NARROWS is an online storytelling system. The name stands for NARRation On Web System. The easiest way to explain it is to imagine an online Choose Your Own Adventure book with the following differences:

1. Instead of having a single reader, there are as many readers as protagonists in the story (it could be one, but also four or five).
2. Instead of having to choose between two or three preset choices after each "chapter", readers can write in a textbox whatever their characters do.
3. Instead of the narrator writing the whole story with all possible branches upfront, then give it to the readers; the narrator writes only one chapter at a time and waits for the readers to submit the "actions" for their characters. Based on those actions, the narrator writes the next chapter.

You can also think of it as a way of running ruleless, diceless RPGs online (which is indeed the reason why I wrote it in the first place).

NARROWS is a web application with a backend. As such, it needs a server connected to the internet to be used. To install you need to run the following steps:

1. Clone the code somewhere.
2. Make sure you have Node.js (at least version 4) and NPM (at least version 4).
3. Run npm install
4. Run npm install -g [email protected]
5. Run elm-package install
6. Run npm run build
7. Install MySQL, create a new user and an empty MySQL database. Make sure the new user has all privileges to that database.
8. Copy config/default.js to config/local-production.js and modify any values you need.
9. Run NODE_ENV=production npm run dbmigrate
10. Run NODE_ENV=production node build/index.js

If all this works you will have to find a way to keep the server running, eg. supervisor.

Every time you update the code you will have to install any new dependencies with:

npm install

And run any new migrations with the following command. Note that you might need to pass the NODE_ENV variable as in the installation instructions above:

npm run dbmigrate

Then you will have to recompile the frontend and backend code with:

npm run build

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