That’s a really interesting question — and it’s something the novel will explore more deeply later on.
The video series always glossed over a huge contradiction: NPCs stick to their roles like mindless puppets, yet they’re constantly shown reacting with shock, fear, frustration, or genuine investment in what adventurers do. As a comedy series, they naturally didn’t want to over-explain that. Still, the tension already implies a degree of self-awareness, even though the canon rarely addresses it directly. (In fact, the few episodes that do touch on this were the very ones that inspired me to write the novel in the first place.)
I wanted to explore and resolve that contradiction. In Azerim, most NPCs do have some level of AI — likely because the developers wanted more life-like interactions — but they still needed them tightly controlled. That conflict between autonomy and restriction is shaping everything in the background.
The latest chapter (“The One Who Remembers”) drops the first hints of that control system, and it’ll become much clearer later on. I just don’t want to spoil too much this early.
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palutcaifiu on Chapter 1 Mon 01 Dec 2025 02:32PM UTC
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