Ignatius M. Meen posted:

I'm betting one of the two non-Yorick swords is the sword Laertes is supposed to have, and so Hamlet wins the duel instead of dying.

Act 5, Scene 2 posted:

"Let's make this a drinking game!" he says.

"Um," you say.

"If you make the first hit," Claudius says, "then we'll both take a drink."

"Okay," you say.

"But if Laertes hits you and you only make the second hit," he says, "then we'll both take a drink too."

"Okay," you say.

"Ooh! And if Laertes hits you TWICE before you make a hit, so you only make the third hit, then we'll both take a drink."

"I'm not sure if I should get drunk during a fencing match," you say.

"I'll put a pearl in your drink, hah hah, there's nothing suspicious about that!" Claudius says.

"Not really super thirsty either way," you say.

Claudius stares at you.

"Can we fence now?" you say.

The fencing match begins! Laertes moves towards you, sword at the ready.

Act 5, Scene 2 posted:

The audience is heckling you! With dirt!! This makes you mad, which makes you attack his upper body after all!

You jab and thrust towards Laertes' upper body. He deftly parries, blocking your every attack and returning them with attacks of his own, using your own momentum against you.

This isn't as easy as it was on the pirate ship! It seems like Laertes really knows what he's doing?

Every time it looks like you might take a hit, Claudius seems really excited and raises his glass. Wow, that is one thirsty usurper to the throne!

Finally, and not without quite a bit of luck, you land a glancing blow on Laertes' left shoulder!

"Got you!" you say.

"Nuh-uh!" he says.

"Ref?" you say.

"Am I the ref?" says Osric. "I am? Oh. Yeah, that was a hit. Palpably so!"

"Hooray!!" Claudius says. "Let's drink! Hamlet, come drink with me! Look, I put a foreign substance in your drink!"

"I'm in the middle of fencing here, Claudius," you say.

Claudius looks crestfallen. He lowers the drink as the fencing match begins again.

Act 5, Scene 2 posted:

Act 5, Scene 2 posted:

"Our son will win," says Claudius calmly.

"Um, hello, I'm not your son!" you shout in reply. Just then, your mom calls you fat and lazy and offers you a napkin to rub off your sweat, because she thinks you're so fat you're already sweating out of your forehead from just one little fight.

Whoah! Where'd THAT come from?

"What the butt, Mom?" you say. "Where'd THAT come from?"

"Whatever," she says and holds up the goblet Claudius poured for you. "Look, I'm ironically drinking to your good health and fortune!"

"Don't drink that!" Claudius says.

"I drinks what I wants," your mom says, and then she does just that, drinking what she wants.

Act 5, Scene 2 posted:

When they invented "choose your own path" books, I'm pretty sure they were assuming you wouldn't choose to be insane! So thanks for proving them wrong, I guess!

Okay, you ignore him, and since this is YOUR adventure, everyone else ignores him too. Why not, right? You and Laertes continue your fight.

At one point Laertes says that what he's doing is almost against his conscience, which seems like a weird thing to say in a friendly non-fatal fight like this, but you ignore that too! Hooray! Your ears are useless!

You fight back and forth, and at one point your swords clash in front of you and there's a moment of silence as both of you try to overpower the other. This is your chance to say something awesome.

"Bring it on," you try to say as grimly and badassedly as possible, but somehow it comes out as "I pray you, pass with your best violence. I am afeard you make a wanton of me," so... oh well?

Pushing as hard as you can, you manage to force Laertes' sword aside, but in the fighting that ensues he manages to cut you on your arm.

Enraged, you break the rules of swordfighting just a little and kick his hand, sending his sword flying. In response, he kicks at your hand, sending your sword flying to the exact same spot.

Act 5, Scene 2 posted:

Fortunately for you, the sword you grabbed had poison on its tip! Life's full of surprises, huh? And this new surprise is that Laertes is now poisoned.

Very soon you're going to be responsible for an extremely public murder.

