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Next question, I'm trying to build in story interrupts. Interrupts would be possible if the page has an 'allow interrupt = yes' to prevent breaking the critical path of the story. 

Say the PC is travelling between cities and the normal story links would take him to the next city. I want to overrule that (otherwise predictable) onward journey with a mechanic driven interrupt, say with the event 'Your friend in City A has fallen sick, you really should return' - this adds spice and unexpected choices that can offset of the shortcomings of the genre - things becoming predictable and being taken for granted. 

Again, I understand I can pre-bake this (have two hyperlinks, one reveals when a variable - say story chaos - goes beyond a trigger threshold (in this example when chaos is too low). However, pre-baking significantly increases the amount of hidden coding I have to put up, and it prevents multiple systems from being able to generate dynamic events (which contribute to replayability). In addition, having multiple systems then brings the question of prioritization, if within the mechanics two events would be eligible to happen - say 'Your friend in A is sick' AND 'A plague has reached City B,' I'd want the system to prioritize one of them and send that up (merging events is beyond the scope of the current tech as far as I can see, hence the need to prioritize)

Thanks in advance for reading through this

StrykerL 

You could have a global link script that does this under the condition that some flag is set to 1 (you'd have to change this flag with local link scripts). You'll also have to somehow save the current page you're on when the interrupt happens so that you can return there. 

This is one of those things that sounds awesome but that will take you a lot more work than it's probably worth! I think it's doable though, if you're okay spending a shit ton of time troubleshooting.

Alright, thing is the game HAS to be complex for the key themes to hit home (think Undertale). Yep, saving the page was on the cards (figured that when saw the article on how to build a Codex). The game is also practice for larger works, so I'd be curious to gain more experience in troubleshooting now before diving in too deep in a later project and regretting it

I suspect that if you accomplish half of what you're going for, you will have a massive global script file.

I'm coming to terms with that. Am taking Killa_Robot 's words into consideration. One solution is to simply pre-roll all probabilities on page one (perhaps via entirely story irrelevant questions e.g. what's your favorite icecream) - which you can skip in favor of the 'canon' seed. Basically have one thousand rolls (or as many rolls needed) ready in advance, and whenever a roll is needed, it just looks at the next value on the roll list (looking at n and then moving the count to n+1). Within pages, same named hyperlinks could manage the shuttling between pages. The only challenge there then becomes building an error free forwarding system. Its a complex solution to avoid a complex problem, so still thinking over it

Basically the priority is held within if/else checks at the end of the page, where higher priority events (e.g. death of a character) overrule lower ones (now dead character continues journey). Interestingly, I should be able to build a macro for the coding of this in Excel, so the pre-rolled option is looking more attractive