15 Choose Your Own Adventure Ideas: Interactive Story Concepts

Explore 15 CYOA story ideas perfect for branching adventures. From fantasy quests to sci-fi explorations, these concepts make readers the hero.

Choose Your Own Adventure stories put readers in control of the narrative, making decisions that lead to different outcomes. These 15 ideas are designed for maximum interactivity and replay value.

Fantasy Adventures

1. The Dragon’s Covenant

You’re a young dragon rider bonded to a newly hatched dragon. Your choices determine your dragon’s personality, your faction loyalty, and whether you’ll save or doom the kingdom when war comes.

2. The Merchant’s Road

A trade caravan through dangerous territory. Each decision—which route to take, who to trust, what to trade—affects your profit, reputation, and whether you’ll survive bandits, monsters, and rival merchants.

3. The Inheritance

You inherit a decrepit magical estate with strange rooms that change, servants who might not be human, and a family curse. Exploring different areas reveals different secrets—and different fates.

4. The Tournament

A grand tournament where your choices determine which events to enter, which competitors to befriend or sabotage, and what you’ll discover about the tournament’s dark secret.

Mystery and Thriller

5. The Disappearing Town

People are vanishing from your small town. Your investigation choices determine which disappearances you solve, what conspiracy you uncover, and whether you disappear too.

6. The Heist

Planning and executing a impossible heist. Each choice in planning affects options during execution. Multiple endings range from wealthy escape to imprisonment to unexpected betrayal.

7. The Stranded

Shipwrecked on a mysterious island with other survivors. Your choices about leadership, exploration, and resource allocation determine who survives—and what you discover about why you crashed here.

8. The Witness

You witnessed a crime, and now you’re being hunted. Choices about who to trust, where to hide, and when to run determine whether you survive—and whether justice is served.

Sci-Fi Adventures

9. The Colony Ship

Generations into a voyage to a new world, a crisis threatens the ship. Your role and your choices determine which factions you support, what sacrifices you’ll make, and what kind of society reaches the destination.

10. The First Contact

You’re humanity’s representative at first alien contact. Each diplomatic choice affects relations, trade agreements, and whether humanity gains allies or enemies in a larger galactic community.

11. The Simulation Theory

You discover evidence that reality might be a simulation. Your choices about whether to investigate, who to tell, and what to do with the knowledge lead to very different understandings of existence.

Survival Adventures

12. The Expedition

An expedition into uncharted wilderness. Each decision about route, supplies, and camp affects survival. Different paths reveal different discoveries, dangers, and possible fates.

13. The Outbreak

A mysterious illness is spreading. Your choices about quarantine, treatment, and who to save affect the outbreak’s course and your own survival. Multiple endings range from cure to catastrophe.

14. The Escape

You’re trapped somewhere you shouldn’t be—a facility, a dimension, a time period. Each escape attempt reveals more about your prison and offers different paths to freedom or doom.

15. The Competition

A survival competition with increasing stakes. Your choices about alliances, challenges, and moral compromises determine your ranking—and what you discover about the competition’s true purpose.

Making Your CYOA Engaging

Branch meaningfully: Choices should lead to genuinely different content, not just different words before the same outcome.

Track consequences: Reader decisions should have lasting effects that ripple through subsequent choices.

Reward replay: Include paths that can only be discovered through multiple readings, with different starting choices.

Balance endings: Include positive endings readers can feel satisfied by and negative endings that feel earned by choices made.

Start Your Adventure

Ready to create branching narratives? Multic’s node-graph storytelling system makes designing complex choice trees intuitive—see all your paths at once and ensure every branch leads somewhere satisfying.