Choice of the Vampire

Slake your thirst—without becoming a monster! Blessed with the blood-soaked gift of immortality, will you tend the flock of humanity—or twist it to your whims? When a brash young country clashes with a brash young vampire, who will come out ahead? "Choice of the Vampire" is an epic interactive novel by Jason Stevan Hill. It's entirely text-based, 900,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Choose from over a dozen wildly different human backgrounds in Volume One, "Battle of New Orleans," set in 1815 antebellum Louisiana. You can be a Choctaw interpreter, a French landowner, a Free Person of Color, an ordained priest, an Irish laborer, a Yankee entrepreneur, and many more. You'll also get to choose your "maker," the vampire who turned you, from one of six different vampires, each with their own unique background.

Your choice of background affects the entire rest of the game, as you live through a hundred years of American history. Each background engages differently with the Civil War, Reconstruction, the liberation of Haiti, the Exodusters, Cuba, lynchings, and vodou. Your vampire may or may not be literate, may or may not speak English, French, German, Latin, Spanish, or Choctaw.

These options combine to make "Choice of the Vampire" one of the most replayable interactive novels in the world. Will you decide to kill your maker in the first five minutes of the game, or follow in your maker's footsteps for decades? Or will you flee New Orleans entirely, playing an alternate version of Volume One in the nearby village of St. Charles?

Volume Two, "Siege of Vicksburg," continues into the Civil War, at the site of one of the war's most grueling and decisive battles. When a strange vampire seeks to disrupt the Confederate defenses, will you help him, hinder him, or consume him? In Volume Three, "The Fall of Memphis" (available as an in-app purchase) you find yourself in Memphis, as ex-Confederates loot the public coffers and dismantle the advances of Reconstruction. In Volume Four, "St. Louis, Unreal City," explore the 1904 World's Fair, which promises to be the party of the century.

As your character concludes their first century of unlife, they must navigate the waters of industrialization and urbanization. The excesses of capital and rapid industrialization is producing a new class of educated, militant workers who are ready and willing to stand up to the nation's elite. Meanwhile, the vestiges of the Confederacy systematically dismantle Reconstruction, while simultaneously pitting European immigrants against the Chinese and the formerly enslaved. And yet, national figures such as JP Morgan and Jay Gould are forcing their will upon St. Louis all the way from New York.

Still, the vampires of the Society must adapt and thrive, caught between centuries of experience and the rapidly changing world around them—a world that would destroy them utterly if they were to be revealed. When one of their number permanently gives into their Beast and begins hunting other vampires, the Society of North America are thrust into disarray, and you must decide what is worth dying for.

• Play as male or female; gay, straight, or pan; cis or trans.
• Exploit the domains of humanity: become a patron of the arts, an advocate of the temperance movement, an underworld boss, an investor in industry, or a visionary of the world of the unseen.
• Choose your prey: gamblers, artists, financiers, or workers. Hold your head up high and feed only from animals—or drink the heartsblood of your fellow vampires with gusto.
• Survive the machinations of your fellow vampires, the malice of the mortals you have wronged, and the hunters who want to see your kind destroyed.
• Unravel the mysteries of vampirekind.
• Meet famous historical figures—and drink their blood.

Can the American Republic satiate you, or will you drain it dry?