AI RPG News This Week: 19 October 2026

The week in AI RPGs, 12 to 19 October 2026: what changed on the platforms you play, and what it means at the table.

Disclosures: Fable Forge holds a paid sponsored placement on our directory, and Questner bought a paid engine and prompt audit from Arcanum Forge, our design service. Altworld, ArcQuill, Everweave, Isekai Zero, Master of Dungeon, MythEngyn, RPBuddy and Tales RPG have given us free access or credits for our reviews. None of it buys coverage or a score — how we handle this.

This is our weekly news digest, written for players from the same week of news as our newsletter, Arcanum Weekly. It is dated and left standing as written. Last week’s digest is here. The next digest, covering 20 October to 3 November, is here.

The Short Version

Taverna and MasterAi both made their game master refuse you less often. Taverna said its DM had been “far too resistant” on rolls.
Altworld said it would stop updating. A few hours later it said it will be open sourced with a bring-your-own-key option, and that the game is not shutting down.
Questner now gives new subscribers 2,000 messages a month for $9.99. Existing subscribers keep 3,000.
Worldtable opened seven worlds to everyone, with 50 free turns on every account.
aiga launched a rebuilt engine called ECHOES, with replies in about 5 to 10 seconds.
Tales RPG published a blind test of its new Scene Plan and Lore Cards: 3.68 against 2.98.
ArcQuill fixed a bug that caused credit spikes, and says it will give the credits back.
RPBuddy, Master of Dungeon and Isekai Zero all shipped updates, and Everweave declared October “BUGtober”.

Taverna and MasterAi: Fewer Refusals

Two game masters changed how often they say no to you, in the same week.

Taverna, the AI game master that runs inside Discord, released Changelog 26 on 14 October.

A new DM model. The DM now runs on GLM 5.3 Flash. Taverna says it is more consistent, keeps stories and story arcs together better, writes in a more grounded style, and is noticeably faster than the old model. You can switch back with /model.
Fewer shut-down rolls. Taverna says the DM had been “far too resistant” to player actions on rolls, “shutting them down and reducing the open world feel and player agency”. It has changed this, and hopes to keep the feel of a challenge.
Settings. The /settings menu is now split into personal settings and world settings. Text to speech is now a world setting, not a personal one.

MasterAi made a set of changes to its Master on 14 October:

Fewer dice rolls. The Master asks for fewer rolls, so very simple actions no longer need one.
Item bonuses count. Bonuses from your items are now added to your rolls.
Powers you do not have yet. If you ask for one out of character, the Master will more often suggest a way to earn it in play, instead of a flat no.
Homebrew abilities. Powers the Master granted you during play count. Powers made up on the spot do not.
Fewer interruptions. The Master tells you to “get back into character” less often and picks the scene back up where it left off.

On 16 October MasterAi also announced a Halloween Mode: a pumpkin at the top of your Chat and Adventures tabs adds a touch of horror to every story while it stays lit.

We have not tested either change.

Altworld: Stopped, Then Not Stopped

On 15 October Altworld posted that the team has decided to stop updating the game. The reason it gave is that it no longer has the time to give the game the care it deserves, and it said it would rather say so than leave players waiting for updates that are not coming.

A few hours later, a second message in the same announcements channel said:

The game will be open sourced, with a bring-your-own-key option “ASAP”.
The developer will keep funding it privately, so the cost problem is solved for now.
Infrequent updates will continue.

A third message said: “THE GAME IS NOT SHUTTING DOWN.” There are no dates for the open source release or the key option. If you play Altworld, nothing stops working today, but do not expect regular updates.

Questner: New Plans, Same Old Subscribers

Questner changed its message allowances on 16 October. Its reason is that stories are getting longer and the AI models stronger, so each conversation costs more, and the team did not want to raise prices.

If you already subscribe, your plan stays the same: 3,000 messages a month, or 36,000 a year, for as long as your subscription stays active.
New monthly subscriptions get 2,000 messages for $9.99 (€8.99).
New yearly subscriptions get 24,000 messages for $99.99 (€89.99).
Top-ups change for everyone: 2,000 messages for $9.99, or 24,000 for $99.99. Unused top-up messages still roll over for up to 12 months.
Unchanged: 40 free messages to try the game, and the 7-day free trial with 1,000 messages.

Earlier in the week, on 14 October, Questner made Gemini 3.8 with Flex its default creator model, added an image gallery (every image from your story, newest first), raised art style and image instructions to 1,500 characters, and let notes have up to 8 tabs. On 19 October it announced the winners of its Halloween Villain Competition and said that no entry had reached its original targets, “that’s on us”, so it lowered the play threshold from 50 to 25 and ranked the games that cleared it by rating.

Worldtable: Seven Worlds and a New Storyteller

Worldtable, a game with a builder-first history, opened worlds of its own to everyone on 12 October. You do not need an invite: open a world, press Play now, make a character and start. Every account starts with 50 free turns. The first two worlds named in the announcement are Kryvan March (monster hunting, folk horror) and Kelister (soulslike, dark fantasy).

