Towards Twenty Three: Ultraviolet Grasslands and AI Dungeon, Part 3

In a previous post I generated the opening of a story set in Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands RPG setting using AI Dungeon, the neural-network-powered adventure game. After trying to improve the formatting of the World Info that I provided to the AI, using the format created by a user called Zaltys, I decided to continue the story. Here is an edited version, with some parts cleaned up and cut down for brevity. Some names of locations have been changed so the AI can keep them straight. I have italicized my inputs, although sometimes I could not remember what I wrote and what the AI generated. This time I just tried to get the AI to continue the story wherever possible and only prompted it in order to add my character's own agency or to keep things on track (there was some pointless noodling around before the caravan set off). 

"Where is the destination of the caravan?" you ask.

"The town of Twenty-Three, on the way to the Black Portals and the Gloom."

It's an adventure!

You shake his hand. "It's an honor, sir" you tell him. "But what trade goods are we carrying to the Black Portals?" you ask.

The Caravan master laughs. "We're not selling any. We're just transporting a gift to the Black King. He's the one you need to speak to, not me"

You make a mental note of what the Caravan Master tells you and ask "Where will the caravan head to first? The Great Steppe or the High Road?"

"The Great Steppe. It's not too far away from Twenty-Three, and we're likely to find water there. We'll fill the water skins and move on from there."

"How can I help?" you ask, thinking that it would be best to secure yourself a place in the caravan.

The Caravan Master smiles and says "We're just looking for one more person to share the costs and split the profits. It's dangerous out there, but I think you'd do well."

You offer your handshake to the Caravan Master "It would be an honor to join you. I'd be happy to take my share of the risk."

The Caravan Master shakes your hand and nods. "Great! We leave at noon. I'd introduce you to the rest of the crew, but they're all busy making preparations right now. We'll introduce you when we're on our way."

You thank him and take your leave, heading back to your home to pack for the journey.

…

When you reach the caravan the next morning you see that it is packed full of goods, and the crew are all busy loading the last of it. The Caravan Master sees you and smiles. "Perfect! You're here! The rest of the crew is inside getting ready. We leave as soon as they're done loading."

You enter the caravan. It's well-furnished inside. There's a small kitchen with a cauldron for cooking, tables and chairs, even a few bunks for sleeping.

"Impressive operation you are running here," you tell the Caravan Master "How many of us are travelling in the convoy?"

He chuckles. "Convoy? This isn't a military operation, sir. There isn't any need for all that. We're just going to the next town over. Only one of the caravans is leaving today. The other will leave tomorrow or the day after."

You nod, and he shows you to a seat at the table. Soon, the rest of the crew arrives.

There's the Caravan Master, who you've already met. There's the Navigator, a young man who promises to get you to your destination quickly and safely. There's the Doctor, a cheerful fellow who assures you that if you do get sick on the trip, he can provide the best care. There's the Chief, a massive man who is in charge of defending the caravan from raiders and monsters. Finally, there's the Guide, an older fellow with a long white beard who is familiar with the route to your destination.

You introduce yourself, swap jokes with the other Rainbowlanders and shake hands.

You sit down and introduce yourself. The other members of the crew are happy to meet you. They swap a few jokes, tell a few stories, and then the caravan sets off.

You travel West for three days. The land is flat and grassy. You see no people, but you pass several old towns and cities, now just ruins in the grass. The air is warm and humid, filled with birdsong.

You examine your map. You trace your route West from the Violet City. The map indicates that the road continues West for many miles, before turning North and ascending into the mountains. The mountains are high and jagged, and you see a narrow pass that winds through them. This is the route to the Black Portals. You are not going there, however: your destination is Twenty Three, a small community near a lake at the foot of the mountains.

You talk with the Navigator about the route. He traces it on the map for you.

The caravan stops for the night. The crew set up tents, start a fire and begin cooking supper. You're just heating some water to make coffee when you hear a chugging noise over the hiss of the fire.

You all look up. A strange vehicle is coming along the road. It's only the second time you've seen one of these vehicles in your life, but you recognize it immediately. It's a land train, powered by an ancient solar engine. The train runs on a set of metal tracks that disappear into the grasslands to the East. The train is long and flat, with a row of small windows, and a back engine to push it. There's a small platform at the front, and a door to access it.

It chugs toward you. There is no urgency to its movement. It looks almost like an old steam train, except that it is much longer, and the engine is in the back instead of the front.

The caravan crew stares at the strange vehicle as it approaches. You can hear it chugging along for miles. It eventually pulls up alongside the camp.

