What is Unwritten AI? A complete guide
Everything the app is, how a turn works, what it tracks, what it costs, and — just as usefully — what it deliberately isn't.
Unwritten AI is a narrative role-playing game for iOS and Android. You choose one of a small catalogue of hand-authored worlds, create a character, and play through a multi-act story one turn at a time. An AI narrator writes each scene. Underneath it, a rules engine tracks your health, skill domains, rank, reputation, oaths and relationships — and that engine, not the narrator, decides what is true.
It's free to start: fifteen turns a day, one adventure at a time, no payment details.
The short version
Most AI storytelling apps are one language model in a loop. You type, it improvises, you type again. That's fun for twenty minutes and structurally unable to hold a story together for forty turns, because nothing is being recorded and therefore nothing can be contradicted.
Unwritten splits the work in two. The worlds are written in advance — cast, factions, bestiary, companions, the secret at the centre and the order it comes apart in. The game is run by a backend that keeps the books. The model's job is narrower than usual: write this scene, in this world's voice, given this state. It's a smaller job, and models are much better at small jobs.
How a turn works
Four steps, repeated for as long as your character survives.
1 — The world speaks
The narrator writes the consequence of your last action. Not a summary — a scene, in the voice of that particular world. Length depends on the narrative style you've chosen: roughly 120–180 words in the terser voices, 250–350 in the immersive ones.
2 — You answer
Three paths are generated and offered. You can take one, or ignore all three and type your own action in free text. The engine reads intent rather than keywords, so "try to talk her down" and "I don't want to fight her" land in the same place.
3 — The dice decide
Actions with real stakes roll a d20. The difficulty band depends on how risky the action is, and your skill in the relevant domain shifts the odds — but never guarantees them. Outcomes are graded across five bands, from critical failure to critical success, with partial success in the middle doing most of the interesting work. A full explanation lives in the piece on the dice system.
4 — The books are updated
Wounds, stress, gold, rank points, reputation, relationship standing, promises made and broken, act transitions. All recorded as state, all carried into the next turn's prompt, none of it dependent on the model remembering anything.
What the engine actually tracks
| What | How it behaves |
|---|---|
| Health | Reduced by failed rolls and combat. Reaching zero ends the adventure. |
| Stress | Rises with shocks and danger, falls with rest and respite. Changes how your character reads the world. |
| Skill domains | Four to six per world, specific to that world. They improve through use, not through a menu, and shift your odds on relevant rolls. |
| Rank | A ladder specific to each world. Earned through accomplishments, not turns played. |
| Reputation | What the world thinks of you. High renown helps on social rolls; disgrace hurts. Neutral is neutral — no hidden penalty for being unknown. |
| Oaths | Promises you make are written down with a creditor, a deadline and a price for keeping or breaking them. |
| Companions | Each has an arc and lines they will not cross. Cross one and the relationship changes permanently. |
| Moral compass | Two or three gauges per world, measuring the kind of person you're becoming rather than a good/evil slider. |
The catalogue
Unwritten ships a small number of worlds, each written through a multi-pass process and validated before release. That's a deliberate constraint: the whole experience rests on the depth of the scenario underneath it, and depth doesn't come from volume.
Each world has its own tone contract — its own voice, its own palette, and an explicit list of things it will never do. The app takes on that world's colour while you're inside it. A political court intrigue and a salvage story on a dying ship shouldn't feel like the same app wearing different hats, so they don't.
What you won't find is user-generated content. There's no scenario editor and no marketplace. That rules out a whole category of player, and we're at peace with it.
Narrative voices
The same events can be told four ways, and the choice changes the experience more than you'd expect:
- Immersive — long, atmospheric, close to literary fiction.
- Gamebook — terse and second-person, in the tradition of printed choose-your-own-adventure.
- Chronicle — a recording voice, as though someone is writing your deeds down after the fact.
- Embodied — tight to the character's senses and interior.
Free accounts play in Chronicle. Paid plans can switch between all four, including mid-adventure — each voice is its own contract.
What it costs
| Plan | What you get |
|---|---|
| Wanderer — free | 15 turns a day, resetting at midnight in your timezone. One adventure at a time. The starter scenarios. Chronicle narration. One revival per adventure. |
| Adventurer — $6.99/mo or $59.99/yr | No daily turn limit (fair-use ceiling around 300/day). Three adventures in parallel. Every scenario in the catalogue. All four narrative voices. |
| Chronicler — $14.99/mo or $124.99/yr | Everything above, plus ten parallel adventures, new worlds before general release, PDF export of your finished chronicles, and premium dice skins. |
Both paid plans can be billed monthly or yearly, and the annual option works out around 30% cheaper. Subscriptions are sold through Apple and Google in-app purchase and cancelled from your device's settings; prices vary by storefront, so the current figure for you is the one shown in the app.
What Unwritten is not
Worth being direct about, because the wrong expectation ruins a good app:
- Not a sandbox. You act freely inside a frame you can't rewrite. If you want to teleport a dragon into a detective story, this is the wrong tool.
- Not a creation platform. No world editor, no publishing.
- Not a companion chat. Characters exist to serve a story that's going somewhere. They aren't there to talk to indefinitely.
- No images, no voice, no multiplayer. It's prose, on purpose.
- Not playable offline. Each turn is generated on our servers.
Who it's actually for
People who read. Readers of LitRPG and progression fantasy, in particular, tend to recognise the shape of it immediately — rank ladders, skill domains, a world that keeps score. Solo roleplayers who want a game master and don't have a group. Anyone who bounced off open-ended AI storytellers because the story never went anywhere.
If you want to see the difference in practice rather than in theory, the comparison with AI Dungeon lays out both sides, including where the sandbox genuinely wins.
Getting started
Download it, make an account, pick a world, name a character. The first act is designed to be playable well within the free daily allowance, so you'll know whether the writing holds you before you're asked for anything.
Unwritten AI is a narrative RPG for iOS and Android. Free to start, fifteen turns a day.
See how it plays