When I was in primary school, I loved gamebooks. An ordinary book told you that the hero went left. A gamebook asked whether I would like to send him there myself, and directed me to page 17. Right was page 25. Reading both was, of course, forbidden. Or so the rules claimed.
My love of story-driven RPGs has stayed with me. I like taking part in a story: making a choice, getting it wrong, and discovering that the world is under no obligation to admire my plan.
Later I found apps that encourage walking: cover a few kilometres and, in a sense, make your way across Middle-earth. There are also videos you can walk or cycle along with while the scenery changes in front of you. What if I combined a walk with a gamebook?
That is where WalkQuest began. You leave home, listen to a story and walk wherever you like. After a certain distance, something happens. You make a choice, keep walking and discover the consequences. The story knows how far you have gone, but it will not insist that saving the kingdom requires a left turn at a particular pharmacy.
Choices alone do not quite satisfy me. I want the walk itself to enter the story now and then. Say your character is fleeing a pursuer. You accept a pace challenge: succeed, and they escape; fail, and events take a different turn. Not necessarily a worse one. A good adventure should have a plan for when its hero arrives late.
I once suggested covering 500 metres in three minutes. Do the maths and that is a run, not a walk, so it cannot be a fixed rule. The interesting part is the principle: sometimes what you do in the real world becomes part of the fictional one. The dragon can wait if there is a road ahead or you need to stop.
Of course, players could be allowed to retry every challenge. But I am more curious about a version where failure stays in the story, like a dice roll in a tabletop RPG. You did not make it. Neither did the hero. Now let us see what they do about it. A way to enjoy the story without that rule should exist too: a walk is voluntary, after all.
For now, WalkQuest is an idea I want to test, not a finished game. I want to walk through a whole story and see whether the thought afterwards is not 'how many kilometres did I cover?' but 'what happens to my character next?' If the answer makes me want to leave the house again tomorrow, this idea has legs.