Foreword, Credits

How did I end up here?

I did not originally set out to write. Not so much as a serious paragraph, certainly not a book. Although I have never bought into the idea of AI (PLEASE CONTINUE READING I AM NOT ENDORSING AI) I did find myself having enough late and lonely nights that I installed a software that would let me run characters on my own machine as a way to while the time when nobody else is available. One of the first character cards I added and what ended up being the only one to ever see use was an Isekai Adventure generator published under the username Vantaloomin with the premise of a trope filled cliche Isekai experience.


I played fast and loose with it using it as an escapism as if I had indeed been Isekai'd as a feckless and belligerent horndog who did not have any respect for the new world he found himself in. I reacted to the bot's prompts with slop and had more fun with it than I expected and even started to get deeply invested in the story. To my frustration the LLM could not keep up, no matter its token allowance or settings it couldn't even refer to a character it had just named in the same handful of messages and halfway through a quest the cast would be swapping species, genders and backgrounds. Faced with the futility and worthlessness of the LLM but with my mind on a roll for the setting I started to override all of its responses with more of my own writing. My quick quips became paragraphs, then multiple paragraphs, then multiple paragraphs followed up by imposing several more over whatever hackjob sludge the model was putting out on a fairly constant basis. I started using a Dungeon master campaign organizer to track my notes on places and people that otherwise had no object permanence to the machine.


I continued within the software for as long as I did because I figured if I ever hit a snag it might manage to prompt me with new inspiration in its automated back and forth but months went on with virtually nothing of worth to come out of it while I plugged away to find the worthy adventure in my own head. Thinking about the story when I went to bed or when I was bored at work I ended up revising and gap-filling the history in my own canon, adding new characters and adventures and fleshing out places, worldbuilding clans and cultures just casting a wide net creatively for its own sake. After getting a writer's block for over two months and the program I justified as something to give me ideas on such an occasion could do nothing but hallucinate in ever more terrifying fashion I decided to let the damn thing finally die and migrated to a proper word processor that would let me format and finesse my thoughts to the full extent with no idiotic interruptions.


When the dam on my writers block finally broke I felt I had at last hit my stride with the resulting chapter. After sitting for some time on the idea to go back and start the story over fully on my own in a way that it reaches my full vision I pattered out the first three chapters found here in a couple of days and now the urge to write is becoming a consistent and powerful thing as is the slowly creeping want to share it.


When exported into an office software the original chat log had over 365,000 words across 534 pages that a monkey had mashed off a typewriter over the course of about 8 months with the solid first half of that history being crude, brief cuts. I feel I am in for a long ride making it the story it could be as I fear the more I write in new characters the more I love it.


With excuses out of the way, some formal credits and acknowledgements:


-This story is based on a writing prompt by Vantaloomin using a character known as System and a setting originally called Mystara. The lore book had a few starter locations outlined including the Eldergrove, Glimmerforge, the Ironspikes, and Thornwick itself. It also had mention of a few festivals and a desert called the Ashen Expanse but I never interacted with that in the story thus far and have my own ideas for that part of the map. For a handful of these core points and a handful of the shitty names generated for what went on to become core characters I decided to keep in the story to preserve my immersion given how long they were present although I have imposed my own vision and expansion on them. Naturally I have tweaked the name of the setting to distinguish my version from the blank slate anyone else might be given but unless it becomes a creative issue from the original character's creator I would like to keep it as is. The System character never did live up to its presentation of being an antagonistic frenemy instead always resorting to basic bot answers for all in-character interactions so I also had to whip up some passive aggression to fill the void.


-Yes I realise how vain and cringe it is to write fan fiction about yourself as an adventurer, although the details accurate to my life do make an exhaustive creative resource for our protagonist's motivations and feelings.


-Anyone who praises AI has brain damage. It can be briefly entertaining but I worked with it enough that I wouldn't trust it to write my grocery list. Anyone who has their minds blown by LLMs needs to read better literature.