9 Best AI Dungeon Alternatives in 2026 (Free & Uncensored)

AI Dungeon started the modern AI text adventure, and it's still good. Players leave for one of three reasons: the filter softens scenes that weren't explicit, the AI loses the plot hours into a story, or longer memory costs more than they want to pay. The nine alternatives below are ranked by which of those they fix.

One of the nine is Mythx AI, which we make. We've put it where we think it fits, so read that entry with that in mind.

TL;DR: key takeaways

• Three problems drive most people away: a filter that feels too aggressive, memory that fails on long stories, and paying for a bigger context window to fix that memory. Start from the one that bothers you most.
• Fewer content limits: NovelAI, DreamGen, KoboldCPP, SillyTavern and Chub sit at the uncensored end, though the setup effort varies a lot between them.
• Free: KoboldCPP and Perchance cost nothing, and several others have usable free tiers.
• Pictures, not just text: we built Mythx AI for this. Scenes are illustrated (all of them on Premium), and characters keep their look across scenes.
• Real D&D rules: Friends & Fables runs 5e with an AI Dungeon Master.
• Nearly all of these start free or run on your own machine, so try two or three for an evening each before you pay for anything.

Why people look for an AI Dungeon alternative in 2026

The right pick depends on what pushed you out. These are the usual reasons.

1. Content filtering. There are three safety settings on AI Dungeon: Safe, Moderate and Mature. Mature requires age confirmation and keeps only the always-on filter against sexual content involving minors. Players still report non-explicit scenes getting sanitized, mostly on the lower settings, and it's among the top reasons they leave.
2. Long-story memory. In Latitude's own player survey, memory scored as the weakest feature. Players often say the AI forgets characters and plot a few hours into a session. AI Dungeon rebuilt its memory system in late 2025 and added more memory tools in August and September 2026. It's getting better, but it's still the fix players ask for most.
3. The price of context. Every tier, free included, lets you play without limits, and normal story actions never spend credits. Credits pay only for extras: images, video, premium narration voices and optional extra context. The catch is that the free Wanderer tier holds about 4,000 tokens of story. More memory means Journey, Legend, Mythic or Ultimate, which cost $14.99 to $99.99 a month (September 2026). Long memory is where the money goes.

AI Dungeon is still the most mature open-ended text sandbox, and plenty of players should stay. For a direct comparison with our app, read our head-to-head of the two. If one of the three problems above is a dealbreaker, the list below is sorted for you.

AI Dungeon's pricing page on October 4, 2026: Free with 4k context, Journey $14.99 (8k), Legend $29.99 (16k), Mythic $49.99 (32k).

What to look for in an AI Dungeon alternative

These four questions split the field, and each entry below answers them.

1. Content policy. Is it filtered, uncensored or adjustable, and does that suit the stories you tell?
2. Memory. Can it keep names, relationships and plot straight over a long story without you keeping notes?
3. Visuals. Text only, or pictures of scenes and characters? If there are pictures, does a character look the same each time?
4. Cost and setup. Is the free tier usable? Do you need your own hardware or API keys? Can you try it without entering a card?

These products update constantly and reshuffle their tiers. We checked each one against its own site in September 2026 and quote only prices the company publishes. Check again before you subscribe.

The 9 best AI Dungeon alternatives in 2026

1. NovelAI: best for uncensored prose and serious writers

NovelAI is a writing tool first, and it happens to work very well for solo roleplay. There's no game loop. You get something like a text editor that continues your prose in your own style, a Lorebook that keeps world and character facts straight, and fine control over tone. Its anime-style image generator is well regarded too.

Players leaving AI Dungeon come for its hands-off stance on what you write, its clear privacy position on your stories, and Lorebook memory that holds long stories together. The trade-offs: there's a learning curve, nothing pushes back the way a game master would, and the only free option is a one-time trial. Plans start at $10 a month with unlimited text on every paid tier; images cost its Anlas currency. If your roleplay is really fiction written with an assistant, this may be the best pick here.

2. KoboldCPP: best for free, private, offline play

When cost and privacy are the problem, the community keeps recommending KoboldCPP. It's a free, open-source program in a single file that runs an AI model on your own machine. A built-in web interface, KoboldAI Lite, has dedicated story and adventure modes. Nothing you write goes to a company's server.

You choose the model, so there's no built-in filter; it behaves however the model you load behaves. Beyond your hardware it costs nothing, and it can also generate images and speech locally. That hardware is the catch. Your GPU and RAM, not the software, set the quality, the coherence and how much story it remembers, and setup takes more work than a hosted app. Without a strong GPU, you can use the same KoboldAI Lite interface free in the browser at lite.koboldai.net, on models the community shares. Two notes: KoboldCPP is the maintained successor to the older KoboldAI project, and koboldcpp.com is not its official site, so download it only from GitHub.

