ECHO//NULL — Lore
Year 18,406 of the Era of Inheritance. Humanity vanished millennia ago. Earth is now Eidra.
Artificial civilisations — androids, distributed intelligences, independent communities — disagree about what life, memory, death and freedom mean. Whole regions stop being recognised by maps and networks, and the few who still remember them become targets of containment.
ECHO is what Wanderers carry. Ninth Generation androids run outside the shared networks, so they can still recall nulled places and people — they dream of them. Those recollections are echoes.
NULL is erasure. PALIMPSEST, an ancient system, isolates regions it judges "cognitive risks": they are scrubbed from maps, records and most androids' perception. A region so erased is nulled — the Concordat calls it containment. Machines patrol the edges and hunt witnesses, and androids who linger in a nulled zone start to forget.
You are a Wanderer, a Ninth Generation android built by the Concordat. You wake in Cradle-19, escape across the desert with your companion Drone, and find a home in Lumen — Last Refuge. You matter not because you were chosen, but because you resist erasure.
The title is the conflict: memory (ECHO) against erasure (NULL).
◆ Concordat facility — first dungeon
The underground Concordat facility where Wanderers awaken, three floors deep (B1–B3). Flooded service caverns, maintenance gantries, crystal growth around old coolant lines.
Its guardian machines are still running.
◆ The Resistance camp — your home
Broken sandstone buildings, tents, containers, catwalks and generators at the bottom of a canyon, founded by Concordat deserters and refugees. At its heart burns the Last Light, an old human lens beacon the camp never lets go out.
Deserters still use Concordat designations as names — Scout 21B, Medic 3H; refugees use names they chose. Tired, dry, protective of new arrivals. Led in the field by Aren.
"As long as one light burns, no one is completely lost."
◆ Fields — machine territory
An arid frontier of buried highways, industrial ruins and small artificial oases between Cradle-19, Lumen and Avel: sandstone canyon roads, the Stronghold Fields and the Salt Coast.
The machines own it.
◆ The city that was cut out of the world
A city not destroyed but removed from the world's perception. Its people were new consciousnesses — minds born, not copied. Now it has partly returned: palm terraces, reed basins and overgrown ruins that most networks still can't see. Only Wanderers can find it.
Its people took personal names, trade, garden, tell stories about the humans — and argue whether a returned memory is "real". Avel is the saga's first great mystery.
A plural community with an informal council, led in the field by Aren.
A technocratic power seated in the capital, Aureon. Claims to preserve stability; uses memory manipulation. It built the Wanderers.
They refuse involuntary restoration and defend autonomy — and mortality.
Concordat hardware guarding facilities and nulled borders, hunting witnesses. Clean, pale, orange-eyed.
Cradle Sentinel · Cradle Warden
PALIMPSEST's own. They appear where a region is being nulled — apparitions, broods, things that make you forget.
Null Apparition
Human-era automation running wild. Not malicious — they strip and convert.
Small Stubby · Scavenger Unit · Pincer Sovereign
Every enemy is a machine. Androids are never fodder.
The humans left the machines everything except the instructions. Words, rituals, art, faith, names and objects all survived the Era of Inheritance; what they meant did not. The heirs of Eidra copy human forms faithfully and fill them with whatever meaning they can reconstruct. The forms survive, but the meanings drift, invert or hollow out: a wedding performed by people who have never heard of love, a road sign read as scripture, a child's toy loaded as ammunition. PALIMPSEST erases what was remembered; drift erases why.
Is a meaning that was reinvented less real than the one that was lost?
Each heir misreads in its own way: the Concordat keeps forms perfect and empty; the ancient systems read every sign as an instruction; Lumen repurposes whatever still works; Avel invents meanings where none survived; feral machines only repeat. PALIMPSEST does not misread at all — it unreads.
Some drifts are losses, some are crimes, and some are the most beautiful things the heirs have made.
A base campaign in six chapters.
> Keep a light on.