It’s been about a year and a half since our last “Choose Our Adventure” storyline. A little longer than I had originally planned to leave that particular cliffhanger, but better late than never, am I right? Here are the last two issues of the COA adventures in case you want to catch up/refresh your memory: Idiots in Space and The Mesocron of Knowledge.

I really enjoy writing these adventures and then drawing the paths that you guys choose. Based on the emails and feedback I’ve gotten about today’s reveal of the next issue, it seems you guys are pretty excited as well.

With Planet of Doom I will continue to refine and tweak the system behind the Choose Our Adventure concept, primarily as it relates to the way I’ve structured the story trees. After the first issue, I realized I’d peppered the story tree with so many “Ethan Dies” endings that it was very unlikely to get to a full story on the first try. That’s fine for books (one of which I still hope to do someday), but for a democratic voting system where you only get one shot, I needed to curb that a little bit.

So while Mesocron of Knowledge had “Ethan Dies Horribly” endings, it also had more “Ethan gets fucked up, but the story continues” choices. Which resulted in you guys getting a longer story (and ending on one of two “to be continued” endings), but some of the paths were also a bit of a tangent. Paths that were fun to follow, but didn’t really provide a solid, climactic and satisfying conclusion to the story I’d set up at the start.

So for Planet of Doom I’ve tried to focus on what worked and what didn’t work in the past, and written a number of story paths which I’m really happy with. This time I’ve added some diverging paths that reconverge further down a particular tree. Meaning that rather than every choice meaning a totally different direction (or tangent), now some of them will move us down the same narrative but just take different (perhaps more violent) routes to get there.

So we’ve got a number of different stories and outcomes we can end up with, and of course, all of the possibility of death and dismemberment lurks at every corner!

I’m looking forward to it.