What is Tome Smith?

What is Tome Smith?

Hi there. My name is Jeff and I'm the founder and lead developer at Tome Smith.

Which is ... what exactly?

It's a virtual assistant that harnesses the power of AI to empower you to enjoy your games mores. Whether as a GM or player, you can ask the Chat Bot about campaign background and previous gameplay sessions and get useful answers. And it's game system agnostic. Play whatever role-playing game you want, and Tome Smith will be here to help.

Let me go back in time for a moment.

I've been playing role-playing games for a long, long time. Like multiple decades kind of long. And I've spent a great deal of that time behind the GM's screen. And whether I'm running a home-brew game, or using a pre-published adventure, I often found myself struggling to remember important details.

I mean, c'mon. Who can remember the name of the barkeep from the town three session ago? Not me, that's who. So Tome Smith grew out of a real need that I experienced week in and week out while playing with my friends.

It's easier to explain with an example. Below is a screenshot of me asking the Chat Bot about a campaign. Note that this is a campaign for which I'm the GM, so there may be players spoilers in the response (though not in the screenshot). When I upload a document to Tome Smith, I can designate whether or not it contains spoilers.

The core functionality depends on a technology called Retrieval Augmented Generation. This is just a fancy way of saying you can upload documents and session audio recordings and have an LLM-based chat bot have all that information in its context when it answers your questions.

What kind of documents? All sorts. PDFs, word documents, text documents, however you're keeping your notes. If we don't yet support the document format you use, let us know through the Contact form, and we'll try to add it as soon as we can.

The ability to upload audio recordings of your gameplay sessions is another great feature of Tome Smith. The system will automatically transcribe the audio, assign speakers based on PCs and NPCs you've added to your campaign, and give you a scene-by-scene summary of what happened. All of this then becomes queryable by the Chat Bot. So now you can ask "What was the name of the King's Senechal?" and get back an answer in seconds.

But wait, I hear you saying, will my documents and session recordings be used to train an AI model? No, not at all. We use existing models that have already been trained. The information you upload is used to seed the context of the model. Which basically means the chat bot knows everything that has happened in your campaign, and everything you have planned. Think of the Chat Bot as a helpful assistant who can keep track of all the things that tend to slip your mind.

You might be thinking why not just use ChatGPT or some other mainstream LLM to do all this? The short answer is that those systems, while very impressive, can't do what Tome Smith does. Believe me, I've tried. In the end, it's impossible for an LLM to keep an entire campaign's worth of background information and session happenings to give accurate answers.

I'm still working on the site, and am not quite ready to launch. But I'm hoping to do so in the coming months. If you're interested in knowing about it when the site does launch, sign up for the mailing list. (There's a signup form on the home page.) There's a chance I'll be pulling beta testers from that list, so sign up early, spots will be limited.

I plan to add more blog posts on a regular basis, both about progress on Tome Smith, and my own thoughts and advice on running and playing role-playing games. Check this space. Or, you know, subscribe to the RSS feed. There's a link at the bottom of the page.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Gaming!