A story file for the Holy Land Game Engine contains all of the information the engine needs to allow the player to navigate the story. This file is typed by the story's creator, but since it must be parsed by the game engine, it must be strongly formatted.

The beginning of a location is indicated with '@'. The word immediately following the '@' is the location's name. The end of a location is marked with a '[q' tag. Everything in between '@' and '[q' will be assigned to the same location. Location names must be one word, as they are read by fscanf as %s.

The body text of a location is indicated with [b <text>] where <text> is any text within the maximum length. Maximum values can be found in the Holy_Land.h header file.

Options are indicated by [><target> <description>] where <target> is the name of the location to go to, and the <description> is any text.

Effects are indicated by [^<keyword> <value>], where <keyword> is the keyword to be incremented by the integer <value>.

Conditional Redirects are indicated by [? <target> <keyword> <value>], where the player will be redirected to the location named <target> if the value associated with <keyword> is greater than or equal to <value>.