Harry Potter Role Playing Game: Four Ways to Play
If you want a Harry Potter role playing game, you have four real choices today. You can play Hogwarts Legacy, the open-world action RPG on consoles and PC. You can play Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, the official mobile game where you live through school years as your own student. You can run a tabletop game with friends, using a system you already know. Or you can play inside the books themselves, as your own character, with a narrator that has read the novels and answers whatever you type. Each one gives you a different kind of freedom, and the right pick depends on whether you want to explore, collect, tell a story together, or simply keep living in the story you just finished reading.
This guide walks through all four, says honestly what each is best at, and ends with how to try the last one tonight without paying anything.
What people mean by a Harry Potter role playing game
“Role playing” covers three quite different wishes, and it helps to know which one is yours before you pick.
- You want to be a student at Hogwarts. Get sorted, learn spells, make friends, explore the castle. This is the video game wish.
- You want to tell a story with other people. Your friends play witches and wizards, somebody runs the world, and the plot goes wherever the table takes it. This is the tabletop wish.
- You want to step into the books you love. Walk the corridors the novels describe, meet the characters as they are written, and make choices the author never offered. This is the reader’s wish, and it is the one the video games answer least directly, because they set their stories apart from the books’ own plot.
Most people have a bit of all three. The table below shows where each option lands.
The four options side by side
| Hogwarts Legacy | Hogwarts Mystery | Tabletop with friends | Play inside the book | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where you play | PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Switch | Phone or tablet | Around a table or a video call | Web browser |
| Who you are | Your own student in the 1800s | Your own student | Whoever you invent | Your own character, in the book’s world |
| How you act | Controller, combat and exploration | Tapping through set scenes | Talking, dice, whatever your rules say | Typing anything you want to do |
| Story | Written by the studio | Written by the studio | Made up by your group | Grows from your choices, grounded in the novel |
| Needs other people | No | No | Yes, and one of them runs it | No |
| Best for | Exploring the castle and grounds | Short sessions and collecting | Friends who love improvising | Readers who want the book’s own world |
The claims about the two official games below were read from their official sites in September 2026.
Hogwarts Legacy: the big open world
Hogwarts Legacy is the one most people think of first. Its official site describes it as:
“an immersive, open-world action RPG set in the world first introduced in the Harry Potter books.”
You play a student in the 1800s, long before Harry’s time, who “holds the key to an ancient secret”. As of September 2026 the site lists it on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch, including Switch 2. You can roam Hogwarts, Hogsmeade and the Forbidden Forest, learn spells, brew potions and tend magical beasts, and you fight trolls, Dark Wizards and goblins along the way.
Pick it if you want to see the castle rendered in full and spend dozens of hours exploring it. Nothing else on this list gives you that.
It is weaker for the reader’s wish. The story is set in a different century with its own cast, so the characters from the books are not the people you meet, and your choices happen inside a plot the studio wrote. It is a video game with combat and a controller, which suits many players and not every reader.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery on your phone
Hogwarts Mystery is the official mobile game from Jam City. Its site calls it “the first game in which players can create their own character and experience life as a Hogwarts student.” As of September 2026 the site also promotes an expansion that lets you “Graduate, become an adult, begin a career and explore the wizarding world”.
Pick it if you want a few minutes of Hogwarts on the bus, a long-running story you return to over months, and a character you build up slowly.
It is weaker for freedom. Scenes play out as written, and your choices are the ones the game offers. If you have ever wanted to answer a professor with something the options did not include, this is where you will feel it.
A tabletop game with your friends
There is a lot of joy in running the wizarding world as a tabletop game. One person plays the game master, describing the world and voicing everyone the players meet. The others play students, teachers or members of a secret order. You can use any tabletop system your group already knows, or a light one where a single roll decides whether a spell works.
Pick it if you have friends who like to improvise and one person who enjoys running the show. Nothing beats a table of people laughing at the same bad Transfiguration roll.
It is weaker for anyone without a regular group, and it asks a lot of the game master, who has to keep the world’s details straight from memory while thinking on their feet. If you want some ideas for games built around a shared book, our list of games for book club has several that work with no preparation at all.
Playing inside the books themselves
The fourth way is the newest. You give a narrator the novel itself, and it reads the book before you start: the places, the people, how they speak, what they know and what they are hiding. You are shown what the reading costs before anything is spent. Then you create your own character, drop into that world, and type what you do. There are no menus of choices. You can follow the plot, stand beside it, or walk somewhere the book never went, and the narrator keeps the world consistent with what the author wrote.
This is what LLM RPG does. You upload a copy of a book you own, as a
.txt or .epub file, and it builds an atlas of that book’s world before your
first scene. Because it works from the text rather than from a preset, it works
for the Harry Potter novels and equally for any other book on your shelf.
Pick it if the thing you miss after the last page is the world itself, and you would rather be a new student in the books’ own Hogwarts than in a different century or on a fixed path.
It is weaker for players who want graphics. It is a written story, read and typed, like a very attentive game master who never gets tired. It also needs the book file, so you use your own copy.
If you are curious how this compares with other AI storytellers, our guide to AI roleplaying covers the wider field, and fan fiction AI compares writing a story in a world with stepping inside it.
What it costs to try each one
| Option | How to start | What you pay |
|---|---|---|
| Hogwarts Legacy | Buy the game for your platform | The price of a console or PC game |
| Hogwarts Mystery | Download it on your phone | Whatever your app store lists today |
| Tabletop with friends | Pick a system and a free evening | Nothing beyond the rules you already own |
| LLM RPG | Open the site in a browser | Free to try, see below |
With LLM RPG you can play a ready-made world for five turns with no account at all. Signing up adds 50 free credits. A standard turn costs one credit, and reading a book costs one credit per 50,000 characters, so a long novel costs more to read than a short one. After that, Pro is $9 a month for 1,000 credits, or you can buy a one-time pack of 400 credits for $5. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
How to start a Harry Potter role playing game tonight
If playing inside the books sounds like your kind of game, here is the whole path from start to first scene.
- Try it with no account first. Open a ready-made world and play five turns. This tells you in a few minutes whether typing your own actions suits you.
- Sign up with your email if it does. You get a one-time code, no password, and 50 free credits.
- Upload the book. Choose the novel you want to live in, as a
.txtor.epubfile from your own copy. The narrator reads it and builds the world before you play. - Make your character. A new first-year, a Hufflepuff prefect, a visiting student from abroad. You are a new person in the book’s world, so you can be anyone.
- Type what you do. “I sneak out after curfew to find the kitchens.” “I ask the ghost what it remembers.” The narrator answers in the book’s own voice and keeps track of what you have done.
When one of the official games is the better choice
Be honest with yourself about what you want. If you want to fly a broom over the Forbidden Forest and see it on screen, play Hogwarts Legacy. If you want a small daily ritual on your phone, Hogwarts Mystery is made for exactly that. If you have a group of friends who love to improvise, a tabletop evening will give you stories nobody else has.
A written game fits a different moment: you have just finished the last book, you are not ready to leave, and you want to stay in that world as yourself. That is the moment it was built for.