Eclipse Phase - The Scary Door RPG - The Something Awful Forums

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Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

InfiniteJesters posted:

C) Ahhhh, yeah. I think in the real world Firewall would be a bigger and more overt organization instead of an exoplague-fighting space CIA that has to improvise constantly, at the very least the corps would make a small fortune off of providing for Firewall's needs, but on the other hand such an organization would draw the attention of the more intelligent TITAN elements...But at any rate I imagine Firewall could replace (begrudgingly) anything that wasn't 100% custom-fabricated. Unless you're suicidal, utilize gambits off of expendable bodies or just consider digital death and rebirth to be a weirdly morbid but common thing, backups are just that---backups.

The hypercorps do have their own well-funded profiteering version of Firewall, though; Project OZMA. It's the CIA to Firewall's Anonymous; centralised rather than cell-like, funded by the big bucks, looking after government interests more than moral/political ones, etc. I really hope it gets more material down the line that isn't all 'lol secret evil fascists', as it could do a lot to balance out the line.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2012 13:48

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 00:38

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

They do have *some* horror fiction; for example they have the most terrifying piece of existential horror I've ever read, Peter Watt's Blindsight. It's incredibly appropriate for Eclipse Phase; it's the right tech level, shows extreme transhumanism and a mesh-equivalent, has TITAN or Factor like antagonism, and is released free under a creative commons license! You can get it here: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

# ¿ Feb 21, 2012 18:24

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

My view on the Jovian Republic is that essentially all those people you see in EP conversations who think that transhumanity is freaky and wrong have a valid viewpoint, an some of them survived the fall. When they looked at the rest of the system, full of transhumanity going *weird* in seven million different directions, they reckoned that they were the only surviving true humanity and prioritised their own security as much as possible.

Look at it this way; Cthulhu just rose up, ate all the major cities, then buggered off who knows where leaving the deep ones, Dagon and Hydra behind to wreck poo poo. You managed to flee to the mountains to hide, and you hear that other people escaped too. Trouble is, everyone else is all like 'being a deep one hybrid isn't so bad! Now I have these fancy gills! Glub glub." or summoning eldritch entities to mangle their soul so they can come back to life after death. In that situation, wouldn't *you* get at least a little paranoid and armed-up?

# ¿ Mar 8, 2012 19:13

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Ronwayne posted:

But the question is at what point do I start naming my home after arch-right wing dictators?

Eh, after a rather amazingly lovely series of life experiences and jobs I've come to associate "horror" with "annoyance, boredom, dull despair, and having to work unpaid overtime." You know, things you don't want in an RPG when you're trying to have fun.

In addition, being scared of things you have no control over is a mindnumbing way to live, and few things are as out of your control as a Exsurgant problem.

At the point where all the half-fishmen are all like "You're just dissing on my cthonic lifestyle because you're a backwards fascist conservative!" and you're all like "FINE, say hello to my shotgun Pinochet!".

After a while, I can kinda see them just doing it as a middle finger to everyone else.

I should say I don't think this is all that in line with the written material, but it's how I'd run them in a game.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2012 19:51

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Of the three supplements out so far, Sunward's definitely the most useful. It gives you a really cool run-down of all of the solar system out to Mars, and has a lot of extra morphs and factions. Panopticon is good for looking at general transhuman culture, with a focus on privacy, uplifts and habitats, but it can be rather dry. Gatecrashing's very cool if you want to run a stargate game, but that's pretty niche.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2012 20:13

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

WhitemageofDOOM posted:

So, your trying to mess with code you don't remotely understand.
Yes this is totally going to go well.

What your missing, is that hacking doesn't give your character an understanding of how brains function. So how do you know how what to look for when you open up the code?

I think what they were suggesting was that instead of using delicate psychosurgery to do in-depth interrogation, they'd just dump the ego in a cheap unmeshed ego in a room and go to town in an old-fashioned way on them.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 17:01

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Goggle Fox posted:

Have you read Altered Carbon by any chance? Minus "an old fashioned way," you just described how psychosurgery works in the Takeshi Kovacs novels. You take the ego into digital space and interact with it there. It's a form of hacking, sure, but you need to understand the machine code you're working with, and in this case the code is in massive parallel and self-correcting in real time. An ordinary hacker isn't going to know which way is up in that mess.

