Brass Basilisk is a story format for Twine/Twee.
It's purpose is to easily create and play stories resembling the classic Golden Dragon Fantasy Gamebooks.
In those gamebooks, entries (what Twine calls passages) were written using a remarkably uniform language and format. A typical entry looked like this:
107
The Giant tears a branch from a nearby tree and lumbers towards you.
There is nowehere to run - you must fight.GIANT VIGOUR 15
Roll two dice:
Score 2 to 6 You are hit. Lose 3 VIGOUR points
Score 7 to 12 The Giant loses 3 VIGOUR pointsIf you win, turn to 273.
You can see the following features, from top to bottom:
- Entries were numbered. This one is entry 107. This translates well to passage titles in Twine.
- Some entries featured combat. The presence of a table like the one above indicated the name ("GIANT") and health ("VIGOUR 15") on the enemy, how to fight them ("Roll two dice"), and how each combat round is scored ("Score x to y"). "Lose n VIGOUR" meant the player was hit, and "loses n VIGOUR" meant that the enemy was hit.
- Links to other entries were always indicated by the phrase "turn to number".
There were also random dice rolls, and a rudimentary inventory (yes, i know), all expressed in mostly uniform language.
The aim of this story format is to recreate that experience as faithfully and easily as possible. Passage authors should be able to just put in text, with ideally no markup whatsover. As long as the text is written according to a small set of rules, the story format will figure out and execute what needs to happen, from rendering the text with appropriate decorations to providing dice rolls and combat.
This story format has now been released. Import it into twine from:
https://github.com/rajch/brass-basilisk/releases/latest/download/format.js
Documentation and sample story coming soon.