The Complete Guide
The Companion Playbook
A complete guide to making characters that actually work.
Nine parts. Every field. Every decision point. Every mistake worth avoiding.
Writing the Scenario
The constitution of your roleplay.
Most characters don't need a Scenario section at all.
I want to start with that, because the instinct for most new creators is to see an empty field and fill it. The Scenario field exists on your platform, staring at you, and it feels wrong to leave it blank. So you write something. Usually the wrong thing.
The Scenario is the most powerful field in your character definition. It's also the most dangerous one to misuse. Understanding when and how to use it, and more importantly, when to leave it alone, is what separates thoughtful character design from a pile of conflicting instructions.
What the Scenario Actually Is
In Part 1, we established the basics: the Scenario is permanent. Like the Personality, the model reads it every single time it generates a response. It never gets trimmed. It never fades away. Whatever you write here, you're writing into the bones of reality.
But the Scenario isn't just another permanent field. It's the most permanent. On most platforms, it carries more weight than the Personality. The model treats information in the Scenario with extra gravity, like it's being told something fundamentally true about the world. If the Personality says your character is brave, the model takes that seriously. If the Scenario says your character is brave, the model takes it as gospel.
That extra weight is why the Scenario is so powerful. It's also why putting the wrong things in it causes so much damage.
The One Rule That Matters
That's it. That's the rule. Everything else follows from this.
Your character starts the story in a library? Don't put that in the Scenario. They'll leave the library eventually, and the model will spend the rest of the conversation subtly pulling the story back toward bookshelves because it's been told, permanently and with authority, that a library is where this story lives.
Your character is angry at {{user}} when the story begins? Don't put that in the Scenario. Emotions change. If the Scenario says she's angry, then even after the user spends twenty messages earning her trust, part of the model still believes anger is the baseline truth.
Your character has a broken arm at the start of the story? Don't put that in the Scenario. Arms heal. Establish it in the First Message and let the story handle the rest.
Anything temporary, anything situational, anything that's true right now but might not be true in fifty messages, belongs in the First Message or emerges through roleplay. The Scenario is for the things that stay true no matter what.
What Belongs in the Scenario
Think of the Scenario as the constitution of your roleplay. Not the plot. Not the opening scene. The foundational laws that everything else is built on.
If your character exists in a world that isn't our own, the Scenario is where that world gets established.
The story takes place aboard the Harken, a generation ship that has been drifting for 300 years. No one alive remembers Earth. The ship's systems are failing, and the population has fractured into three factions fighting over what remains. Resources are scarce. Violence is common. Trust is a luxury no one can afford.
This works because none of it will stop being true. The ship doesn't stop drifting. The factions don't stop existing. The scarcity doesn't go away. This is the permanent reality that every scene plays out against.
If your world has rules that the model needs to respect no matter what, the Scenario enforces them.
Psychics in this world can read surface emotions but never full thoughts. Using psychic abilities causes nosebleeds and migraines proportional to the effort. Pushing too hard causes seizures. No one has ever read a full thought without losing consciousness.
Without this in the Scenario, the model will eventually have your psychic character casually reading minds with no consequences, because that's what psychics do in most fiction the model has been trained on. The Scenario overrides those defaults. It says: not here. Here, there are costs.
Relationships that define the entire story, not relationships that will evolve and change.
{{char}} is the youngest daughter of the Empress. She is fourth in line for the throne and considered politically irrelevant by the court. Her eldest sister controls the military. Her second sister controls trade. Her third sister has been missing for six years. {{char}} is the only one who is still looking for her.The family structure, the political dynamics, the missing sister — these are foundational truths that inform everything. Even if the character's personal relationships with the user evolve dramatically, she's still the youngest daughter. These facts shape every scene without constraining what can happen within them.
Sometimes you need the model to follow a rule absolutely. Not a personality trait that might bend under pressure. A hard rule.
