How it works

1. You ask

Hold the button and ask. Apple's speech recognition, running on the phone, writes down what you say.

Fantasy words trip it up ("owlbear" comes out as "Albert", "githyanki" as "get the Yankee"), so the goblin checks what it heard against the names of spells, monsters and conditions and fixes the ones that sound alike.

2. The goblin searches the rules

The rules are inside the app: the System Reference Document 5.2.1, the free version of the fifth-edition (2024) rules.

People describe what's happening ("the orc grabbed me") more often than they name the rule (Grappled). So the goblin searches two ways at once: by the words you used, and by meaning, with a small language model that knows "grabbed" is close to "grappled". Then it picks the few rules that matter.

3. The goblin reads and answers

An AI model on your phone reads only those rules and writes a short answer from them. The goblin's own model is Google's open Gemma model. Until it has downloaded, the goblin uses Apple's built-in model instead.

4. It tells you, and shows you

The answer is spoken out loud and shown on screen, with cards for the rules it used. If something sounds off, read the card. Ask a follow-up straight after and the goblin remembers what you were talking about.

How good is it?

We test every change against more than a thousand questions: ones asked at our own table, ones players ask online, and ones written to sound like a new player. It gets most of them right. Questions that mix two or three rules at once are the hardest.

When it's wrong, it's usually because it found the wrong rule, so the cards make mistakes easy to spot. Found one? Tell us.

What you need

• An iPhone 15 Pro or newer, with the latest iOS.
• About 4 GB free for the goblin's model. It downloads once, from Apple's App Store servers, the first time you open the app. Use Wi-Fi.
• Until then, answers come from Apple's built-in model, which needs Apple Intelligence turned on.