This month’s round-up features a new D&D adventure from the very popular 5e Solo Gamebooks series, an indie app about love and fate, two interactive novels from Choice of Games, and a time-travelling adventure in a haunted house.
The Tortured Land
5e Solo Gamebooks has released The Tortured Land, the fourth in their series of solo adventures set in the Forgotten Realms. In this adventure your Player Character (PC) is thrown into the thick of some serious danger in the frigid north of Faerun. Only the most hardened adventurers will make it through in one piece, and with several different paths available, replayability is assured.
Arriving in a lonely village in the middle of the northern plain known as The Ride, your hero is soon drawn into a quest to retrieve a precious artifact. From there they will journey even further north, towards the barren waste known as the Tortured Land, in search of an unknown enemy.
There are items to collect, codewords to activate and perils to avoid. And of course, many combat encounters! As always, hyperlinks are included in the text to facilitate easy navigation, removing the need for scrolling between entries.
New to this adventure is a detailed Multi PC Conversion Table, for those players who like to solo with more than 1 PC. It converts every encounter for 2, 3 or 4 PCs, a more thoughtful method than the blanket rule provided in previous adventures. Now multiple players can journey without a DM, secure in the knowledge that each encounter is balanced as the author intended, no matter the number of PCs.
With deadly ice monsters and numerous traps and landscape hazards, you will need all your wits about you to get through this solo adventure! At the end of it your character will progress up to level 5, in preparation for the next 5e Solo adventure, Drums at Daggerford, which will be released in the near future.
The Tortured Land can be purchased from the Dungeon Masters Guild website. Players wanting a taster of the adventure can download a FREE pdf of the first 50+ entries here.
Railways of Love
Railways of Love from indie game developer Provodnik Games is a short interactive story about love and fate, featuring beautiful minimalist graphics and atmospheric sounds.
Train wheels click-clack monotonously. Two people – a man and a woman – go back home from the city of the future. They have feelings for each other. They are doomed to part.
Change their destiny and help the protagonists confess their love. It won’t be simple, but every successive attempt will reveal more about the world controlled by Progress-program, about the protagonists’ background and will unlock additional paths through the conversation.
Every small detail of the dialogue is important: a blinking light; a spikehead outside the window; music in the next compartment. Discover the right sequence of these events to finally…
And it is tempting to say – make the protagonists happy. But what is happiness? What sacrifice should be made to find it? Is it possible at all? Answers to such questions may turn out to be unexpected.
Railways of Love is available on iOS from the App Store, and on Android via the Google Play Store.
Choice of Games
The Superlatives: Shattered Worlds is a 218,000-word interactive novel by Alice Ripley, the thrilling sequel to The Superlatives: Aetherfall. Conquer assassins and alien invaders in Superlative London! Defend Earth and negotiate interplanetary peace as you race to rescue Queen Victoria.
You are the Arbiter, a planet-hopping operative assigned to stabilize a peace summit between Mars, Venus, and Earth. But when Queen Victoria is targeted for assassination, you must find her killer, unmask the Mysterious Officer he serves, and stop an otherworldly invasion before it’s too late! Armed with powerful aetheric artifacts and your own wit and skill, you’ll fight alongside your allies to unravel the mystery of this new threat, defend your home planet, and face a final foe both strange and strangely familiar.
Your employers, the shadowy body known as the Divergent Conclave, are dedicated to maintaining peace between the planets. Impress the Conclave and its members might help you protect Earth – or recruit you to serve their personal agendas. Will you manipulate them to gain their support? If the peace summit falters, will you placate the parties, or choose a faction? How will you stop the impending invasion? And who will you romance?
What started as a job of politics and diplomacy could end in murderous chaos. Face aliens, automata, and whole new worlds on a quest to save the solar system!
Drag Star! is a 150,000-word interactive novel by Evan J. Peterson, where you can play as a drag queen, a drag king, or a nonbinary or genderfluid performer, competing against a diverse cast of fierce drag performers. You better throw shade, serve looks, and slay each episode to become the next drag icon!
As a contestant on the newest season of Drag Star! You’ll prove your skills on the S.H.A.D.E. scale: Smarts, Humour, Artistry, Daring, and Enchantment. Through celebrity impersonation, singing, dancing, costuming, and comedy, you’ll need to be sickening in every stunt to win it all. But how will you steal the show?
Enter the Twerkshop with your own catchphrase, meet your new drag family, and try to maintain self-care and integrity while still playing to win. How will you balance competing and bonding with castmates like Lady Kali, Scandal Dupree, and Dorian Slay? Oh, but there’s more. Not everyone is playing by the same rules –there’s a saboteur on the cast, waiting for the right opportunities to cause even more drama.
Will you emerge as a finalist and grab the crown? Will you own the catwalk and the title of Fan Favourite? Will your wig stay on while you whip it back and forth? And will you be able to save the show from a devilish saboteur?
You can play the first few chapters of both games online for FREE. The Superlatives: Shattered Worlds is also available at 33% off until April 4th. Visit the Choice of Games website for further details.
The Ghosts of Craven Manor
The Ghosts of Craven Manor is a new time-travelling interactive adventure featuring numerous paths and puzzles, and multiple thrilling climaxes.
You are Dave Ingram. When you and your fiancée are given a chance to move into Craven Manor, you think that you have just been given the deal of a lifetime. That is until you discover the house is haunted. When your fiancée is possessed by one of the spirits inhabiting the house, you learn that the only way to free her is with the aid of a time travelling amulet. In an attempt to remove the ghosts from the house, you must travel through time and learn the truth about what happened there, so that you can either fight the threat in the present, or possibly attempt to prevent it in the past. The choice is yours.
The Ghosts of Craven Manor is available to purchase for Kindle or the Kindle app from Amazon (US or UK). A FREE trial version containing just the first part of the adventure can also be downloaded from Smashwords.