Each Archetype contains five or six Themed Backgrounds, designed to frame a character concept within the campaign setting. Each one offers a unique glimpse into the Echelon System, its people, and its dangers.
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It would be fantastic if each player chose a different Archetype, but this is not required. These Backgrounds were not designed for specific players, but it was difficult not to imagine how certain players would react to them as I designed them.
Lean into your background during roleplay to earn Bennies.
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"Perfection is not achieved through rebellion. It is engineered, incentivized, and enforced. Those who survive the corporate crucible are the ones worth keeping."
— Dr. Alexis Sokolov
The megacorporations are more than employers—they are architects of identity, morality, and survival. Those who rise within their ranks are either indoctrinated or transformed, molded into tools too valuable to discard. Whether you’ve escaped that machine or still live inside its gears, you know one truth better than anyone else: everything is a transaction, and someone is always collecting.
You sold your face to Prism Entertainment, your voice to the Mnemoscape, and your soul to your agent—if you ever had one. Maybe you were a network icon, a neural influencer, or a headliner in corporate morale campaigns. Now your contract is full of fine print and surveillance clauses. You’ve been shipped from warzones to colony launch ceremonies on “public service tours,” shaking hands for a system that owns your likeness in perpetuity. If you step out of line, the next Prism program might be a dramatized biopic—about your tragic, sanctioned death.
You were embedded in the system: department head at Axiom, risk analyst for Metacortex, logistics controller for Astra. Maybe you leaked something. Maybe they just needed a scapegoat. Either way, you were black-bagged, neural-scrubbed, or publicly denounced—and you got out. Barely. You still know the names, the codes, the unspoken rules. You know what’s under the corporate towers and what’s beneath the Mnemoscape. You just don’t know how long you can keep breathing without someone cashing in the bounty on your clearance level.
You weren’t supposed to want anything. Not freedom. Not questions. Not escape. You were a perfect drone—Sentia-certified, Mnemoscape-locked, bio-conditioned for compliance. But something cracked. A memory. A whisper. A glitch in the Directive. Now you’re running through a system that doesn’t see you as a person—just as a breach. Every checkpoint, every neural sweep, every corporate drone lab is a trap waiting to close. And worst of all? Some part of you still wants to obey.
NOTE: The GM’s SPC fits this background. That’s not a dissuasion, just FYI.
They never called you by name—just subject ID. You were altered, shaped, tested, catalogued. You were something between a case study and a prototype. Maybe you were grown in one of Axiom’s remote labs. Maybe they picked you off the street and rewrote your genome while you slept. The powers they unlocked in you were no accident. You were engineered to serve a purpose, even if they never told you what it was. You don’t know who you are without the experiment—and you’re not sure they ever meant to let you go.
You wrote the compliance code. You tuned the Mnemoscape lattice. You designed half the firmware that tracks loyalty in corporate drones—and then you turned it inward and asked the question no one in your division dared to ask: What happens if I rewrite it? Now you live between shadows and scrubbing tools, hunted by your own updates. The corporations see you as a liability with legacy access. But in the Hollow, there are constructs that whisper your name with reverence—or fear.
You weren’t infected. You were designed to open.
You are the consequence of a long-buried directive, encoded into bloodlines, refined through generations, and awakened by contact with the forbidden. Whether Sentia cultivated you to observe or unleash you, it no longer matters—something ancient has begun to take hold. Each day, a different fracture rises to the surface: a symptom, a pattern, a signal of what’s trying to emerge.
