The Doom That Came to the Coffee Shop: A Night Office Training Exercise with Multiple Endings

by Mark Teppo

For more than a hundred and fifty years, the Night Office has stayed up late, fighting off all sorts of whistling horrors, shrieking monstrosities, and drooling frog monsters. One of the secrets to their success is lots and lots of coffee.

This Education Assessment Exercise is meant to introduce you to the perils of working for the Night Office. Instead of throwing you into the field, where all kinds of terrible things could happen to you, the Night Office wants to know if you can manage to order a cup of coffee.

Naturally, tentacled face-suckers from another dimension are always lurking nearby, waiting for their chance. Can you survive a seemingly ordinary visit to the coffee shop?

WHAT YOU WILL
• How to quickly assess a group of people, and discern credible threats.
• How to deal with aggressive personalities who might interfere with a Night Office field operation.
• How to think outside the realms of possibility.
• How to decisively order coffee.

126 pages, Paperback

Published January 18, 2021

About the author

Mark Teppo has written more than a dozen novels across a number of genres. He's a book-seller, paper-hoarder, and troublemaker. Not necessarily in that order.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun ‘choose your own adventure’ Lovecraftian Eldritch horror mixed with the SCP Foundation, and a good sense of dark humor style of story. Look forward to checking out the others.

[Randolph King · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a choose-your-own-adventure book, it is a training exercise for the Night Office, an organization that fights otherworldly and extra-dimensional monsters. This is a training exercise. In this exercise, the reader is transported to a coffee shop where they are to identify an existential threat to humanity.

You will die, maybe you will walk away. But can you survive the mission? I found the adventure fun, playing it several times to explore different paths through the book. It can be run through in about 15 minutes to complete most paths. It will still get read from time to time. Now I need to get another book in the series, this is the cheapest and smallest so I anticipate more complex stories.

[John D DeWeese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun choose your own adventure that’s perfect if you like dark humor and Lovecraftian horror.