Midweek MC: CHYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) Edition

Choose Your Own Adventure. The phrase hearkens back to my childhood, scattered with small paperback books containing odd choices. A time traveler? An art thief? A mystery? All those and more could be had in those short adventure books. As long as you didn't make the wrong choice and get sucked out an airlock, shrunk by a shrink ray, or pulled apart by a roiling portal.

I tried to make one myself out of a sheath of paper when I was a kid. It was a horror story about an axe murderer, and you as the hero had to make decisions to avoid being killed by him. I recall there was one scenario in this sordid tale where you were juggling knives and needed to make the right choice to avoid killing yourself with a flying knife.

Yes, I was a strange kid.

The problem with good CHYOA is that it's hard to write. Not that any individual piece is that difficult, mind you, but because of the branching paths there's so much MORE to write. A single narrative gets split and chopped up into any number of endings you desire.

Writers often get bogged down trying to work on different endings and never finish the story at all. To help solve this problem, web sites have been created to help authors share the load with each other, which then results in different problems - a lack of vision and differing skill levels.

Nothing is more jarring than reading a fun story where the writing takes a turn for the worse due to swapping authors midstream. The new author decided he didn't like the story line and looped the story back to the beginning. Or the choices you're given are boring.

Sure, a different author could come back and flesh out a different choice for a more interesting ending, but that might never happen. Eventually, these stories peter out as the original author loses interest, or they turn into completely different stories as other creative visions take hold.

That isn't to say that good choose your own adventure stories don't exist. It simply means that they are harder to find. Fortunately, I have two great corruption/transformation stories here that I'll list, and if somebody else knows of more hopefully they'll post them!

A good CHYOA on Amazon

It's harder to make the leap to reading a CHYOA on Amazon because it's difficult to invest in something that may not quite strike your fancy. Self-published CHYOAs will at least be more complete than their counterparts online, but it's easier to read and discard ones you don't like when you're not paying money for them.

Fortunately, Escape the Island of Eldritch Lust is definitely one I can recommend.

The story has the erroneous subtitle 'Princess to Pleasure Slave Adventure 2,' which is silly to me since 'adventure 1' isn't a choose your own adventure tale. That collection of short stories might be interesting in their own right, but I haven't read them so you'll need to decide on your own.

Regardless, the story is long and the endings are many. You can be corrupted yourself, corrupted with your mother, corrupted with your sister, etc. The table of contents sets you up to skip to certain endings, making it easy to read certain paths in the story if you so choose. I've read a handful of CHYOA stories on Amazon, and by far this one is the best laid out so far.

In passing, I should also mention The Easily Defeated Hero's Monster Girl Adventure. While by the one of the co-authors of the other work, I don't consider this to be nearly as good because not as many alternate paths have been fleshed out. Also it looks like those people buying the stories separately may have gotten hosed, which is unfortunate (include me in that list, I probably won't be buying the final collection). Still, it's a fun romp if you're into that sort of thing.

A great CHYOA on chyoa.com

If you're looking for something more free, I have found a story I would recommend on chyoa.com - The Tower.

Fair warning, though, you'll only find this hot if you're not afraid of mind controlling bugs/aliens with tentacle thingies converting victims into hive breeders. However, there are also plot points where women soldiers are corrupted by the hive, their hair turning pink as they become breeding bimbos.

The best bits, in my opinion, is where some of the characters turn into matriarchs and help to convert their compatriots to the side of Hive. There is also a path where your character gets podded and altered into a more willing slave of the tower. Yum.

In general, chyoa.com is a good place to write this sort of smutty fiction, but you will need to register for a free account if you want to look at the story map. 

I would advocate doing this, as the story map not only shows you which paths are available with their titles, but also color codes which paths you've already read. It can be difficult to determine what you've already seen in a CHYOA tale, and this helps with that immensely.

Have fun choosing your own corruption!