Choice of the Deathless Walkthrough
Choice of the Deathless is the first of two unconnected choose-your-own-adventure text games set in the world of the Craft Sequence, set several years before the novels. You can see where they fit into the sequence at the end of this unofficial timeline article. It was built via Choice of Games, and written entirely by Gladstone so it’s all canon!
You don’t need to have played the games to understand the novels, or vice versa - they are entirely self-contained. However, characters from Choice of the Deathless do pop up in later novels so the knowledge of one does add entertainment to the other. I personally played the games after the series, but I know some people were introduced to the Craft Sequence via Choice of the Deathless and say it works great as an introduction to the world.
This walkthrough contains major spoilers for Choice of the Deathless, so be warned!!
We’ll be looking at the different chapters of the game, key characters, and the awards you can win through different choices you make but it does not go through every single choice you can make or direction the story can take. This was initially because I haven’t managed to get through every achievement, but NOW it’s because another fan who is much better at games than me is writing one so keep an eye out for that!
Basic Structure of the Game
“So many alternative pasts, so many options. Dreamshards, timepieces.”
The plot of Choice of the Deathless is split into six chapters separated by brief interludes. There’s an intro and outro that in my mind function separately from the chapters, but I’m not sure if they technically count as separate sections.
For those who aren’t aware, a choose-your-own adventure game means that you’ll be given several options to choose from at various points in the story, and the choices you make shape the direction the story takes. I haven’t personally watched Black Mirror, but I’ve heard it’s like an episode called Bandersnatch if that helps with a point of reference.
There are a limited number of options, of course - this is still a self-contained story! But you can play many times with different goals, characterisation choices and intentions and experience a vastly different story, within the constraints of the six chapters.
After a brief scene-setting introduction, you get to choose your character. The game gives you a choice of genders and names, though you can input your own name choice if you would like to. You can choose your character’s sexuality (which shapes future romantic and sexual options in the story), and a bit about their background and personality. Did they grow up poor, rich, in between? What was their experience of first discovering the Craft? Did they have fun at the Hidden Schools, or work day and night? Are they trying to make ethical choices in their career or are they here to climb to the top no matter what?
Setting and Characters in Choice of the Deathless
“Krieg Tower rises like a black needle over the sprawling Shikaw skyline. To the east stretches the Greatwater, slate gray broken by white chalk-line waves. Below, and off to the west, broad gridded streets map the earth between buildings the size of city blocks, and beyond these lie older, red brick neighborhoods that never quite recovered from the God Wars.
Varkath Nebuchadnezzar Stone occupies the top twenty floors of Krieg Tower; your new office, your first office ever, is a cubby on floor thirty-five, toward the lower bound of VNS territory.”
Your character is a recent graduate of the Hidden Schools, now first-year associate at the Craft firm Varkath Nebuchadnezzar Stone. VNS is based in Shikaw, a city we hear about in other Craft Sequence instalments but haven’t yet seen outwith Choice of the Deathless. It’s a bit of a blank slate of a city, without the specific character other settings have in the Sequence.
As a busy junior Craftsperson, your social life and connections are pretty much entirely based on your work, so the non playable characters in the game are all Craftsfolk themselves or clients. Whatever your choices, you’ll meet the following at some point or other - and you may be able to romance a few of them.
Friends / colleagues / lovers
The first character we meet is Cassowary ‘Cass’ Chen, a fellow first-year associate at VNS. She shows up a lot, and is the first person you have the chance to befriend (or more). You also have many opportunities to screw her over in cases if you like. Our first introduction to Cass describes her as: “She started a week ago, same as you. She’s born it well, better than you feel you have. She’s intense, five-foot-five or so, dark hair, expressive features, given to sharp broad gestures with her hands while talking.”
Another colleague you meet and work with is Pat Ngabe, another colleague - who you can also work with later on. You can befriend or betray Pat, but not ‘get with’ him (as the achievements page calls it). Our initial introduction to Pat describes him as : “a big guy, a slow-mover, but smart. Older than you and Cass, too, old for an associate. Dignified: short curly hair, dark skin, Iskari cuffs on his pressed shirts. He has a family, even, from what you've heard. A wife at home, and a kid on the way.”
