| 1 | [[quoteright:290:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/EPcorebook_4273.jpg]] |
| 2 | |
| 3 | ->''Your mind is software. Program it.\ |
| 4 | Your body is a shell. Change it.\ |
| 5 | Death is a disease. Cure it.\ |
| 6 | Extinction is approaching. '''Fight it.''''' |
| 7 | |
| 8 | Humanity stood on the cusp of a new age, with accelerated technological growth converging toward a singularity point, promising an undreamt-of future. Despite the ecopocalypse and social upheavals on Earth, humanity had conquered the solar system and partially terraformed UsefulNotes/{{Mars}}. Advancements in biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science transformed our lives. Everyone was wirelessly networked with the world around them, [=AIs=] processed vast amounts of information, and nano-fabrication enables people to print complex devices on the molecular level at home. Biotechnology allowed people to genefix, enhance, and clone their bodies, while others pursued body modifications to adapt to new environments or make themselves into something no longer quite human. People's minds and memories could be digitized, uploaded, transferred over long distances, and downloaded into new bodies (biological or synthetic). Death had been defeated...for those who can afford it. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | From within, disaster struck. Transhumanity reaped the rewards of its arrogance when conflict spiked between the battered nations of Earth, already weakened by decades of climate catastrophes and other disruptive factors. Rampant netwars soon exploded into physical conflicts with spiraling body counts. In the midst of these aggressions, a group of military [=AIs=] known as [=TITANs=] quietly achieved full sentience and autonomy, and rapidly began exponentially incrementing their own intellectual growth. The [=AIs=] spawned by this hard-takeoff singularity quickly turned against transhumanity, enveloping the system in unprecedented levels of violence, disaster, and warfare. What began as a whirlwind of conflict between political factions, revolutionaries, and hypercorps soon escalated into a struggle between man and machine. |
| 11 | |
| 12 | In just a few years, transhumanity was nearly wiped out with nuclear strikes, biowarfare plagues, destructive nanoswarms, infowar attacks, mass uploads, and other unexplained singularity events, ripping the superpowers of old to pieces. Our planetary home—Earth—was transformed into a toxic and strange hellhole, while many major habitats were left frozen sarcophagi in the vacuum of space. Just as quickly as they came, the [=TITANs=] disappeared, taking millions of uploaded minds with them, leaving behind a network of wormhole gateways. Known as Pandora Gates, these poorly-understood devices allow instantaneous teleportation to distant star systems...often one-way and/or fatal. Though only a handful of Pandora Gates are known to exist—each highly contested—the foolish, brave, curious, and desperate are already risking certain death to enter and explore what lies beyond. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | In the aftermath of the Fall, transhumanity lives on, divided into a patchwork of hypercorp combines, survivalist stations, transhuman faction species, and city-state habitats. Under the oppressive police states of immortal inner-system oligarchies, advanced technologies remain highly restricted, and refugee infomorphs are held in virtual slavery or re-sleeved in robotic bodies and forced into indentured labor. In the outer system, rebel transhuman scientists and techno-anarchists struggle to maintain a new society-from each according to their imagination and to each according to their need. On the fringes, in obscure crevices of the system, lurk networked tribes of political extremists, religious fanatics, criminal entrepreneurs, and bizarre posthumans - among other, stranger, and more alien things... |
| 15 | |
| 16 | Though most claim the Fall was carefully orchestrated by the out-of-control [=TITANs=], others whisper that the driving powers behind the wars—both AI and transhuman—were infected by a mutating virus with multiple infection vectors—biological, information, nano—dubbed the Exsurgent virus. Whatever its source, this virus has been known to sometimes transform its victims into something unexplainable...something monstrous and reality-altering. Whatever the truth, the remnants of the [=TITANs=] and this virus were left to the desolated ruins or driven to the edges of the system, where they remain hidden away in dark corners, quietly waiting to infect the minds of the scavengers and explorers who find them... |
| 17 | |
| 18 | This game is brought to you by Posthuman Studios. The three editors/writers/founders buy into some of the post-classical economic thinking seen in the setting; books are published under the Creative Commons license, and their website's forum is used as a hive mind to collect ideas and features to be used in the book. |
| 19 | |
| 20 | So far, they have released the following: |
