What Happens to Your Campaign When You Leave (2026): 18 AI RPG Platforms, Audited

You cannot export an AI RPG campaign. Not from any of the eighteen launched platforms in our directory — not one of them hands you a file that puts your campaign back.

This is not the finding we expected. We expected to rank exports from best to worst. Instead we found that the word “export” is doing four different jobs in this category, and that once you ask the only question that matters — can the file go back in? — the list of platforms that pass drops to one.

Here is what we asked of every launched platform in the client directory, and what came back.

Arcanum is independent and unpaid. Two platforms mentioned here gave us access we did not pay for: AI Game Master, and Voyage through its parent company. Neither had any say in what follows. All product names are used for identification only; Arcanum is not affiliated with any platform reviewed here.

The Two Things You Are Probably Afraid Of, and Why Both Are Wrong

Start with the good news, because there is more of it than the internet suggests.

Cancelling does not delete your campaigns. We checked every paid platform in the directory, and access survives cancellation on all of them. What a lapsed subscription limits is usage — turns, credits, models — not access. Your old campaigns are still there and still readable. The story people tell each other, that you stop paying and your year of play evaporates, is not what happens anywhere we looked.

There is one exception and it runs the other way. Deep Realms has one of the most complete exports in the field, and it is behind the subscription. Cancelling does not delete your writing. It removes your ability to take it with you.

Your stories are almost certainly not public. Ten of the eighteen are private by default. Four ask you to choose. Only one platform in the set ships public as the default — and we will come back to it, because it happens to be the biggest one.

Both of those are worth saying plainly before the rest, because the rest is harder.

Four Kinds of Export, and Only One That Works

The category treats “export” as a single feature. It is at least four, and they are not close to equivalent.

Grade	What it means	Platforms
Portable	The file opens in someone else’s software	Chub AI
Round-trip	The file goes back into the same product	Perchance, Deep Realms (behind the paywall)
Partial	Some of it goes back, some does not	AI Dungeon — story cards yes, campaign no
Souvenir	An export exists, with no supported way back in	Character.AI, Friends & Fables, Janitor AI
Nothing	—	The other eleven

The question that produced this table is the one nobody in this niche asks: can the file go back in? Ask it and the number of platforms with a meaningful export falls from six to one.

A download you cannot re-import is a souvenir. It is pleasant to have, it proves the campaign happened, and it will not restore anything. Friends & Fables exports characters as PDFs carrying the full detail — human-readable, machine-dead, and there is no import feature anywhere in the product to read them back. Character.AI gives you the fullest handover of the eighteen, an entire account dump, and offers no way to load any of it back in. That dump exists because data-protection law requires it, not because anyone built it as a feature.

And not one platform of the eighteen exports a save that restores a campaign. Your character can come back. Your transcript can come back. The state — the ledger of what happened, the relationships, the place you stopped — stays behind, everywhere, without exception. If you want the practical workaround, we wrote it up in how to move a campaign between AI RPG platforms: you do not transfer a campaign, you reconstruct it.

The One That Survives

Chub AI is the only platform here whose files work somewhere else, and the reason is instructive: it uses a format it did not invent. Characters export as V2/V3 JSON, or as the same JSON embedded in PNG metadata, which is why a character card travels as an image you can post anywhere. Those files drop straight into SillyTavern and other local frontends. Chats export as JSONL and re-import through the bot page.

Nothing about that is generous. It is a consequence of building on a community standard instead of a proprietary one. Every platform that invented its own format produced an export that only its own software can read — which is another way of saying it produced a souvenir.

There is a catch, and it deserves the same paragraph. Set content public on Chub and you grant every other user “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license” to it. Perpetual and irrevocable. Pair that with the platform’s other quirk — delete your account without deleting your history first and the content stays, outliving the account it belonged to — and Chub is at once the best custodian of what you keep private and the most permanent publisher of what you do not. That toggle is the most consequential single click in this audit, and nothing warns you about it.

Does Your Writing Train a Model? Mostly, Nobody Says

This is the question players ask most and the one the category answers least.

Three platforms state plainly that they do not train on your content. Old Greg’s Tavern has the clearest sentence in the entire audit: “We do not use your chats, characters, stories, or other game content to train AI models.” ArcQuill: “ArcQuill does not train, fine-tune, or otherwise use your content to improve any AI models.” Chub AI, for private content: “your Private Characters and Chats will not ever be distributed to a third party, unencrypted, used for training an AI model, or any other purpose beyond providing the Services.”
One has a switch. Character.AI — see below.
Two use wording that sounds like a denial and is not one.
Ten say nothing either way.
Two have no privacy policy at all. Perchance has no policy page, which at least matches its account-less, collect-nothing design. Infinity DM has a privacy-policy link that leads to an empty page, which is worse than an honest absence.