Next, we meet Ashleigh ‘Ash’ Wakefield - a name book readers may recognise from Four Roads Cross. Ash is not a non-binary character, but the character that shows up in the game may be male or female depending on your own character’s sexuality, so I’ll use they/them pronouns for ease in this article. You know Ash from before the game, the only character you have any kind of history with.
Their introduction paints quite a picture: “You haven't seen Wakefield since graduation. You sort of hoped never to see them again. Ash Wakefield of the Southern Wakefields, the scion of a high family, and everyone in the Hidden Schools knew it. Affluent, blonde, brilliant, and sculpted out of marble. Metaphorically. Though you never got close enough to check. Kelethres Albrecht & Ao—one of the world's most prestigious Craft firms—hired Wakefield straight out of the Hidden Schools as an associate in their Shikaw office, and they made certain everyone knew. Perhaps they were just excited. That'd be a charitable way to look at it.”
And finally, there’s Halcyon Vega y Alatriste a partner at VNS leading the project you’re part of in chapter 2. You’re encouraged by the narrative to screw him over, but there is the opportunity to screw him nicely instead. Vega is described as “elegant, tall, slim, dark-eyed and vicious, lately of counsel and a rapid climber in the firm” but is quite harried and overwhelmed by work.
Senior Partners
At different opportunities you get to meet and work with the three named partners: Golan Varkath, Angelica Nebuchadnezzar, and Damien Stone.
Golan Varkath is the first to show up, in chapter 1, playing poker at a party. I’m yet to make choices in the game that lead to properly impressing him here, but maybe I’m just not that good at the game… He is the most Deathless King-like of all the partners, described as “That skeleton in green, with the hands of cold iron and the glyphs burning on the pate of his bared skull, and the mask of cured leather—that's Golan Varkath. As in, the named partner Golan Varkath. You've seen his portrait, but you've never seen him in person before.” Delightful.
Damien Stone is overseeing the project in which you meet Vega, and his introduction is much less exciting than Varkath’s: “a heavy, dark Craftsman in his late sixties.” Ah well. Not all Craftfolk can be as cool as Varkath. You have the opportunity to work with Stone against Vega, either screwing over a peer or pissing of a partner. Gods, I’m glad to not be a lawyer.
Angelica Nebuchadnezzar is the one who posted the pro bono case you take on in chapter 3, giving you the opportunity to impress her. She is described as “a dark-skinned woman in a light blue suit. One of her eyes is gone, replaced by a ruby sphere. You can't tell if the sphere is looking at you or not; her remaining eye is.” Badass.
Clients and Opposition
Finally, we meet four different characters across several cases in the story - two demons, a goddess, and a being of indeterminate origin and power who pretends to be a bland human. The latter is definitely the most alarming of the four.
R’ok is your client in chapter 3, and a character you may recognise from Ruin of Angels. In his introduction, we read: “Nothing so large, so dangerous, should move so…delicately. He skitters forward, and in the yellowed glint of morning light through dirty glass, you see him: a five-foot-five mantis of gleaming jet, with long four-fingered scythelike preying hands. Gleaming red eyes.” He’s in the Craft world due to an employment contract, which he wants you to get him out of. Despite his alarming appearance and demonic nature, he wants is to make art that’s impossible in the demon realm.
You also have the opportunity to meet his dad, K’lint (short for K'th'k'lint, which doesn’t quite roll of human tongues). We learn that, at least in the Domain, he wears a necktie. A necktie on a demon, I love this series. “You don't know how the entity waiting for you in the lobby made it up the elevator, or the stairs for that matter. It's at least seven feet tall, and ten feet long, a carapace of jet razors, a shield-like face with crimson multifaceted eyes and bobbing antennae. It wears a necktie, and greets you with a dismissive nod.” He’s a pretty nice guy (can one call a demon a guy? Or nice?) and despite not understanding his son does seem to want the best for him.
