Campaign Preferences

Campaign Preferences let you define your campaign's tone, danger level, cultural aesthetic, and party level in one place. Once set, those choices automatically pre-fill every generation form in the campaign, so your NPCs, encounters, plots, and maps all stay consistent without you re-entering the same options each time.

Think of it as "set it and forget it" for your campaign's vibe.

Where to Find Preferences

1. Open your campaign page from the dashboard.
2. Expand the Generation Preferences panel -- it sits on the campaign page as a collapsible section. If you've already set preferences, it opens automatically.

The panel shows four fields. Set any combination you want -- they're all optional.

Preference Fields

Tone

The overall mood for generated content. Choose from:

When you select a tone, every generator in this campaign uses it as the default. You can still override tone on individual generations.

Threat Level

How dangerous the world feels. This shapes encounters, maps, and plot content.

• Peaceful -- Minimal combat, social focus
• Low -- Occasional danger, mostly safe
• Moderate -- Balanced risk and reward (the system default)
• High -- Constant danger, lethal encounters
• Deadly -- Survival is uncertain

Aesthetic

Cultural flavor that influences naming conventions, architecture, politics, and social structures across your generated content. Options include historical inspirations like Viking Age, Feudal Japanese, Imperial Roman, Ancient Egyptian, Renaissance Italian, Byzantine, Mesoamerican, Mongol Empire, and more -- 16 options total.

Setting an aesthetic doesn't lock your world into a historical simulation. It gives the AI a cultural lens for details like NPC names, building descriptions, political structures, and social customs. A Viking Age aesthetic paired with an Epic tone produces very different content than the same aesthetic with a Horror tone.

Party Level

Your party's current level (1-20). This feeds into encounter balancing, treasure generation, and plot complexity. When your party levels up, update this here and all future content adjusts automatically.

How Cascading Works

CritForge resolves preferences through a priority chain. Each field resolves independently, so your tone might come from one level while your threat level comes from another.

The priority order, from highest to lowest:

1. Your choice in the generator form -- Always wins. If you pick a tone on the NPC form, that overrides everything below.
2. Session override -- If you've set preferences on a specific session, those apply when generating for that session.
3. Campaign preference -- What you set in the Generation Preferences panel described above.
4. Your profile defaults -- Personal defaults you've set in your account profile (these apply across all campaigns).
5. System default -- If nothing else is set: Neutral tone, Moderate threat, Level 5, no aesthetic.

Each level only fills in gaps. If your campaign sets a tone but not a threat level, the tone comes from the campaign and the threat level falls through to your profile defaults or the system default.

Source Indicators

When you open a generation form, you'll see small indicators next to pre-filled fields showing where each value came from. A blue tent icon means "from your campaign." An amber calendar icon means "from the session." A person icon means "from your profile."

If you override a pre-filled value, a Reset link appears so you can snap back to the inherited value without guessing what it was.

Changing Preferences Doesn't Rewrite History

Updating your campaign preferences only affects future generations. Content you've already created keeps whatever settings it was generated with. If you shift from a Heroic tone to a Dark tone mid-campaign, your existing NPCs stay heroic -- only new NPCs pick up the darker mood.

Session Overrides

For individual sessions that need different settings (a horror one-shot in the middle of a heroic campaign, for example), you can set session-level overrides from the session page. These sit above campaign preferences in the priority chain, so they win without you needing to change your campaign-wide settings.

Profile Defaults

If you run multiple campaigns with similar settings, set your profile defaults once in your account settings. These act as a personal baseline that applies to every campaign where you haven't set a campaign-level preference. Useful if you always run gritty, high-threat games.

Tips

Set preferences early. The sooner you define your campaign's tone and aesthetic, the more consistent your content will be. Even setting just tone and threat level makes a noticeable difference across dozens of generations.

Adjust for story arcs. Running a lighter arc before plunging into darkness? Change the tone for those sessions using session overrides rather than changing the whole campaign. When the arc ends, the campaign-level tone picks back up automatically.

Use aesthetic for world-building consistency. Setting a cultural aesthetic is especially powerful for names. Without one, you might get a mix of naming conventions across your NPCs. With one, every generated character, location, and faction shares a cohesive cultural identity.

Party level saves time on encounters. If your party is level 8, setting it here means every encounter and plot defaults to level-appropriate challenges. No more manually entering "party level 8" on every generation form.

Clear a preference to remove it. Each field has a Clear button that removes that preference, letting values fall through to lower levels in the chain. If you set a campaign tone but later want to go back to using your profile default, just clear it.