Your Adventure Path
The CYOA intake is a short reading and branching story that routes you into a personalized adventure. Here is what it is, how it works, and what to expect.
What is this?
When you enter a campaign's adventure path, you go through a short intake — a combination of emotional calibration and a choose-your-own-adventure story. The intake is not a quiz. It reads your current state and your choices, then routes you into a personalized spoke adventure: a second, deeper story built for where you are right now.
The routing is invisible by design. You navigate the story; the system reads the signal. Two players can take the same intake and land in completely different adventures — each calibrated to them without either one knowing the routing happened.
The four phases
Where are you right now?
A quick reading of your current state — how stuck or in flow you feel (a 1–10 slider), and which emotional current is most present for you right now (the five channels: joy, anger, neutrality, fear, sadness). This is not a test. It is a tuning fork.
How intense is that?
One more calibration: is the feeling running hot, neutral, or flowing? This sets the depth of the adventure you will enter — stuck-and-in-it lands differently than clear-and-ready.
The story
A short branching narrative — usually 4–8 scenes. You make real choices. Each choice is weighted, but not in a way you can see. The system reads your navigation as a signal, not a test. There are no wrong paths. At the end, a terminal scene closes.
Your path is prepared
Once you reach the end of the intake story, the system generates (or retrieves) a personalized spoke adventure — a second, longer CYOA shaped to where you are right now. This is your actual journey for the session.
The four move types
Every adventure is ultimately oriented around one of the four moves. You will not be told which one you are in — but you may feel it. Here is what each means:
Wake Up
See more of what is available
A Wake Up adventure asks you to raise awareness — to look clearly at something you've been avoiding or missing. The path tends toward noticing, honest naming, and threshold-crossing.
Clean Up
Unblock emotional energy
A Clean Up adventure moves emotional energy through you. The path tends toward metabolizing what is stuck — processing charge so you can act from clarity rather than reactivity.
Grow Up
Expand capacity at developmental edges
A Grow Up adventure challenges you to expand past your current edge. The path tends toward development, new skills, and genuine maturation — not just knowledge but capacity.
Show Up
Do the work — complete quests, take action
A Show Up adventure calls you into decisive action. The path tends toward being fully here, stepping toward others, and doing what you've been holding back.
The move you land in comes from how you navigated the intake — your emotional state, your channel, and your choices in the story. It is a reading, not an assignment. Learn more about the four moves →
The spoke adventure
Once the intake completes, a spoke adventure is prepared for you. This is a full branching story — longer than the intake — shaped to your current move orientation and the campaign's context. It may include NPCs from the campaign world who appear specifically in your path.
Spoke adventures are generated the first time a particular combination is needed, then cached for others who land in the same territory. The story you get was written for your orientation — but it is shared with any player who arrives at the same junction.
NPCs in your path
Some passages in your spoke adventure will name specific characters from the campaign world. These are live NPCs drawn from the campaign's cast. The system selects them by role — prioritizing characters you have not encountered yet in this session, and among those you have, the ones you met longest ago.
Encountering an NPC in your adventure creates a record. This is how the game tracks relational territory — who you have met, when, and what you were navigating when you did.
Resuming mid-adventure
Your progress is saved as you go. If you close the tab or navigate away, you will resume from your last passage when you return. The check-in step will not repeat if you have already completed it today — you will drop straight into the story.
For campaign stewards
The intake story and its routing weights are authored in the campaign's Adventure template. Spoke adventures are generated automatically on first use and cached per orientation. Re-saving the master template invalidates all existing spoke caches — new players will trigger fresh generation. The admin interface for this is under /admin/adventures.