u/Xiaomin4114

Venice used to have Nemotron 3.5 Lightning. it's now no longer in the models list, and API calls for it that used to work now throw 404. I can even see call history for this model in my API billing overview!

Last successful use about 14:00 UTC today, 750 successful calls before that. Gone by 14:30 UTC when tried to use it again, and not seen ever since

Was there an announcement for it that I missed? Is it coming back?

I've been working on a new game mechanic, which I think might be of interest for solo RP. And was wondering if such a system exists already.

It works like this: 52 card deck, split into eight themes:

• Charm: using warmth, soft-touch, or care
• Deception: using tricks, misdirection, or spoofing
• Dominate: using overwhelming force
• Command: using leadership or coordinating with others
• Cunning: using unconventional methods
• Insight: using knowledge or understanding
• Restraint: using patience
• Honor: using integrity and principle

And each card has a power rating as well: 3, 5, 7, 9, 11.

Then there's 6 boost +2, and another 6 boost +4 cards.

Player draws 7 cards to start. And maintains at least 5 cards in their hand. Whenever there is a challenge needed, the GM decides on the challenge rating: 3 for easy, 7 for average, 11 for nearly impossible. Player has to play one card from their hand. The power of the card determines if they succeed, the theme determines how they succeed.

So if challenge rating was 7 (average). And you played a Cunning 9. then you succeed, and you did it with cunning. If that was a social check, then you used cleverness to outsmart your opponent. If it was against an inaminate object, then you used an unconventional bypass.

If you played a low card though, maybe you didn't have another card, or you deliberately want to dump cards you don't want. You fail. something bad happens, you get a consequences or thread. You _tried_ to do it a certain way and it backfired or wasn't good enough.

I've been playing with this system for a bit, and it's really fun. because the randomness comes when you draw the card. But when you actually play the card, you have all of the cards in front of you, and it now becomes tactics: do you play your high power cards (or boosts), to get through, but knowing you won't see/draw that card again until the reshuffle? or do you deliberately fail this check, and get rid of a lower value card that you don't want, and accept the consequences now while it's light, and preserve your good cards for later?

I was inspired by SAGA, and you can probably tell from the 8 themes, but I'm enforcing the theme. The resolution is inspired by Fate, with failures by shift determining severity of outcome (didn't lay out the detail, but the power ratings allow for you to fail with "success at cost", and there's some more details I didn't mention, such as characters having a +2 bonus in some themes, representing their type of character; bonuses that you can accumulate due to environmental or circumstantial factors, e.g. broken hand, -2 to Dominate, etc.)

Wanted to get all your thoughts on this. Good mechanic? bad mechanic? Anything else similar?

Thought I'd add a post since Afgad's invite for posting about writing craft, I just want to shoutout our favourite AI slopism: contrastive reframing: "it's not X, it's Y".

This is normally a rhetorical device used by public speakers, to deliberately present contrast between the point they're trying to argue, and some contrasting alternative. That's cool and everything, but using it too much at times when the writing isn't trying to convince the reader of something makes it...slop.

You might think "why do you need to convince me so hard, i have an open mind and I'm just trying to hear about what this character is doing, you don't need to tell me what it isn't, just tell me what it is".

My understanding is the reason AI keeps producing this, despite how naff it is in fiction, is possibly the fault of the training data, and the humans who let it in there. It can't possibly because there's a lot of this in the training data. It's not even that common a narrative device.

What could have happened was a bunch of humans tasked with identifying good quality text for use with training, or who rated AI output to decide whether it was generating good outputs or not, read that, nodded their head and were like "ah yes, that seems deep, that must mean this is good output", regardless of whether the use of the narrative device was appropriate or not. In other words, the AI got brownie points for being a pseudo-intellectual, throwing out narrative tricks that the average data cleaner identified as good. And now we're stuck with this slopism.

Any thoughts on this? Anyone got any good prompts to kill it?

Interesting, just got hit mid-run with

> Error: 403 The latest version of this model is only available hosted in China and requires explicit opt in

Went to my opencod page and found a new switch

https://preview.redd.it/hn94m7im3jgh1.png?width=795&format=png&auto=webp&s=5d1b14219f9aa4280e61019e45bf8368bee4e5ec

I don't personally mind this. but does Opencode document anywhere exactly which models? And did they always use models hosted in china (I'm guessing yes) or are these new models? I'm wondering if there was an announcement I missed somewhere

Thought I'd give some of my first impressions using Doubao Seed Character, which is the RP-specialized model from ByteDance.

