Friends. Gamers. Fellow adventurers. We bid you fond greetings and a warm welcome to Echelon. As it stands, this site is merely the avatar of an idea. A promise of things to come. Over the next year, it will undergo a radical evolution to host a Virtual Tabletop (VTT) featuring a completely new, digitally augmented RPG.
The title in question is Anno Amagium: The RPG, an adaptation of the web serial of the same name. The game is currently in a playable state, and the consensus among our play-testers is that it is a lot of fun too. But we want to make sure things are as polished as possible before we share it with you. Right now, we are shooting for an open beta at the end of 2025. And with any luck, it will be the first of many games hosted on Echelon.
It is our dream to help homebrew game masters bring their systems to life by digitally adapting and publishing them for fully-online or digitally-augmented tabletop play. We believe there are thousands of unexplored worlds out there. Games that deserve broader audiences and widespread adoption. We are not looking to obsolesce tabletop play. We do not aspire to be "disruptive," or any other tired Silicon Valley buzzword. Rather, we seek to honor the excellent traditions that make tabletop games what they are. We want to support our Local Game Stores, game masters, and content creators of every stripe. It is our goal to enable gameplay that is too complex—too rich—to calculate, track, and play with pens and paper alone. We want to speed up table math and facilitate interactions that are only possible with digital augmentation.
It must be acknowledged: this is our first rodeo. It is the first rodeo of its kind. Things fall apart. Centers cannot hold. There will be hiccups, setbacks, and missteps. But the same can be said of every meaningful endeavor. After all, what is an adventure without a few pitfalls along the way? We are in this for the long haul, and we ask that you watch us as we adapt, learn, and grow. Because we know the payoff will be something truly special.
To introduce ourselves, we are continuing an annual event that we have refined over the course of 8 years: ConQuesting at DragonCon. The dedicated page does a fine job of explaining things, so rather than retreading it here, we will simply say that DragonCon is a reflection of what we hope Echelon will become: a radically inclusive, aggressively creative, and ultimately celebratory forum for escapism.
The Epic Quest Tome for this year has been finalized and prospective ConQuesters may peruse it at their leisure here. 2024's volume clocks in at a respectable 90 pages, just shy of 1000 total quests (or just over it if you count the 100 varieties of Mystery Quests). To that end, we are currently hard at work rolling, tying, and wax-sealing scrolls. (They are still a little tricky to open, but we did our best to make them easier to undo than last year's batch!.) So. Once more, with feeling: Hello friends. Hello world. We are Echelon, and we cannot wait for you to see what we've been working on.