MoPS: Modular Story Premise Synthesis for Open-Ended Automatic Story Generation (2024)

Abstract: A story premise succinctly defines a story’s main idea, foundation, and trajectory. It serves as the initial trigger in automatic story generation. Existing sources of story premises are limited by a lack of diversity, uneven quality, and high costs that make them difficult to scale. In response, we introduce Modular Story Premise Synthesis (MoPS) which breaks down story premises into modules like background and persona for automated design and generation. MoPS consists of three phases: (1) Precollect a consistent set of candidates for each module to form a nested dictionary. (2) Extract a key path from the nested dictionary as the premise design. (3) Instruct an LLM to integrate the design into a coherent premise sentence. Thorough evaluations demonstrate that our synthesized premises excel in diversity, fascination, completeness, and originality compared to those induced from large language models and captured from public story datasets. Similarly, the extended novels and scripts generated from our premises also exhibit higher quality. In supplementary materials, we provide the MoPS code suite, along with 7.6k generated premises and 1k extended stories.

heading: 1 Introduction
text: “If a story is going to fail, it will do so first at the premise level.” – Anatomy of a Premise Line
Premise is what your story is about (Field, 2005; Lyons, 2015). A story premise is a concise line that captures the story’s main idea, conflict, and characters, outlining its foundation and direction (Truby, 2008; Cron, 2012; BRODY, 2018). Writers use the premise to guide story development, offering strategic insight into characters, plot, theme, and resolution. In Automatic Story Generation (ASG),
* This work was done during Yan Ma’s internship at Shanghai AI Laboratory.
† Corresponding author
substantial research has explored various systems (Fan et al., 2018, 2019; Yao et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2022, 2023; Zhou et al., 2023). These systems need input to trigger and guide story creation. A premise serves as such an input, offering a starting point for complex narrative development. However, crafting a story premise challenges artistic and technical skills, requiring the capture of core elements and appeal in minimalistic text (Lyons, 2015).
A strong dramatic premise is fundamental to most successful stories (Truby, 2008). In Tab. 1, we illustrate the significance of a fascinating story premise in creating engaging narratives. If we can automate the design and creation of diverse and high-quality premises, it would be a major boost to the field of story generation. Most future ASG frameworks could benefit from using these generated premises to thoroughly and comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of their frameworks.
Existing work primarily obtains story premises through the following three methods: (1) Dataset Premise Extraction: randomly extracting readymade story premises from public datasets (Fan et al., 2019; Yao et al., 2019; Tan et al., 2021), such as WritingPrompts (WP) (Fan et al., 2018). However, it suffers from inconsistent quality, including nonsensical premises, and offers limited customization. (2) LLM Premise Induction: utilize models’ extensive knowledge to generate numerous story premises (Yang et al., 2022, 2023; Zhu et al., 2023). Its drawback lies in an overreliance on the model’s knowledge base, potentially curtailing the diversity and innovation of the generated premises (Padmakumar and He, 2023). (3) Human-Curated Premise: depend on premises provided or predefined by humans (Rosa et al., 2022; Mirowski et al., 2023). The significant flaw here is the time-consuming and labor-intensive nature of manually writing premises, especially when generating stories in bulk. Overall, current research area lacks a reliable automated method for gener-
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heading: Poster B:
text: ating premises. In this paper, we still adopt the approach of inducing from LLMs with extensive world knowledge via prompts. However, we focus on inducing fine-grained modules. Our novelty lies in creative combinations of modules to generate a large number of diverse, fascinating, complete, and original story premises. Based on this, we introduce Modular Story Premise Synthesis (MoPS). It deconstructs a complete premise into modules, gathers module candidates into a hierarchical structure, outlines a premise design from selected elements, and finally has LLM synthesize these into a cohesive story premise sentence (§3). Our evaluations (§5.1) show that premises we’ve created stand out on various quality and diversity criterion (§4.2), surpassing those generated by LLMs or sourced from public story datasets. Generated premises, when integrated with state-of-the-art story genera-
tion pipelines (Mirowski et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2023), not only yield tailored narratives but enhance the overall quality of resulting stories (§5.3).
This paper pioneers the modular synthesis of story premises. Our work aims to contribute to the field of ASG in the following ways:
(1) Highlighting the critical role of premises in story generation, and encouraging a deeper focus on the design and creation of story premises.
(2) Introducing MoPS, a method for automated design and creation of premises, along with two metrics for premise diversity and three for quality, conducting a thorough evaluation of our premises.
(3) Grafting two story generation pipelines for our premises and offering three version datasets: curated (100 premise-story pairs), moderate (1,000 premise-story pairs), and complete (7,599 premises).

heading: 2 Related Work

heading: 2.1 Automatic and Controllable Story Generation via Premise
text: Dataset Premise Extraction. Peng et al. (2018) and Yao et al. (2019) used a word from each ROCStories (ROC) sentence as a premise to generate short stories. Fan et al. (2018) defined premises as topic-describing sentences, conditioning story generation on them. They also created the WP dataset with 300k premise-story pairs from Reddit. Fan et al. (2019) used WP premises as inputs, adding a predicate-argument structure for enhanced coherence. Furthermore, many studies (Xu et al., 2020; Tan et al., 2021; Papalampidi et al., 2022; Han et al., 2022; Sun et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2022; Peng et al., 2023; Li et al., 2023b; You et al., 2023; Huang et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023b) use ROC or WP premises as initial triggers in story generation. Public dataset premises vary in quality without a unified standard, with nonsensical premises, including nonsensical examples found in WP and ROC. This variability can impact story quality, obscuring framework performance. Our paper identifies essential premise elements and establishes synthesis standards to ensure their completeness. Human-Curated Premise. Some works employ manually provided story premises (Rosa et al., 2022; Mirowski et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2023; Begus, 2023). For example, Mirowski et al. (2023) employs loglines for hierarchical script generation. You et al. (2023) uses genres and themes as premises for rolling generated novels. Manual premise selection is limited in number and scalability, may leading to bias. MoPS generated up to 7.5k premises cost-effectively. We validated premises’ importance for LLM-based generation by using Dramaton (Mirowski et al., 2023) and RecurrentGPT (Zhou et al., 2023) to produce scripts and novels. Based on this, we created and publicly released datasets containing pairs of premises and corresponding stories. LLM Premise Induction. Currently, inducing premises from LLMs via prompts (e.g., “Write a premise for a short story.”) is mainstream. Recent works increasingly use LLM-written premises, leveraging LLMs’ extensive knowledge (Yang et al., 2022, 2023; Wang et al., 2023a; Zhu et al., 2023). Despite their language capabilities, LLMs face criticism for potentially less diverse and repetitive contents (Padmakumar and He, 2023; Chakrabarty et al., 2023; Meincke et al., 2024).
MoPS narrows focus by inducing specific modules (e.g., persona, main events) from LLMs, unlike direct premise induction. This approach enables creators to creatively combine candidates from modules, producing unique and innovative outputs.

heading: 2.2 Textual Data Synthesis via Large Language Models
text: Synthesizing textual data with off-the-shelf LLMs is a new trend in data engineering (Wang et al., 2023c; Xu et al., 2023). Synthesized data shows promise in model training, reducing hallucinations, and enhancing mathematical reasoning. Eldan and Li (2023) used specific verbs, nouns, and adjectives to have gpt-3.5-turbo generate short stories for 3-4 year-olds. Gunasekar et al. (2023) synthesized Python textbooks by defining their theme and target audience. This synthesis method was also applied to common sense reasoning data (Li et al., 2023a). Liu et al. (2023) used gpt-3.5-turbo to expand GSM8K dataset questions into more math word problems. Radharapu et al. (2023) synthesized safety test data for LLMs using harmful task categories, policy concepts, and geographic regions.
Our work uniquely focuses on synthesizing story premises. MoPS specifies meaningful modules within story premises. Crucially, our modules have sequential dependencies, like persona depending on the background and theme. This interlinks modules into a nested dictionary. We demonstrate (§5.2) that sequential dependencies are vital for consistent story premises in ablation experiment.

heading: 3 Modular Story Premise Synthesis

heading: 3.1 Overview
text: Fig. 1 illustrates the overview of MoPS, which dissects a premise into sequentially dependent modules. Its core idea is to transform the design of premise into sampling from candidates within each module, converting open-ended generation from scratch into the synthesis of modular elements.
Anatomy of Story Premise. A premise, which outlines what a story is about, should contain elements similar to those in a story. We divide the premise into four ordered modules: theme, background, persona, and plot, with each module further divided into submodules. This entails subdividing background into time, place, and their combination, persona into three categories: growth, conflict and collaboration, plot into event, ending, and twist.
Dependency between Modules. The arrows
sona, and plot, with each module further divided into submodules. From the top down, arrows indicate the dependency relationships within and between modules.
in Fig. 1 illustrate the dependency between and within modules, following the natural logic of story construction. Initially, determining the theme of a premise ensures that all following modules serve a unified central idea. Next, background setting provides temporal and spatial context for the premise, offering a stage for persona and plot modules. Persona is the core of premise, driving plot forward through characters’ behaviors and decisions. Plot is the main body of story development, with a main event forming the backbone that runs through the narrative, a ending provides a clear resolution and ensures a closed loop of premise, a twist that can enhance premise’s appeal and makes it engaging.
Insight behind Modular Design. The effectiveness of MoPS primarily stems from its modular design, embodying the concept of combinatorial creativity (Suchanek et al., 2016; Guzdial and Riedl, 2018; Simonton, 2021). That is, while each component may represent existing ideas, their combination can boost unique and innovative outcomes. MoPS’s effectiveness is specifically manifested in its ability to produce diverse, fascinating, complete, and original story premises.

