Buckle up friends, this is our biggest update ever. Today, we’re announcing ACE-1, the world’s first agentic campaign engine.

We’ve learned so much from our first couple tries of building an AI Game Master, and we’ve taken those learnings to build something we believe is truly special. It’s not just us, here’s what our alpha testers had to say:

If you have already seen this post, it’s because we did a preview launch of ACE-1 a couple of weeks ago. ACE-1 is now stable and will be used as the default for all campaigns moving forward.

What is ACE-1?

ACE-1 is a game engine that powers our AI game master (Franz) and game state tracking systems. In the future, it will also manage NPCs, world weather, events, music, sounds, and more. It is a system of interconnected modules that resembles something between the brain of a game master and a classic game engine.

What is an AI agent? What does “agentic” mean?

An AI agent is an AI system that can retrieve information, make decisions, think in cycles, and execute actions. Calling our campaign engine “agentic” just means that it is made up of interconnected agents that can think and make decisions.

What makes ACE-1 different from Franz or other AI Game Masters?

Franz was the first AI Game Master we built, and was the first AI chat bot to manage game state. Franz was a step in the right direction, but we realized that the AI Game Master is only a small part of what’s necessary to make a compelling AI TTRPG experience. That’s why we’re separating the concept of the AI game master from the campaign engine.

AI Game Master → The outer face/personality you interact with.

Campaign Engine → The game engine that brings your world and NPCs to life, manages state, and retrieves information for your game master.

Before ACE-1, Franz worked much more linearly. In the past, Franz would generate a response, and we would use that response to update game state to the best of our ability. Now, ACE-1 is much closer to imitating the thought process of a real game master and decides when and how to use and update the game state, resulting in much more cohesive and engaging campaigns.

Is ACE-1 a language model?

Nope! ACE-1 is a collection of interconnected agent systems and modules built on top of language models.

What’s new about game play? How does ACE-1 make my campaigns better?

At a high level:

Let’s dive into some of the specific features we’ve added:

Memories

Memories have been completely reworked. Previously, we used a hierarchical summarization method. The problem with this was that important details would eventually be compressed with other details, and the most important parts would get lost too quickly.

Now, memories are atomic units of knowledge. Each memory is a short fact, such as “Neela offered 50 gold for the safe transport of her cat”, and that detail will not be compressed further.

That being said, we can’t hang onto every memory. Memory gets expensive once we add too many, and too many memories can actually confuse the language models. Our solution to more cohesive campaigns is to try to keep the most important memories in longer, and shed less important details. Now, memories will be automatically prioritized by ACE based on what type of memory it is. If it’s an important plot point, ACE will hang onto it longer than it would a small detail about an NPC. ACE prioritizes memories based on memory type, recency, and its own ranking algorithm.

When you correct Franz or give him an instruction, that will also be stored as a memory. Memories are good for temporary instructions. If you have an instruction you would like Franz to use long term, use custom instructions.

You can also decide which memories stick around longer by locking them. If you lock a memory, it will stay in context until you unlock it.

Each plan has a different amount of memories that it can keep in context,

Free - 30, Starter - 50, Pro - 70, Legend - 100.

Note: Memories are not backwards compatible with existing campaigns. If you enable ACE-1 in an existing campaign, it will not have summaries from the old system. We recommend you start new campaigns or be aware that you may have to remind Franz of things that happened in the past so that the memories can be reformed.

Trope/Cliche Reduction System

Repeated tropes such as hooded figures, Elara, and the old windmill have been the #1 feedback we’ve received from you all. That’s why we’ve built a brand new trope reduction system. Now these tropes should no longer make appearances in your campaigns (as long as you don’t mention them first). This seems to be a common issue across all AI roleplaying services, so we’re super excited to be one of the first platforms to solve this issue.

As you play, you’ll likely run into other types of tropes eventually. If you do, please let us know! We’ve designed this system so we can steer ACE-1 away from certain things in the future.

Unknown NPCs & Locations

When you start a campaign, NPCs and locations you haven’t visited will be unknown to you. You won’t be able to see their images or names.

Once you are at the same coordinates as a character or location, it becomes seen and you can see the image.

Only after the game master or player has mentioned the name of the character or location, does its name and information become available in the UI.

If you wish to still see everything as before, you can toggle this setting off in the Campaign Settings tab.

Entity Links

ACE-1 will automatically update text and link characters, locations, items, spells, and monsters so you can easily click on the text and view the image and other details of anyone or anything that was mentioned in a message.

Mentions

You can now “@” anything in the world. When you “@” an entity, ACE will guarantee that information in context for the next message. “@” mentions are a great way to surface context about an entity that has not been talked about in a while.

Each plan has a limited number of mentions per message:

Free - 1, Starter - 2, Pro - 3, Legend - 5.

