The heart of my portfolio, the place where I show off my AI tinkering, tuning, and world-building, is the land of Tharendell. For anyone just tuning in: during my first semester of grad school, I took a course called Computational Symbolic Linguistics. Our final project required creating something with Natural Language Processing, and being a kid of the ’80s who grew up on D&D, naturally I set out to build an autonomous, AI-powered Dungeon Master.
I started small, LoRA tuning on a tiny Phi-2 model, but the results were… let’s say “enthusiastically unhinged.” The model kept hallucinating or rambling about cell phones in London instead of goblins and kobolds. After a deep dive into model behavior and training, I realized the answer wasn’t to hunt for the perfect dataset. I needed to create my own.
Using the Qwen 2.5-7B Instruct model, I wrote a Python routine that generates seeds from a character profile. Once I had about 300 seeds, I used Qwen again to generate responses to each of them. With around 3,600 high-quality training pairs, I moved on to full fine-tuning a Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct model… and that’s how each NPC (Non-Playable Character) of Tharendell is born.
But an autonomous Dungeon Master needs more than characters, it needs a world. My first version of Tharendell… well, it looked a bit like a late-1990s fantasy fan site. Nostalgic? Yes. AI-worthy? Not quite. So over the past few weeks I’ve been leveling up my PHP and CSS skills to build a custom WordPress theme that actually does Tharendell justice.
Between the new theme and a fresh batch of art generated using Flux, I’m thrilled to say that the new Tharendell site is now live. Check it out: Tharendell.com
Next up: polishing DM-42 (the Dungeon Master), wiring NPC chat directly into the Tharendell site, and then integrating a full RAG memory system so NPCs gain awareness of their world, history, and relationships.
If everything goes according to plan, the Stormforge Battle Engine will be running before the end of the year, and I’m aiming for alpha testing in early 2026.
The times are changing.
Keep your swords sharp,
Babble Baz