A pretty short story, just in time for Mara's 2020 Halloween Jam. Involves murder, non-graphic violence and mild profanity. This is the first story I've written since grade school, over a decade ago, my only completed story, and my first attempt with CYOA. I found it to be a very useful exercise. There are two main forks here, and the first one is choice-poor, while I was trying to figure out how to spin a story. Both are pretty short in practice.

I hope you find this mildly entertaining. Criticisms I can apply to other works are highly appreciated.

If you're logged into IFDB and you visit this link, you'll have dark mode: https://ifdb.tads.org/styles?set=5. Don't even have to do anything else. You can also go to ifdb.tads.org/styles directly and choose from others, but this dark mode theme is the most popular and reasonable enough. I posted a link to this two weeks ago on a discord discussion about adding dark modes to external sites for CYSCE, when I went looking out of curiosity.

Amended the reviews on IFDB to use spoiler syntax.

Some reviews for Necromancer and Death Song, which link back to CYS since it's not against IFDB rules and might help give a little more attention. I rewrote these based on the CYS ones to talk more to the player and less to the author. 

Really easy to moderate, in fact. You just tag people in and make them do all the work of reviewing. If they do a bad review or don't show up, doc them 10 points or send asbestos in the mail. Otherwise, you reward them a meager and meaningless quantity of points. Simple.

The whole story is written with that style of dialog, so it fits.

Wow, that's one small kingdom! Must've settled for Rhode Island; maybe they arrived late to the continent and had to settle for scraps. I liked the way it was revealed that the main character isn't exactly stricken with moral duties, first when leaving and more dramatically when returning, which made for a great twist. The phoenix dilemma was a nice spin. I didn't think the mention of Elven magic held as much weight as it could've, but the hints at what the mount might be -- without revealing it -- made up for that. Fun little story.

Oh, but surely she's in the story somewhere, and you didn't have it plugged in correctly.

Remove the cartridge, then make sure to blow all the dust out, optionally replacing it with an equal volume of spittle, before slamming it back into the console. Then restart Rogues.

Congratulations on your new canon backstory that can never be forgotten from the forum now.

Ah, removing school-based. Best thing to happen since I made an account here. I noticed the levels of feedback we get on this site shortly after being linked to it. Pretty amazing, honestly, and the reason I'll be making contributions to the site, right after a significant side-quest. Lots of impact to be had in smoothing out pain points in the site functionality, which'll make the community even better.

Funny to see people on IFDB continue to read/write with bouts of illiteracy as it only proves the superiority of this community.

I can't get past the thought people would use a profanity filter to protect themselves from seeing bad words.

Well I originally wrote North Kor--