Aura_Storyteller_and_Chat

Aura Storyteller and Chat

How the 0.9 storyteller engine behaves in play. Everything on this page is dormant unless a RimSynapse storyteller (Aura) is selected — under Cassandra, Phoebe or Randy the vanilla storyteller runs completely unchanged.

LLM-driven incident selection

When Aura is your storyteller, the AI chooses which incident fires — not when. Timing stays on the game's own deterministic schedule (the same cadence math vanilla uses), so the pace of your game does not depend on an AI being fast or slow. When a story beat is due, Aura looks at the incidents that could legitimately fire right now and picks the one that fits the colony's story best.

• Only incidents the game itself says are eligible can ever be chosen — Aura cannot conjure an impossible event.
• Choices respect the difficulty ceiling: a peaceful-difficulty colony cannot be carpet-bombed because the model felt dramatic.
• If your LLM backend is offline, slow, or out of budget, that beat falls back to the normal vanilla weighted roll. The colony is always fully playable without a working backend.
• Decisions land through the game's incident queue, which re-checks validity when the moment arrives — a decision that stopped making sense is dropped, never forced.

Difficulty as Aura's mood

Aura reads your difficulty settings — including a custom threat-scale slider — and treats them as her stance, from bored (peaceful) through engaged (standard) to gleeful (cranked). Difficulty is never overridden; it is a hard budget her choices must fit inside.

Chatting with the storyteller

A speech-bubble toggle appears in the bottom-right play settings row when Aura is active. It opens a floating, draggable chat window where you can talk to her directly; she answers in character, aware of your colony's situation. With a voice backend configured (OpenAI, ElevenLabs, or local TTS) her replies are also spoken aloud.

• The chat window lives in Core: it works with or without the Conversations mod installed.
• Chat history is saved with your game.

Talking to Aura is not a control panel

The chat and the storyteller are deliberately two separate agents:

• The Chat agent you talk to holds no game-changing tools at all. However persuasively it is talked into misbehaving, the worst it can do is be rude.
• Your messages never trigger storyteller decisions. Aura reads the chat log on her own schedule, reduced to a coarse mood signal — did the player plead for mercy, taunt her, thank her — never your literal words. She may heed it, ignore it, or spite it.

Begging for mercy might help. It might not. That is the point.

The world remembers

Regional events — solar flares, toxic fallout, disease outbreaks, weather extremes — are recorded into a save-backed world history with their outcomes. Unresolved events stay open as threads Aura can call back to later ("the fallout that never quite ended..."). The history is bounded, so long games do not bloat their saves.