Grimmloch

The creative heart of Grimmloch is human. The lore is ours, written by us and used in our online roleplay community for the better part of seven years. The stories are yours. The 3D world is built from assets we buy from working human artists.

Where we do use AI, the use is narrow and deliberate, and every decision is held to an ethical line with three parts: ethically sourced training data, environmental impact, and protecting your writing from ever being used to train a model.

There are three places a language model appears in the game.

ONBOARDING

People who are new to roleplaying often feel self-conscious about not knowing the lore, or about whether their writing is good enough to join in. The onboarding assistant lets a new player learn the backstory at their own pace and practice their writing without an audience. The lore it teaches from was written by us, not by an AI.

THE INTENT PARSER

Most games handle player action through menus of pre-written responses. The parser reads what you actually wrote, which lets us drop the "choose your response" menus entirely and lets you write your character's own words. In this role the model produces no writing of its own. Its entire job is to understand yours.

NPC VOICES

We use a language model to give an NPC its voice and personality. Every decision the NPC makes is made deterministically by our game systems. The model's only creative output is the roleplay post in which the NPC speaks.

OUR ETHICAL LINE

We work with Mistral for our language model, because we consider them to be an ethical company, and we self-host on Mac hardware which carries roughly one tenth of the environmental impact of running the same model in a data center. It also means that what you write never leaves our environment, and it cannot be used to train anything.

STILL IN DISCUSSION

Two further uses of AI are currently in discussion with the community. Players have asked for both the ability to upload privately commissioned character portraits, as well as to generate character portraits from an ethically sourced AI model. Further, the community has expressed interest in the game generating limited personal songs from their actual role-play that might appear in taverns or played by roaming bards. Once those conversations are complete, and decisions are made, we will update this disclaimer.

World design is ours. Player stories are theirs. AI is the infrastructure connecting the two.