You get to meet Ajaia, a goddess in Southern Kath. “She is a lady of nature, which seems obvious enough from your surroundings. But, despite her people's idiosyncratic architecture, she's not technically a tree goddess. She moves through water: the water of the great rivers, the water that flows in the blood vessels of her subjects, the water that rises to the top of the trees.” It’s always fascinating to meet a new deity in the Craft Sequence world and I hope she shows up in the books.
And finally, we have John Smith, who keeps showing up and being obviously evil but you’re working for a semi-evil magical law firm so what can you do? In his first introduction, you describe him as: “The client himself, an executive of Transdimensional Thaumaturgics, a thin pale man in a black suit. You know him only as John Smith. The world warps around him, and the stuff of nightmares bends.” Horrifying.
Chapter One: Making Frenemies and Influencing Craftspeople
“The sky over the demon world is broken. Lightning licks the strange geometries of cloud. Around you rises the demon-city Akargath, warped crystal and flame, thorns and razor wire. And this is the nice part of town.”
Choice of the Deathless opens in media res, with your as-yet unnamed character battling an enemy in the demon city Akargath. You choose a few moves before flashing back to how you got here - this is when you get to pick your character’s name, personality, and background. Then, the story begins properly.
You’re in Shikaw, early in your days as a first-year associate at Varkath Nebuchadnezzar Stone. There’s a quick introduction to Cass Chen, who invites you to dinner with her and another associate Pat Ngabe. At your apartment that evening, Ash Wakefield appears at your door slightly antagonising you and inviting you to drinks. You get to pick whether to ditch Cass and Pat to go with Ash, or keep your former commitment.
Either way you end up at a Craft firm party with all of the above plus the named partners of your firm. There are a variety of activities to try out, including a potentially meaningful poker game with Varkath. This chapter ends at the end of the night.
Chapter Two: Demons, Documents, and Decisions
“You stand in a dark room, inside a glowing pentacle, and hold a knife of lightning to your wrist.
You press the knife point into your skin. A drop of blood wells up. You pull the blade away, and the blood drop falls, round and reflective, to the floor. And when it splashes there, you fall, too.
You fall into a world of gods.”
It’s some time later and you’re working on a big case with your client Transdimensional Thaumaturgics. The ‘person’ you’re dealing with goes by John Smith, an obvious pseudonym for an unsavoury character. Demons are attempting to take over the contract through loopholes, which you are tasked to identify and close. Of course, in the world of the Craft Sequence, document review isn’t quite what we expect in our world - much like in Three Parts Dead, you go on a sort of vision quest into the Craft contract itself.
We also learn a lot about demons here, which is cool, but is for a future article.
You identify the problem and have to take action. Working with (or against) Cass, you speak to the client lead Halcyon Vega y Alatriste and either help or hinder him. You also get the chance to meet the second named partner of your firm, Damian Stone.
Later, Cass goes on vacation and you open an urgent package she receives that reveals the big hole in the contract. You get to decide who you bring in to the discussion, whether you take credit, whether you hold it over Vega.
Basically, this chapter is a lot about ethics. Who will you work with? Will you let someone else take credit for your work? Will you choose to screw over your friends and colleagues to gain advantage?
Chapter Three: Pro-Bono Demonic Work Visas
“The case is a straightforward demonic contract dispute. Common enough. Demons are visitors from worlds beyond the skein of our reality, and physical laws don’t bind them in the same way they bind most people. A demon, loose in our world, would have virtually unlimited power, though it would be profoundly unstable and probably die in short order.”
This chapter involves your character doing a pro bono assignment for Angelica Nebuchadnezzar; it starts with you in a dirty, collapsing building hunting a monster - who is, naturally, your client. Book readers may remember demonic artist R’ok from Ruin of Angels. Well, this is his origin story!
The poor dear was desperate to escape the demon realm and create art in our world - or, rather, the world of the Craft Sequence, which we learn in this game is known as the Domain. You’ve been tasked with helping R’ok with an employment contract dispute, as he arrived in the Domain through unconventional methods.
