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Dareon posted:Fair point, but it seems like that would just move the goalposts. In theory robots could perform every task except maybe AI programming, and even that's a possibility if you don't mind getting horrified looks and/or nuked on principle. The setting is set up in such a way that, with the nanofabrication and robots, everyone could basically live without want because there's enough for everyone. However, the evil hypercapitalists arbitrarily restrict things so they can rise to the top on the backs of people kept in artificial poverty. Entirely in line with anarchist ethos, just kind of annoying at times because of how incredibly on the nose it gets with painting things as black-and-white. To wit: Rimward posted:[...]within anarchist spaces, the basic needs of everyone are provided for: shelter, clothing, food, water, air, education, healthcare, and security. Nanofabrication and other advanced technologies make this automatic and readily available. On anarchist habs, community nanofabbers are everywhere and unrestricted. This leaves us to use our time to follow our desires in creative endeavors. That's a small part of about 20 pages in Rimward that provide pretty much no plot hooks for the game, because it literally says that there's basically no conflict on anarchist habitats.
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Apr 20, 2015 17:50
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quote:What about menial work? Thankless jobs that no one wants to do? Who gets to clean out the sewage filter traps and scrape the barnacles off the habitat’s hull? That’s what AIs and robots are for, my friend. Surprised they didn't point out there must be a tension here in trying to find AIs strong enough to do the jobs but weak enough to not be people themselves and have a right to do sculpture instead of maintenance. What if that balance is almost impossible,and an average anarchist hab is either falling apart because the bots doing the work are incompetent or getting by through exploiting an underclass of AIs it's expedient noone recognises as people?
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Apr 20, 2015 18:35
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That's a really good potential conflict that makes use of what's given rather than rewriting. Thanks!
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Apr 20, 2015 18:47
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Are you guys reading the same Rimward that I did? I really enjoyed it and thought the writeups of the various factions were pretty good and useful as a GM. The Jovians are not boring - they're one of the most interesting factions in the setting. A Jovian Republic game could resemble Battlestar Galactica with the military, political intrigue, infighting, and fear of technology. The Jovians are the closest society to a cyberpunk dystopia, after all. When I ran a 5 session adventure set in the Republic, my players' biggest complaint was that it wasn't longer. Anarchists have a ton of plot hooks in Rimward: They run their own espionage collectives that fight a war in the shadows against the Planetary Consortium - sabotaging inner system projects while trying to root out hypercorp spies in their own home turf. Their biggest plot hook is the insanely cliquish nature of their politics. I mean, they're essentially popularity contests with life and death consequences. Numerous terrorist and radical groups stay with the Anarchists, so it would be very easy for a small but highly motivated group to take over a larger anarchist habitat and start a reign of terror. For a real world example, look at how ISIS took over large cities in Syria: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-show-structure-of-islamist-terror-group-a-1029274.html Recruit local informants, then start a campaign of terror to take out opposition leaders and weaken the populace. Then roll in and claim it as yours. Given how isolated many anarchist habitats, a skilled radical faction could pull it off. Given how the anarchist lifestyle alienates the poo poo out of so many people, building an army with malcontents to conquer the anarchists from within is certainly possible. On a more basic level, anarchists can literally get away with murder if they win popularity contests. A high rep PC murders a low rep rear end in a top hat and then uses her influence to sway the community into not restoring the rear end in a top hat? How is that not ripe for abuse/conflict? Conversely the rep economy is also open to exploitation to criminals and scammers. The open nature of anarchist communities make them ripe vectors for exsurgent infections. Why hasn't anyone mentioned Extropia yet? It's basically Bioshock/Rapture in Space, but with micro-torts.
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Apr 20, 2015 20:45
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Dareon posted:....you wind up with a hab of lotus-eaters. Which admittedly would be a nice locale for the proper plot. Bonus points for working Tennyson into it thematically or referentially. clockworkjoe posted:[Anarchists] run their own espionage collectives that fight a war in the shadows against the Planetary Consortium - sabotaging inner system projects while trying to root out hypercorp spies in their own home turf. Their biggest plot hook is the insanely cliquish nature of their politics. I mean, they're essentially popularity contests with life and death consequences. Numerous terrorist and radical groups stay with the Anarchists, so it would be very easy for a small but highly motivated group to take over a larger anarchist habitat and start a reign of terror Well I have the antagonists for my next campaign lined up; a bunch of Lotus-Eaters with years of time-acceleration on their hands are going to use an X-threat [insert your favorite one here] to try and destabilize an inner system state. Finally have a real chance for players to experience anarchist culture and the new gift economy. Thanks thread!
