Fiction | Fantasy

Tunnels! Goblins! Magic! Adventure!

Come and find a COMPLETE choose-your-own story right here on Medium

I’ve written a lot of stories on Medium, most of them fiction, and most interconnected in some way. I’ve also worked with many other writers on here.

Perhaps the biggest and best achievement that I’ve contributed to is The Castle of Shadows. It’s a full fantasy story in a ‘choose-your-own’ style, where you decide the paths and the ending.

Using the links from one page to the next in Medium, I was able to construct the whole story over several months, from set-up to conclusion. At the outset, the story was fairly unplanned. It grew over time. And while I wrote most of it, several of the chapters were written by guest authors as part of a collaboration.

(One of the great things about writing on this platform, if you ask me!)

The Style

Like other ‘choose your own’ type stories, the adventure is written in the second person voice. After most of the chapters, you are asked to make a choice – which way to go? Whether to attack or run away? What strategy to use in order to escape danger?

You get the idea!

The Premise

The story begins when you wake up in a cave, with only a vague memory of having set out the day before. You recall that you had a disagreement with your adventuring sidekick Jade, as the two of you worked to find an artefact called the Sword of Light.

As you explore the area, you start to come across villagers and weird creatures, many of which seem to know something about a mysterious ancient fortress called The Castle of Shadows. Could the sword be there?

The whole thing is very much inspired by Celtic legends, and it captures (I hope) some of the fun, mystery and craziness of classic adventure tales

Intrigued? Click on chapter 1 to start reading:

And the great thing is that the story is finished. Unlike the many incomplete fiction projects on Medium (some of mine included), you can read the whole of theCastle of Shadows beginning to end. For free!

One caveat to the last point… there are a few paths that take you out of this story arc and into another. Following particular choices, you might find yourself stumbling into ‘The Doctor and the Fairy’, a LitRPG tale started by Samuel Kenneth Kauffman, or travelling to the world of Pendown, crafted by Jonathon Sawyer. Or even dicing for your life with Death, in a drabble-based choose-your-own tale, ‘Until Luck Runs Out’, started by Bradan Writes Stories.

Who knows — perhaps there are more? The choice, after all, is yours.

Follow ‘Choose Your Own Adventures — Collaboration’ here

Thanks for reading! Before you go, you can find more of my fiction here, as well as all of my advice and guidance on creative writing right here. Or avoid missing a thing by getting all my posts direct to your inbox! 🧠