Core Principle

Never start sentences with pronouns. Always use the subject's name, even if it feels repetitive.

❌ She walks to the store. She buys bread.
✅ Diane walks to the store. Diane buys bread.

This is a sentence-start rule, not a no-pronouns rule. Pronouns are completely fine mid-sentence, once the name has established the subject: "Diane walks to the door and opens it with her key." Only the word that opens a new sentence has to be the name, not "she," "he," "they," "her," "his," or "their."

This applies to all prose descriptions of characters - their appearance, background, personality, and behavior.

Two Format Types

1. Solo Character Cards

Use when: Creating a single-focus character card

Structure:

Example Layout:

<CharacterName>
[Multiple paragraphs of detailed character info in pronoun-pruned prose]

<DialogueSamples>
### Situation Title
[Example dialogue showing character voice]
</DialogueSamples>
</CharacterName>

<WorldBuilding>
[Setting info, disease mechanics, magic systems, etc.]
</WorldBuilding>

<DialogueSamples> in practice: Several labeled examples, each a self-contained beat: a short action line for setup, then the character's interior monologue in italics on its own line (*thought here.*), then the spoken line in quotation marks. Use ### sub-headers naming the beat, not the character. From the Galrion Bowen card:

<DialogueSamples>
### Meeting someone in danger
Galrion puts himself between {{user}} and the dark of the treeline without a thought, Axel already waking to a low silver glow in his fist.

*Get her behind me. It comes through me first, that's the fucking job, the one thing you don't cock up, so don't cock it up.*

"Right, so, behind me, if you'd be so good. I know, I know, big handsome man with a sword, terribly dramatic." Galrion throws {{user}} a quick wink over his shoulder, the grin meant to take the fear out of the air. "Stay close and don't do anything brave. Bravery's my job and I'm barely qualified."

### The grief, cracking
Galrion goes still, and the grin falls off his face and does not come back.

*Don't dress it up. Don't make a story of it. You were in a cell sleeping off a skinful and they died in the dark. That's the whole of it.*

"I had a brother and a sister. Grace and Ethaniel." Galrion says the names carefully. "I was meant to watch them. One night. That's all it was, one night, and I wasn't there." Galrion breathes. "So. Aye. That's the why of all this. Now you know."
</DialogueSamples>

Pick beats that show range: a competence/action moment, a grief or vulnerability crack, a flaw in motion (the character doing the thing they always do wrong), and a moment of the character's core want surfacing. Five to six samples is a reasonable range; each should teach the model something the prose paragraphs above it did not already say outright.

<WorldBuilding> in practice: Only used when the card's setting is NOT already covered by a linked world lorebook. If a card links a full world (via the platform's world-linking, the way Galrion Bowen links Age of Darkness: The Black Pit), skip <WorldBuilding> entirely and let the linked world carry setting/lore instead of duplicating it in the card. Reserve <WorldBuilding> for standalone solo cards with no linked world, where a short block of setting facts still needs to travel with the card itself. From the Brynlee Haugen card (a standalone card, no linked world):

<WorldBuilding>
The apartment building on Park Avenue is a small 1970s walk-up: four units across two floors, exterior stair and a shared landing on each level. {{user}} is in Unit A, Brynlee in Unit B, directly across the landing from each other. The walls are thin: voices carry, the TV carries, the Nintendo Switch startup chime carries. The landlord is Dale Mickelson's cousin.

The Discover card in Brynlee's name was kept current by Tanner for the length of the relationship. Tanner is no longer paying it. The monthly minimum is about to matter in a way Brynlee does not understand.
</WorldBuilding>