A choose your own adventure
“Surrender to the flow.”
In a mystical forest realm, an ancient book holds the secrets to eternal joy and never-ending splendor. When a tyrant steals it and enslaves a peaceful people, you must navigate the complex web of revolution, wisdom, and revenge.
Begin your journey →01
The Prelude
You're Colonel Forbin — fifty-two, retired, hollow with the years. Behind the door is a forest where the Lizards labor in Wilson's collars, a stolen book waits in the highest tower of his castle, and a mountain has begun to remember your name.
The country reads the way you walk. No meters, no scores — Gamehendge does not grade on points — but every choice carries a color: wisdom, action, compassion, or doubt. Walk far enough in one of them and the world starts answering it. Errand sizes you up at the fire. Smaller doors open that others never see. And on the mountain, Icculus — who sees everything — will name your walk to your face.
I
Ask before you take. Wisdom walkers see more — count the guards, mark the gates, notice the birds that come and go from the castle eaves.
II
Move before the fear can file its objection. The country respects it, fears it, and answers it — all the way to the frame in the square.
III
Sit down at the fire before you ask a single question. Lizards notice that. So does a wounded old knight with an hour to fill.
02
The Wager
Walk the canon and the country offers you two: Possum, the 1988 thesis, where the wheel turns and a new tyrant takes the throne; or Split Open and Melt, the 12/31/23 variant, where you speak in the public square and the chant does not start. Stray from the spine and the country, kindly, lets you fail — in dozens of small, specific ways, each one its own ending.
The wheel turns. Tyrants fall, and new ones are sometimes the people you loved. You will not perfect Gamehendge — but you may, through how you walk, leave it a little clearer, a little kinder, a little wiser.
That is the wager of the book: act with full compassion while releasing attachment to the outcome. Fight tyranny knowing tyranny will arise again. Create beauty knowing it will fade.
Step through the door →03
The Book Remembers
Every fall in Gamehendge tears a page loose — not from the Helping Friendly Book, which no outsider holds, but from the book death is writing into you. Twenty-three pages, one per ending, kept across every morning you begin again. Scenes you have died in grow faint whispers. The night sky above the great black rhombus fills, star by star, with every path you have walked.
Reach a true ending once and the country opens: every fall thereafter closes with what McGrupp saw — the whole saga, at nose level, from the only witness who was there for all of it. And before any of it, if you choose, a prologue: Prussia at night, a knock at a teacher's door, and the morning they took Roger Wolfe.
Every scene shows its sources. Canon is marked canon, our extensions are marked ours, and your heresies are marked yours. The 1988 thesis is the spine; nothing here contradicts it, and nothing ever will.
Begin collecting →