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Most discussion has centered around the Cleft, public/private; neighborhoods, and Relto. This is one point that I agree with The Stranger on: an alternate, public surface location.
My thoughts center around a small town or villa that has little more than a Main Street. Perhaps a small general store, a coffee shop/bookstore, a drugstore/arcade/sodafountain, a theater and a compound containing living quarters and a warehouse. The interesting thing about this warehouse is the vertical mine shaft/elevator that allows one to enter the cavern without following The Yeesha. This compound may or may not be the base of field operations for the DRC. My thinking has been along those lines but It could have been left by some other entity. One would have to 'break in' to the compound and restore power before actually getting any where, of course. There would be clues around to point explorers to the different methods of entry.
This little villa would be public. Just how public would be defined by the capabilities of the shard. Perhaps global, perhaps neighborhood related.
Once an 'authorized' explorer has successfully broken into the compound; he/she would venture down into the cavern arriving in a neighborhood. Perhaps the default for 'journey' explorers could be the Bevin style neighborhood and the default for 'authorized' explorers could be the Kirel style.
'Authorized' explorers would be limited to moving about via the nexus; Bahro stones wouldn't work for them since they are not followers of Yeesha and therefore not necessarily sympathetic to the Bahro. If an 'authorized' explorer gets into a journey age; he/she would not be able to complete it as a journey explorer does. Instead of linking to a Bahro cave and receiving a wedgie; they would be linked to the Cleft as a form of hint. Perhaps touching the journey cloths(except at the cleft) would result in a different glow and their reward for trekking through a journey age could be something less spiritual.
I feel that a solution such as this is more workable than a confusing mess of Cleft instances and Descents. I also think that Descent is going to be a huge undertaking and would be best left to an on-going restoration project whereas a few buildings and a shaft could be implemented relatively quickly.
#Problems that I see:
## A system of rewards for the non-journey explorer.
## A method to protect such an explorer from death. -- emergency linking books has been proposed
## Moving from this public area to a private Cleft. I have a possible solution for this.
## I had some more but can't remember them right now.
## A path to reach Descent once it is open.....
For this last; I've come up with a quick and dirty solution. Simply an alternate route from this little villa and moving the fence around the volcano. Suppose that the fence doesn't completely enclose the volcano and there is ground access to it from the side opposite the Cleft. Yeeshaphiles and the others alike could have access which doesn't interrupt the Cleft in any significant way.
This doesn't break any canon that I'm aware of; the DRC has some method of entering the cavern we don't currently know about.
Authorized is 'Authorized' because without the DRC, nobody is really authorized.
EDIT1: With this model; KI retrieval would still happen after reaching a neighborhood via either method. This still leaves the issue of immediate interactivity with other players not currently in this starting area. For this I propose a tool that almost everybody has: a cellular phone. This handy instrument would give newcomers a method for messaging people not in the immediate vicinity.
PS I reserve the right to make edits to this post when my memory clears.
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)