Ah, right. I think I misunderstood the situation being proposed. Way I see it, there's three options to interrogate someone whose stack you have;

1) Sleeve the ego in a flat in an interrogation room. Use standard, 20th century interrogation tactics.
2) Put the ego in a virtual interrogation room in a VR world or something, send an interrogator in like in 1 but with the increased capabilities provided by VR (and the utility that you could do this while sitting in a coffee shop or something).
3) Use psychosurgery to poke them right in the qualia to get whatever you want.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2012 17:28

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

nvm, people got to it first.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2012 10:51

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Chance II posted:

I ran a Law & Order: SVU in space style oneshot last week for our group and I think it went pretty well. We didn't have a bunch of sci-fi combat or high adventure. We did have a small team of underpaid and over worked members of a lowest bid security firm for an O'Neil cylinder colony try to untangle a pretty twisted crime.

I gave them a missing persons case involving a hypercorp VIP. Basically they are called in and given a chance to find the victim or recover her stack for a nice finders fee, before company protocol restores her from backups. Plenty of red herrings, side plots, and some random secret motivations that the players seemed to get a kick out of.

The thing I'm proud of, however, is that the resolution to the session is the first time I've gotten a "whooaa, dude!" out of a game I ran. See the mission seems pretty simple at first. VIP probably kidnapped for ransom or to steal company secrets from her stack. Along the way, the players are finding little hints and clues that something is a little off. The victim has an XP playback module in her room with a large number of highly illicit XP scenarios, all featuring romantic engagements with one of her female coworkers, an uplifted dolphin in a humanoid splicer morph working as an indenture in the company's systems analysis department. The victim also has a forged alternate mesh ID, some high end neural pruning software, and a number of regular credit transfers to an unknown source. Interrogating the co-worker reveals that while the dolphin girl tried to befriend the obviously overstressed VIP, the VIP suddenly broke things off and has been cold to her since then. The players eventually track the transactions and XP production to the dolphin girl's live-in girlfriend. Other circumstantial evidence is found that prompts the players to arrest the girlfriend for the VIPs murder with a search of their apartment turning up trace evidence of a cortical stack being destroyed. The session ended with the players getting their bonus for confirming the the VIPs death and destruction of the stack and they have a suspect in custody but the "who, dude!" moment came later, where I filled the players in on the whole story.

See, they more or less got their man, so to speak, when they arrested the girl friend but they hadn't quite connected the dots. Turns out the girlfriend was actually a specially pruned fork of the VIP whose stressful responsibilities along with a company morality clause that forbid her from continuing her relationship with the uplift coworker lead her to create a version of herself that wasn't bogged down with corporate responsibility or obligation. She paid a black market morph broker in the colony's growing slums to sleeve the fork. Since the fork was so divergent by that point, she couldn't just reintegrate and experience her relationship by proxy with the coworker, so she provided a regular stipend in exchange for XP files from the fork. The VIP became increasingly addicted to these experiences and, over time, the fork became more and more uncomfortable with the situation culminating in the fork refusing further XPs. The VIP has a nervous breakdown soon after and confronts the fork. During the encounter, the VIP has is accidentally killed and the fork removes the VIPs stack before leaving the body in an alleyway. The body was later found with an infomorph refugee sleeved into it. It was a kick seeing the player's Holy poo poo! expressions as they connected the dots.

That's pretty awesome! It's exactly the caliber of plot I'd expect in a Richard Morgan or Steven Baxter story, so kudos

Thinking about it, it could be really fun to do a Noctis-Qianjiao City PD campaign. No Firewall elements, just traids, gun-running, ruster intolerance and the weirdest cases the system's entertainment capital can provide. Like CSI Miami with... well, about the same weirdness level really, but with more octopi.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2012 18:08

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

We're using a mashup of Eclipse Fate and Fate Core for our game, and it's working pretty well. All it really entails is an altered skill list, +1 rank on the skill pyramid to represent more badass characters, and getting a free Morph Aspect. It makes changing morphs really easy and keeps morphs flavourful and different mechanically without being overwhelming. When we first started we were using the rule in Eclipse Fate where different morphs gave you a bonus with either mental, physical or social skills (essentially ignoring a certain number of minuses per roll) but abandoned it due to it being too powerful. Aspects work well enough for us, I reckon.

You can get Eclipse Fate here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxeriyJE-cySNTEwODRlM2ItNGMzMy00YjliLWFlMzItZDJlZTIxMjJlMThm/edit

# ¿ Mar 19, 2013 10:00

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

clockworkjoe posted:

Transhuman Kickstarter is up: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/507486226/transhuman-the-eclipse-phase-players-guide

Oof, $80 is far too much for me for a book and shipping. Guess I'll back for the .pdf and wait until it appears at my FLGS before picking up a physical copy.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2013 09:04

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

black metal hugbox posted:

What are features you'd want to see in an Eclipse Phase app?

