AI at the Vanishing Tower

 I was playing around with AI recently and see if it could fulfill publishing roles for Vanishing Tower Press. Help me get better products out the door faster. I got some great results at the boiler-plate level of product management. Sometimes it helps to have someone tell you what they think you should do. But only if the source has valuable information. Hence AI as a new way to aggregate useful information in ways you can then use in creative ways.

Couple of things I have used it for over the last couple of days: 

Space Acid; my space opera retro-clone had serious mechanical issues which plagued the overall use of the book. Considering the source material, no surprise. I had AI review the manuscript and rationalize the mechanics. I asked it to attack the text as a copy editor and playtester would. Gave some good suggestions on how to accomplish this. Gave me enough enthusiasm to start rewriting the impacted sections. Having some sense of how to get out of the box I was writing myself into. Asking what kind of vibe it gets from reading the text can give me decent enough feedback to see if I am getting my idea across in a coherent matter. Asking it to expose weakness in the text the software handles with ease as well as any editor would that you paid. And have the edits back in your hands in a minute, I'm re-writing drafts in real time with some professional critique.

A road map, a refresher course on how a publishing house, no matter how small an ameature and hacky, can go about and make the best product they can. It produced this for me in seconds. I'll attach it here through a link if you care to review it. I'm not saying the output has tremendouse value, but getting even this level of detail out of myself would be hours and hours of work. Which wouldn't make any sense. Because the results I got have me doing what I expected. Hours and hours of editing, and writing, and designing on the publishing software. Which is where I need to be spending my time if I am going to get anything done. 

The other task I have it going into is formatting tables so I don't have to build each one in my layout document. This always takes me a long time manually, constructing the table styles, paragraph styles, and character styles. I've got some more learning to do, but I think I can get AI to do these tasks for me within the actual program. Formating press releases and customer email corrispondance, these will be intersting to see how these can be intergrated. 

Not to try and grow the business in any grandstanding way. This project is spurred on by a desire to understand what is going on around me in the tech world. That is what VTP is all about. Interacting with the world through a creative hobby. One that has real people interaction at the core. 

Any tool which gets me in the chair to actually write, I get exited about that. 

Another challange I want to throw at it is editing audio from recorded game sessions for snappy playback. Doing that with my audio software suite is hours of work. I am over it. But I want that tight audio damn it. If it can skin a session as good as did then I could get more episodes up on a regular schedule on the podcast. When I could put months of play in easy to listen to back to back episodes there are people who enjoyed that. And I enjoyed the infrequent feedback. Makes it all the more fun.  

New Company Logo

Vanishing Tower Press has a new publishers logo. Actually, I have two to choose from. I am at a loss which one is better? Here, take a look and tell me what you think.

Different System, Different Genres, Same Game?

Running different games with different groups of players has allowed me to “self-populate” these same game worlds with ongoing, behind the scenes world building which may be the holy grail of what I am after with TTRPG’s. World building by borrowing elements from other campaign games I have or am currently running. For example, in my Blood of Heroes bronze age comics game PCs encountered “Trans-Arcana Radiation”. In my Traveller games PCs can uncover disturbances in the “G Band” which will lead to “secrets of the ancients”. If any of these characters have a chance to compare analysis, they are the same thing. So what are the wizards wielding in Rom’Myr. Some might call it magic, but at the scientific level it is the same. G Band disturbance, physics-defying radiation, pure Vancian magic… its all Trans-Arcana Radiation in these wildly different games.

Once I started tinkering with this idea it was only a short jump to keep PC events and encounters in play from other games. My next Traveller game will have built in the fallout from previous groups’ play. Since those previous groups were poking around in the “Secrets of the Ancients”, I now have built-in ramifications which can occur in the background of any new group’s actions and inclinations. Cosmic-scale occurrences and planet-shattering events are daily occurrences in your average comic book stories. The phenomena and powers encountered in my supers campaign give a bridge to walk over into my fantasy campaign, without even getting lost!

 

The Faceless Howl Kabuki Kaiser 2

Well the whole damn thing worked out. Here is how. Go with the crazy. And be willing to convert on the fly without much agonizing whether you got it right or not. Conversion you say? Yes, while I used the adventure material to run the session, we are also playing my game Deluxe USR Sword & Sorcery DUSRSS), which is much different than the traditional d20, 6 attributes and a class type game systems. But you need to be good at this if you ae going to use any outside adventure material from other games. Which will be everything if you are playing DUSRSS. 

The Howl is another great example of quality adventure content available for peanuts from independent creators these days. As a Crypt Keeper, I know I do not need another version of the rule book. I need nightmare fuel to feed the campaign beast. Adding outside material is an essential part of my job at the table. The trouble is where do you find great stuff in a landscape of AI trash and poorly thought out ideas which made it to print? If you are playing Old-school DnD I recommend Bryce Lynche's adventure review blog Ten Foot Pole. He has you covered with curated lists of some really dope stuff.

Howl gives the right amount of intriguing detail and evocative writing so the DM can convey the feel of the place quickly and adroitly. There are factions in the village which further define the environment, opening up multiple avenues of play. This is one of the features of the good stuff available these days. Creators understand the importance of factions being played out in a living game world. In fact, factions make a campaign setting so much more then geography and scale. And you can run the adventure adequately at the table with the book in hand. But not recommended. 

Read the entire adventure before you decide how to use it, how it will fit into the game world if called. The nuance and hooks written inside the adventure will allow you to find the adventure's rightful place in your pantcampaign. But you are going to want to meditate and let the pieces jell. I didn't give myself that opportunity. I used the adventure with only preliminary reading of the content. This situation and site location offer many possibilites in any fantasy setting.

So I read hard and fast and we ended up with a nice nagical trip into the shadow world for a game session which would have been otherwise cancelled. What emerged was an adventure I used on the fly and found it easy enough to parse so I could make it "fit" into the current game and enough cool stuff going on (think factions) that even if the plot of the module was not the plot of my players I could use the adventure premise as a whole and shave where needed. I found the adventure intriguing. If you are looking for PCs to come across a town with problems, this adventure is a good pick.