Shepherds of Haven - A Dark Fantasy Interactive Fiction Game
You are a Mage living in a world where magic is outlawed and your people—those possessing supernatural powers—are oppressed and reviled. The world is ruled by humans who believe in science, technology, and industry: at best, you and your kind are nothing more than a fairytale, and at worst, you are the state’s greatest threat.
Thus, using magic has been illegal for centuries…
But then the demons return.
After years of persecution, you are suddenly offered an opportunity to use your powers for good: demons are once again troubling the realm after centuries of absence, and the world needs fighters like you to protect the population from their invasion. Guns and bullets do no good against monsters pulled from primeval nightmares; only your people and your mystical gifts have the ability to fight fire with fire.
So you join the Shepherds: a new order of elite heroes and fighters that, until very recently, the world feared more than the demons themselves. As a Shepherd, you’ll solve magical crimes, slay demons to protect the citizens of Haven, and build your reputation throughout the capital. Explore the world of Blest, recruit allies and factions to join the Shepherds’ cause, find romance and companionship, investigate mysteries, lead rebellions and exorcisms, and uncover answers to the crises plaguing the world. Where are the demons coming from? Where have the gods or God gone, if they ever existed? Who are you, really?
And will you be the world’s true savior… or will you be its ultimate downfall?
✦ Over 1 million words of choice-based, story-rich interactive fiction!
✦ Fully customizable protagonist! Choose names and nicknames, gender, sexuality, appearance, weapon, magic specialization, educational background, racial heritage, and much more.
Includes options to play as male, female, nonbinary; straight, gay, bisexual, or pansexual; and aromantic, asexual, aroace, or allo.
✦ Thousands of choices and role-playing variations! Build your character’s personality and worldview from the ground up, test your loyalties and morals in every chapter, and make meaningful decisions that will change the story and world of the game in large and small ways.
✦ 15 companions to recruit and befriend, each with their own unique story.
Fulfilling friendship and romance routes, culminating in dozens of different possible endings for each major character, as well as diverse endings for the protagonist, their relationships, and the state of the world
✦ A hubworld-style exploration system between chapters! Interact with the city and explore the world on your days off; take quests or side jobs; train; shop; gamble; pray; read; and spend time with or date companions between story missions.
✦ Dynamic gameplay features! Explore an ever-changing codex, character guide, journal, inventory, and stats page that grows and adjusts as you play.
✦ Dozens of mechanical secrets to reward your playthrough, including achievements, a new game+ system, a save system, unlockable art, collectible trading cards, room decorations and souvenirs, a planned “stupid mode,” and planned DLC.
✦ Much more!
✨ Play Here ✨
Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, first half of Chapter 4
With the public release of this new chapter we’re getting into the meat of what it's like to be the Crown on a daily basis, with some very important decisions to make, as well as consequences from previous chapters coming into play:
Additional scenes for those of you who chose to meet with Eshkar directly in CH12
Different choices and options on how to deal with Keeper Bazo depending on whether you forgave him, condemned him, or did not judge him back in CH7
Having to make several decisions about public petitions submitted to you from the citizens as well as other officials
Additional scenes during the court meeting for A and R romancers, as well as a minor variation for D romancers depending on if you successfully defended them from the court in CH11: these are new for those of you who played the early access, so I would recommend replaying the chapter from scratch!
And, of course, more romance at the end: D and X romancers make a consequential decision that will check their romance for the high/low status again. A and R romancers are safe, this time...
A few additional changes made to the game overall:
Added a summary of the main choices your Crown has made so far when transitioning from CH12 to CH13
Added a small snippet of text in the Relationships screen clarifying what it means to get a 'high' romance or a 'low' romance status
Thank you for all your patience and support, I hope you enjoy the new chapter with the start of the summer 💖
For those that are unfamiliar with the game
A Tale of Crowns is a high fantasy romance story, told in the form of a text-based interactive novel with choice mechanics. The setting is inspired by Kurdish culture as well as other historical settings in the Middle East such as Ancient Persia, but it also draws heavily from other cultures and countries in the region.
