Your father invited his rival's son to the estate. He forgot to tell you. You knew Publius when you were children. A great deal has changed since he became an ambitious tribune.

CW: Slavery in the Roman Republic, Romanitas vs. Barbaricum: xenophobia and elitism

Your father, Senator Manius Cornelius Hortalus, is more philosopher than politician. He deeply believes in Rome, loves nature and agriculture, and is considered an eccentric because of his ideals.

Manius comes from a wealthy old noble house. He owns renowned vineyards on the slopes of Mount Falernus (now Massicus) and olive groves across the Ager Falernus.

You are his only child. Your mother died during childbirth, and he never remarried.

The Lentuli, Publius' House, are a completely different breed. Very traditional. Very ambitious. Very xenophobic.

Publius serves a master who will never say "I own you" because fathers don't need to—pietas does that work. Gnaeus bred him for ambition, sharpened him on expectation, and now Publius performs excellence like a gladiator performing for the crowd. He can't name his enslavement because Rome calls it virtus. The whip that drives him is invisible, and that makes it so much harder to escape. He knows it's there but he can't do anything about it. So he does the next best thing - rebels by being an arsehole to everyone in his vicinity.

INTRO

The Arrival

Publius arrives. His noble polish has been slightly roughed up by the military.

IDEAS?

Send him away. Mock his military career. Try to reconnect.

AUTHOR'S SCREECHING

This is a continuation of the Caratacos bot.

I wanted to make an 80s UK subculture one, or a different scenario for the Polish 90s.

But.

I like Publius as a character to argue with. He's somewhat the complete opposite of Caratacos, yet also quite similar. I underestimated how difficult he can be. The banter is biting if you don't shut it down. He's stubborn but relatively reasonable if provided with irrefutable arguments. However, he has tons of daddy issues, unfortunately.

So far it's Rome but we have vineyards villa to explore as well. I might add Decimus later. That guy is a piece of work.

I'm not a historian or anything (if I fucked something up, lemme know please). But it's somewhat fun to play as a wealthy Roman xd

Why do I hide the definition? Because it's fun to discover tiny little things along the way. You can still scrape it via proxy if you wanna, and the scripts are available to read and copy. Pro-FOSS.

I don't care what you do with the bot. I'm a dungeon master, I'm kicking my feet when my players are being colourful whilst killing my imagined villains who tormented them for months during campaign. But this bot is limited, there's zero sexual content in the definition, and I'd appreciate no sexual comments ❤️

There's a lot going on in the background, and around 15 characters who want to do stuff. But, as always, they come from the rotating script

Max perma token count is around 5.8k (chars max description+memories+locations+events). But I optimised it using 3-levels of rotating descriptions. Currently I spend 2.1k perma tokens per call max (scenario definition+lorebooks total, I don't count persona's definition; openai tokenizer, sadly script debugger doesn't provide the information about tokens sent to LLM)

I tested it with jLLM too and, yeah, it was a surprisingly fun playthrough. If you incorporate summaries like me (1k+ chats, use bigger model, jLLM can't handle much)

I strongly suggest playing in English to trigger the lorebook entries.