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Apr 21, 2015 03:46
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Had a thought. During the Fall, a popular search engine or social media site gets hit with a ton of malware and viruses. Through whatever coincidence and contrivance makes you happy, it remained undestroyed and unquarantined, and is still active on the mesh after the Fall. Which would be a neat development on its own, because that would be direct communication with Earth, someone could use it for cool poo poo. But that's not the thought. A large number of reinstantiated were habitual users of said search engine or social media, and, through force of habit, will tend to use it if opportunity arises. Of course, it's loaded with military cyberwarfare and TITAN malware. What results is a digital Typhoid Mary, the rough equivalent of an office worker with a dozen toolbars and a desktop stripper that keeps hitting "Forward to all" on his virus emails. A sentinel team actually confronting one of these would be constantly making Infosec checks, failure resulting in various penalties to skill checks, with accompanying flavor text. "One weird tip. -10 to Perception." "Single birds in your area. -10 Animal Handling." (You could theoretically roll for which skill is affected, or tailor it to your group) "Freedom is under attack! -10 Kinetic Weapons."
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Apr 22, 2015 08:47
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The space whales in Sunward are probably the most useless/ungameable elements of Eclipse Phase, but some RPPR listeners are trying to come up with good plot hooks to use with them: http://slangdesign.com/forums/index.php/topic,1915.0.html
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Apr 25, 2015 23:34
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I'm 45k words into a postcyberpunk-ish novel featuring misanthrope transhumanist academics as villains. I need a good name for them and their unethical research and social change movement. I was thinking something vague and benign-sounding like "The Partners" and "The Agenda," but I'm thinking those are too boring. Any suggestions from EP-playing folks here? Not trying to crib anything from the game, just figured you guys have probably thought about this kind of thing a lot. If possible it should reflect the fact that the four people at the top (and a probable shadowy true leader) are all doctors in some field or another.
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Apr 29, 2015 01:53
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Aleph 😜
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Apr 29, 2015 02:18
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The Practice? I think I'm stealing that from a Fear Itself adventure. Edit: Majestic 12 The Galen Agenda The Cairo Operation Alexandrian Heirs The Cosian Circle (straight from white wolf) Progenitors (also) Recombinators Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 06:22
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First thing that comes to mind is Asclepius, the greek god of medicine. He was killed for resurrecting the dead and generally messing up the natural order of things (transhumanism? eh?), and his staff (the asklepian) was adopted as a symbol for medicine (although a lot of groups mess it up and use the Caduceus, Hermes' symbol of liars and thieves).
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Apr 29, 2015 07:31
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The Four Chambers (of the heart)
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Apr 29, 2015 07:40
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The Old World Order
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Apr 29, 2015 09:20
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These people sound like basically a sinister version of the Technocracy Movement, so "The Technocracy" or "The Technocracy Foundation" or "Technocratic Future Initiative" or something like that could work.
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Apr 29, 2015 12:53
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Thanks guys, I will consider all of those.
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Apr 29, 2015 13:05
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"Technocratic Government Initiative for the Future". They hold all their meetings at TGI Friday's.
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Apr 29, 2015 13:32
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Helical Nightmares posted:The Practice? Correct. The Practice is from the Book of Unremitting Horror and appears in Invasive Procedures. Personally, putting "the" in front of just about any unusual noun makes it sound more threatening. The Consortium. The Body Farm. The Residency. I like the Four Chambers suggestion, personally.
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Apr 29, 2015 14:07
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Some people on the RPPR Forums are pitching scenario ideas for the surya/space whales from Sunward: http://slangdesign.com/forums/index.php/topic,1915.0.html One example: quote:The sun powers the entire solar system. Any threat to it is automatically an X-threat. But who, besides maybe the TITANS or some other alien species, would try to destroy the sun? Well, maybe with a viable threat, you could hold the solar system hostage, dictating terms to every planet and habitat from Mercury to the Oort cloud. But that's just crazy. It's a comic book supervillain plot; real people don't think like that. And that's true, real people don't. But what about a memetic virus that thinks of itself as a supervillain?
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May 4, 2015 07:19
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I'm currently planning to run my first Eclipse Phase game. Other than the Morph pool what are some good house rules? Anyone have any thoughts about the Transhuman Package system for character creation as well? I wanna make character creation a bit less painful but trying to use this while also making sure you have decent fray, a combat skill and networking/rep felt a bit fiddly.
