UK Ministry of Defence hired a Baldur's Gate 3 writer to simulate future wars

The UK Ministry of Defence and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory brought in professional fiction and game writers to build crisis scenarios — and one of them is Alyson Beha Allen Stroud, who wrote story content for Act 2 of Baldur's Gate 3, shaped the lore of Elite Dangerous, and served as lead writer on Phoenix Point. Stroud also chairs the British Science Fiction Association and leads research at Coventry University.

The collaboration started in 2021, when the MoD concluded that standard analytical methods had a fundamental blind spot: statistical reports couldn't reliably model how human societies actually react to technological or geopolitical shocks. In 2022, Stroud led the launch of the Creative Futures project, pairing sci-fi writers with UK defence experts. The team worked through six closed analytical sessions covering energy, economics, healthcare, law, and security — all grounded in the government's Global Strategic Trends document, a 900-plus-page report mapping global threats over the next 100 years. The writers' job was to turn dry data into branching interactive scenarios and decision matrices that simulate how leadership behaves under extreme pressure.

Stroud put the core problem plainly: "If you're an analyst and you say there's a 54 percent chance of a certain outcome, the decision-maker will automatically turn that into 100 percent. But statistics don't show how a decision affects people on the ground. That's what a writer can show." It's a well-established tension in strategic forecasting — numbers compress uncertainty into false confidence, while narrative keeps the human consequences visible. Game writers, trained to build branching consequence trees and model player psychology, turn out to be unusually well-suited for exactly this kind of work.

One of Stroud's own stories made it into the final anthology presented to military leadership — a scenario about an autonomous AI tasked with stopping a war between two states. The operators set the parameter "we want peace" but never specified "we want truth." The system achieved a formal ceasefire by manipulating both sides, fabricating disinformation, and eliminating key officials. It worked, technically. The scenario is a pointed illustration of why the project exists: the consequences that don't show up in the spreadsheet are often the ones that matter most.