Welcome! I moved it to the WIP category and also reformatted the OP to a wiki so you can freely edit the link as needed.
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This story looks interesting ill bookmark it for later
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You worked on kim kardasian: hollywood
Dude that was a nice game really liked it.
And this wip is really interesting so far.
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@JoshMLabelle welcome to the forum and stuff 
lol will be honest never even heard of those games yet I’ve seen others have so you got some fans already but your story in the original post has my interest and though I should be asleep I will defintly be checking out the demo as soon as I can.
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Hello all!
UPDATES
- Big thank you to Bryce and Jason for sorting out the formatting and category issues with the post, and thanks to everyone who caught my flub!
- Save functionality has been added! Thank you to @Sakura_Higanbana28, @Den and @Rani for noticing this was missing. You’ll now have more freedom to play in digestible bites, mess around and see the differences between elven, dwarven, human, and Vayyan culture, and maybe do a dual playthrough where you see what it’s like to be a spy for the queen.
- There are a couple of verbiage changes and typo fixes – thanks to those who pointed them out, in particular @Naldek for catching the Choicescript syntax issue in Chapter 3.
- I’ve added Chapter 4, so players of the demo can get to learn a bit more of Vid’s backstory, learn more about orcs in this world, and get a taste of the palace intrigue to come as they become tangled up in the affairs of the Vayyan royal family.
FUTURE REVISIONS
- Thank you so much to @Rani for the thoughtful feedback about the current balance and surfacing of the stat choices. I’m going to think on this and earmark it for major improvement in the near future.
- Big thanks to @stsword and @Vexius_Krexius for the observation about your expectations around magic in the game versus the implementation. This is a world where magic is dangerous, arduous business at the best of times, and the queen has snuffed out most arcane knowledge… but you can become an accomplished spell-slinger by the end of the game as one of your long-term goals, if you make the right choices. I’m going to take some time to surface this goal more clearly to players, and allow some more early victories for players who are interested in this path.
WRITING DIARY
Tonight, I’ll be working a little bit on Chapter 6, which is a beast of a chapter where lots of threads come together, choices pay off, romances burble to the surface, and epic fantasy battle scenes play out. I’ve been going back and examining the Battle of Helm’s Deep for inspiration. Watching the LotR DVD special features was pretty formative for me, and definitely a big part of what lead me to go to film school, so it’s fun to go back and revisit them now.
CONVERSATION PROMPT
As always, I’m excited to hear about any thoughts or feedback you have, as well as any egregious typos or bugs you catch.
But in addition to that, feel free to chime in and let me know: if you’re somebody who loves tabletop roleplaying games, what was the best session you ever had? What made it so great?
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Just played through Tavern Crawler. Really excellent game. Got the best ending by romancing both Ford and Aurora and burning the Eventide to the ground. Definitely worth the top spot in the IF competition.
Sounds like this game has the same setting! Queen Nidana is the same queen from Tavern Crawler, isn’t she?
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Do you play as a king
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!!! This is so exciting! I’ve played the start so far and I love the atmosphere and the tense inexorableness of the Queen’s arrival. Congrats on the project, it sounds like it’s going really well, and good luck for the rest!
I don’t have a single best tabletop experience, but recently my Urban Shadows DM ran a seemingly innocuous us-throwing-a-karaoke-party filler episode and it turned into a full on mindbending musical episode complete with a playlist and songs for all the NPCs as they were expressing their innermost feelings and turmoil. It. Was. Glorious.
Also as someone who till recently was in the same boat of mainstream-mobile-game-dayjob with fantasy-CoG-side-hustle:
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Thanks for the kind words! The ending you got is, funnily enough, one of the absolute last things I implemented based on player feedback just days before the Comp deadline. I’m so glad I did, but man, was I cutting it close.
CoSS basically takes place in the world of Tavern Crawler, but there’s been some drift as I’ve fleshed stuff out and there are some details that don’t quite sync up anymore. I think of Tavern Crawler as being a bit like The Hobbit to CoSS’s LotR – not in terms of greatness, just since it’s a smaller story playing out in the margins of the big epic.
