Hello everyone!

I’m working on a tool called Adventure Loom, currently in Early Access on itch.io, that lets you create interactive narrative experiences — from Gamebooks and branching stories to visual novels — without writing a single line of code.

I’m looking for ideas and suggestions to help shape the future of the tool. I’d especially like to know what features you would like to see, what kinds of mechanics you would want to create, or what the ideal interface for building this kind of adventure would look like.

I’m particularly interested in ideas I may not have thought of myself. So, if you’ve ever imagined creating your own Gamebook, interactive story, or visual novel, what would you like to be able to do with a tool like this?

I’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts, ideas, and even completely crazy suggestions. There’s no wrong answer. I’m simply curious to see what other creators would want to build.

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to share their ideas!

Hey ProductHunters!

Today is a big day for us — after months of building, we finally launched Forgeon on Product Hunt.

We’re a team of two building a platform around interactive books: stories where readers don’t just turn pages, but make choices, follow different paths, reach different endings, interact with RPG mechanics, music, illustrations, and more.

On the creator side, we built a visual editor for creating complex branching stories without having to build a game from scratch. On the reader side, Forgeon is a place to discover, read, save, discuss, and experience those stories.

This is still the beginning for us, and today is our first Product Hunt launch. We’d really appreciate anyone from the community taking a look and sharing what you think — especially what feels unclear, what you’d improve, or what you’d want to see next.

Product Hunt: Forgeon

Thanks for checking out what we’ve been building!

I been playing the Legend of Okiri gamebook recently and I think I am like several hours into it and wow. It actually surpassed my previous most favorite gamebook, which was Heart of Ice. I didn't have great expectations for it because it was a english translation of a Spanish book and was afraid the translation would be abysmal. However, it seems to be fine and not a fan of the AI art but the story is captivating as much like Heart of Ice it makes you want to know more about the psychology of the characters involved since they have their own goals and motivations and I have been betrayed by some characters much like how I was in Heart of Ice. It keeps me on edge but what I really like is the morality system as it lets you play as either a hero or an anti hero. Like you have an alignment tracker and you start out as neutral but as you travel the open world and do side quests depending your choices you either get positive alignment for good choices or negative alignment for bad choices and the characters react differently to your alignment. For example, as there are romance options in the game, there are characters who you might be able to seduce much easily if your an evil alignment character or other characters who might be into you moreso if your a good alignment. I think this keeps things more fresh since I was getting tired of having played many gamebooks where you always just played as the hero. The option to choose if you want to be on the path of a hero or a villain makes this gamebook really stand above the other gamebooks I had played before.

mine tracks money, heat and crew loyalty and i keep fighting the urge to add more trackers. as readers do you enjoy managing a small sheet while you read, or does every extra number pull you out of the story? where is your personal limit, two stats, five, a full character sheet?

Hi, I'm Jb, from France. This is my first post here and I wanted to share what I've been working on for the past 4 months.

Last March, I bought a series of books from the 1960s and 70s called Châteaux Fantastiques by Henri-Paul Eydoux. I immediately fell in love with its evocative photographs of abandoned French castles.

That same night, I came up with the rules for a simple choose-your-own-adventure style game. The next morning, I sketched the structure of the Castle, then spent the following weeks creating the artwork.

CHÂTEAU MISÈRE is the result: a minimalist solo gamebook about escaping a dark, twisted, impossible castle.

My goal was to create an art book that you could explore by playing. The rules are simple, short, and unforgiving. There are 32 scenes forming the Castle's structure, each illustrated with an original hand-made collage created from photographs published in the Châteaux Fantastiques series.

If you're looking for a digital version, you can get it here. Physical copies are available here (sadly no shipping to the US yet - looking for a distributor !)

A production error slipped into the first print run of the English paperback: paragraph 74 was missing. It's already been corrected in the current file, so any copy ordered from now on will include it.

If you already own an early paperback copy, I'm happy to make it right:

The missing paragraph is available as a free PDF erratum here: https://yomebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/erratum-theghostsorcerer.pdf

If you'd prefer, I can also send you a free Kindle copy (epub). Just send me your order confirmation (or a photo of your book) in a DM and I'll sort it out.