But don't worry too much: since it was Laertes' sword that was poison-tipped in the first place, that means you too are poisoned from that earlier cut! Hooray!

Okay, just to summarize real quick: you still haven't killed Claudius, but you have managed to poison your one-time (now dead) girlfriend's brother, get poisoned yourself, and allow your mother to be poisoned too.

If you're wondering about your score, right now it's at, oh I don't know...



Gertrude collapses from the poison you ignored earlier, and feigning ignorance you say, "How's the queen?" and Claudius says, "She fainted because you guys are bleeding," and she says, "NO, I'm poisoned from the drink!" and then she dies.

"We've been betrayed" you shout, and then feigning ignorance again, you shout, "Quick, lock the doors! Let's find out who did it!"

Laertes, a man who is dying AS WE SPEAK, is thus forced to spend his last few moments alive explaining to you very clearly and with no big words that your mother was poisoned by the king.

He also explains to you that you've been poisoned too, but I already told you that.

It's too bad too, because he said it very nicely, all "Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good" while I was all "wooby wooby woo, jokes jokes jokes" (NOTE: I am paraphrasing).

ANYWAY. Now is your absolute last chance. You have a poisoned sword in your hand and Claudius is sitting here in front of you.

You will be dead in 1 turn(s).

Act 5, Scene 2 posted:

Okay let's do this!!

You stab Claudius a few times with the poisoned sword, but man, poison is slow and you've already got it in your system!

So then you pick up the poisoned goblet and force it down his throat, all the while calling him "an incestuous, murderous, Goddamned Dane."

Wow.

I mean it's a little racist (at least partially self-racist too, so: irony) but still -- wow. It's a huge dose of poison and he dies instantly.

What's that? You didn't know poison worked that way?

WELL, THAT'S WEIRD BECAUSE I'M PRETTY SURE IT JUST DID.

Meanwhile, as the poison starts to kill you, Laertes forgives you for the deaths you've caused and asks you to forgive him of the same, and you do it.

It's actually pretty classy. Then you call Horatio over.

"Horatio," you say, "don't be crazy and chug the poison too. It's your job to tell everyone my story so people know what really happened. You need to tell the people."

"Okay," says Horatio, glancing at the surrounding crowd which has already seen this all go down.

"Oh, and write it down when you do, so future generations will know," you say.

"Okay," says Horatio.

"Oooh! And make it one of those choose-your-own-adventure dealies," you say. "I love those."

"Right," says Horatio.

Suddenly you hear an army marching in! Osric runs in and says that Fortinbras is here and marching on the capital with some English ambassadors.

Remember Fortinbras? He's that Norwegian crown prince whose father died and who decided right away to take action!

He's almost like a parallel to you, only, you know -- better?

Anyway. You're not going to survive long enough to talk to him. You're actually not going to survive long at all.

It's time, Hamlet, to choose your last words to Horatio -- well, last words EVER really:

Conclusion posted:

So! Your final score is, oh, let's say 675 points out of 1000.



You took a heck of a long time to kill Claudius, but you DID do the pirate sidequest, which is nice, because it was my mistake to put it so late in the story anyway.

We'll open with it in the remastered edition.

Okay! Thanks for playing! Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

THE END

Infoblurb posted:

Emily Carroll is a cartoonist living in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Some of her comics can be found here: emcarroll.com.

Conclusion posted:

The thing is, you're still dead. You played as Hamlet and you killed him and there's no taking that back.

But here's the secret: while you ARE dead, there's another you that exists outside this book. There's a you reading these words right now who hasn't even died once yet (PROBABLY??).

There's a you who invested some time reading this and there's a me who invested even more time writing it and we're all in this together and it's way too late to back out now.

But we've come a long way, and I like you. I think we had fun.

So here's your secret ending, and it's the very last choice you ever get to make.

You find yourself in a certain location in the universe, remarkable, at the very least, for being where you are right now.

You have just experienced the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. It was a fun diversion, but real life beckons.