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May 8, 2015 14:00
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Just make sure everyone grabs the Essential Skills package. Otherwise, the package system is pretty good about things.
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May 8, 2015 18:44
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the Transhuman package and life path system makes pretty competent characters.
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May 10, 2015 22:00
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One of the biggest conflicts I've had while reading Eclipse Phase is that everyone seems comfortable with the fact that switching morphs is literally them dying and being replaced with an exact replica. I know this is acknowledged occasionally, but the book says that changing sleeves is like changing pants to transhumans. Why the the idea of Continuity of the self not bigger in the book, or at the very least, the majority of the cultures described? Is there a section in one of the books that describes how "Oh, we found the soul, your true consciousness, and using science magic we can totally put the real you in this new body!"? Because if not, I feel like the Bioconservatives are totally right.
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May 12, 2015 03:24
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Your brain is either backed up onto a stack or it's a cyberbrain, so there's no interruption of continuity. Resleeving doesn't kill you. Now, getting resurrected after you get blown up from a remote backup, that's totally dying and it's weird that people don't give a poo poo about it.
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May 12, 2015 03:28
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Is there a section in one of the books that describes how "Oh, we found the soul, your true consciousness, and using science magic we can totally put the real you in this new body!"? Because if not, I feel like the Bioconservatives are totally right. I do remember one of the books (panopticon I think?) saying something about your unique brain code/signal? thats like the fingerprint of your ego, and that it was as close to a soul as transhumanity has been able to find.
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May 12, 2015 03:33
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But if your brain is put in a stack by the stack just taking constant pictures of your brain states, which are saved. Your stack is just a bunch of data on brain states, not your brain or consciousness. Cyberbrain, however, I understand better.
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May 12, 2015 03:34
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perfect! wrestle with that moral quandary.
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May 12, 2015 03:36
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Kommando posted:perfect! wrestle with that moral quandary.
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May 12, 2015 03:39
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I just feel like resleeving is so central to the game that it would become tiresome very quickly to roleplay an existential crisis whenever I resleeved. This was a pretty huge problem in the game I was running, as I've noticed it's very much a personal philosophy thing. I'm with you where I consider "being backed up" is nice and all but I still died, that's just a copy of me that can be a super efficient legacy for my desires for the future. I asked in this very thread about the idea of an EP character being completely comfortable with the shock of dying as long as they have a backup somewhere (to the point of not taking any Stress being the sticking point for the game). I would call it more of a huge potential problem than an actual issue, just something to say at the beginning of the game. The same way everyone agrees that murdering evil things may be the best option most of the time in DnD, in EP most people are fine with the idea of continuity of self when resleeving. Or maybe they're not if you want to change things up from what the game seems to imply.
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May 12, 2015 03:46
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I just feel like resleeving is so central to the game that it would become tiresome very quickly to roleplay an existential crisis whenever I resleeved. Here's the thing you have to bear in mind; all the people in-universe who would have this sort of existential crisis regarding casual resleeving? Are dead. Or in cyberhell being tortured for eleventy billion subjective eternities. By and large, they're the ones who didn't make it off Earth when the TITANs turned it into SkynetLand. Some people made it off Earth with their bodies intact but those were the minority, many of the evacuees are the ones who had no compunction against going "gently caress it, I'm just gonna beam my brainwaves offworld and I'll deal with the whole body business later."
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May 12, 2015 03:53
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The people who weren't okay with resleeving mostly didn't escape Earth before the Fall - I take it as society now relies on the convenient fiction that you are really you even after a backup because to say otherwise would be loving horrifying (hence why you make a stress test for continuity / alienation / etc).
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May 12, 2015 03:53
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Plus the thing is, you have no way of guaranteeing that you're the same "you" that you were before you went to sleep and woke up the night before, if you're really bothered by the whole continuity of consciousness thing, it's not like the concept behind it only came into existence with cortical stacks and resleeving. It's not necessarily a "convenient fiction" since it's not really a matter that has an objective right and wrong answer. If I say, and believe, that I'm the same person even after being turned into chunky meat sauce and having my brain shunted into a new body, well, you can't really prove otherwise unless you've actually figured out this whole "soul" thing when no one was looking, so.
