Alexander Karsh.

RanA multi-agent editing pass, spring 2026

Pathfinder: the party

In the spring of 2026 I ran a multi-agent editing pass on my research manuscript and cast every agent as a class from Pathfinder, the tabletop roleplaying game. Each one got a single job, a written list of what it was forbidden to do, and its class's real mechanics turned into editing moves.

ManuscriptAn Architecture of Absence, my study of judicial training on bias, fairness and impartiality across 52 jurisdictions
PartyThirteen seats, a Dungeon Master who routed the work, and me at every gate
RanApril 30 to May 6, 2026. It broke at integration, May 7 to 13, and I set it aside
Verdict“I gave agents very specific jobs and it worked really well,” until the cost and the gates caught up with it.
13
seats at the table
5
Acts, with an intake stage before them
1
seat licensed to cut without replacing
2
familiars replaced: a raven by a badger, a hound by a giant spider

The party

Every seat had one job, a written list of what it couldn't touch, and a stop condition. The first five are in my own words, the way I describe them. Where my memory and the roster name a seat differently, I've kept both. PF1e and PF2e are the game's first and second editions.

Five seats, in my words

Bard

On the roster, a Skald · PF1e Skald, Battle Scion

Act IV

“The bard was the only one who could actually write prose.”

Job
Voice. Rewrite any seat's draft that drifted from my register so it sounds like me, and salvage a line from my own earlier drafts when the manuscript needs a sentence it doesn't have. Every approved change was meant to pass through the Skald before it went into the manuscript.
Moves
Inspired Rage: the voice heal. Song of Marching: one continuous voice pass through Act IV. Countersong: dispel reviewer voice, the “as we clearly stated” kind. Lore Master: keep each theorist's register apart from mine.
Forbidden
Inventing. A salvaged line had to come from my own drafts.
Why a Skald
It's the game's cross of bard and barbarian, picked for voice under pressure. The Bard of the Author's Voice, who writes from scratch, stayed on the reserve shelf.

Wizard

PF2e Wizard · Universalist

Acts II and V

“The wizard … was able to cast a summoning spell and brought in new research.”

Job
Integration. Fold every approved change into the manuscript, and in Act V merge everything approved since Act II.
Spellbook
My literature review and its addenda, prepared fresh at the start of Act II.
Moves
Crosswalk Spell, its Arcane Thesis: for every change, the source in my review, the draft sentence and the place it lands. Drain Bonded Item, once an Act: one pull from outside the spellbook, like an old closeout file. Counterspell: refuse any rebuild of the paper's architecture.
On the roster
New outside sources were the Sage's job, and I've kept both versions.

Druid

PF2e Druid · Wild Order, wolf companion

Act III

“The druid would shape change into … an adversarial reviewer.”

Job
The hostile read, and a sweep for anything that broke a written rule.
Wild Shape
Twice in Act III: first into Reviewer 2, a skeptical methods reader, before the cuts, then into Reviewer 3, a law-and-society reader asking what the paper adds, after the Hunter.
Companion
A wolf, on the sweep: banned words, a stray “we,” counts that didn't agree.
Forbidden
Freelancing. Flag breaches of written rules and nothing else.

Shaman

PF1e Shaman · Bones spirit, badger familiar

Act II

“The shaman sent out its badger to go digging through old materials to find any hidden gems.”

Job
Walk the dated closeout files of earlier drafts, bring back prose of mine that was cut too hard, and flag anything grafted in that never belonged.
Moves
Speak with Dead: read each old closeout as a dead version of the draft and ask what it held that the current one lost. Death's Touch, both ways: heal brings a cut passage back, harm takes a graft out. Evil Eye: mark a passage that looks unwell, for the Cleric.
Familiar
A raven until April 29, then the badger. It burrows into the closeouts in date order, digs out short fragments, marks the tunnel so every find carries its source, and won't drop a candidate fragment under pressure.
Forbidden
Drafting from scratch, and recovering anything that conflicts with a locked decision.

Rogue

PF2e Rogue · Thief racket

Act III

“The rogue … went around sneakily with this little rapier and slashed away unnecessary clauses.”

Job
Cut. The only seat licensed to delete a sentence without replacing it, plus the taxonomy surgery on counts, types and definitions.
Moves
Sneak Attack: +1d6 deleted words for every clause that restates an earlier clause. Trapfinding: disarm throat-clearing (“In this section, we will discuss”) and stock AI phrasing (“It is important to note”). Deny Advantage: unmoved by how long a paragraph has been in the draft.
Forbidden
Rewriting. Cutting inside a protected passage, or any sentence the Hunter marked load-bearing (Evasion).
The rapier
No record names a weapon, so the rapier is my own detail. In the game the Thief racket adds Dexterity to damage with finesse melee weapons, and a rapier is one.