That middle category is worth reading closely. Hidden Door writes: “We do not license your User Content to third parties for training foundation models distributed outside the Services.” Read it again — it rules out licensing, to third parties, for foundation models, distributed outside. The very next thing it says is: “We may use your User Content to operate, evaluate, and improve the Services and the automated systems and technologies that power them.” Janitor AI lists among its purposes: “Conducting research and development to improve our AI systems and user experience.”

Neither is lying. Neither is denying, either. The sentence a reader walks away with is not the sentence that was written, and there is no opt-out in either case.

The overall shape is the finding: in a category with no disclosure norm, saying nothing costs nothing and making a promise costs something. So the only platforms that made a promise are the ones that chose to — and the clearest promise in the field belongs to Old Greg’s Tavern, a small platform with no export at all. It gives you nothing to take with you and the best assurance about what stays.

Character.AI Ships Both Switches Pointing Outward

Character.AI is the largest platform in this category by a wide margin, and it is the only one of the eighteen where public is the default. Create a character and public is pre-selected. It is also the only one where model training is on by default — the setting is labelled “Allow your content to be used to train our models”, and it starts switched on.

Nothing here is hidden, and that matters. Both controls are visible on the character creation page, both are one click to change, and Character.AI is more forthcoming about this than most of the field. There is no concealment to report; we looked.

The finding is the default. Two switches, both pre-selected outward, on the platform where more of this category’s stories are written than anywhere else — so most of those stories end up public and training a model, because defaults are what most people ship with. That is a fact about how defaults work, not a claim about anyone’s honesty.

The contrast that makes the point is Hidden Door, which has no default at all: you pick public or private at creation, every time. It is the only platform in eighteen that refuses to decide for you. A forced choice is possible, it is cheap, and somebody already does it.

Leaving Is Easier Than Packing

Twelve of the eighteen let you delete your account yourself. Six give you a real download of your work.

A platform in this category is exactly twice as likely to erase you as it is to hand you a copy of what you made. Both numbers come from the same audit and they point the same way: the industry built the exit that costs it nothing and skipped the one that costs it a customer.

The remaining six split in ways worth knowing:

MacerAI has no deletion at all — not the account, not a campaign, not a character. Its privacy policy does not mention deletion, so there is not even a documented email route. Pair that with an export that is a compression summary too small to be useful, and it is the only platform of eighteen where your work is neither portable nor removable.
Dunia lets you delete stories but not your account — while its privacy policy says “You can delete your account and all associated data at any time.” The policy never says how, and the control is not in the product. We are not calling that dishonest; we are reporting that the document states a right the interface does not provide.
AI Realm and Hidden Door require an email to support. ArcQuill’s product deletes campaigns only, but its policy grants an explicit right to erasure by email.
WyrdTale splits the difference in a way no other platform does. You can delete your chats. The files its engine generated about your campaign live on its server, and removing those means writing to support.

That WyrdTale line is the through-line of the whole audit. Its engine runs outside the language model, which is exactly why we rate it well — a game whose state is held in a real system does not forget what you did. It is also why nothing comes out of it, why the engine’s files cannot be deleted by you, and why, when we asked whether its content is public by default, the honest answer was that there is no way to tell. The world file goes to a server you cannot see. Good architecture and portability are pulling in opposite directions, and this is what that looks like from the inside.

The Thing You Cannot Get Back Is the Part You Care About

The clearest illustration of what “no import” costs did not come from a platform failing. It came from one working fine.

Our owner built a world in Voyage — not just a setting but a system, with new gameplay mechanics of his own. It was, by his account, some of the best play he has had in this category. Then he hit a serious bug in his own world. His build, his system, nobody else’s fault.

He went back to the editor and fixed it. He returned to the campaign, and the bug was still there. The editor’s own assistant explained why: the fix applies to new campaigns, not to saves already running.

There was no way to move his story and his character into the corrected world. He lost the campaign and started over. As of this writing there is still no export for a whole story, so the situation stands.

Nobody did anything wrong in that story, and that is what makes it the right one to end on. A running campaign is welded to the version of the world it was born in, and with no export and no import there is no way to carry it one step sideways. Play on with the bug, or begin again. Those are the only two doors.

That is what this is actually about. Not a company going under some day — that is a distant, abstract risk that no one plans around. It is your own campaign, in a world you built, on a platform that works, unable to move.

How Much of This You Could Have Found Yourself

Very little, and we have proof, because we got it wrong three times while doing it.

