Building an AI Game Master from 10 years of homebrew tabletop
I've been the Dungeon Master for our homebrew D&D campaign for nearly 10 years. The world is Syrinway. Now I'm taking it digital with an AI narrator named Algus. Here's what 10 years behind the DM screen taught me about what an AI Game Master should do, and what it should never try to do.
I've been running Syrinway as the backdrop of our homebrew D&D games for nearly a decade. Our hand-crafted world has been explored by the same group of friends across several different parties, in more ways than I can count. Now I'm taking Syrinway digital as the backdrop of a mobile game with an AI narrator named Algus. There are several things I set out to make sure an AI Game Master does and doesn't do. I learned them the hard way, from parties that rarely went the way I planned.
It started with a group of close friends and a zoom screen. My phone was propped up on a kleenex box, pointed at my kitchen table so everyone could see their mini, next to the cheapest set of dice I could find at the local hobby shop. Over years of weekly sessions, we built out a setting that felt like ours: a city with neighborhoods nobody else has heard of, and NPCs who became fixtures of campaign lore. Goblin guards who started as throwaway characters ended up being the soul of the party for multi-year arcs.
Syrinway has Anelise, the tavern-keeper's daughter at the Lucky Rabbit's Foot in our starting town of Derandil. She remembers when a player brought her father a cask of imported ale and didn't ask for anything in return. Three campaigns later, players who barely interacted with her last year walk into the tavern and she lights up because they came back. That moment is good tabletop: the world saying, "I remember you."
Syrinway has Yarlos, the lamplighter who tunes a lute behind the bar at the Lucky Rabbit's Foot when the lamp work is done. Players who tipped him a silver one rainy night ended up with a bard ally three sessions later because Yarlos remembered the kindness. That's story the table built together because the world held what mattered.
After running it for that long, two things become true. I love this world too much to let it die when our weekly sessions someday end. And a lot of friends who would love this kind of play can't sit at a tabletop every Thursday at 7 PM. They have kids and work, and lives that don't fit a four-hour session with seven adults.
So I started thinking about Syrinway as a thing in your pocket. A campaign you could open during your lunch break. A world that would remember your character between turns at the dentist's office and turns on the train home.
The obvious answer was AI. The problem is that almost every AI roleplay product on the market right now is bad at the one thing tabletop RPGs are good at, which is memory.
The wanted poster moment
Ten years of the same campaign taught me what makes a game feel alive: the things players remember best are the small details the world held onto.
A friend of mine ran a half-elf rogue for three years. The character once stole a pendant from a noblewoman in a tavern, gave it to a sister offscreen because she was sick, then walked back into the tavern in the next session like nothing happened. As the DM, I noted the pendant theft on the side of my prep notes. Eight sessions later, the noblewoman's brother showed up in a completely different city with the pendant's description on a wanted poster.
The table loved that a one-line decision the rogue made eight sessions ago came back as a wanted poster. The world remembered.
Every AI RPG I've used in 2026 fails at this. Type three turns in a row, mention something specific from turn one, and the AI shrugs and generates a generic response. You become the world's memory keeper because the AI isn't. That's improv with a goldfish.
What an AI Game Master needs to do, and what it should never try to do
Translating tabletop DM craft into AI design turned out to be a useful exercise. Most of what good DMs actually do is tracking: holding context and knowing which thread in the campaign is being pulled at any given moment.
When a player walks into the Lucky Rabbit's Foot, a good DM remembers that Anelise is the tavern-keeper's daughter. That the player tipped her father last week. That Yarlos is in the corner tuning his lute because that's where he is on a Tuesday evening. That the brigands you robbed two sessions ago might have their cousin watching this tavern for reprisal.
The DM is pulling specific facts from a world they've been holding in their head for years.
So that's what we built. In Branching Skies, Anelise and Yarlos were written. Their dialogue patterns were authored, and their relationships were established in campaign canon long before the AI ever opened its mouth.
What the AI should never try to do is worldbuild. A bad AI roleplay product tries to generate the world and its entire mythology from a one-line prompt. The result is the slop most people have already tasted: generic taverns, and NPCs whose names you forget the moment they say them.
The thing tabletop DMs know that AI products keep missing is that worlds need authors. A world built in one minute by an algorithm and a world built in 10 years by a DM hand-tuning every faction and NPC are not the same thing. The first one is forgettable. The second one is what you remember.
When Algus drifts
Even with a hand-built world, the AI will sometimes drift. It's an AI. That's what they do.
A real DM doesn't always get it right at the table either. The fix in tabletop is conversational. The player says, "hey, I think you forgot that Anelise's father owes me a favor." The DM checks their notes. The DM says, "you're right, sorry, let me adjust." The game continues.
So we built that into Branching Skies. You can tap Algus's name and step out of the scene to talk to him directly. Ask him what he meant, or correct him when he drifts. Then he checks the canon and fixes the story if you were right. It's the only AI roleplay I know of where the player can fact-check the narrator in real time. Because we're the only one with a canon worth fact-checking against.
A pocket campaign
Branching Skies isn't meant to replace your weekly game. It's meant to live between sessions. The thing in your pocket when your group can't meet. A pocket campaign with a GM who doesn't forget what you did last time. The session you play on the bus, or the hour after the kids go to sleep on a night nobody's available for a four-hour session.
Your real tabletop is still your real tabletop. This is the extra slot.
We have a tagline. Stories that remember you. It means exactly what it says.
What's next
Branching Skies is in pre-launch. The DM lessons above became architecture: why the narrator never gets to own your story's memory, and how the world holds your choices against you the way a good table does. If you've ever wanted an AI campaign that doesn't make you the world's memory keeper, get on the list. The world is ours, and your choices stay yours.