Welcome to EchoQuest: The AI RPG Built for Everyone

Lots of people love the idea of a tabletop RPG and never actually get to play one. Sometimes the group falls apart after three sessions, or nobody has the energy to prep. Other times the tools are the problem: virtual tabletops built around maps and tiny token icons that a screen reader can barely make sense of. If any of that sounds familiar, I built EchoQuest for you.

The idea I started from was simple, if a little cheeky. What if a Dungeon Master lived in your pocket, never got tired and never cancelled on a Friday night? And what if that same GM felt just as much at home narrating to a sighted player on a laptop as to a blind player on a phone with a screen reader? That second question became the rule everything else had to obey. Accessibility came first. It was never going to be a patch I bolted on after launch, and honestly, it bent every other decision in a direction I didn't expect. As a result, EchoQuest looks and sounds quite unlike most AI games out there.

What Is EchoQuest?

EchoQuest is an audio-first RPG, and its Game Master runs on Claude, the large language model made by Anthropic. You don't squint at walls of text, because every scene gets read aloud in a clear, expressive voice. You don't roll physical dice or cross-check rulebook tables either. A live AI Game Master answers exactly what you say, in plain language, and you never have to memorise special commands.

That last bit matters more than it sounds. Back in 1980, Infocom's Zork impressed people because its parser could handle complete sentences and complex commands, which was a real leap at the time. Still, you had to phrase things the way the game expected. Forty-odd years later, you can just talk.

There are three ways to tell the GM what you do:

• Type your actions with a keyboard
• Speak them aloud with built-in voice input
• Pick a suggested choice (tap it, or press its number key) when you'd rather choose a path than write one

And the story bends around you. There's no "wrong" answer, and you won't slam into the dead ends of a branching tree. Say "I want to climb the bell tower and look across the city," and the GM works out what you're after, then folds it into the story, even if whoever designed the campaign never gave that bell tower a second thought.

Voice input taught me a lesson or two, by the way. Speech recognition mishears people, so EchoQuest shows you the transcript to confirm before anything reaches the GM. Then I discovered the microphone was actually blocked on my own pages, so voice input quietly did nothing at all. That one stung. It's fixed now.

Built for Blind and Sighted Adventurers

Most games treat accessibility as an afterthought, a checkbox somebody ticks after launch. You've probably watched the pattern play out. A studio ships something gorgeous and very visual, disabled players report that they can't play it, and months later a "high contrast mode" or a narrator toggle appears without fixing what's broken underneath. I went the other way round. The audio layer came first and the visuals sat on top of it, and that order changes everything downstream.

The audience is far bigger than people tend to assume, too. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment. That's hardly a niche.

Here's what I committed to:

• Every menu, button and piece of game text is readable by screen readers. EchoQuest is built for NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack, and an automated accessibility suite (Playwright plus axe) runs against the web app in CI. Those aren't random picks, either: in WebAIM's latest screen reader survey, JAWS and NVDA were the main desktop screen readers for 40.5% and 37.7% of respondents, and VoiceOver led on mobile
• Full keyboard navigation. Anything a mouse user can do, you can do from the keyboard alone, with a logical tab order and visible focus rings. Single keys cover the everyday stuff: L tells you where you are, S reads your status, I lists your inventory and U undoes your last turn
• Voice commands, so you can play completely hands-free. That helps blind players, and it helps players with motor disabilities just as much
• Narration speed and pitch controls, so the voice fits how you listen. Plenty of screen reader users run speech much faster than most people would find comfortable, and the [ and ] keys let you nudge the speed mid-scene
• Reduced-motion mode for anyone who finds animation unpleasant
• High-contrast and large-text modes for low-vision players, plus a light theme if dark screens wear your eyes out

Some of my hardest lessons here were about timing rather than coverage. Early on, I noticed EchoQuest was announcing and focusing the choices while the narrator was still talking, so screen reader users got two voices at once. Technically everything was "accessible". In practice it was a racket. Now the choices wait their turn. Around the same time, I made HP and inventory changes announce themselves, because losing six hit points in silence is no fun when you can't glance at a health bar.

So if you're blind or have low vision, or you simply like to close your eyes and listen, EchoQuest should fit the way you play. I designed it with a few people in mind. One has never managed to enjoy a story-heavy RPG on their own. Another has always depended on a family member reading the screen to them. And then there's the sighted player who listens to it like an audiobook while folding laundry. To me, every one of them is a real player, and each one shaped the design.

A Living, Breathing AI Game Master

The heart of EchoQuest is the AI Game Master, and Claude does the thinking behind it. Older text adventures handed you a branching menu. The EchoQuest GM works differently. It:

• Responds to anything you say, not just preset choices
• Remembers what happened earlier in your session, so callbacks and consequences feel earned
• Gives NPCs their own personalities, and on the Storyteller plan their own voices too, so the shopkeeper doesn't sound like the city guard
• Tracks your character's HP, inventory, quests, relationships and story flags behind the scenes, turn by turn
• Plays ambient sound that suits the scene, like a storm rolling in, a forge's roar, the hush underwater or a city humming at night
• Paces itself to the moment, so a fight lands quick and hard and exploration gets room to breathe

None of this comes out of a lookup table. Claude reasons about your situation as it unfolds, much the way a sharp human GM would. In fact, I rewrote the GM's instructions so it talks like a seasoned person behind the screen: it opens a scene on one concrete detail and ends on a direct question to you. Skill checks now resolve in the same turn as well, so you're not left hanging for a whole exchange to learn whether you made the jump.

