Loremaster's Manual

The engine resolves all hard state — dice, HP, morale, positions. The AI layers (monster tactics, NPC minds, the campaign director) decide intent, and the engine validates and clamps it. Your job as author is to give the engine honest numbers and the AI interesting tools; the chronicle prints every roll so players can audit the result.

Hit Dice drive everything. A monster's Aim comes from its HD; its HP are rolled fresh from HD for every battle (the same ogre is tougher some nights); 16+ HD grants three natural attacks a round. Write HD honestly and the rest follows.

AC is descending — lower is better. Unarmored humanoid ≈ 10, mail-clad veteran ≈ 4–2, adult dragon ≈ 1 to −1. If you equip a monster from the gear catalog, its AC is derived from that loadout (armor + shield + agility) — don't fight the number by hand; fix the gear.

Ranged monsters need ammo: give them a capacity and type (arrow / bolt / stone) and the engine counts every shot — an empty quiver forces them into melee.

Every creature has a size class, which drives its 3D model height and its wielding rules. Footprint (tiles occupied) is set separately for the big ones.

Heroes size by race: halflings and gnomes are Small; dwarves are Medium (a battleaxe culture). If you don't set a size, the engine classifies from the creature's kind and name — set it explicitly when the guess is wrong.

Weapons are sized S / M / L (editable per item in Weapons & Gear). One matrix decides who can wield what:

Natural weapons (claws, bite) are exempt. A halfling handed a longsword sets it aside with a chronicle notice and draws a legal sidearm — fists only as a last resort. A hero whose only blocker is the shield slings the shield (worsening AC by 1) rather than punching. The off-hand slot accepts only S weapons.

The Bestiary ability editor's fields, and what the engine does with them:

The AI weighs each ability by expected damage — resistances, saves, and shove value included — and will not blast its own side unless the trade is clearly worth it (enemy damage at least twice ally damage).

Morale is B/X: 2d6 rolled under the rating (2–12) when an ally falls, at half strength, or when grievously wounded — with modifiers for being outnumbered or last standing. Rate 12 for zealots, 6–8 for hired blades, and don't rate the fearless (undead, constructs never check). Flag a commander and the warband steadies (+1) while they stand — and shakes (−2) when they fall. Named bosses use their AI mind instead of the table.

Not every encounter starts with steel. Wandering and camp meetings roll a seeded reaction — hostile, wary, neutral, open — shaded by your authored reaction modifier, racial attitudes, and the party's conduct. Intelligent bands can be parleyed with (their commander speaks with a full NPC mind); mindless creatures always ambush. Author the modifier to make a faction famously friendly or infamously vicious.

Encounter tables bind to terrain, regions, or specific sites, and entries can be mixed packs ("2 ogres + 6 goblins" spawns as one warband). Pin a table to a dungeon or settlement to override the regional default. The AI can draft a table for you; edit the result — it's yours.

Named NPCs carry a persistent mind: personality, memories, disposition, factions, and bonds. Every conversation — tavern, parley, camp fireside — distills into memory, and disposition follows the character everywhere. Companions who join the party fight under the same morale rules as everyone else; break their trust badly enough mid-battle and they may leave for good.

Write a premise, or upload a classic module PDF — Goldveil extracts only its structure (layout, pacing, encounter difficulty) and generates an entirely original chronicle over it: names, story, maps, monsters, NPCs. The build runs in resumable stages (story → dungeons → settlements → NPCs → monsters → social web), and everything it generates is saved, never regenerated — your Bestiary and gear catalogs compound across campaigns. Refine the generated tile maps, wire the story beats, and playtest in the Sandbox before publishing to the Adventure Board.

Sculpted figures are normalized so size class sets the height on the battlefield — a kobold model and a giant model both come out the right size automatically, and the per-model scale slider is a permanent nudge on top (0.5×–2×). Sculpt prompts pass through a safety pre-pass that stylizes gore automatically; your lore text is never edited — only the image prompt.