Welcome
Start your journey on the stage
Welcome to RoleCall
RoleCall is a place to run scenes with AI characters. You can pick a character someone else designed and step onto the stage, or you can design your own — a person, a setting, a whole cast — and share them with everyone else on the platform. You get the depth long-time roleplayers want (prompts, samplers, lorebooks, post-production passes, image generation) without having to build everything from scratch. Community creators have already made hundreds of characters, presets, and worlds you can use in one click.
Two Studios
Most people live in one of two modes most of the time.
Consume — play what's already there
Browse the catalogue on Discovery, pick a character, hit start. (Discovery lives on PlotLight — RoleCall's separate sister site and discovery platform, where everything published gets moderated and audited for quality. Same account, same library.) No setup required. The character comes with a recommended preset, an optional lorebook, and a first message. You read it, write a reply, and you're in the scene.
This is how the vast majority of new users spend their first week. You don't need to know what a sampler is or what a system prompt does. Pick something interesting, talk to it.
Every published character has a Use on RoleCall button on its card. Click it and you're dropped straight into a scene — no library detour, no setup. If you want the character to stay in sync with the creator's future updates (or pin a specific version), the Repertoire subscription handles that separately. But for "I want to play with this character right now," it's one click to the stage.
Create — make your own
Build your own character, your own AI behavior recipe, your own world. Keep your work private for personal use, or publish it so others can play with it and build on top of it. Every shareable piece of content moves through this lifecycle: draft → private → published, and pending review (under moderator attention) as the one special state.
Rewriting
Everything published is rewritable. Tap Rewrite on someone else's character, preset, lorebook, or persona and a copy lands in your library as a draft. Edit it however you want — the original creator stays credited automatically. If you publish your rewrite, the lineage is preserved, so anyone who visits your version can trace it back to the source.
Rewriting is how most "creators" on RoleCall actually got there. Rewrite a character that's almost what you want, change five fields, you've authored a character. Same for presets, personas, and lorebooks.
Importing from elsewhere
If you've been on SillyTavern, JanitorAI, Backyard, or any other roleplay platform, RoleCall accepts your work. Drop in:
- Character cards — PNG cards with v1, v2, or v3 metadata (the SillyTavern standard).
- Personas — PNG persona cards.
- Presets — JSON preset files.
- Lorebooks — JSON world info / lorebook files.
- Scene logs — JSONL message-history exports from other platforms.
- RoleOut bundles — full scene-plus-character-plus-preset-plus-persona ZIPs from the SillyTavern RoleOut extension.
Or zip a folder of any combination — the bulk importer figures out what each file is by sniffing PNG metadata and JSON structure, then sorts them into your library. Folder structure doesn't matter; flat ZIPs work too. You can migrate a whole library in one drop.
Recovery Phrase — Read This Before You Sign Up
When you create your account, RoleCall generates a 12-word recovery phrase for you. This phrase is the only thing that can decrypt your scene history and your provider API keys on a new device. It is never sent to RoleCall's servers — it lives only in your browser and (hopefully) somewhere safe you can find again.
Write it down. Store it somewhere you trust. A password manager, a piece of paper, a notes file you actually back up — any of those. If you lose it:
- You lose access to every scene you've ever run on this account.
- You lose every connected API key.
- There is no reset link. RoleCall cannot recover it for you. That is the cost of true end-to-end encryption.
This is the single most important paragraph in this entire guide. If you skip it, please come back to it before you start a real scene you'd be sad to lose.
See Providers & Keys for the full story on what gets encrypted, how device pairing works, and what to do if you want to add a second device to the same account.
Content Types
Everything you create or rewrite on RoleCall fits into one of three buckets: core scene atoms that get slotted into a live scene, tools that sit alongside them, and Series as a special carveout for bundling multiple pieces together.
Core Scene Atoms
The four building blocks of any scene. Pick one of each and you're ready to play.
| Type | One-line |
|---|---|
| Characters | Who the AI plays — name, description, personality, scenario, first message. |
| Personas | Who you play in the scene — your side of the roleplay. |
| Presets | The AI behavior recipe — system prompts, sampler settings, formatting. |
| Lorebooks | World info that gets pulled into context — locations, factions, rules. |
Compendium — the AI layer on top of lorebooks
The Compendium isn't a separate content type. It's an AI-managed knowledge layer that runs on top of whichever lorebook(s) you attach to a scene. When you flip it on, a sidecar AI reads each turn, pulls the relevant entries into the narrator's context, writes new entries when fresh facts emerge, and quietly reorganizes the lorebook as the story grows.
