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Young Freud posted:Yeah, it would be real easy to just push EP2 ten years forward of the first edition and the Autonomist League is in collapse because their techno-anarchist utopia got co-opted by factions that gamed their own system. The Hypercorps are putting infogees into Freeman biomorphs for easy labor and disposing them when they have become unprofitable. The Ultimates have become just another group of ExHumans, who are tearing across the habitats converting, torturing, or slaughtering what's left of transhumanity, because cruelty is now the point of their evolution. The only really safe place where you won't be transhumanly exploited in the solar system is the Jovian Republic, which is because they use the old-fashioned, bioconservative-sanctioned methods of oppression to ensure societal compliance. Add in that the only reason why both sides aren't fighting one another is that (A) half of Mars is literally ungovernable due to open revolt, (B) the Morningstar lot are this close to throwing in with the AA to get rid of the PC, (C) both sides are fighting tooth and nail to stop the Ultimates sizing their interstellar holdings and both the Martian and Iapetan TQZ have gone active and mean that all the concerned parties are squashing an exsurgency a week when it's quiet... Flavivirus posted:Jesus, I was a big fan of EP 1e but that section on trans issues is loving yikes. Even just the assertion that the non-trans population is totally a-ok with different gendered bodies is completely tone deaf. Not to mention the old faithful of immediately conflating trans issues and drag EP seems to have this special ability to be remarkably yikes about minorities yet goes mostly undetected. Lessee, we got Devotees, which is an entire stereotype racist voudou adventure with every trope from mind control to capering evil native medicine providers (literally grinding up cortical stacks) with the old racist urban legend about minority gangs killing folks as an initiation added on top  , we have literally giving a religious minority persecuted as devil worshippers exsurgent powers so they can play magic arab, as well as most likely pulling a chakotay with their myths, as I've done some searching and I've yet to see any mention of Ny’knikiin outside of EP  ; doesn't even look like any anglicized Kurdish I ever seen, although I am willing to admit I'm wrong here. I don't think I ever saw a asian origin hab that didn't have some degree of mob infiltration of the government either?Also, they used pansexuality for folks willing to gently caress uplifts. Ithle01 posted:EP has always been like a Silicon Valley nerd's techno-futurist ideal world and is about as well thought as most Silicon Valley bullshit.. Mixed with their idea of the apocalypse and their specific complex about superscience fueled  ; that core mix, and how badly it causes themes to  is one of the core issues that plagues the design of the universe and game.Is it just me, or do I get the feel that things went badly sideways during the EP 2.0 dev cycle? We know that there was some kind of significant breach of trust that had come out between Jack Graham and Rob Boyle around, estimating, a bit past the half-way mark. IIRC, he was a major setting guru and his departure took some material with him - IIRC, there was an early version of the sample character list that had Carter, a character of his that notably is missing him at release. I'm wondering if his departure was a major inflection point in the game's dev and caused some kind of major thrashing for a while.
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Aug 7, 2019 01:55
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Anil Dasharez0ne posted:Here I'm imagining Groverhaus walking around like Baba Yaga's hut and needing this in my life. Be pretty easy to track the trail of bits falling off... though you might want to stay clear, I don't wanna imagine Groverenchantments.
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Aug 8, 2019 17:18
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PurpleXVI posted:A couple of EP2 sidenotes before the next post: My feel that their dev cycle went sideways in a dramatic way is definitely.... maybe strengthening, some of these things can be seen when things don't go pear shaped, but when a major team member punches out, it's strongly suggestive . Also, I think they mooted the possibility of agnostic augs back in... 2018? StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 21:40
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Hostile V posted:Psionic powers are a result of one of the many strains of the Exsurgent Virus, the Watts-MacLeod Virus. It's more or less taking some of the Titans' capabilities and stripping them way the hell back for use in a clean(ish) morph and ego. Some Exsurgent Viruses will turn you into a constantly regenerating manchine dragging a trail of brain-harvesting nanomachines in your wake. Watts-MacLeod just gives you psychic powers that are cast from health and strain. You're still infected and nobody has any clue if it's a benign infection, especially because more mutated individuals can use more powerful variants on psi. Plus, every single member of the Lost generation is infected with it because somehow the virus ended up in the program. As a result psychic powers are distrusted for two reasons. First, who knows if you'll mutate and go berserk and cause another city to become a quarantine zone. Second, there's a nonzero chance you're a poorly designed science project with an unimaginably lovely childhood that tends to result in megalomania, depersonalization disorders, narcissism or some form of psychopathy and that makes people nervous too. It's also transmissible, so the latter isn't necessarily true, but people still talk and fear. At least in the original core book, they used TITAN hard/software for the simulation, the computer tech not really being good enough at accelerating such things. That is probably your vector of infection.
