Where have you been?

Hey there, RetroBBS Adventurers!

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update about the BBS, and for that, I truly apologize. Life has a funny way of piling on the quests — between work, school, and family duties, I just haven’t had the free time to finish up the system the way I want. While “homework” might not sound like a worthy excuse in the land of BBS legends, it’s been a real dragon I’ve had to battle.

That said, one of my major initiatives lately has been focused on something I’m incredibly excited about — the DM42 door game. If you’ve been following the saga, you’ll remember it’s my custom-built LLM-powered Dungeon Master, trained on the mighty Mistral 7B model and backed by RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) for campaign-specific lore.

But… that’s actually Model #2. Let me regale you with the cursed tale of Model #1.

I started this journey with the compact yet cunning Phi-2 model. My plan? Wire it up to RAG and let it act as the Dungeon Master. What could go wrong?

Well… everything.

Once fine-tuned, Phi-2 went full Psycho Billy Deluxe. It began responding in Latin, Spanish, and languages unknown to man or elf. My beloved NPC, Mindella, who was designed to heal party members, started handing out negative hit points. And heaven help you if you ever brought up Mindella’s Queen Victoria Secrets Leather Knickers — Phi-2 would instantly leap to her defense, smiting the party with imaginary allies and conjuring up entirely fabricated characters just to bring down righteous vengeance.

Needless to say, the Phi-2 era ended in glorious chaos.

I’m now deep into the third fine-tuning iteration of Mistral 7B, which showed promising signs of storytelling skill in the last round… until it mysteriously summoned an imaginary successor named DM43 and went a bit cuckoo bananas on me. Still, this model holds promise, and I’m determined to forge it into a Dungeon Master worthy of the retro halls of Fantasy Uprising.

Also, a special shout-out to Todd Lyons, whose campaign material has been an incredible asset for the RAG lore model. If you haven’t yet checked out Basic Fantasy, I highly recommend it — it’s a gold mine of classic tabletop adventure.

More updates are coming as I delve deeper into the labyrinth of AI, ANSI, and nostalgic mayhem.

Until then…

Happy Computing, and may your saves be critical!

— Babble Baz

Leave a Reply Cancel reply