Choice of the Vampire: Choosing Prey and Social Roles in Text-Based Fiction

Shaping a Vampire Through Text Choices, Identity, and Social Roles

Choice of the Vampire builds its protagonist through decisions in a text-based interactive novel, rather than through a graphical representation. Jason Stevan Hill’s four-volume work contains 900,000 words and uses neither graphics nor sound effects: descriptions and choices carry the story. You can play a male or female vampire, choose a gay, straight, or pan identity, and play as cis or trans. Alongside those identity options, the narrative asks how your immortal character will treat humanity: care for people or bend them to your purposes. Your decisions shape the resulting narrative.

Social roles give that character concrete pursuits within human society. You can support the arts as a patron, advocate for the temperance movement, become an underworld boss, invest in industry, or pursue a visionary role concerned with the unseen world. These options concern what your vampire does among people, alongside the choices about who that vampire is. Patronage and industrial investment place cultural and economic pursuits on the list; temperance advocacy and underworld leadership offer contrasting forms of social involvement. Character development therefore includes both personal identity and a chosen role in humanity’s affairs.

Choosing Prey: Human Targets, Animal Feeding, and Vampire Heartsblood

Choosing prey makes feeding a question of whom your vampire is willing to target. The human options include gamblers, artists, financiers, and workers, giving you specific groups to select rather than treating humanity as a single source of blood. These are choices about victims, distinct from the social roles your character can pursue. The game also includes encounters with famous historical figures whose blood you can drink, extending the feeding possibilities beyond those four categories to named people within its historical setting.

Human prey is not the only feeding option: you can restrict your vampire to animals, making abstention from human blood an explicit course of action. At the other extreme, you can drink the heartsblood of fellow vampires, turning members of your own kind into prey. Choosing among human groups therefore sits within a broader decision about what creatures you will feed upon at all. Animal-only feeding and consuming vampire heartsblood give concrete expression to the game's contrast between humanitarian restraint and monstrous behavior.

Across the Volumes: Louisiana Duels, Vicksburg Decisions, and Reconstruction Memphis

The opening volumes move from antebellum Louisiana to the Civil War, changing the circumstances surrounding your vampire. In Volume One, Battle of New Orleans, reputation rests on skill with a sword or dueling pistol, placing those weapons at the center of your standing. Volume Two, Siege of Vicksburg, presents a more specific decision amid the battle: another vampire intends to undermine the Confederate defenses. You can assist his effort, obstruct it, or consume him. The choice concerns both his military purpose and whether you treat the vampire himself as prey.

Volume Three, The Fall of Memphis, moves the setting into Reconstruction and places you in a city where former Confederates are stealing public funds and undoing Reconstruction's advances. This follows the earlier Louisiana emphasis on armed reputation and the wartime decision over interference at Vicksburg. Across these three named volumes, the historical progression supplies distinct circumstances: dueling in antebellum society, a vampire's intervention in Confederate defenses, and the dismantling of postwar reforms. Memphis thus continues the sequence beyond the Civil War, with public corruption and political reversal defining its documented setting.

Surviving Vampire Intrigue, Wronged Mortals, and Hunters While Uncovering Mysteries

Survival means facing hostility from both vampires and mortals. Fellow vampires pursue schemes of their own, while humans you have wronged can turn against you. Hunters pose a separate threat: they want vampirekind destroyed, rather than revenge for a particular injury. These are three distinct sources of danger, not a single conflict between humans and vampires. Your own kind can be adversaries, and mortal opposition includes both personal enemies and people committed to eradicating vampires altogether. Staying alive is therefore an objective within vampire society as well as outside it.

The Society places those conflicts within a broader problem of secrecy and adaptation. Its vampires possess centuries of experience, yet must survive in a rapidly changing world that would destroy them if their existence became known. In St. Louis, that pressure accompanies interference from national figures such as JP Morgan and Jay Gould, exercising power from New York. Alongside surviving these threats, you pursue mysteries concerning vampirekind itself. Investigation thus concerns your own kind, while the Society’s predicament brings the danger of exposure into the same world as its internal conflicts.

First published Nov 6, 2026.