The gap between an EchoQuest session and a 1980s text adventure feels like the gap between a real conversation and an automated phone menu. Have you ever yelled "operator!" at one of those? Then you know exactly what I mean.

Three Official Worlds, Endless Possibilities

EchoQuest's prebuilt campaigns exist to show what the platform can do, so here are three of them. The Iron Citadel is a steampunk thriller set in a city-sized iron fortress perched over a volcanic fissure. The Engines that keep the lower tiers breathing will go dark by dawn. Who you trust tonight decides what the Citadel turns into. Neon Precinct is cyberpunk noir in the rain-slick megacity of Karthos-12, where you play a freshly decommissioned synthetic detective who just took a job you really shouldn't have. Saltbound drops you into age-of-sail piracy in the Stradovine Archipelago. Your crew of forty-eight has just elected you captain of the brigantine Mercy, and of course the navigator has vanished right as a Crown frigate shows up three islands east.

Those three are only a taste, though. The library holds nine prebuilt worlds in all, stretching from gothic horror and nature fantasy to a buried desert empire, a generation ship in deep space and a cosmic-horror investigation, and three of them are free to play. On top of that, members on the Creator plan can publish their own worlds to the library, so the shelves can grow in directions I'd never think of myself. A gritty western mystery? A cosy slice-of-life isekai? If someone writes it, it can go up there.

Free to Start

EchoQuest is free to play, and you don't pay a cent to get going. Here's what the free tier includes:

• Three prebuilt campaigns
• 60 free AI turns per day (one turn uses one minute of credit), and you can buy extra AI minutes whenever you like
• Browser text-to-speech narration using your device's built-in voices
• Full keyboard access, screen reader support and voice commands

I'll be upfront that the free tier shows ads between sessions. Browser voices also have their quirks. Chrome's built-in voice once had a race condition and would cut off after roughly 15 seconds, so I had to engineer around it. Later it started stopping a few seconds into a scene, and I chased that one down too.

If you'd like unlimited play, there are two paid plans. Storyteller costs $15 a month or $129 a year. You get unlimited turns with no ads. On top of that, premium ElevenLabs narration gives each NPC a distinct voice, and you get one private world that you can build with the World Builder Wizard or by uploading a Game Bible. Those premium voices had their own gremlins, incidentally: they used to pitch up like chipmunks whenever you sped up playback, so I made sure the pitch holds steady now. Creator costs $29 a month or $239 a year and adds publishing worlds to the library, along with creator analytics. The monthly plans carry no annual commitment, and you can manage or cancel your subscription from your account page.

How EchoQuest Compares to Other AI RPGs

You may have tried other AI storytelling apps already. In my view, most of them land in one of two camps. Some are pure chatbots in an RPG costume, with no real game state, just open-ended conversation. Others are visual novel engines with a sprinkle of AI text, and they tend to skip audio and accessibility entirely, with very little GM behaviour to speak of. EchoQuest belongs in a different category.

It keeps real game state (HP, inventory, quests, NPC relationships, story flags, location and time of day) and updates it as you play. A dedicated GM prompt keeps the narration consistent and properly paced. Skill checks roll against a real difficulty with your stat modifier added, so combat runs on rules rather than vibes, and dropping to 0 HP brings a genuine setback. Story arcs climb toward satisfying climaxes instead of meandering forever. And every single layer works without sight.

Real state brings real responsibility, however. Early on, a turn that errored halfway could leave half-applied changes behind (say, gold gone from your purse but no sword in your pack). So I added a full rollback, which means a turn either lands completely or not at all. There's single-step undo now, plus auto-save every five turns and a manual Save button. And your character's progress lives on the server, so you can pick up where you left off on another device.

What's Coming

EchoQuest is under active development, and I keep a list. Please read these as plans, not promises. Multiplayer sits near the top, so you and your friends can adventure together in real time with shared narration and a proper turn order. I'd also like premium voices that keep each recurring NPC sounding like the same person in every scene. Deeper support for adaptive hardware is on there too, starting with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which Microsoft designed with extensive input from gamers with disabilities and which plugs into external buttons and switches. Then there's a creator marketplace where world designers could earn money when players try their campaigns, and native iOS and Android apps with offline downloads of your favourite sessions.

Your feedback shapes that list. If something doesn't work for you, tell me. Frankly, an accessibility bug report is about the most useful message I can get.

A Word to Sighted Players

If you're sighted and reading this while wondering "is this even for me?", the answer is yes. The same choices that make EchoQuest work for blind players make it brilliant for everyone else. You can listen on your commute, or play while you cook dinner. After a long day staring at a monitor, you can rest your eyes and still get the whole story. My bet is that plenty of sighted players who try it "just to see" will leave the audio on for good.

Audio-first isn't a downgrade. It's a different way to take in a story, and I'd say a more immersive one, because your own imagination handles the set design.

Ready to Begin?

Your first adventure is one click away. Pick a world and sketch a quick backstory for your character. The AI Game Master handles the rest. Give it five minutes and you'll be deep inside a story that reacts to you in real time.

So, which world are you going to start with?

Browse the Adventure Library →

Welcome to EchoQuest. I'm really glad you're here.

Related reading: Browse all EchoQuest blog posts.