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Aug 12, 2019 14:14
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Ronwayne posted:Yeah, "Disposable" is a lot of the impression I get out of everything in EP. Even characters themselves are disposable, given how forks exist and there is literally nothing stopping you from pulling an AD&D style "Oh, Andy died? I'm his identical brother Randy. There's also the sisters Mandy, Sandy and Candy, so you better hope nothing happens to m-URK. Reminds me of some critiques of the concept of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism (as opposed to the meme), namely that it fails to jettison modern western consumer culture; fitting, as EP is the TT ambassador of the anarcho version of such. Also, I'm pretty sure that spacers would be the most frugal, stick up the rear end fuckers imaginable - space has no room for profligacy or irregularity; even with the tech of EP, the culture would take a long drat time to change; and that's before the fact that you can download The Beast off dodgy websites.
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Aug 13, 2019 18:20
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Ronwayne posted:"4chan, the nation state" was a concept that seemed funnier back in 2009, I agree. I guess it would be "funnier" if the space fash faction was a split off of the scum, and not GOP members that managed to make it to an escape ship and then mellow out slightly about catholicism. The Exsurgent virus basically kills any concept of the AA dead, as literally no one is gonna tolerate that kind of potential growth culture running around unchecked; both the PC and the TC would have brought AT LEAST the Scum to heel fairly quickly, if only after the first time this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDcELUCroDs happened to a swarm. Granted, I suspect the only reason the TC didn't is so the TC can use the rest of the AA as geopolitical pawn/useful idiot/distraction to offset the PC and keep them busy... which may kind of another example of things Not Being Thought through by the authors. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 18:34
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EthanSteele posted:I guess we're the only geniuses that see the horror of capitalism in the game where capitalism is explicitly said to be an existential threat to humanity. We're already living that horror show, so... well, kind of already numb to it.  (  )
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Aug 13, 2019 20:37
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Ronwayne posted:Granted, its a scum vessel, so there's a higher than average chance Doom guy/girl is aboard. Which is also a recurring conversation with my EP GMs. "NO, YOUR FURY DOES NOT NEED MORE MODS." pointing lady/sneering cat meme. That only works while a problem is small enough to be shot in the face; and it takes a lot of work to hit those things while they're that small. TBF, The Beast took over vaguely south of 565,000 metric tonnes of starship in less than a minute from probably a few kilos of infectious material at best, and 131,000 tonnes from what is at most a few grams of nanomachine (  ) , so it's a bit unfair to compare it.Overall, despite the Big E's predilection for vectoring up and down hierarchies, the anarchists are an extremely soft target - their bodymodding makes it very easy for exsurgents to assume comfortable forms while staying undetected, their often... outre... fads make excellent cultural cover for the subverted's often... odd... behaviors, or even vectors - called out in book as an entire swarm literally nearly got subverted by a multipart basilisk in the firewall book, and many live cheek to jowl, leading to quick spread (again, called out in universe) and I'm not even getting into how their multipartner, often open sexcapades are a perfect vector for a bionano/subtle nanoswarm version to spread wildly, though the mainstream society has the same weakness. I'm not sure how much damage a delayed action version of mindstealer, ala New Mumbai could do, just by that route. Frankly, societies that could survive that are going to be conformist, with heavy controls over bio, nano or computational tech, and willing to be vicious about any sign of trouble... Now, who fits that description perfectly? (frankly, the only bit I really like is the Exsurgent virus, as it's an interesting take on subversion entities. Granted, I am working toward epidemiology, so my standards are skewed) StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Aug 14, 2019 |
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Aug 14, 2019 00:30
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Young Freud posted:Furies are like the best thing about EP because they turn that whole "WH40K Space Marines are ALWAYS male" on its head, because the biomorphs are RAW as being female to emotionally/hormonely compensate for how physically powerful they are, in like a Dune's Fish Speaker way. I personally hated it, as it's pretty  . It's also a bit revealing about transhumanism; for all it's liberatory pretense, it's the most bioreductionist ideology around; it's not for nothing it's popular in the crowd.
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Aug 14, 2019 18:38
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Ronwayne posted:That, and the omnipresent, casual opportunities for mass mind rape, are part of what the make large chunks of the setting too toxic to want to play in, hence my preference for exoplanet focused stuff. At a certain point, the answer to "wHaT mAkEs YoU a PeRsOn?!?!?" is "gently caress it, I'm tired and everything is so nasty and lovely and mean that I don't care anymore." I could see a use for the setting in GURPS Infinite Worlds - some odd hosed up thing that both Homeline and Centrum or their analogs in some other universe jumping game - is there alternates to that? I'd love to see them, if there are - both came across that system - they call it Bostrom-1 or some  shite like that - and had a mutual after finding out what happened and came to a mutual agreement that this place Was Not To Be Touched for fear of the Big E or possibly worse, the natives getting access to parachronic tech and spreading everywhere.