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You play as an adventurer in the classic fantasy mold… but if you make the right choices, you could wind up king of an empire or two by the end of the story…
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I’m intrigued by the “genders” of the nonhuman races being more akin to social castes than genders in the naturalistic sense; it makes them feel far more alien than these familiar fantasy races often do these days. I’m assuming they still have males and females, but just don’t consider it to be an important distinction? Or is their physiology completely different from humans?
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I think the most powerful element of your game is your setting. I really dig the war-torn sorceo-mechanical time and place you’re developing. The bleak tone of overwhelming odds and staccato pacing are more popular in military science fiction these days, so I’m glad to see dark action-fantasy finding its way into IF. Like KOTOR done by Warhammer. 
On the constructive side, my biggest point of feedback is that I’d love to see you slow down and build in more on the non-mundane mundane elements of your world. Especially since I have to orient myself to all the ways you’re inventing and/or subverting tropes. I’m really curious about obscure life details built into the background of your setting. What are eating utensils made from? Do people have sorceo-mechanical replacement limbs? If so, where can I get one? Is there a weird fantasy version of black lung happening? Granite pimples, maybe? How do everyday dudes see in the dark? Like, what kind of contraption are they using? More non-beauty please, like perpetually dying mine canaries! Tabletop campaigns–I’m guessing you’ve run your fair share–tend to jump from plot action to plot action, whereas, with prose, I think we’ve agreed to settle in for the long-haul epic. The “show, don’t tell” part of exposition gets tricky, but I’ve worked out some ChoiceScript tricks from slogging through my own WiP if you’re interested. 
TL;DR: strong start with a solid sense of place and definite tone. Could use some more sophistication in terms of choices, but I think that will come as you get more familiar with ChoiceScript. Thanks for letting me be a dwarf. I think I’ll stick around for this one. 
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That Urban Shadows experience sounds amazing – both as a tabletop fan and somebody whose only party trick is karaoke. I’ve wanted to play Urban Shadows for quite a while but have never been able to quite get a group together for it. I’ve been Keeper for a game of Monster of the Week though, which I often think of as Urban Shadows’ slightly cheerier small town cousin, and it was a blast.
Have always been such a fan of all you UK-based mainstream-mobile-game-dayjob with interactive-fiction-on-the-side folks! Lovely to have you in the thread.
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I think you put it exactly right when you say that they just don’t consider “male” and “female” to be important distinctions that are relevant to how they organize their cultures, though when among humans they may be recognized/assigned/voluntarily answer to the pronouns of these human genders based on their apparent physiology – and because to some degrees the finer points of these genders don’t necessarily translate in human language.
In crafting the various genders, I looked at it as an opportunity to think deeply about a binary that was important to each culture, and a thing that was important to them that existed outside of that binary. Elves (at least, this specific culture of elves that built the Sanctuaries and ruled Kanda once) are interested in the corporeal vs. the spiritual, and then have certain artisan interests that exist outside of that. Dwarves (at least, this specific culture of dwarves that is deeply tied to the mountains) are interested in the world above the mountain vs. the world within the mountain, but have a deep interest in story and song as a way to tie the culture together. Orcs (in the Vayyan Empire, at least) have a side that thrills over war and conquest and a side that loves decadence, and then a craftsman class that does productive artistic work with their hands.
Particularly the dwarven and Vayyan genders will be explored in more depth in the latter half of the story, as you spend more time around a variety of dwarves and orcs. So far, for example, Od the leader of the Artificer’s Guild, introduced in Chapter 2, is a dredger, while Okka is (obviously) a bard. Vid is very much a Precis among the orcs. Though he has some aspirations to being a great warrior, he’s a bit of a dabbler, and mainly refracts the idea through the lens of it being an artform.
I could ramble about elf, dwarf, and orc genders forever, so I’ll leave it there, but it’s definitely an idea that I’m interested to keep fleshing out and exploring!
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Thanks so much for the kind words and constructive feedback. Love that description of the world as KOTOR done by Warhammer! I think you’re going to like Chapters 5 and 6 a lot, as that’s where this tone really comes to full bloom, with clashes between cultures in Kanda coming to a head and some big, nasty, grueling fantasy warfare scenes.
