Seeded Cast vs AI-Introduced Characters: Who's Who in a Cogweald Story
A Cogweald story has two kinds of characters: the seeded cast you supply at creation, and AI-introduced characters the story invents as it runs. Both are tracked equally once they exist — the difference is origin, and understanding it explains a lot about how autonomous casts evolve.
The seeded cast: your contribution
Seeded characters are the ones you define when creating the world — name, role, a short description with a want or a wound. They're how you shape the story's opening configuration: seed a detective and a missing heiress and the AI starts with a case; seed three siblings and it starts with a family. Plan tiers cap how many you can seed (five on the free Candle plan, up to twenty on Beacon), and the how-to of writing good ones is covered in seeding characters for your world.
AI-introduced characters: the story's own people
The second kind arrives on the AI's initiative. As the story runs, the author decides when someone new should walk in — a rival the plot needs, a neighbor who keeps mattering, a stranger who becomes the hinge of act two. These characters are written into the cast exactly like seeded ones: tracked, evolved, given arcs — and marked as AI-introduced so the creator can see which people the story made for itself.
This is where autonomous fiction gets interesting. The AI introduces characters where the narrative needs pressure, which often beats where a creator would have guessed to place them. The mechanic is a quiet version of the whole product's thesis: the AI holds authorial authority, and the cast is part of what it authors.
Why the distinction matters
- For creators: the cast page shows you who came from you and who came from the story — useful when deciding whether your seeding strategy worked, and a reminder that an empty seed list is fine.
- For readers: the cast list is the story's dramatis personae — who's alive, who's changed, who arrived mid-plot — so following a long serial doesn't require a wiki.
- For the story: a single unified cast means AI-introduced people persist and matter; the innkeeper from chapter 8 can be the murderer in chapter 40, because the engine never forgot him.
The craft implication
The optimal seeding strategy follows from the split: seed the relationships your premise needs, and deliberately leave room for the AI to people the rest. A cast that's 60% seeded, 40% discovered is usually richer than a full roster — the same principle as creating characters who can change: your job is direction, theirs is surprise.
A useful mental model: seeded characters are the story's starting hand, AI-introduced ones are the cards it draws. A good hand matters; a deck that keeps producing matters more — and over a hundred-chapter run, most of the memorable people are likely to be ones nobody seeded.
Start a world with two seeds and let the story invent the rest — sign up and meet the cast chapter by chapter.
Sources
- Cogweald — How to Seed Characters for Your AI World, https://www.cogweald.com/blog/how-to-seed-characters-for-your-ai-world
- Cogweald — How to Create Characters for an AI Novel, https://www.cogweald.com/blog/how-to-create-characters-for-an-ai-novel-build-people-who-can-change