The Ilacean Academy is nestled deep within the elven Empire of Avloneri. Students pass their day in study and training, far from the wars to the west. Sages remark that it was this sense of security that let the incident get so far out of hand...

You are a student at the academy, having studied for many years, you a competent magic user. During the beginning of the tragedy, staying alive is paramount. As the incident progresses, the courageous and resourceful can save their elven brethren and find ways to stave off the worst of the disaster!

This is a serious fiction containing violence and death, other potentially offensive subject matter has intentionally been minimized or eliminated. Players of tabletop RPGs will find familiar elements as I've been a gamemaster for many years and many games and enjoy applying the same storytelling methods to other media.

Magic is used throughout, and having the right spell at the right time can solve many problems. By using spell components (little bags that are items in your inventory) like any other item, it will cast the spell. Pages where a spell would be useful will note "Useable Spells:" just above the links to other pages. The bags of spell components that you pick up may have more than one use worth of material, allowing you to use the spell multiple times before it is consumed.

This game is for academic testing only.

alright, I just changed the root location and it worked. Silly webpage blocker.

I'll check it out when I get home. What's funny is my workplace blocks "www.myadventuregame.com" but not "chooseyourstory.com", LOL!

Thanks!

Alright, this thread was very enlightening. As I've been writing I've continually been able to find the things I need with the help files. While there is a ton of good info on scripting and the engine itself, I'm not finding anywhere that details the things you can sneak into the page itself, like the %%[stuff]%% method listed above.

Any advice on where to look? Or if there isn't a help file on it, is there at least a quick and dirty list someone (you..) can throw up with whatever options you have personally found useful?

Also, I've been reading other stories and decided to include images in mine. How do you get them to appear in the upper right (as seems to be the accepted use) of a page. Again, if you could just point me to where the info is, I'd be grateful.

Your solutions continue to be as elegent as they are simple!  Thank you yet again!

And I still can't figure out why that didn't occur to me, I was trying some really kooky stuff to get the same result; and failing miserably. 

Alright, let's ratchet up the complexity a notch. I have a page that has a few paragraphs on it, and (based on variables)there might be another paragraph inserted. I've tried inserting HTML to create page breaks, but the engine dutifully just diplays the html tags like regular text. Here's an illustration of the issue:

Paragraph 1.

Paragraph 2.

[This is where the variable dependent paragraph would be if its displayed. If not, I don't want empty whitespace here]

Paragraph 3.

So far, the methods I've tested either resulted in extra whitespace, or no seperation between the inserted paragraph and the one below is (or as I mentioned above, HTML tags plainly visible in the middle of my text).

Any advice on this one?

Excellent information about the operator! Thanks guys!

Alright, just to make sure I understand the usage that you're describing:

This would be inserted into the page itself (among the text that will be displayed when the reader arrives at the page) and the syntax is

% - to open

%[variable name]%=%[variable value]%[string to be inserted]%

% - to close

in english it would be "if [variable name] is [variable value] then print [string to be inserted] here"?

This is exactly the functionality I was looking for, a little cumbersome to use but much more flexible than the method I had in mind. Thanks!

I haven't found anything in the forums dealing with this yet. What I'm discussing here is the ability to conduct pre-processing of storygame pages before they are displayed to the reader. The goal being that certain strings within the page would be replaced by other strings specified in a global script. Here's a hypothetical example:

I have 3 characters in my story that may possibly accompany the protagonist, let's name them Tom, Dick, and Harry. During the scenes that have them, they're going to say and do the same things, only the name will change. Their name will be used within the text, not at the beginning or end, so this won't work:

$PAGETEXT := $PAGETEXT + " Dude's name is Dick."

is there a way to search through the $PAGETEXT variable and replace a code, to prevent overlap to other story elements, I'd use something like "0AP34GHTXP" where the names would be. I'd imaging the code to look something like:

IF $FRIEND = 1 THEN

REPLACE "0AP34GHTXP" WITH "Tom" IN $PAGETEXT

ELSE IF $FRIEND = 2 THEN

REPLACE "0AP34GHTXP" WITH "Dick" IN $PAGETEXT

ELSE

REPLACE "0AP34GHTXP" WITH "Harry" IN $PAGETEXT

Any thoughts? Has this been discussed and I missed it?

I've been through all the tutorials that related to scripting and didn't find anything about this in specific, but it seems like the kind of feature that would have at least been thought about by someone.

There are few things here that you're citing as negatives that can be spun into positives. If you are writing a story that seems to be very close to an existing world, or a body of another author's work, why not just make it a fan fiction type of work? This satisfies the fans as the world they love is being expanded, it allows you to use elements that fans are familiar with, and it does a lot of the setting work for you (which reduces the amount of work you need to put into making it immersive).

Alternatively, if you want something that's entirely your own but you like a certain genre, there's nothing wrong with making it similar to something existing. The way to really shine in this situation is simply to change a few things so that the world itself (or the characters, but I find altering the setting to be easier usually) has a few notable differences. Then you incorporate those changes into the story so that the storyline has to account for the changes, or the differences figure prominantly in such a way that the story focuses on the unique elements you're introduced while allowing the "rest" of the setting to be generic sword and sorcery!

Any way you choose to handle it, remember that unless you're trying to copy someone else's work, the writing style and the imagrey will be yours. To an outside reader, I doubt we would notice if a city seems a little too much like some other city from a book we may or may not have read.