ShadowRealms AI 0.14: V5 characters by the book and a new trailer

On 15 and 16 October versions 0.11.0 to 0.14.1 came out for ShadowRealms AI, my local AI Storyteller for World of Darkness chronicles. Almost all of it is one thing, Forge v2: V5 character creation the way the books describe it. A new trailer came out with them too, two and a half minutes long, in English and in Greek.

Forge v2 started from the feedback of my friends who play, and we designed it together with two of them.

The rules catalog

The base is a rules catalog for V5. A script builds it from the official books, the same way every time, and it keeps only facts: names, ratings, prerequisites, book and page. No book text goes into the repository. Every entry has a short description in our own words, in English and Greek, and the build checks that none of them has eight words in a row from the book.

Today the catalog knows 24 books: 16 clans, 210 Discipline powers, 109 rituals, 29 ceremonies, 48 formulae, 279 Merits, Backgrounds and Flaws, and 157 loresheets.

The new forge

The forge now follows the corebook’s order: concept, clan and sire, Attributes, Skills, Disciplines, predator type, Advantages, Convictions and Touchstones, and last age and generation. At the Disciplines step you see what each predator type gives before you pick it. The predator type’s Flaws now count as extra, and every character also takes 2 Flaw dots of its own, as the book says (p. 136). Powers, rituals, ceremonies, Merits, Flaws and loresheets are picked from lists, each with its description and page.

For anyone who doesn’t know where to start, there’s Guided mode. You answer scenario questions, one per screen, and get a suggested clan and predator type, with the answers behind it and the Attributes and Skills filled in. Then you carry on in the normal forge, and everything stays editable. The questions are a first set; the real ones are being written by one of my players.

Guided mode suggests Hecata and Grim Reaper · the forge with every power and its page.

Every new V5 character is counted again on the server. A sheet that breaks the rules doesn’t go through, and the app says what’s wrong, in English or Greek. The Storyteller can still approve a sheet outside the rules.

The Storyteller sets the rules

Every chronicle has its own character creation rules: which clans, predator types and ages are allowed, a cap on Flaws, house rules at the top of the forge and, since 0.14.0, which books. The forge and Guided mode offer only what the chronicle allows.

Advantage dots you don’t spend at creation stay on the sheet, and you spend them later with the Storyteller’s approval. A chronicle can let the AI Storyteller approve whatever passes the rule check by itself. That’s done by a fixed check, not the language model, and a person can reverse it. Anything outside the rules always waits for a person.

And three house rulings, where the book is silent or says otherwise: the Caitiff’s Suspect counts toward the 2 Flaw dots, a player can take more than one loresheet at creation, and a player can take an Enemy or Dark Secret of their own, beside the one the predator type gives.

At the table

Reply to a dice card with /ai explain, and the Storyteller explains how that roll was counted, step by step, with the corebook page. The numbers come from the stored roll and are counted again with the dice code, not by the model, and hidden rolls stay hidden.

Every sheet, V5 or Classic Revised, exports to a fillable two-page PDF, in black and white for ordinary printers, Greek included. For V5 a Reference page follows, with everything the character has, each with its book and page.

/ai explain on a bestial failure · the Reference page in the PDF.

The new trailer

It shows all of the above: the creation rules, Guided mode, the new forge, a bestial failure with /ai explain on it, a botch in Classic and the PDF. It was recorded on a demo copy of the app. The Storyteller replies come from Llama-Krikri running locally and the dice are normal server rolls; for the bestial failure and the botch I just kept rolling until they landed. The score is original.

Both videos, in English and in Greek, play on the ShadowRealms AI page. The first trailer is still on GitHub.

How it was made

As with 0.10, I worked with Claude Code: Claude Fable 5.1 for the research in the books, the plans and the reviews, and Claude Opus 5.5 for the building. Each part of Forge v2 was made in its own branch, reviewed, fixed and passed the tests before it went into a release. Every change, one by one, is in the CHANGELOG.