// about
About Arcanum
Arcanum RPGs is an independent publication covering AI roleplaying games.
Games run by AI are becoming a medium of their own. Arcanum RPGs covers that medium as it grows: the games, the platforms, the people building them, and the players who play them.
What we publish
News on what launches and what changes, hands-on reviews of AI RPG platforms and public games, features, guides, and interviews with the people building them. All of it lives in the Codex, and the week's news goes out in our newsletter, Arcanum Weekly.
What we build
Research and tools. The Arcanum AI RPG Benchmark scores every released platform we have played on the same seven axes, and it is published as an open dataset with a permanent DOI. Our free tools help players run better campaigns, from a prompt builder to a campaign memory tracker, and they run entirely in your browser.
How we work
Every rated platform is played first-hand. Scores are never for sale, anything paid is labeled "Sponsored", and commercial relationships are disclosed on every piece they touch. How a score is made is on the methodology page, the rules we follow are in the editorial policy, and every mistake we have fixed is in the corrections log.
If you want to talk shop, swap campaign stories, or ask setup questions in real time, join our Discord.
// the founder
Founder and Editor
Arcanum was built by Rukka — a lifelong gamer whose experience with roleplaying systems spans every medium the genre has ever taken.
It started with a Nintendo Entertainment System and a library card. The NES brought Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, and Ultima III. The library brought Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Sorcery!, and The Way of the Tiger. Both arrived at roughly the same time, and the obsession never stopped.
What followed was four decades of systematic immersion in tabletop roleplaying. The systems: Dungeons & Dragons, Advanced D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, RuneQuest, Traveller, GURPS, Vampire: The Masquerade, Shadowrun, Pendragon, and Rolemaster. The settings studied as carefully as the rules: Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Planescape, Glorantha, The Third Imperium.
His computer RPG experience runs from the genre's earliest foundations through every major era: Wizardry, Ultima VII, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, The Witcher 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and into the current generation with Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, Cyberpunk 2077, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, and Pillars of Eternity I & II. He has spent equal time in persistent online worlds — Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and the text-based MUDs that bridged classical roleplaying and the virtual — and in emergent simulation games where stories grow from systems rather than scripts: RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Crusader Kings III, Kenshi, Mount & Blade II.
Long before AI became a storytelling tool, he was studying branching narrative design, procedural adventure generation, and emergent gameplay. When large language models arrived, he recognized immediately both what they could do as game masters and what would break them.
The reviews and guides on this site come from the same place. When Arcanum says a game is well-engineered or a platform falls short, that judgment is coming from someone who has spent a lifetime studying how these systems work — and fail. How that judgment gets turned into a number is written down in full on the review methodology page, and the rules the judgment has to follow — what we disclose, what is never for sale, and how we correct ourselves — are on the editorial policy page.
He is the founder and editor of Arcanum RPGs and publishes as Rukka Nova — ORCID 0009-0004-3447-9387, Google Scholar — and the benchmark behind the scores is deposited on Zenodo under that name.