A Few Decisions

Yesterday and last night (and early this morning) AJ made a decision or a few anyway.

1. The name of the series will be “Echoes”. Last night AJ sketched out a logo, and today it was made! AJ may not be an artist, but she knows the basics.

2. The premise of the world is there are infinite number of planes, dimensions layered on top of the world as you know it to be in the here and now. And these dimensions can cause echoes of their world in other dimensions. These are the things that in our world we can’t explain — the loch ness monster, bigfoot, ufo sightings, etc. Our world is as we know it, there is no magic, yet the Nexus does exists — at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean we’ve yet to uncover — the sunken city you call Atlantis. The Nexus is in every world, not always in the same location on the material plane, but always on the plane. The right people can traverse through the Nexus to other worlds as visitors. Usually not done but possible.

Straight on the other side of the Nexus is Arcadis. The legend says it is the sunken city known as Atlantis, but that’s just a legend passed down from generation to generation to explain it’s existence out side the realm of the planes. In Arcadis you can access all planes if you are a drifter paired with an anchor. Drifters can access any plane but they can’t get back without an anchor. Drifters are rare in the planes. They don’t just originate in Arcadis. Most souls are anchors — tethered to their home planes and never know that the other planes exist.

A drifter on the other hand sees the echoes of the other planes. They can see an aura around an entity and know which plane it came from.

These planes vary in degree of magic and tech levels and they are designated by a color. Purple which is high magic, high tech is the color of Arcadis denizens. Red is High Magic, No tech, Cyan is High tech, No Magic and Yellow is No magic, no tech and pretty much a wasteland. Each designation also has varying degrees of difference from the world as you know it. These are called Shifts. Shift 0 is the real world you live in. Arcadis also belongs on Shift 0. As you travel away from the Nexus in Arcadis the rings of the plans shift. Shift 1 has only a slight variation and the farther you go, the more changes and alien the world becomes. There are infinite shifts.

In Arcadis Echoes are monitored. Echoes can manifest in other Shifts and cause problems, there are dedicated teams of Drifters and Anchors whose job it is to return these entities back to their worlds and clean up any messes they made. Drifters and anchors always work together. Many times the entities are destroyed as there is no safe way to return a ravaging monster home.

The game AJ creates with the Cypher System will be about drifters and anchors.

3. Arcadis has a map!

4. The last bit of decision making is the Agency name that patrols the Echoes in the realms in Arcadis is called Dimensional Echo Hunters Incorporated (DEHI). But it goes by other names. The other name it will go by in this story is Rift Hunters International (RHI), which is where Ant and Ryan work in Shift #45. And they have a base logo which is centered around Arcadis and the Nexus and showcases how the planes look in Arcadis.

AJ’s gonna work on Alex first and then probably Ant and Ryan’s stories before tackling mine. Not that I don’t already have part of my back story already created. We might share that tomorrow. We’ll see.