I had a fairly awesome and strange dream last night, and it woke me up right into the beginning of a long train of ideas for a new campaign setting, if not an entire new game. Right now it has the working title of "echoes" due to the first word that entered my waking mind after the dream. Due to the nature of the inspiration, I imagine this post will probably ramble on, and read a bit like a dream journal.

While most of the ideas so far are fairly shifting, and some may be dropped completely, one staple of the concept is the relationship between alternate realities. I remember reading some theories somewhere (if anyone knows them, please point me in the right directions) about every action having millions of different outcomes, each one starting a new sub-reality of its own, or something along those lines. Kinda similar to the butterfly-in-China effect.

The original idea I had for this was that people played characters who had the ability to create weak copies of themselves (called "echoes"), by sacrificing multiple senses. They could send these copies forth to do things, and whole sessions could be based around the players playing these copies. The idea that followed was to have the characters actually all be copies of someone else, and each one sacrificing one or more senses. That morphed into my current focus on the idea: all of the players play the same person, but from alternate realities spawned by decisions made during the person's life.

Character creation would involve the players working together to create a person and that person's multiple Echoes (the characters). They develop this person from birth forward, and define choices made during that person's life wherein they would have diverged. The character creation session alone could take a long time, depending on how much detail is put into the different versions of this person. Perhaps there would be a "Real Person" or perhaps there wouldn't, or perhaps it would be randomly determined. I think that would be more of an optional element to the game.

But this could lead to drastically different characters, yet they all have something in common, and some bond keeping them together. They could even be different genders, and it would only make their dynamics even more interesting.

Another element that factored heavily into the day's earliest post-dream thoughts was the idea of the One Big Secret. The concept is that every player would have to come up with a world-shattering Big Secret. Examples: Soylent Green Is People, Aliens Have Infected Our Leaders, We're All Really Dead And This Is The Afterlife, This Is All One Big TV Show (For Who?), The City Is Completely Rebuilt By Weird Wizards Every Night, and so on. These could be used in a variety of ways:

* Each player submits one, and then that one is randomly picked as the game theme.
* The GM keeps records of all the secrets, and as the game proceeds the characters' actions make one of them happen.

Another idea with the Big Secret would be to have it somehow pertain to the reason behind why reality is being so crazy (more on that in a bit). I'm still mulling over the idea of Big Secrets, though. It might be better served in a completely different system, so I'll focus on it later.

Anyway, another idea that would fit well with the Echoes is a Deja-Vu mechanic. With a focus on alternate realities, Deja Vu would play heavily in the flow of the game, and moments of Deja Vu would occur frequently, in which the natures of the current reality would shift in random ways. Perhaps conflict failure would result in that happening, and the degree of failure would determine the degree of change for the worse. Or continuing that thought, the entire conflict mechanic could involve changes to reality for the better or worse.

9I see the focus of the game as being similar to that of Unknown Armies: shit is crazy, let's find out why. Alternate realities are all merging, seemingly at random, and something brought all this person's multiple lives together. And... go!

I'll add more as it comes to me.