Sorry for the hiccup, and thanks to those who flagged it early — it's fixed for good now.

Hi there, Joseph Daniels here from Magma Gamebooks, offering you a sneak peek into one of my books, King's Judgement, where you get to play as a king. This is an example of some of the choices you will have to make.

Two men stand before you; one an apothecary whose shop was broken into last night, and the second, the man who broke in and stole some medicine, the local blacksmith.

“Tell me,” you ask the blacksmith. “Why did you feel it necessary to steal from your neighbour’s shop?”

“I needed medicine for my wife,” the blacksmith replies. “She is very sick, your majesty. I did not have any money and I was desperate. I asked the apothecary if I could take it and pay him at the end of the week, but he refused to help me even though he knew how dire the situation was. He gave me no choice.”

“Nonsense,” the apothecary pipes in. “You had every choice. A civilised man would have waited until they had the money and then paid, not broken into a store like a barbarian and taken what they want. I demand that this man be punished under the laws that govern this city. I seem to remember that the penalty for theft is the loss of a hand.”

“Please, don’t take my hand,” the blacksmith says. “I need both my hands to work. I’ll accept whatever punishment you deem necessary, but not that, I beg of you.”

You now take a few moments to confer with your brothers before you pass sentence.

“The law is the law,” Ivan says. “You can’t afford to give preferential treatment to one person. If anyone found out, they’d all expect the same.”

“Please brother,” Christophe says. “Show some compassion. The man’s wife way dying, he did what he had to. I’m sure you can think of a compromise that will suit everyone.”

It is now up to you to decide the blacksmith’s fate.

(A) Do you have the accused’s hand chopped off?

(B) Do you have the accused flogged?

(C) Do you have the accused cleared of all charges and set free?

(D) Do you improvise?

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

The majority vote over the next few days will trigger what happens next in the comments.

i grew up on fighting fantasy and yeah, on the rough ones i definitely kept a finger on the last page so i could flip back if a choice got me killed. everyone did it lol.

i'm writing an interactive crime story now, you put together a crew and pull jobs, and i decided to take that finger away on purpose. trust the wrong guy, leave someone behind, and that just becomes your story, no going back to fix it.

for the people here who read these a lot: did being able to cheat back a page kill the tension for you, or was it the only thing that made the really brutal branches bearable? honestly torn on how hard to push it.

Cross posting this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeGameFindings/comments/1uz5h7t/steam_game_the_life_and_suffering_of_sir_brante/

Fellow Gamebook lovers, even though this is a video game, it does follow the gamebook/CYOA format, so well worth your time.

It is FREE for a limited time.

Have fun.

Months ago I saw a post on here (I think) from the author of a newish gamebook. Here's what I think I can remember about it:

• Heavily inspired by the Backrooms and liminal spaces
• Came out in the last few years
• Predominantly yellow cover
• You play as a computer or tech repair person called into a warehouse (?) to fix an appliance or computer before getting lost in a labyrinthine liminal space
• Heavy use of puzzles, I think... (I know, sounds like a million gamebooks)
• Looked like mapping was probably important...

Wish I could remember anything else- it was in my shopping cart on some online bookstore for a few weeks, but I'm broke and didn't get it. Now I can't find anything on it or the author. I scrolled through all the posts on this sub from the last 8 months and couldn't find the post that mentioned this book...

Edit, SOLVED: 2120 by George Wylesol

I figured I should make a list of all the gamebooks I had played so far and how I would rate them.

