Balance wrote:Eclipse Phase is very cool, and I should mention that it's CC licensed with free downloads of the PDFs available.

However, it's firmly int he transhumanist subgenre and may be a bit hard to 'grok' at first. Major themes are that uploading and backing up a human mind is very common, which causes a lot of societal upheavals.

Death is someone else's problem. Get killed, and you can be resleeved from your stack (an implanted cortical stack that backs up your mind) with almost no loss of continuity, or from long-term backups (that may be weeks or months out of date, with attendant problems of memory/skill loss).

Resource scarcity is not gone, but is going away. Common goods, up to and including complex weapons and even robotic bodies, are pretty cheap and affordable. Find someoone with a nanotech assembler and they can print you a new set of gear, if they've got time and some feed stock of base elements. Biological bodies are one of the main items that are actually scarce... A lot of people escaped from Earth during an apocalypse a decade back as 'informorphs' (digital uploads) and are still trying to earn a body.

It's a great setting and the rules, while a bit complex, have some neat 'stuff' to support things like resleeving and reputation economies. (In many places in the setting, money is an obsolete concept.. Your reputation is used as a form of currency to ask for and receive favors.)

It's a neat game, and the books are beautiful, but it's a concept that takes a while to get into. I'd strongly recommend looking at it and checking out the 'Resources' page. See if you've checked out some of the books, movies, and anime suggested (The book Altered Carbon and the anime Ghost in the Shell: SAC are two I've found are good examples of the setting) to see if it's what you're into.

The FFG are cool, too, if you want something that is more 'light' sci-fi space opera with a 40k feel.

Balance wrote:

 Casey's Law wrote:
Not to hijack the thread but:

Balance, are all of the pdf's for EP available in hard copy? And if so, is there somewhere i can buy them all? Maybe bundled together.

I believe their only PDF-only stuff is some add-ons (They sell 'Hack Packs' with artwork to mess with and diagrams GMs might want to sue for scenarios) and maybe a few works that they can't see the sales on (I think their is a NPC file, for example, that has not been published in dead tree). Otherwise, everything should be in print.

I have the hardcover main book and got it for a great price from The War Store, but that might not make sense for you as you appear to be in the UK. In general the main book is a huge intro to the setting and covers a lot of ground. There's brief info on every planet in the solar system and some of the countless habitats that humanity has fled to as the Earth is no longer viable. The Earth was wrecked by roge AIs that incorporated xenotechnololy/ubertech/Cthulhu so certain tech is considered dangerous.

The follow up books are good, but much more specialized: There's 'Sunward' which includes the inner system (Mercury to Mars or so) which tends to be more corporate-controlled and 'traditional' in economy. (Do work, make money. Spend money. Guys who managed to get lucky investing/inheriting money control 90% of the money.)

'Rimward' covers the outer worlds. As a rule, these are more 'new economy' than the inner, and more anarchist/ultra-libertarian/etc. in outlook. Think a big O'Neil-cylinder space station that is run by a co-op that provides basic needs to all residents with extra credit handed out for doing work for the community. And it works.

(Side note: I love the EP setting, but I expect a few people would get annoyed at reading how some of the cultures int he setting that are most successful are also communist, socialist, and/or areligious. If the idea that these ideas might work given different pressures on the society, this might not be the game for you. I'm skeptical, but admit it'd be cool if some of the wacky ideas could be made workable.)

Rimward also has some info on the 'Jovian Junta' a nation-state centered around Jupiter that is known to be radically bio-conservative. As in, they don't even believe in the virtual immortality and always-on net connections that are pretty much 'free' to most characters in the game. (I think the developers have pointed out that, long term, this is a losing proposition. Even breeding like rabbits, they're heavily outnumbered, and the rest of the solar system has experience and better tech. However, they could be used as bad guys or just deluded patsies to be pitied.

Panopticon may turn into the first volume of several 'catch all' books. The volume that is out has two major topics: Security in the EP setting, and Uplifts. Security is 'interesting' as most cultures have settled on a model where privacy is pretty much a thing of the past due to the needs of living in a spinning tin can, but it's a fair system in that the same rules apply to everyone. Uplifts are animals given human intelligence. There are only a few major species, and they can have some interesting drawbacks (like being corporate owned and dependent on implants). The main book has a couple like Ne-Hominids, Neo-Octopi and Neo-Avians (big birds) but this book adds a few more to the mix, as well as some oddballs like resurrected and uplifted neanderthals. Uplifts are described in a very clinical and gritty way: They aren't just 'people that look like animals.'

The last of the main books I've read from this setting is 'Gatecrashers'. This book centers around exploring the 'Pandora Gates' that have been found around the system. Think 'Stargate' for this, but a bit more open. Gates are not 100% reliable, have varying levels of control and protection, and offer players a chance to do a lot of 'alien world exploration' adventures. This is a pretty good book with a lot of thought into Gatecrashing gear and such.

