~*Premise*~

What if...

What if the only life you had ever known, wasn't the only life you had ever had?
What if really you were just a figment of someone's imagination?
What if everything you are wasn't real?

Welcome to Eidolon City - where nothing is really what it seems, where events seem to happen around you and a face in the crowd is never just a face in the crowd. Where the world is just that little bit too real. A world of extremes - the wealth, the poverty, the corruption. Where mob families have their fingers in every pie and innocence is a rarity.

Eidolon City is a noir world, set in the early twentieth century - or so it seems. To those observing, nothing is quite right, yet its citizens notice no difference. For them, this is the only world they have ever known - in all it's dark and seedy glory. A world where two major mob families hold sway, where crooked cops lurk on every corner and private investigators run their own show. Where nightclub singers use their talent to claw their way out of the gutters of homelessness and the underbelly of society live by their own rules.

Eidolon City, where life is hard, harsh and dramatic. Where some people even seem to be living manifestations of old tales and myths.

And that is because they are.

That is because nothing in Eidolon City is what it seems.

That is because the whole place, the entire world it is in, is an illusion.

Now...

What if...

What if the world was threatened?
What if you could see the end?
What if the only way you could find to save it was something terrible?
What would you do?

Would you sacrifice thousands of people to save millions? Would you take away their waking lives, send them into a perpetual sleep, because it was the only way?

This is what happened here, in the near future. This is what created Eidolon City.

What is Eidolon City

Have we got your attention yet? If you're still reading, we must have.

Eidolon City is a creation of the human mind. It is a shared illusion, but an illusion which is so real that those experiencing it do not know that it isn't real. As far as the citizens of Eidolon City are concerned, it is reality.

Eidolon City is a city from a time past - from the early days of the twentieth century. It is a city of forgotten glory, where the buildings and the streets suggest a time of prosperity which has passed. It is a city which has been plunged into the grips of a depression, where there is a wide gaps between rich and poor. It is a place of extremes.

What formed Eidolon City?

Eidolon City was formed by people in the real world, our world. Only one of these people was aware that Eidolon City would be created. This person is known as The Betrayer, though nobody in Eidolon City has ever heard that name.

It was the Betrayer who took the decision to sacrifice people to create Eidolon City and it was the Betrayer who brought about that sacrifice. Everyone else was an unwilling participant who didn't even know what was happening.

But why did the Betrayer do this? What was the motivation? The motivation was created by the Prophet. You see, sometime in the not too distant future, in the real world, there arose the Prophet, a woman of great strength and vision who preached a message of peace for the world. And, amazingly, her message began to come true. She brought peace to areas of the world where most had almost given up hope of anything but an endless war, she brought harmony to those who before had only known discord and it seemed that, maybe, finally, world peace could be a reality.

There were those who hailed her as a god, and she had plenty of followers all across the globe. One such follower, one of her closest, was the one who would become known as the Betrayer. It was the Betrayer who saw the danger - saw that the world needed balance and that the Prophet was destroying that balance. Peace may be what every same people hoped and prayed for, but actually achieving that would bring about the end of the world.

But the world did not want to heed the warning and the Betrayer found few followers. Far too few to stop the progress towards peace.

The Betrayer found a way to harness a dormant psychic ability which existed in a small percentage of earth's population. It is this dormant ability which meant that the abilities of these people could be harnessed to form a shared illusion - the illusion which is Eidolon City.

Until that connection, these people lived and worked in the world just as you and I do. They had homes and families, hopes and dreams, just like you and me. They knew nothing of the Betrayer's plans - very few, if any, of them would even have heard of the Betrayer.

However, when the Betrayer activated the connection, the result in the real world was that each and every person around the globe who had a psychic ability they didn't even know they had fell into a coma, a persistent vegetative state. But they all remain in a coma, scattered around the world, not in numbers enough to raise an outcry. There was no fuss about it, the world hardly noticed. These people were spread all over, and what was a few thousand people in the grand scheme of things? Anyway, nobody wanted to hear bad news anymore. The coma victims were left, most in hospitals across the globe, some being cared for as best possible by their local communities, or their families. The world went on.