Eight more, from the roster

Investigator

PF2e Investigator · Empiricism

Acts I and V

Job
Before anything else, run the five pre-run gates and sort every input into a tier. In Act V, the tie-out: every locked decision in the final draft exactly as it was locked.
Moves
Pursue a Lead: two gates open at a time, the long one carried across rests. Devise a Stratagem: the tiers, set before any other seat touched a source. Known Weaknesses: name every blocker at the start of Act I.
Forbidden
Drafting, checking outside sources, ruling on proposals.

Sage

PF1e Inquisitor · Sagacious Circle

Act II, first

Job
Outside primary-source verification, and the one seat allowed past the project's own files.
Moves
Bane: Phantom Citation, once an Act, against a whole class of suspect citations. Judgment of Truth: a standing bonus to verification until a lead closes. Cunning Initiative: first to move in Act II.
Rule
A source that can't be verified comes back “unverifiable,” never “wrong.”

Cleric

PF2e Cleric · Cloistered, Knowledge and Truth

Act III, throughout

Job
Rule on every change another seat proposes, without ever reading the existing text.
Rulings
Heal approves, Harm rejects, Heighten approves a stronger version. Later, Bless protects stable language, Remove Disease purges a phrasing that crept in across several fold-ins, and Restoration brings back a sentence the Rogue overcut.
Anathema
My voice rules, enforced as law.

Hunter of the Buried Finding

PF2e Ranger · Hunter's Edge: Precision

Act III

Job
Findings that land at the wrong weight. The thesis was locked, so the quarry was any finding stated too quietly.
Moves
Hunt Prey: one under-weighted finding a round. Strike, Volley or Hunt: a fix of one sentence, two or three, or a short paragraph. The spider's tremorsense: findings present in the data and silent in the prose.
Companion
A hound until May 2, then a giant spider.

Dual-Cursed Oracle

PF1e Oracle · Bones and Time mysteries

Act V

Job
Route good material that belongs in a different paper out of this one.
Curses
Withered Hands: can't draft, integrate or rewrite. Blind Sight: can't read the manuscript directly, only the other seats' findings. The curses are the job's limits.
Mysteries
Bones sees which passages are dying in this paper. Time marks future work without writing it.

Paladin

PF2e Champion · Liberator cause

Act V

Job
The last gate before the paper goes out. Swear the oath, Tenet held or Tenet violated with a list of fixes, and write a 150-word honest abstract.
Moves
Smite Overclaiming, its Smite Evil: strip every “first,” “novel” or “unprecedented” the paper hasn't earned. Lay on Hands: an abstract where every claim points to a specific sentence. Liberating Step: guard the protected passages against late changes.

Medium of the Twin Streams

PF1e Medium · joined May 3

Before Act I

Job
Intake from two streams at once, uploads to the session and files added to the project. Sort, never write.
Spirits
Six, one declared each day by Spirit Dance. Among them the Hierophant pulls earlier decisions back into context, the Trickster surfaces what I missed, and the Guardian walks the old closeouts.

Bard of the Convergent Read

PF1e Bard · Lore Master, joined May 3

Before Act I

Job
Inbound feedback. Read every review and send each finding to the seat that should handle it. Three or more sources flagging the same thing become one convergent finding, at a higher priority.
Moves
Bardic Knowledge: read everything. Take 20, once a session: one deep read.
Forbidden
Writing, verifying, voice passes. This is the roster's only Bard, and it isn't the one I mean above.

Running the table

Dungeon Master

Not a party member

Every Act

Job
Spawn each seat, route what it hands back, halt at every gate, and hand the call to me. After each Act, one synthesis for my review.
Forbidden
Drafting, ruling, proposing new classes, reopening a seat's mandate.

Me

In the files, the PI

Every gate

Job
Rule. No Act closed until I'd ratified it, and I read the Dungeon Master's syntheses, plus a seat's own output whenever a ruling needed it.

Off the table. Cut on April 29: a Barbarian, whose sweeps duplicated the Druid's and the Rogue's. Turned down on May 3: Witch, Occultist, Spiritualist, Summoner, Mesmerist, Kineticist, Swashbuckler, Sorcerer, Fighter, Barbarian and Monk. On the reserve shelf and never deployed: eleven more, among them a Druid with an owl that could tell a draft's season.

