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). Natural attacks scale by HD: 7–10 HD gets 3 attacks every 2 rounds, 11–15 HD gets 2, and 16+ gets 3. Dragons and hydras get 3 regardless. 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. Your own Weapons & Gear armor counts too, and if a piece can't be found the stat-block AC is kept, never 10.

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.

Alignment drives a paladin's evil sense, smite and protective aura, plus the evil-companion conduct rule. A recruited companion copies alignment from the source NPC.

Undead type selects the Turn Undead column. Flee policy is auto (normal morale), defend (holds the field), or escape (seeks the exit).

The Bestiary source filter distinguishes SRD and Original badges. Habitat tags are forest, plains, savanna, hills, mountains, arctic, jungle, swamp, desert, coast, sea, caves, dungeon and town. They provide encounter flavour now and leave room for terrain-aware selection later.

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.

Recruitment is a bargain. At the Dragon Tavern the NPC's own mind decides whether to join and what loot share to ask; the engine keeps the price inside a fair band for their level. Once hired, their share of coin is paid automatically from every drop. A companion keeps the 3D sculpt you gave the source NPC — sculpt the NPC and the companion fights as that figure, in battle and in social scenes.

Is a pet? marks beasts and animal aging/recruitment. Fighter NPCs may carry a weapon specialization that is used when hired. Alignment copies into the companion. Conditional terms and oaths are real promises: break one and the companion may leave.

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.

Hand-crafted dungeons from One Page Dungeon. On any dungeon card, Import Watabou JSON gives you the three-step loop: roll (Open One Page Dungeon — a new tab; press Enter until you like the map), export (press J, or right-click → Export as → JSON), drop the file on the card. You get a preview — tiles, rooms, doors, secret doors, pillars, pools — before it replaces the map; the generator's room notes become the rooms' descriptions, verbatim. Enrichment (foes, loot, traps) is never run for you: trigger it as usual, and its cost is reported there. Dungeons only — towns are drawn on the street map. On a dungeon that already has rooms the same panel reads Re-render with Watabou: the generator openstuned to the dungeon (its size, style, water, treasure, danger, stairs and secrets become generator tags, and it is titled after it), and the import can keep your rooms— every room, with its foes, chest, trap, notes and world-map pin, is re-anchored inside a chamber of the new map (entrance to entrance, boss to the final chamber, fights and hoards into the largest rooms). Painted battle interiors are dropped, since they were shaped for the old walls.

Who sees the re-rendered map. New parties always get it. A party that already entered the dungeon gets the new map the next time they open it only if they haven't really explored yet (no room cleared or looted, at most one step taken); parties mid-delve keep the map they are playing. The room-bubble editor now sits on the painted map: bubbles are pinned to their painted rooms, and the full tile painter (doors, traps, stairs and the rest) is available both inline and in Zoom 3×.

Treasure chests. Select a Treasure, Encounter or Boss room to author its lock, trap and hoard. Chests ask at every step. A found trap offers Disarm / Spring it from a distance / Open anyway / Leave; a lock offers Pick / Force / Leave. Picking or disarming without thieves' tools is −15%. A failed pick waits for a level-up; a failed disarm springs the trap. Random hoards roll once when first opened. Gems and jewellery: list them by name with a value — "a 500 gp sapphire", "gold torc (300 gp)" — and they arrive as valuables (jewellery unappraised). Plain coin above 200 gp splits on its own: half coin, half gems and jewellery. The Gilded Wheel (gambling hall) is Goldveil-only for now; module towns have no hall.

Traps and riddles. Every authored DC maps to the one-roll tier: ≤10 obvious (+10), 11–13 standard (0), 14–16 cunning (−15), 17+ diabolical (−30). Only a thief with free hands disarms. Rangers spot on the rogue table at half ranger level; everyone else uses 15% + 5% per Intellect modifier point. A found trap can be Sprung from a distance: a local dart, blade, needle or pit hurts nobody, while area gas, glyphs, alarms and portcullises still reach the company. “Brave it” is gone from the live choice; springing from afar replaced it. Riddles may bar passage, cost leader damage, spring a trap, exhaust attempts, or unlock the room's chest.

