◆NPC Dialogue: Characters With Their Own Voice
When someone in your world speaks, the narrator hands them the microphone. Their words appear in their own card, with their portrait, sitting between the narrator's prose. It is a small change with a big effect: characters stop sounding like an echo of the narration and start sounding like themselves.
›1. What You Will See
In Play Mode, scenes flow as they always have: narrator prose describes the room, the weather, the smell of the forge. When a named character speaks, their dialogue lifts out of the prose into a distinct card.
Each speaking character gets their own card. Mira's lines look like Mira's lines. Voss's lines look like Voss's lines. If a portrait exists in your OmniCodex, it appears in the card; if not, the card uses the character's initials inside a soft silhouette.
The narrator's prose continues above and below the card, so the scene keeps breathing. A long conversation across a table feels like a conversation, not a wall of quotation marks.
›2. Inline Quotes Are Different
Not every quoted line becomes a card. The narrator decides:
- Standalone dialogue - a paragraph whose entire content is one character speaking - becomes a card.
- Inline quotes - a phrase tucked inside a sentence of description - stays inline as prose.
Mira looks up from the rolling pin.
Mira: "If you're here about the rye, the answer is no. Not for him. Not for anyone."
She returns to the dough without waiting for a reply.
The split is intentional. A throwaway aside should not interrupt the scene with a portrait. A real moment should.
›3. Your Own Voice Stays Yours
When you type, you are the player; what you say is what you said. Your speech is never lifted into an NPC card, even if you write it in dialogue form. Player voice belongs to you and only you.
›4. When a Character Is New
If the narrator improvises a one-off voice - the courier you pass on the road, the drunk three tables over - and that character is not in your roster, the line stays in the prose. The card system is reserved for people the world actually remembers.
A character speaking does not automatically generate a portrait. If you want a face for Mira, open her entry in the OmniCodex and forge one. Portraits stay an intentional act, never a surprise charge.
›5. Why It Works This Way
A good scene has rhythm. Narrator, character, narrator, character. When everyone sounds the same on the page, that rhythm flattens. Pulling speech into its own card restores the conversation's shape, makes it easier to scan back through a long session, and gives every named character the dignity of their own voice.