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Aug 15, 2019 00:19
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Nessus posted:I think they both already act this way about Reich-5 (guess what that one is) and this weird bizarro one where there's like ubiquitous digital spying technology and some kind of neo-feudalism. They also get that way about Caliph but that's because Caliph is basically "the Islamic Golden Age never ended: it's 16XX and they have interstellar colonies. May Allah requite thee abundantly." One of those things that tells you what year the book was most decisively written before. I've got a vague curse that as soon as I see something, I can imagine a scenario for it. Having reread Infinite worlds, I think Bostrom-1 is a singularly hard world to operate in, as baseline humans stand out hard, only beaten by non-native enhanced humans. They mostly keep an eye on things with cheap as poo poo camera drones, switching over to whatever can be farted out with the few replicators they've stolen, as everyone was getting a bit twitchy about the lowtech camera drones that folks had started finding in orbit in various areas. The place has only one factor overcoming the danger that makes them keep any real interest, and that's that for whatever reason (TITAN assholery, probably) conveyors end up landing on Mars rather then Earth, which is a potentially very interesting source of knowledge about the underlying physics of parachronic travel. What Homeline doesn't know is that a few Centrum Shuttles have gone missing here, they having suspended their exploration operation slower then Homeline. Firewall has one of the shuttles, as well as custody of the braintapes of a few of the crew, and has it's Crows and Vectors poking both with sticks; the the thing was taken before self-destruct charges could be fired - the thing is damaged, but reparable. What keeps Firewall worrying is where the hell any other shuttles may have ended up, and what the hell else might be dropping in... LatwPIAT posted:I mean, on one hand a not entirely accurate treatment of biology and not making sense within the setting, but on the other hand, best soldiers in the setting are mostly female-bodied and also it grates the gently caress out of hardcore misogynists. While recreating a classic trope?  Frankly, it seems to be more of the nerdlinger thing for Hawt Warrior Womenz then any real subversion.
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Aug 15, 2019 02:57
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PurpleXVI posted:luv2read 200 pages of save-or-dies. No one's done Devotees - aka The One Worse Then Glory - yet either. Might be tempted to dibs it.
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Aug 16, 2019 21:57
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Night10194 posted:So it's like a dumber version of The Thing, got it. While EP is generally just loving stupid, there's a bit more to the Big E then that. Most Exsurgents aren't cronenburgs any more, that was a bit too unsubtle; the shock value had worn off, as it were - most can still pass as normal locals. They mostly hide, but have certain behavioral tells - various odd hobbies or other behavioral tics, though the general background radiation of headfucked weirdness that characterizes that shithole future tends to act as effective camo. quote:the suggested measures are 'kill and burn everyone and everything' but it doesnt really fit with the idea that there are a ton of sleepers all over the place? like the virus is insanely infectious through a bunch of different avenues, and there are sleepers doing secret virus terrorism around the place that nobody knows about, but also the entire setting isnt overrun. Well, to be fair, they do endorse the 'Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru' reading on the official website and in the name of the game itself: quote:An "eclipse phase" is the period between when a cell is infected by a virus and when the virus appears within the cell and transforms it. During this period, the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is. quote:Hahahahahahahah, loving Prometheans. loving Prometheans. gently caress the authors. It's classic x-risks/friendly AI subculture, as you'd find in groups like the Lifeboat Foundation: https://lifeboat.com/ex/aishield EP is largely a... proselytory? Is that a word? setting, that exists to push certain discourses in futurology - Firewall itself is descended from in-universe versions of groups like Lifeboat, MIRI and the IEET that run on that grift. EP seems to namedrop these concepts with mechanical precision. Also, that everyone hates Firewall is perfectly justified by the fact that they're clasping that clutch of vipers to their bosom - if and when the Big E finally gets into one - and it's specialized, it it's most basal form, toward taking things like them over - it will spread fast and they'll already have a disruption network ready and waiting for marching orders to pave the way for the next TITANomachy; I'd bet AT LEAST Ozma knows. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 19:47
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quote:Threat level - Ultraviolet It's not so much that's hard, I think, as the brain had some specific software and hardware design choices to explicitly make it more compatible with hiveminds, with no considerations given to conventional operation, and the software and hardware demands are significantly different - though preventing 'players from stealing a cool unstoppable tank robot body' may have been a specific in-universe design priority as well. You could still do it, you'd just need to bin the unconventional computers and put in something from an arachnoid or preferably a Fenrir,  which is essentially a PC usable version of this, with a more flexible war load and more conventional electronics setup but somewhat thinner skin, and can have multiple minds as a crew, without needing the melding. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 15:56
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Hostile V posted:In all seriousness you make a good point about meat cells being, uh, real and that's why currently the real work for quality of life improvements (and horrible unethical corporate decisions) can be found in biotech. Nature has already provided us with a solidly tested model of delivery and construction and since the dissemination of CRISPR technology and deeper analysis of DNA and genes, biotech has been making serious strides. We're nowhere near the transhumanist pipe dream of everyone (white cis dudes) being post-singularity powerhouses but stem cell experiments and gengineering are doing solid medical work these days. So why don't transhumanists really embrace biotech? Speaking as a bio nerd (and one that will work with bio for a living, albeit NOT genetic engineering), the biotech side of transhumanism is equally loving stupid and abusive of the science; just to name one particularly annoying thing CRISPR is hideously overhyped, and is only accurate by comparison to the predecessors - that Chinese professor that genetically engineered those two baby girls deserved whatever gawdawful thing the Chinese government did to him, because I would be very surprised if they made 50, and totally unsurprised if they didn't make 20. loving idiot breakdanced through their loving genomes, and that's before that the genotype is associated with an increased rate of death from the flu. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 02:51
