Scribarchy: a persistent, multiplayer choice-based platform, now in production with 3 completed multiverses
Hi all, long-time reader, infrequent poster about my own project. I’ve just moved Scribarchy out of beta and into production, and wanted to share it here since I think it’ll be of interest to this crowd.
Scribarchy is a persistent, multiplayer, collaborative interactive fiction. There’s no parser: at each location, you’re given a set of choices, and each one can succeed or fail depending on who your character is. Every decision changes the world permanently, for every player, not just your own session. You can play a world as-is, or propose short action ideas that a curator shapes into new choices with real stakes, so the worlds keep growing over time.
Three multiverses are live right now, all adapted from public-domain source material:
- The City of a Thousand Domes, adapted from Andrew Lang’s Arabian Nights Entertainments (1898). Nine of the classic tales (Sindbad, the Three Calenders, Aladdin, Camaralzaman, and more) woven into one world, with becoming Caliph as the ultimate win state.
- A Princess of Mars, adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel. Warring city-states, ancient canals, and four-armed green Martian hordes on a dying Barsoom, with saving the planet itself as the goal.
- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, adapted from H. P. Lovecraft’s 1926 dreamland. Ghouls, cat-armies, and a landscape that runs on its own impossible logic, with reaching the golden sunset city as the win condition.
I wrote up a fuller devlog with more detail on each world here: [link to devlog]
And the platform itself is here if you’d rather just dive in: https://d2zlljxoc0vzu0.cloudfront.net
Happy to answer questions about how the choice/curation system works under the hood, or about the design decisions behind treating this as a persistent shared world rather than a per-player instance. Feedback very welcome, especially from people who’ve built or played a lot of choice-based IF; I’d love to know what does and doesn’t work here.