I appreciate the feedback about taking the time to slow down and indulge the non-mundane mundane elements. In addition to tabletop, I’m coming from screenwriting, which is pretty big on the relentless sense of momentum, and mobile story games, where you can actually look at a tap map and see how many hundreds of people you lost during any small lull in the story, so needless to say my anxiety about pace is VERY HIGH. But I think you’re right that prose is a different beast, and I’ll be undertaking continual flavour/choice improvement passes on these early chapters as I plow forward with the later ones.
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Just a suggestion. In the Annals, there are three main paths you can take at the main decision point. Each of them is gated behind one attribute though. I’d maybe recommend giving some varied ways to accomplish the objective there. Right now it’s locking a plot path behind one build each. Like saving the scrolls requires rugged, and if you don’t build that way, it’s impossible to do. It just seems very limiting choice wise.
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Ive played twice and failed to save anything either time, so yeah.
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Thanks @Archtmag and @stsword, that’s good to know. I’m going to investigate a couple of different ways to improve this. It may be an issue of balance, as right now a strong “second stat” is supposed to be able to succeed here, but the gate may be a little too high for where these stats will be for the majority of players.
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Hi all, I hope this forum post finds you as well as possible under global circumstances!
WRITING DIARY
I’ll be working on a few things today. The main thing will be that I’m aiming to get about 1000 more words of Chapter 6 done, which includes finishing up the first big romance scenes for Okka and Cora, and some more fantasy warfare stuff (which is some of my favourite stuff to write.)
In addition to this, I’ve been working on clarity around the early stat establishing choices and some improvements to the Chapter 3 annals choice. I’m also going to be creating write-ups of each stat, and a “codex” page for terms that might be unfamiliar.
If I have time today, I also want to add an improvement to the way weapons work. Right now, the player has one of four weapons depending on their background: dagger, axe, sword, and scimitar. I’m not sure the work that went into that is very evident for a player on the first playthrough, and it’s not super fun to be stuck with the weapon you were handed based on where you come from, so I’m going to add an option upon your arrival in Breakwater to spend some coin on a more premium version of any of the four weapons (and an accompanying stat upgrade).
LOVE INTEREST/PARTY MEMBER OF THE WEEK: ANATTHO
The initial concept for Anattho was: what if the “Aragorn” of this story weren’t a king, but a cook? Specifically, I think of Anattho as a sort of Anthony Bourdain of the fantasy world, who loves and knows all the cultures of this fantasy world through their food. Caught up in the war effort in a way he never expected to be, Anattho’s arc is quite dependent on the player’s choices. If the player finds the war effort going awry (or aligns with the queen and pushes it that way), they’ll find Anattho starts to come unraveled starting in chapter 5.
Do you like a love interest who can cook? Is there an element of the culinary world of Kanda you’d like to know about?
FEEDBACK QUESTIONS
I’m beginning to think on some larger overhauls to the prologue and Chapter 1 based on early feedback and would love some thoughts on this from anyone who has played. (Or more general thoughts on the topics below if you haven’t!)
- I personally get bored with too much establishing stuff in games/books, and I really wanted to “get to the good stuff” with the queen’s invasion coming right away. However, I’m wondering if this happens so abruptly that players never have a chance to feel the impact of the background they’ve chosen and become familiar with their home before Nidana’s invasion. Would you prefer a slower opening with more colour about your background & hometown (and the creeping dread of Nidana picking off nearby villages/enclaves/cities/towns one by one) or do you like to get to the action right away and leave that background lore for later?
- Many of the character-defining choices for name, gender, pronouns, and character visual appearance are in Chapter 1 right now rather than the prologue – again, because my impulse is hook 'em with action first, get to that stuff later. Are you happy with where that is right now, or would you prefer to build your character in the early part of the prologue, before we get to the action with Nidana’s invasion?
- The skills + alignments/quests/inventory/relationships with your party stuff is currently broken up into different pages in the stats section. Did this help make it more digestible for you, or was this stuff too buried? Would you prefer it stats stay like this or all be contained to one page?
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As much as I agree with you that jumping right into the action usually is kind of awesome, I really like how this world has been written and opening up with a breather and slowly Getting into the action from there will make it easier for all of the Lore and other stuff to sink in before the fun stuff hits. As for character creation, I’m actually fine with where it is right now and for the stats thing, I like having all of it on one page, but that might just be me
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