Well… We’re Doing It Again.

It has been a while.

Quite a while, actually.

Back in 2020, we wrote on this website about experimenting with an RPG. Six years later, apparently we still haven’t learned our lesson.

So we’re doing it again.

This time we’re experimenting with AERIS RPG, a small project built around a simple question:

Can a local AI actually behave like a Dungeon Master?

Not just generate fantasy text, but improvise, react to the player, remember what happened and somehow keep an adventure coherent while the player does everything the DM wasn’t expecting.

We’re building and testing it on very ordinary hardware — an old i7-8700, 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 2070 with 8 GB of VRAM.

In other words, definitely not an AI workstation.

And that’s part of the experiment.

There are plenty of impressive things being done with expensive GPUs and enormous models. We’re more interested in discovering what someone with an ageing gaming PC, some free software and an unreasonable amount of curiosity can do with this technology.

So far?

More than we expected.

We’ll occasionally post our experiments here: AI Dungeon Master problems, local LLMs, generated characters and scenes, things that unexpectedly worked and, almost certainly, things that spectacularly didn’t.

No promises. No roadmap. No revolutionary AI claims.

Just two amateurs, one increasingly worried RTX 2070, and an RPG experiment.

MacPowerDev is alive again.

Sort of.