Custom Instructions & Game Master Settings

Custom instructions have also gotten a bit of a makeover. Previously, we had 1 text box where you could enter instructions. We did a bad job explaining how custom instructions worked and what was possible with them, and we found a lot of players were using instructions that were impossible for the system to use; this is unideal as it adds complexity which can confuse the AI and degrade overall performance.

Here’s what’s new:

Each plan has access to a different number of custom instructions,

Free - 5, Starter - 5, Pro - 10, Legend - 15.

Character Relationship System

ACE-1 will now track your relationship status with NPCs. If you give an NPC a gift or make them laugh, the score might increase. If you punch an NPC in the face or do something else unfavourable, it might decrease.

You can see the top five relationships a character has in their character sheet. We’ll have a future update coming soon that allows you to edit relationships.

View Context

Have you ever wondered why Franz got something wrong or didn't know something he should have? Well usually it's one of two reasons:

Most of the time, it's #1. For the first time ever, we're letting you peek into the context that Franz can see.

This way, if Franz totally forgot about something, you can look at the context and see if it is because it was not included. If you find that we're not including context you think is relevant for the scene, please drop a bug report with an event ID and tell us what is missing from the context.

To view context, click the 3 dots and then click View Context. This will only show up on messages from the GM, not your own. If you want to learn more about how the GM sees context, check out this article: https://help.fables.gg/en/help/articles/4035786-what-game-state-can-ace-see-update

Adventure / Downtime Pacing Modes

You can now change your pacing mode. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback before from players who just want to hang out in the world and Franz would try too hard to force an adventure. No longer!

On every message we display what pacing mode was used for the message. You can click this to quickly toggle the setting. You can also change the pacing mode on the settings page.

Adventure Mode

In adventure mode we use additional settings in the background to help manage pacing and keep the adventure cohesive.

Downtime Mode

Franz will do his best to keep things relaxed and casual without forcing an adventure. In this mode, the game should feel more like a cozy life sim than a TTRPG.

Character Sheet Updates

Your game master should now be much more responsive when you correct them and ask them to update something on your character sheet or the character sheet of an NPC. For now this is limited to the basic details on the character sheets and does not include items or spells, but more improvements will be coming in the future.

Franz Glow Up

We partnered with Humble Squid Creatives to create brand new artwork for Franz! We’ll miss the original pixel Franz, but that image wasn’t always a great stylistic fit for campaigns. For the holiday season Franz also has a Santa hat!

Coming soon: Dynamic Moods, and an option to change your Game Master Image.

Quests & Interactions - Temporarily Disabled

Quests and interactions have been disabled for now. We’re looking into alternative approaches for both of these! More on these soon.

Pick Your Path Mode - Early Preview

If you ever wanted to have more control over where your story goes, you can try Pick Your Path mode which lets you occasionally see and pick a path for the next GM response. This mode isn’t complete yet, but if you’d like to try it out and provide feedback, you can enable it in your campaign settings.

Other Improvements

This post is getting too massive for us to go into detail about everything so here’s a quick rundown of some other new features,

How do I enable ACE-1? What about my old campaigns?

Since everything has changed, we recommend starting a fresh campaign with ACE-1. New campaigns will automatically use ACE-1.

Existing campaigns before this update will have a setting to toggle on ACE-1 but ACE cannot access the summaries of the old campaigns, so you will have to remind Franz of things to reform memories.

You’ll know you have ACE-1 turned on if you see Powered by ACE-1 beside Franz’s name.

What has NOT changed?

Combat: The combat system hasn’t been touched yet, so when you’re in an encounter it’s still the same as before. By default, new campaigns using ACE-1 have the combat mode turned off. You can turn on the existing combat system in the Gamemaster settings if you wish to enable it. The combat system will get its own improvements and overhaul in the future.

Player Feedback

Thank you all for providing your feedback and submitting bug reports! Even though we may not be able to reply to every message, we do read every single feedback post and every message on the Discord which helps guide us in the features and improvements we build for you. Since the new system is a complete overhaul from the previous, we’ll be closing old posts on the feedback portal related to AI issues with Franz as they’re no longer applicable to ACE-1. Please continue to let us know in Discord and the feedback portal how the new system feels and where it falls short!

What’s coming next?

Creating ACE-1 was a big undertaking but this is just the beginning; we now have an architecture and system that’s much more modular and steerable than before, allowing us to move faster on certain mechanics, give you more control, and unlock new features which weren’t possible before.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be prioritized on polishing and fixing bugs on the site which we haven’t had time to address while working on ACE-1. We’ll also be focusing on building the Free to Play system which we expect to go live in early 2025.

Stay tuned for future updates, and as always thank you for playing and supporting the project!