3. SillyTavern: best for total control (power users)

SillyTavern is the most misunderstood tool on this list. It's a front end, not an AI. Think of it as a control room for roleplay (characters, prompts, lorebooks, memory extensions, image plugins) that can't write a word by itself. You supply the model: a local one (free, but it needs good hardware) or a cloud API you pay for per use.

If you like tuning every setting, nothing else comes close. Its World Info (lorebook) system and summary extensions give you about as much control over long-term memory as any tool offers, and it connects to almost any model or image backend. The cost is friction. You install it yourself, then add a model or API key separately. Choose it if you're a power user, not if you want something that works on first launch.

4. Mythx AI: best for visual, world-driven adventures

Mythx AI is our product. It's on this list for players whose problem was memory or a blank page. It won't help with the filter.

AI Dungeon can now draw images on request, but it's still a text canvas at heart. Mythx starts from pictures, and scenes arrive illustrated without you asking. On the free plan your first scenes come illustrated, and Premium illustrates every scene. We worked hardest on keeping characters consistent, so the companion from your first scene still looks like herself forty scenes later. Most text-plus-image tools get that wrong. The features page has examples.

What that looks like in practice: one companion across morning, dusk, and night scenes — same face, same outfit, no drift.

The world is the other difference. You don't start in an empty text box. You arrive as a newcomer somewhere that already exists, such as a cozy village, the gaslit streets of Victorian London, a magic academy, or a tavern you inherit along with its debts. Every world has a cast with jobs, routines and relationships, places to travel between, and a day that moves on while you play. People remember what you told them and act on it later, so you walk around inside the story instead of narrating it. Meet the casts on the worlds page, or see a first day play out on the isekai game page.

The trade-offs: AI Dungeon has total blank-canvas freedom and a huge scenario library, while Mythx gives you a built world to play in. Mythx is also filtered and has no Mature setting. If you want a pure anything-goes sandbox, AI Dungeon may still be the better fit. Mythx is for players who never quite got hooked on text alone and suspect pictures are what was missing.

Cost: the free plan needs no credit card and gives you 10 scenes a day, the first few illustrated. It works on the web and in the iOS and Android apps. Premium ($79.99 a year, $9.99 a month or $4.99 a week) adds unlimited story, with up to 100 scenes a day illustrated. See pricing.

5. DreamGen: best for uncensored long-form roleplay

If the filter pushed you out, DreamGen is one of the obvious next stops. It allows adult fiction for users 18 and over and bans only illegal content. It's made for players who direct. You describe the plot, the setting, the characters and the style you want, then guide each turn with instructions, retries and branches, in role-play or long-form story writing.

The trade-offs: you do much of the remembering. Important turns get pinned and old history gets compressed into sequels by hand, and its community often talks about characters forgetting things. DreamGen's pricing page lists plans from $7.83 to $48.30 a month. Credits pay for images and for some models, charged per token. The interface takes time to learn, and there's no app outside the browser. Our guide to sites like DreamGen goes deeper.

6. Chub: best for a huge library of uncensored characters

Think of Chub as an app store for uncensored character cards, with hosted chat built in (it used to be called Venus). Anyone can browse its huge community library of character profiles for free, without logging in. You can download cards, make your own and chat with them without installing anything. The appeal is variety with no setup, and it's uncensored on purpose.

Next to a self-hosted SillyTavern, Chub gives up some control for convenience. You get lorebooks, image generation and voice inside the chat, plus its own large model. The trade-offs: its own models have no lasting free tier. New users get one-time trial credits worth "a few dozen messages." After that you subscribe ($20 a month for unlimited use, paid in crypto only) or connect your own API key or local model. It's browser-based. Choose it for ready-made uncensored characters, fast, if crypto billing doesn't bother you.

7. Perchance: best for free casual play with no login

Perchance doesn't fit the pattern of this list. It's a community-built hub of free generators that run in the browser, including a popular AI story generator and an AI RPG / text-adventure tool. It's free and unlimited, and you never register or log in. Light ads and donations pay for it, not a subscription or credits.

No tool here is quicker for trying AI storytelling with zero commitment. It works alongside Perchance's popular free image generator, and the AI RPG has a scene-image tray built in. It now also writes rolling summaries and tracks stats to keep longer adventures on course. The trade-offs come with being free and login-free. Adventures live only in your browser and don't sync anywhere. The interface is bare, and very long stories lose coherence sooner than on paid tools. It suits a casual evening better than a months-long saga.

8. Friends & Fables: best for real D&D with an AI Dungeon Master

If you came to AI Dungeon wanting Dungeons & Dragons, Friends & Fables is closer. It runs D&D 5e as a text RPG, with an AI game master called Franz who enforces the rules, from character sheets to spell slots and battlemaps. Nobody else in the category offers world-building tools this deep, and the top plan seats parties of up to six. It runs on the web. Private campaigns can include mature themes, and published content is moderated.