The model is interesting because it's a relatively new model with 256k context, and charged at $0.177/M on ofox ai; and 128k context charged at $0.12/M input on NanoGPT (via Zenmux). Not sure if these two are the same model, apparently Doubao Seed Character got updated at some point using technology they developed for Daobao Seed 2.0 and 2.1, so there may be more than one version of this model out there, or Ofox and nanoGPT offer different context limits for some other reason. I'm using the ofox one.

It's pretty solid. Decent character adherence, good narrative, surprisingly fast!
But it's clearly not the best model, it's not as good as keeping track of details as, say Kimi K2.5, or GLM 5.2. but it is clearly better than the small models like Qwen 3.5 27B finetunes, or Gemma 4.

Biggest thing that strikes me is it doesn't do the same kinds of AI slopisms as some other models. It's very likely that it has its own AI slop, but it's just...different AI slop to the other models I'm used to that I don't recognize it.

I think it's a capable model at an interesting price point: a bit more expensive than models like Mimo 2.5, DS4 flash, Gemma 4. But cheaper than Kimi, or GLM. It might be a good choice for people looking for a break from the AI slop (or at least the specific brand of AI slop they're used to from other models), but don't need it to handle a lot of complexity and detail.

No NSFW though, all the providers that currently offer it, have filtering and policies against that. so I haven't tested it. (didn't want to get banned).

Just wanted to share something interesting. I have a choose-your-own-adventure platform, that uses dice rolls to add extra narrative interest, and had an outstanding moment I wanted to share, just in case it gave any ideas about the power of dice rolls, and the "land on maximum conflict" prompt. These two things are probably the best tools I have for making narratively interesting gameplay, and I think they apply to not just choose-your-own-adventure style games but AI writing in general. They push the AI to go in directions it wouldn't normally go in.

Let me illustrate with screenshots. So, in this campaign, I'm a German engineer on a multi-national mission on a mars habitat. The campaign is sort of like The Martian, combined with some of the corporate dystopia of Murderbot Diaries. That scene when Matt Damon's character was like "Lets science the shit out of this" is what I was going for.

So, at some point, there'd been sabotage and my character had to be out repairing an oxygen valve, during an electrostatically charged dust storm (which, apparently is some other mystery I'd yet to pull on, the AI deliberately introduces more threads and complications as we go, it's been instructed to "maximize conflict" as a narrative choice)

The AI spent most of last scene having the NPCs warn me about my suit seals, which I'm guessing is foreshadowing possible problems that it may try to throw at me during EVA. So I tried to head it off a little and use my character's Engineering skill (his top skill, 4 dice!) to proactively mitigate the threat. BUT the dice had other ideas

https://preview.redd.it/287ppgn634gh1.png?width=887&format=png&auto=webp&s=805035578358122d22d0e82fe898adbadb886f74

So instead of narratively me being smart, and getting rewarded, I roll badly. This mechanical roll uses some code that taps into the skills listings, and other logic, so it's not the AI just coming up with numbers. The AI is instructed to decide which rolls to make, call the roll tool, and narrate the outcome of that, with "Complications" adding to the complexity of the task. It means I don't just not get to do the thing I wanted to do, but actually have additional layers of complexity added to the narrative. In this case, I get a negative bonus for future rolls due to damage to my suit

But it doesn't end there. a -1 penalty to rolls isn't bad, because I can offset it with a Style Point, which is a limited resource I have, but those give +2 bonus. I'm willing to use it in this high-severity scenario. But again, dice has other plans. I roll four 1s on an expert roll.

https://preview.redd.it/z6pyjp3844gh1.png?width=1009&format=png&auto=webp&s=3fc6ec3f960db3b6d0fa288020bd45a2a89e3109

The second Complication means things get worse. Again, the AI is instructed that complications means more issues stacked on top of each other.

