AI RPG News This Week: 29 September 2026

The week in AI RPGs, 21 to 28 September 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. Craft’s developers, Short Hill Labs (Tabled), Isekai Zero, Tidefall, NOPOTIONS, MythEngyn 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 Short Version

AI Dungeon and Voyage stopped showing likes. Scenarios and worlds now show how much people actually played them, and you rate something only after you have played it.
Questner changed its ratings so that games people finish rank higher than games people abandon.
AI Dungeon shipped its big quarterly release: guided retries, voice narration, and — for Premium — story cards you can pin so the AI never drops them.
Voyage lets you bring dead characters back, catches you up when you join a game in progress, and lets you look around without an account.
NOPOTIONS added magic: a Sorcerer class, spells you describe in your own words, and characters who speak in their own voices. A cheaper plan arrived at $9.99.
Tidefall rebuilt a whole region, and its world now remembers where you put things.
Isekai Zero is back on iPhone, with stricter content rules — and bigger changes to 18+ stories are coming.

The Like Button Is Disappearing

The biggest change this week is one you will see every time you browse for something to play.

AI Dungeon no longer shows a Like count on scenarios. Scenario pages now show Actions (how many turns people have taken in it) and Plays. The thumbs buttons are gone from the top bar. Instead, after you play a scenario you can open More → Rate this Scenario. A like invites you to leave a comment; a dislike goes privately to Latitude, or becomes a report.

Voyage did the same for worlds. Instead of ”% Liked”, a world now shows Actions, Plays and Remixes. On both, the small cards you scroll past show only Actions and Bookmarks.

Questner went further. A game’s rating now counts players who stayed more than players who left after a message or two. A game with fewer than five plays cannot show more than 8/10. And a game now loses a little rating if most of its players never reach 89 actions — so games people actually finish climb the list. A day later Questner eased that rule: your separate playthroughs of a game are now added together.

Janitor AI added anti-bot measures to its trending feed, to make the rankings harder to fake.

What this means for you: the numbers on a catalogue page now say more about whether people kept playing something than whether they clicked a thumb. That is usually more useful. Two things to keep in mind, though. A long, slow scenario collects more actions than a short, tight one, so a big Actions number is not the same as a good game. And because dislikes on AI Dungeon and Voyage are now private, you can no longer see when most people were disappointed by something. Read the comments before you commit an evening.

AI Dungeon: The “Alchemy” Release

AI Dungeon published its quarterly release, which it calls “Alchemy”, along with a large patch. The things you are most likely to notice:

Guided Continues and Guided Retries — steer the next response instead of rolling it again blind.
Voice narration for your adventure, and video generation.
Scripts can now be added to an adventure, not only to a scenario.
For Premium players: responses up to 400 length, a new memory model, and story cards you can pin so they always stay in context. That last one matters. Story cards are normally among the first things dropped when the AI runs out of room — our story cards guide explains why — and a pinned card is not.
New models, including GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 and “Shimmer”, a style-tuned Gemma model.
You can look at a scenario’s story cards before you start playing it, and filter out tags and creators you do not want to see.

Two smaller changes are worth knowing. If you use Optimized Context, the context slider now shows the most your context can grow to before it is trimmed — so it may read 12,000 where it used to read 8,000. Nothing about how much the AI actually reads has changed; only the label did. And a bug was fixed where a lower context length you had chosen could be ignored.

If you close a game with text still in the box, it is now waiting for you when you come back, in the same browser. New accounts now start at the Moderate content setting instead of Safe. And there are new profile badges, and profile pictures you can unlock through daily rewards.

Voyage: Bring Them Back

Voyage shipped the same release number with a long list of its own.

You can now revive dead characters. Ask the Assistant or the in-game Studio to bring back a dead, dying or knocked-out NPC, and they return with at least 35% of their health, marked as recovering. The world also gained combat triggers, so a world’s creator can make something happen when, say, a dragon enters a fight.

Joining a game late is easier. If you join a public game that is already running, you now get a short recap of the story so far and a Take my first turn button. In async games, you can queue actions while the DM is offline.

Leveling up is now one card that shows everything you gained — level, resources, points to spend, traits and titles — with a button to make your choices.

A few other changes: you can browse and preview worlds without an account; new worlds open in Visual Novel Mode by default (you can turn it off in the game menu); memory selection was improved to reduce contradictions; and multiplayer chat now hides messages from players you have blocked.

The bug fixes are worth a look if you care about rules. Untrained skill checks now add your attribute modifier, as they should. NPCs no longer deliver their planned lines after they have been killed or knocked out. Quest NPCs now turn up where the quest said they would.

NOPOTIONS: Magic Arrives

NOPOTIONS shipped its biggest update so far, Alpha 0.0.31.

The Sorcerer is playable, casting with Charisma, with two bloodlines to choose from: Solstice, which mixes fire and frost, and Arcanist, which uses arcane magic and telekinesis to lift, carry and throw things.

You cast by describing it. You write the spell you want, and the game matches it to one you know. A firebolt can become a flaming spear if you want it to — but it keeps the damage, range and single target of a firebolt. You get to describe it your way; the rules stay the rules.

Classes that cannot cast spells can still use wands, staves and foci that grant spells, and so can your companions if you give them one. Several magic-using NPCs now sell magical goods.