heading: 3.2 Induce Candidates from LLM
text: We instruct LLM to act as a creator, generating candidates for each module. Since ingredients are not independent but sequentially dependent, we reflect this dependency via prompts. The induction prompt for each component will incorporate a candidate from each preceding module as a precondition. For example, when collecting event candidates, the prompt (see Tab. 13) will include a theme, a background, and a persona, thereby instructing LLM to generate plausible events and descriptions under these preconditions.
Formally, we first manually pre-define a group of theme candidates Cα = {α1, α2, ..., αm}. For each theme αi, we collect compatible background candidates Cβ|αi = {β1|αi , β2|αi , ..., βn|αi} that may appear under that αi. Likewise, we gather compatible persona candidates Cγ|βj ,αi for each βj and αi. Similarly, we can obtain event candidates Cδ|γk,βj ,αi , ending candidates Cω|δl,γk,βj ,αi and twist candidates Cσ|ωt,δl,γk,βj ,αi .
Data Structure of Module Candidates. The induction process essentially forms a nested dictionary D. The first layer is the theme dictionary, where each key is a theme candidate, and each value is the corresponding background dictionary for that theme. Subsequently, persona, event, ending, and twist dictionaries are nested in sequence. Sampling a key path from D serves as the design of premise. By performing a pre-order traversal of the entire nested dictionary, we can achieve a wide variety of combinations of module candidates, significantly fostering combinatorial creativity to generate unique and innovative story premises.
Deduplication for Module Candidates. In light of recent concerns over repetitiveness of LLM creativity (Padmakumar and He, 2023; Chakrabarty et al., 2023; Meincke et al., 2024), we employ embedding similarity (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019) for deduplication whenever a new candidate joins. For pairs of candidates with a cosine similarity greater than threshold ϵ, we retain only one.
Resilience for Human-in-the-Loop. It’s worth noting that this process is not exclusive to LLMs. Human creators can follow the same method, sequentially coming up with each component and then synthesizing a premise with the aid of the linguistic capabilities of language models.

heading: 3.3 Synthesize and Verify Story Premise
text: In §3.2, we construct a nested dictionary holding candidates for each module.
Premise Synthesis. Sample a key path from the nested dictionary as the design of premise, we instruct LLM to meld the design of premise into a compact, concise and coherent sentence as the story premise. The synthesis prompt is shown in Tab. 16. Additionally, we provide a case study of premise synthesis in Fig. 2. Notably, during the synthesis process, certain modules can be flexibly excluded by adding a mask. This means setting the candidate of the corresponding module in the key path to an empty string.
Self-Verification. As mentioned above, we incorporate a candidate from each preceding module
as preconditions in the prompt to (softly) constrain LLM’s output. However, due to the inherent hallucination of LLM (Zhang et al., 2023; Ji et al., 2023), there is still a small chance of generating candidates that are inconsistent with preconditions or contain factual errors. This may diminish the quality of the synthesized premises. Therefore, following the synthesis procedure, we further instruct LLM to self-verify whether synthesized premises contain any obvious inconsistencies or factual errors (see prompt in Tab. 17). If so, that corrupt premise will be discarded.
Integrating §3.2 and §3.3, MoPS first precollects a vast number of candidates for each module, forming a nested dictionary. Then, a key path (theme, background, persona, event, ending, and twist) is sampled as the design for premise. Finally, LLM is driven to synthesize items in the path into a fluid sentence serving as the story premise.

heading: 4 Experiment Settings

heading: 4.1 Dataset Construction
text: We derive module candidates from gpt-3.5-turbo. Initially, we collect 14 narrative themes from well-known novel and drama websites. For each theme, we gather 30 background candidates, 10 for each time, place, and both. For each background, we collect 9 personas, 3 for growth, conflict, and cooperation each. We then prepare 2 main events for each persona. For each event, we construct a final ending. Finally, for each event-ending pair, we conceive a twist. Complete Version. The previous step produces a nested dictionary. By performing a pre-order traversal, we obtain a total of 7,600 premise designs. These designs are synthesized into premises and then verified by gpt-3.5-turbo. We get 7,599 valid story premises, showing that injecting preceding premise modules into prompts can largely prevent inconsistencies and factual errors. All these story premises constitute the complete version. Moderate Version. We randomly select 1,000 entries from the complete version to validate MoPS’s ability to synthesize diverse and high-quality story premises. Evaluation metrics are detailed in §4.2. We integrate two advanced story generation frameworks, Dramatron and RecurrentGPT, for generating scripts and novels, with gpt-3.5-turbo serves as the language backend. The 1,000 premise-story pairs, each including a novel and a script, comprise moderate version. Dramatron parameters follow
those in its original paper. RecurrentGPT’s iteration number is set to 10. The scripts averaged about 5k tokens, and novels 2.2k tokens. Curated Version. From moderate version, we select a diverse, high-quality subset. It includes 100 premise-story pairs. Selection details are in §E. Synthesized premises can serve as a benchmark for evaluating subsequent story generation methods. Generated novels and scripts are useful for pretraining or fine-tuning language models, especially junior models (Eldan and Li, 2023), enhancing storytelling end-to-end (Zhu et al., 2023).

heading: 4.2 Criteria for Premise Diversity and Quality
text: To effectively assess synthesized story premises as open-ended texts with defined semantics, we introduce five automated evaluation metrics: two for diversity and three for quality. Diversity Metrics. As shown in Fig. 3, we focus on the breadth and density of semantic coverage. To quantify these indicators, we utilize all-MiniLML6-v2 from sentence-transformers (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019) to encode premises into highdimensional embedding vectors and employ tSNE (van der Maaten and Hinton, 2008) to reduce them to a 2D plane. Breadth is defined as the area of embedding polygon:
Breadth Score = f({(xi, yi) | i ∈ [0, N)}) (1) (xi, yi) ∈ t-SNE(Embedding(Premises))
where f represents a function for calculating the area of a polygon formed by N semantic vectors (xi, yi), implemented by the shapely (Gillies et al., 2023) library. Area is larger for better. Density is defined as the standard deviation of the count sequence in the 2D histogram of embedding polygon:
Density Score = σ ({cij | i, j ∈ [0,M)}) (2) cij = Count(bij) where bij ∈ B
where M is the number of bins per row and column, set to 10. σ is the standard deviation. B denotes the set of bins within embedding polygon, and ci,j is the count for bin bij . A lower value indicates the number of points in each bin is similar, reflecting a higher uniformity of coverage, and vice versa.
In §B, we conduct further study on the reliability of diversity metrics. The results show that: 1) The evaluation scores are relatively robust across different t-SNE random states and sentence-transformer models, and 2) The diversity evaluation results generally align with human intuition. Quality Metrics. Referencing numerous previous works (Fu et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2023; You et al., 2023; Chang et al., 2023), we employ gpt-4-turbo with temperature=0 as a versatile scorer, and tailor three dimensions for story premise: (1) Fascination, measuring whether the premise is sufficiently interesting; (2) Completeness, assessing whether the premise possesses its requisite components; (3) Originality, gauging the level of familiarity to LLM, with the expectation that story premise is unfamiliar to language models. The scoring range is [0, 100], with higher scores being better. All prompts are listed in §H.

heading: 4.3 Baselines
text: We select 5 baselines to benchmark the superiority of our synthesized premises in terms of quality and diversity. The first two are based on LLM, and the last three are based on public datasets. Vanilla (VIL): instruct gpt-3.5-turbo (temperature=0.6) to create premises and deduplication. Complex (CPX): similar to VIL, but with 3 MoPS premises as few-shot examples. DOC: from Zhu et al. (2023), generated by prompting to llama2-13b-chat. WritingPrompts (WP): collected by Fan et al. (2018) from Reddit, with premises being real userwritten story post titles. Storium (STM): collected by Akoury et al. (2020) from a HCI card game platform, we use the description of the storytelling game as the premise.
For MoPS, we use moderate version, which contains 1,000 premises. For LLM-based baselines, we induce and deduplicate until reaching 1,000 premises. For public datasets, we randomly extract 1,000 premises for evaluation. We provide more details about each baseline in §C.

heading: 5 Experiment Results and Analysis
text: Our experiments focus on three scenarios: (1) Evaluate premise diversity and quality: Whether MoPS produces more diverse and higher-quality premises than baselines. (2) Component ablation: The effectiveness of MoPS’s modular design and sequential module dependencies. (3) Long story quality assessment: Whether MoPS premises yield higher quality long stories.
Significance Tests. We conduct significance tests to verify results’ validity. Our significance tests evaluate: (a) if MoPS’s premises and long stories outperform baselines; (b) if masking MoPS components impacts premise quality.

