Worldtable
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The World Studio · for world builders

You build the world.
It keeps score.

An AI storyteller runs every scene in it. Your map, your peoples and your rules are held by the engine, not left to its memory.

Shape a continent and name its towns. Write the peoples, the magic, the powers and their secrets, then pick how hard the world should be. Invite your own table. Worldtable plays every innkeeper, rival and villain, and it plays them the way you wrote them.

Start building How building works

Your world · your players · first $1 of AI on us

Open to everyone: sign in, name a world, and you're in the Studio.

14

shapes of land, or your own drawing

23

naming styles

12

scales of magic, in your words

20

rules the engine enforces

20

earlier versions kept

The map

Start with land you can walk across.

The map is the centre of the Studio. Pick a shape, or rough out a coastline yourself, and the generator raises the terrain, runs the rivers, lays the roads and founds the towns. It isn't a picture. Players travel it kilometre by kilometre, and the storyteller can only send them to places that are really on it.

The World Studio's Map tab showing The Long Ebb: six named regions across a generated continent, with towns and roads
The Long Ebb in the Studio. Shape: “Many-shaped lands, ranges and inland seas”. Size: Vast. Names: Old English.
A region card open on the map: The Saltings, with its land type, town count and border width chosen as words

Words, not numbers.

Click a region and you choose what it is like, not a set of sliders. The land is Wastes or Marsh or Deep forest. Towns are A few, Some or Many. Borders are Narrow, Normal or Wide.

  • Drag a region's name across the map and watch its borders regrow as you move. Nothing else shifts when you let go.
  • Click any name to rename it, or roll a new one in one of 23 naming styles, from Old English and Nordic to Desert, Elven and Draconic.
  • One landmass, a scatter of islands, or both. Fourteen shapes, or your own drawing in sea, land, hills and mountains.
  • Put gates to other realms in any region, sealed or open.
The map, in the docs

Start from a sentence

Six questions, then a whole world to edit.

Don't want to start from a blank page? Answer six questions and Worldtable drafts the whole world in a minute or two. Then it's yours to edit, line by line, and nothing is saved until you say “Use this world”.

  1. 1

    What is your world about?

    A sentence or two, and a genre.

  2. 2

    How should it feel?

    Grim, heroic, mysterious, political, eerie, hopeful…

  3. 3

    The land

    One land or islands, a shape, and how many regions.

  4. 4

    Peoples and magic

    Mostly humans or many peoples; no magic, rare magic or magic everywhere.

  5. 5

    How do places sound?

    The naming style for every region and town.

  6. 6

    Anything else?

    Notes, in your own words.

What comes back

  • A premise, a tone and the event history hangs on
  • Regions with their hooks, histories, factions and taboos
  • Peoples, and where they live
  • Magic, including anything forbidden
  • Six to ten notable figures, rulers and villains
  • Eight to twelve lore entries
  • Its own money
  • A map to put it all on

The model writes in words (a people is “strong”, a region “deadly”) and Worldtable turns those into the engine's numbers. Region names come from the naming style you picked, not from the model.

Every text box in the Studio also has a quiet helper: Flesh it out, Make it clearer, or Write one for me, with an undo.

Creating a world

A world made in the Studio

The Long Ebb.

“Forty years ago the sea went out one morning and never came back. The drowned kingdoms of the old coast lie open under the sun, and everyone with a shovel, a sword or a prayer is walking out onto the seabed to claim them.”

Every Studio screenshot on this page is this world: six regions, three peoples, four kinds of tide magic (one of them hanged on sight), seven notable figures, ten lore entries, and its own money.

The Beached Crown

Greyhithe

A royal harbour whose fleet stands on timber stilts, thirty miles from any water.

The Open Floor

The Saltings

The dry seabed. Wrecks by the thousand, and the drowned dead walk at night.

The Last Water

Wendmere

Brackish lakes where the tide-priests keep a lamp lit for the sea's return.

The Landward Kingdom

Harrowdown

Sheep country grown rich on owning every road down to the seabed.

The Old Cliffs

Skarrow Fells

Sea caves a hundred feet up a dry cliff, sold by the Gullkin by the word.

The Hiding Wood

Brackenholt

A forest kept wet by the Drowned, who walked out of the sea after it.

Night on the salt flats: a salvage crew digging out a wreck by lantern light while pale drowned figures walk toward them
One of the Drowned: grey-skinned, the throat ridged with gills, in a verdigrised brass harness with a barnacled spear, standing on the dry seabed with a stranded wreck behind

Paintings made for this page to illustrate the world. The world itself (map, peoples, cast, lore) is exactly what the Studio holds.

The cast

Your villain exists before anyone meets her.

