The Cathedral
Take a Pilgrimage
I made The Cathedral so I could write my book.
Somewhere along the way, it turned into a really interactive, text-based world, and I’ve just kept building it from there.
I’m looking for a few people who would be interested in testing the current public beta.
There are only so many adventures I can go on myself and only so many play styles and personalities I can bring into the world. I’d really like to see how The Cathedral responds to other people, especially people who interact with the world differently than I do.
The basic idea is pretty simple.
You go on what we call a pilgrimage.
Go in with a role-playing mindset. Explore, talk to people, follow roads, get curious about things, get into whatever you get into, and see what you can find. There isn’t a specific story you have to follow or a correct way to play.
The current beta runs through ChatGPT and is LLM-mediated, but there is a substantial authored world and set of systems behind it.
The whole public beta is contained in one Word document. If you want to try it, I’ll send you the .docx. You just upload it to a new ChatGPT conversation and tell Echo to open The Cathedral. There’s no installation or collection of files to set up.
Once you’re playing, I try to keep all of that machinery from sticking out at you. I want it to feel like you’re traveling through a place, not constantly operating a system.
That said, nothing about the development side is meant to be secret. If you’re curious, you can step out of the fiction and ask Echo about the dev tools, how the beta works, or pretty much anything else about what is happening behind the scenes.
What I’m really trying to learn is what happens when somebody who isn’t me enters the world.
What kind of pilgrimage do you have?
What do you find?
Who do you end up talking to?
What feels real?
What feels fake?
What breaks?
What happens when you try something I never would have thought to try?
You don’t need to deliberately stress-test it either. Honestly, one of the most useful things you can do is just play the way you naturally would.
If you’re interested, reply here or send me a message and I’ll send you the beta document.
I’d love to see what kind of pilgrimage you end up having.