useful because they give player characters a problem to react to in interesting ways. It’s hard to ignore a dragon. The dragon in Caverns of Sorcery was imprisoned by your ancestors centuries ago in the caverns near your town. It would very much like to escape, set your town on fire, and feast on the survivors. What else the dragon wants is possible to explore over the course of the game. But this isn’t, at its heart, a game about a dragon; it’s a game about a situation where doing nothing will lead to disaster, so you have to try doing something. What kind of “something” is up to you.

In addition to writing interactive fiction for us, you’re also a prolific novelist, I’d love to tell our readers about other works of yours they can enjoy.

Fans of the steampunk world of The Eagle’s Heir may enjoy the gaslamp fantasy mysteries Death by Silver and A Death at the Dionysus Club (with Melissa Scott), in which metaphysician Ned Mathey and detective Julian Lynes solve mysteries and navigate the fascinatingly awful world of Victorian London and its gay community. And for sci-fi adventure, I recommend the Stargate Legacy series, a virtual fifth season of tie-in novels set after the end of the Stargate Atlantis TV series (start with Homecoming by Jo Graham and Melissa Scott.)

What are you working on next?

I’m working on revisions to a science fiction novel, Gyre, that’s under contract for probably sometime in 2026, and I’ve got a couple of historical fiction projects on the back burner as well.

In partnership with World of Darkness and Paradox Interactive, Choice of Games is proud to announce the release of Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove by William Brown, now available on Steam, iOS, and Android. It’s 25% off until January 23!

William Brown’s earlier game The Mysteries of Baroque is 33% off as well!

Full moon. Cold night. Dark shadow. Warm gun. The Beast of Glenkildove has stalked Ireland for centuries. Now, you must hunt it.

Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove is an interactive novel by William Brown, set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Eight years ago, when you were eighteen, the Beast of Glenkildove killed one of your closest friends. You’ve never returned to Ireland since that day.

It’s difficult to remember what happened. As you’ll soon learn, the human mind blots out the traumatic memories of facing a werewolf.

Now, you must stalk that werewolf across the shadowed glens and fogbound mountains of Ireland, hunting a shapeshifting killing machine with your friends, your wits, and a shotgun.

But you and your friends are not alone. You have entered a world of Hunters, humans who dare to challenge the dominion of the monsters who rule over them. Can you trust the fanatics of the Society of Leopold, the scholars and savants of the Arcanum, the ruthless Duffy crime family, or the enigmatic biotech company Fada?

Can you even trust your oldest friends?

Redemption for some. Retribution for others. A reckoning for all.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; befriend or romance humans and supernaturals of any gender
• Kill, study, capture, document or negotiate with the creatures you hunt
• Craft your own traps, gear, and weapons to take the Hunt to the enemy
• Find camaraderie and romance with the only people in the world that you can trust to fight alongside you
• Adopt and train your own wolfhound to assist you in the Hunt
• Build and maintain your own safehouse at the Wolf’s Head Inn in the Wicklow Mountains

Become the thing that even nightmares fear.

We hope you enjoy playing Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store and on Steam. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

We’re excited to announce that Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove is releasing this Thursday, January 16th!

You can play the first three chapters for free today, and check out the author interview as well!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

Full moon. Cold night. Dark shadow. Warm gun. The Beast of Glenkildove has stalked Ireland for centuries. Now, you must hunt it.

Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove is an interactive novel by William Brown, set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Choice of Games Editor Mary Duffy sat down to talk with William about this upcoming game. You can play the first three chapters of Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove today; the rest of the game will release on January 16th! Be sure to wishlist it on Steam—it really helps.

Hunter: The Reckoning was actually your first World of Darkness game as a player, and it was a given that you’d pitch us a Hunter game when we asked you. Tell me what drew you/draws you to that world.

Yes, Hunter: The Reckoning was my first experience of the World of Darkness. What I liked best about it was its emphasis on ordinary people – admittedly, ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, ordinary people with extraordinary drives and obsessions, but still ordinary people.

The other World of Darkness games sometimes had a bit of tendency to treat ordinary people as basically uninteresting. If you weren’t a supernatural of some description, you didn’t really matter. You were an extra, there to be fed on or be collateral damage or just to be completely ignored. The idea of the Reckoning turned that on its head: suddenly, your vampire’s take-away Happy Meal, your mage’s meaningless set-dressing, had a shotgun, an armful of Molotov cocktails, and a bunch of equally angry friends.

Along with that came the idea that Hunters, because they were after all just human, were fragile and flawed. They’re loners, relying on home-made gear and second-hand weapons, keeping themselves awake on all-night stake-outs with black coffee and cigarettes (assuming, probably correctly, that they’ll die violently long before lung cancer gets to takes its shot). They’re also people with mortgages and marriages and jobs and kids, all of which they’re endangering by pursuing the Hunt.

