Welcome to The Dreamlands

For Judd Shaw, a medically retired Army Ranger, a quiet life managing his schizophrenia is all he wants. His only anchor is Boris, his fiercely loyal Bull Terrier. When he and his friends get an exclusive invite to beta test a revolutionary new AI-driven virtual tabletop game, it seems like the perfect, safe way to spend a night in.

But the moment they click "play," they aren't just logging in. They're physically abducted.

Now trapped in a brutal fantasy world where death is permanent, Judd must fight for his life while his own mind becomes the most dangerous enemy. But he's not alone. Boris was pulled in too and has been transformed into the party's holy warrior tank. Together, they must survive a game designed to break them and uncover the sanity-bending truth behind their capture.

What if the next big Virtual Tabletop RPG wasn't virtual?

Welcome to The Dreamlands is a LitRPG Thriller where a hardcore, full-immersion game slowly unravels into a sanity-draining nightmare. The System is a lie, its tooltips glitch with impossible, cryptic warnings, and every level up comes at a cost. It's a dungeon crawl where the ultimate boss isn't a dragon. It's your own crumbling sanity.

A.C. Echo is one half of a writing duo with R.C. Croft, specializing in LitRPG, psychological thrillers, and cosmic horror. A former Army Parachute Rigger, he is also the co-founder of the indie audio network Creative Typo Entertainment.Years spent as a Game Master and creating actual play podcasts heavily shape his world-building. He has served as a creative lead, writer, and voice actor for multiple audio projects, and his debut series, Welcome to The Dreamlands, expands on the classic Lovecraftian mythos within a shared universe first introduced in his podcast Microphones & Monsters.A lifelong MMO gamer, he naturally blends complex game mechanics and deep lore into his storytelling. He lives in the Carolinas with his wife and a small army of three dogs, three cats, and a horse.