Rolling the Dice on Human Storytelling: The Brimstone Beta Launch

Underdog stories are a classic for a reason. Rolling the dice against great odds is what I live for. This is why I love playing Dungeons & Dragons. For 6 years I sat down every weekend for 4 hours with my friends and we created a story together. And then the story ended and I looked at all of that we accomplished and there were so many emotions, so many memories. But a lot of it was difficult to find because in my chaotic note taking, I had saved so much information in different files and trying to find anything in them was impossible.

The Quest for the Perfect Notebook

So when I decided to build a new world and start a new game, I was sure that this time I would take better notes, organize well and have a really good Lore Bible by the end of it. I was looking at all of the software options out there and some were decent but none really did what I needed. So in my eagerness I decided to start looking into solving it on my own. I looked at what technology is out there and what I could do with it.

After early testing and talking to friends and other writers I realized I wasn’t alone in my problem. This is something that a lot of writers face, whether their own notes and files or looking at a long running project, it can be overwhelming to get answers from it.

Every big company is currently looking at how to make some AI model to write the answers for you and give up the most interesting part about creating.

Mind-Maps are Still the Best

So this is where Brimstone comes in. You process your entire project catalogue and get a cohesive mind-map that visualizes every character, location, creature, object, and more. You can view attributes of each entity and the relationships between them. You can track down every plot and storyline and with a press of a button find it in your files. For me this meant that I could put my entire old note catalogue in and find all the forgotten memories. It became even more useful when working on new projects and trying to make sure that things connect in the way I want.

Brimstone automatically creates a dynamic mind-map linking characters, places, and plotlines.

Photo via Unsplash

And There's More...

The unexpected new result that grew out of it is that now I could add new information to this and compare, making sure that it’s consistent with the rest of the Lore Bible. In Brimstone that’s actually built in. You can check any new files for inconsistencies and it’ll show a comparison where information about entities doesn’t match.

This way when in the flow-state of writing a new scene I don’t have to worry if my description of a small side character is consistent. I can just check later and make sure it is. No need to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars to proofread everything.

Something that’s personally important to me: I don’t want to outsource my creative work and writing. That’s the part I enjoy, that’s why I love storytelling. So it feels like building Brimstone without generative AI is like one of the D&D campaigns, fighting against the great odds. These big companies are selling this idea of replacing writers with AI. And here I am trying to make sure that only humans do the writing. So Brimstone is that, it automates a lot of the boring tasks without needing to generate any text for me. I can make all the decisions and mistakes. Brimstone will tell me if something looks off but it will never tell me what the right answer is. That’s up to me.

Join the Beta

After working on this for a long time and testing with many select users, we are now at a place where we’re able to open the beta test to all users. If you’re a professional writer or a hobbyist, try it out. It’s currently only on Windows but we’ll expand soon. I believe that the future isn’t outsourced intelligence as some people put it.