# BookWorld: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Creative Story Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 17 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05701/) (2018)
- [Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14958/) (2022)
- [OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11581/) (2024)
- [Avalon's Game of Thoughts: Battle Against Deception through Recursive Contemplation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01320/) (2023)
- [A Confederacy of Models: a Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs on Creative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08433/) (2023)
- [Content Planning for Neural Story Generation with Aristotelian Rescoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09870/) (2020)
- [Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13248/) (2024)
- [Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00114/) (2024)
- [From Role-Play to Drama-Interaction: An LLM Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14231/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12726/) (2024)
- [IBSEN: Director-Actor Agent Collaboration for Controllable and Interactive Drama Script Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01093/) (2024)
- [The Wisdom of Partisan Crowds: Comparing Collective Intelligence in Humans and LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09665/) (2023)
- [Open-world Story Generation with Structured Knowledge Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04634/) (2022)
- [HoLLMwood: Unleashing the Creativity of Large Language Models in Screenwriting via Role Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11683/) (2024)
- [Artificial Leviathan: Exploring Social Evolution of LLM Agents Through the Lens of Hobbesian Social Contract Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14373/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Multi-Agent-as-Judge: Aligning LLM-Agent-Based Automated Evaluation with Multi-Dimensional Human Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21028/) (2025)
- [TwinVoice: A Multi-dimensional Benchmark Towards Digital Twins via LLM Persona Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25536/) (2025)
- [The PIMMUR Principles: Ensuring Validity in Collective Behavior of LLM Societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18052/) (2025)
- [Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04962/) (2025)
- [FURINA: A Fully Customizable Role-Playing Benchmark via Scalable Multi-Agent Collaboration Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06800/) (2025)
- [Sentipolis: Emotion-Aware Agents for Social Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18027/) (2026)
- [Staying In Character: Perspective-Bounded Memory For Book-Based Role-Playing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25632/) (2026)
- [CreAgentive: An Agent Workflow Driven Multi-Category Creative Generation Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26461/) (2025)
- [Telling Speculative Stories to Help Humans Imagine the Harms of Healthcare AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14718/) (2025)
- [SAGE: Hierarchical LLM-Based Literary Evaluation through Ontology-Grounded Interpretive Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07102/) (2026)
- [ANIMASK: What the Model Contributes to Role Play in Simulated Story Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16667/) (2026)
- [Agentsensus: Consensus-Compressed Shared Memory for Multi-Agent Story Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32297/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled social simulation through multi-agent systems. Prior efforts focus on agent societies created from scratch, assigning agents with newly defined personas. However, simulating established fictional worlds and characters remain largely underexplored, despite its significant practical value. In this paper, we introduce BookWorld, a comprehensive system for constructing and simulating book-based multi-agent societies. BookWorld's design covers comprehensive real-world intricacies, including diverse and dynamic characters, fictional worldviews, geographical constraints and changes, e.t.c. BookWorld enables diverse applications including story generation, interactive games and social simulation, offering novel ways to extend and explore beloved fictional works. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that BookWorld generates creative, high-quality stories while maintaining fidelity to the source books, surpassing previous methods with a win rate of 75.36%. The code of this paper can be found at the project page: https://bookworld2025.github.io/.