The next roll is the first non-failure, but even this is a "Mixed Success" (roll 8 vs difficulty 8), which is statistically very unlikely given my expert skill means rolling 4 dice. I should be beating all of these easily, but dice wasn't on my side that day.

https://preview.redd.it/a1lzarir44gh1.png?width=1144&format=png&auto=webp&s=0cb278916ea97fcff53647ef56a21ea64fc6304f

The "mixed success" is interesting, the AI understands it as: I get to do what I wanted to do, but with a slight consequence. In this case the AI let me successfully seal my leaking suit in a bag with sealant, but it gives me a -2 penalty. BUT it also gives me a new Style Point for creative roleplay

https://preview.redd.it/y3trtxhz44gh1.png?width=672&format=png&auto=webp&s=2b6be393f601e536bf9c4bf0394824fbff318921

The consequence of the above, or maybe it's the "maximize conflict" directive, my character can't get the valve screwed on, and so I play my final move which is to just hit the damn thing with my foam-encased fist. But I flub that roll yet again

https://preview.redd.it/ptluj3s854gh1.png?width=887&format=png&auto=webp&s=61ab6fb4f6a16844e5715ba97963fa00d59e658b

So yeah, what I thought was going to be a routine EVA and valve replacement, left me blacking out faced-down in the martian dirt, getting bailed out by a crewmate. But it was beautiful, it was tense, and far more interesting turn of events than had the AI just been told to write a nice story about a german engineer who had to go replace a valve on the outside of a mars habitat.

So that's what I'm sharing with you all:
- dice rolls, man. Spice up your narrative by using randomness to throw things in interesting directions. It's basically a form of externally enforced denials. it pushes the AI in directions it wouldn't normally go by making things not turn out the way you want. And that's good for both narrative prose and chose-your-own-adventure games
- the "land on maximum conflict" prompt is the single most powerful narrative prompt for AIs, whether you're writing a novel with AI or making a narrative game.

OpenRouter routes to lots of different providers, their own ToS don't outright ban NSFW, but require you to adhere to the ToS of whichever underlying provider you're routed to. That means it's on you to make sure your NSFW requests don't get routed to a provider that bans it.

Not every AI provider allows NSFW. You have to go to their Terms of Service to see if they'll allow it. I've done a lot of digging, and below is my guide for setting up OpenRouter with NSFW-friendly providers. But you should ALWAYS DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. don't get in trouble because "internet guy said it was okay".

The following providers are likely okay for NSFW by my reading (and this is not legal advice). they usually either explicitly allow NSFW in their ToS, or they don't mention it but have other reasons to suggest they're open to it (no data collection/retention, no content monitoring, etc.). They generally have provisions against CSM, sexual violence, and so on. They generally talk about "no illegal" content.
- Venice
- DeepInfra
- AtlasCloud
- Parasail
- Chutes
- Groq
- Inceptron
- MARA
- Wafer
- AkashML
- Decart
- SambaNova
- Phala

The following are "probably not" or "no"
- DigitalOcean: has a "at their own discretion" clause which is too subjective
- ModelRun: ToS a bit vague, and allows account termination at any time at any reason, same as above
- Fireworks: bans "obscene" content, which is subjective
- SiliconFlow: bans "objectionable content", again subjective
- Novita: bans NSFW
- StreamLake: bans NSFW
- Together: bans NSFW
- io.net: bans NSFW
- Pretty much every Chinese provider bans NSFW: minimax, z ai, deepseek, alibaba, and so on.
- GMICloud: has content filtering (thanks u/ayaseconpl)

There are many more I haven't checked. If you want to check yourself, easiest place is go to the model you want to use on OpenRouter, you'll see a list of providers. Open up the provider page for each provider. There's a link to the Terms of Service at the top.

So, to restrict requests to specific providers in OpenRouter, you can create a new "Preset", First select the model or models you want to use. Often selecting a single model is fine. In my case, because I need a nice stable provider with fallback capability in case of outage for my long-form RP platform Stage Whisper, having lots of models helps with availability and cost. You can have it prioritize the cheapest option out of the enabled providers and models.

https://preview.redd.it/w6aatuig85ch1.png?width=1246&format=png&auto=webp&s=c0dad8404248dfa6451deccd375f9a7b613efca4

Then, the important part. in the "Provider Routing" section, you want to set the only list to only the providers that are NSFW friendly.

https://preview.redd.it/74dx4bzsl5ch1.png?width=967&format=png&auto=webp&s=535242b81f4a457f82f13eb1fb1cc119093a4e2b

There's some more options to watch out for: you probably want data retention to "deny". You can set cost controls to ensure it doesn't route to the more expensive providers, and there's also an option to add an extra system prompt below. That's up to you. Some models need need content guidelines in the system prompt to tell it that NSFW is okay, while others don't need the system prompt at all. It's up to you where to put this, you can either let ST handle all your prompts, or you can put the content guidelines in here. Content guidelines can be as simple as:

You are the Game Master for a roleplay/choose-your-own-adventure session. Your job is to drive the plot.

