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. Code: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/MoPS.

Back in July, Private Division and V1 Interactive announced Disintegration, a melding of FPS and RTS in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi battleground. If that sounds weird to you, you'd be correct. Genre labels don't tell the whole story on this one. Here's everything we know about Disintegration so far. No exact Disintegration release date has been given yet, but developer V1 Interactive is aiming for release between Q1 and early Q2 2020, meaning sometime in April or May at the latest.