I've spent a few weeks now iterating on the prompting. At first this also produced generic slop, but I've slowly built a few cool features into the prompting and the stories are getting good!

1. You can select from a list of values that resonate with you, these values get woven into the stories.

2. Stories are targeted by age. Length and vocabulary reflect the age of the children they are for (A 2-year-old gets ≤300 words with sensory refrains; a 9-year-old gets up to 2000 and can handle ambiguous endings.) and the stories also target certain developmental milestones for children.

3. Added variety and randomness by using RNG on the server to select things like setting and theme on the server. I found the LLM alone just always collapses to pretty much the same story - so the server picks the species, setting, angle, tone, and structure independently and hands all of that to the LLM. One seeded 32-bit RNG drives the lot, so I can reproduce any story exactly from its seed.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!