Characters now have voices. NPCs and companions speak in distinct voices, the words highlight as they are spoken, you can play NPC voices without the narrator, and you can tap a portrait to hear a line again.

Also new:

A Lite plan at $9.99 a month, with 400 credits plus up to 100 more from free daily claims.
Promises: when someone offers you a job or a paid service, a card now shows who owes the payment — and whether the promise was kept, broken or released.
Shop theft: you can try to steal what a merchant has on display. Get caught, and prices rise until the shop closes to you.
Your half-finished character is saved if you leave creation partway through.

And a very long list of fixes, many of them about money: a refused bribe that still took your gold, gold paid twice, merchants taking your goods when they could not afford them.

Craft: Where Your Models Come From

Craft shipped two patches, and the more interesting part is an explanation. If you have ever felt that a model on Craft plays differently from one week to the next, Craft says why: many open models are served by several providers, Craft routes between them, and those providers change their speed, quality and price without warning. Because Craft’s core models are unlimited, cost decides which providers it can use.

The changes: GPT-6 Luna is now the default model for new games, Opus 5.5 replaced Opus 5, a free experimental model called Space Bunny Alpha is available for a limited time, and MiMo 2.5 is back as a core option after players reported MiMo 2.6 Flash getting stuck. Muse Spark models are temporarily unavailable; games using them now run on GPT-6 Luna.

Visual novels — which you could export from a game last week — can now be started from a blank page, carry your own narration audio, and have separate layouts for phones. Readers can pick up where they left off.

Questner: A Creator You Can Undo

Beyond the ratings change above, Questner rebuilt its game creator. Every reply now shows what it changed, and there is an Undo this turn button. It also stopped naming every character Elara or Kaelen.

Two new models arrived: GPT-6 Luna at 0.8 messages per action, the cheapest on the platform, and GPT-6 Sol at 5. Claude models got more expensive: Haiku now costs 5 messages per turn and Sonnet 8. There is now a light mode, and a rebuilt Game Menu that is much easier to use on a phone.

Questner is also running a Halloween villain competition until 16 October: make a Halloween game where the villain is the main character.

Isekai Zero: Back on iPhone, With New Rules

Isekai Zero is back on the App Store. Getting back meant stricter rules. Inside the iPhone app, content is held to Apple’s guidelines, and intimate scenes in SFW stories fade to black. Across the whole platform, mature content only appears if you turn on the NSFW toggle, comments are screened, usernames were checked (if yours was changed by mistake, you can set it back in your profile), and creator bios have been removed for now.

Then a bigger announcement: changes are coming for 18+ stories, driven by what app stores and payment companies require. Isekai Zero says nothing is being deleted, your account and currency are safe, and creators will get clear instructions and time before anything changes. Details are promised soon.

One more thing if you earn currency on Isekai Zero: Lootably, one of its offerwalls, shuts down on 30 September. Finish any offers there before then.

Tidefall: A World That Remembers

Tidefall rebuilt its Ebstone region with new places, characters, monsters, music and a new race, the Murkborn — plus about 60 story items, each with its own artwork, to find as you explore.

The part that changes how it plays is the new inventory. Put something down, leave, come back later, and it is still there. Items used to be regenerated with a location; now they stay where you left them. The world also now keeps track of deaths for certain characters and monsters, so the dead do not quietly come back. A new Compendium records the people, places, monsters and items you have discovered.

Tabled: Stay a Bear

Tabled had a week of rules fixes, several prompted by players. Wild Shape and Rage now last from round to round — you stay the bear — instead of costing a use every round. You can aim a heal at a specific ally. A foe that stands down stays out of the fight until someone hurts it. And a host can now set a table to Mature 18+ after confirming everyone at it is 18 or older; intimate scenes still fade to black.

Newcomers can now play their first round at play.tabled.gg before giving an email.

Also This Week

Tales RPG on Android lets you edit the latest passage, makes portraits cheaper (0.1 credits instead of 0.3), and now says, for each difficulty, whether your character can die permanently.
MythEngyn renamed its tools so their purpose is clearer: Edit is now DM, Correct is Steer, and Go is Act. The Knowledge Barrier from last week’s news should launch next week.
DreamGen added MiMo 2.6, lets you insert a turn anywhere in a conversation, and lets you hide items you have put into collections.
Old Greg’s Tavern brought back portraits for the characters in your story.
Narratica added usage limits, measured over five hours and over a week. Worldbuilding and a Codex are next.
MasterAI apologised to iPhone players who could not buy tokens; the fix is waiting on Apple.
Pax Historia added a free experimental model, and pays players in tokens for improving its wiki.
Everweave started a monthly art event for hand-made art only.

Try This on Whatever You Play

This week’s ratings changes give you a quick way to find better games in any catalogue.

Before you pick something to play, look past the biggest number. A high play count tells you the cover worked. A high action count can mean people loved it — or that it is long. The signal worth trusting is how many people finished, or came back to it, and what they said in the comments.

Then check it the other way round: think of the last game you really enjoyed on that platform. Is it near the top? If the catalogue buries the games you love, sort by newest or by comments instead, and you will find more of them.

This digest is published weekly. It is dated, and left standing as written. The next one is 5 October 2026.