Writers Guild

AI-powered short story writing application that supports Tavern character cards and SillyTavern lorebooks.

Features

• Interactive Story Writing - Pick one or multiple characters, optionally assign a character as your persona, and go on an adventure with them
• Character Card Support - Import Tavern V2 character cards from PNG or CHUB (or create one from scratch)
• Full Lorebook Support - Import SillyTavern lorebooks with fully featured activation engine
• ST Macro Support - Supports ST macros like {{random:a,b,c}} and {{pick:x,y,z}}
• Generation Control - Continue the story from a specific character's perspective; open-ended generation based on story context; or request specific events to occur.

Motivations

After years of using SillyTavern, I realized the character cards I enjoyed interacting with the most were very prose-like, and I started to suspect that the "chat" oriented nature of SillyTavern was actually preventing LLMs from fulfilling their potential as interactive story writers, and likely causing a lot of common issues (like repetitive messages, low creativity, etc).

So I decided to make Writers Guild, which uses the same character cards and lorebooks as SillyTavern, but uses them to write in a format more akin to a short story or novel. Writers Guild also attempts to enforce a consistent perspective (third) and tense (past), which is something a lot of character card authors struggle with, so it has a button to automatically rewrite the original greeting from the character into a consistent style (the most useful feature, imho).

Quick Start

Local Development (Recommended)

Run both server and client with one command:

# Install dependencies (first time only)
npm install
cd server && npm install && cd ..
cd vue_client && npm install && cd ..

# Start both server and client
npm run dev

This will start:

• Server on http://localhost:8000 (API)
• Vue Client on http://localhost:5173 (Dev UI with hot-reload)

Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser.

Or run separately:

# Terminal 1 - Server
cd server
npm install
npm run dev

# Terminal 2 - Vue Client
cd vue_client
npm install
npm run dev

Docker (Production)

docker-compose up -d

This builds the Vue client and serves it from the Node.js server on http://localhost:8000.

Setup

1. Open http://localhost:5173 (dev) or http://localhost:8000 (Docker)
2. Navigate to Settings and add your DeepSeek API key
3. Import character cards and lorebooks
4. Start writing!

Project Structure

writers-guild/
├── server/           # Node.js/Express API server
├── vue_client/       # Vue 3 frontend application
├── data/            # User data (stories, characters, lorebooks)
└── docker-compose.yml

Development

• Server: Node.js with Express, serves API and static files
• Client: Vue 3 with Vue Router and Vite
• Hot Reload: Both server and client support hot-reload in dev mode

API

The server runs on port 8000 and provides:

• /api/stories - Story management
• /api/characters - Character library
• /api/lorebooks - Lorebook management
• /api/settings - User settings
• / - Serves the Vue client (production) or forwards to Vite (dev)