A Mage Reborn, Book Two (WIP) - UPDATED August 7th | Book One Released!

Thank you for supporting AMR! Artwork commissioned from Yesa.

A Mage Reborn is my first real attempt at making a ChoiceScript game, and I would love to get feedback on anything you find lacking. It is planned to be the first of a trilogy, with each book being ranging between 150k-300k words.

The demo (216k words excluding code) currently covers all of the events leading up to the protagonist’s death, as well as a good chunk of the post-resurrection arc. Functionally, this demo contains basically all of Book I, as well as a good chunk of Book II!

About

A Mage Reborn is a high fantasy game set in the continent of Arvanand, where four states have coexisted in a strained but longstanding peace.

You take on the role of a talented mage on the run from your mysterious past, who becomes embroiled in a tangle of royal politics and warfare you had never seen coming.

This chain of events sees you executed for a crime you did not commit–and resurrected by a mysterious group bearing a vicious vendetta. As Arvanand moves to repeat the tragedy of an age-old conflict, you must find a place for yourself in the midst of this chaos…lest it takes your life once more.

Features
  • Play as a man, woman, or non-binary.
  • Walk the path of a legendary mage, combining four different schools of magic to devastating effects.
  • Uncover the secrets of your dark heritage, and harness the tremendous powers that run through your bloodline.
  • Strike a bargain with arcane deities beyond your ken, and invoke their powers on the field of battle–at a steep price.
  • Find love from among five romance options, including a warrior king, an aspiring saintess, a pair of underground revolutionaries, and a figure from your distant past.
  • Shape your character’s personality, and have it influence their dialogue with others in the world.
  • Rise to lofty heights as the right hand of royalty, and experience a fall from grace resulting in your execution.
  • Take revenge against the kingdom that executed you, or seek a path to reconciliation.
  • Unravel the truth behind the continent’s age-old conflicts, and see its future shaped according to your influence.
ROs

A Mage Reborn features a cast of five romance options: one male, one female, and three who are gender-flippable. The blurb below contains spoilers for the demo, and the last romance option in particular is a pretty big spoiler unless you have played the demo to completion.

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  • Leomar Nantael “Leon” de Param
    Appearance: 6’1", with a broad-shouldered, athletic build. Light skin, easily given to tanning during summer months. Fine-boned facial features, with green almond-shaped eyes and an angular jawline. Golden-blond hair kept short. Dimples only visible when he smiles wide.
    Description: Formerly the leader of the White Fangs, a band of mercenaries operating out of the Parami city of Calinger. Leon is a member of the Royal House of Param, and a celebrated war hero who liberated his nation from foreign invaders. Although in his youth he was known to have a laid-back and sunny disposition, recent events have rendered him solemn and aloof.

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  • Ilya Magritte de Alviar
    Appearance: 5’6", with a demure build that easily gives off the impression of frailty. Very pale skin tone. Small, heart-shaped face, with prominent blue eyes, a gently sloping jawline, and a slender nose. Snow white hair that reaches down to her mid-back.
    Description: Former healer of the White Fangs. Ilya is a priestess and foremost candidate for the position of Saintess of the Jovian Church, one of the most influential positions in all of Arvanand. She is also heiress to a noble house on the brink of ruin, and living at the edge of destitution has tempered her into a wise and dutiful young woman.

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  • Falco/Flyss Mateus, formerly Falco/Flyss Oscionne
    Appearance: 5’7" for Falco, 5’3" for Flyss. Lean build with deep mahogany skin that speaks of Southwest Parami heritage. Deep-set golden eyes with angular, perennially furrowed brows. Oval-shaped face, with a strong jawline. White hair kept short (Falco) / shoulder-length (Flyss).
    Desciption: A young mage possessing prodigious skill in commanding the arcane, with the ambition to match. They are irascible and easily given to grandstanding, and they further seem to carry a particular dislike for you.

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  • Yusuha/Yurui Mateus, formerly Yusuha/Yurui Cheilong
    Appearance: 6’4" for Yusuha, 6’ for Yurui. Wiry and lanky physique, a bit on the thin side. Warm beige skin tone. Straight brows over upturned, heavy-lidded brown eyes. Bow-shaped lips locked into an almost permanent smirk. Scarlet hair at mid-length and slicked back (Yusuha) / going down to their upper back (Yurui).
    Description: A native of the Yotai Free Cities, though their maternal family tree can be traced back to Salantira. Kind-hearted and easygoing to a fault, which makes them seem an odd fit for the sinister organization they work for. And though they often advocate against the crude methods of those they work with, their loyalty to the cause never seems to waver.

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  • Elias / Eliana “Eli” Revelois
    Appearance: 5’10" (m) / 5′7″ (f), with a lean build and olive skintone tattooed with barely-visible seals (much like MC). Angular face with thick, straight brows over hooded brown eyes. Straight, voluminous black hair kept short (m) / in a long braid reaching her lower back (f).
    Description: A combat healer whose cold demeanor belies a heart of gold. A close confidant of yours in your childhood, Eli was present during the most traumatic moments of your life and was the only reason you survived them. Certain events compelled them to sacrifice their life to save yours; now that you’ve been miraculously reunited, they seem adamant to stay by your side at all costs.
Platonic Options

The people shown under this tab are important NPCs. Though they will not be romanceable, they are still fully fleshed-out characters with whom you can develop a platonic bond.

