Deathless: City’s Thirst
Many of us have a visceral fascination with control. The Craft is the trick of taking and convincing others to give. We trade, and bind. We seek our damage, and a special kind of damage calls folk to the sort of power we possess. We do not trust easily, nor do we cede control without a fight.
A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure text-based game set many years before the book series but after the God Wars.
Featuring backstory and insight to the Dresediel Lex stories, a still-human King in Red, pre-marriage Temoc, a murder mystery in the desert, insight into the Scorpionkind society, along with weird and wonderful Craft.
This was the first of the games I played and I enjoyed it a lot - but despite going through a dozen or more times I can’t seem to reach all the achievements and got a bit frustrated. However, I’m not a gamer so it’s not my medium anyway.
Summary of City’s Thirst
(From publisher)
Negotiate water rights from scorpion gods in this necromantic legal thriller! Discredit your boss, solve murders, and reanimate your own corpse to keep your city from drying out.
Deathless: The City’s Thirst is a 150,000-word interactive novel by Max Gladstone, author of Choice of the Deathless and the Craft Sequence novels, nominated for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award, the XYZZY award, and the Lambda Award. Your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based--without graphics or sound effects--and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You won the God Wars, killing the rain god and taking over his desert city. But now the city needs water, and it’s your job to make it rain. As a rising associate at a god-killing public service conglomerate, you can monopolize your city’s public utilities, or fight to keep water affordable for everyone. Build alliances with powerful necromancers, or help local farmers hold onto their land. Find love, or betray your friends. Overcome the trauma you suffered in the God Wars. Prevent murders, or commit them.
Just keep the water flowing.
Play as male or female; straight, gay, or bi
Match wits with master necromancers, real estate magnates, and journalists
Drink with undead kings over the ruins of a destroyed civilization
Betray trusted friends and their entire society
So you’ve made it through the scarred and staggering world left by the God Wars, whichever chronology worked out for you. You’re still picking the shards of Ruin of Angels out of your teeth or you just snapped up Dead Country and it’s not enough. Where should you go next?
This comprehensive guide to Max Gladstone’s other works will help you choose.