Here's your big choice, right here, right now:

You can either a) put down this book and work every day to be the best darn person you can be at whatever it is you choose to do, or b) surprise, there is no other choice.

Go get 'em, tiger.

THE END

Infoblurb posted:

Rosemary Mosco is a field naturalist with a passion for science communication. Her cartoons, which find humor in the natural world, have appeared in print publications, games, and video podcasts. You can make her day by showing her a new kind of fern.

YOUR STATS THIS ADVENTURE:

• Bladed Weapons Poisoned: 2
  
• Poisons Misused: 6
  
• Stabs Stabbed: 3
  
• Tasteless Sexism: 1
  
• Choices Made: 11
  
• Times You Were: 1
  
• Times You Were Not: 1
  
• Games of Tennis Played: 0

GAME OVER

quote:

YOUR STATS THIS ADVENTURE:

• Bladed Weapons Poisoned: 2
  
• High Fives Given: 1
  
• Naps Napped: 1
  
• Poisons Misused: 8
  
• Stabs Stabbed: 4
  
• Puns Dealt: 8
  
• Stockings Befouled: 1
  
• Tasteless Sexism: 13
  
• Choices Made: 114
  
• Times You Were: 2
  
• Times You Were Not: 1
  
• Rosencrantzes: 1
  
• Guildensterns: 1

quote:

quote:

No book comes together without an author feeling like thon's in debt to SOMEONE.

Thanks to MetaFilter for all the terrific advice on how to dispose of a body and not get caught (SPOILER ALERT: there are murders in this book).

They have a page just about this, did you know that? They're one of the top search results for "how to dispose of a body."

And I guess also thanks to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for not getting me in trouble (yet) after I ran all those searches for:

"How to dispose of a body" and "I want to know how to get rid of a dead human body..."

...and "gross dead body +how to hide it" and "what if I committed the murder act, how do I ditch the body & not go to jail IT'S AN EMERGENCY??"

Thanks also to Chef Michael Smith, Emily Horne, and William Shakespeare for the stew recipe...

(SPOILER ALERT: you can learn to make stew in this book too! It's not all murders ALL the time.)

... for the expansive knowledge of boats and the seas in which they sail...

(SPOILER ALERT: play your cards right in this book and you just miiiiight gain command of a pirate ship, just...just be cool.)

...and for ripping me off and making this book so famous (but which thank-you applies to which person??

That is for YOU to decide. Yes, even here in this acknowledgement parenthetical it's up to YOU to choose your own adventure, but I mean come on it's pretty obvious).

Thanks to all my artist friends who drew all these pretty pictures in the book. You've made death into a visually stunning treat.

And thanks to Crissy Calhoun for copyediting this book and fixing all my dumb mistakes! Any that remain I added in afterwards because of brain problems.

Finally, thanks to Joey Comeau for his skills at chess, Ray Fawkes for his skills at mad libs, my extremely awesome wife, Jenn, for being extremely awesome...

...and to my brother, Victor, who confirmed over walkie-talkie that the idea for this book was rad.

And thanks to you, for buying this book or at least picking it up and flipping to this page: that took initiative!

As a reward, you get to continue enjoying reading this book!!

quote:

Right now, the book exists as mere potential. On one hand, you can make it happen, but it'll take months of work.

On the other hand, ideas are like chest hairs: you have so many of them that it's hard to get attached to any one in particular. Plus new ones are popping up all the time!

You go skateboarding to decide what to do. You're getting mad air while pulling off some insanely rad skateboard tricks while also munching on pizza, and it hits you:

Writing this book is something you want to do.

You say goodbye to all the babes and go home to write.

Almost a year later, you write the last ending for the last version of the reality you've chosen to put in this book. It's done. It's a pretty solid first draft.

A few months after that, you've smushed it into a pretty solid second draft, and then months after that, a totally rad final draft.

All that's left now is to do a final readover to make sure there are no typos, inconsistencies, or spelling errorrs!

