Welcome to The Keep: Beta Launch

Welcome and huzzah to the initial beta opening of The Keep! The team at The Keep has been heads down on this project for the better part of the year and we couldn't be more excited for you to come on in and check out the place! I'm sure you have some questions before you enter, so let's get to it!

What is The Keep and why should I make an account?

The Keep is a platform for tabletop gamers to schedule and manage their gaming life. While this will eventually extend to all the games you play at conventions and game stores, (see our About story) it starts with the games you play with your friends at your home table. The first iteration of The Keep is focused on helping you schedule home games, find gaming conventions and connect with other gamers.

Creating a free account allows you to schedule games with your friends, building and maintaining a Quest Log of your HomeTable™ games. The scheduling function is customized for the needs of tabletop gamers and allows you to specify game system, campaign, and game master as well as where and when a game session will occur. It also allows game notes, tracks RSVPs and exports confirmed games to your personal calendar.

Creating a free account allows you to find and select public game conventions from our event directory and add these events to your personal Quest Log. This allows you to share where you're going to be with friends and gamers outside of your HomeTable if you choose, building community and connection through gaming.

Creating a free account allows you to connect with other denizens of The Keep and build on the experiences you've had at the gaming table. Connect with and follow other gamers and game masters to maintain relationships between conventions.

What is the benefit of using yet another tool for game scheduling?

The Keep is a way to centralize all your gaming activity and keep track of past and future game sessions. If your gaming party is anything like ours, you use a combination of text, email, Dischord, IRL conversations, phone calls and smoke signals to get your game night together. That can leave you with questions on what you're playing when and who's going to show up. By planning games through The Keep, you can always see what games you have upcoming and who else is going to be there. Once the game is in the books, this info is saved and moved into an ongoing Quest Log of all the games you've played. Useful and neat!

Why should I trust you with my personal information? Insight check!

At The Keep, our goal is only to ask you for information about yourself as needed to provide services to you. For example, our registration will ask you for your name, email, phone number, birthday and display name. This information is required because The Keep is currently open only to denizens ages 13 and up who reside in the United States. We've limited our scope this way so that not only can we comply with all applicable laws, but more importantly, we can provide a safe and secure environment for our users. We do not sell or distribute any data that you provide to The Keep. You should check out both our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statement for more details and refer to our blog in the future for information as we share details about our commitment to making a safe and secure place for gamers on the internet.

Do I need to provide payment during registration? Follow up, how can you provide all this for free?

At this time, you do not need to provide any payment information to The Keep to use our free services. The Keep is in beta (repeat – Beta!) and as such will be an imperfect and fluid environment. By joining now, we hope you provide us feedback on how to improve our services going forward. But you're right, we can't provide all these services for free indefinitely. Because we work on this full time, with heavy hitting engineers and secure, costly computing resources, we will have to charge for our services soon. We aim to always have basic functionality available for free to our denizens, but we also aim to provide additional services that will provide enough value to you that you feel moved to commit a few bucks every year to build and maintain The Keep.

Feel free to get in touch with me through our contact form!