Ladlord Games
Codex Engine icon: a twenty-sided die

Codex Engine

Play the gamebooks. Then write your own.

Wishlist on Steam

Windows · macOS · Linux · Steam Deck

Choose, roll, survive

Codex Engine plays like the gamebooks you read under the covers, without the pencil and eraser. Roll up a character, choose where to go and what to risk, fight with dice that do not care how far you have come, and keep a careful eye on what is left in your pack.

When you have finished someone else’s adventure, open the editor and start your own. Every campaign in the game was built with the same tools you get.

  • Two full campaignsHundreds of sections each, with branching routes, hidden paths and more than one way to die.
  • Dice, combat and character sheetsStats, skill checks, inventory and equipment, all handled for you.
  • A visual campaign editorLay out your adventure as a map of connected sections, write the prose, set the rules, and playtest as you go.
  • Steam WorkshopPublish your campaigns and play what other writers have made.
  • Read aloudOptional narration that runs entirely on your own computer.
  • Music for every sceneSoundtracks, ambience and sound effects that follow the story, and that you can set for your own campaigns.
  • Couch-readyGamepad controls, a large-text layout for Steam Deck, and a high-contrast mode.
  • Steam Cloud savesPick up an adventure on whichever computer you left it on.

The campaigns

The Emberline

Science fiction · around 385 sections

The Emberline is an old jump-corridor strung with the beacons of a race that left nothing else behind. You are captain of the Sixth Muster, hauling two hundred colonists down it to a world worth crossing the dark for, on a ledger of jump-mass and rations that only runs down. The convoy ahead of you stopped answering ninety days ago.

The Tomb of the Jade Serpent

Fantasy dungeon crawl · around 350 sections

Ten kingdoms have forgotten the name of the god buried under the Greenmaw. What is left of him is a ziggurat of black stone, a doorway like a throat, and one eye of jade at the apex that still catches the light. Six levels down, in the dark, is what he was buried with.

Screenshots

  • The opening page of The Tomb of the Jade Serpent: story text about the Greenmaw jungle with four choices below it, and the character sheet beside it.
    The Tomb of the Jade Serpent
  • The Emberline's opening page at the port of Saltgate, with four choices and a character sheet whose Supplies panel tracks jump-mass, rations, spare parts, morale and colonists.
    The Emberline
  • A fight against a Tomb Skeleton and a Cult Zealot, showing the hero's stats, both enemies' hit points and a round won on a roll of 15 against 9.
    Dice combat
  • The pixel-art map of the Jade Serpent's tomb, with the jungle floor and the Hall of Tongues uncovered and the deeper levels still hidden in fog.
    The campaign map fills in as you explore
  • The campaign editor showing the prologue laid out as a branching tree of linked sections, where skill checks split into green pass and red fail paths, with the section outline on the left and chapter tabs across the top.
    The campaign editor
  • The campaign editor with the section The Watcher in the Roots open in a side panel, showing its story text and choices, next to the graph where its Subterfuge check branches to a pass and a fail section.
    Editing a section