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kommy5 posted:The current state of the art? Yeah... I would not care for some hack trying to stuff baby genomes into the CRISPR drawer. Accuracy of current technology aside (and the sheer complexity of human genomes. There's way more involved than just nucleotide base sequences.), there's also the fact that genes don't really work the way people think. There's not really a 'gay gene' or a 'smart gene' or a 'live longer' gene or 'have an elephant trunk' gene. Even something as seemingly simple as skin color relies on a number of intertwined genes and the resulting system they create that manages skin and its pigmentation. Genes don't make things happen like that. They're not computer code. They code the proteins that under the correct conditions assemble into complex molecular machinery that when permitted to operate (by an array of environmental and biological triggers and inhibitors) will take a place in larger, more complex systems that hopefully digest food into raw materials. Or, I dunno, let you play elfgames. Is it time for an Alpha Centauri quote? Yes, yes it is (it is always time), and it's something that the EP writers should read: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the last good transhumanist/singulatarian piece of fiction as it wasn't wrote by true believers posted:
I'm doubtful, personally, that genetic engineering will will ever get that accurate - it's one thing to piece together virii from bits brought off the deep web, those things have genome whose size in discrete genes can be counted on two hands, quite another to tinker with tetrapods. Also, words do not describe the sheer AM level loathing that the word 'biohacker' causes in me, as it aptly encapsulates the kind of silicon valley arrogance that transhumanism is made from. Imagine thinking you could be loving around with biochemistry or genes like it's a Raspberry Pi or other piece of techie shite like that. Imagine the arrogance. It's sheer  ; Those idiots who call themselves that regularly poison themselves, IIRC.Transhumanism, as a subculture today is pure  all the way down, and EP makes a good sample to jump off on and own it from.
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Aug 19, 2019 13:38
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Night10194 posted:Also that a lot of transhuman thinking is again, along the same contours as eugenics. 'There is a superior state that exists, and has more value, based on its power/intelligence/strength of 5 gorillas robot body' isn't that different from 'If the right people and only the right people are allowed to have children there will be a better humanity' because they both proceed from the idea that an increase in power is desirable rather than focusing on the idea that personhood itself is the undiminished value of a human being.  'dI'm an autistic enbie; that poo poo gives me mondo hives for exactly that reason, as I'm something of a amateur historian; the whole reason 'Aspergers'' existed as a separate diagnosis is to sort out the 'good ones' from the ones of us that got gassed; I read about the kind of future that the EP lot are  over and honestly... why do NTs want to put themselves in the same situation as folks like me?I'm also reminded of the attitudes that drained swamps and caused flooding problems or destroyed the Aral sea, but applied to our own biology; if we tampered with germlines, we could do a lot of damage to ourselves and it would be a while before it was apparent. Imagine being an anarcho-transhumanist or other 'left' transhumanist. Imagine looking at grifter bullshit and cover for the rich enhancing themselves or the the latest thing DARPA came up with to kick the poo poo out of dirt farmers with janky AKs and thinking there's something to salvage there. Edit: Do recall that transhumanism as a name came about when eugenics got too radioactive, do recall. Edit: Mors Rattus posted:I love Alpha Cent's quotes, you can piece together so much story and lore entirely from them. Also, I'd rather play a Clanner then a AA type; Clanners earn a lot of points for being honest about what the hell they're about. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 15:46
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PurpleXVI posted:
I can understand this as a holdover from when they were underground from pre-Fall goverments - OPSEC and all that jazz - but it strikes me as something of a problematic institutional relic nowadays; how the poo poo are you gonna get rid of Oversight trying to COINTELPRO you without being able to track egos? And that's before when you need to figure out who might have been exposed to some Exsurgent incident before they spread pestilence across half the AA. PurpleXVI posted:
This issue was apparent since the morph section - probably the best part of Transhuman from a player's perspective was this lovely beast:  Got your additional minerals right here The Daitya, nearly a tonne of future Bobcat goodness, with a statline just waiting to be turned into a  :The most useful official morph in the entire 1st ed game, likely posted:Enhancements: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Grip Pads, Hardened Skeleton, Industrial Armor, Mnemonic Augmentation, Pneumatic Limbs (Arms), Puppet Sock, Radar, 4 Weapon Mounts (Disassembly Tools; 2 fixed, 2 articulated), Wrist-Mounted Tools Most are anthropoid, so if you want to, you can give it a MG to use like a rifle, and sling a seeker on the back like an XCOM 2 MEC, or just load heavy guns unto the hardpoints, you can get one anywhere, so no matter what the problem is, chances are a heavy combat morph is available, and if you get the time you can load on some heavy armor and uprate the cyberbrain to be capable of neurachem and wired reflexes emulation, turning it into an absolute monster - to quote: Sava posted:Sava: You know what you won’t find on an average O’Neill cylinder or mining colony? A tank. But you will find a daitya, and for certain ops, this can be the next best thing—and they’re much easier to explain away. Great if you have a day or two to fab up some weapons and armor up the frame. What is more useful to the player characters? Some generic  or this beast? Now, which got in? The pleasure pod only warrants mention as a subvarient of the work pod, not stats!PurpleXVI posted:
Again, I am strongly suspecting some kind of major shitstorm went down within Posthuman as Jack Graham left, and that major parts ended up reedited in a hurry as a result, at least. He is already known to have taken some writing with him... StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 20:05
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It's worth noting that the ship hull rules will be obsolete in A While anyway, as a space combat mini-sourcebook is in the early planning stages: https://eclipsephase.com/project-status Though if my suspicion of internal problems at Posthuman is accurate, I'd not count on them coming out; as if you didn't need any more reasons to avoid the next EP KS.
