Ashford After Dark

**Ashford After Dark** Uses InnerSelf by LewdLeah - Be sure to set your name in the Configure inner self Story Card. **Scenario** You wake in a barricaded room inside Ashford Hospital several days after an unknown disaster crippled the power and left most electronics useless. Something has gone terribly wrong. Unnatural creatures and other threats roam the halls, rooms and routes seem to change when nobody is looking, and every apparent exit somehow leads back inside. The survivors around you have their own personalities, fears, goals, grudges, and priorities. They may help you, oppose you, abandon you, or become threats themselves. Somewhere else in the hospital, other survivors are still trying to stay alive. Explore a hospital that refuses to stay the same, survive whatever it decides to throw at you, and uncover whatever explanation or escape may exist. Every run can unfold differently, with new threats, strange events, shifting relationships, and no guarantee that reality works the way you remember. **Author's Comments** During my testing, the NPCs were pretty good about doing their own thing and interacting with each other according to their personalities instead of waiting on the player. I felt like part of the story instead of the center of the universe, but I could still grab hold of the general direction of things if I pushed. There were occasional agency slips, but they were usually mild and fit reasonably well with my last action. Any especially bad ones, I either edited out or rerolled the response. Because of the freedom it was given, the AI basically created an emergent story during every run. There were a lot of differences and variations between runs, including different threats, events, and character interactions. I also started treating continuity errors, AI forgetfulness, and the usual fuzzy details as changes in the world caused by whatever is happening to the hospital. If something didn't line up, I would blatantly point out the weirdness in-character, and the AI would usually roll with it and fold the inconsistency into the story. The base story uses about 1,500 tokens at the start for Plot Essentials, Author's Note, AI Instructions, and the five starting Story Cards. Story Cards average around 100 tokens each when they are in context.