You walk over to it.

"Hello there," you call to whoever is in the train "We are traders travelling West. Do you have any news from the Ultraviolet Grasslands?"

There is a pause, then the door opens. A figure steps out.

You gasp. It is a woman, with purple skin and four arms. She wears a strange outfit of leather and brass. You've heard rumors of such people, but you've never seen one before. She stares at you in surprise. She's clearly just as shocked to see you.

She talks to you in a language you don't understand. It sounds almost like Red Tongue, spoken by the Redland dwarves. [Edited as the AI referred to contemporary languages]

"I am sorry," you apologize "Do you speak the Violet dialect like myself and my comrades?"

She stares at you, surprised by your fluency. "Who are you?" she asks "What are you doing out here in the middle of the Ultraviolet Grasslands? How did you end up so far from the caravans' usual routes?"

"I am called Aleph," you reply. You explain how your trading caravan is journeying to the town of Twenty Three via the Great Steppe.

"I see," says the woman, "My name is Ravan. I am a... a warrior of the Steppe Nomads."

"What brings you so far from your homeland?" you ask.

"I'm looking for someone," she says simply. She looks at you, as if trying to read your mind. "A child, lost in the wilderness. His name is Ata."

"I am sorry. If I every meet him I will tell him Ravan is looking for him."

She looks at you.

"How do I know you are not lying?"

"You do not," you say. "But I will tell you one thing. I have never lied. Not once in my life."

"Hmm..." she says, thinking about your answer. "I shall have to trust you."

You look at her, surprised.

"Just like that?"

"Just like that," she says, smiling.

"Good luck on your quest," you tell the purple woman as she climbs back into the land train. She waves as the train pulls away from the station.

You turn, and continue your own journey to Twenty Three.

It is nearly dawn and your caravan companions are beginning to break camp and reload the gear into the caravan. The Caravan Master is ready to set off again. You are looking forward to a long day in the saddle, chewing the fat with your friends. "Come on, Aleph," calls out the Caravan Master, "let's ride!"

Twenty minutes later, you are riding through the desert. The land is harsh and inhospitable, but there are signs that people have made this journey before. You pass by a stone obelisk carved with symbols from before times. The obelisk is cracked and weathered with age.

Your mount stops suddenly. "Woah, easy there," you tell the startled beast. The obelisk is strange though.

You descend from your mount and walk over to the obelisk for a closer look. "What do you think these symbols are, Guide?" you ask your travelling companion.

The Guide dismounts from his pack lizard and walks over to the obelisk. He squints at it for a while, then scratches his head. "I'll be damned if I know," he says.

You all scratch your heads in confusion.

He stares at the obelisk in silence. "It's old," he replies, "very old."

You look at him, then back at the crumbling stone pillar. You run your finger along the line of symbols on its surface. What could it mean? You've never seen anything like it.

"We should go back," says the Guide.

You look at your map of the Twenty Three Cities. It is old and faded, and the cities have probably changed names many times since it was written. Still, it is all you have to go on. You trace the line of the trade route from the Violet City to Twenty Three. Your finger stops at each numbered city along the path.

"One... Two... Three..."

Something clicks. There must have been a city here long ago. But it was swallowed by the Ultraviolet Grasslands. Now all that remains is this obelisk. You shake your head and return to the caravan.

"What's that?" asks the Caravan Master.

"It's an obelisk," you reply, "but I don't know what it means."

The Caravan Master frowns.

"How do you know it means anything?" he asks.

You shrug and point to the line of symbols near the bottom.

"I think there was a town here once. That's what my map indicates, anyways," you say to him, slightly melancholy "I guess we had better be going if we want to make it to the Great Steppe before nightfall".

"Very well," says the Caravan Master.

The Caravan Master calls the caravan to depart. The great beasts of burden that carry your supplies begin to lumber forward. You turn to leave, then stop.

You've forgotten something... but what?

The obelisk. The obelisk is important.

You hurry back towards it and find... nothing. It's not there. Nothing is there. Your brow furrows in confusion. You must have imagined it.

Perturbed, you spur your mount back to the rest of the caravan. You try not to think about it during the rest of the journey.

AI-Assisted Apocrypha for the Ultraviolet Grasslands

In the last two posts, I discussed some of my attempts to explore the RPG setting Ultraviolet Grasslands using the GPT-3-powered game and story-writing sandbox AI Dungeon. In a bit of a detour, at the weekend I tried to investigate whether AI Dungeon was any good at remixing and riffing on the fragments of myth and history that the UVG contains. 

