Press Kit - The Ghost and the Golem
Brief Bio
Benjamin Rosenbaum's stories have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards, translated into 25 languages, and adapted as a SXSW Best Animated Short and a Sick Flick Chicks Best Sci Fi Film. He lives near Basel, Switzerland. His Jewish historical fantasy tabletop roleplaying game, Dream Apart, co-published with Avery Alder's Dream Askew, was nominated for three Ennie Awards (Best Game, Best Setting, and Product of the Year) and launched the Belonging Outside Belonging family of roleplaying games. He lives near Basel, Switzerland with his family. For the last fifteen years, he's served on the board of Basel's liberal synagogue, Migwan.
About The Ghost and the Golem
The Ghost and the Golem is a 450,000-word Jewish historical fantasy interactive novel from Choice of Games: a powerful literary adventure story full of mysticism, magic, humor, and pathos, set amidst the pogroms of 1881 in the Russian Empire.
"An endless labyrinth of cursed amulets, haunted caves, traveling bards, cruel armies, Jewish mysticism, and good old-fashioned mischief—I’m obsessed with this gorgeous novel in the form of a game. The Ghost and the Golem is a Goosebumps choose-your-own-adventure for adults and on steroids. Seriously, play it—this is storytelling as you’ve never seen it before..." - GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot
Find the game at choiceofgames.com or on Steam.
Game Pitch
Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, peasants, bandits, anarchists, and demons!
The Ghost and the Golem is an interactive historical fantasy novel by Benjamin Rosenbaum. It's entirely text-based, 450,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
The year is 1881. Life in your village on the border of Poland and Ukraine is sweet as raisin pastries and bitter as horseradish. Matchmakers arrange marriages and klezmer musicians play at the weddings; friends reconcile after feuds and gossip about their neighbors; people pray in the little synagogue and study holy texts. But it is a tense time in the Russian empire, with antisemitic riots spreading across the land.
And inside your pocket is a magic amulet, revealing visions of the future, omens of your village in flames. When you hold it, you can see the blood and the bodies, smell the gunshots, and hear the marching songs. (Is that Russian? Or Ukrainian? You hear shouting in Polish.)
How could this future come to pass, and how will you stop it?
You'll need allies. Can you sway the local Christian peasants or the Czarist garrison to protect your village from harm? What about the bandits and anarchists lurking in the wild forest? When a demonic sheyd offers you a bargain, what will you do to save the ones you love?
Or, there may be another answer. One of your closest friends has built a golem, a hulking clay creature stronger than a dozen soldiers, waiting to be animated with a forbidden power, a secret name. Will you breathe life into the golem? If you do, will it help to defend your village, or help to destroy it?
Or perhaps the amulet's previous owner can help you. He was exiled from the academy for studying forbidden texts—for delving into mysteries he was far too young and unstable to understand, and now he's missing. Can you find him? Can you harness the powers he unleashed? Does he know a secret name?
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; intersex or not; gay, straight, bi, or asexual.
• Accept an arranged marriage and make your Mamma happy—and maybe yourself, too! Or find love on your own terms with a childhood friend or an anarchist musician.
• Delve into the secrets of the Unseen World to tangle with ghosts, dybbuks, prophetic visions, and a golem—or even ascend to a mystical plane to discover the greatest secrets of the universe!
• Hold fast to the traditions of your people’s past, or chase modern new ideas.
• Pursue your love of music and get a standing ovation onstage—or be pelted with potatoes as you fail miserably.
• Stand up to antisemitic agitators, angry peasants, Czarist soldiers, and hostile bandits to defend your village—or face defeat and flee in the wake of violence.
• Succumb to demonic influence, fend it off with faith or Enlightenment skepticism, or help those spirits find their path to the gates of repentance.
Can you find peace for your people—and your heart?
Sample Interview Topics and Questions
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Playing with Serious History
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Gender and Queerness: Reconciling Queer Agency and Joy with Historical Accuracy
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Interactivity, Agency, and Choice
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Yiddishkeit, Translation, and Cultural and Linguistic Accessibility
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Protagonist as Possibility: Making Meaning Across Multiple Possible Narratives
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Sources, Influences, and Antecedents: The Shadow of Yiddish Literature
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History, Hope, and the Limits of Agency
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Balancing Humor and Tragedy
Sample Topics
Sample Questions
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Judaism often figures prominently in your writing, from your Jewish historical fantasy tabletop roleplaying game Dream Apart to the Hugo-nominated "Biographical Notes..." How was this project similar and different?
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The very first scene has us encounter a dairyman named Tevye, and further allusions and references to Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I. L. Peretz, among others, abound. How did you integrate this legacy of Yiddish literature into a modern computer game written (mostly) in English?
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Players can choose to make their protagonist trans, nonbinary, and/or intersex, and to demonstrate a variety of what we today would call sexual orientations. How did you align this with the generally realistic historical nineteenth century setting? How did you avoid either anachronism, or tropes of queer despair?
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The game takes place during a the first terrible outbreak of the antisemitic riots that plagued the late Russian Empire, which directly threaten the protagonist's world. That's a heavy topic. Yet it's a game, and games are meant to be fun; not to mention a fantasy, and one full of jokes. How do you reconcile humor, play, and magic with very real history full of oppression and misery? How do you avoid either trivializing the pain of the past, or inflicting it on players in a way that makes play uncomfortable or un-fun?
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Your most recent work, The Unraveling, is a wild far-future kaleidoscope featuring invented genders, multiple bodies, and a troubled utopia. It seems like quite a jump from there to the shtetl. Are there common themes that you're exploring?