The Winking Skull and other stories

This collection contains three mysteries to unravel in three different settings: * You just started your graduate work in Anthropology. Your first assignment involves some odd bones in a basement in the interior of Massachusetts. In the familiar setting of Arkham and the Miskatonic University, there are three major alternative narratives you can explore depending on the type of character embodied by your decisions. * You are a detective searching for a lost deed in a house full of dolls and creepy things. The story is a fun short mystery in the style of Zork and Call-of-Cthuluh RPG. * You are a mafioso trying to extort money from a Mahjong parlour owner in Chinatown, who is keen in burning cash. It is a crossover of the gangster genre and Asian horror. These are short stories (in the 1,000-5,000 word range) that are quick to read but have many alternatives to explore. Each of them is a gamebook, which means you have decisions to make while going through the story, decisions that affect the ending. This genre was popularized by the Choose Your Own Adventure® books in the 70s and 80s. This gamebook uses a layout engine by Textualization Software Ltd. that incorporates a "preferred path" at the beginning: you can read it from the beginning until the end of the preferred path by flipping pages without making decisions. Another advantage is that pages contain backlinks, indicating which pages contain decisions that can land you on a given page. Therefore, you can backtrack and explore other paths of the story. Finally, all the endings are listed in the table of contents. All these improvements address some of the commons complaints about the genre.

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