CHESS is a research prototype system aimed at enriching museum visits through personalized interactive storytelling. Aspiring to replace traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with carefully-designed references to the exhibits, CHESS follows a plot-based approach, where the story authors create stories around pre-selected museum themes. In this paper we place the CHESS system within the Interactive Digital Narrative field, describing the main objectives and requirements addressed. We present the system’s architecture and outline its overall functionality. We describe the underlying storytelling model using examples from the stories authored using the CHESS Authoring Tool. Finally, we report key results focusing on the authors’ perspective for the creation of personalized stories.