The Red Ettin
From the novel by Freya Magnúsdóttir
The game we see here
Twelve contestants sit in a round red room in a Highland castle. The host's chair turns and stops at you. Answer wrong and the game takes something you didn't bet: your map, your sprint, the names above your friends' heads. Lose everything and you turn to stone. Between rounds the castle rearranges itself. The way out is to stop playing, with help from a dog, a fox and an oatcake.
Why this world
Recent horror hits on the platforms we build for share a signature monster, short co-op runs and scares worth clipping. This novel turns an old Scottish fairy tale into rules a game can use: every answer feeds the host, a wrong answer costs a different memory than the one asked about, players who lose everything become statues their friends can restore with crumbs of a mother's oatcake, and the castle's corridors change between rounds. Its boss is a charming host who becomes three hungry mouths.
The book · Fantasy & Mythology
Three gold envelopes arrive on the same morning. A reclusive billionaire has invited twelve strangers to a once-in-a-lifetime television event at Duncraith Castle: one weekend, one ring of red-lit chairs, ten million pounds. The questions will be personal. The wrong answers will cost more than money.
Fern Moray is the youngest of three siblings — a carer for her dying mother in Inverness, with no career and no plans. Her brothers have reasons to go: Rowan is a London lawyer drowning in debt, Calder an ex-Marine still hunting a mission. Fern has only her mother's warning, a bannock wrapped in wax cloth, and a scruffy terrier who refuses to cross the threshold of the Red Room.
The castle is a stitched thing — medieval stone, satellite dishes, corridors that rearrange themselves at night. The host, Alastair Ettin, knows too much, too quickly. After the first round, Fern understands what her mother had tried to tell her: the host is not testing knowledge, and the prize was never the point. The cameras have always been watching. The questions are designed to make the answering feel like a choice.
Drawing on the Scottish folktale of the three-headed Red Ettin, Freya Magnúsdóttir's novel is a study of consent, debt, and what is left of a person when memory is taken piece by piece — and whether the ones who love you can be fetched home from a place that eats them in plain sight.
Games set in this world
Game adaptation is considered per title when the world-building can support it. Pitching is the first step; it is not a licence. See rights at Greenlight Publishing.