Write down the people who matter: the queen, the marshal, the raider on the salt flats. Give each a manner, a want and a secret. The storyteller is told who belongs to the region the players are in, and who is out there elsewhere, and it is told never to invent another holder of their roles.

  • When the story calls for Hask the Wrecker, she is built from what you wrote: her people, her role, how dangerous she is, and the secret only the storyteller knows.
  • Once met, she's a real character with memories of the players, like anyone else in the world.
  • Ask about someone nobody has met yet and the storyteller knows they exist and where they belong.
The Cast tab listing Queen Aldith, Pell Marrow, Hask the Wrecker and Mother Ysolde, grouped by region
Painted wooden figurines of The Long Ebb's cast standing on a candlelit map

Peoples and magic

Limits that hold, in words you'd use anyway.

A people is a description the storyteller reads, plus limits the engine enforces. A school of magic is described at every scale of power, in its own idiom, and the engine prices the effect by scale, so a spell costs what it should wherever it comes from.

The Peoples tab: the Drowned, with description, a picture slot and strength and magic limits set to Strong and Potent

Peoples

  • Strength and magic limits run from Frail to Legendary and None to Arcane-born. Heroes can't be created past them, and a people with no magic can't take up a school.
  • Transformations, from a nudge to a rebirth. The count is a hard limit.
  • Where they live decides who players meet in that region's towns.
  • Paint a picture of them from their description, or upload your own. Players see it when choosing who to be.

Magic

  • Call it schools, currents, paths, arts, or whatever your world calls it. Or switch magic off.
  • Say what it does at each scale, from A cantrip through Kills a person to Breaks a fortress. The storyteller shows it that way; the engine decides what it costs.
  • Mark a school forbidden and write the price. The storyteller is told who hunts its users.
The Magic tab: The Deep Hymn, a forbidden school, with its mark, its price and what it can do at each scale

Rules

Rules the storyteller can't talk its way around.

Start from a feel (Classic, Heroic or Grim) and change only what you want different. These aren't suggestions in a prompt. Turn death off and the tool that kills a hero downs them instead. Cap companions at two and a third one won't follow, however well the story is told.

Classic

Real danger, room to grow.

Heroic

Heroes are beaten, not killed.

Grim

Death is final, purses lean.

Also yours: how sure heroes' and enemies' aim is, a new hero's purse, how fast they grow, how quickly the day passes, how fast word of a deed spreads, how often trouble finds them, the price of sea passage, whether a failed craft eats its ingredients, and which AI model tells the story.

Every rule, and what it changes
The Long Ebb · RulesGrim

  • When a hero falls

    Off: the kill is refused and the hero is downed instead.

    They die for goodThey're beaten, and wake later

  • Time to save a fallen hero

    The bleed-out clock on a downed hero.

    MomentsA few hoursHalf a dayA full dayDays

  • Players fighting each other

    Off: robbing, harming or killing another player's hero outside a shared fight is refused.

    AllowedNot allowed

  • Companions who can follow one hero

    The next one won't follow.

    NoneOneA pairA small bandA companyAny number

  • The most dangerous thing the world may bring

    Nothing stronger is ever created.

    Trained fightersChampionsLegendsMythsWorld-enders

  • Great powers can scar the map

    Craters, razed towns and new roads, or none.

    YesNo

  • How much a hero can take

    The hit-point formula.

    FragileHardySturdyTough as oak

  • The biggest reward handed out at once

    Larger grants are cut down to it.

    ModestFairRichKinglyNo limit

  • Long journeys rest the party

    Whether travel heals.

    After a day on the roadAfter a few daysAfter a weekNever

Ask your world

Find the holes before your players do.

Ask the storyteller anything (“Who really controls the water trade?”) before a single player has walked in. It answers from your canon, and tells you how much of the answer your canon actually settles.

  • Settled by your canon

    The answer comes straight from what you wrote, with the sources.

  • Partly the storyteller's reading

    Your canon points that way; the rest is inference.

  • Your canon is silent: this is invented

    Here's what it would make up. Add it to your lore as a start, or write your own.

Check the whole world reads everything you've written and reports what contradicts itself, what's missing, and the loose ends.

Lore the storyteller looks up

History, legends, customs, creatures, anything you like, as entries with a title and the facts a narrator must keep straight. When a scene touches one, the storyteller looks it up rather than guessing. Add the other names players might use and those find it too.

creatures

The Drowned Dead

They lie quiet under the salt by day. After sunset they walk to where they died, and anything in the way is pulled down with them.

customs

Water Law

Fouling a still is a hanging offence, and any crew must give water to anyone who asks for it once.

legends

The New Shore

Whoever finds where the sea went will own a harbour the world has never seen. No expedition has come back.

Three of The Long Ebb's ten lore entries.

Inside the buildings

In testing

Step inside, and the room is really there.