Think of it as a librarian for the lorebook you already have. The lorebook is the content; the Compendium is the AI that operates on it.
Tools
These sit alongside the core atoms — they sharpen or transform what the scene produces.
| Type | One-line |
|---|---|
| Prompts | Individual prompt snippets you can inject on top of presets. |
| Regex Scripts | Find-and-replace rules that clean up or reformat AI output before you see it. |
Series — the carveout
A Series isn't a single piece of content. It's an explicit bundle — a collection that groups characters, lorebooks, presets, and personas that belong together (the same world, the same cast, the same setup). When several pieces of content should live and travel together, a Series packages them as one unit. Rewriting a Series brings the whole bundle along instead of forcing you to chase down five separate items.
This is why Series gets its own carveout: it's the only content type whose contents are other content types.
Coming Soon
| Type | Status |
|---|---|
| Visual Novels | Branching, illustrated VN-style stories built on the Scene engine. In active development — not yet generally available. |
How They Fit Together in a Scene
A live scene pulls from the core four (plus optional extras):
Scene
├── Character (1) — who the AI plays
├── Persona (1) — who you play
├── Preset (1) — how the AI behaves
├── Lorebooks (0+) — optional world context (+ Compendium AI layer)
└── Extra Prompts (0+) — optional inject-on-top snippets
Regex Scripts sit a layer up — they help you transform output, but they aren't slotted into a scene the way the core four are.
Most users start by picking just a character and letting RoleCall pick everything else from the character's recommended setup. You can swap any of the four mid-scene from the chat rails — change your persona halfway through a chat, add a lorebook because the scene wandered into a new region, switch presets because the AI's tone needs to shift. Nothing locks in.
Theaters — Where the AI Runs
RoleCall is BYOK (bring your own key). You connect an AI provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter, NanoGPT, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — and your chats run against your account there. RoleCall does not proxy your traffic or store your key in readable form.
There are two pools of models you can pick from. You can mix both freely.
Premiere Theater
RoleCall-hosted models, available without any of your own keys. The Premiere Theater is the friction-free path: you sign up, the models are already there, you can start chatting. Different tiers unlock different model lineups. This is what most new users run on for their first few weeks before they ever look at API keys.
Local Theater
Your own connected providers. The Local Theater is the power-user path: you bring your own API keys, and you can run any model your provider supports — including frontier models, fine-tunes, and self-hosted endpoints. Slower to set up, but you get total control over models, costs, and limits.
Most users use Premiere for casual play and switch to their own keys for heavier sessions or specific models they prefer.
Picking a Model Mid-Scene
Whichever theater you use, the model picker for your main model is found in the Quickplay panel on the left, or the model panel on the right. (The lightning bolt or the computer chip). Swap models at any time, even mid-conversation — the next reply will use the new model. If you want a long, careful reply from a frontier model and a quick swipe from a cheaper one, you can change between them turn by turn.
What Makes RoleCall Different
If you've used a roleplay AI app before, here is what you'll find new.
- Group chats. Solo scenes with one character are the default, but you can also run a whole cast in the same conversation. Group responder modes let the AI pick who speaks next, go round-robin, or wait for you to cue a specific character manually. Each character carries their own state, so a tracked relationship with one doesn't bleed into the next. You can also invite your friends to stories for a group experience, every character setup with (potentially) a different lorebook, model and preset if you want!
- Story Director. A second AI sitting behind the scene as the game master. While the Narrator writes the prose, the Story Director plans arcs, plants foreshadowing, paces the story, sets objectives, and maintains hidden world state — then feeds the Narrator filtered hints so it can't accidentally spoil twists. Pick one of ten DM Personalities to set the directing style. Trackers and Storyboards (relationships, quests, calendars, maps, and the rest) are outputs of the Director, not the Director itself.
- Post-Production passes. After each AI reply, a second AI pass can clean up clichés, polish prose, translate to another language, or run a custom agent you've written. Automatic, or on demand per message.
- The Compendium. Lorebooks with an AI librarian. The AI picks relevant entries by meaning instead of by keyword, writes new entries as facts emerge in the scene, and summarizes long sessions automatically so context stays manageable.
