Virtual tabletop platform Quest Portal is set to launch a fully integrated AI-powered Game Master Assistant later this month. The new feature is designed to help GMs generate entire campaigns, including lore, maps, NPCs, and stat blocks, in minutes.
The new tool aims to assist both new and veteran GMs by helping with worldbuilding, looking up rules mid-session, and even suggesting player prompts to manage pacing. Initially, the assistant will be available for Dungeons & Dragons 5e, with plans to expand to other popular systems like Call of Cthulhu and Pathfinder 2e.
Quest Portal, founded by a team of designers and developers in Reykjavik, Iceland, aims to create a virtual tabletop that is more accessible and less intimidating for newcomers. Their mission, they say, is to “increase creativity, empathy, and collaboration.”
The introduction of AI into creative spaces is a divisive topic, with many roleplayers concerned about the ethical sourcing of AI training data and the potential for such tools to diminish the human element of storytelling. In the exclusive interview that follows, Geek Native speaks with Content Operations Manager Heather Haynsen, CEO Gunnar Holmsteinn, and COO Gummi Gunnlaugsson about these concerns, the practical applications of their new AI assistant, and their vision for the future of roleplaying.
An interview with Quest Portal
Let’s start with an introduction! Who are the people behind Quest Portal, and what was the spark that led you to create a new virtual tabletop in a space with some established names?
Quest Portal was founded by a small, passionate team of nerds in Reykjavik, Iceland. We’re storytellers, designers, developers, and dog-lovers who have been playing tabletop RPGs together for years. Many of us came from tech and gaming backgrounds, and we were frustrated with how inaccessible and intimidating virtual tabletops (VTTs) could feel, especially for new Game Masters. So we set out to make a VTT that’s truly easy to use.
Your new Game Master Assistant is powered by AI, a topic that’s quite divisive in creative communities. Many feel that AI-generated content can diminish the uniquely human element of storytelling that sits at the heart of roleplaying. Your mission is to ‘increase creativity, empathy, and collaboration’, so how would you address the concern that an AI doing the ‘heavy lifting’ might reduce a GM’s own creative input, rather than increase it?
We’ve heard these concerns, and we share the belief that storytelling is inherently human. Our mission is to increase creativity, empathy, and collaboration, not to replace them. The Game Master Assistant should take the friction out of prep and improvisation. Think of it as a co-GM who handles whatever you don’t enjoy. Maybe that’s creating NPCs, quickly answering rules questions, or fleshing out a location.
Most importantly, a Game Master Assistant only does what you ask of it. So if creating NPCs brings you joy, then by all means, continue! We’re trying to cut down on the grind so you can focus on what you care about most in these games.
For a new GM, using the Game Master assistant can mean finally gaining confidence to run a first game. For veterans, it means more energy spent crafting arcs instead of all the searching, copy-pasting, and scheduling that can very easily fill a GM’s time.
Say you’re running a one-shot in two hours and haven’t had time to prepare. Instead of panicking, you can feed all your notes and thoughts into the Game Master Assistant to guide it into creating the night’s adventure for you. Or say you already prepped, but one of your players has food poisoning, or a player decided to bring a plus-one you definitely didn’t invite. The Game Master Assistant can rebalance your adventure for the new number of players. The creativity is yours, as well as much of the prep as you want. The rest is seamlessly delegated.
The assistant can generate visual assets like maps and avatars, and a major concern for many in our community is the ethical sourcing of data for AI art models. Could you tell us a bit about the models you use and the steps you take to ensure the assets generated are ethically produced and don’t infringe on the work of human artists?
We like to think of the Game Master Assistant as a little box of kobolds sitting by your side, sharpening pencils, sketching maps, and doodling portraits whenever you need them. For years, the standard GM advice has been “just grab something off Pinterest,” which is a bit like having goblins sneak into someone else’s studio and steal their paintings.
Our kobolds work differently. The Game Master Assistant generates images using Google’s Nano Banana model, which, in their words (Google’s, not the kobolds’), is designed to respect copyright and avoid copying existing IP or artists’ work.
