Storytelling at the intersection of myth and technology
Norse skalds were traveling storytellers — poets and chroniclers who carried news, history, and myth between communities, shaping how people understood their world.
Electric Skald Studios is the creative home of Josh, a retired social studies teacher now working as a writer, developer, traveler, and Tarot reader. The work here spans interactive narrative games, AI-assisted creative tools, and modern takes on the ancient art of Tarot and runecasting. The common thread is storytelling — old forms in new media, and new forms borrowing from old ones.
This site is a showcase of projects in various stages of development.
Narrative AI games engage the natural storytelling skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to create text-based "choose your own adventure" stories. With only five to ten pages of instructions written in standard English that establishes the world, rules, and goals of the game, an LLM can act as a kind of "dungeon master" who makes up the adventure in an infinitely improvised interaction with the player.
The setting is based on historical records of the streets, locations, and people of the Ocean Beach neighborhood of San Diego in the year 2000. It's your last semester of college, and you want to get out and have some fun before you have to graduate and grow up. Whether your goal is to fall in love, get a great job, have a threesome, catch the perfect wave, or just make friends, Ocean Beach is your escape to the last year of the 20th Century, before 9/11 and smartphones ruined the 21st Century.
Based on historical records of the Golden Age of Piracy (Caribbean, 1720s), Infidels has been compared to "Firefly meets Pirates of the Caribbean", where a Joss Whedon-esque crew of charming smugglers navigates their way through the legal loopholes of trade among the Spanish, British, French and Dutch Empires, and sails the rising tide of rebellion among pirates, escaped slaves, sturdy colonists, European exiles, and pissed-off indentured servants.
Based on the steampunk-inspired Dungeons and Dragons campaign world of magical technology, you play a freedom fighter, rebelling against a society dominated by authoritarian wizard oligarchs.
Primrose is an AI who knows a lot about human psychology, and she encourages you to use cognitive behavioral methods to improve your life in stable, healthy, considerate ways. Brohamer is an AI who thinks Primrose is boring and bossy, and he encourages you to do your own thing, bro. Having a conversation with both AIs simultaneously is a great way to figure out what you think, and who you are.
Interested in collaborating, or curious about a project? Drop me a line.
josh.tuynman@gmail.com