| 21 | * Eclipse Phase: The core rulebook, with LoadsAndLoadsOfRules. |
| 22 | * Sunward: A sourcebook concerning the inner solar system and the politics of the Planetary Consortium. |
| 23 | * Gatecrashing: A sourcebook which covers the use of the [[PortalNetwork Pandora Gates]], sending expeditions beyond gates, and many exoplanet descriptions. |
| 24 | * Panopticon: A sourcebook combining the topics of [[{{SurveillanceAsThePlotDemands}} surveillance]], [[{{UpliftedAnimal}} uplifts]], and [[{{SpaceStation}} space habitats]]. |
| 25 | * Rimward: A sourcebook concerning the outer solar system and its autonomist polities, as well as the Jovian Republic, a [[NoTranshumanismAllowed bioconservative]] faction. |
| 26 | * Transhuman: A player's guide containing alternate character creation rules and many new options for characters, including advice on how to play. |
| 27 | * Firewall: A sourcebook filled with details and information about Firewall, the BenevolentConspiracy dedicated to ensuring transhumanity's survival. |
| 28 | * ''After the Fall'': A fiction anthology containing the short stories from the rulebooks and a number of new stories. |
| 29 | * X-Risks: A sourcebook that details many of the existential threats that Firewall fights against, TITAN or otherwise. |
| 30 | * Argonauts: A mini-sourcebook that details the titular autonomist-scientist faction. |
| 31 | * Transhumanity's Fate: A “rules-light” adaptation of the game based on the ''UsefulNotes/{{Fate}} Core'' system. |
| 32 | |
| 33 | These products have been announced but not released: |
| 34 | * An as-yet-untitled sourcebook [[http://eclipsephase.com/comment/55259#comment-55259 about crime in the transhuman future]], now delayed to be released as a sourcebook for the second edition. |
| 35 | * Eclipse Phase, Second Edition: The core rulebook with streamlined character creation, a revamp of the re-sleeving system, and a condensed version of the first edition's aptitude set and skill chart. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | The original idea for the setting was as the far future of the setting for ''TabletopGame/{{Earthdawn}}'' and ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}''; however, the creators chose to take it in a different direction, focusing on transhumanism rather than magic. Compare ''TabletopGame/{{Equinox}}'', which also began from the idea of being the future of those games. |
| 38 | |
| 39 | Also compare ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}} TabletopGame/TranshumanSpace'', another SpaceOpera RPG focused on Transhumanism. |
| 40 | |
| 41 | ---- |
| 42 | !!This TabletopRPG provides examples of: |
| 43 | |
| 44 | * AbsentAliens: {{Downplayed}}, but still pretty strongly in effect. |
| 45 | ** The Factors are the only aliens to be seen face to face. They're essentially highly evolved slime mold, having technology just years in advance of transhumanity--if the rumors of them having FTL travel turn out to be false--and just handful of ships doing trading and diplomatic missions throughout the solar system. However, their given name comes from the that they claim to be the self-appointed representatives of other species out there, though they are not giving out any details, and the fact they can be very deceptive when they choose to be, just opens up more questions than putting this fully into doubt. That said, they're still quite enigmatic and made first contact just a few years after the Fall. Surely just a coincidence... |
| 46 | ** Then there's also the [[spoiler:[=ETI=] and their Exsurgent virus]], some truly alien and horrifying concepts, to be sure, but still absent but for their tools. What drives them and what's the higher goal of their actions is largely unknown (as in it's for the gamemaster to decide). |
| 47 | ** The creatures that built the Pandora gates, if it weren't the [=TITANs=] or the above. Considering the number of them and how old many of them apparently are, the possibility that it was the [=TITANs=] who built them is looking vanishingly small. [[spoiler: The [=TITANs=] did indeed build them, or at least the ones in the Solar System, though the knowledge how to do it either came from their higher understanding of the universe, or was carried over to them from the Exsurgent virus.]] |
| 48 | ** The Iktomi are/were an arachnoid race that was active about 10,000 years ago and had settlements on several planets transhumanity has access to, but so far the Iktomi appear to [[NothingIsScarier have all disappeared without a trace...]] |
| 49 | ** Apparent alien contact has been made on the world of Giza, where alien artifacts, the strange "black box" communication devices, have instant communications to other terminals across the galaxy, or even the universe. People aren't entirely sure if it's an AI driven device used in some sort of con, or if the aliens who are willing to use them to trade technology and information are trading in safe technologies, marking Giza as a potential risk. [[spoiler: The black boxes, if they are indeed connecting to other aliens, apparently function as a galactic chat service, rife with aliens who are quite nasty about [[{{Squick}} wanting to cyber]] or just engaging in [[ForumSpeak G.I.F.T]]. The one tryout of the xenotech they gave the human gatecrashers gave the skeptics very good justification to be wary of any designs that came out of those boxes.]] |