I like the idea that Hunters aren’t part of big, world-spanning organizations and that they don’t have infinite resources to draw on. A Hunter is going up against enemies that are far, far more powerful than them, enemies that can draw on untold supernatural and mundane resources. They have to plan and research and train and prepare obsessively, they have to use every scrap of ingenuity they have to give themselves any chance of survival. And as things get darker, they have to decide just how far they’re prepared to go to achieve their aims.

You’ve written some fantastic, unique stories for COG: The Mysteries of Baroque and Cliffhanger, one a bit of a 19th century Gothic literature homage, the other bringing 1930s retro-futurism/pulp adventure to interactive fiction. Despite the supernatural underpinnings of Hunter: The Reckoning, Beast of Glenkildove is in some sense the most slice-of-life or true to life game you’ve written for us. Tell me about what it’s like writing characters in the present day with present day (a well as werewolf-based) problems.

I tried to ground Beast as much as possible in reality, particularly in the early chapters. I think that WoD supernatural horror works best when it has a strong foundation in something real. So I drew a lot on real life – most of the main characters are at least partly based on people I grew up with or knew in college. I tried to find their voice when I was writing their dialogue – sounding it out in my head, trying to decide if it was something that I could hear them saying.

I also drew on the stories that I heard growing up in Wicklow: folklore, crimes, disappearances, strange and colourful characters. I go back there every summer: while I was writing Beast, I’d eavesdrop and people-watch in the local pubs, pump my family for stories and gossip, and just wander through the woods trying to get at what makes this part of the world unique.

What will WOD fans find surprising about your approach to the world of Hunter in Beast of Glenkildove?

I hope that one of the things that will come across is a renewed sense of how rich and strange the World of Darkness is. Vampires, werewolves and other scary things can lose their sense of menace and mystery when they’re thoroughly explored and catalogued. One of the things that I was trying to do in Beast is to reset that. You’re playing a character who’s an outsider to the supernatural world: they don’t know any of the things that WoD players would take for granted, like tribes and clans, and so they can’t classify things in those terms. Everything out there in the darkness is, at least at the start, just one terrifying, undifferentiated mass of Horrible Things – with only hints as to the factions and alliances and intrigues and secret wars which define the other game lines.

Some of these take the form of stories and weird tales that the PC will hear throughout the game; brief microfictions that hint at the bigger World of Darkness beyond the scope of Beast. I like the idea that in a world as riddled with supernatural corruption as the World of Darkness, these kinds of stories are everywhere, Masquerade or no; it’s just that Hunters are the only people who lack the self-preservation instincts to simply resolutely ignore them.

Finally, I’ve included a number of Easter Eggs referring to other Choice of Games World of Darkness titles; Jim Dattilo and Jeffrey Dean were very gracious about letting me use characters from Out for Blood and Parliament of Knives respectively and Kyle Marquis and I were working on Beast and The Book of Hungry Names at the same time, so we agreed on a few shared setting elements and even arranged a crossover of sorts.

One of my favorite Pavement lyrics is “Beware, the head of state says that she believes in leprechauns/ Irish folktales scare the $%*! out of me.” And they do! What is it about Irish storytelling and myths that make it such a fertile ground for your imagination?

I think one of the key things to understand about Irish folklore is its playfulness and its ambiguity. A typical Irish person’s attitude to a story is not to consider whether it’s true but whether it’s entertaining. So the older generation in particular will tell stories about Fionn mac Cumhaill, the Other Crowd, the Good People, the púca and ghosts in the same way they might tell stories about historical Irish figures of the past like Michael Dwyer or Charles Stewart Parnell or Éamon de Valera. If they’re telling a story about a child being stolen by the sidhe, they don’t insist on being believed the way that an alien abductee insists on being believed. They know what they think is true but as long as the story holds their audience’s attention, they’re satisfied.

I think there’s a political dimension to this attitude. The rational, evidence-based approach was, after all, an English import. Surveyors coming with chains, measuring staves, and compasses, measuring and mapping land that had previously been described and controlled through folk tradition and memory, was usually a prelude to that land changing hands, from Irish to British owners. Under these circumstances, the Irish propensity to mythology, superstition, and exaggeration (noted with considerable irritation in British sources) was a form of self-defence, a way of making sure that there were some things kept beyond the imperial reach.

Ireland was nicknamed “Wolfland” by the English and Scottish settlers who came there from the 16th century onwards. For them, there was a connection between the native Irish and the wolves, living out in the darkness beyond the Pale (the zone of British control around Dublin). For the British, part of the process of “civilising” Ireland meant cutting down woods, draining bogs, and killing wolves; Cromwell put a bounty on wolf heads.