Your character is native to Arsur, a vast empire overseen by a single ruler known as the Crown. Unlike traditional monarchies, however, the title is not inherited through blood. Whenever the Crown dies, their famed golden eyes pass on to the one chosen by the Spirits of this world to be the new Crown. In this story, your MC takes on that role.
There are four different love interests to choose from, whose genders will be customized to suit the preferences of your Crown. You can find more info about them on the blog page!
Also note that this current version of the game is safe for those 16 years and older.
Like the premise so far? Play it and give it a try! The entire game is free!
If you enjoyed the game, please reblog! Share it with your friends! Recognition and reader interaction is just about the only thing I get in return for creating it ❤️
If you have the means, consider donating to the Khartoum Aid Kitchen which feeds around 20,000 people a day in Sudan, who are suffering from extreme starvation.
The War in Sudan has created the World’s largest Humanitarian cris… Mustafa Ibrahim needs your support for Fight Hunger in Sudan: The Khart
Some recent posts of theirs with information about what they do:
There is a fairly significant bit of wordplay in Frieren that will escape the notice of most English-speaking viewers, but I quite like it so I’ll explain it here. The title of the series in Japanese is 葬送のフリーレン (Sousou no Furiiren). “Furiiren” is of course Frieren; “sousou” means “funeral rites” or “attending a funeral”, but can literally be translated as “sending to the grave”. Since the story opens with Frieren watching her old adventuring pals growing old and passing away, we’re naturally led to the simple interpretation of the title: she’s attending her friends’ funerals.
(The full official English title is Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, because literal translations rarely make catchy titles.)
Later, as Frieren is fighting Aura, Lügner explains that Frieren is the most prolific demon-killer in history. In the English translations I’ve seen, this earns her the nickname “Frieren the Slayer”. But in the original Japanese, this nickname is 葬送のフリーレン: “Sousou no Furiiren”, the title of the series.
In this context, this line (and the title, too) could be more literally interpreted as “Frieren, who sends you to your grave”. It also means the line is a little more impactful in Japanese — you’re supposed to point at the screen and yell “hey that’s the name of the show!!”
There’s really just no way to preserve wordplay like this through translation so I can’t fault the translators at all for not trying, but it’s a fun thing that’s worth pointing out nonetheless. I just love that this was clearly something the author was setting up from the very beginning.
i still think one of tumblr's darkest moments (much worse than anything i've seen before and i have been here since 2011) was when random fandom bloggers started doing confidently accusing people living through a genocide of being scammers. i think there's a lot that has happened on this website but the juxtaposition of running something so trivial as a fandom blog (i have been in fandom for a long time and triviality here is not an insult but an understanding of what makes it light) while doing something so enormously heavy and dark has me reeling
there are not many moments in history when you could reach out and save someone from death from your bedroom tens of thousands of miles away. in fact, this is one of the first times this has happened on this scale, because this is a completely modern development in warfare. i think a lot about mahasen el khatib, who ran a blog on here and posted her gofundme here and made headlines around the world when she was killed in her home by israel.
you were given the opportunity to save someone from a holocaust with the click of a button and you scorned it. that's what gets me. you think the ease of the act means the dismissal of it must be equally small. but it isn't. the complete lack of fear, the lack of understanding the gravity of what they've taken part in is very disturbing to me
i think many of those bloggers still don't realize what a horrific thing they've done. some of them are even basking in the praise of "thank you for saying this" that other fools are giving them. some of them think they were being smart. instead they've added to the suffering of a people undergoing genocide. they have also doomed hundreds of thousands of users to believing ignorant cynicism and critical thinking are the same thing. and because of that, not only will people die, but the people who could have saved them won't do that. you've turned rescuers into bystanders, good people into doubters. just a shitshow all around
I had a campaign on gfm to provide food and shelter for my family of 24, unfortunately these bloggers reported it and I lost 38k, I suffered a lot because of this, I got sick in the winter because of worn out tents and malnutrition, now I am running a new campaign on chuffed and I am trying to reach 10k just to move to a new shelter as we live in a red zone threatened with evacuation, meaning we are between life and death, so I ask for help or participation urgently.
