Solo fifth edition. Play by writing.
A rules engine that never bends. A Game Master that never sleeps.
Write what your character does, in your own words. The Keystone Engine rolls it, tracks it, and holds you to fifth edition. ROWAN narrates the world back and plays everyone in it.
Continue with Google or your email address. No password to make. Play the opening act of one campaign, free. Then $15 a month, with no turn limit and no counter. You must be 18 or over.
How it works
Two halves. One of them cannot bluff.
You
Write what you do
In your own words. No commands to learn, no sheet to look up.
The engine
Keystone Engine
Rolls the dice, applies your modifiers, and moves your hit points, gold, spell slots and conditions.
Your Game Master
ROWAN
Takes the result it is handed and tells you what happens. It plays every character you meet.
Then it is your turn again.
This is why the world can tell you no. You are not narrating your own success, because the half of the system that decides whether you succeeded is not the half that is telling the story.
Where you start
The Reclamation
- Levels 3 to 10
- The Sunderlands
- Solo
The escort ticket you signed at Karth's Hold this morning promised a quiet road, four hours, two silver. It is not yet noon. The mule is dead, the Charter mail-wagon is on its side across two milestones, and the two men still upright are wearing Free Company grey over armour they did not pay for.
Sixty feet back, a bareheaded man sits a grey horse and does not draw. He is reading names off a stick of notched wood, one at a time, in the clear carrying voice of a clerk calling a roll. Each name he reads, something out in the dead stubble sits up and starts walking in. He has read six. There are three notches left.
It is not the only one. The Sunken Vault of Malachar is a shorter, darker dungeon crawl if you would rather start underground, and you can build a world and a campaign of your own from a blank page whenever you want.
Start
Take a ready-made character and answer her.
Continue with Google or your email address. No password to make. You must be 18 or over.
Your turn
You write a line. This is what comes back.
Game Master:
Serrin sets the lantern down on the lip of the well and does not look into it. “The lower ward has been shut since the frost,” she says. “So either you came over the wall, or somebody let you through, and I would like to know which one of those you are about to tell me.”
She has warded this gate for thirty years and she has already read the mud on your boots. Talking your way past her is a hard sell, DC 15, and she will hear the whole of it before she decides.
Wren:
i tell her we came over the wall, which is true, and leave the well out of it entirely. im looking for my brother, and i say his name like she ought to know it already.
Keystone
Deception check to keep the well out of it
- d20
- 1d20[9]
- CHA mod
- +3
- Proficiency
- +2
1d20+3+2
Total: 14Fig 1ROWAN did not produce this number. It asked for a check; Keystone rolled the die.
Fig 2The bonuses are itemised because they were read off the character sheet rather than worked out in a sentence. Nothing here is anybody’s arithmetic.
Game Master:
“Corwen,” Serrin says, before you have finished offering it. “He came through this gate on the eighth. He did not come back out of it.”
She lets the rest sit where it is. You have been standing beside the well for a full minute and you have not once asked her what is in it, and she has watched you not ask. She steps between you and the lip of it, and leaves the lantern exactly where she put it. “So ask me,” she says, “or go back over the wall the way you came.”
Fig 3The reply had no choice about the number. It had every choice about the sentence, and that is the honest limit of all of this.
- Hit points9 / 11Your character sheet
- LocationMarrow Gate, lower wardThe world
- QuestFind Corwen (active)Your quest log
- She remembersThat you lied about the wellThe world
Fig 4Your sheet after the turn. These are stored values that Keystone changed, not things ROWAN is trying to keep in mind.
What it replaces
Fifteen minutes, whenever the fifteen minutes happen.
- 08:12 On the bus. You read what the warden said last night and write two sentences about what you do next.
- 13:40 ROWAN has answered, and there is a body in the well. You do not reply.
- 23:05 You reply.
- Thursday You forget about it completely.
Nothing expired while you were gone. There is no streak, no daily allowance resetting at midnight on the paid plan, and nobody sitting in a voice channel waiting on you. You end a session when you decide to, and ending one writes a recap ROWAN carries into the next.
Start
Your first turn is two sentences long.
Continue with Google or your email address. No password to make. You must be 18 or over.
What runs underneath
You never look a rule up.
Every roll
Attack rolls, saves, skill checks. Your modifiers and proficiency come off your sheet, not out of anyone's head.
Hit points and damage
Damage lands, resistances halve it, healing brings it back. You never have to correct anyone's arithmetic.
Conditions
Poisoned, prone, restrained, frightened. Once you have one it changes your rolls until something removes it.
Spell slots
Cast it and the slot is spent. Nothing quietly gives it back to you because the scene needed it.
Initiative and turns
Order is rolled and kept. Enemies act on their own turns with their own statistics.
Your pack
Gold, gear, ammunition and carrying capacity. Nothing is dropped from the story because the conversation got long.
Rests
Short and long rests restore what they should and no more, and the clock they run on is tracked.
Experience and levelling
Earned automatically, and levelling up walks you through the choices your class actually gets.
Start
Bring a character. The rulebook stays shut.
Continue with Google or your email address. No password to make. You must be 18 or over.
What is next
Where it is going, and what it does not do yet.
Tactical positioning
Today: There is no battle grid. Distance, cover and flanking are described rather than measured.
Next: Positional combat, so movement, cover and opportunity attacks are enforced like everything else.
Playing together
Today: A campaign has one player. There is no shared table and no way to join someone else's game.
Next: Shared tables, so a party can be more than one person writing.
Sharing what you build
Today: You can build worlds and campaigns, and download any run as a transcript, but you cannot publish one to other players.
Next: Publishing, so a campaign you write can be played by somebody else.