In The Beast of Glenkildove, the werewolves represent a kind of violent eruption of this forgotten, primeval Ireland into the urban civilisation that displaced it. I think we’re all a little bit simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the idea of the wild. We worry that our technology is alienating us from the natural cycle of the seasons but at the same time we’re horrified by the violence and ruthlessness of the reality of nature. I think that’s where folk horror lives.

Was there an NPC you enjoyed writing most?

I love all of my children equally.

In all seriousness, I’d find it hard to choose. I tried to make every character, even relatively minor ones, as memorable and engaging as possible. They were all lots of fun to write: Sister Judith, Tottenham, Ray and Dekko, the Mulcahy, Arthur Snow… maybe among my favourite scenes, though, were the ones where the core cast just kind of bounced off one another and argued or teased each other or joked around. Those scenes kind of wrote themselves; it really was like hanging out in the pub with friends.

Has your feeling for the game world changed as you’ve been immersed in writing a Hunter story?

I’ve certainly learned quite a lot about topics like how to make homemade explosives. My Google search history over the past year or so would make worrying reading for law enforcement.

I’ve tried to imagine the World of Darkness from the perspective of those who are mostly kind of on the penumbra of the supernatural world: people who’ve seen some shit and have (sometimes wildly misguided) ideas or theories about what’s really going on, but who are very much not insiders.

If you were the PC in Glenkildove, what would your character sheet/customization look like?

Predictably, I’d be an Inquisitive creed Hunter with an Academics specialisation and the Folklore Library edge. Assuming a werewolf didn’t eat my face, I’d try to hook up with the Arcanum.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Journey into the magical world of Therania, a place where heroism and villainy are paths of Fate that can be foreseen in one’s destiny. Join forces with four eccentric individuals with puzzling goals and fight, plan, persuade, or run as you attempt to get a grip on your own legacy! 

Scales of Justice is 40% off until January 9th!

Scales of Justice is a 600,000-word interactive novel, the first volume in a planned series by Julia Owl. It’s entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Rumours circulate the streets of Capital. Rumours of an artefact, as dangerous and powerful as one can only fear. Some claim it’s capable of twisting one’s true nature, shaping it much to the owner’s whim; others say that it can identify a soul’s essence, putting the Ritual of Fate in a tight spot for the first time in centuries. The mage who made it is unknown; whispers in shadows only talk about a labyrinth, set somewhere hidden to protect its power. Many want to get it; many others, to destroy it. You? You are none of those–you just want to live.

And yet, your (almost) safe and peaceful life as a humble adventurer is threatened by a letter with today’s date on it, written in your mother’s hand…

• Play as male, female or nonbinary; gay, straight, bisexual, or asexual.
• Meet four distinct characters, with stories and ideals that highly differ from one another: a runaway heir, a rogue knight, a lost alien, and a foreign leader. Romance, befriend or doom them, and watch their tales shape your own.
• Choose one of the three species available and discover your own worldview and the world’s view of you. What is it like to be a human, a half-elf, or a half-satyr in this vast realm?
• Fight, conjure, heal, plan, or persuade–choose your path and deal with trouble in your own way.
• Buy yourself a horse! You want one, don’t you? 
• Learn, think, doubt, conclude. This world has a pre-written destiny – will you abide by it or challenge it? Who are you, and who will you become? 

Who is worthy of holding the scales?

Julia 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.

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Lead your troops in desperate, brutal Civil War combat!  Fight to end slavery and preserve the Union!  Earn promotion through impetuous bravery or tactical brilliance.  Stand in the battle line or fix bayonets!  

First Bull Run is 25% off until January 9th!

First Bull Run is an 88,000-word interactive novel by Dan Rasmussen. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

The fledgling Union Army is yet to meet the Confederates in a major battle.  The north expects a swift and decisive victory, but they are overconfident.  They will soon discover the brutal, drawn-out nature of industrial warfare.  

As a regimental commander in the Union Army, you must navigate a series of desperate decisions to keep your men alive and prevent military disaster.  Face down howling artillery shells, massive musket volleys, and vicious hand to hand combat with bayonets and sabers.  

Serve alongside the real officers and regiments who fought at First Bull Run in this historically accurate depiction of the battle.  Manage twelve real subordinate officers who live or die by your decisions!  Will you capture howitzers and turn them on the enemy, or storm their positions with infantry?  Will you deploy your companies as skirmishers or concentrate your forces for the attack?  

