March 17. 2026

You cannot sit and ignore the world, and then complain when the world ignores you back

Building out a story universe is one of those things that, it seems, everyone has some advice for.

When I began building out the Echo Walkers Universe 10 months ago, it was an idea borne from, ‘what if my character became weaker throughout the game, rather than stronger?’

Echo Walkers was originally an idea I had for a new TTRPG IP, I really wanted to mess about with the idea of choice and memory being primary themes in an RPG, rather than monsters and magic.

I already had a central conceit that I had been bouncing around for years. ‘The Echo’ was the anti-life. Not malicious, nothing that you could point at as being the bad guy, but the opposite of what we find comfortable in the real world.

My own ancient history is that I studied Chemistry and came across the concept of Entropy (from an academic standpoint). Frankly it terrified me, so I wanted to make that ‘the bad guy’. The trouble with making a law of physics a bad guy is that it doesn’t have much of a personality. So, having read a lot of Terry Pratchett, and learning the phrase “Anthropomorphic personification“, I gave Entropy a name, and a face, and a dress style. I am not giving anything away at this stage. (I mean, I might, nobody reads this stuff anyway,) but that felt like an important first step.

Then, somewhere along the line the rest of the ideas fell into place. Rough, absolutely no connective tissue, but lumps of writing, scenes, descriptions of unease that I felt could string together in something that represented the story that I wanted to tell.

My central character, ‘Moi’ (pronounced Moy, not Mwa, as in the French) was at first a dashing, muscle bound, twenty-something hero. Leaping from one unbelievable escapade to another, which was fun and all, but one of many stories that were already out there, and not the story that I wanted to tell. It was fun enough to write, but it didn’t do the job I wanted it to. He is now on the other end of his story, old, battered by the Echo, keeping secrets that may or may not change the direction of the story. He is my oldest friend within the Echo Walkers Universe and frankly the one that scares me the most.

My voice, the level of horror that I wanted to portray, the random lore drops, they all came naturally after I had fixed those two things. I spend as much time building out the world as I do writing the stories, but this is an exercise in laying the foundation for the setting as a whole. I even found myself writing an essay on the nature of good and evil within this world, because, like life, this is not binary. People make decisions that outsiders might consider evil, bad people portray altruistic tendencies. There is no ruler-straight, visible line that you cross on your travels to becoming the bad guy. It is a blur. Much like the Echo itself.

Be awesome to each other
Mx