The obvious way to make an AI storyteller tell your story is to tell it the story. Give it the premise, the cast, the secrets, the ending, and a list of what not to reveal yet. Then let it narrate.
We drafted it that way for the adventure we are writing now, and review withdrew the draft. The rule that replaced it we treat as law: the storyteller’s persona holds no story.
What the draft got wrong
The first draft of the storyteller’s persona was fourteen fields long, and twelve of them described the book: its devices, its rules, and a list of words the first chapter was not to use because the things they name had not appeared yet. It read well. It was a good description of the book.
It was also a set of instructions to a performer about things the performer must not do yet, and a performer who has been told the ending cannot un-know it. In the best case the storyteller writes around the hole so carefully that the reader feels its shape. In the ordinary case it mentions the thing, politely, in the first chapter, because it was asked to hold it and holding is not something a sentence-by-sentence writer does well. In our experience an instruction to withhold a piece of the story fails beyond very small exceptions. A rule that says “do not use this” is a second author arguing with the first inside the same story, and the reader hears both.
We have written before that one author decides and the storyteller performs. This is that rule applied to the storyteller’s own instructions. A persona that contains the plot is a second author.
The three rules that replaced it
The persona is a storyteller and nothing else. How it sees people. How it builds a scene. How long its sentences run and when it spends a one-line paragraph. What it finds funny and what is never funny. What it trusts the reader with. What it never does. Eighteen short fields, each a tendency and none a quota, because a quota is an order the storyteller obeys at the worst moment. Nothing in it names a person, a place, a device or a rule of the book. The same persona tells the first chapter and the last, and the only thing that changes between them is what it is handed.
The story arrives turn by turn, and only what has been earned. Each turn the game hands the storyteller where the player is and what is true there right now, who is in the room, what the player carries and can do, and what just happened. A secret is written once, together with the deed that earns it, and it reaches the storyteller only after that deed. There is no list of things to avoid, because nothing it must avoid is ever in its hands. The storyteller learns the story as it tells it.
What is not the storyteller’s lives somewhere else. The author’s relationship to each character lives with the character, on a card the storyteller sees only while that person is present: who they are to the player, what they want now, how they talk, and what the author loves and protects in them. The manner of a world’s official voice, if the world has one, lives on that voice’s own card, sent only when it is in the room. And anything that stands on the page, a sign, a ledger line, a label on a crate, a notice on a board, is an object the game holds with exact fields; the storyteller shows them and never changes them, and when the player does something the game applies the change and the object comes back as the source of truth. That is continuity for the storyteller to work from, not a line for it to say.
What it took to make the rules hold
Rules like these fail quietly. A persona can be clean and the story still leaks, because the leak is in the material handed over turn by turn. So the material is reviewed the way the persona is.
Every fact the storyteller can be told has a lifetime: the thing that makes it true, the thing that makes it false, and the place, person or chapter it belongs to. A fact with no lifetime follows the player everywhere for the rest of the game. Every fact has one owner, because two owners contradict each other. Nothing names what has not happened; “no letter has come” puts a letter in the storyteller’s hands. And the list of what is withheld is written down, item by item, and read against every draft.
Independent AI reviewers read each draft, each with one lens, and a person rules on every finding. A script walks every statement against the ledger and assembles what the storyteller would be handed on a set of stated turns. On this adventure an early cut had a hundred and thirty-seven open items, most of them lifetimes and owners. Two cuts later there were none. None of those defects would have been caught by reading the persona, because the persona was already clean.
Why this is the opposite of a weaker storyteller
The fear is that a storyteller told so little will write thinly. The reverse is true, and we saw it on our first adventure: hand the storyteller a name and the fact that a character is present and you get a generic clerk; hand it who she is, what she wants, how she speaks and what she currently thinks of you, and you get a person. The storyteller is not starved. It is handed exactly what this moment needs, richly, and nothing it must pretend not to know.
It also makes the voice tunable. A persona with no story in it can be adjusted by editing a field and rerunning the same scene, and the author can judge the voice without the plot getting in the way. The starting voice for the adventure in development was set that way: three settings turned softer after a side-by-side read, with the rest left for playtesting.
What this does not claim
It does not claim the storyteller invents nothing. It invents every sentence. The story the sentence serves was decided by a person.
It does not claim the method is finished. The rules above are the ones that survived one adventure and the writing of a second, written down so that the authors we work with can use them.
It claims that an AI storyteller is at its best when it knows exactly as much as the reader is about to learn, and that building the story so that this is always true is most of the work.