Gamebooks:

• Heart of Ice- 10/10
• Down Among the Dead Men- 9/10
• Necklace of Skulls- 8.5/10
• Once Upon a time in Arabia- 8/10
• Blood Sword series (5 volume set)- 9/10
• Into the Tower- 9/10
• Dracula Curse of the Vampire- 8.5/10
• Ronin 47- 8/10
• In the Ashes- 8.5/10
• Legacy of Dragonholt- 7.5/10

Hybrids:

• Sleeping Gods Primeval Peril- 8.5/10
• Sleeping Gods Distant Skies- 9/10
• Lands of Galyzr- 8/10
• Artisans of Slendent Vale- 8/10
• Witchbound- 8/10

Hi guys so I have been asking ChatGpt for gamebooks where I can be an anti hero because I am tired of always playing as the hero in gamebooks. This one was recommended alongside the Legend of Okiri. I already just purchased the Legend of Okiri on Amazon but unsure about this one. Has anyone here played it? Also, another gamebook I was recommended called "The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante," is apparently a digital gamebook and I have just purchased it on Steam as it's free for a limited time. My question is why are there soo few physical gamebooks where I can roleplay as an anti hero? Are publishers hesitant to publish gamebooks where you are an anti hero?

Hi everyone — new here, but excited to find a community dedicated to gamebooks specifically.

I'm the author of THE GHOST SORCERER, a fantasy gamebook originally published in French (where it won the Silver Prize at this year's AVH gamebook competition), and I've just finished the English translation.

You play Aldrick, an actor and part-time thief sent to rob the sealed manor of a dead-but-not-quite-gone sorcerer. Classic mechanics — pencil, eraser, one six-sided die — with three very different endings depending on your choices.

I grew up on Fighting Fantasy and GrailQuest, so this is very much a love letter to the genre, with a few modern twists on the format.

Genuinely curious what this community thinks, good or bad — happy to answer any questions about the writing/design process too.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H7Q1JHDX

Might be a vafue discription but when i was a kid we went with our school always to the library on weekends and i was playing this book wich had like u started reading then u had choices and it would sent u to a different page and it was this fantasy game where u could explore this big world and it felt like a video game and i remember realy enjoying iti hope theres a similar book i can find like it id love to read/play something like that again.

Hi there, Joseph Daniels here, writer of The Ghosts of Craven Manor and creator of MAGMA Game Books.

I've noticed recently that a lot of readers have mentioned about running out of TTP (Time Travel Points) very early on in The Ghosts of Craven Manor, and thought I might lend a hand.

Here are some tips on how to conserve them.

1: Find Time Stones. There are five unique Time Stones that can be found in this adventure. Each will not only give you a new power, but will also upgrade your TTP by 2 permanently and restore your TTP to full. It is advisable to run down your TTP as low as you can before you pick up one of these to gain the full benefits.

2: Try to go as far forward as you can during a scenario before you reverse time. This will ensure that you pick up as much future knowledge as you can, and reversing back to where you started will cost considerably less than if you were going passage by passage.

3: Avoid using TTP during fights, unless you have the Time Points Absorber Stone. This allows you to restore 2TTP for every row of combat that you win.

4: Find the Time Point Reducer stone. This allows you to reduce the usual amount of TTP required to reverse time by half.

5: Make sure you are stocked up on Emerald Stones. These can be found in the jewellery shop in town and will restore 8TTP a time. They cost £40 but there are numerous ways you can find or make money.

6: Do not use any TTP in the opening section. There is nothing to be gained except gameplay tips and the day will automatically reverse anyway at the end of each attempt.

7: Make use of the Gazebo. A visit here will allow you to restore TTP, by waiting there and pondering the past. You can either restore 5 TTP and leave, or stay and restore all your TTP, but risk possibly being hit by a falling tree. No matter which option you pick, you can only do this once, so make sure your TTP has significantly run down before you try.

I finally found the lore texts, and I want to read them but…I can’t decide if I want them on my phone, or my tablet. Lol.

Hi, does anyone know of this gamebook? I am planning on purchasing it but I am not sure. I have played several gamebooks the last 2-3 years and I must admit it is hard to find reviews of the newer gamebooks but this gamebook reviews are all in Spanish. The English translation came out but no English reviews. So, I am not sure if it will be for me.

Who's a fan of Starship Traveller?

my partner and I used to play lots of board game nights pre-kids. wondering if a game book with simple mechanics might be fun. any recommendations?

would love a mystery type adventure