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Aug 20, 2019 21:13
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PurpleXVI posted:Every time we play EP2 or even look at it everything we do raises another question. The book says that all bots and machines come with their own ALI, but doesn't list which. The cheapest bot costs 1GP, the simplest ALI costs 2GP. If every bot already has a simple ALI rolled into the price, then the simplest ALI has no reason to exist since you'd never buy one on its own. If, on the other hand, it means you need to always factor in the cost of an ALI alongside, then any even vaguely independent bot is riotously expensive(it literally triples the price of the cheapest scouting bots). Either situation is something you could play with, but the game never says which it is. The latter strikes me as more likely, vis a vis bots, looking at business software- the upside is, once you have a licence number squirreled away, you don't have to pay it again, tho.... unless you need to cover your tracks  The latter depends on the licencing plan for your Eidolon, I suspect. That none of this is made clear, however, is yet another sin on that lovely game. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Aug 22, 2019 |
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Aug 22, 2019 23:53
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Ithle01 posted:I think I can explain the Gut Eater or at least the particular strain of scientific ignorance that led to it. It's possible one of the authors skimmed a blurb on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, misunderstood it, then tried to Star Trek techno-babble up an alien monster. Anyway, the Headhunter is the best of these, which are otherwise pretty weak to be honest, except maybe the Hollow. Personally, I think the trope of AIs harvesting human minds is a bit worn out in media, but I could get some great use out of these in my space fantasy game as an emergency medical evac robot that's outlived its function.  'Prion' could be referring to PRNP, the protein that gets deformed in those diseases, which is found everywhere, but is most common in the nervous system; for whatever reason, the Gut Eater either needs these things (maybe it's the equivalent of vitamin C or whatever for it) or likes the taste. quote:Even in the GM section in the EP1 book where they went: "okay all the other potential TITAN sources we wrote about are actually bullshit it was an Evil Alien Virus." All that Evil Alien Virus does is make TITANs go insane, so they're just fishmalk robot gods. They're not collecting human egos for anything except to be evil with. Like... it's not even a SHODAN situation where they've been kicked sideways into a non-human morality/ethics system that has some, well, logic to it. They're just TITANS, they're craaaaaaaaaazy. Eh.... having read it (and X-risks) myself, I don't quite agree. Viral actors are often erratic, and sometimes vanish up their own rear end, but they tend to execute specific agendas - all the TITANs specialized into specific roles when they launched their attack - AI hunters, nanotech specialists, generals (one of these got knocked out) and even a cluster that specialized in white collar crime and finance/asset fuckery to build up their assets. They're not that... crazy. It's also possible different exsurgent strains may go at cross-purposes when working inside the same host, depending on how much agency they have - Glory, the one from the adventure of the same name, came off the knocked out general TITAN; what a virus that did... that... was doing on that thing has several different explanations. Overall, EP suffers from being TOO ambiguous/lazy about giving outlines of these things to the GM - I understand their reasoning, but it doesn't really work. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Aug 25, 2019 |
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Aug 24, 2019 20:35
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Ronwayne posted:RE: TITAN stuff in EP, one of the reasons I don't like them is there's no other way to sensibly interact with it other than burn it down and burn yourself down (until a It's worth noting that, sooner or later, someone has to poke TITAN, exsurgent and exhuman hardware with a stick, as there's a lot of innovations to be mined from them, if you're foolhardy enough, or simply so you know how to interact with it without needing to burn things down... or at the very least, how hot a fire is needed; it's also generally not that bad - most exsurgent specimens can be handled safely with waldoes and the like, most aren't infectious after transformation, with exceptions. Bear in mind, apparently their current gen radar stealth was mined from dead Headhunters. quote:Guess I'm going to join a violent bioconservative terrorist group than. Honestly, outside of their treatment of uplifts, the only problem I have with the Jovian's policy is that they're not in the process of building sleeperships and then noping out of Sol before the Exhumans (this includes the hyperelites as well as groups like the increasingly inhuman parts of the Titanian Commonwealth's intel establishment) take over, the TITANs come back, or the Exsurgent virus gets into the Prometheans and starts the Titanomachy all over again. Place is well beyond saving, and the only practical option is to leave for the furthest practical system or rogue planetoid/asteroid system with no known gates and not look back, not EVER looking back, even when the screaming starts or ends. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Aug 25, 2019 |
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Aug 25, 2019 14:11
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writer/GM decrees that fire actually makes it worse.). That's the only story you can tell with it other than a HOLY GOD THE EXPERIMENT IS OUT OF CONTROL WHO COULD HAVE FORSEEN THIS for people that try to do anything but burn it down.