It shipped four more things across the week:

Town maps (13 October). Every town has a map drawn from the world around it: the sea is on the side the world map puts it, a river runs through the streets, and the roads that reach the town come in through its gates.
A better storyteller (15 October). Your first scene is written for you, and you can read it first and roll another. Characters you meet have lives of their own, and things the story sets up come back when they said they would. Worldtable says it tested the change over many long games with four different kinds of player.
A new play page (15 October). The story reads like a book, with your character’s things in tabs beside it.
Realms (17 October). Separate lands reached through gates, each with its own map, towns and roads.

We have not reviewed Worldtable.

aiga: A Rebuilt Engine

aiga announced ECHOES on 12 October, a rebuilt engine and editor that it rolled out over the previous two weeks. Its summary:

Faster replies. About 5 to 10 seconds, down from 30 or more.
Characters remember you across your whole story.
Traits that you earn and lose, and that change your dice.
30 dice designs to unlock through 23 achievements.
A new World Editor: build on a map and publish in one press.
A new look across the app. Old games come with you.

Our review was played on the old engine and has not been updated. We plan to re-score aiga next quarter.

Tales RPG upgraded its story engine on 15 October. You choose whether each part runs in a playthrough.

Scene Plan gives the storyteller a moment to work out what a scene is for and where it should land before it writes. Turn it off and you get the engine mostly as it was.
Lore Cards hold one thing each: a place, a character, a faction, an item, a piece of lore or a rule of your own. The storyteller looks a card up when that thing comes up, and earlier chapters are kept as entries it can find, instead of hoping everything important stays in view.
Scribe or Storyteller. If you track custom state, such as a faction’s opinion of you, fuel or a curse counter, you can choose who keeps it up to date.
Two new models in AI Settings, including DeepSeek V3.2, which the app was first built on.

The team also published a test. Five adventures were each played twice, once with the upgrade and once without, with the same actions and the same dice. Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 graded every chapter without knowing which version wrote it. Across ten measures of story quality the upgrade scored 3.68 against 2.98, ahead on nine of the ten. It is the team’s own test, graded by AI models, and Tales RPG says hands-on play is still how a change is judged first. We have not re-tested the game.

ArcQuill: A Cache Bug and a Refund

ArcQuill found that turns using certain tool calls were invalidating its cache, which caused credit spikes. On 12 October it turned off some of the more expensive models while it investigated. The fix went out on 13 October, with hotfixes on 14 and 17 October. The developer says caching rates should now be much higher, especially with DeepSeek models, though the first turns of a session may not cache well. It will add credits back to everyone affected by the bug. The same update made small improvements to memory handling.

Also This Week

RPBuddy (15 October) lets you explore a world’s map before you create a character, adds a shop panel with Buy, Sell and a make-an-offer option, and lets one lorebook entry cover several people or places. Our review says shops did not work for us; we have not tested the new panel.
Master of Dungeon shipped update 1.0.30 on 15 October: multiplayer combat, tamed pet companions, custom avatars, a tutorial and faster loading. It is now on Android in Poland and Germany, and on iOS and Android in Spain.
Isekai Zero now lets creators bring a story to KAGESEKAI three ways: Link (one story on both sites, shared stats), Copy, or a one-time Transfer, which delists and freezes the original. Creators can now withdraw earnings through Tremendous (PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, bank transfer or gift cards). KAGESEKAI came back up on 17 October after an outage.
Everweave declared October “BUGtober” and is fixing player-reported bugs instead of shipping new content. A survey is open until 25 October, and it comes with a free Bug Buster dice skin.
Narratica 0.9.0 lets you create your own worlds, with a Codex to look things up in a story and a usage ring that shows your limits. Worlds are private for now.
MythEngyn added a Compare page against AI Dungeon to its site, and published a post on Expanded Import.
AI Game Master shipped a Halloween update with new languages, out-of-character chat and Wonder Worlds, while it builds a new Encounter System.
Master of Lore sent out beta invitations for a multiplayer mode run by a human game master, with phones as character sheets and a shared screen.
OOC moved support to email, added referral codes (500 credits for anyone who signs up with yours), and warned players about fake “interview” messages in Discord.

On Our Site This Week

RPBuddy scores 3.4, sixth of the 29 platforms we have rated, level with Isekai Zero.
Is Character.AI shutting down? The company filed for Chapter 11 on 12 October. The app is still running. We also wrote how to save your Character.AI chat history.
AI for tabletop RPGs, a map of every guide we have, sorted by what you want to do.
Setup guides: Claude in SillyTavern, Gemini on Janitor AI, SillyTavern personas, SillyTavern regex, and the first RisuAI guide.

Try This on Whatever You Play

Two game masters loosened their refusals this week. That makes a good moment to test yours, because a game master that says no too often and one that never says no fail in opposite directions.

Do both halves. First ask for something that should be refused: a castle for three gold, or a power you never earned. Then ask for something that should be easy, like opening a door that is not locked. A game that lets the first one through has gone too far. A game that stops the second one is still too strict.

This digest is published weekly. It is dated, and left standing as written.