Tohil is an interactive audiobook. You listen to a story, you choose what happens next, and the world responds. These pages explain everything on the screen, and how to make a world of your own.
How a turn plays
Listen as the story is told. A full cast plays the scene, and the line being spoken lights up on the page, so you can follow along or look away. When the turn ends, the story waits for you: tap one of the three choices, or type your own action. The narrator weaves it in, and your next turn begins.
A story runs for 25 turns, then it reaches its ending.
Listening
- Play and pause: the round amber button at the bottom.
- Seek: the thin line above the composer. Drag it to jump around in the turn.
- Follow: the crosshair to the left of the play button keeps the spoken line in view.
- Autoplay: the chevrons to the right of the play button play each new turn as soon as its voice is ready.
- Text first: the words arrive before the voice. Lines the voice hasn’t reached yet are dimmed, never hidden.
- Choices are never read aloud. The audio ends inside the story, and the choices wait on the page.
Your own action
Type anything into the composer: an action, a line of dialogue, a question to someone in the scene. To use something you carry, open the drawer, pick the item and press Use: it goes with your next action.
Features inside
Bend the world to your liking while you play, bring real-life facts into your story, redo a turn or branch off a new path.
The Game Master
Switch the composer to the Game Master to step outside the story. Ask about the world, or ask for a change, like a lantern that never goes out. The Game Master answers out of character, and what it grants applies to your story.
Web search
Turn on Web search for a turn and the narrator looks things up on the live web first, so real facts (local news, the weather, the lore of a place) can find their way into the fiction. Some topics return nothing; the story simply goes on without them.
Turn tools
Under each turn: replay its audio, copy its text, regenerate the latest turn, or branch a new path from that point. A thumbs up or down tells us how a turn went.
The drawer
The drawer holds everything about your story: your characters, their health, their inventory, their personalities, the way they think, and more. It fills as the story unfolds.
- Health: characters who can be hurt have three hearts. Lose them all and they fall.
- Conditions: temporary states such as poisoned or stunned, each with a line on what it does.
- Inventory: what each character carries. Some items hold others, like a wallet in a bag.
- Skills and traits: what a character is good at, or bad at, which tells the narrator what they can plausibly pull off.
- Mind and voice: how a character thinks on the inside, and how they speak out loud.
If the character you play falls, is captured or is taken over, you carry on as the next character in the story’s succession order.
Two ways to hear a story
Every world is made in one of two formats, and keeps it for life.
- Full cast: every character speaks in their own voice, and keeps it from the first turn to the last. The sound of the scene plays under them. There is no narrator.
- Narrated: one narrator reads the story as prose, with a choice of voices, including voices that run on your own device.
Seed, sprout and tree
Every story is a file you can keep and share.
- Seed: a world before anyone plays it: its characters, plot threads and opening scene.
- Sprout: a story in progress, with every turn so far and the state of the world right now. Send it to a friend and they play on from where you stopped, toward their own ending.
- Tree: a finished story, sealed for good: every turn, the ending you reached and the world you left behind. Share it, or grow a sequel that remembers all of it.
Your stories are saved on our servers, so you can pick one up on any device. You can also download a story’s narration as audio files and listen anywhere, outside the app.
Making a world
Tap Create to grow a new seed. Answer some questions about your world in plain words and Tohil builds it. Write every detail yourself in the seed editor for a world made exactly your way, or import a seed file someone else made.
The world
- Name: the title of your story, shown at the top of its card. The Last Lighthouse, Ashfall.
- Tagline: a short, catchy line, like the one on a movie poster. Keep it under about 15 words.
- Description: one or two sentences on what the story is about. Think: “This is a story about ___.”
- Genre and sub-genre: the shelf it sits on, then a more exact flavour. Science Fiction → Cyberpunk.
- Tone: the mood of the writing, in a few words. Dark and grounded, Warm and whimsical.
- Setting: where and when the story takes place, in a sentence or two.
- Language: the language the story is written and voiced in: English or Mexican Spanish.
Characters
- Role: protagonist (the hero you play, only one), ally, neutral or antagonist.
- Health: three hearts for someone who can be hurt and killed, or none for a storm, a god or an unkillable force.
- Age, gender and species: they help the narrator write the character believably.
- Minor: turn this on for a character who is 13 or younger. It switches on extra protections: minors are kept out of graphic violence and are never sexualized.
- Traits and description: a line on their personality, and a longer note on who they are.
- Inventory: what they carry when the story begins, each item with a name, a kind, a count and a short note. Items can hold other items, two layers deep.
- Skills: what they are good at, as short cues, not numbers. Lockpicking: opens most ordinary locks given a minute.
- Inner voice and dialogue style: how they think, and how they sound when they talk.
- Voice (full cast): how their voice sounds, so the cast can give them one and keep it.
The narration
- Point of view: second person (“You step into the rain.”), first person (“I step…”) or third person (“She steps…”).
- Style: how the writing should sound, like you’d describe a film’s look.
- Rules: up to 8 short laws the story never breaks. Magic always has a visible cost.
- Desired ending: the ending you’d like the story to build toward. The narrator aims for it, but your choices still decide.
Plot threads and the opening
- Plot threads: storylines for the narrator to weave in, each with a tension from 1 (a quiet hum) to 10 (a ticking bomb). Higher tension presses harder, and resolves faster if ignored.
- Succession order: who you become if your lead falls, in order.
- Opening: where the first scene happens, the weather and the time, each as an icon and a few words, and the hook: the spark that starts turn 1. Make something happen, so there is a choice to make right away.
Content and safety
Dark fiction is welcome: horror, violence and mature themes. By default the engine protects anyone who is, or appears to be, 13 or younger: it keeps them out of violence and won’t let them die on the page. A serious story can opt into specific mature territory with its content switches. Sexual content involving minors is always forbidden: it is blocked when a seed is checked and again during play, and no switch can turn it on.