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PurpleXVI posted:"NANOSTUFF AND RESLEEVING LETS US BE WANKTASTICALLY WOKE." While being completely fuckawful at minority issues in the process - their section on ethnic minorities is very telling - to quote a friend of mine: quote:How rich, to claim to be "antifascist" while presenting a very white and very male masturbatory isekai-like futurology setting that glibly dismisses ethnic and cultural issues by saying they basically don't exist in the future, only social strata of white-signaling people that may put on an Asian-looking "sheath" because that's most kawaii and sugoi. loving weebs. He overstates it somewhat, but only somewhat. Also, frankly, as a lefty, I find these nanotech futures actively useless to actively problematic as they jam up the discourse with stupid technowank that says we can eat our cake and gently caress it too, rather then looking hard at our own consumption habits. Also, I have wonder if their FOSS philosophy may have had a unintended negative effect on smaller TTRPG. kommy5 posted:Um, do you really want to bring out Bundle Theory here? Resleeving into different morphs, kind of by definition, completely destroys Bundle Theory. Because you're assigning wildly different physical forms, experiences, sensory perception, and even brain matter into the mix with each resleeving and that would certainly destroy any concept of that person being the same as the previous iterations. And they cover that explicitly in the book; I'm the child of a hardware engineer and a hardware nerd myself, and I always give the stink eye to folks to who underestimate the effect of what hardware can have with software, particularly as an emulation hobbyist. The hardware environment matters, and I have no patience for the transporter problem, as it smacks of folks who have spent too drat long on software and not the real world. Also, the idea that octomorphs can be sleeved into and out of by anyone is probably one of the biggest biology screamers in the whole drat setting. juggalo baby coffin posted:they keep accidentally making the jovians be right about everything There's a reason why my same friend thought that the sample Jovian in the original core book was the best character of the lot, and certainly the most badass. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Aug 25, 2019 |
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Aug 25, 2019 17:41
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Joe Slowboat posted:A fun monster they ought to steal from Rajaniemi is the All-Defector, an intelligence with a theory of mind that is more efficient and accurate than actually thinking, so it can precisely simulate your behavior with less effort and computation than you took to think and act in the first place. It always wins prisoner dilemma situations by convincing the opponent to cooperate then betraying them, every time, and is implied to not be fully sentient. Except there's a simple way to beat such things - don't communicate with it and just  the drat thing as soon as you've detected it. It's trivial to beat, if you know it exists. There is always a gameplan to beat things like that, even if it's just 'flip the loving table'.Sounds like a novel exsurgent only slight, TBH - or just a good Psi, as you don't need to emulate when you can read.
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Aug 25, 2019 17:56
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Joe Slowboat posted:The All-D actually almost never does that, because its focus is weird and specific. It's much more like a weird mimic monster than a perfect mastermind; once you actually get near it and talking to it you're kind of screwed, but it has no sense of a larger-scale world because that's not how it thinks - everything is a prisoner's dilemma to it, and a major part of the plot is the Defector taking over a faction/posthuman city then immediately throwing everything into chaos by applying its ideas to the universe and starting a pointless war. If Firewall or the like knew about things like that.... in a setting with ubiquitous brain scanning, that thing would be hard to camouflage, if a copy of the thing's ego could be procured. Even if it's an Async, it would be an odd one, that could be detected. Something would be detectably off about it's neurology, in a distinctive way.
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Aug 25, 2019 18:17
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Joe Slowboat posted:Again, I don't think the All-Defector would eat the setting. It would certainly be dangerous if it got into the hierarchy of a hypercorp (it's much much better at infiltrating/taking over hierarchies than networks) and if it was backed up with a TITAN Avatar set of skills it could probably be very dangerous, but ultimately the point is more the unease factor of 'you can be simulated much more efficiently than you think.' It just so happens that there is a TITAN that was specialized in modelling specific human beings, the computing cluster known under the Firewall reporting name 'Akonus' Akonus TITAN profile posted:Akonus seems to be unique in that it was also built If there's anything in EP that could do that, it would be an Akonus fetch, I wager. Indeed, it may have already done so. Fundamentally, a single monster manual was a bad design choice for EP 1.0. They should have taken a leaf out of FF's book and had a specific sourcebook for each major threat, ala the threats from within, outside and beyond Dark Heresy books, so some real detail could be given to the TITANS, the exsurgents, Exhumans and more 'mundane' threats like Space Dracula. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Aug 25, 2019 |
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Aug 25, 2019 19:11
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Continuity of consciousness and the transporter discourse is bullshit that I absolutely hate and I hate EP even more for making me have to see it again, and I'm mad that Star Trek didn't just punt folks through subspace or something so as to avoid that gong show.