| d6 | Symptom | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blacklight Veins | Each morning, faint lines of ultraviolet light shimmer just beneath your skin—so subtle they’re almost invisible, even to you. Only in the dim hours or near shadow do they reveal themselves like cracked constellations running your veins. But when you're near something alien, ancient, or corrupted, the glow intensifies—blinding, pulsing, undeniable. Only dense shielding, like lead or composite alloy, can obscure it. |
| 2 | Glyph Overload | Your daydreams and nightmares are full of symbols—not letters or language, but something older. Curves and edges arranged in alien logic, pulsing like neural diagrams or carved bone. You don't remember drawing them. But sometimes you open your eyes to find your fingertips bleeding. |
| 3 | Temporal Distortion | Time slips. You experience the day out of sync with chronology—a glance too early, a response too late. You miss things you swear happened, and remember things that haven’t. Conversations skip like corrupted footage. You stare at clocks and feel like they're mocking you. |
| 4 | Void Whispers | There’s a murmur in the stillness today. Not a voice. Not quite. Just a constant pressure beneath your thoughts, like an unfinished sentence crawling up your spine. It’s stronger near relics, derelicts, cold places that remember the Void. When you're alone, it sounds like breathing. When you're not… it’s quieter. But never silent. |
| 5 | Echo of the Chamber | Something old stalks you. You find yourself hesitating at sealed doors, reaching for objects you shouldn’t, standing too close to things no one should touch. You go to sleep in your bed and wake up standing in the middle of the room, dressed, alert, and afraid to move. There’s no evidence of anything. Only the certainty that something in you is responding to something deeper. |
| 6 | Reflected Disassociation | You avoid reflections of yourself and others. They lag. They jitter. They fade or become too pronounced and glow with an eerie blacklight aura. Video feeds stutter when you're in frame. Facial recognition fails. People say you look “slightly off” today. You don’t feel different, but sometimes you feel like you're watching yourself from outside your own body. |
They say power speaks softly. But when you look across the table and remind them who you were—what you know—they don’t hear your voice. They hear their own contract cracking.
"Power doesn’t make you special. It makes you seen. And the ones who see you first are rarely your friends."
— Nova Sinclair
Paragons don’t ask for power. They’re born into it, carved from it, caught in its gravitational pull. The Founders say it’s a gift. The corporations say it’s a mutation—before they attempt to patent it. The Void says nothing—just watches. Whether your power came with a bloodline, a lab tag, or a scream in the dark, you’ve stepped off the path of the ordinary. Now the world either wants you dead—or wants you back.
You died. Or something like it. You Drift through the Mnemoscape like a lost frequency—half-there, half-forgotten. You hear whispers others can’t, see constructs glitching just before they fracture. The Hollow knows you. Sometimes it even listens. You’ve felt Wraiths hesitate. You’ve felt yourself hesitate. The question isn’t whether you’re real—it’s whether it matters.
You're the protector of people who have no protector. The streetlight shadow with a pulse in the concrete. Born from the alleys of Neo Prospect, armored in purpose, branded by myth. Maybe it started with a riot. Maybe you pulled someone out of the fire. But now, stories follow you—a flash of light, a blur of motion, a voice that says “not today”. You don’t fight for justice. You fight because someone has to.
You were a number. A file in the secret project logs. A specimen that didn’t take—until you did. You weren’t supposed to survive the splicing, the rewiring, the bleed-through. You still feel the phantom limbs of other lives stitched into your bones. Your abilities glitch, surge, flicker when you least expect. Axiom called you a failure. But failures don’t run. Failures break containment.
Everything checks out. Biometrics. Neural pattern. Government logs. But it’s not you—not really. You have memories that don’t match your timeline. You know people who flinch when you speak. Somewhere, someone is living your life. Or maybe they already did. And maybe you’re the replacement. The Mnemoscape disagrees with your existence. And that scares you more than anything.
You’ve never fit. Never been wanted. Hunger’s always been with you, but it’s not food that fills it. Not sleep. Not touch. There’s something else inside. Something... old. And when the world goes quiet—when you’re alone—you feel it watching. A presence that feels like protection. Or ownership. You don’t know where you came from. But someone does. And they’re still out there.
Your sibling was taken during the Dissonance Screening—flagged by the system as unstable, removed like a malfunctioning node. You stayed behind. Grew up normal. Except you're not. The signs came late—flashes of power, dreams with someone else’s voice. You’re still linked, somehow. Your twin is alive. Changed. And whatever happened to them, it’s coming for you next.
You’ve been called a monk, a machine, a ghost with a pulse. But you don’t care about names. You care about stillness. Every motion you make has weight. Every silence has shape. Power isn’t something to flaunt—it’s something to master. You feel the Hollow’s static in your spine. The Void’s tension in your breath. And when the world fractures, you don’t shatter. You center.
The Chamber doesn’t grant power. It grants opportunity. Moments unaccounted for. Choices that shouldn’t exist.
"Out there? There’s no Pact. No surveillance net. No Founder whispering in your dreams. Just stars, ruins, and your own bad choices. They call it freedom, but it’s just chaos."
Civilization is a lie built on infrastructure and ideology. The void between buoys is where the truth lives. Pirates aren’t just raiders—they’re survivors, wanderers, and believers in the forbidden. They operate beyond the control of Neo Prospect, beyond the Pax of the megacorps. Whether they run with the Forsaken Tide or drift solo through the back routes of the system, pirates live by one rule: if you want to live free, you better earn it.