You know, I gotta say, nobody has ever done the immortal boyfriend with a mortal girlfriend trope better than the Emily Wilde books. Their relationship isn't some edgy, drama filled sex romp where everyone is unbelievably hot and cool. (Not to hate on those stories if that's your thing, to each their own.) They're literally two people who respect each other for their respective abilities and personalities. Emily is a devoted academic with little interest in anything but her area of study (which sort of happens to include Wendell). Wendell, despite being an exiled prince of Faerie, is just a lazy, slightly ridiculous dude who likes nothing better than being cozy and following his girlfriend around while she does research. He also happens to be insanely talented with a sword and with magic, but somehow that never makes him seem like a badass, just even more ridiculous.
And though the Fae in this book are often described as sort of unearthly beautiful, it's really never meant to be sexy. They're beautiful by and large in a cold and terrifying way. Like, they might drag you around partying for a while, but then they slit your throat and hang you from a tree with no warning at all, and your friends and loved ones never know what happened to you. And the story does address this as a legitimate concern in terms of Wendell's and Emily's relationship. It's totally possible that he could some day become a mad King of Faerie, and her friends try to warn her repeatedly. Wendell is aware of their warnings, and in some stories the love interest would storm about in anger and disbelief that anyone could doubt him or he would laugh it off, but Wendell being Wendell, he's pleased that her friends care enough about her to voice their concerns and he acknowledges that this is a real threat. In the end, he knows Emily is a genius, and he trusts her to stop him from tumbling headlong into disaster, as she's done time and time again. And Emily does consider these concerns as well. But if Emily is anything, she's confident in her knowledge and abilities. She doesn't refuse to believe that her beloved is incapable of being like other Fae, quite the opposite, she acknowledges his occasional strange, uncanny otherness multiple times and the fact that he could go mad. She does everything in her power to keep this from happening, and we have every reason to believe that this will continue to be the case.
Then there's the age old issue of human/immortal age gaps that so many similar books face. Emily Wilde books side step this issue nicely by making Wendell very similar in age to Emily. He's not some 500 year old dude hitting on a 30 year old, he's a teenager when he's driven out of Faerie, and he ultimately comes of age in the human world at about the same time as Emily. This takes away the kind of creepy aspect of someone hooking up with someone young enough to be their great-great-grandaughter, and it gives a nice excuse for Wendell to be less cruel and mad than other Faerie monarchs as well.
And even though I keep saying these books don't make the Fae sexy, that's not to say the books are sterile and chaste. Emily and Wendell do eventually have a sexual relationship, but it comes along very naturally, from people who start out as coworkers and academic rivals and grow to become friends and then partners and then co-rulers and spouses. When they have sex it just feels like two people who love each other and enjoy each other's company, not like some wild outburst of edgy, sexy, repressed desires. (Again, no hate if that's your thing.)
And maybe the best thing about their mortal/immortal relationship is that Emily doesn't have to change herself or abandon everything she held dear for Wendell. Emily goes through a brief phase where she tries to fit into the beauty standards of the Fae, and then she quickly realizes that's stupid and she's better off being herself. And Wendell never cared about any of that at all, he's too busy just adoring her scholarly obsessions. Many stories ask the mortal heroines to leave behind their loved ones and lives for their immortal lover, but again, Emily Wilde does it better. Wendell immediately recognizes that academia is Emily's first love. He sets her up with a library, endless journals, and most importantly, multiple points of access to the mortal realm, where she can go to research in peace, continue her connection with Cambridge, publish her work, and of course, present at the occassional academic conference now that her career has taken off.
Emily Wilde got her man, a throne, and a flourishing career. Our girl really can do it all.
titsay
yousharknotpass
janainaart
romaincrisis
areudirty
