AERIS RPG
Can a local AI actually behave like a Dungeon Master?
We’re building one to find out.
WHAT IS AERIS?
AERIS RPG is an experimental role-playing game built around a simple idea: instead of giving an AI a finished adventure to narrate, let it behave more like a Dungeon Master.
The world isn’t supposed to wait for the player on a predefined path. The AI improvises, remembers what happened and lets previous decisions shape what can happen next.
The complexity should be in the DM, not in the rules.
That’s the principle behind the whole experiment.
A WORLD THAT REMEMBERS
If you cut a trap, the trap should stay cut. If you give your dagger to a companion, you shouldn’t magically have it again two minutes later. If something apparently insignificant becomes important because of what the player does, the world should remember that too.
AERIS tries to preserve those consequences while still giving the Dungeon Master enough freedom to improvise.
The goal isn’t to generate an infinite amount of random fantasy content. It’s to make the adventure feel as though somebody on the other side of the table is paying attention.
AI IMPROVISES. CODE KEEPS IT HONEST.
AERIS uses a hybrid approach.
The AI
Acts as the Dungeon Master: describing the world, improvising situations, interpreting actions and developing characters and story threads.
The Code
Keeps track of the things that shouldn’t depend on improvisation: character state, inventory, positions, dice rolls, rules and persistent facts.
Or, put another way: the AI gets to be creative. Python gets to be suspicious.
MEET THE PARTY
Aric
A knight, and currently the player’s window into the world. Sword, leather armour, dagger and a remarkable talent for investigating things that would probably be safer left alone.
Mira
An elven scout and archer. More importantly, a companion who should behave like an actual participant in the adventure rather than decorative furniture following the player around.
Dawn
Aric’s mare. She has already caused enough state-management problems to earn her place in the cast.
BUILT LOCALLY
No giant server farm is hiding behind AERIS. The experiment runs locally on an aging gaming PC with an Intel i7-8700, 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 2070 with 8 GB of VRAM.
Local language models handle the Dungeon Master, Python holds the game together, and locally generated images occasionally attempt to illustrate what happened.
It is definitely not an AI workstation. Nobody has told it.
CURRENT STATUS
AERIS is very much an experiment in progress. Right now we’re working on memory, persistent world state, companions, skill checks, inventory, narrative consistency and all the interesting ways a small local language model can misunderstand perfectly reasonable instructions.
Sometimes it behaves remarkably like a Dungeon Master.
Sometimes it needs to be reminded that you already got off the horse.
That’s why we’re building it.
🏠 Generated locally · RTX 2070 8GB