“I am, he says, “an anomaly among my clutch. I have no interest in ... the hierarchy. The meetings. The assured future. The eternal vendettas. I wished to travel. I wished to see other worlds. I wished to create art using the materials of your plane. To build sculptures which decay, to use your phase-transition physics and your odd indices of refraction and your mad geometries to create visions unimaginable in my world.”
You nod, because he seems to expect you to.”
Through this case, you get to visit the Hell Embassy and meet a demon consul who imitates your appearance to freak you out; you also attempt to renegotiate the predatory employment contract. Oh, and you meet R’ok’s dad!
This is another chance you have to work with Cass, Pat or Vega, and different adventure options and achievements shoot out from those choices. Depending on your actions, R’ok also has a variety of outcomes (but we know from Ruin of Angels that he ends up in Alikand at some point after this living his chaotic artist dreams).
Chapter Four: Presentations and Possessions
In this chapter, you have to face a dreaded scenario: presenting at a conference. Specifically, you’re on a panel discussing the “mechanics and attendant risks of demonic labor at the annual Shikaw Craft Summit.” Thrilling stuff.
You show up at the Caerlon Convention Centre (formerly the location of the Temple of Bridging Waters, sacrosanct to now-dead gods) only to find your good old frenemy Ash Wakefield on the panel - playing host to a demon panellist.
“Easier to do it this way than to summon her all the way from the far hells,” they say. “I’ll see you when we’re done—at Craige’s, perhaps?” You watch in horror as Wakefield’s grin widens and hardens until it’s more a seizure than grin, the hysterical opposite of a stroke victim’s arrest. Those bright blue eyes roll up in their sockets, and keep rolling, and cease to be eyes at all but holes, pits welling with blood.
A blood tear drips down Wakefield’s cheek, and they remove a red handkerchief to wipe it away. The smile remains wide; their teeth now are pointed, and their tongue is thinner.”
This goes about as well as you would expect.
You see Smith and Wakefield leave the post-conference drinks gathering and go to follow them, only to find Ash Wakefield is possessed by their demonic co-panellist, which stabs Smith through Ash’s body.
What do you do? Can you save Ashleigh Wakefield? Do you even want to? Can you defeat the demon that is trying to get out of its summoning contract and stay in the Domain?
Chapter Five: Goddess Negotiations
This chapter takes us to a new continent, somewhere none of the other Craft Sequence instalments have yet gone: Southern Kath. We start mid-dragonflight en route to Tassadon, where you and Pat Ngabe will be negotiating with the goddess Ajaia, who is suing Transdimensional Thaumaturgics over water rights.
“You can’t see much of the country on approach, only what moonlight and gaps in clouds reveal. Tall trees, thick leaves a rich wet shade of black you expect the morning will repaint green. Roads, a few of them, appear as razor-gash in the forest from overhead, bleeding light. Some patches of the jungle shimmer smoky jade from underneath, the colors of a wine bottle placed over a candle flame, only bigger—a sheen the size of cities. The stars are clear and bright overhead. You’re not used to seeing them back home in Shikaw.
…
You were too out of it last night to notice any details about the hotel, but waking, you find that it’s a tree. The hotel’s many rooms corkscrew up a trunk as broad as an ullamal stadium, with huge spreading leaves overhead. The whole city looks like this, from what you can see out your window: buildings woven through trees, resting in giant bark. Roads winding between groves, suspended by thick steel cables, society spread between different layers of canopy.”
Your choices in this chapter are all about ethics. How do you deal with Ajaia? Do you go full Craftsperson on Her, finding loopholes in her logic and breaking her in the courtroom like your predecessors broke gods on the battlefield? You suspect you may be on the wrong side of the case, but are you in any position to do something about it?
