10/12/2022

8/25/2025 2:38 AM

140

2

0 wins / 0 losses

Marauder

Rainbow-1

You are a Californian inmate firefighter, flying out to stop a wildfire in the sierras. You are also a native of this land, descendent of a proud line of firewalker shamans, but the blaze you're facing now is unlike anything you've ever seen. As you stand before it with your high-powered chainsaw, you'll will have to face the demons of your past. Depending on your choices, you may emerge tempered, reforged, or burned to a crisp. The choice is yours, Chief.

This is a game for adults. It has a fair bit of gore, violence, sexual elements, and touches on offensive topics. If that's not for you, turn around now, this site has plenty of other content that you will like better.

Despite the word count this is a short game: Typical time for one playthrough is 25min.

This game was an entry to Sherbet's "Summer's End Synnergy Contest". (I wanted it to be Quentin Tarantino, but it turned out David Lynch.)

The Laconia Incident

It's 1942 and you are Karl Petersen—In another life, you'd still be studying for your doctorate in English Literature, but this isn't another life, and you've been assigned as second officer of the submarine U-156, patrolling the South Atlantic. So come on now, the Third Reich is at war and the Kriegsmarine needs you!

The game was made as an entry to END MASTER'S PROMPT CONTEST 4, with the prompt “A story about naval warfare.”

Content Warning: I thought this one would turn out on the lighter side, but the usual sex, violence, occasional torture and optional suicide crept back in (It also has language!). In cinematic terms think of Hemmingway and the Reservoir Dogs re-enacting the Omen on a submarine.

Regardless of word count, this is a short game: Playtime is only 20-30 min.

There are several storylines but only ONE TRUE ENDING.

Angelside

unpublished

In this near-future hard sci-fi noir story you are Patricia 'Mace' Angelside, an ex-cop who has a hard time adjusting to her role as a bodyguard for the heir of a business empire. Can you keep him save during his trip on a luxury space liner? And, do you actually want to? Depending on your answers, this might turn dark pretty quickly.

This is a game for adults: if you are under 18 please give this one a pass, there are many other stories on this side you can enjoy.

This is a relatively short game: Much of the word count comes from the breadth of choices you have. You'll likely reach an ending within 20 minutes of reading, but there are quite a number of major storylines to explore.

This game was started as contribution to Sherbet's Summer's End Synergy contest. The theme of the contest was a character coping with a bad event in the immediate past. I thought that would go well with a noir detective story. An important inspiration was William Hjortsberg's noir novel "Falling Angel," but I wanted to escape some outdated cliches of the noir genre. You might say I wanted to show another side of the Angel, hence the name of the story. Specifically I wanted a female protagonist and a sci-fi setting. To accommodate the noir theme near-future hard sci-fi capitalist world, ala "The Expanse" was an obvious choice. In the writing, the story got a bit out of hand, and eventually I had to quickly write another game (Rainbow-1) to have something to show by the contest deadline.

Goldbird (Rework)

unpublished , coauthor

Everything looks calm right now: The usual mists are wafting in from the Red River at nightfall. They bring the same old smugglers sneaking into port, the same old harlots, making their rounds on the piers, and the same old bards, spinning their tales in the taverns. But, the good citizens are huddling in their warm little houses, speaking their prayers to Sol. They pray for order, stability and the holy law to protect them. Let's hope they pray really hard, because strange things are starting to happen on Rador's day, a burglary goes unreported, a work of art is destroyed, an ancient demon walks the street and there are whispers of snow.

In this story you step into the boots of Nyvella Begat, a young lass trying to find her way in a city filled with intrigue and adventure. But when a startling discovery disrupts your comfortable life, you must decide who you want to be, lest others seal your fate for you.

Fabrikant's note: This is the second version of Goldbird. The original game by Northwind was intended as a metaphor on fate. While there were quite a number of endings, fate would try to push you towards one of them. To see some of the rarer endings you had to assert your will through a series of decisions. The result was a puzzle where choices had delayed consequences, and branches were unlocked by combinations of choices. Mostly, this subtlety was mostly lost on the audience. With Northwind's permission I have rewritten the storygame in a form that is easier to navigate (though there are still some delayed choices and well-hidden branches to discover). The game still tells the same story, containing essentially the same branches, but I have added some small bits of my own, rearanged others, and told some events which were only hinted at in the original.

Shades of Ice

unpublished

tbc

I want in!

Oh another thing: I see you are writing in third person, past tense. But then the choices are in first person, present tense. It's not a huge issue, but it might be a good idea to stay consistent there.

I gave it a very quick look. That's actually well written. The initial meeting with the boss was very good. The scenes with the colleagues that followed lack a bit of energy. But of course quite soon after the action starts. There are a lot of choices, but a good part seem fake, and sometimes the decision themselves are quite light. In real life I wouldn't think twice about walking or taking the subway, so deciding for one or the other doesn't feel like deciding very much. Rereading the Goldbird story recently made me realize how much such minor choices can confuse the reader. So my advice would be to focus more on major choices with known stakes. Anyway, very cool first story.

The bit you might be looking for is $PAGETEXT:=$PAGETEXT+"Text"

I trained myself to Ctrl-A Ctrl-C every few minutes while I am writing. A habit tempered in grief.

Once a colleague of mine managed to get his backspace key struck. He was working on a 100-page document. The scream that echoed through the office would have fitted any horror movie (though autosave got his back)

Thank you.

Leaving was not an easy thing. Were would you even go. Also Nero would have just killed the rest of his family. And Seneca was dying anyway. I think he suffered from Asthma(?) and he nearly died due to this even as a young man. The old Seneca had prepared himself for death for years and he was a stoic.

Also this quote which is a bit more recent

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

--Richard Dawkins

He didn't really have him killed. He ordered him to commit suicide.

For stoic philosophy, it's really easy: Hands down Marc Aurel is my clear favorite. To get into it just install a phone app with stoic quotes; there are lots of free ones. Reading a quote a day and thinking about it for a bit, is the way to go.

For horror, I like the classics. Poe, Lovecraft, etc. Poe's Ligeia is a great short story. A lesser known old master of horror is F. Marrion Crawford. He has a short story collection that is really good. It's called "For the blood is the life".