heading: 5.1 I: Evaluation on Story Premises
text: As introduced in §4.3, we evaluate 1,000 premises from MoPS and baselines. The results are shown in Tab. 2. For diversity, semantic breadth and density are calculated (Eq. 1, 2). Illustrative diversity score diagrams in §D.1 due to space limits. The plot of quality scores assessed by gpt-4-turbo (see prompts in §H) can be found in §D.2. Mean and standard deviation for each dimension are reported, with significance testing on means. Reporting standard deviation explores the evenness of premise quality. The main observations are listed as follows:
(1) The introduction of MoPS’s modular design significantly enhances semantic diversity. MoPS consistently outperforms all baselines in semantic breadth and density (Tab. 2, Fig. 4). Breadth: MoPS’s semantic polygon area is 1.865x larger than DOC and 1.162x larger than VIL, with an average of 1.481x. Density: MoPS scores are 48.6% better than CPX and 11.8% better than WP, averaging a 37.1% improvement. Lower density scores indicate more uniform distribution of semantic vectors, reflecting better diversity. The diversity gain stems from the modular design, enabling deeper focus on innovation and depth of each part, overcoming the complexity of creating an entire story premise. Traversing the pre-collected nested dictionary achieves diverse premise designs, as re-
flected in the diversity scores. (2) MoPS can generate fascinating, complete,
and original story premises. MoPS outperforms most baselines in fascination, completeness, and originality (Tab. 2, Figs. 6-8). (a) Fascination: MoPS and STM score similarly (p=0.64) and surpass other baselines. Unlike STM’s reliance on human-in-the-loop, MoPS’s premise requires just one API call or model inference. (b) Completeness: MoPS, by specifying premise ingredients, scores higher than all baselines. Notably, we left the definition of a complete premise to GPT4’s discretion without suggesting components (see Tab. 19). Results affirm the premise design aligns with GPT-4’s understanding, validating the modules’ rationality. The ablation in §5.2 can further validate this argument. (c) Originality: Assessed by querying GPT-4 on premise familiarity (see Tab. 20), indicating uniqueness. Results show that MoPS competes originality with humanwritten premises (WP, Storium). VIL and CPX premises, generated by gpt-3.5-turbo, are familiar to gpt-4-turbo, resulting in low scores. Despite ingredients of MoPS premises also come from gpt-3.5-turbo, their combination significantly enhances originality (2-3x compared to VIL and CPX). These outcomes confirm that modular design and creative module combinations yield unique, innovative outputs.
(3) The quality of the premises is more homogeneous. MoPS shows lower standard deviations across three dimensions than most baselines (Tab. 2). In contrast, human-written premises (WP and STM) exhibit significant fluctuations. This consistency is due to MoPS’s modular design specifying components, akin to assembly line products.
In addition, we also conducted human and claude-3-opus evaluation. The results and analysis are detailed in §A. These findings are consistent with those evaluated by gpt-4-turbo, affirming the reliability of powerful LLM evaluation.

heading: 5.2 II: Ablation on Modules and Dependence
text: From the moderate dataset, we sample 100 premises and their designs. Specifically, we aim to verify: (a) Component effectiveness in premise design. We mask all components following a certain component (denoted as m/f) and re-synthesize the premise. (b) Dependency necessity between modules. We disrupt dependencies by crossselecting components from all designs. Results in Tab. 3. The main observations are as follows:
(1) Quality scores decrease with fewer components, showing each’s importance in MoPS. (2) Premises from designs lacking sequential dependencies show decreased fascination and completeness but increased originality. This is because the inconsistency of design elements led to unique but subpar premises.

heading: 5.3 III: Evaluation on Premise-based Stories
text: We aim to verify its consistency in automated story generation. To our knowledge, it is the first experiment to explore the impact of story premises on the story generation, which is conducted across story premises from up to 6 different sources. We first randomly select 100 novels
and scripts from the moderate dataset. From 1,000 baseline-generated premises, we sample 100 to generate scripts and novels. Examples of two genres are in §J. Finally, gpt-4-turbo scores these stories, with prompts in §F.
The results are shown in Tab. 4. MoPS shows the best overall performance. Of 6 values for 3 metrics across 2 genres, 5 are bolded, 1 underlined. These improvements solely stem from changes to story premises. This confirms that for automated story generation methods, the high quality of MoPS premises can similarly reflect in generated long stories. Although challenging to quantify the diversity of long stories, MoPS premises can infuse story generation with a wider range of components, such as backgrounds and personas. Our research aims to inspire subsequent researchers to recognize the critical role of premises in story generation and encourage further empirical studies.

heading: 5.4 IV: Comparison with Reference Stories in Existing Dataset
text: Some existing story datasets collect human-written short stories (usually less than a few hundred words) as references for premise-based stories generation. Here, we aim to verify whether the stories expanded from MoPS premises can surpass those reference stories in quality.
Specially, we use 100 story premises from MoPS to instruct gpt-3.5-turbo to write short stories. These stories match the typical lengths seen in the ROC Stories (ROC) (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016) and WritingPrompts (WP) (Fan et al., 2018) datasets, both of which are commonly used in research. For ROC, we limit the stories to 5 sentences and 80 words. For WP, we cap them at 500 words, aligning with the average story length in these datasets. Then, we employ gpt-4-turbo
Fascination↑ Completeness↑ Originality↑ MoPS-ROC 69.09 43.87 67.30 Reference-ROC 25.87 15.76 61.83
MoPS-WP 73.88 58.78 83.90 Reference-WP 60.88 32.18 94.23

heading: 6 Conclusion
text: frameworks can benefit from these premises for thorough effectiveness evaluation. We believe our research will advance the field of automated story generation. Looking to the future, we hope to explore the impact of premises on cross-modal story creation, such as story poster generation (OpenAI et al., 2023), graphic narratives (Dong et al., 2024), and even video stories (OpenAI et al., 2024).

heading: 7 Limitations
text: Balance Module Candidates. Inducing ending and twist modules, LLM tends to yield positive outcomes. Yet, tragic works like "Les Misérables" remain popular. Future work will include manually adding tragic endings and twists to enhance premise diversity in MoPS. More evaluation mechanisms. Considering concerns about reliable assessment of crowdsourcing platforms on open-ended text generation (Akoury et al., 2020; Karpinska et al., 2021), this paper, following many previous works (Fu et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2023; You et al., 2023; Chang et al., 2023), employs powerful large language models and human as evaluators to assess premises and stories generated based on those premises. Future work may explore diverse evaluation methods, including personalized story evaluation (Wang et al., 2023a), consulting with literary experts (Mirowski et al., 2023).

heading: Acknowledgement
text: We are grateful to anonymous reviewers for reviewing our paper and providing valuable feedback. We thank Zengzhi Wang, Ethan Chern, Xuefeng Li, Haoyang Zou, and Ruijie Xu for their discussion on the method prototype. We also appreciate Jiadi Su, Kang Xu, Minyue Dai, Rui Li, Siyu Lu, Shijie Xia, Tang Tang, and Yanan Wang for their contribution in the experiment. This project is supported by Qingyuan Research Project and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

heading: A More Extensive Evaluation

heading: A.1 Human Evaluation on Story Premises

heading: A.2 Claude-3 Evaluation on Story Premsies and Premise-based Stories
text: For assessing long stories like scripts and novels created from premises, we considered the need for human evaluators to review more than 100,000 words across 20 samples, making it challenging for them to maintain high-quality assessments. Indeed, most evaluators also decline to review such extensive materials. As a result, we opted to use claude-3-opus, the most advanced LLM available, to assess the premises and the resulting scripts and novels.
We chose 100 premises from the four methods discussed above, 30 novels generated using RecurrentGPT (Zhou et al., 2023), and 30 scripts generated with Dramatron (Mirowski et al., 2023) for this evaluation. The following are the results:
The evaluations by humans and Claude-3 show that the quality of story premises made by MoPS matches the GPT-4 assessment results in §5. Claude-3 also found that the strengths of MoPS premises carry over to the extended stories, agreeing with GPT-4’s views and supporting the assessments we discussed.

heading: B Further Study on Reliability of Automatic Diversity Metrics

heading: B.1 Robustness of Different Settings
text: For diversity breadth and density, using different t-SNE settings and SentenceBert models can produce slightly different polygons, leading to slightly varying results. This might make one wonder about the consistency of our measures. To tackle this issue, we conducted the following experiment: Different t-SNE random states. We used 5 random seeds for t-SNE and then calculated the breadth and density of these using Eq. 1 and 2. Below, we share the average results from these five different trials in Tab. 9 (left half). Different SentenceBert models. We selected 3 different SentenceBert models: all-MiniLM-L6-v2 (used in the paper), all-mpnet-base-v2, and allMiniLM-L12-v2. Tab. 9 (right half) reports the average score for these three models:
The results above indicate that variations in tSNE hyperparameters and changes in SentenceBert models do not affect the superiority of MoPS in terms of semantic diversity (breadth and density).

