Roleplay with Character Cards

A character card is a character packaged to share: who they are, the scene they open with, and often a lorebook, the world they live in. inksprite imports the cards made for SillyTavern and the sites that share them, and plays them as cooperative storytelling: you play your character, the model plays everyone else and the world, and either of you can steer.

This guide plays Pif, by bipbop: an orphan mechanic in a world of flying islands who takes odd jobs from the underworld. The game was played with Claude Sonnet 5.5, through Anthropic.

Get the card and its lorebook

On Pif’s page, download the card as a PNG: the picture carries the card inside it. The notes under it link two lorebooks; download the first, for SillyTavern (sohhf2.json). A card can come as JSON instead, and imports the same way.

Import them

Make a project for the game. Right-click it, choose Import › Files…, and choose the PNG. inksprite says what’s in the card before it writes anything. Click Import, then do the same with the lorebook.

Both go in a Cards folder: the card in Characters, a document for each part of it, and the lorebook in Lorebooks, a document for each of its 246 entries. The model reads folder names too, so right-click the lorebook’s folder, named after its file, choose Rename, and call it Divided Skies, the name of Pif’s world.

Make a persona

Your character is a document, like everything else the model reads. Make a folder called Personas, and a document in it named for your character, with a description. This guide plays Tal:

A tall, lean man who looks to be in his late 30s. He speaks little and wears a pair of revolvers at his hip.

Start the chat

Right-click the card’s folder, Pif, choose Chat with Pif…, type your character’s name in Your name, and click Start chat. The card says {{user}} where it means you, and the model reads your name there instead. A card with more than one greeting lets you choose one here.

The chat opens on the Roleplay profile (or the one chosen as Profile for character cards in Settings › System), with Pif’s greeting as its first message.

Now hover over Tal in the outline and click the pin. A pinned document goes to the model with every message you send, so it always knows who you are playing. The card’s description is pinned already; pinned documents show in colour. Pins belong to the chat they were made in.

Turn on the dice

Click the gear in the message box for the chat’s settings. Under Roleplay are your name and the card’s post-history instructions, which go with every message after the author’s note. Change either here.

Open Tools, and switch on RPG Tools: dice, the oracle, tables, tarot and names. A model like Claude Sonnet 5.5 rolls on its own when an outcome is in doubt.

Documents is on already, so the model looks entries up in the lorebook as the story needs them, rather than reading all 13,000 words with every message.

Let the model read up

Before the first move, tell the model what to do. A line that starts with OOC:, out of character, is from you as the player rather than from Tal:

OOC: Before we start, explore the lorebook in Cards/Lorebooks/Divided Skies and gather whatever context you need to run this world. Let me know when you’re ready.

It read ten entries (the world, Pif’s island, her slum, her rival, the crew that keeps foiling her) and answered out of character. Click 11 tool calls to see what it read.

Play

Write short turns, the way you’d talk at a table: what Tal says and does.

“Doesn’t seem like much of a choice to me.” I draw my revolver and fire.

The model narrates, plays Pif and everyone else, and leaves Tal to you. When the outcome is in doubt, it rolls: here a d20 for the shot, which came up 13, a hit that only dents the war-golem.

Steer the story

Ask the oracle

The oracle answers a yes-or-no question at the odds you give it. Put it on a line of its own, then your move on the next (Shift Enter starts a new line):

/oracle(likely) Is the boiler vent open when it raises the hammer?
I wait for the hammer to come up and put two rounds in the vent.

The odds are nearly_impossible, very_unlikely, unlikely, fifty_fifty, likely, very_likely or nearly_certain; leave them off for 50/50. The model takes the answer as fact. Here it was no, so the vent was shuttered:

/roll 2d6+1 rolls dice the same way. Type / for the rest.

Say what you’d like

An out-of-character note can ask for anything: a twist, a character, a change of pace, or less of something.

I step in close and empty the cylinder into the open vent.

OOC: While we're busy with the golem, have Ridge slip in and make off with the crate.

Ridge, Pif’s rival, came down from the rafters in the same reply. The dice still had their say: a 6, and the shots went wide.

Compact the chat

Every turn sends the whole chat so far, so a long game gets slower and costs more. Type /compact and the model writes a summary of the game to stand in for the turns before it.

The turns stay in the chat for you to read back. Here the next turn went to the model at 7.8k tokens (ctx in its header), where the one before the summary was 22k.

/compact(2) keeps the last two turns as they are, under the summary. Compact a long chat has the other ways.