We named AI Dungeon best-in-field while one platform sat unchecked, and Chub beat it comfortably. We recorded Tabled as having no account deletion — the control exists, as small text below a menu of buttons under Preferences, and it took a deliberate second hunt to find. And the harshest conclusions in our first draft turned out to be the least verified ones, which is exactly the wrong way round.

Every error ran the same direction: we concluded a feature was absent when it was merely hard to see. Tabled’s privacy policy was accurate the whole time and its product was compliant the whole time. The right was still, in practice, nearly invisible — not because anyone lied, but because nothing in the interface treats leaving as something you might want to do.

Old Greg’s Tavern puts character creation behind a paywall, so a prospective player cannot find out how their content will be treated without subscribing first. Its policy does not answer the question either. There is a version of this in every direction you look.

If a site with accounts on all eighteen platforms gets this wrong three times, the honest conclusion is not that these companies are hostile. Most of them are not. It is that nobody can answer these questions by looking. The information you need in order to decide whether to trust a platform with a year of your imagination is not hidden. It is just nowhere in particular, and assembling it is a research project.

What To Do Before Your Next Long Campaign

Check the export before you need it, not after. Make something small, export it, and try to load it back in. That five-minute test tells you more than any policy page.
Look for the private toggle at creation. On most platforms you already have it. On the biggest one, it is pre-selected the other way.
Keep your own copy of what you wrote. Character definitions, world notes, a summary of where things stand. Anything you authored travels; anything the platform derived for you does not.
Prefer platforms that score well on Longevity — our measure of whether a game still holds together past turn 50, once the novelty has worn off — and on NPC fidelity. Over a hundred turns you will spend a lot of it talking. The current figures are on the benchmark — and, like the export files this piece is about, they are downloadable and archived where we cannot quietly edit them.
If a platform will not tell you whether it trains on your writing, assume the answer is unhelpful. Ten of eighteen say nothing, and silence in this category is not evidence of restraint. It is evidence that nobody has had to answer yet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you export an AI RPG campaign? Not in the way you probably mean. Across eighteen launched platforms, not one gives you a file that restores a campaign — the state, the ledger, the place you stopped. Some do give you real files: Chub AI exports character cards and chat logs that open in other people’s software, Perchance exports a backup it can reload, and AI Dungeon exports story cards that go back in. What comes back is always thinner than what you had. You get the character back, or the transcript back, never the game back.

Do AI RPG platforms delete your campaigns when you stop paying? No. We checked every paid platform in our directory and access survives cancellation everywhere. What a free tier limits is usage, not access — your old campaigns stay there and stay readable. There is one exception and it works the other way around: Deep Realms puts its export behind the subscription, so cancelling does not delete your writing, it just removes your ability to take it with you.

Are your AI roleplay characters public by default? Almost never. Ten of the eighteen platforms we audited make your content private by default, and four ask you to choose. Character.AI is the only one in the set where public is pre-selected when you create a character. You can switch it to private in the same screen, but public is what you get if you do not.

Do AI RPG platforms train their models on your stories? Mostly they do not say. Three platforms state plainly that they do not — Old Greg’s Tavern, ArcQuill, and Chub AI for private content. Character.AI has a switch, and it is on by default. Two use wording that sounds like a denial but only rules out licensing your content to outside companies. Ten say nothing either way, and two have no privacy policy at all.

Can you delete your AI RPG account? Usually yes. Twelve of eighteen platforms let you delete your account yourself. Three require an email to support, one lets you delete your work but never your account, and one — MacerAI — has no way to delete anything at all. A platform in this category is twice as likely to erase you as it is to hand you a copy of what you made.

Which AI RPG platform is best if you want to keep your work? Chub AI, by a distance. It is the only platform whose files open in someone else’s software, because it uses the community character-card format rather than one it invented, and its policy states that private characters and chats are never used to train a model. The one thing to know is that setting content public grants every other user a perpetual, irrevocable licence to it, and that choice cannot be taken back.

Findings gathered August 2026 across the eighteen platforms carrying launched status in our directory. Policy quotations are from each platform’s published privacy policy as of 23 August 2026; product behaviour was checked in the live products by an operator with paid or free accounts on all of them. Seven platforms joined the launched set after this audit was run and none of them is one of the eighteen counted here: Craft on 25 August 2026, Tidefall on 28 August, Voyage on 31 August, Tales RPG on 1 September, NOPOTIONS on 4 September, aiga_ on 8 September and Master of Dungeon on 18 September. We will audit them separately. Platforms change, and we date our claims rather than quietly rewriting them — if something here no longer matches what you see, tell us and we will note the change.