Reviews
Janitor, Friends & Fables, AI Dungeon and the rest — every roleplay platform played and scored, so you know what's worth your time.
26 platforms → Compare them side by side →// the home base for AI RPGs & LLM roleplay
Every AI RPG worth
playing, in one place.
Arcanum is the dedicated home for AI RPGs — the platforms that turn a language model into a real game master. We play every one of them first-hand and score it on a single published rubric, so you can tell which ones hold up over a long campaign, and which quietly fall apart.
// the benchmark
Somebody had to measure this category.
Every AI RPG platform you can actually play, scored on the same seven axes from first-hand play — not from marketing copy, not from a press kit. 16 platforms, one rubric, every score published with its working.
Three of the seven axes have no top score anywhere in the field. Nobody has solved Memory & Continuity, Player Agency and Longevity — not one platform on the board.
| Axis | Field average | Highest reached |
|---|---|---|
| NPC Fidelity | 3.19 | 5 |
| Memory & Continuity | 2.66 | 4 · unclaimed |
| Signature Design | 2.63 | 5 |
| Determinism & Fairness | 2.56 | 5 |
| Longevity | 2.31 | 4 · unclaimed |
| Player Agency | 2.25 | 4 · unclaimed |
| Mechanical Depth | 2.19 | 5 |
field average · highest any platform reached
// how these numbers were made
- Four decades of tabletop RPGs, CRPGs, MUDs and MMOs behind every verdict.
- Every platform played first-hand. Nothing is ever scored from marketing material.
- A published rubric — seven axes, defined scale bands, stated limits.
- In July we re-scored the entire board. Almost every platform went down, and the before and after is published.
- Our own games are excluded from the benchmark by policy — we don't score our own work.
Public Games
The best AI RPGs you can play right now — published GPTs, Gems, and Claude projects — rated and sorted by model and genre.
16 games →Arcanum Originals
Our own games — download the files, drop them into the AI you already pay for, and play worlds you won't find anywhere else. Always free.
4 originals →Tools
Free browser tools for running better campaigns — prompt builder, character cards, context budget, campaign memory. No signup, nothing sent anywhere.
4 tools →// from our workshop
GPT CLA GEM
Aevum Realm Architect
Rise from serf to sovereign in a deterministic kingdom-builder: a tag-based domain economy, tactical war, spycraft, and a Deference Engine that makes medieval rank mean something the moment you speak out of turn.
It runs inside ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with no external state layer — so arithmetic drifts and memory degrades as a campaign grows. In practice a run holds together for roughly 200–300 turns before it wants a reset. We don't score our own work, so take this as a description, not a verdict.
- Eirathis Strider A mature, Witcher-style open-world RPG for Gemini — dice-less tactical combat, skill mastery, and companions who live their own lives.
- Star Freighter Drift Run cargo, dodge customs, and keep the reactor from melting — a gritty space-trading RPG for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
- The Chronicler A slow-burn, relationship-driven RPG for Claude where trust is earned, never unlocked, and companions live their own lives.
Arcanum is the only site dedicated entirely to AI RPGs and LLM roleplay — the art of turning ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini into genuine game masters rather than chat partners. We find the best public AI RPGs worth your time, review every major roleplay platform honestly, and build our own original games that solve the problems every long AI campaign eventually hits: memory drift, passive NPCs, and worlds that stop feeling real around turn fifty.
Everything we build is free to download. The games run on the AI you already use. No new apps, no new accounts, no subscriptions beyond what you already pay. If you want to know what your AI is actually capable of as a storytelling engine, you are in the right place. Browse the complete AI RPG directory to see every game and platform in one place.