'In Lieu of Histories', 'Fragments of a Glossary' and 'Travel Quests' in the UVG sourcebook all contain (contradictory) hints about what has occurred in the world and how it might motivate characters to investigate the many strange sights on the way to the Black City. I had the idea that with a bit of set-up AI Dungeon might be able to mesh these appendixes (which I believe are intentionally fragmentary to prevent the setting from having a definitive canon) into new apocrypha about the world of the UVG.

I put the blurb from pages 6 and 9 into the pinned Memory. Using the Author's Note I asked the AI Dungeon to write in a literary style, within the dying Earth genre. The AI is definitely able to write material from this genre, although it tends towards the gloomy. I don't think that the Author's Note is as flexible a tool as some other users think and I've not had much luck getting it to leaven the gloominess with a dose of upbeat weirdness by suggesting a 'whimsical' writing style. 

I then created a starting prompt using the tables 'Forgotten Times', 'Dimly Remembered Strife', 'Fabled Stories', and 'Oral Histories of the Revolution' on pages 180-1 from the UVG. I plucked out eight entries from these table to emphasise certain aspects of the UVG's myths and secret history. I put several glossary entries in the World Info, so that the AI would be fed information about some of the peoples and places that make up the UVG if they were mentioned.

At first what the AI produced was often a bit flat, so I came up with some starter sentences that it could expand, describing some recent discovery or controversy that might set the wheels of a plot in motion. I reloaded, edited, tweaked and embellished until I got a set of apocrypha that seemed interesting. About halfway through I switched to using a different set of entries from the 'In Lieu of Histories' tables on pages 180-1, to mix up the input the AI was getting. Sometimes (#7, #11) I wrote more of an entry and sometimes the AI did most of the work (#1, #2, #5, #8). When the AI threw out something interesting I tried to work on it and cut away generic filler or nonsense. 

As tradition dictates, I've placed the apocrypha in a D12 table. What the AI produces is remixed from the UVG sourcebook, so credit to Luka Rejec and thanks for his permission to post this. 

D12 Apocryphal Prophecies and Plotlines

1.

According to the prophecy of the Uncreation, only the forces of the Polychrome Orders stand between the human race and extinction.

The Great Mist is a vast field of roiling gas and solidifying plasma that fills the sky, blocking out the sun. It is a side-effect of the Vile Ones' attempt to leave this plane. It is filled with monsters and monstrosities. The mist will one day block out all light and life from the world. The Great Mist has grown and covers more than a fifth of the sky, swallowing the sun and plunging the world into perpetual violet twilight.

The Lightless Void is a theoretical space between universes. It is filled with a substance less structured that even the primal chaos that existed before the Creation. The Lightless Void threatens to expand, consuming this universe in an entropic decay. When the world ends, it will be with a whimper, not a bang.

2.

A great seer has foreseen the death of the world and it draws nigh. The coming of the end times has been transcribed as the Great Lament, which states that a cycle of creation and destruction has played out innumerable times before, and so it shall again: “The first life was spawned by the heat death of a previous universe. That life spawned new universes until it too died. Then that dead life evolved into new forms of life, which did the same, ad infinitum. We are all dead people dreaming that we're alive.”

The Great Lament began as a minor, self-pitying poetry movement before becoming a mass religion of doom. The Lament's hold on the populace’s imagination is strong, and its prophecies are treated with the utmost seriousness by all who dwell on the shores of the Circle Sea. The human population is divided between those that wish to embrace the coming darkness, or stave it off for as long as possible.

3.

Recently discovered information from a crashed voidship’s databank implies that the viles were the first living creatures to gain sentience.

This has led to a heretical new theory that the viles were the last of the living machines created by the Uncreated, sometimes referred to as the Gods. Some say the viles possessed the ability to transfer their minds from body to body, and so survived the cataclysm that destroyed their masters. It is likely that the viles destroyed themselves in a war of mutual annihilation that took thousands of years.

The databank contained a translation of one of the few vile documents that survived to the Half-Broken Age, the original now lost utterly. It is a simple message. It translates roughly to:

“The sun is setting and we have never been more awake.”

4.

According to a popular legend, an angel once scooped up the dying ember of humanity and took it to the far-flung reaches of the world, where she nurtured its spark and lit a rainbow torch that would guide the people to her. Sparks from the blazing brand painted the Rainbowlands in their polychrome hues. The torch was placed at the heart of the Black City, but as its glow dims, reality itself wears thin.

