The world you set.
Characters, rules, tone, the personality of the narrator. Read-only once play begins, so the ground never shifts under you.
What it is
A story that listens back.
Tohil is an interactive-fiction engine. You describe a world (or borrow one), then live inside it: an AI narrator writes the scene, reads it aloud, and hands you the next choice. Every turn bends to what you just did. Nothing is on rails, and nothing is pre-written.
It is built for eyes-off play. Put the phone down, let the narration carry, and answer when the story turns to you. Part audiobook, part game, entirely yours.
How it works
Seed, Sprout, Tree.
Three ideas run the whole engine. A guided wizard walks you through the first one, and the rest happens as you play.
The story as it lives.
Health, inventory, weather, time, plot threads, who is standing where. It grows and mutates with every choice you make.
The story once it ends.
A sealed record of the run you played. Keep it, revisit it, or plant a sequel that remembers everything that came before.
Under the hood
Everything the engine does.
One story turn hides a lot of moving parts. Here is the whole toolkit you get.
Guided world-builder
Toh, the wizard, walks you through a world in a few short beats. Prefer your own? Import a seed written anywhere else and play it straight away.
The game master
Step out of the story whenever you like. Ask the GM to bend a rule, repair your inventory, set a directive for the next turn, or change whose eyes you see through.
Live web search
Opt in per turn and the GM pulls real facts off the live web into the fiction: a real city's streets, a real date, a real name, woven in as you play.
Read aloud
Full narration through your browser's built-in voice or the richer Kokoro voices. Auto-read, adjustable pace, made for listening with the screen off.
Inventory that behaves
Items carry quantities and states. Arm one and it binds into your next action, spend it and it is gone. No phantom loot, no infinite potions.
Conditions
A living status taxonomy: injured, bleeding, poisoned, terrified, charmed, empowered, and more, plus any custom condition your world defines.
Consequences that persist
Health, weather, time of day, and every open plot thread are tracked turn to turn, so what you did an hour ago still shapes what happens next.
Perspective shifts
If your protagonist falls, the story can hand you an ally and carry on. Or ask the GM to switch point of view outright, whenever the tale needs it.
Branch and clone
Rewind to any past turn and split a fresh path from it. The original run stays intact, so you can explore the road not taken without losing the one you were on.
Sequels
A finished story seals into a Tree. Plant a sequel from it and the new tale remembers everything that came before.
Two narrators
A fast default voice for most play, or flip to the deeper model for a session when you want richer, slower prose.
Safety, built in
Standing rules protect minors and real people and refuse real-world harm. Mature and dark themes are opt-in per world, never switched on for you by default.
The philosophy
You have full agency.
Most AI stories quietly steer you back to the plot they wanted. Tohil does the opposite. When you decide something, it happens. The engine tracks the consequences and lets them land, comfortable or not, and never second-guesses what you asked for.
The only lines it holds are the ones that keep fiction from becoming harm. Inside those lines the world is genuinely open: go off-script, break the quest, walk the other way. The story follows you, not the other way around.
Why it is useful
Made for real life, not just screens.
- Listen anywhere. Full text-to-speech narration, so a story fits into a commute, a walk, a chore, or the dark before sleep.
- Bring any world. Build one with the guided wizard, or import a seed written anywhere else. Fantasy, noir, sci-fi, quiet drama, all of it.
- Choices that stick. The engine remembers what you did and carries it forward, so your decisions compound instead of resetting each turn.
- Endings that mean something. Runs are finite and shaped, then sealed into a Tree you can continue as a sequel.