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This is the first time I've written since high school, and for some reason I've decided to make an interactive fiction to make it ten times harder on myself.

Here's the first page I have which is based loosely on a roleplaying game my friends and I played last summer:

***

You were a great warlord once, or so you believe. Fragmented memories of leading armies and of the cries of the women in the villages you sacked still surface at times, even after how many years....centuries, millenia? You spent that time as a tattered soul in the depths of the Forge, what you all call the region of molten lakes where new forms able to withstand the fires of all but the deepest Hells are crafted.

You think you are smaller than you were, stunted and twisted in a few ways, and you don't believe you had the scaly tail and lopsided goat horns in your previous life. But you believe all your experience should count for something, even if you don't remember it. So when the proclamation is issued by the demon lord Axxerus that he'll be carving out a piece of the mortal realm for himself soon, you're quick to volunteer.

There before Axxerus's obsidian throne you scrabble and vie with the others over a pile of rusted weapons and armor you've been allowed to pick through, trading a few scratches and bites and giving a few in return, until you emerge finally with a dented iron breastplate, and a cudgel with obsidian spikes driven through it.

Grasping these new prizes as from somewhere down the echoing hall the drums of war begin to beat, you are elated. It's time to make something of yourself again.

***

I could really use opinions on this, mainly does it catch your interest as a first page? I've thought maybe I should add more to it, let them pick their appearance or do more with the recruitment process or when they're fighting over the weapons. But none of that is very important to the overall story.

I am also wondering if I should change my name, it was a one off joke when I made the account.

I'm sure others will put their thoughts into a much more detailed essay, bullet points and all, so I'll try to be brief.

These four paragraphs don't catch my interest mainly because of a lack of clear voice in the text, a lack of mood and impact. It tries to say a lot but doesn't actually say anything. Take the first sentence for example:

"You were a great warlord once, or so you believe."

What the hell man. This would've been a great opener for a comedy sketch, but then it all goes melodramatic with millennia and ends with just pure dry exposition without any feel to it at all. Take a breather and figure out what you want to introduce and in what light you want to introduce it in.

I tried to read this comment but I got bored and bounced off like two paragraphs in.

In my opinion, it's alright, I actually read the... four paragraphs you wrote. The one thing I'd say is that some of the sentences seem kind of... run-on to me. Like splitting them up would work better. Like, the entire third paragraph is a sentence on its own. Also, the last sentence of the first paragraph was kinda difficult to read.

Damn, @Axxius, I had no idea you had the connect like that.

It's fine. More showing and less telling would be preferred, though.

More warlord stories are always welcome at CYS.

lol

On the user name: did the bitches actually take your boat? I mean, if they did, you should certainly stay with that username. Well, at least stay with it until you manage to get your boat back from the bitches. Oh, and the bitches need to pay, that's for sure. If you don't have a serious plan to make those bitches pay, you need to be working on a plan. And not some simple plan where they get some horse manure dumped in their convertible, no. You need to have a very detailed plan to make those bitches pay for life. Bitches can't be stealing no boats, who do they think they are? Do they know who YOU are? Maybe they don't, but they will before you get through with them, I'm sure. And don't be going and shooting them bitches or nothing, that's too good for them. You need to make them suffer for a long, long time. And don't be messing up and trying to tie them up in your basement and torture them yourself, them bitches always manage to escape from those things. No, if you're going to be doing some basement torturing, make sure you hire some of that crap out. You can always get them to film it for you so they can't tie it back to you, but oh, those bitches, they'll know who is responsible. Yeah, you will show them, won't you?

Unless you already got your boat back, of course.

It was just a meme with my brothers and a friend at the time I made the account. I can't really explain how funny it was at the time, but we had been in a restaurant when this very upset man in shorts entered the foyer while shouting this line into his phone. Everyone in the restaurant heard him and we could not stop laughing for several minutes and ended up repeating it to each other over the next couple of weeks. And then it was just the first thing to pop into my head while coming up with a name for this site.

Maybe that man went on to do all those things, there's no way to know now. He was pretty mad.

I liked it as a first page. There are some extra commas and some missing ones from place to place, so you might want to run the text through a grammar-checking program.

All right so "okay but not exciting" is the sense I'm getting from responses. I'll rewrite this page to have a little more detail, but no one seems to think it needs more choices in this part which was the main thing I was wondering.

The plot takes place in the surface world once you're already invading and not in the Abyss, this first page was mainly to establish the backstory and who you are so I didn't want to linger on the intro long. But I may have gone too much in the direction of brevity as people have said.

I'll put up a revised version this evening.

I'm having a great time with the rewrite, and now that I've learned to script I feel like anything is possible.

https://chooseyourstory.com/story/hell's-army

I'll just leave this here with my first three pages, which is the expanded intro with choices added to choose equipment. (Your starting gear will effect flavor text but also have strategic importance later.)

I still would appreciate hearing any opinions, but I honestly feel like I'm on a roll with this now. The only thing I'm not sure of is the title it feels a little generic so I may change it later.

Didn't change the first line though, that enterpride guy will just have to keep on laughing.

I'm glad you're having fun with it!

Looks like you've got a good handle on scripting, it really does allow you to do a lot given how simple it is at the basic level. Just don't get so caught up in the bells and whistles you forget that the writing is the core thing. Although I really like your edits, you've added just enough detail and dialogue to make it more immersive while still keeping things moving along at a good pace.

I'd just like to point out that only the admins can see your story for now. If you want the opinion of us regular plebs, you have to enable sneak preview in the story properties.

Also, if you have any questions about the "on-page variables" that I see you like, feel free to ask. I've used them extensively in my latest story.

Since it seemed to be his intent, I'll just slip on in there and check the sneak peek box....

That's what writing a good story feels like. Having read all of the pages so far, I can say that they make me want to read the rest of the story.

Oh this thread has actually been useful. Brad's site extension converts text links into clicky ones, and he was able to fix a bug related to apostrophes in titles from this.