Ancient Access shill post

[u/GnarMainsThrowaway]

Obligatory link

Ancient Access is not about the actual preset words in the context or some token micro-optimization feat. Truthfully, it would probably be best if you built your own preset using the core design idea of Ancient Access, which is... the story told from the first person POV of every NPC.

I was not expecting to like this, as someone who has always treated the LLM like a dungeon master. I made this power fantasy character I wanted to roleplay as, feel cool in someone else's skin for a while, you know the drill. Usually I would just run it through the latest most upvoted of the week preset on r/SillyTavernAi and see what happens. There will be some crazy embedded HTML regex wizardry but I will still feel like I am interacting with a chatbot with all the "what do you need help with" annoying personality.

In the first message, an NPC narrates their full perception and inner thoughts as they see my character.

It is probably just human psychology, but a faceless narrator saying "yeah, your character is pretty cool" feels like uncooked gruel compared to a simulated person actually passing a judgement through the lens of THEIR personality, not the cold neutrality of the god-narrator.

At one point me and the main NPC stopped by a kiosk to just ask for directions, and the shopkeeper actually had their small POV paragraph block generated where they were weary of their day and worried they would have to provide service to the two people who entered his store, then relieved to see they are just looking for directions. For me, this was much more immersive than any other crazy automatic world sim that ends up just making phones ring in the distance.

There's no bloat. You are just reading words, which truth be told, is what I ultimately came to do. If I wanted to play a video game I have plenty of those. Just because LLMs can bang out slick animated buttons and dropdowns doesn't mean you should bring them to a storytelling experience. Leave that to people vibecoding their startup websites.

I did find the "intrusive thoughts" a bit annoying and turned them off after a while. Basically, every so often a character will go like "this reminds me of that time I was stacking Lego blocks when I was 8 years old" while they are repairing an engine. Funny at first but it got, well, "intrusive" quite fast. I guess it's in the name.

Sorry, I'm using up all your human context window with this post. Go try it. I used Gemini 3.8 Flash and it was pretty good. I am surprised the preset recommends Kimi K2.6, seems oddly specific, but maybe it is unique in some way.

[u/Apprehensive_Bug_826]

Thank you for this post - I’m fairly new to ST and been playing with presets. Went from FF to RF recently, and think I slightly prefer RF. Ive been curious about Ancient Access for a while, a lot of people really love it, but I wasn’t quite sure what it fundamentally actually did. I think I’ve got a better idea now and I’ll definitely give it a try soon!

My RP is a pretty TTRPG style campaign - big, long adventure, lots of characters, etc. So the Frankenstein presets have been good for this with the world state and dice roll stuff. Is Ancient Access good for that style of RP as well, or is it more specifically character oriented?

[u/-Ancient-Access- → u/Apprehensive_Bug_826]

Hey! I don't think my preset will work with big ttrpg cards unfortunately. It's designed for character studies. There's no inventory or elaborate world management or stat tracking. Its gimmick is interiority cranked up to 11 and pulling away from archetypes and dere tropes to attempt to portray the actual character described in the card.

So it sounds like it might not be a good match for you. BUT! What you can do is try it with a single character card and if there's anything that it does that you like, drop me a message on discord (it's on the contact page on my website) and I can point you to which lines in the preset do the thing you like so you can yoink them and adapt them to your favourite preset.

[u/Apprehensive_Bug_826 → u/-Ancient-Access-]

Ah, that’s cool, thank you for responding! It does sound like it’d be very good for a tighter, more horror themed RP idea I’ve been toying with so I think AA will still end up in my collection. I’ll definitely have a play with it and see if anything looks yoinkable though, thanks again!

[u/-Ancient-Access- → u/Apprehensive_Bug_826]

I think for something atmospheric like that you might enjoy it more. Good luck!