Keeping a long roleplay consistent, from the first arc to the fifth

Why long threads drift

An AI partner only sees what fits in its context window, and free tiers are not generous. On several popular platforms the free context sits somewhere between about 4,000 and 9,000 tokens, which is a few dozen messages once the character card has taken its share. Everything older is simply gone, and the model fills the gap by guessing.

Human partners drift for the same reason with a different cause. Nobody rereads four hundred posts before replying. The fix is the same for both: keep the facts that matter somewhere short, and put that short thing back in front of everyone regularly.

The running summary

This is the one tool I would keep if I could only keep one. After every scene, or every forty messages or so, update a summary of the story so far. Write it in the present tense, as facts, and keep it under 250 words. Track who knows what, because secrets are where continuity breaks first.

STORY SO FAR (after scene 14)
Where: the Low Tide, moored at Corran, night.
Who knows what:
- Rhian knows the navigator found the rubbed-out sandbar.
- The navigator does not know who owned Rhian's coat.
- The harbour watch suspects the barge, not the crew.
Open threads:
- The last navigator is still missing.
- Rhian owes the Corran fence two crates by Friday.
Between them: a wary truce, one shared joke (the coffee).

Most AI tools have somewhere to put this. In SillyTavern it is the Summarize extension, which can update on its own and lets you edit the result; its docs warn that automatic summaries drop details and sometimes invent them, so read every update before you trust it. With a human partner, post it out of character at the start of each session.

Lorebook entries for things that come back

Places, side characters, objects and rules of the world all belong in a lorebook, not in the character card. A lorebook entry is only sent when one of its keywords appears in recent messages, so the tavern in Corran costs nothing until somebody walks back into it. Most serious platforms have some version of this; the SillyTavern setup guide shows how World Info entries and their keywords work.

Keep each entry to a few lines and write it so it makes sense on its own, because the keywords and title are not sent with it. One thing per entry. "Corran: river town, two docks, the fence works out of the chandlery, the watch captain drinks at the Gull" is a good entry. A page of town history is not.

A character sheet that changes

The card describes who a character is. It should barely change. Alongside it, keep a short current-state sheet for what does change: injuries, what they are wearing, what they carry, who they trust this week, and which secrets are out.

Update it after any scene where something lands. If the navigator learned about the coat in scene twenty, the sheet says so, and nobody has to remember whether that conversation happened or was only planned. In a group campaign, one sheet per player character, kept by the host, saves a lot of arguments.

Pinned notes for the current scene

Some facts only matter for tonight: the weather, the time, the fact that a door is locked and one person has the key. Pinned notes are the right home for those. Several platforms now let you pin text so it stays in the prompt, and SillyTavern's Author's Note does the same job with control over how deep in the chat it lands.

Clear them when the scene ends. A pinned note that says "it is raining" will keep it raining for three weeks of story time if you let it.

Recaps between sessions

When a thread has been quiet for a few days, open with a recap before anyone writes in character. Three to five lines is plenty: where we are, what just happened, what each character wants right now. Ask your partner to correct anything you got wrong. This takes two minutes and catches most contradictions before they reach the story.

Handling drift without stopping the scene

When something goes wrong, fix it in this order, from least disruptive to most.

• Correct it in character. If the bartender is suddenly called Tom, have Rhian say "Thanks, Sal" in the next line. Partners and models both tend to follow.
• Swipe or regenerate an AI reply that contradicts the record, rather than arguing with it.
• Edit the bad message if your tool allows it, so the mistake does not sit in the history and get copied.
• Step out of character briefly, in double parentheses, with one sentence: ((Quick note, Sal is the bartender, Tom was the dock hand.)).
• If a character has drifted for many scenes, reread their card and current-state sheet together and post a reply that is unmistakably them.

Splitting the story into arcs

A thousand-message chat is a strain on any context window and on anyone trying to find anything in it. Arcs fix both. End an arc when a goal is met, the location changes for good, or time jumps forward. Then start a fresh chat carrying three things: the latest summary, the updated sheets, and a new opening post that picks up the story.

The new opening matters more than people expect, because it resets the length and tone of everything after it. The guide to writing an opening message applies to arc two as much as arc one. Name your arcs, too. "Arc 3: The Corran Debt" is easier to search than "chat (4) final FINAL".

A maintenance routine

1. After every scene, update the current-state sheet.
2. Every forty messages or so, update the summary and read it back.
3. When a new place or person appears twice, give it a lorebook entry.
4. At the start of a session, post a recap and clear stale pinned notes.
5. At the end of an arc, start a fresh chat with the summary, the sheets and a new opening.

None of this is glamorous. That is the point. The campaigns of mine that reached a thousand messages all ran on a text file, a habit and a partner who did not mind a recap. If you are starting a campaign from nothing, the scenario generator can draft the first setup, and this routine takes it from there.

Questions