An AI co-GM for Savage Worlds, whichever setting you play

Same dice every time, different world every time

Deadlands, Rifts, Savage Pathfinder, Holler: every one of them runs on the same trait dice, the same Wild Die and the same action deck. That is what makes the system portable, and it is also what makes the split here easy to point at.

Your Foundry system already owns that layer, and owns it well. It builds the trait die and the Wild Die into one pool and lets them ace. It works out the wound and fatigue penalty before you have finished reading the card, deals the action deck at the top of every round, reshuffles on a Joker, and opens the Soak prompt when a hit gets through.

Setting Rules are checkboxes there too. Gritty Damage, Wound Cap, Heroes Never Die, Joker's Wild: you tick the ones your table uses and the system carries them from then on. Chase and Dramatic Task are combat types it knows by name.

None of that is where a Savage Worlds evening gets hard. The one thing the system cannot know is which world it is in. A border town in the Weird West, a wilderness stop in Rifts and a Varisian road are three different rooms with three different accents and three different reasons to be nervous, and the mechanics underneath them are identical. Familiar works from the one you imported: the journals you wrote and the campaign notes already sitting in that world.

• The room described and lit while the cards are still being dealt
• Every Extra in the scene given a voice of its own, without any of them taking the evening over
• A session written up into your own world, so a Plot Point Campaign keeps its record between chapters
• A portrait or a handout made when the table needs to see the thing rather than hear about it
• A campaign record that survives the jump from one world to the next, because it lives in Foundry rather than in a context window

• How the prep, read and run loop worksWhat belongs on a journal page so the AI narrates your setting rather than a generic version of it.

What gets dropped when the table is moving this fast

Savage Worlds moves. That is most of the reason people play it, and it is also why the parts that are not printed on a card are the parts that slip.

None of these are rules problems. Every one of them is attention, and there is only so much of that going spare while a Chase is running.

• A Chase is on, the cards are out, and the street it happens in gets three words because you are busy counting complications
• The Wild Card the party has been circling for four sessions finally speaks, and has to sound like it was worth the wait
• A Dramatic Task wants a consequence described every round, not another token counted
• Six Extras go down in a round and the aftermath still has to look like the setting it happened in
• Somebody asks what the broker actually promised them two sessions back, and nobody wrote it down

One request, while the cards are still out

"They reach the mining camp after dark. Set the scene, and give me the assayer who would rather they moved on." That is one sentence, and not one part of it is a die.

Familiar reads the journal page you wrote for that camp and narrates what is on it. It sets the light low, brings the wind up, and holds an ambient track under the scene. The assayer arrives with the want you gave him in your notes and the thing he would rather not mention, and he keeps the same voice for as long as the camp is on the table.

Ask for a session note once the camp is behind them and it writes one into your world, so the next time anybody asks about the assayer the answer is on a page instead of in your head.

The trait rolls, the Soak and everything a Wound does to the next roll stay on the SWADE side of the table. What Familiar covers is the work that scene would otherwise have taken before anybody sat down.

Pace is the thing it has to get right here

Vocabulary is the easy part. On a Savage Worlds world the terms come out right from the first request: Wild Cards and Extras, Bennies, Shaken, a Raise, a Test, Support. Ask a rules question and it looks through the compendia and journals your world has installed, then leaves the call with you.

Tempo is the harder part. A scene that runs long has stopped being a Savage Worlds scene, and an AI answering a simple request with four paragraphs of weather is the thing making it run long.

That is what the starter below is for, and it leans harder on pace than on terminology. Where the other starters mostly hand over a vocabulary, this one hands over a tempo, and then says whose turn it is to be interesting. Paste it in and it is the brief Familiar works from for the rest of the campaign.

The Setting line in that starter is left open on purpose. The same table can run the Weird West this month and Rifts the next, and that one line is the only thing that has to change.

Where the rules engine stops

On Savage Worlds, Familiar runs everything around the rules, and the rules are the one thing it does not touch.

