The Acolyte's Trial

The Acolyte's Trial is a choose-your-own-adventure style adaptation of a one-shot adventure I wrote to act as a play test for the Kineticist class of Pathfinder 2e. Originally, it was planned for four players  to cooperate and move through a series of challenges that would test out the abilities of the class as well as how balanced basic skills would be when combined with them. However, because only a single reader can follow twine, I adapted it to be about a single acolyte at the monastery the adventure was planned around. I was also careful to avoid ascribing characteristics to the acolyte, such as gender, age, physical appearance, or personality traits, so that any reader could be immersed in the story.

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The trial itself is very close to what was in the original adventure with some minor changes. Keeping track of reader choices, such as which element their Gate (a term from Pathfinder 2e referring to one's connection with an elemental plane, sometimes multiple planes) could channel, choices made for what gear to take or how they prepared was somewhat of a challenge as this was my first time creating with Twine.

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This was overall a learning experience for me, both in terms of technical skills with using a new tool and with adapting one form of interactive fiction to another. While the original was a table-top adventure that could easily be changed on the fly and had much broader possibilities, adapting it to a choose-your-own-adventure style story meant i had to narrow down the possibilities a reader could choose from while also keeping track of what impact those decisions made.

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