The first set of AI-driven NPCs is up and ready to chat: https://babblebaz.com/npc-ai. They live in Tharendell, the fantasy world I’m building in public—and you’re invited to help. After you finish poking around the random musings of Babble Baz, take a leap into Tharendell. If inspiration strikes, you can submit a new location; I’ve added a simple uploader to collect towns, shops, landmarks, and more.
Why your submissions matter: I’m integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) so the NPCs don’t just “act” like locals—they remember like locals. As RAG content rolls in, NPCs will be able to reference real places and details in Tharendell: where to buy armor, which tavern runs hot dice, who’s hiring muscle, or which alley hums with rumors. Right now they’re fully tuned to their personas; the RAG layer is being blended into their system prompts so they gain situational knowledge without losing their voice.
If you’re just here for the story, go play. If you want the build details, read on.
How I built these NPCs (the nerdy bit)
I use a three-stage pipeline to lock in persona and style:
- Seed generation (Qwen 7B Instruct).
I fed the model structured categories and had it generate seed lines—signature sayings, tics, and micro-behaviors. I saved these in a TSV; think of it as the character’s quote-book. - Response synthesis (Qwen 7B Instruct, again).
From those seeds, I asked Qwen to produce full responses in each NPC’s voice—consistent tone, diction, and boundaries (PG-13, in-world, first-person). This becomes the shaped training corpus. - Full fine-tune (Llama 3B Instruct).
I performed a full fine-tune (not LoRA) so the persona sits in-model rather than as a flimsy prompt add-on. I trained ~1.5 epochs with an initial 6e-6 learning rate. Result: the NPCs answer like themselves, not generic fantasy bots.
This is the pipeline behind Kadines, Mindella, and Gor’ash (with many more coming). I’ll publish a fuller write-up soon with dataset structure, prompt templates, and training args for anyone who wants to replicate or riff.
See you in Tharendell—bring ideas, drop a location, and watch the NPCs get smarter as the world fills in.
— Babble Baz