Dryads Wake — a game of uncertain choices and dialogue

I’ve been searching for good ways to build text-rpgs since writing my Python-Based TextRPG in 2008. With Dryads Wake I finally found a structure that I really like and that can be played from the browser as well as from the text-terminal.

Dryads Wake is a pure text-based game using the 1d6-rules. You can play an introductory chapter on dryads-wake.1w6.org. As usual, the full source is available as free software.

You can even embed it, and for example play it here (click to play):

(I make no promises whether this will work at any given time, because it runs on a weak virtual server without fail-safe and is pretty easy to take down. If you see an nginx error-page, just give it time to recover and try again a few minutes later).

To play it from the terminal, get the sources, follow the instructions in the README and run ./dryads-wake.w. Sadly it isn’t packaged in any distro yet (state of 2022-04).

You can use it to build your own games. Just clone the sources and edit dryads-wake.w — then run it with ./dryads-wake.w --server and you have your text-rpg running in your browser on http://127.0.0.1:9423/.

A huge thank you goes to the Accessibility Testers Robert Kingett and Random Songbird who helped to make Dryads Wake work for blind people!

PS: Dryads Wake uses Wisp, a Scheme dialect running on Guile. It is a continuation of Enter Three Witches that I first presented at FOSDEM 2017 as Natural Script Writing.