Dungeons and Dragons (Curple Lard), Or: An AI Monster Manual
Neural Networks can do everything from designing custom spells to generating character backstories–in short, they can be ready to play in whatever adventure you throw at them. But now they’re that much closer to running the game.
Artificial Intelligence can do just about anything if movies and television can be believed. And since they’ve never lied to me before, I have no reason to suspect that they would be lying about the capabilities of the internet. Which includes playing games of Tic-Tac-Toe…
Or they can do things like help you open the doors to your house.
There’s no end of things to that an artificial intelligence can do. They’re always learning and adapting too–and so it should be no surprise that they’re engaging in the most fulfilling activity known to humanity, playing Dungeons and Dragons.
And like any true gamer, they’ve already learned the rules and read through the monster manual, and now they’re going to work trying to create their own custom content. We’ve already seen them work up some custom spells, and now they’re taking a crack at doing up some custom monsters. In the interest of understanding and connecting with our machine-minded co-habitants of this planet, let’s take a look at the monsters they’ve created. Let’s kick off the weekend with some new denizens for your tabletop dungeons.
First up we have a batch of monsters that belong on the radical table for random encounters.
With things like a Space Ogre or Vampire Bear or Chromatic Wolf–your next encounter is going to be incredible. But radical monsters might be a feat of creativity and a triumph of the imagination that bridges the gap between humans and computers, showing that anyone can have a soul–but that isn’t the real test of Dungeons and Dragons. The real meat and potatoes are: can you make something that winds up with a TPK?
And monsters like the Desert Beeple or the Jabberwont might sound adorable, and the Spectral Woof Greepy is definitely a homebrewed monster–can any of them table a party? Well, it sounds like the neural networks are picking up on that and creating a whole batch of Dragons.
Now a Dead Dragon makes sense–difficult to fight. How can you possibly kill something that’s already dead? And the Death Seep or Purple Fang Dragon can probably go toe to toe with even the hardiest fighters. But, really the Big Dragon is the star player on this team. And there’s more, of course. With a swath of Unicorns including the Black Willow Unicorn and Unicorn, Bat, you can see how far the machines have come since the days of creating spells like Protection From Dave. Here’s one last batch of monsters for you.
Truly Dungeons and Dragons unites us all.
You can find more AI Weirdness at aiweirdness.com, including a link to the older D&D & AI posts, as well as a survey where you’ll be able to tell tales from your own experience to teach AIs how to generate backstories. Check it out!