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  • Iver Norsaine “Saine” de Param
    Appearance: 5’9", thin build. Light skin a shade lighter than Leon’s, with similarly green almond-shaped eyes. Oval-shaped face with gently curved features. Wavy chestnut-brown hair that would be perpetually disheveled, if he had his way. Formal occasions have him slicking it back, however.
    Description: Brother to Leon and himself a prince of Param. Though there is a childishness and naivete to him that speaks of his youth, Saine is the model prince in nearly all aspects: he excels at his studies, observes decorum perfectly, and is a fighter talented enough to hold his own in the White Fangs. Yet the prince seems to have a strained relationship with his station in life, and is markedly resentful of those who seeks to tie him down to it.

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  • Tahlia Mateus
    Appearance: 5’11", unhealthily thin figure. Pale skintone with almost permanently rosy cheeks. Aristocratic face, with high cheekbones, wide-set red eyes and full lips. Long, wavy platinum blond hair.
    Description: A woman of ethereal beauty who serves as a priestess of the Ishavak Faith. Though on paper her position within the Ishavak Church is a lowly one, in truth she acts as the covert leader of its military arm. As the foremost expert on matters of the arcane, an able political strategist, and an incredible mage besides, Tahlia is perhaps the Ishavak Faith’s strongest asset in reestablishing its presence throughout Arvanand.
Content Warning

Content warning for warfare and all that comes with it–death, violence, some gore, fantasy discrimination, childhood trauma. The game will also feature some optional, non-explicit sexual content. PS. This list is likely non-exhaustive as I don’t come from a culture where content warnings are the norm. Please let me know if any should be added and sorry in advance for any omissions!

Other things to note
  • English is my third language, and I don’t yet have the most intuitive grasp on it (I particularly struggle with tenses and proper nouns). I’ve gone to painstaking lengths to ensure that the demo is free of linguistic errors and such, but you should still expect some.

  • If you are submitting errors (particularly code-related ones), it would be of tremendous help if you could provide a screenshot to go with it. That’ll really streamline my troubleshooting process.

  • I’d also love a peek at your stats by the demo’s end! It will help me rebalance stats/stat checks for upcoming editions of the demo.

DEMO: https://dashingdon.com/play/parivir/a-mage-reborn/mygame/
Word count: 216k without command lines
Average playthrough: Roughly 80k words
If you did not start from a clean save in a post-2.5 edition of the demo, it will be broken in the current one. Otherwise, you should be good to go!

TUMBLR: https://mage-parivir.tumblr.com/
For smaller devlog notes on the game (read: non-demo updates), with an open askbox!

PATREON: Adam Rifky is creating interactive fiction | Patreon

FAN-RUN DISCORD: Click here for the invite!

FANWORKS
Sunblind, an AMR fangame: Click here to play
Fanart tag: #we got fanart???
Fanfic tag: #we got fanfic???
Consolidated fanwork tag: #fanmage

Art: Thank you for 100k views!

Thanks everyone!

1622 Likes

3 Likes

This is a very promising start. There’s nothing I enjoy more than playing as a mage in a fantasy world, and your grasp of English is excellent, I’d never have guessed it wasn’t your first language. I did hit an error which unfortunately cut the story short, but once that’s fixed I’ll look forward to reading more.

11 Likes

This seems interesting, but I noticed that, despite being marked as gender-choice and nonbinary-inclusive, the game refers to you as male (“helpless little boy” should lead to it) without ever giving you the chance to pick your gender. There’s nothing wrong with making a genderlocked game, of course, but judging from the game’s feature list and the fact that everywhere else it seems you’ve taken care to be gender-neutral, I don’t think that’s your intention?

EDIT: Found another one of those, this time after getting the chance to choose to be female (“considered me a son”). I imagine this story was originally written with a male protagonist in mind? :stuck_out_tongue:

11 Likes
Summary

i was female :slight_smile:


Error?

6 Likes

Huh, so I really liked this.
The plotline is amazing. Really a good idea and I like the execution so far. I hope to read more :slight_smile:
I also had some errors as well as pronoun errors as I was playing female.

The rest:

Also I like the characters so far. But I did stumble a little when a new scene started. It gave me a distorted feel. I like ot non the less!

6 Likes

Hmm… I don’t know if it got to do anything or if I miss anything about changing my gender in the arc but… my main characters is a female but it suddenly turn into male when I meet Sister?? Or it is a bug perhaps?

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Found this error while playing:

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Oi @Parivir this WiP has save files from some other WiP…

6 Likes

Hello everyone, thanks for giving this WIP a chance!

Sorry for the pronoun issues :pensive: A lot of it, especially the ones on the banquet chapter, stem from me defining a quick character at the start of the scene for testing purposes. Which I foolishly forgot to delete before publishing. Big sad.

In any case, all errors mentioned in this thread (save the save file one, which…stumps me) has been corrected!

As for @Empress_Nightmare’s concern with the save files…I confess I have 0 knowledge on the workings of dashingdon/save plugins, so I don’t even know how to begin to approach this issue. I only added (*sm_init mygame | 3) to the startup txt, as per the site’s instructions. Would anyone more tech savvy be able to have any insight on it?

20 Likes

I think you should use your custom name instead of mygame…:roll_eyes::neutral_face::thinking:

3 Likes

Anyway are those second set of choices have all choices greyed out except one?!?

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Yeah, it’s like some kind of flash back, each of them is a piece of our memory

4 Likes

Thanks @Manaxaggd

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Hi, save issue is hopefully fixed. Thanks for pointing out! And yeah, @Manaxaggd has the right of it :slight_smile:

6 Likes

Oi @Parivir save system is fixed…
And


Who is this helpless little boy in here?!?

4 Likes

Shoot, I could’ve sworn I caught that one. Fixed!

6 Likes

:roll_eyes::smile_cat::kissing_cat:

I got a game breaking error when after helping the healer I said we were friends, something about the yesfriends variable.

1 Like

That was extraordinary! Simple, neat and thrilling!
The pacing was profesionally done.

9 Likes