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May 12, 2015 04:00
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I'd say that acceptance of sleeving, stacking, forking, spindling, psychosurgery and the like is a symptom of the setting's horror aspect. Humanity as an organism has suffered a catastrophic shock, and has been forced into some pretty extreme coping mechanisms. Maybe the bioconservatives are right. Maybe transhumanity (emphasis on the trans) is in its eclipse phase, on the cusp of becoming something vastly different to its origins. Maybe most people don't think about it, or rationalize it with a reference to the Ship of Theseus. I think it's the kind of existential anxiety that surrounds a Call of Cthulhu investigator: you know they're probably doomed, and they probably realize it too, but it's something that just lurks constantly in the background until someone blows a roll.
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May 12, 2015 04:22
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Personally I think the bigger issue that Eclipse Phase glosses over is how generally together and with-it people are considering it's only been 10 years since 90% of humanity got died or consigned to unimaginable torture for eternity and Earth was turned into a giant quarantine zone. Sure, people rebound after catastrophes, but this isn't some 9/11 thing, this is "billions of people are dead or gone forever, maybe in hell, maybe enslaved to malevolent alien intelligences, and our ancestral home is lost to us." How much psychosurgery do you figure the average transhuman Earth evacuee needs to not simply toss their stack in an incinerator and eat a bullet? To not collapse into uncontrollable violent paranoia at the knowledge that any random person they encounter could be infected with something that will warp them beyond the salvation of resleeving? But hey look, sunwhales! Octopusses! Neo-anarchsim woo!
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May 12, 2015 04:29
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Re-Instantiated automatically come with Edited Memories but I imagine that loads of people in the world of Eclipse Phase have it as well, though it also doesn't hurt that they also all have a Muse with 80 skill in Academics: Psychology who can monitor and handle them 24/7 (what's the future space version of that phrase I wonder?)
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May 12, 2015 04:35
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Grim posted:Re-Instantiated automatically come with Edited Memories but I imagine that loads of people in the world of Eclipse Phase have it as well, though it also doesn't hurt that they also all have a Muse with 80 skill in Academics: Psychology who can monitor and handle them 24/7 (what's the future space version of that phrase I wonder?) Yeah, this right here is the real horror angle of EP to me...not continuity of consciousness but the fact that like 90% of everyone is only able to go about their lives without committing suicide or having a psychotic break because they've had their memories and personalities judiciously edited and constantly monitored by their pet AI assistants.
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May 12, 2015 04:39
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That's why I cheat and make characters that are inhuman monsters to begin with, or they were too young to really be conscious of the world before the Fall.
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May 12, 2015 04:53
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and you can totally run your game that way. I set my game in AF 21 and have two characters with Immortality blues. I could weigh it down with questions about continuity and being but my players are dealing with engineered nano enhanced space Ebola on Titan right now. Maybe once they've fixed this existential problem they will have time to be depressed. maybe they won't as being Firewall Sentinels they have their poo poo together better than most.
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May 12, 2015 04:54
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Kommando posted:I could weigh it down with questions about continuity and being but my players are dealing with engineered nano enhanced space Ebola on Titan right now. This is more or less how I would expect most people play Eclipse Phase. It's how I would play Eclipse Phase, really. I don't blame anyone that doesn't want to spend their pretend-elf time dwelling on the crushing existential dread that comes from knowing that humanity only persists in the face of overwhelming, unfathomable loss thanks to a heaping helping of psychosurgery, it just seems weird to me that resleeving is always the thing that trips people up when there's something so much bigger and so much more horrifying to consider the ramifications of.
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May 12, 2015 05:03
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I imagine it's the opposite really; most of transhumanity gets by on the diehard belief that the Fall actually can't happen again. The Titans left. We barely survived but we survived. Like, of course there are sunwhales and neoanarchism and muses all that. Humanity needs that poo poo not to collectively lose their poo poo. Part of Firewall's thing isn't just defending humanity, it's doing it quietly so humanity never learns just how close it is to dying constantly. The other thing to remember is that stuff like resleeving isn't new tech in EP. It's not only been ten years since the Fall, but pre-Fall Earth was a shitball. Humanity had plenty of time to get used to both horribleness and body science before it all ended. AGIs and uplifts and such were around long before the Fall occured.
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May 12, 2015 05:16
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Horror of resleeving and lack of continuity is really something you can take or leave in play - if it interests you to explore it, there's heaps of material, if you want to ignore it and bodyhop like crazy, you can do that too. Half of the appeal of EP for my group was just going off on philosophical tangents about this kind of stuff. Also re continuity and backups - isn't there a sidebar in one of the books about how the bonus quantum entanglement effects that you get from being an async arguably counts as generating a soul for you?
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May 12, 2015 06:20
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