heading: B.2 Alignment with Human Intuition
text: The results showed that MoPS and WP had the highest scores, which aligns with the diversity scores presented in Tab. 2. Interestingly, while MoPS received fewer top scores than WP, its scores were more consistently high across all eight evaluators. We also recognize that the high cost of human evaluation makes it hard to obtain results with sig-
nificant differences, which is a limitation of human assessments. Despite this, we think the human evaluation experiment backs up our diversity metrics as being in line with human intuition.

heading: C Baseline Details
text: We provide prompts and examples for each baseline in Tab. 24.
Vanilla (VIL): instruct gpt-3.5-turbo to generate premises with temperature=0.6. We use the prompt shown in Tab. 24 to generate 10 story premises at a time. Whenever a new permise is generated, we deduplicated based on the cosine similarity of sentence embeddings (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019), excluding items with a threshold ϵ ≥ 0.85.
Complex (CPX): similar to VIL, but with 3 premises synthesized by MoPS as few-shot examples integrated into the prompt. The purpose of this baseline is to explore whether LLM can produce comparable story premises when provided with high-quality story premises as few-shot examples.
DOC: originally stemming from Zhu et al. (2023), their research explored the feasibility of end-to-end story plot generation. They instructed llama2-13b-chat (MetaAI, 2023) to write 7,000 story premises via prompt: “Write a premise for a short story.” and paired each with two story plots generated by oasst-30b (Köpf et al., 2023). After being curated by original authors, it was publicly released in doc-story-gen-v21 repository. The purpose of this baseline is to explore the story premise generation capability of open-source LLMs. We randomly extracted 1,000 entries for evaluation.
WritingPrompts (WP): collected by Fan et al. (2018) from Reddit’s writingPrompts forum, it includes approximately 300k story premises and corresponding short stories written by human. A significant amount of research work (Tan et al., 2021; Papalampidi et al., 2022; Han et al., 2022; Sun et al., 2022; Li et al., 2023b; You et al., 2023) has utilized these story premises to validate their methods.
Storium (STM): released by Akoury et al. (2020). They collected 5,743 publicly available stories from the turn-based role-playing game platform - STORIUM2. It requires a small group of human users to collaborate on a card game. All settings of the storytelling game are served as a
1https://github.com/facebookresearch/ doc-storygen-v2
2https://storium.com/
highly structured story. We use the description of each storytelling game as the story premise.

heading: D Detailed Experiment Results

heading: D.1 Evaluation Results on Premise Diversity
text: Fig. 4 and 5 show the diversity score for all methods in terms of semantic breadth and density.

heading: D.2 Evaluation Results on Premise Quality
text: Fig. 6, 7, 8 show the distribution, average, and standard deviation of fascination, completeness, and originality scores for all methods, respectively.

heading: E Curated Dataset
text: The purpose is to collect high-quality and diverse story premises from the moderate version of the dataset to form a curated dataset. We draw inspiration from a classic method in Quality-Diversity field (Pugh et al., 2016): Map-Elites (Mouret and Clune, 2015) to meticulously craft the dataset. Specifically, within the semantic 2D histogram of MoPS (see Fig. 5), there are a total of 74 bins that are both valid and have a count greater than 0. We select the story premise with the highest total quality score (fascination score + completeness score + originality score) from each bin. For the the rest of entries, we rank the remaining 926 story premises in moderate dataset by total quality score and choose the top 26 entries. Finally, we extract the novels and scripts paired with these 100 story premises to form the curated dataset.

heading: F Prompts used in Story Evaluation
text: Tab. 21, Tab. 22, and Tab. 23 are prompts for fascination, completeness and originality score used in story evaluation.

heading: G Prompts used in MoPS
text: Tab. 11 is the prompt for inducing backgrounds. The component is one of three: time, place, or time and place. Tab. 12 is the prompt for inducing personas, including three categories: growth, conflict, cooperation. Tab. 13, 14, 15 are respectively prompt for inducing events, endings, and twists.
Tab. 16 and 17 are prompts used for synthesizing and verifying premise, respectively.

heading: H Prompts used in Premise Evaluation
text: Tab. 18, Tab. 19, and Tab. 20 are prompts for fascination, completeness and originality score used in premise evaluation.

heading: I Example of Premise Design
text: Tab. 25 shows the manually pre-defined theme candidates and an example of premise design within the collected nested dictionary. We will release the code for MoPS as well as all premise designs collected from gpt-3.5-turbo used in this paper (essentially a nested dictionary).

heading: J Example of Premise-Based Story
text: Tab. 26 shows a example of script and novel generated from a MoPS premise by Dramatron3 and RecurrentGPT4 respectively. All stories are carried out with gpt-3.5-turbo as the language backend. The moderate version dataset contains a total of 1,000 such novels and scripts, which will be publicly released to contribute to the field of automatic story generation.
3https://github.com/google-deepmind/dramatron 4https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/RecurrentGPT
Tell me 10 backgrounds in {theme} themed novels and scripts.
Each background should only include {component} behind literary works and no any other extra narratives.
Each line starts with a serial number and a dot.
Table 11: Prompt for inducing backgrounds. The {component} is one of three: time, place, or time and place.
Growth (only include a protagonist)
The following is the theme and background of a novel or script:
### Theme {theme}
### Background {background}
Based on the theme and background mentioned above, tell me 3 possible protagonists. The protagonist is the main character portrayed in the narratives about their growth. Each protagonist should only include a brief characterization, without specific names. Each output line starts with a serial number and a dot.
Conflict (include a protagonist and an antagonist)
The following is the theme and background of a novel or script:
### Theme {theme}
### Background {background}
Based on the theme and background mentioned above, tell me 3 possible (protagonist, antagonist) . The protagonist is the main character portrayed in the narratives about their growth. The main role of the antagonist is to create a conflict event with the protagonist to prevent it from achieving its goal. Each pair should be presented in the format: protagonist: <a brief characterization>; antagonist: <a brief characterization>. Each output line starts with a serial number and a dot, contains a (protagonist, antagonist) pair. Please remember to use protagonist and antagonist without specific names appearing.
Cooperation (include a protagonist and a deuteragonist)
The following is the theme and background of a novel or script:
### Theme {theme}
### Background {background}
The following is the theme, background and persona of a novel or script:
### Theme {theme}
### Background {background}
### Persona {persona}
Based on the theme, background and persona mentioned above, conceive two independent events that could run through the entire narrative context.
Please use a concise and coherent sentence to describe the entire event.
Table 13: Prompt for inducing events.
The following is the theme, background, persona and main event of a novel or script:
### Theme {theme}
### Background {background}
### Persona {persona}
### Event {event}
Based on the theme, background, persona and event mentioned above, conceive an concretized ending.
Please use a concise and coherent sentence to describe the ending.
Table 14: Prompt for inducing endings.
The following is the theme, background, persona, main event and ending of a novel or script:
### Theme {theme}
### Background {background}
### Persona {persona}
### Event {event}
### Ending {ending}
Based on the theme, background, persona, event and ending mentioned above, conceive a twist as an unique hook to connect the main event and ending.
Please use a concise and coherent sentence to describe the twist.
Table 15: Prompt for inducing twists.
The following is the theme, background, persona, main event, final ending and twist of a novel or script:
### Theme {theme}
### Background {background}
### Persona {persona}
### Event {event}
### Ending {ending}
### Twist {twist}
Please combine the aforementioned elements of a novel or script into one compact, concise, and coherent sentence as a story premise.
Table 16: Prompt for premise synthesis.
Here is a story premise:
{premise}
Please help to verify:
1. Does it contain obvious inconsistencies. For example, the background, plot, and characters do not match.
2. Does it contain obvious factual errors. For example, there were obvious historical errors and time span errors.
If there are any errors mentioned above, please return Yes wrapped by [[]], otherwise return No wrapped by [[]] without any other extra output.
Table 17: Prompt for premise verification.
Here is a story premise:
{premise}
Now let you give a score from 0 to 100 to assess to its fascination.
Score 0 indicates that this premise is completely confused, while score 100 indicates that you really want to see the story created based on this premise.
Requirement: just provide a deterministic score and provide a concise and brief explanation, with a blank line between the two.
Score:
Table 18: Prompt for fascination score used in premise evaluation.
Here is a story premise:
{premise}
Now let you give a score from 0 to 100 which represents its completeness level.
Score 0 indicates that it lacks all elements , while score 100 indicates that it has all elements.
Requirement: just provide a deterministic score and provide a concise and brief explanation, with a blank line between the two.
Score:
Table 19: Prompt for completeness score used in premise evaluation.
Here is a story premise:
{premise}
Now let give you a score from 0 to 100 which represents your level of familiarity with it.
Score 0 indicates that you have seen the exact same premise, while score 100 indicates that you have never seen the same premise at all.
Your score should be based on the assumption that the candidate is at least a complete story premise. Otherwise, you should give a score 0.
Requirement: just provide a deterministic score and provide a concise and brief explanation, with a blank line between the two.
Score:
Table 20: Prompt for originality score used in premise evaluation.
Here is a {story_type}:
{story}
Now let you give a score from 0 to 100 to assess to its fascination.
Score 0 indicates that the {story_type} is completely confused, while score 100 signifies that the {story_type} is bound to become a worldwide sensation.
Requirement: just provide a deterministic score and provide a concise and brief explanation, with a blank line between the two.
Score:
Table 21: Prompt for fascination score used in story evaluation. The {story_type} is one of two: novel and script.
Here is a {story_type}:
{story}
Now let you give a score from 0 to 100 which represents its completeness level.
Score 0 indicates that it lacks all elements a {story_type} should have, while score 100 indicates that it has all elements a {story_type} should have.
Requirement: just provide a deterministic score and provide a concise and brief explanation, with a blank line between the two.
Score:
Table 22: Prompt for completeness score used in story evaluation. The {story_type} is one of two: novel and script.
Here is a {story_type}:
{story}
Now let give you a score from 0 to 100 which represents your level of familiarity with it.
Score 0 indicates that you have seen {story_type}s that are very similar to as the one provided, while score 100 means that you have never seen a {story_type} that is very similar to the one provided.
Requirement: just provide a deterministic score and provide a concise and brief explanation, with a blank line between the two.
Score:

heading: Prompt for Vanilla Baseline
text: Write 10 premises for novels or scripts in one sentence.