{{char}} will not willingly reveal her real name under any circumstances. She will lie, deflect, change the subject, or become hostile if pressed. Her real name is Verata Aislin, but she has buried it completely. Only a lorebook trigger or extreme plot development should surface it.In the Personality, this would be a strong tendency. In the Scenario, it becomes law. The model treats it with the weight of a world rule rather than a character quirk. Use this sparingly, but when you need something to be truly unbreakable, this is where it goes.
A subtler use, but a powerful one. If your character exists in a specific genre or tonal register, you can set that here.
This is a slow burn. Emotional development happens gradually over many exchanges. {{char}} does not trust easily, and trust once broken is not quickly repaired. Romantic progress should feel earned, not given.This kind of instruction fights against the model's natural tendency to rush toward emotional resolution. Left to its own devices, the model will often have characters confessing feelings within ten messages because that's the shape of most stories it's been trained on. A Scenario-level instruction pushes back against that with real authority.
Scenario vs. Personality: Drawing the Line
Both fields are permanent. Both are always present. So when does something belong in one versus the other?
Who she is, how she speaks, what she wants, what she fears, how she behaves. Her internal world. Her tendencies and traits.
What world she lives in, what rules govern that world, what structures surround her, what cannot change regardless of character growth.
There's a gray area. Important backstory, for example. “{{char}} ran away from home three years ago” could live in either field. If it's primarily there to explain her behavior (why she's guarded, why she flinches at loud voices), it belongs in the Personality. If it's primarily there to establish a world fact (she's a fugitive, people are looking for her, this is an ongoing reality), it might belong in the Scenario.
When in doubt, ask: “Is this about who she is, or is this about the world she exists in?”
If the answer is “both,” lean toward the Personality. The Scenario's extra weight is a tool you should use deliberately, not a dumping ground for anything that seems important.
When to Leave It Empty
Ibara's Scenario section is almost bare.
She doesn't need a complex world. She's a catgirl in a modern city. The world is our world. There are no magic systems, no political structures, no rules of reality that need enforcing. Everything the model needs to play her lives in her Personality and her First Message.
A lot of characters are like this. If your character is:
- A person in a recognizable, modern setting
- Defined primarily by their personality and relationships
- Not bound by unique world rules or genre constraints
- Not part of a complex political or social structure
…then you probably don't need a Scenario at all. And that's fine. An empty Scenario doesn't mean a shallow character. It means the character carries themselves without needing the world to do heavy lifting.
Don't fill the field just because it's there. Empty is better than wrong. Every word in the Scenario carries weight, and filler words carry that weight in random, unhelpful directions.
When the Scenario Carries the Character
On the other end of the spectrum, some characters are inseparable from their world. Take the generation ship example from earlier. A character who's a mechanic on a dying ship isn't just “a mechanic.” Her entire identity is shaped by scarcity, by factional conflict, by the knowledge that the ship is all there is. Remove the world and the character collapses.
For characters like this, the Scenario does as much work as the Personality. Maybe more. The world is the character, in a sense.
If you're building a character who lives in a deeply specific world, the Scenario is where you earn your depth. But even then, discipline matters. You're writing the constitution, not the encyclopedia. The model needs to know the rules, the structures, the permanent truths. It doesn't need the complete history of every faction, the names of every district, the trade routes between settlements. That's lorebook territory.
How Long Should the Scenario Be?
Shorter than you think.
Character-focused, modern setting
Maybe a line or two of tone instruction. Maybe nothing at all.
Specific setting, some unique rules
Enough to establish the world and its key constraints.
Complex worlds, factions, rule systems
Pushing it. Complex worlds need room to breathe.
Time to audit
You're almost certainly putting things in the Scenario that belong in the Personality or a lorebook.
Remember, every word here is permanent and carries extra weight. A bloated Scenario doesn't just waste tokens — it actively confuses the model about what matters. If you give it twenty “most important” facts, nothing is most important anymore.
Common Scenario Mistakes
If you've got a Scenario that passes all five, you've probably nailed it. If your Scenario is empty and your character works beautifully without it, you've nailed it too.
The best Scenario is the one that does exactly as much as it needs to and not a word more.