About
The table I missed.
I grew up on tabletop role-playing games — friends around one table, paper character sheets, a single shared story that belonged to all of us. Then everyone grew up. The dice went into a drawer, and the itch — call it nostalgia — never really left.
When AI got good enough to hold a conversation all evening, the thought was hard to shake: why couldn't the gamemaster be an AI? It never tires, it reads faster than any of us ever did, and it can improvise a living world at two in the morning.
Two problems kept me up for a long time. An AI forgets — its memory fills up and the early chapters of your story quietly fall out of it. And running a whole campaign through a paid API gets expensive at exactly the moment the story gets good. lorewend is the answer I finally landed on: the campaign lives in a game engine, not in the chat — every fact, every coin, every promise — so the story survives any conversation, any new chat, even a different AI. And it runs inside the AI subscription you already pay for. No API keys, no per-message fees.
There was one more thing I couldn't let go of: I love too many universes to settle for one. Books, games, films — I wanted more than fantasy. So lorewend opened with five worlds — classic fantasy, sword and sorcery, rain-slick cyberpunk, gothic horror, a heroic space opera — each its own game, with its own language, its own money, its own dangers. And then came the Premium worlds, built whole before launch: The Long Road, the high fantasy of the journey I kept saving for last — and The Arcanum, the hidden universities of magic, where the Gift wakes at seventeen and the term begins. And one more I couldn’t resist, free for everyone: Feralia, the post-apocalyptic eighth — a rewilded world where the dead still walk, noise is the enemy, and the dream is a light behind a wall that outlives you.
And the old table? My friends are scattered now — different cities, jobs, families. Getting everyone into one room for an evening is nearly impossible. That is what multiplayer is for: one player hosts the game on their AI, everyone else joins with a link — free, in six of the eight worlds — each playing their own character. The table, back — without anyone leaving home.
lorewend is built by one person. If something feels off, tell me. And if an evening in it feels — even for an hour — like those old evenings did, then it is doing exactly what I built it for.
— Ivan