Refereeing the rules is D&D 5e (2024) only. In combat the tracker, the turns, and the tokens still work; the rulings stay yours.

One setting to change: turn the combat auto-pilot off in Familiar's settings. It drives NPC turns through the 5e engine, so it does not know your system; the monsters' turns stay yours to run. Playing solo, that is the part you will feel.

This table is read from Savage Worlds's own data model and Familiar's shipped code. It has not yet been run at a live Savage Worlds table, so nothing here is described as observed.

The starter your table begins from

Familiar carries a Table Rules field per world, under Settings, System Rules. Whatever you put there is appended to every request, and it reaches your MCP client too.

Savage Worlds has its own starter, offered first when Familiar sees your world. It is a starting point rather than a ruleset: the terms, the table culture, and slots for your setting, your tone, and your house rules. Paste it, then cut what does not match your table.

We play Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. Use this system's terms: trait dice and the Wild Die, Bennies, Shaken, Aces, Raises, and Wild Cards versus Extras. Look rules up in this world's compendium and journals, and defer all rules adjudication to the GM.
Let the SWADE system handle dice, Bennies, initiative cards, conditions, and damage.
Standing guidance:
- Cut to the action and keep it moving. Give a routine task one roll, not a whole scene.
- Hand out Bennies freely for a bold move, a clever plan, or a Hindrance played to the hilt.
- Let Extras fall fast and save the spotlight for Wild Cards, the foes worth a name.
- Reward a Test, a Trick, or one hero setting up another over trading the same attack twice.
- When a roll fails, raise the stakes with a fresh complication rather than stalling the scene.
- Describe the action like a scene from a film, loose enough to picture without a grid.
- Recall past events from the written notes, not memory, and say plainly when something was never recorded.
Setting: [your setting or a licensed world].
Tone: [fast, furious, and fun, or your table's mood].
House rules:
- [rule]
Never speak or decide for the player characters.

Where it deliberately knows less than your sheet does

One of these is a decision somebody made on purpose. The other is a tool declining a job that does not exist in this system.

• Wounds count up from zero here rather than down to it. A tool reading that number as a pool would call a hero in perfect shape one about to drop, so Familiar does not read it as one at all. Your Wound and Fatigue counts still reach the model in the raw sheet data and it can talk about them, but nothing is keeping score for you: not the scene listing, not the token strip, not the GM screen.
• Advances, experience and recovery are Savage Worlds' own business, and the tools for them know it. Ask Familiar to take a character up a rank, award experience, or rest the party between scenes, and it names your system and hands the job straight back rather than writing to fields that mean something else here.

Your system makes the same call. SWADE ships with no primary token attribute at all, so on a fresh world nothing is watching that number by default, and Familiar is not the odd one out for leaving it alone.

The setting you actually bought

Pinnacle publishes its settings for Foundry itself, so a table that owns them has the whole world sitting in its compendia: the Weird West, Rifts, Savage Pathfinder, Holler, and the companions around them.

That decides where the answers come from. Familiar searches the packs your world actually has, so the creature it puts on the map and the location it reads out came from the book you paid for rather than from a model half remembering it. Where nobody has published a module, your own journals do the same job.

It is also why changing worlds costs you nothing here. The next campaign arrives with its own modules and its own journals, and what Familiar reads changes with them.

• Laying a published setting into FoundryGetting an adventure onto the page as journals and sheets, so there is something to read from.

The parts that are the same everywhere

Connecting an AI, choosing a model, and what it costs do not change with your game system.

• Everything Familiar can doThe full tool reference. Everything outside combat refereeing runs on your system too.
• Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or GeminiThe connection steps, identical on every game system.
• Choosing an AI modelWhich model, and how much thinking headroom a hard scene needs.
• AI voices for your NPCsTTS setup and voice pinning, the same on every game system.
• Campaign memoryThe record and the recall, unchanged by your game system.