Vroomfogle has awoken
After more than a decade in the shadows, Vroomfogle & Company is back.
A Return to Kulthea
More than a decade ago, I stepped away from Rolemaster and Shadow World. Back then, I ran vroomfogle.com and the Nomikos library as resources for our gaming community. Life moved on, domains lapsed, and those sites faded into memory.
Around the same time, I also stepped away from the development of RMU. It was great to see it finally published, and I’m proud of the work I contributed. These days, though, I’m less interested in rules and mechanics and more interested in the setting and stories.
Shadow World never truly left me. Terry Amthor’s creation — with its deep history, powerful magic, and richly detailed cultures — deserves to live on. I’ve always loved Shadow World because it’s detailed, mysterious, and alive and even with all that canon there are still blank spaces that invite you to step in and make something of your own. Every line in the timeline feels like a story waiting to happen.
I still play RM occasionally with old friends — we’ve been playing for years, maybe about once a year on average — and it’s always a good reminder of why the setting mattered more to me than the rules ever did.
Part of this reboot is simply because I like building things. It was a good excuse to learn some new technologies and to explore what it looks like to integrate LLMs with RAG (vector embeddings and semantic search) for a fun hobby application.
Another reason is simple: I want to encourage people to play Shadow World. If this helps existing fans go deeper (and maybe pulls a few new folks in) that’s a win.
This is me rebuilding a small corner of the old internet: a place to preserve canon lore, explore it deeply, and build upon it in ways that respect the source material while enabling new stories.
For me, the Y’kin were one of those places where the story felt unfinished. Rather than leaving them frozen as villains, this campaign gives them a narrative—and lets them matter in one small, consequential part of the Shadow World.
What is Vroomfogle & Company?
Vroomfogle & Company is my interactive archive for Kulthea: AI-powered exploration tools, a growing library index, and campaign notes written as a living chronicle.
On the site you’ll find Nomikos (source-grounded Q&A over an indexed Shadow World library), Ask Andraax (the same underlying retrieval with a more cryptic voice for hooks), and a living campaign archive for Legacy of the Y’kin.
Nomikos is a great tool for reflecting canon, but it’s not a replacement for the books. The canon books have maps, adventures, statistics, and they’re browseable in a way an AI summary isn’t. Nomikos is ultimately a summary and rephrasing of those texts — and it can (and does) get things wrong.
If you’re interested in the retrieval/indexing side of this (RAG, vector embeddings, semantic search), the core library is athenaeum, available on GitHub.
The AI personas and retrieval behavior are very likely to need ongoing tweaking (prompting, guardrails, retrieval parameters, and UI details) as real-world usage reveals edge cases. If something feels off—tone, refusal behavior, citations/context, or missing answers—please file an issue.
I’ll keep adding to the site over time as the library grows and the rough edges get sanded down.
Questions or feedback? Please file an issue on GitHub.
— Matt
Great work Matt! Very helpful for me as I write.