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Quick Start Guide

Table of Contents

There are four general ways to play today, and each has its own section.

  1. Play a Web Game
  2. Play a TTRPG Session
    1. Proposing Canon
  3. Play by Social Media
    1. By Comment or Post
    2. By Discord
    3. By Stream Participation
  4. Play the TCG

Please review the section on Proposing Canon if you are interested in making a narrative contribution!

Play a Web Game

Visit ariastale.com and click the Games item in the site navigation menu!

Play a TTRPG Session

Visit the TTRPG Game Manual, copy the contents to clipboard, and paste the instructions into your favorite large language model!

Aria's Tale TTRPG is optimized for large language models with a context window size of more than 30k tokens. Optionally, using multimodal models with a code compiler for programmatically fair die rolls and image generation capabilities may further improve your experience. Here is a list of models that are known to work well:

  1. ChatGPT Premium, with GPT-4o or higher
  2. Claude Sonnet 3.5 or higher
  3. Gemini, with Flash or Pro 1.5 or higher
  4. Grok 2 or higher
  5. Llama 3.1 or higher

For advanced play using a code compiler, consider using two two alternative rule sets:

  1. Advanced Mode, featuring CSV roll tables and encyclopedia data for more consistent gameplay
  2. Experimental Mode, featuring:
    1. Detailed character JSON files allowing for software-driven gaming and lower level strategy
    2. Alternative and work-in-progress battle modes such as strategic rpg battles with positional character data

Proposing Canon

We encourage you to submit stories, gameplay sessions, and fan fiction for canonization into the Aria's Tale official narrative content!

Here are some ways to submit:

  1. Create a GitHub issue or pull request with a plain text draft of your content
  2. Create a GitHub issue or pull request with a markdown draft of your content
  3. Post a link to your published game play session on the Ladderly.io Discord, or create a GitHub issue mentioning the URL

Play by Social Media

TikTok is currently the most popular channel, but feel free to post on any social media channel! Use #ariastale for the highest chance of discovery by the community.

Play by Comment or Post

The general idea is:

  1. Someone spawns a new TTRPG campaign by posting about a scene and action
  2. Individuals across the community take turns by making moves on that same thread
  3. Individuals feed their actions into a language model, which then resolves the action or describes the result
  4. Return to step 2 until the episode resolves

On TikTok, there is an official Aria's Tale TikTok account which has a pinned video that you can use to play. You can comment on this video, or use TikTok stitch or duet features, which are posting techniques, to continue the game!

Play by Discord

You can comment on the #gaming channel in the Ladderly.io Discord server to play a move or just chat about the game!

Play by Stream

John Vandivier is the lead maintainer for Aria's Tale as an open source project. He often holds live gameplay or development sessions for Aria's Tale. You can impact the game world as an audience member during gameplay sessions, and you can also contact John and request to join a stream as an on-camera player!

John streams mainly to TikTok and YouTube. Here is a YouTube playlist of some prior gameplay and development streams.