Generating Entities

Unaided generation returns the statistical average. That is not a slur on the model, it is what the model is for — and the average is precisely what makes a world feel like every other world.

So there is a whole guide, The Loom, whose entire job is breaking that pull.

The rule that does most of the work

Never derive one slot from the previous one.

Noble origin → privileged upbringing → fall from grace → seeks redemption. Every step is plausible given the last, and that is exactly the problem: plausibility is a gradient that runs downhill into cliché. By the sixth character you have written the first one again with different hair.

The Loom resolves each slot from a code, not from narrative momentum. The result is people who do not quite add up — which is what real people are like.

Grafting, and how not to plagiarise

Roll a domain. Take a minor figure — never a lead, because leads are the archetypes the model already flattened. Research them properly rather than recalling them. Then take texture only: a mannerism, how they handle being wrong, what they do with their hands when they are lying.

Never take a name, an appearance, a plot role, or the thing they are famous for. Re-clothe the texture in your world's Lexicon and the seam disappears.

Everything gets a present tense

Every generated thing carries existence: what it is doing now, what it would do unobserved, when it last moved, and what it is attached to. A thing born with no present tense and nothing to pull on is a prop with a name on it.

Characters also get a voice — cast from the world's pool, matched on gender and age. Silent casts are how a whole population ends up sounding like one narrator.

Most things should be ordinary

This is the one people fight and it matters. If everything generated turns out to be significant, you have taught the player that touching things is how you find plot — and from then on they are shopping, not living.