Character creation and management, with easy resleeving and ego backups.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2013 09:59

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Welp, the new stretch goals were enough for me to jump the gap between $30 (PDF) and $100 (Book+Shipping+Morph Cards). To be honest I'm more stoked for the chargen software than I am for the fate rules - I've already played a campaign using Eclipse FATE and it worked fine. A full D&DI-style character management app would be godly though.

# ¿ May 18, 2013 16:56

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Yeah, I have to admit I wasn't expecting them to charge extra for the character creation software. I'll probably still get it, but given how complete it was looking already and that they're charging backers full-price for it I'm not sure why it needed the $10,000 from the stretch goal.

# ¿ May 22, 2013 08:59

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

sebmojo posted:

I guess I agree, because I never even mentioned it in my 18 month EP campaign. But really, it's just there as an option. It's so vague that it can be excised from the game without even leaving a mark.

Yeah, I always read that section as 'If we were running our own Eclipse Phase campaign, this is what would be behind the TITANs if it ever mattered. Feel free to make up your own though!' It's just there as a suggestion in case you want to add a bunch of cosmic horror to your game.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 11:49

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Bear Enthusiast posted:

So is that implant completely redundant? Any thoughts? An easy fix is to just take away the ability to record XP from the Basic Mesh Inserts or just remove Mnemonic Augmentation, but I'm not sure which to go with. Recording XP seems like it would be an interesting thing for a character to have to invest in, albeit something like 250 credits isn't much of an investment.

Maybe stock mesh inserts have to be set to record, whereas Mnemonic Augmentation is recording everything you experience 24/7?

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 11:09

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

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?

# ¿ Apr 20, 2015 18:35

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Covok posted:

I think the best answer is the devs didn't think of it. Just like one could ask why haven't they uplifted Dolphins.

The in-universe answer could be something related to them being extinct in the modern day. Elephants, I mean. They are endangered now so that could be an out. Then again, neatherthals are a possible up-lift in Transhuman.

But, I'm sure you could probably come up with an Elephant uplift stat block and add it into the setting without any issue.

I'm pretty sure an uplifted dolphin narrates the Uplift chapter in Panopticon so they're covered. As for elephants, I think it might be that they're low-visibility due to Neo-Elephant morphs being impractical in habitats, or just that none of them made it through the filter of the Fall. That or they just never got round to it, and some Cognite facility is hard at work making Neo-Babar.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2015 17:14

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Kai Tave posted:

It's kind of weird to me that "continuity of consciousness" is supposed to be a big horror bugaboo in Eclipse Phase when people have been debating whether the "you" that you are right now is still the same "you" that you are after you go to sleep and wake up for who knows how long. EP doesn't do a whole lot to sell me on the idea that effective immortality is actually supposed to be this big moment of dawning existential horror.

Pretty sure it's the Lack that's meant to be disquieting - the idea that you have done things and experienced things that you have no memory of. It's bad enough if you went crazy and butchered the rest of the team, but you've lost everything since the last backup - that could include social events, important conversations with loved ones, etc.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2015 11:50

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

I think Panopticon goes into identity verification stuff in quite some detail? From what I recall there's a characteristic 'brainprint' that can be read from a surface scan of your ego that's reasonably difficult to fake and unique to you, based on your memories and personality. Other than that I remember that book had a load of ways identity can be checked and faked.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 08:50

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Man that new layout and art is pretty lovely too.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2017 18:48

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

Let's be fair, it's not like people getting tails caused the fall. Plenty of factions are placing restrictions on Titan-scale tech (while researching it in secret, of course). The jovians aren't just reacting to the Fall, they're using it as an excuse to roll back a whole raft of social changes their leadership was opposed to.

The core system has plenty of societies trying to pump the brakes and put technology back in the bottle - Jovians are going far further than that.

E: and, what counts as transhumanism? Medichines? Cosmetic surgery? Siri? Gender reassignment? Prosthetics curing genetic diseases? There isn't one big core tech that was a mistake.

Flavivirus fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Mar 25, 2018

# ¿ Mar 25, 2018 15:50

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 00:38

Flavivirus: Dec 14, 2011; The next stage of evolution.

ProfessorCirno posted:

It's becoming increasingly obvious certain people in this thread really have not read the books.

Also like, if your argument is "but I don't like transhumanism!" then cool, but also, wrong game for you then.

Agreed - if the books have a default antagonist it's the planetary consortium, not the jovians. They're the ones running OZMA, after all.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 08:43

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