Chapter Six: Back to the Beginning…
“Upon your entry into the demon plane, you’ll have a body roughly equivalent to yours in this world, and be subject to the equivalent of human limits as regards action over a distance, causality, and so forth. Anchoring you in the local physics. Fine. In exchange for this, you and Smith pledge to negotiate in good faith a deal between Transdimensional Thaumaturgics and Akargath. The contract’s void in the event of your death.”
We approach the end of the story now, summoned to Akargath with John Smith. There’s a lot of fascinating information about summoning, Craft tools, and the demon world but we’ll save that analysis for a later article.
The visit starts with a banquet, your character seated with Smith, R’ok and his father; you then progress to a negotiation room that is more a stadium than an office - with hundreds of thousands of demons there to watch your work.
And then someone - or something - tries to kill Smith.
Your choices thus far in the game dictate the options you have now. What powers do you have? Who is on your side? Who is your enemy?
Can you win? Win or lose, can you survive? If you survive, what’s your future - in the Craft, with the firm, in the next stage of your life (or unlife)?
What kind of story are you writing?
Achievements
You gain achievements and points as you go through the story. You can’t gain them all in one game, as they require different choices, so it’s fun to place again and try to reach different outcomes. I’ve only managed to get half the achievements, and barely a third of the available points… clearly not strategic enough a player. In particular, I’ve never even got close to paying off my student loans - ostensibly the point of the game.
There are 32 possible achievements and 900 points available. They are:
Aid a Goddess: You earned a goddess's blessing. (50 points)
Become a partner: Make partner. (50 points)
Become a skeleton: You became an undead abomination. Awesome. (75 points)
Bright college years: You had dinner with Ashleigh Wakefield. (15 points)
Brutal politician: By bringing in Damien Stone, you exposed Vega's weakness. (10 points)
Consolation Prize: You can't save them all. (25 points)
Demonic Intervention: You won thanks to the demons' aid. (10 points)
Depose a Goddess: As in "take a deposition from." You're not that powerful—yet. (40 points)
Die: You died! Let's see you get out of this one… (15 points)
Divine Intervention: You won thanks to divine intervention. (10 points)
Eager romantic: Start a romance as early as possible. (25 points)
Finish the game: You finished the game! Care to play again? (25 points)
Firm Moves: Take a different path. (25 points)
Get with Cass: You started a romance with Cass Chen. (25 points)
Get with Vega: Enter a relationship with Vega. (25 points)
Get with Wakefield: Enter a relationship with Ashleigh Wakefield. (25 points)
Go it alone: Solve Transdimensional's problem on your own. (50 points)
Heal Thyself: Pull yourself together. (40 points)
Hell of a Job: You took a job from a demon. (25 points)
I Want My Life Back: Take a different path. (50 points)
In-Temple Counsel: Take a different path. (25 points)
Master player: Who cares if he's killed gods? You don’t take a hand like that to the river. (15 points)
One step ahead: You figured out that Wakefield was possessed in time to make a difference! (15 points)
The Power of Friendship: Your friends saved you. (10 points)
Pro bono: You helped R'ok achieve his dream. (25 points)
Pro bono, solo: Who likes group work anyway? (50 points)
Punch a dark god in the face: Why not use some old-fashioned fisticuffs? (20 points)
Repay your debt: Pay off your student loans. (70 points)
Sacrifice Play: Win through self-sacrifice. (5 points)
Save Ash: You stopped the demon before it could hurt Ash. (25 points)
Save Smith: You saved John Smith from the assassin. At least for now. (15 points)
Sorcerous Rescue: Win with your firm's help. (10 points)
What now?
There we have it! If you’re yet to play the game, please do head over to Choice Of Games and download it - you can get it on Steam, Google Play Store, Apple Store and probably anywhere else you get this kind of game. If you’ve already played it, play it again! Can you get all the achievements before our next game article comes out?
Done both of those? Check out the other Craft Sequence game, Deathless: City’s Thirst! One day we’ll do a walkthrough of that too, but this one has been such a beast we’re taking a break from the games for a bit…
What do you think? Don’t forget you can subscribe to be the first to hear about new articles and fun projects in the pipeline!