But what of the people? The Betrayer's solution? The balance? What was the Betrayer's plan?

The Betrayer's plan was to use these people, to use their latent abilities to lock them away in a group dream, a city, a place so real that they would 'live' there for the rest of their lives, never knowing that they were only dreaming, never remembering the lives they knew before. And into this dream would be poured all the things that were being stripped from the real world - the pain, the suffering, the evil and corruption. It would all be found here, in one way or another: in Eidolon City.

Who lives in Eidolon City?

For the game, the population is made up of three character types. All characters are human, they all look the same, they are all simply citizens of Eidolon City, but their origins are different.

The citizens of Eidolon City fall into three categories - Wakings, Aspects and Others (Citizens), though these names are used simply for ease of reference, characters do not refer to themselves or each other by these names in game!

The simplest and most common type found in the city is merely a citizen. Citizens make up the majority of the population and they are, quite simply, NPCs. They are every person in the city who isn't a Player Character. They are the background people - and they are a creation of the mass dream as much as the city itself is. Every city needs a population, so Eidolon City has a population. They are all just people on the street - there because they are needed to be, but of no real overwhelming significance.

The 'significant' people in Eidolon City are broken down into two groups with very different origins. These two groups can be referred to as 'Wakings' and 'Aspects' -

Wakings are the people who created Eidolon City - they are the people who, in the real world, are in comas. They do not know that Eidolon City is not real, or that they once had another life.

Aspects are living representations of old ideas - people whose personality and being is formed around fairytale characters, ancient gods, emotions or other abstract concepts. They are a creation of Eidolon City, but they are player characters. They have no existence in the real world.

Where/When does the game take place?

The majority of this game takes place in Eidolon City itself. That is the life your character knows and the one which he/she lives day to day. Who they are in Eidolon City and their interactions there are what drives this game.

Alongside that, if you play a Waking character, there is the chance to play out glimpses of the real world through 'dreams' which your character may have. The direction the real world takes has influence on the direction of the game being played in Eidolon City, therefore your characters interactions in game can have an effect on the plot in a number of ways.

The game is set in a time period encompassing the 1930s/1940s.

What kind of a place is Eidolon City?

Eidolon City is a creation of the massed subconscious of the coma-victims, those people who would become referred to by the Betrayer as the Wakings. The city is not a modern day city, but rather a city which appears to be from the late 1930s-1940s, though the exact time period is vague. It is very much like a city from an vintage movie.

Eidolon City is a large city, with a population which is likely well over several million, though there are no exact figures available. It is mostly dense urban sprawl, with high rise stone or brick built buildings being the main order of the day. Nobody appears to live in suburbs in Eidolon City, though everybody agrees that they exist. One side of the City runs down to a coastline and is fronted by docks. There are no beaches in Eidolon City: the entire of the coastline is filled with a large port where goods are imported and exported.

The overall feel of Eidolon City is that it has seen better days. The buildings are dirty, and many of them are run down, some abandoned and decrepit. It doesn't help that the sun rarely seems to shine over the city, meaning that even during the day the shadows cast by the looming buildings into the city streets are darker than they would otherwise have been. And at night, the streetlighting is often inadequate. Eidolon City is filled with a maze of narrow alleyways between streets, backways to places, and both alley and street are strewn with litter.

Green spaces are few and far between here. There is a large, sprawling park at one side of the city, but even this is encroached by the city's criminal element at night - nothing here is pure or innocent.

Eidolon City is very much under the sway of the mob. Corruption rules and one or both mob families have infiltrated and subverted almost every part of official city life. There are still good, honest people around, but everybody knows that you're more likely to encounter a cop or a politician with mob ties than someone who's determined to walk the straight and narrow - course that could be because those people who do try and walk the straight and narrow are likely to end up face down in the river, or disappearing without a trace. Sticking to your morals is known as 'suicidal tendencies' in the city.

That said, as long as you don't get in their way, mostly the city runs just fine with the mob influence. Most citizens accept it all as an ordinary fact of live, just one of those things. Nobody can remember a time when it was any other way.