Questions and answers

A solo role-playing game where the story answers to the world you built. Describe a setting, create a character with real strengths and weaknesses, and play through a story that reacts to what you do. It's a structured RPG with skill checks and tracked state, not a chat window.

No. There's no sign-up, no login, no profile, and no email to hand over. Open the site and start building.

A browser and a provider key of your own. Setting it up takes about two minutes under Settings, then Providers. Google Gemini is the easiest place to start — getting a key is quick, needs no card, and Google has a tier that costs nothing.

Build a world. The wizard asks for a genre and a description, then suggests attributes and skills that fit what you wrote — “Force Sensitivity” for a Star Wars setting, “Sanity” for something Lovecraftian. Accept, edit, or replace each one. Then create a character and start playing.

Because generation runs on your account rather than a shared one. That's what keeps Narraitor account-free, with no sign-up and nothing to bill. You set the key up once and it stays in this browser.

Gemini is easiest: Google AI Studio hands you one in a minute. Every other provider issues keys from its own dashboard, and a model you host yourself needs no key at all. Paste whatever you have into Settings, Providers, Set up a provider. The wizard runs a connection check before it saves anything, so you find out then and there whether it works.

Narraitor doesn't charge anything. Generation is billed to whichever key you set up, and Google's no-cost Gemini tier covers casual play. If you go past it, or use a paid provider, what you spend is between you and them. A model you host yourself costs nothing but your own hardware.

Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Ollama if you host a model yourself. OpenRouter is the other one you can reach without a card, and a single key there covers dozens of models. The setup screen also lists Deepseek, Mistral, Together, Groq and Perplexity, which stay out of reach until each has been checked against a live key.

gemini-2.5-flash by default. The setup wizard offers gemini-2.5-pro if you'd rather trade speed for depth, and every other provider brings its own list — on a model you host yourself, you type the name of whatever you installed.

In your browser's own storage, on the device you're using. Worlds, characters, sessions, journal entries, inventory — all of it. There's no backend database and no server-side copy of your games.

It's encrypted in this browser with a key the page can't read back out, and it's sent only with the request that needs it. The plaintext key is never written to storage and never logged.

The prompt for the next piece of story: your world and character details, and the choices you've made. It travels by way of our own server, which passes it on without keeping a copy. What the provider does with it from there is governed by their terms, not ours.

Treat a prompt like anything you'd paste into a third-party service — no passwords, no secrets, no real personal data you'd rather not share. Privacy has the full picture.

Yes. Settings exports everything — worlds, characters, sessions, journal, narrative, inventory, and lore — to a single JSON file, and import restores it. That's how you move between browsers or devices. An import replaces what's already there, so it's a restore rather than a merge.

Everything goes: worlds, characters, saves, and your saved key. There's no server copy to restore from, so export anything you'd be sad to lose before you clear anything.

A setting description plus the attributes and skills that matter in it. Those aren't decoration — they're what the story checks against when your character tries something difficult.

The creation wizard suggests them from your description, and you accept, edit, or replace each one. Most worlds sit well at four to six attributes and eight to twelve skills — enough to make choices meaningful without drowning you in options. You can write your own instead.

Pick a suggested choice or type your own action. Decisions are weighted Minor, Major, or Critical so you can see what's at stake, and they get tested against your character's relevant skill. A failed check bends the story rather than handing you a retry. Alignment tracking (Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic) keeps a read on how your character has been playing.

They're the record of what happened. The journal drawer holds story history and past decisions, inventory tracks what you're carrying, and “Story So Far” summaries capture where things stand — which is also what keeps a long campaign coherent when you come back to it weeks later.

When a story is reaching its natural end you get an ending suggestion, and taking it generates a conclusion that accounts for what you actually did. So a campaign finishes properly instead of trailing off.

Check that you copied the whole key with no stray whitespace, and that it's an API key from AI Studio rather than something else from your Google account. Re-run the connection check under Settings, Providers — the wizard won't save a key that fails it.

Long turns usually mean the provider is under load. Wait a moment and retry the turn. If it keeps timing out, switching the model from gemini-2.5-pro to gemini-2.5-flash under Settings, Providers is the fastest thing to try.

Two separate limits can stop a turn. Narraitor caps generation at 50 requests an hour from one connection, and that's usually the one you hit first; the message tells you how long the wait is, and nothing you change at Google will shorten it. Google enforces its own limit on your key on top of that, and moving your account onto a paid tier raises only that second one.

Everything lives in one browser's storage, so a cleared cache, a private window, or a different browser or device won't show them. Check you're in the browser you played in, then restore from an export if you have one.

On GitHub. Narraitor is open source, and bug reports and feature requests both go to the same place.