In practice, this means that when we tried to trick it into generating Star Wars characters, it consistently gave something similar but not exactly what we were trying to trick it into. Even describing a wookie without ever using the word “wookie” never gave us Chewbacca, just you a generic tall, hairy biped.
That’s the point. These images aren’t meant to replace artists or licensed products; they’re meant to give you something that feels like it belongs to your table. It’s the IKEA effect: when you assemble something (or in this case, generate it), you care about it more. And if you do want the real handcrafted treasures, our marketplace offers publisher-approved content that drops right into your campaign.
So think of the Assistant as a handful of kobolds with crayons: useful, a little unruly, and entirely yours.
It sounds incredibly useful for moments of panic! Could you walk us through a practical example? Imagine a GM is in the middle of a session and the players suddenly decide to investigate a random shopkeeper the GM just invented. How, specifically, would the Game Master Assistant help flesh out that NPC and their shop on the fly without breaking the game’s flow?
Imagine you’re running a session and your players wander into a random shop you just invented. Instead of breaking immersion, you can quickly ask the Assistant to “generate a shop called Tomas & Co, include a scene, a map, and NPCs who work there.”
For example, we ran this inside Dungeon Crawl Classics’ Frozen in Time, and within two minutes, The Game Master Assistant answered, “Tomas & Co is ready for play: I added a cinematic scene, a playable shop map, and three NPC staff aligned to your campaign’s style.” It created a “Storefront” scene, a “Shop Floor” Battlemap, a Note, and three NPCs: the owner, an apprentice, and a door guard.
Easy peasy. Because it’s built directly into your Quest Portal campaign, the game keeps moving, and the players stay immersed.
You’re aiming to help everyone from total beginners to high-prep veterans. How do you balance the needs of those very different groups? For example, how do you ensure the tool is empowering for a new GM who is learning the craft, rather than becoming a crutch they can’t run a game without?
We’ve thought about this a lot, because everyone has different needs and humans are inherently unpredictable. That’s why we’ve designed the Game Master Assistant to be flexible and situational.
For beginners, the Game Master Assistant can act like training wheels. If asked, it offers step-by-step onboarding, pacing prompts, and starter campaigns that get you up and running in minutes. If you’re worried about “getting it wrong,” the Assistant can quietly suggest NPC reactions, flag rules, or even offer scene hooks to keep the table moving. The goal is to build confidence so that you can eventually run games without leaning on it.
For veterans, the Game Master Assistant shines when being used as a creative accelerator. You can use it to integrate homebrew content, quickly cross-reference campaign notes, or generate inspiration in areas you might not want to sink prep hours into. A veteran GM might not need help with pacing or rules reminders, but they might love having the Assistant draft ten variant cult names, summarize last session’s events, or rebalance an encounter on the fly.
And the most important part: the Assistant is completely optional. It never overrides your choices or feeds you content unless you ask for it. Think of it as a creative partner that adapts to you. Visible when you want support, invisible when you’re in your flow. That ensures it empowers rather than replaces, helping Game Masters at every level spend less time worrying about logistics and more time enjoying the story with their players.
You’ve already announced plans to support huge systems like Call of Cthulhu and Pathfinder 2e. Looking beyond just adding new game systems, what’s the next big dream or milestone for Quest Portal? What do you hope the future of AI-assisted roleplaying looks like five years from now?
In five or perhaps ten years, tabletop role-playing games will be bigger than the PC, Console, and Mobile gaming industries. Playing TTRPGs is the most fun you can have with friends and like-minded strangers. The challenge has always been accessibility. Too many people feel the barrier to entry is too high: too much prep, too many rules, too much pressure on the Game Master. That stops incredible stories from ever being told. Quest Portal exists to change that.
Our dream is simple: a world where anyone can run a great game. You don’t need months of prep or encyclopedic rules knowledge. You just need the desire to tell a story. With Quest Portal, you can call up your friends, prep in minutes, and launch into adventures you’ll remember for years. Five years from now, we see AI not as replacing creativity, but as the billions of Kobolds that have onboarded millions and millions of new tabletop role-players.
Thank you, Gunnar, Gummi and Heather!