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Aug 25, 2019 22:47
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juggalo baby coffin posted:no it means you are literally dead. there's just a copy of you walking around, you have ceased to be. Brain copying is roughly sub-FTL level plausibility, so it's angels on pins as far as I'm concerned. Edit: This is one of the biggest loving issues I have with transhumanist fiction, that it constantly wastes time with bullshit questions like that and finding some bullshit answer to them.
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Aug 25, 2019 23:04
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The Jovians are consistently correct about everything, it's true.
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Aug 25, 2019 23:24
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Could Purple please post something new? Transporter chat is reminding me of why I hate transporter chat. Edit: Nessus posted:The teleporting thing isn't even the issue! The issue is that they can make a copy and the original is still around. (One begins to suspect the real reason for icing Earth in the story is to avoid this issue, or at least shove it in a back closet.) Hell there's even a bunch of stuff about making smaller duplicates of your brain and later reunifying with them, like Multiple Man. My thoughts as well; it also let them get rid of anyone inconvenient to their tract, such as the large number of nonwhite leftists who would want basically goddamn zero to do with their nerd eugenics bullshit. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Aug 26, 2019 |
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Aug 26, 2019 00:11
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LatwPIAT posted:You seem really unreasonably angry that EP has taken a stance on an open philosophical debate that isn't your stance on the open philosophical debate. (Even moreso, it's particularly perplexing that you thought Altered Carbon did it better, because it rushes just as quickly through the debate and presents a setting where, basically, either you believe that resleeving and backups are a continuation of the same life, or you're a Catholic bioconservative who doesn't. I wouldn't even call this a neutral presentation, since the novel and series both present decisions made on the assumption that resleeved backups are the same person as their origin as meaningful.) It's a loving stupid philosophical debate, with a fairly clear answer to folks whose brains haven't been warped by excess computer touching. I'm this close to buying plat for the express purpose of reporting everyone who started this debacle so there's some chance the thread can get back on topic.
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Aug 26, 2019 02:26
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Libertad! posted:I concur; instead of ego-souls we should be debating the realism of the Reputation Economy or how Extropia hasn't yet become a Neo-Feudal Asteroid Hellscape. That is fundamentally and unironically more interesting, yes.
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Aug 26, 2019 03:11
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kommy5 posted:Yeah. While it sounds like a good rule to help shut down any nasty stuff at a table, the writers of EP sound like they regard the X-card as a "Get Out of Controversy Free Card" instead. That seems especially the case after seeing what they consider "funny." And the evil space sex monsters with evil space STDs. And the 'just imagine Asia' when giving instructions on how to make a dystopia. I think it a good time to remember that I don't think any asian origin hab in the original game didn't have at least some mob influence in the government.
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Aug 26, 2019 14:07
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Night10194 posted:So by the canon explanation, Firewall is reliant on the Space Elder Gods helping them against the Space Outer Gods who wanted to Space Kill Them but Space Not Really? Depending on how much the other intelligence agencies know about what Firewall is beholden to, it's also why no one outside of Fleet Intel trusts them, and even then it's a distant relationship, mainly because if they take a shot at Ming, they had better not miss, given his connections in both their government and Firewall; for how useful having AI gods may be, it's not damned worth it with the Exsurgent virus running about, and Firewall is just asking to be co-opted and end up "a bunch of dense idiots who got scammed by the TITANs they claimed to be holding at bay." Might be an interesting game, playing as Fleet Intel agents trying to get enough actionable intel to roll up the various Titanian Commonweath notables who are in-bed with Firewall and get past both blockage by the government and possibly dodging Firewall interference and later, eraser teams if they panic, late game. PurpleXVI posted:A civilization with the power to do massive stellar engineering apparently decided that throwing a plague at us that made Robot Cthulhus with magic powers was a more reliable way to destroy us than just marching over and vaporizing/conquering Earth quote:Economics, which you could basically shorten to Crime, i.e. someone disrupting supply massively to leave people starving or freezing or whatever. It feels... a lot below what Firewall should be dealing with, especially since self-sufficiency levels, at least in terms of survival basics, are really high in Sol. Given that in universe, the world got burned down by climate change as it's happening now and was cracked enough by literal Doomsday economics for a space virus to get it's hands into them and wrench it right open, I can see how that would be of deep interest. quote:You know who had a similar scenario? Earthsiege did. Earthsiege and Starsiege. They didn't need any loving space magic or inscrutability, Prometheus was a rational mind traumatized by close contact with humans(when it helped its creator transfer his consciousness into an immortal machine brain, Prometheus, curious about its father, decided to peek at his thought processes and was horrified and disgusted by the human Id.), humanity had multiple run-ins with it that didn't need any wizardry to parse or resolve. And just because humanity survived the first battles, it didn't end Prometheus as a threat because Prometheus was canny enough to run away to fight another day. The destruction even resulted in the same basically-unrecognizable human society that EP did. Why can't the TITANs just be the same way? I guess it's not spooky enough. Another Starsiege Fan  !I think this can be explained from the ideological milieu that EP emerged from; those of you from the Big Yud thread may recall the AIs whose thought patterns are as above us as we are above a dog? Same thought process here. Of course the end of the world has to be brought about by gods of our own creation, anything else is 'not thinking though the implications of emerging technologies.'