- Branching trees. Every chat is a tree, not a line. Swipe past a reply, branch off mid-scene, jump between alternate timelines without losing the original thread.
- Macros. A real macro engine — variables, conditionals, randomness, time of day, weather, dice rolls — that resolves inside any prompt or character field.
- Image generation. Connect an image provider and the AI can generate scene illustrations, character portraits, or props inline with the conversation.
- Visual Novel mode. A dedicated VN play surface for character-driven games — dialogue boxes, sprite swaps, music, choice menus.
- BYOK with true end-to-end encryption. Every message, memory chunk, and API key is encrypted in your browser with a key derived from your recovery phrase. RoleCall's servers see only encrypted blobs. The team running the site cannot read your chats.
You don't need to use any of these to chat with a character. They're there when you want them. New users typically discover one feature at a time as a scene asks for it — you'll start a long campaign, notice you can't remember a side character's name, and that's the moment the Compendium becomes useful. The platform is designed to stay out of your way until you reach for it.
How the Community Works
RoleCall is social, but quietly. There is no algorithmic feed shouting at you. Discovery is browseable and searchable; you can sort by what's trending, what's newest, what's highest rated, or what matches the tags you care about.
A few signals you'll see throughout the site:
| Signal | What it means |
|---|---|
| Favorites | A heart someone tapped on your content. Counts as a quiet endorsement. |
| Forks | How many people copied your work into their own library. The strongest signal that something is useful. |
| Chats | How many scenes have been started from a character. Use it as a popularity proxy. |
| Ratings | A 1–5 score with optional written reviews. The most considered signal. |
| Reports | Flags for tag accuracy, broken content, or policy issues. Used by moderation, not visible publicly. |
Creators show up on each other's pages through attribution chains. If you fork a character and publish your version, your card credits the original author. If someone forks your version, the chain extends. This is how lineage works on RoleCall — credit is automatic and permanent.
Quick Orientation Map
A quick map of the major surfaces on the site. The left rail keeps these within reach across every page.
| Surface | Where it lives | What's There |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | PlotLight | Browse and search every published character, preset, lorebook, persona, series. |
| Library | RoleCall | Your personal collection — content you've created, forked, or favorited. |
| Personas | RoleCall | The people you show up as in scenes. Switch between them per chat. |
| Account & Settings | RoleCall | Subscription, recovery phrase, BYOK providers, regex, loadouts. |
| Scenes | RoleCall | A live conversation with one or more characters. |
| Portfolio | PlotLight | Your public creator page (optional). |
| Stage Whispers | PlotLight | Public feed of standout AI messages from chats. |
| Docs | Both | The pages you're reading right now (one site per app). |
A Note on Privacy
Every chat you have, every memory chunk the AI writes, every API key you connect — encrypted in your browser with the key derived from your recovery phrase. RoleCall's servers see only the encrypted blobs.
What's not encrypted is the public-content side of things: character cards, lorebooks, presets, personas, and prompts you publish. Those are shareable by design — they're meant to land on Discovery and get forked. Your unpublished library content is still visible only to you, but it lives on RoleCall's servers in plain form so it can move between your devices when you sign in.
The short version: anything that's the story you and the AI created together is encrypted. Anything that's the raw material you'd share with another creator is not.
See Providers & Keys for the precise breakdown.
Where to Go Next
If you're brand new, walk through the end-to-end tutorial first:
- Your First Scene — sign up, pick a character, send your first message, branch into an alternate path.
Then dig into the features you'll touch most:
- Characters — anatomy of a character card, first messages, alternate greetings.
- Your Library — your personal collection of forked, favorited, and authored work.
- Discovery on PlotLight — browsing and finding content published by every creator.
- Providers & Keys — connecting an AI provider, recovery phrase, device pairing.
- Macros Guide —
{{char}},{{user}}, variables, conditionals, the macro engine.
The full feature index lives in the left sidebar. Each entry is self-contained — read in any order.
A Note on Naming
You'll see two words sloshing around the docs and the site itself: chat and scene. They mean the same thing — a chat session is a scene. Older menus and slash commands still say "chat"; newer naming is "scene." Same surface, same data. We're slowly settling on scene because RoleCall is more of a roleplay theater than a chatbot, but you don't need to care which word any specific menu uses.
Same goes for TunnelVision vs Compendium — same system, renamed. The slash command prefix is still /tv. See the Compendium doc for the full story.
Welcome in. Take your time. The stage is yours.