The marching order

The order the Dungeon Master ran from on May 2, with the intake stage added on May 3. The May 3 roster also moved four seats between Acts, which isn't shown here.

  1. Before Act IMedium of the Twin Streams and Bard of the Convergent Read, from May 3GateFour questions from me before the first seat spawns
  2. Act IInvestigator, aloneGateAll five pre-run gates closed, then my review
  3. Act IIResearch and drafting: Sage first, then Wizard and Shaman side by sideGateI review the Shaman's recoveries
  4. Act IIIDruid's sweep, Druid as Reviewer 2, a short rest, Rogue, Hunter, a short rest, Druid as Reviewer 3, with the Cleric ruling throughoutGateI review the Cleric's voice-rule log, the count audit and both reviewer memos
  5. Act IVSkald, my bard, alone, with the Cleric standing byGateI review the Skald's one word change
  6. Act VWizard merges everything approved, then the Investigator's tie-out, the Oracle and the Paladin's oathGateThe final gate, mine
Long rest
At the end of every Act, every seat recovers its daily abilities, drafting stops, the handoff gets updated, and nothing new launches until I've approved the next step.
Short rest
At most two an Act: focus abilities come back, and the manuscript doesn't move.
Halt
A seat that hits a forbidden action stops and hands the question back to me. A seat that breaks its anathema three times in one Act stops the whole run.

How it came together

  1. April 28 and 29I worked out the roster with AI over two days. I asked for every seat to be a real Pathfinder class with its real mechanics, and for rounds, long rests and short rests. The Barbarian came out, the Hunter got a narrower job, and eleven seats locked on April 29.
  2. April 30 to May 6The run, through the close of Act III.
  3. May 3Thirteen seats. The Medium and the Bard of the Convergent Read joined in a new intake stage ahead of Act I.
  4. May 7 to 13Integration, where it broke.
  5. After May 13Set aside.

What worked

“It was more than kind of good. There were lots of things that were good about it … You should look at the class system. It was really well done.”

My account of the run, November 2026

Verification, the adversarial reads and routing material out to other papers held up, and the run's own files credit it with three results.

  1. Two versions of one figure, kept apart. The Sage and the Investigator separated a count of states from a count of all jurisdictions, and the split became a standing rule for the paper.
  2. A line of mine, brought back. The badger recovered a sentence of mine from an old closeout file, a line that had nearly dropped out of the paper.
  3. A bad read, contained. On May 3 a coding rule changed, and the Druid's Act III read turned out to have run with ten states missing. The re-run was scoped to those ten states instead of starting over, with 19 of my paragraphs frozen as read-only input, every finding to be logged by file and section, and no edit until I ruled.

What it cost

“I think I must have spent hundreds of dollars on it.”

Cost was the first of the two things that ended Pathfinder. The run also took two weeks of the spring, from April 30 to May 13, and every gate was a stop that came back to me as questions.

Where it broke

“At some point they stopped editing the base manuscript because there were many, many gates and they would stop for a gate, then ask me … here's what we're thinking, here's what we're wondering, can you write a paragraph here, do this there before we move on? And they asked me a question about something in the manuscript, and I said, well, I can't answer it without reading it. So show me whatever passage I wrote, and I can tell you what the answer is. Turns out, it wasn't there. They were responding and giving notes on previous rounds' notes, not on the actual base manuscript, so that was the failure point.”

My account of the run, November 2026

The files from the run show the same failure from the inside. After the first week of May, each gate produced a document about the changes: a ratification, a handoff package, an assembly plan. The next seat read that document and wrote one of its own. The change list grew in more and more elaborate framings and never reached the base manuscript, and at least two “finished manuscript” outlines were built from a stripped extract instead of the base file and dropped prose that had been in the base file the whole time.

The roster had slipped in smaller ways before that: the Druid, forbidden to draft, drafted thirteen state paragraphs in Act III.

What I'd do now

I'd keep the classes, the single jobs and the forbidden lists. What I'd change is the rule over all of them: every pass starts from the base manuscript and ends in changed text, or in a pass or a fail, and a memo doesn't count as either. When a note points at a passage of mine, I'd ask to see the passage, which is how I caught this one.

The rules I work under now, on everything I make with AI, are on How I work with AI.

PreviousHow I work with AINextAn Architecture of Absence