The Purple Scale [AI Text Adventures part 9]

This article is part of a series about playing text adventures with AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but may include examples of clearly identifiable AI-generated text and imagery.

One of ChatGPT’s suggestions for countering context loss was to use a dedicated AI adventure website or app, such as Perchance AI-RPG here. Examples on the landing page imply that this generator understands the intention to play an adventure game, so the prompt can just be a description of the scenario. Here’s my prompt - I'm quite proud of this one:

+ The vampires were driven back behind a wall of fire and a new London was built on the ruins of the old. Now every night the Outer Circle maintains the fire boundary, the Inner Circle hunts for vampires who have breached it, and the Londoners drink in taverns and make the most of their neo-medieval lives. It's your first day as an Inner Circle rookie and there's a body to investigate.

AI-RPG isn’t related to ChatGPT. It uses Llama as it’s main AI processor, and information is held locally on the user’s device rather than being kept in an account.

Here’s the opening paragraph of the game:

You are staring at a puddle of spilled ale and a very dead man when Sergeant Thorne tells you to stop smelling the air. He doesn't look at you, his eyes fixed instead on the jagged puncture marks in the victim's neck that are too wide to be from a stray dog. Around you, the cobblestones of the Lower Ward are still slick from the evening rain, and just a few streets over, the roar of the boundary fires casts a flickering, orange haze over the neo-gothic spires of the city. Thorne sighs, his voice a gravelly rasp as he gestures toward the corpse. "Don't get any ideas about being a hero today, rookie; just tell me if you see any slime on the bricks before the crowd gets too thick to push back."

I want games to surprise me. AI-RPG surprised me by taking my fairly obvious vampire theme and giving me a game with no vampires. Instead the trail from the body led Thorne and myself into combat with a slimy creature called a Gutter-Born, and then to conspiracy after conspiracy – a “puppeteer” controlling the Gutter-Born, a resurgent secret order, cover-ups in the Outer Circle and the High Council, and noble families abducting citizens to make vampire-human hybrids.

The game was action heavy with frequent combat – lots of sword-swinging and staking. Adventures included saving people from a Gutter-Born nest, destroying laboratories, blackmailing one of the noble families and persuading an underground newspaper editor to warn the people. We encountered NPCs including a “mapper” called Elara and the underground printer, Elias. Do all AI engines use the same, short list of fantasy names?

AI-RPG also has the option to generate images from the game – two examples are included here. It’s an older generator, so maybe don’t look too closely at the hands.

There was still drift and context loss. AI-RPG does have some tricks up its sleeve. It automatically adds plot summaries into the transcript every few pages which I think helps to keep the main plot, characters and general tone consistent for much longer. 

There's also a built-in Information Tracker, which I didn't use this time - you can type information into this yourself, including inventory, characters, locations, mission objectives or anything you think the game should be tracking. You can update it manually as you go, or you can click for an AI update at intervals, although this comes with an inaccuracy warning.

I enjoyed this game for a long time – as with the Aurelian Empire and Neon Meridian games there was a good sense of exploring a real world and hunting for clues. I also had the sense that, if I carried on playing, I would continue uncovering conspiracies but would never actually defeat the big bad.

AI-RPG missed my suggestion of basing the story on a ruined London, or perhaps there isn’t enough about London in Llama’s knowledge base. I might come back to this theme and run a version of this prompt in a ChatGPT Project to see if it can create locations based on actual London iconic sights – and whether any vampires show up this time. I'm also keen to try more adventures on AI-RPG and to make more use of the Information Tracker.