Notes from the workshop
How the engine works, why it was built this way, and what it takes to write a world that holds together for forty turns. Plus the occasional guide to the wider genre. Roughly one entry a week.
The best AI text adventures on iPhone and Android
The sandbox, the pick-up game and the scoreboard — an honest field guide to what's actually worth playing on a phone, from people who build one of them.
What is an AI game master?
Narration, interpretation, adjudication, memory: the four jobs of the chair — and six questions that reveal who's actually doing them.
Choose your own adventure, grown up
The gamebook didn't die — it split. What Fighting Fantasy's pencil added, what the branching problem took away, and where the old feeling lives now.
What is Unwritten AI? A complete guide
Everything the app is, how a turn works, what the engine tracks, what it costs — and, just as usefully, what it deliberately isn't.
Why your AI game master forgets — and what we did about it
Most AI adventures break the same way: the story announces something that never happened. The fix isn't a bigger context window. It's a rule.
Real dice, real consequences: how the d20 system works
Graded risk, five outcome bands, and why a failed roll should redirect the scene instead of blocking it.
Unwritten vs AI Dungeon: sandbox or scoreboard
Two different answers to the same question, including a straight account of where the sandbox is the better choice.
What is interactive fiction? A beginner's guide
Parser games, choice-based stories, gamebooks and AI narrators — the shape of a fifty-year-old form, and where to start reading.
Solo roleplaying without a group: a practical guide
Oracles, journalling, and the discipline that makes playing alone work — plus where an AI narrator genuinely helps and where it doesn't.
No spoilers, ever: how a secret stays locked
A name you haven't heard yet should never appear in your list of choices. Why AI adventures leak their own secrets, and the deterministic gate that stops it.
Stress, reputation, oaths: the systems behind the prose
What happens when a promise made in passing gets written down with a deadline and a price — and the playtest lies each system was built to stop.
Curated, not generated: how a world gets written
Five passes, a reviewer's rulebook and an automated gate that refuses to ship an unfinishable world. What "hand-authored" actually means.
Four ways to be told the same story
Immersive, Gamebook, Chronicle, Embodied — one turn, rendered four times. What changes isn't the length. It's the contract.