How much it remembers
Today: Your sheet, your quests and the world's state are stored and never forgotten. The texture of a long campaign - a throwaway line forty sessions back - is recalled less reliably.
Next: Deeper recall of the things that were never written down as facts.
Other systems
Today: Fifth edition only.
Next: The engine is not built around one rulebook, and other systems follow.
Every rule Keystone enforces, applies partly, or leaves to be narrated is listed in full on the rules coverage page, with the date it was last checked against the code.
Pricing
What it costs.
- Play the opening act of one campaign
- No card up front, and no countdown - take as long over it as you like
- Subscribe later and the story picks up from exactly where you stopped
- 1 active campaign run
- No image generation
- Transcript export
The first 50 player turns each month run on the full Game Master; after that play continues on a faster, cheaper one rather than stopping. The count resets on the 1st.
No turn limit and no counter.
- Play every act, right through to the campaign's ending
- Unlimited play, at whatever pace suits you
- Author your own campaigns, and illustrate the people and places in them
- Unlimited active campaign runs
- 50 images per month
- Transcript export
Unlimited play. Under sustained heavy use the Game Master may switch to a faster model to keep it that way, rather than cutting you off.
Prices in USD, billed monthly. Yearly billing, plan status and checkout live on the pricing page.
Start
The opening act costs nothing and takes a real character with you.
Continue with Google or your email address. No password to make. You must be 18 or over.
Questions
Before you start
Do I need to know the D&D rules to play?
No, and you will not have to look anything up. You write what your character does the way you would say it out loud - "I try to talk her down", "I go through the desk" - and ROWAN works out what that means. If it needs a roll, Keystone makes it.
You can start from a ready-made character, so your first turn is two sentences rather than an hour of character creation. Everything underneath - your bonuses, your hit points, what your spells do - is applied for you as you play. Knowing fifth edition will get you more out of it. It is not a requirement, and this is a reasonable way to learn it.
How is this different from playing D&D with ChatGPT?
In a chat window, the same thing that writes the story also writes the numbers - so a roll is whatever the sentence needed it to be, and asking again nicely tends to produce a better one.
Here those are two different systems. Keystone Engine rolls the die before any narration exists, and ROWAN is handed the result and has to live with it. Your character sheet works the same way: hit points, gold, conditions and quests are stored and updated, not held in a conversation that has to keep remembering them. Nothing quietly drops your shield forty turns in.
Can the AI Game Master cheat on a dice roll?
Not on the number. ROWAN never touches the dice. Keystone rolls, adds up your bonuses off your sheet, and records the result before a single word of the reply is written.
What it can still do is narrate a failure gently. That is a real limit, and we are not going to dress it up as a feature - but it cannot turn a 4 into a 19, and it cannot decide after the fact that the lock was easier than it said.
What happens if I do not play for a few weeks?
Nothing at all. There is no streak to break, no daily allowance and no session that expires. You end a session when you decide to, and ending one writes a recap ROWAN carries into the next. Come back in March and your hit points, your gold and your open quests are exactly where you left them.
Is Rolegend really 18 and over?
Yes, by choice rather than as a legal minimum we are hiding behind. You confirm it every time you ask for a sign-in link, and the server will not send one without it. We do not verify it, nobody can, and claiming we did would be the first dishonest sentence on this page. What the Game Master will and will not narrate is set out in the content policy.
Can I play with friends, or is it solo only?
Solo, today. A campaign has one player, and there is no way to invite somebody or join someone else's game. Shared tables are being built and there is no date on them.
What you can hand to another person right now is the play itself: any campaign downloads as a transcript you can send wherever you like, on every plan including the free one.
How long does a session take?
As long or as short as you want, because nobody is waiting on you. This is play by writing: you write a turn, the world answers, and the game sits there until you come back. Fifteen minutes on a bus is a real session.
A session is a chapter you close when you feel like it, not a clock running down. There is no scheduling, no voice call and nobody held up while you think.
What will the Game Master refuse to write?
Rolegend narrates dark fantasy without restraint on violence, and no explicit sexual content.
Inside that, you set your own boundaries. Lines are things kept out entirely, veils are things that happen off-screen, and both are respected on every reply. You can also rewind the most recent one. The content policy sets out where the outer line sits and why.
Do you train AI models on what I write?
No. Your campaigns are not used to train models. The privacy policy covers what does happen to what you write, including at the providers it passes through.
You own what you write. The service schedule is the version that counts - read the "What you own" section there rather than this box.
And you can take it with you. Any campaign downloads as a transcript, and your whole account downloads as a single file from Settings, on every plan. Getting your writing out is not a paid feature.
What happens if I cancel my subscription?
You keep everything you have made. Cancel from the billing portal whenever you like; the paid plan runs to the end of the period you have already paid for and then the account goes back to Free. The unused part of a period is not refunded.
Your campaigns, characters and transcripts stay exactly where they are, and the transcript download stays free. What changes is the limits, which become the Free ones listed above. If you are over them, nothing is taken away - you just cannot start anything new until you archive something or subscribe again.
Which AI model does Rolegend use?
A large language model that we choose and configure, and which one is a setting rather than a feature. It can change between one turn and the next, and there is no per-player model picker - which is why no vendor is named anywhere on this page. A name we could switch tomorrow would be a promise we could not keep.
The companies that can receive what you write are named, with the date the list was last checked, on the sub-processors page.
It also matters less than you would think. Dice, damage, conditions and every other rule are resolved by Keystone Engine, so changing the model cannot change how the game plays out - only how it reads.
Start
You have read a turn. Take one.
Continue with Google or your email address. No password to make. Play the opening act of one campaign, free. You must be 18 or over.