Splice

A 330-passage solo murder-mystery gamebook. Alphabet City, December 1985. Somebody downtown is making Super 8 films of murders, and you shoot pictures for the free weekly that covers the clubs, the squats, and the galleries. You have until the lights go down to name who made the films.

Thanksgiving night, 1985. Vida Lang is found in a squat on East Third Street, sitting in a kitchen chair facing the door, a candle on her left and a Polaroid pinned to her coat like a gallery label. By morning everybody below Fourteenth Street has an opinion about it, and nobody has seen the film.

You shoot for The Tenth Street Wire, a free weekly that runs on bar ads and the goodwill of people who don't like being photographed. You got to East Third before the police finished. You took the picture nobody else thought to take: not of her, but of the room. Over the next four weeks, two more people die in rooms that somebody arranged first, and each time there is a Polaroid, and each time the scene photographs everything and remembers nothing.

SPLICE is a numbered-passage gamebook in the classic turn-to-84 tradition, played with two dice and a pencil. NERVE is how much more you can look at. CRED is what the squats, the clubs, and the galleries will let you into. EYE is the photographer's eye, and it grows as you learn to see. EXPOSURE is how much attention the person who made these pictures is paying to you. The Polaroids you photograph and the manifesto pages you find, are your evidence, and you carry them across four acts, from a wake on Avenue A to a private screening on the longest night of the year.

You win by deduction, not by dice. When the house lights hold at half and you have one minute to name someone, the book gives you four names. Not every passage can be reached by following a link.

Seven endings. Two of them are solved. When an ending sends you back, the Act Ledger lets you restart from the last act you reached with everything you knew then.

You need: Two six-sided dice, a pencil, the Contact Sheet and Act Ledger from the back of the book (or a sheet of paper), and a few evenings.

Format: EPUB with live passage links, validated to the EPUB 3 standard. Reads on Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books and any EPUB reader; send-to-Kindle compatible. The Contact Sheet, the Act Ledger, a passage index and a page linking to each act are built into the book. PDF Print-and-Play available for analog players. A paperback edition is coming soon from Amazon.

Content note: For adult readers. Three murders, never shown at the moment they happen. Drug use. Sexual violence referred to, never depicted.

Price: PWYW — $5 suggested.

Credits:

Text and design: Julian Grant. Cover and act-opener art: Julian Grant, generated with OpenArt. Built with Gamebook Builder by Shaine Hinnant (amphitheatermatch) — https://www.etsy.com/listing/4585447685/gamebook-builder-interactive-fiction Published by Julian Grant Games

The Tenth Street Wire, Roomtone, St. Odilia's Parish Hall and everyone in this book are fictional. Alphabet City in December 1985, its squats, its clubs, and its photocopied flyers are not.