Playing
How Worldtable works
The storyteller narrates; the engine decides. What each one is allowed to touch.
Two jobs, one line between them
Worldtable is a roleplaying game you play by typing. You write what your character does; the world writes back. Two different things answer you, and knowing which is which is most of what there is to learn.
The storyteller is an AI model. It writes every scene, plays every innkeeper, rival and monster, and judges what you meant: how clever the plan was, how much risk you took, how big the thing you tried is.
The engine is ordinary game code with a database behind it. It rolls the dice, does the arithmetic and keeps the records. The storyteller can describe a blow landing, but whether it landed, and what it cost you, was settled before a word was written.
| What | How |
|---|---|
| Whether an attack lands, and how hard Engine | The storyteller grades your tactics and risk; a d100 roll against a threshold decides the outcome, and a formula sets the damage. |
| What an action costs you Engine | The storyteller rates how big the effect is. Code prices it against your stamina or mana, and refuses what you can't afford. |
| Where places are, how long roads take Engine | The map is generated and kept. Travel speed comes from terrain, slope, roads and the hour. |
| What you own, what you're worth Engine | Items and money live in the database. Sale and repair prices come from code, not from haggling. |
| Whether you live Engine | Health, the bleed-out clock, and the world's rule on whether death is final. |
| What people say, want and do Storyteller | Every character is played by the AI, with its memories of you and its standing toward you kept by the engine. |
Throughout these docs, a small tag marks which side a mechanic sits on. Engine means code enforces it and nothing typed can argue past it. Storyteller means the AI is told and trusted to follow: it usually will, but it is judgement, not arithmetic.
Many worlds
Worldtable hosts more than one world. Khorvale is the first: a generated archipelago of five island regions, six currents of magic and ten peoples, run by Worldtable itself. Its lore is in the Codex.
Other worlds are made by their builders in the World Studio. Each has its own map, peoples, magic, money, cast of notable figures and rules: whether death is final, how dangerous things get, how fast word spreads. The engine underneath is the same, so a sword blow is resolved the same way everywhere; what changes is the world it lands in.
A world can also play by a rule system: stats on a sheet and dice you can see, from a system people already know or one its builder wrote from scratch. The storyteller still picks the words; code rolls the dice. See How a roll works.
- Your account works in every world you belong to.
- Characters belong to one world. Making a character in a new world leaves your others untouched.
- A world you're a member of can be entered from the Worlds page.
What it costs
Khorvale is free while Worldtable is in early access, and access is by invitation while the world is small.
Building needs no API key. Every account starts with 50 free credits, and each player pays for their own turns, one credit a turn. A builder can instead run their world on their own AI key (OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible provider); then its players play free. See Players, keys and costs.
Where to start
- To play: Getting in, then Playing a turn.
- To build a world: Making a world, then the Studio, tab by tab.
- To understand a fight: Fighting.
- To play with friends: Playing together.
- To give a world its own rules and dice: Making your own system and Rule cards.
- To give it spells, powers and monsters: Spells and abilities and The bestiary.