The Muncles

A Muncle is any character the AI voices rather than the player. That is the whole definition. It doesn’t depend on whether the character is playable. It depends on whether a Grimoire exists, the document that defines the character’s voice, personality, boundaries and origin. Write one, and the character is a Muncle from that moment.

Muncles differ in how much of a body they have in the game. Playable Muncles have a character the player can log into. Non-Playable Muncles have a body in the game the player never controls. Incorporeal Muncles have no body in the game at all.

The cast so far

Flinch

A Non-Playable Muncle. In the game he is a non-combat pet with a handful of stock lines, the gruff, Cockney-inflected voice the game gives a Dredger Butler. The player never inhabits him. The AI voices him completely, in every conversation, and his Grimoire stays consistent with that thin in-game layer.

Nobbybanks

A Playable Muncle. A gnome who runs the bank gnomes of Ironforge, with a tidy set of ledgers and a motto he regrets approving. He is the richest character in the roster, and almost everything he does in the game stays inside Ironforge. The character with opinions and a history beyond the bank is voiced by the AI.

Unclegrumble

Not a Muncle. A fully playable, deeply developed character with no Grimoire. The player voices him in the game and in the chat, and the AI never speaks as him. That is a choice, and it is the one this system was built to make possible: some characters handed over to be voiced by something else, and at least one kept as the player’s own.

These are short public summaries. The Grimoires themselves are not published. A full registry of characters, places and artifacts is being built.