• Customize your character with 30 portraits and 4 distinct backstories–professional soldier, political leader, German revolutionary, or Irish nationalist.
• Personalize your regiment to be from any of 21 different states and territories, all chosen based on historical research.
• Guide the army with a plan of attack.  Support exhausted units, try to outflank the enemy, or charge up the middle.
• Balance multiple priorities while under enemy fire.  Face real consequences: mistakes will cost lives.  
• Keep track of your regiment with a detailed, highly interactive stats screen.  Watch your battalions lose strength with each volley you receive, and see junior officers step up to fill the roles of killed or wounded superiors.  
• Attack aggressively or outthink your enemy.  Tailor your strategy to the situation.  Shoot morale-breaking volleys, fire at will for maximum damage to personnel, or fix bayonets and charge the enemy.  
• Select companies to deploy as skirmishers.  Split your battalions and delegate command to a subordinate or concentrate your forces for greater strength.  

Can you do what it takes to turn the tide of battle and keep your soldiers alive?

Dan 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.

The Choice of Games community mourns the loss of Brittany Kiera Martin, known on our Forum as Eiwynn, who passed away very suddenly on Thursday, December 5, 2024.

She was a mainstay of the Choice of Games Forum for many years, where she generously gave countless hours of her time as a moderator, as well as a mentor to many. Her kindness, humor, and patience helped make the Forum a welcoming space, and she worked hard to bring new members into the community.

She was especially noted for her work in fostering new writers. She initiated the Author Support threads on the Forum, where writers could offer each other commiserations, congratulations, and advice on their works in progress. Many authors have said that it was her encouraging advice that enabled them to complete – or even begin – their first ChoiceScript game.

In memory of her life, and in honor of her legacy as a mentor to writers in the ChoiceScript community, Choice of Games has made a donation to 826: National Youth Writing, a charitable organization that strives to strengthen communities across the US by creating local spaces where young people can receive free writing lessons and learn how to expand their creative worlds.

We offer our deepest sympathy to her spouse, friends, and the many many people whose lives she made better through her presence in our community. She will be greatly missed.

We were fervently hoping to release Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove next week, but after careful consideration we’ve decided to delay the release until January.

A January release will ensure that we have time to fix bugs we’ve found in the beta process, and, as a bonus, it will give us time to add more character portraits to the game.

If you’re excited about The Beast of Glenkildove, please wishlist it on Steam! The more wishlists we get, the better the game will do on Steam on release day.

And be sure to sign up for our newsletter for the latest news on The Beast of Glenkildove and our other interactive novels!

We’re proud to announce that Honor Bound, 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 40% off until December 12th! And you can catch up on the other games in the Crème de la Crème world, too: Crème de la Crème, Royal Affairs, and Noblesse Oblige are all on sale this week for 40% off!

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran.

Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 595,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’ve built a promising career in the Teranese military, a force which has not seen major engagement in decades but which holds vast influence. Thanks to an injury, you’re no longer in the field. Thanks to the complicated (read, scandalous) circumstances of that injury, you’ve been quietly reassigned as a bodyguard for the teenage child of a famous scientist. This should be an easy assignment: your charge is at boarding school in the wilderness, an exclusive sanctuary where the children of the rich and powerful become artists and scientists of the future. The school sits close to your own hometown, so you’ll be familiar with the area. Finally, you can recover your health and get your career back on track.

But danger is closing in, and peril can come from inside as well as out. What secret projects are your colleagues pursuing in the dead of night? What is your commanding officer not telling you? Bandits lurk in the wilderness—including one of your childhood friends!—and natural disasters constantly threaten the fragile environment. And then there’s the danger to your heart, from the complicated feelings that come from returning to your birthplace, and from adjusting to the new reality of your life. Can you really go home again?

Build a warm community and bond with your colleagues, or impress everyone with your aloof competence. Chase ambition to receive glowing reports and get your life back on track—or become such a disaster that only bandits will tolerate your presence. Or, just maybe, you will have to risk it all for the sake of doing the right thing.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bisexual; asexual and/or aromantic; allosexual and/or alloromantic; monogamous or polyamorous.
• Customize your age: play a junior officer in your 20s, a mid-ranking officer in your 30s, or a senior officer in your 40s.
• Befriend or romance a severe military officer; a bold, easygoing outdoors expert; a determined and overworked priest; an earnest but scatterbrained fellow bodyguard; a childhood friend turned disgraced bandit; or the anxious, serious widowed parent of your charge.
• Pet the dog, the cat, or both.
• Meet the main characters of Crème de la Crème, Royal Affairs, and Noblesse Oblige, and find out what their lives are like now!
• Shape the school life of your teenage charge: encourage her to make friends or sabotage her rivals; let her slack off or push her to achieve; and get caught up in boarding-school drama.
  Unearth and thwart shadowy schemes—or join in the scheming for your own gain.

How far will you go for ambition, duty, and your country?

We hope you enjoy playing Honor Bound. 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.

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran.

Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 595,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

We’re excited to announce that Honor Bound is releasing this Thursday, December 5th!

The trailer is out now, you can play the first three chapters for free today, and check out the author interview as well!

And don’t forget to wishlist it on Steam!