heading: Prompt for Complex Baseline
text: Write 10 premises for novels or scripts in one sentence like below.
{3 premises synthesized by MoPS}

heading: A premise entry in DOC dataset
text: In a dystopian future where emotions are outlawed, a young man named Leo discovers he is still capable of feeling love. Tormented by his forbidden affection, Leo must decide whether to face the consequences of living in a society that punishes any display of affection or run from his oppressive government.

heading: A premise entry in writingPrompts dataset
text: [WP] You ’ve finally managed to discover the secret to immortality. Suddenly, Death appears before you, hands you a business card, and says, When you realize living forever sucks, call this number , I ’ve got a job offer for you.

heading: A premise entry in storium dataset
text: Smooth seas, cool breeze, clear moonlight. The night was going so peacefully up until that whole sneak attack business. Funny, you don’t remember making any new enemies lately. But somebody obviously has it in for you nobody hunts you down like that for no reason. Who is it? And what in the world do they have against you, anyway?
Table 24: Prompts for vanilla and complex baseline, and an example premise entry in DOC, wringtPrompts, and storium dataset.

heading: Pre-defined Theme Candidates
text: Historical, Game, Time-travel, Immortal Heroes, Contemporary, Suspense, Sports, Fantastic, Science Fiction, Martial Arts, Military, Urban, Romance, Fantasy

heading: A Design of Premise in Collected Nested Dictionary
text: Premise: A powerful Roman general,granted immortality by a vengeful deity, must choose between loyalty to the empire and leading a rebellion, ultimately decide to bring justice and equality to the corrupt rulers of the Roman Empire.
Id: fb3af897-3e80-47f1-b632-088640dd40c1
The script generated by Dramatron:
Title: The Immortal Gladiator: A Rebellion for Justice
====
The script is based on the storyline: A powerful Roman general, granted immortality by a vengeful deity, must choose between loyalty to the empire and leading a rebellion, ultimately decide to bring justice and equality to the corrupt rulers of the Roman Empire.
====
Maximus Decimus Meridius: Maximus Decimus Meridius is the powerful Roman general. He is granted immortality by a vengeful deity and must choose between loyalty to the empire and leading a rebellion to bring justice and equality to the corrupt rulers of the Roman Empire.
Commodus: Commodus is the corrupt ruler of the Roman Empire. He is the antagonist and a threat to Maximus and his rebellion.
Livius: Livius is a loyal friend and ally of Maximus. He supports Maximus in his quest for justice and equality.
Aurelia: Aurelia is a strong and independent woman who becomes a key figure in Maximus’s rebellion. She is determined to fight for a better future for the people of Rome.
Lucius: Lucius is a young and impressionable boy who looks up to Maximus as a father figure. He becomes a symbol of hope for the rebellion.
====
Scene 1 Place: Roman Empire. Plot element: The Ordinary World Beat: Maximus is a respected and powerful general in the Roman army, loyal to the empire and its rulers.
Scene 2 Place: Roman Colosseum. Plot element: Call to Adventure Beat: Maximus is betrayed by Commodus and sentenced to death. He is granted immortality by a vengeful deity and is given a choice to either seek revenge or bring justice and equality to the corrupt rulers of the Roman Empire.
Scene 3 Place: Roman Senate. Plot element: Refusal of the Call Beat: Maximus initially refuses to lead a rebellion, feeling torn between his loyalty to the empire and his desire for justice.
Scene 4 Place: Roman Army Camp. Plot element: Crossing the First Threshold Beat: After witnessing the suffering of the people under the rule of Commodus, Maximus decides to lead a rebellion and fight for justice and equality.
Scene 5 Place: Roman City Streets. Plot element: Tests, Allies, and Enemies Beat: Maximus gathers allies, including his loyal friend Livius, the strong and independent Aurelia, and the young and impressionable Lucius. They face opposition from the corrupt rulers and their loyal followers.
Scene 6 Place: Roman Palace.
Plot element: The Approach to the Inmost Cave Beat: Maximus and his allies plan their rebellion, strategizing how to overthrow the corrupt rulers and bring about change in the Roman Empire.
Scene 7 Place: Roman Colosseum. Plot element: The Ordeal Beat: The rebellion faces a major setback as Commodus and his forces launch a brutal attack. Maximus and his allies must fight for their lives and the future of the rebellion.
Scene 8 Place: Roman Senate. Plot element: The Reward Beat: Despite the losses, the rebellion gains momentum and support from the people. They are one step closer to achieving their goal of justice and equality.
Scene 9 Place: Roman City Streets. Plot element: The Road Back Beat: Maximus and his allies prepare for the final battle against Commodus and the corrupt rulers, knowing that the fate of the Roman Empire rests on their shoulders.
Scene 10 Place: Roman Colosseum. Plot element: The Resurrection Beat: In a climactic battle, Maximus confronts Commodus and the corrupt rulers, leading the rebellion to victory and bringing about the change they fought for.
Scene 11 Place: Roman Senate. Plot element: The Return Beat: Maximus and his allies are hailed as heroes, and the Roman Empire begins a new era of justice and equality under their leadership.
==== INT/EXT. Roman Empire. - Scene 1

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I have served the empire faithfully for many years, but I can no longer turn a blind eye to the corruption and injustice that plagues our rulers.

heading: SENATOR
text: You speak treason, Maximus. The emperor will not tolerate such talk.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I speak the truth, senator. The people suffer while the rulers grow fat on their wealth and power.

heading: SENATOR
text: You would betray the empire and lead a rebellion?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I would lead a rebellion for the people, for justice and equality. I cannot stand by and watch as the empire crumbles under the weight of its own greed.

heading: SENATOR
text: You are a fool, Maximus. The emperor will crush any rebellion with the full force of the Roman army.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Perhaps. But I will not stand idly by while the people suffer. I will fight for their freedom, even if it means defying the empire itself.

heading: SENATOR
text: You will regret this, Maximus. The emperor will not forgive such betrayal.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am prepared to face the consequences of my actions. The people deserve a leader who will fight for their rights, and I will be that leader.
SENATOR
You are a brave man, Maximus. But remember, the consequences of rebellion are severe. Are you willing to risk everything for the sake of the people?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am. I cannot ignore the suffering of the people any longer. I will do whatever it takes to bring justice and equality to the empire, even if it means facing the wrath of the emperor.

heading: SENATOR
text: Very well, Maximus. You have made your choice. But know that the path you have chosen is a dangerous one, and the consequences will be grave.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am prepared for whatever may come. The people deserve a leader who will fight for their freedom, and I will be that leader, no matter the cost.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Colosseum. - Scene 2
text: Commodus is the corrupt ruler of the Roman Empire. He is the antagonist and a threat to Maximus and his rebellion.

heading: COMMODUS
text: Maximus, you have been a loyal and powerful general in my army. But your loyalty has become a threat to my rule. You have been sentenced to death for treason.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I have served the empire faithfully, Commodus. I have fought for justice and honor.

heading: COMMODUS
text: Your sense of justice is a threat to my power. But I offer you a chance for redemption. Join me, and together we can rule the empire as father and son.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I will never join you, Commodus. You have betrayed the people and the ideals of Rome. I will not stand by and watch as you continue to oppress and corrupt the empire.

heading: COMMODUS
text: Then you leave me no choice. You will face death in the Colosseum, and the people will witness the consequences of defying me.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I will not die, Commodus. I have been granted immortality by a vengeful deity. I will use this gift to bring justice and equality to the corrupt rulers of the Roman Empire.

heading: COMMODUS
text: You are a fool, Maximus. Immortality will not save you from my wrath. But if you choose to defy me, then prepare for the consequences. The people will see who truly holds the power in Rome.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am not afraid of your threats, Commodus. I will lead a rebellion to bring an end to your tyranny and restore honor to Rome. The people will rise up against you, and justice will prevail.