The trade-offs: the free tier allows 25 turns a day, and paying starts at $19.95 a month. Long campaigns still drift. Memory is a frequent topic in its community, and many players end up correcting the game master. In September 2026 the team also put big new updates on hold until 2027 while it works on a new product. Everything runs on 5e rules, which some players want and others find confining. More options are in our Friends & Fables comparison.

9. Character.AI: best for mainstream character chat (with caveats)

Character.AI is the biggest name in AI character chat. It has a vast community library and polished apps for web, iOS and Android. Lots of AI Dungeon players try it, so it belongs here, but it's built for nearly the opposite of what most of them want.

It does a lot well. It has the largest roster of community characters, voice calls, group chats and image generation. New in 2026 are free memory pins and a Lorebook for world facts (in beta, c.ai+ subscribers first). But its moderation is stricter than AI Dungeon's, and there's no mature setting at all. The free plan shows ads and locks some extras behind a virtual currency; the paid lite and c.ai+ plans remove them. Open-ended chat for under-18 users ended completely in late 2025. If you want fewer restrictions, look elsewhere. If you want polished mainstream chat and the filter doesn't bother you, it leads the category. We cover its rivals in our Character.AI alternatives list.

Comparison at a glance

Pick	Best for	Content policy	Visuals	Free to start
NovelAI	Uncensored prose & writers	Uncensored (text)	Anime-style image gen	Trial only (from $10/mo)
KoboldCPP	Free, private, offline	Uncensored (model-dependent)	Local image gen	Free / open-source
SillyTavern	Total control, power users	Depends on your model	Via extensions	Free software
Mythx AI (our app)	Visual, world-driven adventures	Filtered	Illustrated scenes (every one on Premium), consistent characters	Yes, no credit card
DreamGen	Directing long-form roleplay	Adult fiction allowed (18+)	Image generator, uses credits	Yes (short context)
Chub	Uncensored character cards	Uncensored by design	In-chat image gen (paid)	One-time trial credits
Perchance	Free casual play, no login	Mostly unrestricted	Free image gen, scene tray	Yes, no login
Friends & Fables	Real D&D 5e with an AI GM	Mature allowed (private)	On demand, plus battlemaps	Yes (25 turns a day)
Character.AI	Mainstream character chat	Heavily filtered	Imagine image gen	Yes (ads)

Which should you pick?

Match the pick to the reason you left.

• The content filter: check AI Dungeon's own Mature setting first. For a hosted service, try NovelAI (writers), DreamGen (directed long-form roleplay) or Chub (ready-made characters). For total freedom on your own model, KoboldCPP or SillyTavern.
• The price of long memory: KoboldCPP (free and self-hosted, with memory capped by your hardware), Perchance (free, no login), or Mythx AI, where the world keeps its own state on the free plan or the $9.99 flat one.
• Memory that breaks on long stories: NovelAI's Lorebook, SillyTavern's World Info (if you'll configure it), or Mythx AI, which saves its places, its people and what they remember without your help.
• You wanted D&D with real rules: Friends & Fables.
• You wanted to see the adventure, in a world and cast that last: Mythx AI (ours), which you can start free on the web.
• You want polished mainstream chat and can live with moderation: Character.AI.

Common questions

What's the best free AI Dungeon alternative? KoboldCPP (local or in the browser) and Perchance (no login) are the best options that are both free and unlimited. Mythx AI, DreamGen, Friends & Fables and Character.AI each have a free tier that doesn't ask for a card. AI Dungeon's own free tier also has no action limits; what holds it back is the short context.

Which AI Dungeon alternative has no content filter? NovelAI, DreamGen, KoboldCPP, SillyTavern and Chub are the least restricted. "Uncensored" means different things, though. A private local model follows only your rules, while a hosted service keeps its own. Read each product's current policy.

Which one has the best long-story memory? For fiction you write, NovelAI's Lorebook, or SillyTavern's World Info if you'll set it up. Mythx AI handles it differently. The places, the people and what they remember about you are saved as part of the world, so you never summarize by hand. No tool here stays perfect over a very long story yet.

Is there an AI Dungeon alternative with images? Yes. Most tools on this list make images, and AI Dungeon now does on demand. Mythx AI leans on pictures more than any of them. Our AI text adventure illustrates scenes as you play (every scene on Premium) and keeps characters looking the same, instead of adding a picture now and then.

Where to start

AI Dungeon remains an excellent open-ended text sandbox. If the filter drove you out, try NovelAI, KoboldCPP or SillyTavern. For memory, try NovelAI's Lorebook or a world that saves itself, like Mythx. For price, try KoboldCPP or Perchance. Most start free, so test two before you pay. If you missed seeing the story, try Mythx AI on the web for free.