You grab some snacks, sit down, and bring your draft so close to your face that you can't really see anything else.

quote:

Gosh, well, I suppose if we're really doing this, then I also want to thank everyone involved in the series of events that led to me being here today...

...able to write and tell jokes for a living, which means I'm thanking... pretty much everyone I've ever interacted with?

And I'm also thanking everyone THEY'VE ever interacted with, for helping to make them so awesome.

And if I'm doing that, I should probably thank the people who influenced the people who interacted with the people who influenced me as well, right?

Thank you, a large percentage of the planet that I'm pretty sure reaches 100%!

But these people didn't just pop into existence fully formed.

My thanks take a step sideways and begin racing back in time, up past everyone's parents and grandparents and great-great-great-great-grandparents, thanking them all as we go...

...further and further, grandparents getting hairier and hairier, until my thanks coalesce all the way back 200,000 years ago in East Africa with Mitochondrial Eve...

...the one woman from which every single human alive today descends.

Thank you, Mitochondrial Eve.

My thanks speed up, thanking faster and faster back in time, humanity devolving before our eyes. My thanks extend to the first human, pass through Australopithecus, and then on through great apes.

Thank you, great apes. Without you, none of us would be here.

But my thanks are still speeding up, tearing through the primates, then the treeshrews, than the placental mammals. We're 125,000,000 years in the past, thanking everyone we meet.

We go back further, thanking the early vertebrates, watching them get smaller, simpler...

...until there's no animal life on land and you blink and it's 2,100,000,000 years ago and we're thanking the very first cell with a nucleus, alone in the ocean.

Thank you, very first cell with a nucleus. You're a neat li'l guy. You started some really cool stuff.

We watch the cells around us get simpler, more primitive, and then they're gone. My thanks are rushing backwards almost impossibly quickly through this empty planet when suddenly we're watching the Earth itself break apart, diffusing into a tremendous cloud of dust and gas.

Mixed in here are the beginnings of all the other planets in our solar system, plus all the material that would one day become our sun.

We're 4,568,000,000 years in the past and we are thanking a lifeless hunk of diffuse matter with all our heart.

As we're doing that, it combines itself with a colossal molecular clous, a stellar nursery from which a whole bunch of suns would eventually form, including our own.

Thank you, giant molecular cloud 65,000,000 light-years wide. You were probably very pretty.

The universe around us is contracting, getting smaller and denser and hotter until we're in a universe only a few metres across and shrinking at an incredibly fast rate.

13,000,000,000 years in the past, we are thanking the entire universe, which is right now mostly superheated plasma with a colossally high energy density.

We would hug all that is and ever would be, if we could.

But we can't, so we say thanks instead!

Thank you, the universe as it existed a mere 10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang. If you really are sensitive to initial conditions, then I hope nobody ever goes back in time to mess with you.

And then, at last and finally, my thanks race just a little past the origins of the Big Bang...

...give secret unknowable props all around, and careen back to the present where you're here reading this book.

Hey, thanks babe!!

Not an actual infoblurb posted:

For some reason, this one image doesn't appear in the gallery after unlocking it. Not only does this mean you have to put up with this too-small version until I get a different method of getting these pictures going, I also can't give you the infoblurb on who made it and what they do! Fun!

quote:

Ryan North was born on October 20, 1980. Since then he has done the following things (this is NOT an exhaustive list):

• failed to die for over 11,322 days IN A ROW;
  
• eaten food and then converted that food into ideas;
  
• kissed over FIVE different people not from his family, all of whom totally came back for more;
  
• studied computer science and computational linguistics and graduated from university TWICE;
  
• written the online comic Dinosaur Comics; it's that comic with the dinosaurs that you love;
  
• co-edited the anthology Machine of Death, which is a book about people who know how they will die;
  
• written the Adventure Time comic book series, which has a lot of really awesome stuff going on in it;
  
• analyzed the novelization of Back to the Future in way more detail than probably anyone could've anticipated;
  
• gotten married, and adopted a dog named Noam Chompsky;
  
• oh I also totally wrote this book!!