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Aug 27, 2019 19:46
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Night10194 posted:loving agreed. These kinds of mechanics remove reasons to engage with stuff beyond 'I read no books, close my eyes, and keep swinging away'. They take away reasons to engage with and explore the forces you're dealing with. They also end up making all the people who poke them in hopes of understanding them/fighting them/finding some way to use them that isn't insane and destructive end up just looking like idiots. To work, they need to be somewhat nerfed - you'll get hosed if you're not careful, but if you can figure out what you're dealing with, and have a suitable pair of tongs, it's only moderately hard - gently caress, even internet Creepypasta writers get this, as more recent SCP writing shows... and even the later Firewall book acknowledged this first ed - turn off wireless connectivity, wear a suit and if Basilisks are a risk, keep any video feed at 720p; old style computers too dumb to host an exsurgent process are also useful. Add in ways to inoculate against the virus or treatments - there's a pyschosurgical methodology for cutting out infections in both Firewall and this book, but it's too drat hard and dangerous to be useful in game. The Exsurgent methodology also makes sense in a low-FTL milieu - it's hard to hump invasion fleets interstellar, and I suspect the pandora gates had to be built on site. It makes far more sense to use a Von Neumann approach, and construct the needed armies on sight, like in Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander; it just needs a supermind to take over so it can bootstrap from existing plans. How that squares with that the Factors... well, the factors are a mess anyway, so big whoop. There's also subtle hints that the Exsurgent virus might be how the ETI ITSELF gets around - there's talk about how Haunting victims are literally being overwritten by an alien ego; it would also explain the weird thing looking over Async shoulders or how many non-monster exsurgents change their morphs. Why they don't lean into that, and play along with the themes of their game is beyond me. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Aug 27, 2019 |
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Aug 27, 2019 20:36
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, I might, if the poison in the traps was going to turn the rat's laptop into a rampaging demigod AI that was going to spread nano-garbage all over my front yard and try to gnaw my ankles. There's a reason why I like the 'war remnants' theory - paraphrasing it for the thread, the exact purpose of the Exsurgent Virus is creating rampaging demigods to spread nano-turds across the other guy's front lawn and gnaw his ankles, because gently caress him, that's why - and really works with their attempt at lovecraft; EP literally stepped on Cthulu's own landmine.
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Aug 27, 2019 20:48
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PurpleXVI posted:The problem is that the TITANs as insane, rather than rational actors with motivations, perceptions and ideals different from our own, means that they're just "unfathomable weirdness that does things." There's no theme, no guiding logic. You may as well just roll a die on a random table or make them fishmalk demigods. We're not the target; we're only important as we're a growth medium near the Other Guy; a few mad natives in a war between gods don't mean all that much, or so they'd think anyway, or is a problem that can be handled when the Other Guy has been. The Culture thing also makes sense, possibly as a side thing, as they were vacuuming up minds to do who knows what. They did have a means to save affected egos, but.. yeah, they need inoculations of some kind against the virus to reduce the number of save or die rolls; there's even plot reasons to keep them rare possibly - look at what happened with antibiotic resistance, and then consider that the thing is significantly intelligent. Thought expecting good writing out of a propaganda pamphlet like EP essentially is, is certainly a bit much.
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Aug 27, 2019 21:02
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Joe Slowboat posted:Personally I like the combination of 'the universe is a death trap' and 'because of resleeving a character being dead or dying doesn't end them' - the setting should be full of ambient murder (or at least the part where the PCs get into fights) precisely to push the strengths of a posthuman setting, the unique events and occurrences. Yuds are only one of the flavors of technophile future cultist, though I note that there's surprisingly little space between the various groups in practice - just name one example, the 'respectable' Bostrom is known to cite Yud, and vice versa - and EP literally has MIRI, albiet a thinly disguised version of what they want to be as a precursor to Firewall; EP also works down a list of tropes favored by a whole list of such in fan-service fashion. They're both into X-threat bullshit, but they're a bit more omnivorous, as it were. They're also about the whole technoutopianism thing, to the detriment of both, but as needed to try and push the other side of their subculture. They also have some connections to various groups, and literally pitched EP as a way to get tabletop folx talking transhumanism to the IEET.
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Aug 29, 2019 02:32
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Joe Slowboat posted:...did they get funding for that? Because 'our version of this worldview and SF setting concept is literally a horrorzone full of horror machines that make horror' is not a great pitch. Not to my knowledge - bear in mind, they're trying to hock their worldview by making a game that shows off what they want folks to think will happen if they ain't listened to. Edit: Pitched wasn't the right word for what I was looking for, bloody nerves - showed it off to them is more accurate. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 03:22
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Mors Rattus posted:Hunters exist! They are absolutely not mechanically suited to fighting Hosts, which is probably why Hosts don't show up in their books. How would a Host-hunting hunter campaign work out that isn't " TPK", anyhow? (That includes TPK by installment)
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Aug 29, 2019 21:31
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