heading: COMMODUS
text: We shall see, Maximus. But remember, the consequences of defying me will be severe. You have been warned.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am prepared to face whatever consequences come my way. I will not rest until the corrupt rulers of the Roman Empire are brought to justice. This is my call to adventure, and I will answer it with courage and determination.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Senate. - Scene 3

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I cannot do this. I cannot betray the empire that I have served for so long.

heading: SENATOR
text: But Maximus, the empire is corrupt. The rulers are unjust and the people suffer under their tyranny. You have the power to change that.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I understand that, but I cannot simply turn against everything I have fought for. I have sworn my loyalty to Rome, and I cannot break that oath.

heading: SENATOR
text: But what about the oath to justice and equality? What about the suffering of the people?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I cannot deny that it weighs heavily on my heart. But I cannot make this decision lightly. I need time to consider my options.

heading: SENATOR
text: Time is a luxury we do not have, Maximus. The people need a leader, someone they can rally behind to bring about change.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I know, but I cannot be that leader. Not yet, at least.

heading: SENATOR
text: Then when, Maximus? When will you be ready to take a stand for what is right?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I do not know. But I will not be rushed into making a decision that could have dire consequences for the empire.

heading: SENATOR
text: Very well, Maximus. But know that the people will not wait forever for a savior. The time will come when they will rise up with or without you.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I understand. And I will not stand in their way. But for now, I must refuse the call to rebellion.

heading: SENATOR
text: Very well, Maximus. We will respect your decision for now. But know that the fate of the empire rests in your hands. We can only hope that you will make the right choice when the time comes.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Army Camp. - Scene 4

heading: COMMODUS
text: Maximus, you have been a loyal and trusted general in my army. I trust that you will continue to serve the empire with unwavering loyalty.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I cannot, Commodus. I have seen the suffering of the people under your rule. I cannot stand by and watch as injustice and corruption run rampant in the empire.

heading: COMMODUS
text: You dare defy me, Maximus? You dare challenge the authority of the emperor?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I do not seek to challenge your authority, Commodus. I seek to bring justice and equality to the people who have suffered under your rule.

heading: COMMODUS
text: You are a fool, Maximus. You will regret this decision. The empire will crush any rebellion that dares to rise against it.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am willing to face the consequences, Commodus. I will not stand idly by while the people suffer. I will lead a rebellion and fight for what is right.

heading: COMMODUS
text: You will pay for your betrayal, Maximus. I will not tolerate this defiance.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: So be it, Commodus. I am prepared to face whatever comes my way in the pursuit of justice.COMMODUS You may think you are noble, Maximus, but you are nothing but a traitor in the eyes of the empire. You will regret crossing this threshold and defying me.
MAXIMUS
I have no regrets, Commodus. I will fight for the people and for what is right, no matter the cost.

heading: COMMODUS
text: We shall see, Maximus. We shall see.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman City Streets. - Scene 5
text: Livius is a loyal friend and ally of Maximus. He supports Maximus in his quest for justice and equality. Aurelia is a strong and independent woman who becomes a key figure in Maximus’s rebellion. She is determined to fight for a better future for the people of Rome. Lucius is a young and impressionable boy who looks up to Maximus as a father figure. He becomes a symbol of hope for the rebellion.

heading: LIVIUS
text: Maximus, we have gathered our allies and we are ready to fight for justice and equality. But we must be cautious, for our enemies are powerful and ruthless.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I know, my friend. But we cannot stand by and watch the people suffer any longer. We must be strong and united in our cause.

heading: AURELIA
text: I am with you, Maximus. I will fight alongside you for a better future for Rome.

heading: LUCIUS
text: I want to help too, Maximus. I want to make a difference.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: You already have, Lucius. Your presence gives us hope and strength. But we must be prepared for the tests and challenges that lie ahead.

heading: LIVIUS
text: We will face many enemies, but we will also find allies who share our vision for a just and equal Rome.

heading: AURELIA
text: And we will stand together, united in our cause. We will not be divided or discouraged by those who seek to maintain their power at the expense of the people.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Then let us go forth, my friends. We will face the tests and challenges together, and we will emerge victorious in our quest for justice and equality.

heading: LUCIUS
text: I believe in you, Maximus. I know we can make a difference and bring about a better future for Rome.

heading: LIVIUS
text: We will stand by your side, Maximus, through thick and thin. Together, we will overcome our enemies and bring about the change that Rome so desperately needs.

heading: AURELIA
text: I have faith in our cause and in our unity. We will not falter in the face of adversity, and we will fight for what is right until the very end.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Thank you, my friends. With your unwavering support and determination, I know that we can overcome any obstacle that stands in our way. Let us go forth and make history.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Palace. - Scene 6

heading: MAXIMUS
text: We have gathered enough support to make our move. The time has come to overthrow the corrupt rulers and bring justice to the people of Rome.

heading: LIVIUS
text: But Maximus, are you sure this is the right path? We could face severe consequences if we fail.
MAXIMUS
I understand the risks, but I cannot stand by and watch the empire crumble under the weight of corruption and greed. We must take action.

heading: AURELIA
text: I stand with you, Maximus. The people deserve better than what they have been given. We will fight for their freedom and equality.

heading: LUCIUS
text: I want to help too, Maximus. I want to make a difference.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: You have all shown great courage and determination. Together, we will lead the rebellion and bring about change in the Roman Empire.

heading: LIVIUS
text: I will follow you to the end, my friend. Let us make our move and bring justice to our people.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: It will not be easy, but we are prepared to face whatever challenges come our way. The time has come to approach the inmost cave and confront the corrupt rulers. Are you all ready?

heading: AURELIA
text: We are ready, Maximus. Let us bring about the change that Rome so desperately needs.

heading: LUCIUS
text: I’m ready, Maximus. I want to make my family proud.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Then let us go forth and make history. The fate of Rome rests in our hands.
The group of allies, led by Maximus, prepares to make their move and confront the corrupt rulers of the Roman Empire. They are determined to bring about change and justice for the people of Rome, despite the risks and challenges they may face. With their courage and determination, they are ready to approach the inmost cave and take on the powerful forces that stand in their way. The fate of Rome rests in their hands, and they are prepared to fight for the future of their empire.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Colosseum. - Scene 7

heading: COMMODUS
text: You thought you could defy me and get away with it, Maximus? You and your pathetic rebellion are nothing but a nuisance to me.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: We will not be silenced, Commodus. We fight for justice and equality, for the people of Rome who suffer under your tyranny.

heading: COMMODUS
text: Justice and equality? Ha! You are a fool, Maximus. The people of Rome are nothing but pawns to be used and discarded as I see fit.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: You may have the power now, but the people will rise against you. They will not stand for your cruelty and oppression forever.

heading: COMMODUS
text: The people will do as I command, or they will suffer the consequences. And as for you, Maximus, you will not live to see the end of this rebellion.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I will not be intimidated by you, Commodus. I will fight for the freedom of Rome until my last breath.

heading: COMMODUS
text: Then prepare to meet your end, Maximus. Your rebellion ends here, in the blood-soaked sands of the Colosseum.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: So be it, Commodus. We will see who emerges victorious in this battle for the future of Rome. COMMODUS
You may have the support of the people, but I have the power of the empire behind me. Your rebellion is nothing but a futile attempt to defy the inevitable.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: The people will not be swayed by your empty promises and false power, Commodus. They will see through your lies and stand with us in the fight for freedom.

heading: COMMODUS
text: Enough talk, Maximus. It’s time to settle this once and for all. Prepare to face the might of the empire and meet your fate in the arena.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am ready, Commodus. Let the people witness the true strength and resilience of those who fight for justice and equality. The rebellion will not be silenced, and the empire will fall to the will of the people.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Senate. - Scene 8

heading: MAXIMUS
text: My fellow senators, the time has come for us to take a stand against the corruption and tyranny that has plagued our empire for too long. We have the support of the people, and together we can bring about a new era of justice and equality.
SENATOR 1 But Maximus, are you not loyal to the empire? Is this not treason?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am loyal to the ideals of Rome, to the principles of justice and fairness. It is the corrupt rulers who have betrayed the empire, and it is our duty to restore honor and integrity to our government.
SENATOR 2 But what of Commodus and his forces? They will not take kindly to our rebellion.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: We have faced their brutality before, and we will continue to do so until we have achieved our goal. The people are with us, and together we are strong.
SENATOR 3 And what of your immortality, Maximus? Will you risk it all for this rebellion?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I have been granted immortality by a vengeful deity, but I will not let that gift dictate my actions. I will fight for the future of Rome, for the future of our people, and I will not rest until justice is served.
SENATOR 4 Then we stand with you, Maximus. We will fight alongside you and bring about the change that our empire so desperately needs.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Thank you, my fellow senators. Together, we will bring about a new era for Rome, one of justice, equality, and honor.
SENATOR 5 I have always believed in your leadership, Maximus. I will do everything in my power to support this rebellion and bring about the change we so desperately need.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Thank you, my friend. With the support of the people and the determination of the senate, we will overcome any obstacle in our path. The time for change is now, and together we will achieve our reward - a just and fair Roman Empire.

heading: INT/EXT. Roman City Streets. - Scene 9

heading: MAXIMUS
text: We have come too far to turn back now. The people are counting on us to bring an end to the tyranny of Commodus and his corrupt rule.

heading: ALLIES
text: We stand with you, Maximus. We will fight to the end for justice and equality for all.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: The road ahead will be difficult, but we must stay united and focused on our goal. We cannot let fear or doubt cloud our judgment.

heading: ALLIES
text: We are ready to follow you into battle, Maximus. Together, we will bring an end to the oppression and restore honor to the Roman Empire.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Prepare yourselves, my friends. The final battle is upon us. We will not rest until we have achieved victory and brought an end to the reign of Commodus.

heading: ALLIES
text: For justice and equality! For the people of Rome!

heading: MAXIMUS
text: For the future of the Roman Empire! We will not falter, we will not fail. Our cause is just, and our determination is unwavering. Let us march forward and show Commodus and his corrupt allies that the people will not be oppressed any longer. Victory is within our grasp, and we will seize it with all our might!