Okay, your stalling tactics are really easy to see through and also really confusing because it's not like someone has a gun to your head and is forcing you to read this book.

Right? If this is indeed the case and you are totally fine, let me know by NOT sending a message back in time to me the very moment I'm reading these words, which is March 25th, 2013, 1:11:34 pm EST.

Okay, terrific, we're good.

Ignatius M. Meen posted:

I'd like to see what the successful run at chess looks like.

Oblivion4568238 posted:

quote:

"Oh, I'll play your game," you say.

"Excellent," she says, motioning to her throne. "Please, have a seat."

As you sit down and settle in, she quickly sets up a chess board in front of you, pulling up another throne for the opposite side.

She arranges the pieces with the air of someone who actually knows what she's doing when it comes to playing chess, which isn't the greatest sign for you.

She's white, you're black. "Since you're the one who barged in here, it's my turn to make the next move," she says, advancing her king's pawn up two squares.

"Ah yes, the Queen's Gambit," you say.

"That's not what that is," she says.

You're - kinda in over your head here, aren't you, Ophelia?

quote:

You move your pawn up one square.

Gertrude quickly jots down something on a piece of paper you hadn't noticed before. "e4 f6," it reads. Beside it she's noted the words "oh man, seriously??"

Wow! Maybe she's impressed? I mean, that is a really optimistic way to look at things!

Gertrude moves her queen's pawn out two spaces, so it's standing beside her other one. She's building a wall of pawns!

But she's overlooked the fact that when pawns are side by side, they can't defend each other as well as if they're in a zigzag pattern.

What's she doing? Doesn't she REALIZE?

"d4," she writes.



You bring up your horsey's pawn two spaces to form the first step of a zigzag wall.

Gertrude raises her eyebrows.

"Congratulations," she says. "You have managed to lose the game in the shortest possible time: two moves.

It is impossible to lose at chess any faster. There is no way for you to be worse at this game."

quote:

"Not true!" you say. "I could be worse if I didn't know how the pieces moved." Gertrude writes down "Qd5#," then moves her queen diagonally as far as it'll go, putting it beside your pawn.

"The thing is, I'm not convinced you haven't been guessing your way through it so far," she says, "but it doesn't matter anyway."

Duuuuude, I'm pretty sure that's...

quote:

Gertrude looks at the board, looks at you, and smiles beatifically.

"Checkmate," she says.

You look down at the board, trying out all the possibilities you can see. She's right. There's no move you can make. You've lost.

"Looks like you don't get to kill me after all!" she says, flipping the table.

Attached to the underside of the table are two short-swords that she grabs in mid-air. She takes a swipe at you, which you dodge.

"What the hell? you ask.

"You can't kill me, as per the terms of our agreement," Gertrude says. "But we never agreed that I couldn't kill you."

You reach to draw your sword.

"Now now, be careful with that!" Gertrude says. "You wouldn't want to cut me! I could die from an infection!"



You put the sword away, and Gertrude continues pressing her attack. You fight back passively, dodging all you can, finally dodging your way out through a window and backflipping to the ground below.

"I'll find you!" Gertrude yells after you. "There was no time limit on our promise! I'll continue trying to kill you until the day I die!"

"Of natural causes!" she adds.

You spend the next several days dodging her attacks and traps.

They get progressively more ingenious until one day you break a twig in the forest, which sends a log careening towards a stack of logs, which knocks the logs over like dominoes...

...which sends a boulder down a hill and off a cliff, which hits a see-saw, which sends another boulder up in the air, which comes down on your head, killing you instantly.

"Nailed it!" Gertrude yells. "Man! I KNEW that had an small chance of working!"

Artist Information posted:

Emily Partridge is an artist from the pacific northwest and you can totally tell. She makes cartoons and comics and illustrations and painting and arts and crafts and stuff.

empartridge.com