Private alpha architecture under rebuild
A world that does not wait for you.
Ghostlight Dungeon is an AI game master built around a persistent world—not a chat log. Places stay where they are. Characters know what they have learned. Powers pursue their own interests. What happens offscreen can find you later.
Single-player campaigns · Git-synced Obsidian lore Vaults · Fiction-first d20 resolution · Exportable state
Common failure modes
How LLM roleplay goes wrong.
Good prose can hide a broken game. These are seven common failure modes, a concrete example of each, and how Ghostlight is being built to address them.
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Failure mode 01 The world contradicts itself.
ExampleThe road that took a week becomes an afternoon. The inn moves across town. A spell quietly gains a new rule.
How Ghostlight addresses itLocations, rules, and committed events live in durable state, with relevant source evidence retrieved for narration.
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Failure mode 02 Characters know things they were never told.
ExampleA guard recognises the alias you revealed privately to a thief three cities away.
How Ghostlight addresses itEach character acts from a local view built from what they perceived, learned, and remember—not from every fact the model can see.
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Failure mode 03 NPCs cease to exist offscreen.
ExampleYou leave a refugee convoy for a month. When you return, everyone is still waiting in the same camp for your next line.
How Ghostlight addresses itPeople persist beyond the active scene, and background change can be resolved at the level the campaign needs so individuals can leave, adapt, and return.
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Failure mode 04 Player declarations become facts.
Example“I kick down the fortress gate” works because the player said it confidently—not because the character could do it.
How Ghostlight addresses itAn attempted action is separate from its result. Possibility, cost, risk, and resolution are checked before the world changes.
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Failure mode 05 The world rearranges itself around the protagonist.
ExampleA centuries-old order abandons its interests to admire, recruit, or obey the powerful newcomer.
How Ghostlight addresses itCharacters and institutions have their own pressures, authority, and relationships, so they can refuse, bargain, exploit, contain, or resist.
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Failure mode 06 Consequences vanish from context.
ExampleThe broken treaty, wounded captain, and promised favour disappear once the relevant messages fall out of the chat history.
How Ghostlight addresses itEvents and relationship changes are committed to durable state so later scenes can retrieve what still matters.
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Failure mode 07 “Custom world” means another prompt box.
ExampleYou provide a setting guide, but play still runs from a summary and a handful of memory cards. Distant places drift, setting rules soften, and most of the authored world is never consulted.
How Ghostlight addresses itBind the campaign to an actual Markdown lore Vault. Ghostlight retrieves exact source evidence as locations, mechanics, characters, and history become relevant.
The world is not a prompt
Leave the room.
It remains a room.
Most AI roleplaying games reconstruct reality from the conversation every turn. Ghostlight maintains typed world state, retrieves source evidence, and lets the narrator describe what actually survived validation.
Characters have boundaries
They perceive from where they stand, remember what happened to them, and cannot borrow another character’s secrets or expertise.
Your action is an attempt
Impossible claims are refused. Risky actions expose their odds and stakes before a server-side roll. Power has limits, so victory can matter.
The setting has agency
Factions recruit, obstruct, bargain, migrate and prepare according to their own pressures. The world does not collapse into applause when the protagonist arrives.
Background lives can return
Ghostlight simulates crowds and institutions as multiresolution Gestalts, then materialises individuals without erasing who they were. Help a refugee today; meet the same person years later.
Bring the actual setting
Your lore is a Vault.
Not prompt stuffing.
A compatible lore Vault is simply an Obsidian-compatible folder hierarchy of Markdown files. Keep writing in Obsidian, sync the folder through Git, and adventure in the world you actually authored—not a short description that gradually dissolves into generic fantasy.
Plain Markdown
No proprietary lore database. Existing Obsidian Vaults and Markdown knowledge bases retain their hierarchy, links, and Git history.
Evidence at the point of play
The compiler and simulation retrieve exact source witnesses instead of asking one enormous prompt to remember an entire setting.
Canon stays yours
Campaign inventions remain branch-local. Ghostlight records what evidence it used and does not silently rewrite the source Vault.
Built for real world bibles
GameCult's Aetheria and Zyphos lore sites are already Obsidian-compatible. The same simple shape can carry your setting.
THREE FICTIONAL MONTHS LATER · NORTH QUAY
“I wondered if you would recognise me.”
Mira sets a bundle of shipwright’s tools on the table. The refugee column dispersed weeks ago. She did not disappear with it.
Provisional early-access plans
Choose what your world contributes.
Both lanes run the same game. Contributor campaigns reduce their price by permitting the model provider to use submitted campaign context and generated responses for model improvement. Private campaigns never route through that contributor lane.
Contributor
$5/month
Full persistent-world play at the standard simulation resolution.
- 8 active Persona cells
- 1 active lore Vault
- Up to 10 million indexed source tokens
- 2 full Vault imports per month
- Persistent campaigns and away-time
- Campaign export
- Training contribution permitted
Contributor Plus
$10/month
More simultaneous agency for denser scenes and wider conflicts.
- 16 active Persona cells
- 3 active lore Vaults
- Up to 30 million indexed source tokens combined
- 6 full Vault imports per month
- Less Gestalt consolidation
- Training contribution permitted
Private
$15/month
The standard simulation with a provider policy that forbids Contributor routing.
- 8 active Persona cells
- 1 active lore Vault
- Up to 10 million indexed source tokens
- 2 full Vault imports per month
- No training-contributor provider
- Auditable provider receipts
Private Plus
$30/month
Higher world resolution without contributing campaign material for training.
- 16 active Persona cells
- 3 active lore Vaults
- Up to 30 million indexed source tokens combined
- 6 full Vault imports per month
- No training-contributor provider
- Auditable provider receipts
Prices and limits are provisional while we measure the paid alpha. Vault imports are content-addressed and incremental updates will not count as full imports when unchanged documents can retain their index. Contributor consent will be explicit and campaign-bound; a private campaign will never silently fall back to a contributor provider.
Built by GameCult
The dungeon master remembers.
The world has plans.
We are building the private alpha now. Tell us what kind of campaign would make you want to live in this machine for a while.
Request early access