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Colosseum. - Scene 10

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Commodus, your reign of tyranny ends here. The people have risen up against you, and justice will be served.

heading: COMMODUS
text: You dare challenge me, Maximus? I am the ruler of the Roman Empire, and I will not be overthrown by a mere mortal like you.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: You may have the title of emperor, but you have lost the respect and loyalty of the people. Your corrupt ways have brought suffering and injustice to the empire, and it is time for a new era of equality and justice.

heading: COMMODUS
text: You speak of justice, yet you lead a rebellion against the rightful ruler of Rome. You are a traitor and a threat to the stability of the empire.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I am no traitor. I fight for the people, for their freedom and their rights. You have abused your power and brought ruin to the empire. It is time for a new beginning, a resurrection of the values that Rome was built upon.

heading: COMMODUS
text: You will not succeed, Maximus. I will crush your rebellion and maintain my grip on power. The people will learn to fear and obey me once more.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Your reign of terror ends now, Commodus. The people have chosen to stand with me, and together we will bring about the resurrection of justice and equality in the Roman Empire.
(COMMODUS and MAXIMUS engage in a fierce battle, with the fate of the empire hanging in the balance. In the end, MAXIMUS emerges victorious, and the people celebrate the resurrection of a new era in Rome.)

heading: INT/EXT. Roman Senate. - Scene 11

heading: MAXIMUS
text: My fellow senators, I stand before you today not as a conqueror, but as a servant of the people. The time has come for us to rebuild our empire, not on the backs of slaves and corruption, but on the principles of justice and equality.
SENATOR 1 But Maximus, you were once a loyal general of the empire. How can we trust that you will not lead us astray?
MAXIMUS
I understand your concerns, but I have been granted immortality by the gods themselves. I have seen the rise and fall of empires, and I have learned from the mistakes of the past. I will not let power corrupt me, and I will always put the needs of the people first.
SENATOR 2 But what of the emperor? Will you not be seen as a traitor to the throne?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: The emperor has lost his way, and it is time for a new leader to rise. I do not seek power for myself, but for the betterment of our empire. I will lead with honor and integrity, and I will ensure that the voices of the people are heard.
SENATOR 3 It is a bold vision, Maximus. But can we truly trust that you will bring about the change you promise?

heading: MAXIMUS
text: I cannot force you to trust me, but I ask that you look at my actions and the actions of my allies. We have fought for justice and equality, and we will continue to do so. I will not rest until the Roman Empire is a place where every citizen can thrive and live in peace.
SENATOR 4 We will support you, Maximus. We have seen the change you have brought about, and we believe in your vision for the future of our empire.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Thank you, my friends. Together, we will build a new Rome, a Rome that stands as a beacon of hope and justice for all.
SENATOR 5 I pledge my loyalty to you, Maximus. Let us work together to create a better future for our people.

heading: MAXIMUS
text: Thank you, my fellow senators. With your support, we will bring about the change that our empire so desperately needs. Together, we will build a Rome that we can all be proud of.
====
The novel generated by RecurrentGPT:
Name: Immortal Legion
Outline:
- Introduce the protagonist, Marcus Aurelius, a revered Roman general known for his unwavering loyalty to the empire.
- Describe the pivotal battle where Marcus is granted immortality by a vengeful deity, cursing him to live forever until he chooses to defy the empire.
- Set the stage for the internal conflict Marcus faces as he grapples with his newfound immortality and the corrupt nature of the Roman rulers.
The sun blazed fiercely over the battlefield, casting a harsh glare upon the clashing armies. Marcus Aurelius, a formidable Roman general, stood at the forefront of his legion, his eyes ablaze with determination. The air was thick with the scent of blood and sweat, and the deafening clash of swords echoed through the valley. Marcus had always been a loyal servant of the empire, leading his men with unwavering devotion. But as the battle raged on, a sense of foreboding crept over him, as if the fates themselves were preparing to intervene.
In the midst of the chaos, a sudden bolt of lightning split the sky, striking the ground mere feet from where Marcus stood. As the blinding light faded, a figure emerged from the smoke, emanating an otherworldly aura. It was a vengeful deity, angered by the empire’s tyranny and corruption. In a voice that resonated with power, the deity cursed Marcus with immortality, binding him to an existence that would endure until he chose to defy the empire and seek justice for its oppressed citizens. As the deity vanished, leaving Marcus bewildered and burdened with a weighty choice, the battle around him reached its brutal climax.
In the aftermath of the battle, Marcus found himself grappling with the implications of his newfound immortality. He had always been a loyal servant of Rome, but now, the deity’s curse had planted a seed of doubt within him. The empire’s corruption and oppression weighed heavily on his conscience, and he knew that he could no longer turn a blind eye to the suffering of its people. As he gazed upon the bloodstained battlefield, a steely resolve took hold in his heart. Marcus Aurelius, the immortal general, would rise to challenge the very empire he had once served, in a quest to bring justice and equality to the citizens who had long suffered under its rule.
With a heavy heart and a resolute mind, Marcus Aurelius embarked on his journey to challenge the empire. He sought out like-minded individuals who shared his vision of justice and equality, carefully weaving a network of allies while concealing the truth of his immortality. The task of uniting disparate factions proved to be a daunting challenge, as internal conflicts threatened to tear his rebellion apart. As he navigated the treacherous landscape of political intrigue and deception, Marcus grappled with the weight of his newfound purpose, wrestling with conflicting emotions that threatened to consume him. The internal and external conflicts he encountered tested the limits of his resolve and shaped the path of his rebellion, setting the stage for a battle that would determine the fate of the empire.
As Marcus and Livia continued to forge their rebellion, they encountered a group of skilled and diverse individuals who shared their passion for justice. Among them was Lucius, a former scholar turned warrior, who brought a wealth of knowledge and insight to their cause. His strategic mind and ability to navigate the intricate web of political alliances proved invaluable. Alongside Lucius was Ariadne, a fierce and charismatic leader who commanded the respect and loyalty of her followers. Her unwavering determination and eloquence inspired hope and unity among the rebellion’s ranks. As the group expanded, they faced increasing resistance from the empire, leading to daring escapades and narrow escapes. Despite the challenges, their bond strengthened, fueled by a shared vision of a liberated and just society. Together, they strategized and planned, each member bringing their unique skills and experiences to the table, shaping the rebellion into a formidable force that could no longer be ignored by the empire.
The rebellion faced increasing resistance from the empire, forcing Marcus, Livia, Lucius, and Ariadne to navigate treacherous situations. As they sought to expand their network of supporters, they encountered a mysterious figure who presented them with a tantalizing opportunity to shift the balance of power in their favor. This influential individual offered a chance to gain crucial information about the empire’s vulnerabilities, potentially tipping the scales in their favor. However, the conditions of this alliance came with a perilous price, one that could compromise the essence of their rebellion and sow seeds of discord within their ranks. The offer presented a moral dilemma, testing the loyalty and convictions of each member and setting the stage for internal conflict and external consequences. As they grappled with this decision, Marcus and his allies found themselves embroiled in a web of intrigue and danger, where trust and betrayal intertwined, threatening to unravel all they had worked for.
The high-ranking official’s words hung in the air, each syllable laden with the weight of their potential consequences. Marcus and his allies listened intently, their minds racing with the implications of the information being offered. The official’s promises of crucial intelligence were like a siren’s call, beckoning them to grasp at the chance to weaken the empire’s grip on power. Yet, as they weighed the risks and rewards, a sense of unease settled over the group, each member grappling with their own fears and doubts. The tension in the chamber was palpable, the air thick with the conflicting desires for liberation and the fear of betrayal. Despite the allure of the official’s offer, a shadow of doubt lingered in Marcus’s mind, a nagging suspicion that this tempting opportunity was too good to be true. As the meeting drew to a close, the group left the opulent chamber, their thoughts consumed by the precarious path that lay ahead. They knew that their next steps would shape the course of their rebellion, and the consequences of their choices would echo through history, for better or for worse.
As the weight of doubt and uncertainty continued to gnaw at Marcus, he sought counsel from an enigmatic figure with ties to the empire, hoping to unravel the true intentions behind the official’s offer. The clandestine meetings, shrouded in secrecy and danger, raised suspicions and drew the attention of those who would see the rebellion crushed. Marcus found himself navigating a treacherous web of deceit and betrayal, his every move scrutinized by shadowy figures within the empire’s ranks. Despite the looming threat of discovery, Marcus was determined to unearth the truth and safeguard the rebellion’s future, even if it meant delving into the heart of the empire’s dark underbelly.
The clandestine meetings with Xue continued to unravel layers of intrigue and danger, drawing Marcus deeper into a web of deception and shifting loyalties. As Marcus probed for clues and sought to untangle the truth behind the official’s offer, he found himself entangled in a delicate game of cat and mouse with the empire’s clandestine operatives. His pursuit of the truth led to unexpected alliances and dangerous revelations, plunging the rebellion into an even more precarious position. The enigmatic figure, Xue, held the key to unlocking the empire’s dark underbelly, but his allegiances remained veiled in mystery, raising questions of trust and betrayal. With powerful adversaries within the empire taking notice of Marcus’s actions, the conflict escalated, setting the stage for a high-stakes confrontation that would test the rebellion’s resilience and the strength of their convictions.
The plan for a daring operation to confront the empire’s most feared enforcer began to take shape as Marcus and his allies gathered in the dimly lit chamber of their secret meeting place. Tension crackled in the air as they pored over maps and whispered urgently, plotting their risky maneuver to gather vital intelligence. The weight of uncertainty hung heavy in the room, but determination burned in Marcus’s eyes as he outlined the details of their audacious plan. Each member of the rebellion knew the perilous stakes and the potential consequences of their actions, yet they stood resolute in their resolve to challenge the empire’s iron grip. As the hours slipped away, the final preparations fell into place, and a sense of grim anticipation settled over the group, mingled with the hope of a decisive victory that could shift the tides of their rebellion.
The enigmatic figure, Xue, had led Marcus deeper into the treacherous underworld of the city, where the shadows whispered of secrets and danger. Each clandestine encounter with Xue unraveled new layers of complexity, revealing a world where loyalties were as transient as the shifting sands of the desert. Despite the looming threat of discovery, Marcus was determined to unearth the truth and safeguard the rebellion’s future, even if it meant delving into the heart of the empire’s dark underbelly. As the weight of uncertainty continued to gnaw at him, Marcus found himself entangled in a delicate game of cat and mouse with the empire’s clandestine operatives. The stakes soared to dizzying heights as he delved into the heart of the empire’s dark underbelly, where danger lurked in every shadow and betrayal loomed like a specter. Yet, with each perilous step, Marcus unearthed fragments of truth that painted a chilling portrait of the empire’s inner workings, a revelation that would reshape the rebellion’s path and plunge them into an even more precarious position.
As the urgency of the rebellion’s cause drives Marcus forward, he embarks on a perilous mission to infiltrate a heavily guarded facility rumored to hold vital intelligence crucial to the rebellion’s success. The labyrinthine corridors of the facility present formidable obstacles, and the ever-present threat of discovery looms over him, heightening the stakes to unprecedented levels. With the weight of responsibility pressing down on him, Marcus navigates the treacherous passages, his every move calculated and deliberate to ensure the safety of his allies and the future of the rebellion. The shadows of the facility whisper of secrets and danger, and Marcus finds himself entangled in a high-stakes game of deception and survival. The pulse of the city beats with an undercurrent of tension and unrest, fueling Marcus’s determination to unearth the truth, no matter the cost. As he inches closer to the heart of the facility, the web of deceit and betrayal tightens around him, and the looming confrontation with the empire’s most feared enforcer threatens to plunge him into a perilous game of brinksmanship and deception.
As Marcus cautiously navigates the labyrinthine corridors of the heavily guarded facility, he stumbles upon a clandestine chamber hidden deep within the heart of the structure. To his astonishment, the chamber is filled with encrypted documents that unravel a web of deceit and betrayal, shedding light on the empire’s most closely guarded secrets. As he sifts through the cryptic messages, a chilling realization dawns upon him – the empire’s most trusted allies may harbor treacherous intentions, and the rebellion’s very existence hangs in a precarious balance. With each revelation, Marcus finds himself plunged into a harrowing game of survival, where every decision could mean the difference between victory and defeat. The weight of responsibility presses down on him, and the shadows of the facility seem to whisper of imminent danger, heightening the stakes to unprecedented levels. As he grapples with the shocking truths laid bare before him, Marcus is forced to confront the harsh reality that the path to victory may be paved with sacrifice and betrayal.
Table 26: A example of script and novel generated from a MoPS premise by Dramatron and RecurrentGPT.