Some say that the angel and fell in love with a demon and bore a daughter, Lilial, who was gifted with the love of all living things. Nursemaids and wine-sodden romantics say she still wanders the wastes, but scholars pay such tales no mind.

5.

Mystics in narcotic trances tell of a demon of lies, who can weave a tale so convincing that it becomes fact. He sits at the end of time, in a hall of mirrors, where the future endlessly fulfils itself in an endless mise-en-abyme. The Demon sows lies in the past to bring about a future in which his lies become truth.

Some philosophers speculate that this is why the descendants of the lings possess gene-memories of a war against the viles that never happened.

6.

An antinomian prophecy, sealed for 509 years, has been revealed. To the disquiet of the Green Inquisition, it states that the truths of the world have been forgotten and must be re-learned. Pilgrims stream to the Black City, anticipating a blissful surrender of memory. Fearing that the revelation will inspire a return to Neo-Infantilism, the Cogflower Church has begun a crusade against 'impious amnesia'. It has dispatched its agents to found a new temple-city deep in the Ultraviolet Grasslands that will staunch the flow of supplicants West.

7.

A bitter debate has emerged among Purple University academicians about whether the so-called "Long Now" is a realistic possibility. According to some para-philologists, the damage caused by the vile-ling conflicts is so severe that humanity may be forced to abandon this world and retreat back to the Source, upon which all reality is based. The Council of Algebraists scoffs that this would be impossible, whilst an Emeritus Professor of Solitonics cautions that this migration has already occurred, many times before.  

8.

A priestess of the Violet Goddess had a vision in the form of a vivid dream. In the dream, the priestess saw a warrior of the Violet Goddess, kneeling over a dying soldier of the Blue Temple. "If only there was some way to save them," the priestess thought. The dead soldier stood up and threw off his azure cloak, and underneath he was not a he at all, but a she. 

The priestess awoke with a start, but the vision stayed with her. She realised that this was no dream, but a prophecy.

9.

Astrologers watching the Fast Stars think they have discovered a message in the signals beamed from above. The message states that the Sky Gods are coming back to claim what is theirs and wipe away the filth that has corrupted it.

Reconstructvist researchers hold that the coming of the Sky Gods is a metaphor for the return of the Far Colony Fleet.

"The oceans ran red with blood, and the mountains crumbled to sand, and the people hid beneath the Earth as the Sky Gods passed judgement."

The return of the Far Colony Fleet is a metaphor for the return of the last survivors.

"And when the Great Flood swept over the world, the righteous huddled in their arks, and were saved from the rising waters."

10.

Many people living in the Violet City and all over the Circle Sea have reported remembering a past life in the era of the Brutalist cultures. Most of these memories are the same: people remember living in a walled city under a mad dictator, with huge siege engines bombarding the city daily. Others remember being a soldier, fighting in brutal close combat against other heavily armoured soldiers. Still others remember living as slaves, labouring to harvest food for their masters or working on massive atomic-powered machines used to defend the city.

Most people who experience these memories dismiss them as dreams or hallucinations, but a few take them very seriously. These people are members of a group known as The Echo, a small but dedicated group who believe in reincarnation.

11.

Some years ago, a Redland dwarf polymath claimed he had conceived of a way to reverse the disaster of Long Ago, insisting it resulted from the unfortunate consequences of a valuable scientific experiment. He was prevented from attempting to repeat the experiment by the ever-vigilant Green Inquisitors, but whether he was truly a radical visionary or merely an astute lunatic is still unknown.

The dwarf's claims were dismissed as lies by the authorities, but they spread among the people as a sort of wish-fulfillment myth. After his censure, he headed out into self-exile in the Ultraviolet Grasslands.

12.

On the steppe, shamans chant hymns to the First Mother, who returned to the world and brought with her the gift of life. They sing to the Second Father, who returned to the world and brought with him the gift of knowledge. As the last light of the sun fades violet on the edge of the world, a shaman turns to you and speaks in a voice that is not her own.

"The Mother has brought me a gift."

You look at her with pity. Her mind is gone.

She speaks again, this time in her own voice: "The Mother has brought me a gift, and Father demands you ascend into the sky to meet with him."

She steps forward and touches your shoulder. The Mother has brought you a gift. Your journey begins at last.

“The sun sets on our time, the sun sets on our time

The colour of his world is grey and black and white.

Long may he drift without a soul

Long may his cities lie in the dust

And a new world break from the bud of the old”