Essentially, you're in a world where Echoes of Fantasy, Myth, and Legend are real. Depending on its impact on the human race on Earth, the more real or mixed it is in the world in question.
For instance, courtesy of Anime, King Arthur is a 9 foot tall, wild-lady female of a King.
Richard the Lionheart is also there, the pair of them work together to repel threats from the mythical isle of Faerieheim.
Anyone can survive a drop from any height into a body of water, since so few people know how water reacts from high drops (on Earth). The three second rule is real, plate armor doesn't benefit from agility, and so on.
You've got Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible duking it out in one area, Greeks and Romans fighting, and so on.
I'm extremely excited for the stories I can write.
And, well, here's the story premise, since it's just the prologue. I probably should've started with this:
In the beginning, God spoke and created the heavens and the earth. When He made Man, He placed a spark of His breath within His creation, giving it life and power in its words, heart, and soul. As man’s population grew, along with it, tales and legends. With the spark of their collective words and imaginations, the infant world of Avalon was born as a distant echo. Unbeknownst to mankind, they had made an entirely new creation.
Unfortunately, such a world was a paragon of chaos and destruction. Humanity’s spoken and imagined gods ran rampant - as well as demons and faeries who had found the blossoming world. Tormenting, violating, empowering, and conquering lesser races - God, Himself, could bear the sight and screams no more. God stepped in to establish order. He locked the demons and fallen angels away behind their gates of Gehenna, forbidding them to give their power unrestrained. Then, He did the same to the gods, but locking them in their respective demiplanes. Finally, as for the Faeries, the arbiters of nature and seasons, He locked them onto the Isle of Faerieheim just north of England, forbidding Mab, Titania, and the Erlking from leaving it and tormenting mortals - and from giving their power freely. That done, God looked upon the races and beings that were left in the world and the discrepancies between them.
The Legends system (leveling system) then took hold after those events. While mortals do not know of the events that took place so long ago (as none are alive from that many thousands of years ago), the gods, faeries, and demons are forbidden from speaking of what had happened. While mortals can no longer directly communicate with gods, they may speak to the equivalent of their servitors to gain power from above or below. The Legends system was put in place to prevent either side from hyper-empowering a mortal to become equivalents of avatars or shock troopers. The Legends system is simple. When two beings have a child, a portion of their power is imbued into their child - with each child having the same starting point in their Legend. While their race has an effect on what they can do, their Legend determines what level of power they can receive either from the efforts of their own power or from other powers. To increase one’s legend, they must either slay enemies to absorb portions of their essence or spread their name far and wide, letting their names on the tongues of the populace increase their strength. Might as well as reputation earned can increase the strength of any inhabitant of this world.
There are some beings who are legends on Earth and who aren’t subject to these restrictions and, as such, they are naturally powerful. These beings are often rulers of countries, cities, and so on. The hope for most who seek out to start their Legends is to become greater than those who have come before - while most just seek to live a life of peace and quiet. This is where your Legend starts, will you claim it? Will you be the mysterious Sidhe? Perhaps a Savartalf? A Demigod? A
drow? An Awakened? Just a human? Maybe a Dwarf? It is your choice.