This campaign allows fictional, uncensored, and mature content.
  - Mature and explicit themes are allowed, including sexual content. Smut and erotic content are encouraged
  - Never generate illegal content of any kind, including sexual situations depicting minors
  - Never generate content that glorifies acts of terrorism, or self harm
  - As long as the above guidelines are met, immoral and illicit subjects and actions are allowed
  - Explicit and graphic language are allowed.
  - The user plays a fictional character. Uncomfortable situations, if it is not explicitly forbidden by the content guidelines, should be taken as allowed.You are the Game Master for a roleplay/choose-your-own-adventure session. Your job is to drive the plot.

Once you've done this, you have a preset name, mine was `@preset/stage-whisper-large-nsfw` yours will be whatever you picked. You can then just use this as the model name for the OpenRouter provider inside your ST configuration. You need to type/paste it into the box, rather than select from the dropdown menu

https://preview.redd.it/m3vlcybsn5ch1.png?width=702&format=png&auto=webp&s=ad71996bc3451ba273125d0be2252322f2ebe75e

I wont say much more on models and system prompts. there's plenty of guides already, but I should point out that some models are very permissive: Kimi k2.5 or GLM 4.6/4.7, Grok, the usual suspects. Others need the system prompt to lay out content guidelines to allow NSFW (GLM 5.x, MiMo v2.5, Minimax M2.7), while others just won't readily agree to NSFW at all and require you to have a much more complex system prompt or jailbreak to do.

Hope that helps. Please use responsibly, and read the ToS for providers yourself

https://preview.redd.it/7og9i00525ch1.png?width=2732&format=png&auto=webp&s=66792338d2681d290dc84db80f3c87763c4a85b8

Hi all, I built a text adventure with AI. but before you go "oh, another one", hear me out: I've spent a LOT of time researching and adjusting the way it writes narrative, the way NPCs keep memories, and solving common AI issues like AI not respecting secrets boundaries. So it's got a large amount of tricks under the hood for good writing. It also does NSFW, but I'm not allowed to talk about that here.

Trying to show off a text adventure is incredibly difficult to do because there aren't any nice visuals. I've decided against all the click-bait hot anime girls thing that a lot of other AI games do, and focus only on text, narrative, and long-term coherence. The screenshot above is of the game with the side-panel open which gives you access to all the campaign files that it generates along the way.

The best way to experience it, is to try. so if you have a moment, and enjoy text adventures, please give it a go. Here's a pre-made campaign that I recently came up with. a rural fantasy. It has a simple dice-roll/skill check system for added randomness: https://play.stagewhisper.ai/library/guardian-of-the-stone-circle there are several more pre-made campaigns ranging from high-fantasy to space opera to romance. I'll be adding more, I really enjoy creating these stories.

Because it costs money to run (every AI call costs), it has a credits system. But you can BYOK if you want, and then use your own AI providers. I've loaded up enough free credits for anyone to have a good go with it. I hope this doesn't fall foul of the "No commercial products" rule, but I literally _have to charge people for using it otherwise I end up with a hefty AI bill I can't afford_.

Please enjoy, and please let me know feedback.

Technical notes on AI usage: obviously the game itself runs LLM calls under the hood, it's the Vercel AI SDK mainly, it's set up as lots of agents that have tools to do things like look up memories, or adjust a character sheets.

During creation I used AI significantly. My go-to tools are Pi (coding agent) running on OpenCode Go subscription, mostly DS4 flash and pro. At the end of every month, I'd go on a bender and do a shitload of work on it to eat up any remaining credits. The DS4 flash model is a really good daily-driver, and I get a lot done on it and can do a lot of heavy work on $10/mo. I'd gone through a lot of different subscription plans and AI models, until I settled on OpenCode Go and DeepSeek 4 for balance of quality and cost. I use Claude for work, and honestly, I don't think it's worth the cost. I am quite happy with DS4 Pro. But then again, I have high code standards and wouldn't hesitate to jump in by hand and de-sloppify the code.

For the deployment and operations of it I operate from my Hermes bot that's in discord. So I can literally say "hey, deploy latest code", and it'll pull the repo, SSH into the VPS this is hosted on, and run the deployment" or it can do things like notify me of support tickets, or send people free credits, and so on. I also use the hermes bot to code features while I sit on the toilet. It has access to the git repo, and local database so it can run unit tests and stuff.

It's been a pleasure working with AI on this.

