Category: Table of Contents

It’s December. Here in the northern hemisphere, that means cold weather and more hours of darkness. To celebrate the season, we’ve loaded this issue chock full searches for things that go bump in the night. Jei D. Marcade’s “That Night at Henry’s Place” takes on horror movie tropes as you search for a missing friend […]

This month we’re very excited to bring you all “The Soft Rumor of Spreading Weeds,” a new game from Porpentine Charity Heartscape. This story is set in the same universe as “With Those We Love Alive,” and while you don’t need to have played that one to enjoy this, doing so might increase your enjoyment. […]

Intrigue! Banter! The promise of danger around every corner! These things—along with memorable characters and unusual settings—are some of the things that always make me stay up late reading. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two games in this month’s issue also have these things in common. In Eleanor Hingley’s “A Tragedy of Manners,” you’re thrown into […]

There’s a French term, l’esprit d’escalier (literally “staircase wit”), which refers to the experience of coming up with clever or insightful things to say hours after a conversation. For better or worse, the term perfectly describes many of my own social interactions. Our games this month both consider a similar theme. In “Dead Lake Crossing,” […]

Encounters between the everyday and the unknown are a big part of what makes speculative fiction (and, I would argue, art in general) so effective at pulling us out of ourselves and into the mind of someone else. It’s this tension that gives Poe his eerie cerebral terror and LeGuin’s worlds their endless beauty—and their […]

This month’s issue is all about LOVE. First up, though: heads up. We’re doing something differently with early access for our Patreon supporters and on-site subscribers. We’re committed to paying our authors for their work, and we’re hoping this helps us do that more sustainably. If you’re not currently a subscriber and can’t afford to […]

It’s December, somehow, already, and that means we have another game to set before you! This month on the 18th, we’ll be bringing you “Thanks for the Memories,” an original sci-fi piece from author and game writer Erin Roberts. On the 25th, we’ll feature a guest interview with Erin, where she talks about her process […]

It’s November! We have some exciting things going on this month, not least of which is our second game from author Jac Colvin, whose Russalka game “Lost Ones” we published back in March. This month’s game, “Ocean’s Call,” features a different kind of supernatural water creature, and one that’s just as steeped in mythology as […]

Up here in the northern hemisphere, October heralds the onset of fall—shorter days, longer nights, a crisp coldness to the air that speaks of the coming of winter. One of the reasons I like fall so much is the reaction that gathering dark pulls out of people. There’s a tendency to gather, to light fires, […]

When I was a kid, there was little I liked more than reading—unless maybe it was computer games. So the first time I saw a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book in my school’s library, I was excited. It was like the best of both worlds! I got to be in control of the characters, just like […]

The innate nature of humanity is a topic that’s as old as thought. In Warring States China, for example, Mengzi held that human nature—while innately good—was corruptible by society, while Xunzi argued that society was the only thing which taught good behaviour in the first place. (Xunzi, ever the optimist, also thought that people had […]

Our July game, the Hidden King by dcsross, presents us with a picture of madness, as the unnamed narrator struggles to navigate the shifting realities of a schizoaffective disorder. Also, there may be werewolves. Here’s our schedule for July: July 10th – Bruno Dias brings us part two of a primer in narrative design for writers.  […]

As an author and avid reader of prose fiction as well as the interactive kind, I often wonder what it is about the two media that makes them so engrossing. For me, at least, one of the key elements of interactive fiction is how it involves the reader in the tale it’s telling. The best […]

Here at sub-Q, we’re no stranger to authors using technologies in novel ways. We’re also pretty good at trouble-shooting when things go wrong in a submission, or when one doesn’t play nice with a particular web browser. Still, with wearables, embedded RFIDs, and self-driving cars in the news these past few years, it’s sometimes hard for us […]

Perhaps it’s just my upbringing in England and current residence in Oregon, but I’ve always associated Spring with rain. Another thing that’s associated with Spring in some folklore traditions are certain types of fairy. In pre-Roman Spain, for instance, the Cantabrian people believed that on the night of the Spring Equinox, small female fairies called […]

It’s starting to feel like spring here in the Pacific Northwest, but we still get cold weather overnight, and sometimes in the mornings the landscape seems to shimmer with a fine layer of frost that suggests an otherworldly influence. Which makes this the perfect month to release “Lost Ones” by Jac Colvin, a game with a […]