Demystifying Red Quill

[Editor here: this entire entry is not "known" information. The following post is what I have pieced together/made up to try to figure out how RQ works and how to reduce error and problems. It is unlikely that we will get many (or any) direct answers from RQ. It would not help them to have a bunch of people trying to proxy diagnose the issues. So why write this at all? First, because information wants to be free, and second because this is about how users can get the best outcome, not about how RQ can make the best service.--TDP]

Red Quill, the Company

It is likely not a large, multi-national company. As far as I can tell, it was started by probably 2 people, and while they have almost certainly added a few employees, I imagine it stays pretty lean. They are not a multi-million dollar company raking in money hand over fist. This isn't Google. They are probably just like us, except they have less time to read sexy stories because they have to maintain the website.

Redquill.net, the website

The website is hosted by a company called Railway, which is sort of like a version of Squarespace for companies instead of individuals. RQ is probably limited in selection of providers because of the nature of the business. When I was trying to set up this wiki I had difficulty finding a host because I couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be adult material on the wiki. Fandom wouldn't allow it, and even Miraheze (a service created specifically to host niche wikis) wouldn't accept it because of the adult nature. And this doesn't even get to the billing issues.

The AI

Red Quill does not have a huge, multibillion-dollar data center of their own that hosts their own AI. They pay (several) other companies to access a large AI. It looks like they are using some version of DeepSeek, which is a pretty good choice from what I know. The problem with a lot of big models is that they are more censored and repressed than an 80-year-old Orthodox Catholic Nun sitting in the first pew. We've all had experiences with this with even this AI, not to mention others. DeepSeek is more relaxed about the guardrails on the whole. There are ways to cut these guardrails out (called "abliberating"), but that means hosting the model yourself, and generally means using a smaller (ie. less capable) model to begin with.

The big thing to take away from this is that the RQ staff have absolutely no control of the AI, what it says, or how it operates. They cannot "reprogram" the AI, cannot alter it, cannot make changes to it. They can, however, influence it (as we'll discuss below).

Another thing to remember, and this is a tricky one because we've all been trained for decades on "garbage in, garbage out", is this: AI doesn't work like a normal computer program. A normal program takes the input, applies the instructions, and gives you the answer. Every time. Same input, same output.

AI doesn't do that. The rules for how an AI works (and this is serious) are closer to the way that stars and planets are affected by gravity than they are to traditional computer code. Think of Ian Malcolm placing a drop of water on Ellie Sadler's hand to demonstrate Chaos Theory. The same input will not always get the same output. This is an important bit to keep in mind. It's what makes AI so frustrating and so incredible.

The Operation (ie. How Your Dirty Stuff Gets Made)

Editor's interpretation of prompt construction

Here is the chain as far as I can put it together:

[Begin RQ wrapper/jailbreak] + [writer selection] + (your universal components) + (your selected components) + (your lorebook) + <your prompt> [End RQ wrapper]

In terms of companies, it would look roughly like this:

<your device> -> your ISP -> Railway (for the website) -> internal RQ website programming -> router -> inference provider -> gateway -> LLM

Let's look at each of these in turn as we build the big prompt that is sent to the remote AI.

RQ Wrapper/Jailbreak Begin and End

Everything we send is likely wrapped in a set of instructions to at least tell the AI how to generally behave and what to do. This may or may not (but probably does) contain a "jailbreak", which is a set of statements to try to get around the guardrails and censors. I would imagine that the jailbreak, if it exists, is fairly minimal, or we'd get a lot more failures.

This is the first possible point of failure. If the company that owns the AI model (not the host, which is possibly/likely a different company) changes the model, then everything will get weird and have to be reconfigured. When DeepSeek releases a new model, they sometimes make changes to the gateway that can have an impact on even older models.

Writer Selection

The writers seem to be preconfigured at the host/model level. So (best case) this might be just a simple Standard/Ember/Ink/Spark selection. If not, then there will be a set of instructions here to tell the AI how to write. So why not put in an instruction that says "Keep track of continuity"? Well, because the people who run RQ actually want to have a good service, we can be sure that something like this exists. Also, if it were that easy they would have done it.

On top of that, AI has a "setting" often called "temperature" that describes how wild the AI can get in trying to fulfill its instructions. It runs from 0.0 to 1.0 (because computer nerds love that kind of thing). At 0.0 you get something like a "Full House" episode: staid, boring as hell, so predictable that you could probably recite a new episode along with the actors. 1.0 is like a coked up teenager writing a new episode for "The Young Ones" after 6 espressos--anything can, and probably will happen. Standard is likely set to a low temperature, and the more advanced writers are up around 0.6 to 0.8. Beyond that, you usually get dada-ist madness. (If you feed some of that gibberish a frontier model like Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude, it can sort of untangle what the AI was trying to do. Not helpful, but fun.)

Universal Components

Next comes the universal components you have assigned to your account. These are found under the individual menu (clicking on your icon in the upper right-hand corner on a computer). It takes the text from all these and just jams it all into the prompt.

Selected components

I'm not sure if these come before or after the Lorebook, but I'm not sure how much it matters in the grand scheme of things. At any rate, it takes the text from all the components you've added in this chapter, plus the ones that were there before, and tacks that onto the end of the prompt we're building. You can see that it's getting pretty big already.

Your Mom...er...Prompt

Finally! Here is where your prompt gets tacked on.

Lorebook

Next comes the Lorebook, which includes summaries of all the preceding chapters, as well as the descriptions of your characters and components (old ones). This is all jammed onto the end of the prompt.

Closing Wrapper

It ends with a (probably short) closing statement to tell the AI that the instructions are done, and to start doing its thing.

All of this is then sent down the line to the remote AI, and we wait for the response while clicking on Red Quill logos and getting achievements.

Many a Slip

So, assuming everything goes well thus far, we get to the fun of the internet: You click/tap on “Continue” and RQ sends this giant blob off to the AI. Assuming there are no problems with connectivity, we’ll get a reply. There are obviously many possible points of failure here, and this is the part where those “Unable to connect to server” might be coming from (although they could be coming from Railway as well. Or both.)

The Money Shot

Let’s assume your prompt gets all the way to the AI with no problems (and, despite what some might think, this is the case the vast majority of the time).