About Magic Stories

Magic Stories are stories that (with surprisingly little effort) are almost never the same twice. Rather, it's the same story, sort of, but it goes to different places each time you load it. Same characters, different conflicts; same conflicts, different characters; same characters, same conflicts, different outcomes; etc. As a writer, this approach lets you play with a lot of different what-ifs. You can read 'em here, sure, but you can also register, log in, and make 'em yourself. Try it. It's fun.

How is it done? There are two kinds of randomization at play. One is macro-level. Think of a story as made of pieces. A piece can be a parent and/or a child piece. A piece with no parent is a beginning. A piece with no children is an ending. There can be many beginnings, each one with many children, and those children can have children, and so on. You've got X number of beginnings; the engine picks one at random. That beginning has X number of children; the engine picks one at random. It continues picking random children of the last chapter it picked until it reaches a childless chapter. That's where the story ends. No more children to pick.

Then there's micro-level randomizing. Within any given sentence, for example, you can give the engine a choice of words or phrases to select, by enclosing the options in squiggly brackets separated by the "pipe" character: { cool | awesome | ok I get it | nice | ok already}.