NextGenBooks.com today announces the release of The Sword of Oz for PC, Wii, DS, PS3 and PSP. Written by best selling fantasy author Darren Reid, The Sword of Oz is an epic fantasy prequel to L. Frank Baum’s masterpiece The Wizard of Oz and explores the Oz’s tragic past.
The Sword of Oz is an interactive ebook which allows readers to choose the course of their adventure. Featuring a multi-branching story, The Sword of Oz merges book and videogame with literally dozens of possible combinations that create a vibrant and vividly imagined world for players to experience.
The Sword of Oz is an epic fantasy adventure which tells a part of Oz’s history that has thus far not been chronicled. Written as a companion piece to the original L. Frank Baum novels, The Sword of Oz chronicles Oz in the days before the wicked witches overthrew the old king of Oz and created the world Baum describes in his original works. Arthur Gale (the future grandfather of a rather famous citizen from Kansas) is the character through which this new chapter in Oz’s history is experienced. The Sword of Oz is a multi-branching adventure in which the reader can choose which adventures they wish to see Arthur embark upon. The different paths through the narrative vary widely but are also closely connected so that events not directly experienced by a reader in one sitting still affect those in the adventure they choose to experience.
Two further episodes are planned in the Dark Witches of Oz trilogy and have been given the working titles The Empire of Oz and The Rise of the Dark Witch of Oz. A novelised version of these stories and the series has been mooted as possibility by Reid in the future. A spin off PC adventure game entitled The Sword of Oz: The Emerald Ring is also in development and when a suitable publishing partners are found further announcements will be made about these upcoming project.
Darren Reid is a Scottish fantasy author whose first novel, The Lord of Darkness and Shadow: The Chronicles of the Shadow Book One, was released at the beginning of 2006. This book was the first in a series of fantasy/science fiction cross over novels that fused fantasy with science fiction, horror and simple human drama. 2006 also saw the first media adaptation of one of Darren’s work with the release of Cell. It was developed by Parsec award winning audio-book creators Variant Frequencies and is currently in negotiations to be turned into a comic book.
The Sword of Oz is out now and is available exclusively at www. NextGenBooks.com and for a limited time is completely free.
