Customize

Most chatbots now support Projects — a way to attach background information that gets included in every conversation. You can use a Project to avoid repeating things that stay constant from one encounter to the next: your party composition, an XP adjustment that applies to every fight, the tone or setting of your campaign, or how much detail you want in the output.

In Claude.ai, project instructions live in the Instructions field of a Project. In Claude Cowork, they live in the project's system prompt. Either way, anything you paste there applies to every chat in that project. The snippets below are good starting points.

Pin your party composition

If you always run the same party, retyping “4 PCs at level 5” in every prompt gets old fast. Pin it once and the chatbot stops asking. You can pin a default XP bump in the same snippet — handy if your party is consistently stronger or weaker than baseline.

My party is 4 PCs at level 5. They're stronger than normal. Bump the XP value of all encounters by 15%. Use this whenever you build an encounter unless I say otherwise.

Change the output shape

The encounter-builder skill strips read-aloud text, tactical advice, and stat block summaries by default — they're unreliable enough that we'd rather you opt in than be surprised by hallucinated damage numbers. Ask for them explicitly when you want them.

For every encounter, include short read-aloud text the GM can deliver when the PCs first see the monsters. Keep it under three sentences. Skip stat block summaries and tactical advice.

Set the tone or setting

Pin a default world or mood and the encounter hooks start matching your campaign without you spelling it out each time.

All encounters take place in the Athasian desert (Dark Sun setting). Lean into scarcity, sun-blasted ruins, and morally grey factions when writing the encounter hook.

Override the default habitat

When you don't mention a habitat in your prompt, the encounter builder falls back to a default that fits most campaigns but may not suit yours. Pin a different one in your project instructions — Desert for a Dark Sun game, Underdark for a drow campaign, and so on.

Unless I say otherwise, default the habitat to Desert.

Combining instructions

These snippets stack. Paste the ones you need into your project instructions and the chatbot will use your party, your output shape, and your setting on every encounter. See prompting tips for what to put in the actual prompt once these defaults are in place.