Eclipse Phase uses d100 rolls for most tasks. Character Creation is relatively involved: I highly recommend downloading the Spreadsheet someone has made, as it does all the math and such. Using the Spreadsheet has another advantage as well: when a character is 'backed up' it's easy to make a copy of the spreadsheet that can be reverted to if the character is killed and restored from backup.

From memory, character creation involves choosing a background (Is the character a refugee from Earth, a descendant of a long-time space-faring family, or something else?) and a Faction (Factions include the Argonauts (pro-science), Extropian (HUmanity is the old paradigm, go beyond), and several others). Factions should be taken as a relatively 'weak' concept, more a tendency than anything else. Points are spent to set a few stats. One unique thing is that these stats stay with the character (The 'Ego') even if the character changes bodies in play. So a character with +5 to Reflexes is going to have an above average Reflexes in any body. It's a little weird, but it seems to work in practice. Charcaters also choose three motivations: making progress towards these help refills the 'Moxie' resource, which is used to help smooth out bad die rolls and such.

Points are also spent on several reputation pools. These represent different groups including corporate, organized grime, and celebrities. These can be used to buy favors from the group. A good comparison is the reputation system some MMOs use, but there's a bit more give & take here: If you do a favor for the mob, you might get +2 points to the appropriate reputation pool (You're known as someone that can be trusted and that will help out with things). A character can then spend those reputation points for favors (Need a new gun in a hire? Use the linked Networking skill to see if you can find a contact in the underworld, and you might be able to trade 5 points of rep for the new gun you really, really need). The pools are broad (corporate, crime, media, etc.) so even if you've been dealing with the Mafia in on place, word gets out and you can still try to hit up the Triads as long as there's not active warfare between the two.The rules have some intentional room fro GM intervention: the GM has space to say "OK, they can get you the guns you need, but they need more than rep. What else can you throw in to the deal?" or outright refuse requests, as in most RPGs.

After spending basic rep, the character has 1,000 'Free points' which is where things do get complicated. These points can be used to buy more rep or increase stats, as well as buying skills, gear, and the haracter's starting morph. In fact, 700 if the points must be spent on skills!

The selection of starting morph (body) options can be fun to flip through. The main book includes a large number and the other books generally add a few more. Biological options range from baseline humans to the 'Remade' which are so heavily modified and rebuilt from human that they tend to unnerve people. (A Remade is somehow creepier than the neo-avian giant raven...) Synths, or robots, include bare-bones cheaply made forms up to floating disk-tank things. A third categoy of 'pods' is reserved for biological but not completely normal forms and includes both basic worker pods (a force-grown human clone with a cybernetic brain) and an up-scaled coconut crab designed for work in vacuum and on security due to it's nearly impenetrable shell.

Gear includes a range of guns and armor as well as a lot of stuff people expect in 'cyberpunk' games such as implants to give a character better vision, claws, etc.

'Post-cyberpunk' is a term that is sometimes used for games like Eclipse Phase: Cyberpunk tends to be heavly based around thoguhts and fears coming from the 80s and 90s, so the transhumanist ideals are more inspired by the 2000s.

A note on morphs: The morphs as described in the book are somewhat generic. Think "Sports Car" instead of "Porsche 911." A GM can rule that a specific morph is unavailable, or the only available model has some selection of advantages/disadvantages applied. (It's used, and may have a mild drug addiction and some distinctive tattoos.) This kind of encouragement means this is probably not a good system for GMs that like to actively oppose their players. GMs are encouraged to customize weapons if they wish as well, but saying that XYZ brand has a slight boost to armor piercing at so & so cost increase, etc. it's a general sign that they're expecting players to want to have fun and buy-in to the game, not just show up and expect everything to be spoon-fed to them.

 dementedwombat wrote:
It's true. I get the feeling that the game designers included Jovians as the "designated villains" so that people running the game could always have a "gurenteed bad guy" who isn't as completely terrible and overwhelming as the TITANS. Actually making them the the...well, not good guys, but at least sympathetic characters, might give the players some interesting expectations of the game that won't translate well into other sessions.

 dementedwombat wrote:

That said, as a 21st century human, I think my first impulse in a world like this would be to feel sympathetic to them too. I mean, if you look to your left and right, then see the tin man from The Wizard of Oz and a walking octopus... you might just want to live somewhere that is vaguely "normal", even if it is oppressive and backwards compared to everywhere else. I guess I'll just have to rely on my players to role-play through it after I give them a bit of background info on how their characters would feel about various things.

 dementedwombat wrote:

That said...an interesting idea is coming to mind. It's not really a thing that is supposed to happen by FAW ("fluff as written", heh, I think I just made that up) but what if, for their first game, the players start as pre-fall humans who were frozen in stasis either on Earth or in a sleeper ship, and just got woken up? That way they could just role-play their natural reactions as they get familiar with the system. Could be a good way to ease people into the system without saying "here, you're character is an infomorph. You're riding inside this other character who is a synthetic tank. If any of you die I'll let you pick another body and we'll roll with it."