Levels: pits, cliffs, ladders, tunnels and stairs. With more than one dungeon in the chronicle, the tile painter's Stairs, Ladder, Pit, Cliff, Door and Arch brushes show a → level picker. A tile painted with a level chosen leads to that dungeon instead of pairing within the map: stepping on it takes the party there (the level is built on first visit and remembered after — fog, cleared rooms and all). A pit is down only: the fall does its damage and the party arrives below with no way back up that shaft — unless a rope is in someone's pack, in which case a pit the party can see is climbed down unhurt (a concealed pit nobody noticed is still a fall). A cliff is the opposite: a climb up. The party's thief rolls Climb Walls; with a rope in the packs the line is anchored and everyone follows (and can come back down it); without one the thief comes back down and the climb is remembered — the first step with a rope anchors it, no new roll. This rope rule now applies to every cliff, linked or not. Ladders, tunnels (a linked door or arch), stairs and roped cliffs are two-way — paint a matching tile in the other level linked back to this one and the party arrives on it; its exit, or that tile, returns them to the very rung they left.

Builder detail. The AI builder writes classic monster traits, weapon-immunity tiers and silver/cold-iron weaknesses where appropriate. It also places 1–3 writings per delve in real rooms; password writings seal real doors, while carried writings may appear in treasure, boss chests and key NPC packs.

The Studio's 📜 Writing tool pins a writing to a map cell. Choose its document kind and script flavour, then a payoff: clue, map, cache, password or warning. The chest writing editor places carried texts in hoards. A misread map or cache creates a decoy; a password seals a real door; once read, clue text is quoted by the AI Dungeon Master. AI-placed NPC writings live in key NPC packs but are not yet editable in the Studio.

The Town Guard and Watch Sergeant rows answer thieves and town violence. They are system cast: do not delete them. The heat bands and player consequences are listed in the Player's Manual.

The Sandbox is still the test bench. The Arena runs the same engine and the same hero build as the Sandbox, but only on its curated lists; try new creatures and gear in the Sandbox first.

• The arena menu. In the Monster Manual edit drawer, "On the arena menu" plus a group (Rabble, Warbands, Brutes, Horrors, Oddities, Legends) puts a creature in Skirmish and in the Tournament draw. Guests only ever see Rabble and Warbands. Unique or named creatures, summoners and band-callers, and anything without a figurine or 3D model, are kept out of Tournament draws.
• The hero roster. Each bracket (level 5 / 10 / 15) has its own roster of heroes, taken from the Sandbox. A run keeps snapshots, so editing the roster never changes a run in progress.
• The floors are built in code (src/lib/arena/arena-floors.ts): an octagonal obsidian wall on plain yellow-brown ground, with pillars and rubble placed straight onto the grid for the Colosseum. No scenery tags are needed — the planned scenery:arena-* tags were not required.
• The crowd (owner panel on the Arena page): twelve spectators, each painted calm and cheering (about $0.04 a painting), optionally sculpted in 3D and photographed from eight angles so they turn with the camera. Their name tag, race and sex can be edited. Spectators never become Monster Manual rows.
• The nobles' box: a Roman-style raised box on the north stands (columns, pediment, crimson drape, gilded standards). Its four nobles are painted once each, seated in a chair of state, from the same owner panel, and can be sculpted and photographed the same way. No real hero ever levels up in the Arena.
• Sounds: the Arena group in the Sound Studio (crowd reactions, gate, fanfare). Silent until a take is approved.

The Bestiary Voice dropdown offers Auto by type, 15 iconic voices and 11 type voices, each with ▶ preview. Playback resolves the creature's own voice first, then its type voice, then a synthesized fallback.

Sound Studio is owner-only: generate takes, approve one, adjust gain and starting offset, or Upload many by filename. Signature spell sounds override family sounds. Recorded voice or spell audio may be absent, but battle never goes silent: synthesis is always the fallback.

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. Replaced sculpts are kept in the Salvage Vault for reuse.

The figurine generator paints three standing variants from a portrait; choose one. Sculpt turns that figurine into a rotatable model. The Loremaster allowance is 40 sculpts each month, standard or premium, with prepaid packs for more. Premium is the higher-detail tier. Changing the chosen figurine clears its old sculpt so the new figure can be made. The yaw calibrator fits every model into its viewer without changing battle size; size class sets battlefield height and the scale slider is only a nudge.

Exploration is drawn automatically: module dungeons use the retro tile view (Gold Box style), and settlements use the wide painted street view. A per-place renderer choice overrides both; the global toggle only affects stand-alone dungeons. In towns, only streets and painted buildings can be walked — every building is marked by a sign or the narrator.