Walk into a tavern and it has a floor plan: a common room, a kitchen, a cellar, and people standing somewhere in particular. The storyteller moves them by naming spots (“the bar”, “stairs up”, “near you”), never coordinates. The engine walks them there through the doors, one beat at a time.

A tavern floor plan with lettered tokens for each character, beside the stage direction that just moved the hooded stranger to the stairs, and who can see or overhear the player
The Drowned Lantern, mid-scene. The line of prose and the stage direction behind it ({"who":"stranger","to":"stairs up"}) on the right; who can see and overhear you below it.
A keep's ground floor: great hall, kitchen, guardroom, armoury and pantry
A keep: great hall, kitchen, guardroom, armoury.
A temple: nave with pews, sanctum and vestry
A temple at dawn: nave, sanctum, vestry.

Floor plans for real places

Taverns, temples, keeps and gatehouses get rooms, doors, stairs and cellars, drawn from what the place is and lit by the hour.

People keep hours

The keeper holds the bar, the cook the kitchen; patrons drift between seats. At night the rooms empty and the light changes.

Who can hear you

Same room: they're present. Through a door: they might overhear. The storyteller is told which, every turn.

Fights

When it comes to blows, everyone has somewhere to stand.

A solo fight in your world plays out on a battle map: the building's own plan when it starts indoors, or a forest, an alley, a bridge or a cave outside. Enemies announce their blows, so stepping out of one works. A shove breaks the furniture it lands in, and fire leaves the ground burning.

The engine works out where everyone ends up and what every blow did, before the storyteller writes a word. It narrates the result. It doesn't get to change it.

The game's own battle map, playing a scripted turn in your browser.

Money

Every world names its own coin.

Gold and silver, crowns and shillings, beads, shells, whatever your world trades in. Say what the smallest coin buys and the rest follows: prices in scenes, rewards, a new hero's purse and the price of passage all come out in your coins.

Add a price guide and a line on how trade works, and the storyteller quotes from it instead of making numbers up.

The Long Ebb · Economy
  • crownOne crown is worth 20 shillings
  • shillingOne shilling is worth 12 salts
  • saltOne salt buys about half a loaf

“The Salvage Crown stamps the crowns and shillings, but out on the seabed everyone pays in salts. Water is traded by the skin and often counts for more than coin.”

Your table, your key

Invite who you like. Pay only for what they play.

A world is private to the people you let in. Send an invite link, or publish a public page where anyone can read about the world and ask to join, and you decide who gets in. Characters are separate per world, so your players start fresh in yours.

Invite links

One link per group; revoke any of them. A Worldtable account and your link is all a player needs.

A public page

Your map, peoples, regions and magic on a page of its own, with a way to ask to join. No rules or spoilers.

Your own AI key

Your first $1 of AI is on Worldtable. After that your world runs on your own key, from OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible provider, stored encrypted, and only for your world.

Keys, costs and players

Safekeeping

Build boldly. Nothing is lost.

Every save is undoable

The Studio saves as you type and keeps your last twenty versions. Restore any of them.

Playtest a draft

Walk into your own draft with a throwaway hero. Then start over: play records wiped, your world untouched.

Publishing fixes the land

Once people live there, the coastlines stop moving. Names can still change.

It's one file

Your whole world, map included, exports and imports as a single document.

Straight answers

What builders ask first.

Will the AI actually respect what I wrote?
The parts that matter most aren't left to it. The map, the peoples' limits, the rules and the money are held by the engine, and the storyteller has to work within them. Your prose (tone, histories, taboos, the truths of your world) is handed to the storyteller every scene. It's good at following it, and when it drifts, the Ask tab is where you find out and tighten your canon.
What does it cost?
Worldtable doesn't charge you to build, and your first $1 of AI is on us: enough to draft a world and play it for a while. After that your world's AI (the storyteller, portraits, scene paintings) runs on your own key, so you pay your provider directly for what your players use, and you can choose the model. That's an OpenRouter key, or one from any OpenAI-compatible provider (portraits and scene paintings need OpenRouter).
Do my players need to pay or sign up for anything?
They need a Worldtable account to sign in. An invite to your world is all the access they need, and turns in your world run on your credit or your key, never theirs.
Can I use a world I've already written?
Yes. Paste it in section by section. The helpers will tidy or flesh out what you paste, and Ask your world will show you where it contradicts itself. The whole world also imports and exports as one file.
Who can build right now?
Anyone with an account. Sign in, open your Worlds page and name a world; one account can own up to five. Your first $1 of AI is on Worldtable; add your own AI key when it runs out.

Your world is waiting to be drawn

Write the first sentence.
Then go and live in it.

Name a world and you're in the Studio. Draft it with Worldtable or build it by hand, walk into it yourself, and send the invite when it's ready.

Start building Tour the Studio