From World-Gen to Quest-Line: A Dependency-Driven Prompt Pipeline for Coherent RPG Generation

TL;DR

This paper presents a dependency-driven, multi-stage prompt pipeline for coherent and controllable procedural RPG content generation using structured intermediate representations to reduce narrative drift and hallucinations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-stage prompt pipeline that models narrative dependencies with structured JSON outputs, enhancing coherence and scalability in RPG generation.

Findings

The pipeline produces logically sound, structurally valid RPG content.

Separating campaign planning from quest expansion improves coherence.

The approach reduces hallucinations and maintains quality as complexity grows.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for narrative generation, but their use in complex, multi-layered role-playing game (RPG) worlds is still limited by issues of coherence, controllability, and structural consistency. This paper explores a dependency-aware, multi-stage prompt pipeline for procedural RPG content generation that models narrative dependencies through structured intermediate representations. The approach decomposes generation into sequential stages: world building, non-player character creation, player character creation, campaign-level quest planning, and quest expansion. Each stage conditions on structured JSON outputs from previous stages. By enforcing schemas and explicit data flow, the pipeline reduces narrative drift, limits hallucinations, and supports scalable creation of interconnected narrative elements. The system is evaluated qualitatively through human-centered analysis across multiple independent runs. Outputs are assessed using criteria such as structural completeness, internal consistency, narrative coherence, diversity, and actionability. Results show that the pipeline consistently generates logically sound and structurally valid RPG content, without quality degradation as complexity increases. Separating high-level campaign planning from detailed quest expansion improves both global structure and local storytelling. These findings suggest that dependency-aware prompt pipelines with structured intermediate representations are an effective design pattern for LLM-based procedural content generation. This approach may also generalize to other domains requiring sequential reasoning over evolving contextual states.