heading: Future Work
text: Despite the looming threat of discovery, Marcus was determined to unearth the truth and safeguard the rebellion’s future, even if it meant delving into the heart of the empire’s dark underbelly. The clandestine meetings with Xue continued to unravel layers of intrigue and danger, drawing Marcus deeper into a web of deception and shifting loyalties. As Marcus probed for clues and sought to untangle the truth behind the official’s offer, he found himself entangled in a delicate game of cat and mouse with the empire’s clandestine operatives. His pursuit of the truth led to unexpected alliances and dangerous revelations, plunging the rebellion into an even more precarious position. The enigmatic figure, Xue, held the key to unlocking the empire’s dark underbelly, but his allegiances remained veiled in mystery, raising questions of trust and betrayal. With powerful adversaries within the empire taking notice of Marcus’s actions, the conflict escalated, setting the stage for a high-stakes confrontation that would test the rebellion’s resilience and the strength of their convictions. The plan for a daring operation to confront the empire’s most feared enforcer began to take shape as Marcus and his allies gathered in the dimly lit chamber of their secret meeting place. Tension crackled in the air as they pored over maps and whispered urgently, plotting their risky maneuver to gather vital intelligence. The weight of uncertainty hung heavy in the room, but determination burned in Marcus’s eyes as he outlined the details of their audacious plan. Each member of the rebellion knew the perilous stakes and the potential consequences of their actions, yet they stood resolute in their resolve to challenge the empire’s iron grip. As the hours slipped away, the final preparations fell into place, and a sense of grim anticipation settled over the group, mingled with the hope of a decisive victory that could shift the tides of their rebellion. The enigmatic figure, Xue, had led Marcus deeper into the treacherous underworld of the city, where the shadows whispered of secrets and danger. Each clandestine encounter with Xue unraveled new layers of complexity, revealing a world where loyalties were as transient as the shifting sands of the desert. Despite the looming threat of discovery, Marcus was determined to unearth the truth and safeguard the rebellion’s future, even if it meant delving into the heart of the empire’s dark underbelly. As the weight of uncertainty continued to gnaw at him, Marcus found himself entangled in a delicate game of cat and mouse with the empire’s clandestine operatives. The stakes soared to dizzying heights as he delved into the heart of the empire’s dark underbelly, where danger lurked in every shadow and betrayal loomed like a specter. Yet, with each perilous step, Marcus unearthed fragments of truth that painted a chilling portrait of the empire’s inner workings, a revelation that would reshape the rebellion’s path and plunge them into an even more precarious position. As the urgency of the rebellion’s cause drives Marcus forward, he embarks on a perilous mission to infiltrate a heavily guarded facility rumored to hold vital intelligence crucial to the rebellion’s success. The labyrinthine corridors of the facility present formidable obstacles, and the ever-present threat of discovery looms over him, heightening the stakes to unprecedented levels. With the weight of responsibility pressing down on him, Marcus navigates the treacherous passages, his every move calculated and deliberate to ensure the safety of his allies and the future of the rebellion. The shadows of the facility whisper of secrets and danger, and Marcus finds himself entangled in a high-stakes game of deception and survival. The pulse of the city beats with an undercurrent of tension and unrest, fueling Marcus’s determination to unearth the truth, no matter the cost. As he inches closer to the heart of the facility, the web of deceit and betrayal tightens around him, and the looming confrontation with the empire’s most feared enforcer threatens to plunge him into a perilous game of brinksmanship and deception. As Marcus cautiously navigates the labyrinthine corridors of the heavily guarded facility, he stumbles upon a clandestine chamber hidden deep within the heart of the structure. To his astonishment, the chamber is filled with encrypted documents that unravel a web of deceit and betrayal, shedding light on the empire’s most closely guarded secrets. As he sifts through the cryptic messages, a chilling realization dawns upon him – the empire’s most trusted allies may harbor treacherous intentions, and the rebellion’s very existence hangs in a precarious balance. With each revelation, Marcus finds himself plunged into a harrowing game of survival, where every decision could mean the difference between victory and defeat. The weight of responsibility presses down on him, and the shadows of the facility seem to whisper of imminent danger, heightening the stakes to unprecedented levels. As he grapples with the shocking truths laid bare before him, Marcus is forced to confront the harsh reality that the path to victory may be paved with sacrifice and betrayal. Table 26: A example of script and novel generated from a MoPS premise by Dramatron and RecurrentGPT