Escape from Caldereth
Enter Caldereth. Escape if you can.
Hidden deep within the mountains of the Celestine Dominion stands Caldereth, the legendary fortress prison known across the land as the Black Crucible. Few prisoners ever leave its walls. None are meant to.
In this interactive fantasy adventure, every choice matters.
Will you trust the mysterious Leila, who studies the prison’s routines and hidden passages? Follow Duncan and his reckless followers in a desperate assault on the guards? Sneak through forgotten tunnels beneath the mountain, face creatures lurking in the dark, or uncover the terrifying secret hidden at the heart of Caldereth itself?
But beware.
The prison remembers.
Failure is never the end. Each death, betrayal, and escape attempt drags you back to the beginning, where the walls of Caldereth wait once more.
With branching story paths, multiple endings, deadly choices, and secrets hidden throughout the prison, Escape from the Black Crucible is a dark fantasy gamebook where courage, observation, and sacrifice may be the only path to freedom.
Will you escape the loop… or become part of it forever?
The story behind Escape from Caldereth.
Escape from Caldereth started it's life as a D&D Campaign.
I am a big fan of playing D&D and wanted to come up with a creative way for the players to meet each other and level up before heading out into the world together. Usually they would meet in taverns or at a show but I wanted a different feel.
I then decided to include a time loop mechanic, where under certain conditions the players would reset back the beginning in their cells; keeping all their skills, knowledge and experience.
I actually made a campaign companion book for GMs to use to play this game, with maps, characters, backstories and more.
How it became a story book is through my job as a teacher. I let the children choose the books for the end of the day and we were on a run of reading the "choose your own adventure" style books. One of my class said that I should write one of these, knowing that I had published Elsie.
So I use the bones of Escape from Caldereth was perfect for this.
It was simple enough to write the branches. I followed one set of choices all the way to a success or fail, then worked back to the previous choice and followed them to conclusion as well.
The part that took the longest was assigning the chapter numbers to ensure that players would flick through the book, which is the most fun part of these types of books.
For 10 year old Dion (me), I included a tracker of all the wins and fails in the back of the book.