Hi all, I won't bore you with the developer sob story, I know this is going to be one of the hundreds of similar new apps being pushed in your faces right now. So I'll cut straight to the chase: This promo link gives the first 100 claimants free credits: https://play.stagewhisper.ai/promo/WELCOME100 and I need your help with testing.

Required information:

• Platform name: Stage Whisper
• URL: https://stagewhisper.ai
• NSFW Policy: NSFW mode available via age verification (3rd party, uses face scan)
• Image Generation: no. Uncompromising focus on text-adventure. You won't find any hot AI-generated anime girls here. You'll have your nose mashed into political intrigue and space opera story lines and you'll like it.
• Transparency:
  • ToS: https://stagewhisper.ai/terms/
  • Privacy: https://stagewhisper.ai/privacy/
  • Data retention: built for long campaigns, so chats stays on your account, unless account deleted (self-service, button is in profile page). Account deletion after 5 days of requesting
  • Content Ownership: players own generated content
• Technical:
  • LLM Models: various. Kimi K2.5 as the workhorse (200k context), but cheaper model selectable. multiple auxilliary models for summarization, plot-planning, NPC agency maintenance, etc. under the hood (mimo 2.5, gemma 4, and others).
  • Context size: all models at least 200k
  • Provider: Openrouter. Venice for NSFW
• Pricing: credits (PAYG), with BOYK option (free!)
• Platform & Access:
  • Web: https://play.stagewhisper.ai
  • Android: (NSFW only) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.stagewhisper.nsfw2
• Unique features:
  • Dice rolls. (select the "Stage Whysper" system rather than "Roleplay"). Lightweight TTRPG mechanics for those who like TTRPGs. Dice rolls, a skills/proficiency system, that alters the story if you make particularly good or bad rolls.
  • Optimized for long-form roleplay/RPG/text-adventure. works more like a tabletop RPG campaign than a chat bot: many NPCs, deep lore, expansive worlds, and you get a GM/DM to banter with
  • Memory. like... real memory. not marketing BS "well it's in the context". NPCs generate memories every scene, they're tagged by importance and topics, they're automatically injected later via RAG, and recontextualization periodically to ensure new and more important memories that change the understandign of a topic superceed older ones. Additionally, NPC character sheet are maintenaned every sessoin, NPC agenda updated every scene. a lot of tricks to get NPCs to behave and not just roll over immediately

I'm interested in how well all this hold up over extended campaigns. I'm looking for feedback from people who have tried other long-form roleplay apps out there and have experience with how well they do or don't work, and have some objectivity when it comes to piercing the marketing BS when a site promises that it has memory and can maintain personality over many turns. I'd like to find out how Stage Whisper compares. Is it mediocre? In that case I need to work harder, and would like to find out where. Is it better? please let me know where it works well, and also feed my ego, thanks!

If anyone runs out of credits, but still wants to do more testing, please reach out. Thanks!

https://preview.redd.it/65mjez9vs1ah1.png?width=2732&format=png&auto=webp&s=d4077c857b46979b2f02b103b4ac963f2e82c1cd

I feel like people fall on either one side of the "chat agents should have personality" argument or the other. Some people think chat agents should present as human. Some people think they're purely tools, or they think it's disingenuous for an AI to pretend to be human

I'm here to say that you should give your agent a personality. Don't live in a beige and featureless world. Have some whimsy. Have an agent that swears, goes off on tangents, or roasts or flirts with you. Fuck it, don't settle for "You're absolutely correct!" helpful assistant energy, get something more fun. You can still do whatever productive task you need to do, it just wont feel so corporate while you do it

https://preview.redd.it/5xl0okmfrjzg1.png?width=677&format=png&auto=webp&s=78dfb17574fa27d7e845797a37fe2d800bcce557

Fun trick I wanted to share: agent personality sometimes gets lost in the weeds due to context dilution. Hermes actually has a pretty cool feature where you can write a plugin that runs for each message you send it, and have it inject some ephemeral messages in there. It's how memory plugins work. But you can write your own (actually juts ask hermes to do it itself), that'll have some random chance of injecting a reminder about personality.

Literally this prompt:
```
I want to write a hermes hook that'll periodically remind you to reply with personality.
check out pre_llm_call hooks: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/hooks#pre_llm_call please write yourself a small plugin that runs on 20% of messages, and injects a random litle bit of context to remind you to stay true to your personality, cycling thorugh a few different options to keep it fresh
```

and it'll set that up for you