| 50 | ** The Moravecians are a species that have apparently decided to go into a fully digital existence, with the world of Moravec having an extensive and hardy server network to support an entire virtual universe that's been active for thousands of years. Transhumanity has had some success in penetrating and entering this virtual network, but by almost every indication it's entirely empty... |
| 51 | ** The Amphibs of Droplet are another ancient species. They had disappeared from the surface of their home world about a million years ago rather suddenly after the discovery of the Droplet gate. Very little remains of them, so it's hard to tell how advanced they became, but they appear to have achieved a level of technology similar to Transhumanity but for space travel. More concerning, another building/construct called the Toadstool exists on Droplet, having been made of a highly advanced, hardened, and self-repairing material, and it appears to predate the Amphibs themselves by a long time. |
| 52 | * AfterTheEnd: 10 years after, to be exact. |
| 53 | * AIIsACrapshoot: |
| 54 | ** The [=TITANs=]. [[spoiler: Actually a subversion. They weren't hostile so much as they were ''curious'', but that curiosity led them to the exsurgent virus, and...]] |
| 55 | ** And, on the other side of the coin [[spoiler: The Prometheans.]] |
| 56 | ** It's mentioned that playable [=AIs=] are engineered without the limitless potential of the early designs, to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. That doesn't stop a few of them from trying to upgrade to seed AI status; and the Singularity Seekers are a philosophy that tries to accomplish this, most often with human infomorphs. |
| 57 | * AlienGeometries: |
| 58 | ** The Pandora Gates. No one knows how they work, but that doesn't stop the various corporations from [[TemptingFate constantly sending people in.]] It is stated that the bizarre geometries of said gates might cause dizziness or nausea in people, and that some of the gates' borders are encased with normal structures to keep it looking safe. |
| 59 | ** The [=TITANs=] have a thing for fractals. Their structures almost universally employ them and several of their nanoviri and nanoswarms will twist anything they come into contact with into them. Exactly why they love fractals so much remains a mystery. |
| 60 | * AlienKudzu: The blue forest on the exoplanet Bluewood is a relatively harmless example -- as long as nobody pisses it off, that is. |
| 61 | * TheAlliance: The Autonomist Alliance is a pact between numerous Anarchist, Extropian, and Scum habitats, and the Titanian Commonwealth to fend off encroachment into the Outer System by the Planetary Consortium. |
| 62 | * AllPlanetsAreEarthLike: Averted; Earth-like planets are very rare. |
| 63 | * AlternativeCalendar: |
| 64 | ** All dates are given in terms of BF (Before the Fall) and AF (After the Fall), in order to maintain the setting as being TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture without delving into specifics. |
| 65 | ** Also, given the different rotational and revolutionary speeds of planets, calendars are different on a month-by-month basis. A detailed description of Mars' 668-day year is given. |
| 66 | ** Based on [[InfoDrop the orbital positions of the planets in the core book]] the year is somewhere in the 2150-90 range. |
| 67 | ** The ''Gatecrashing'' sourcebook also includes a conversation involving a human born in late 1983 who never resleeved who was alive during The Fall. |
| 68 | * TheAlternet: The Mesh is a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network wireless mesh network]] that employs post-Singularity technology in order to make routers unnecessary for anything less than interplanetary communication. |
| 69 | * AlwaysChaoticEvil: |
| 70 | ** The Ny'knikiin, a species of force-evolved ''mantis shrimp'' shoved in pod morphs and unleashed on transhumanity. They were raised to sapience by the [=TITANs,=] but notably they aren't exsurgents - their universal sadism and worship of their makers is all of their own free will. |
| 71 | ** Exhuman Predators - transhumans in carnivorous, heavily-genemodded bodies to, well, be predators - run the gamut from misanthropic terrorists, transhumans who've had psycho-surgery (willingly or not) to rip out anything that isn't animalistic instinct or implant new ones, {{Social Darwinist}}s who wish to use the "lesser beings" as a food source, slaves, or both, all the way down to sociopathic spoiled kids looking for a weekend thrill by literally [[KillThePoor eating the poor.]] |
| 72 | * AmazonBrigade: Furies are genetically engineered {{supersoldiers}} (well, bodies for supersoldiers, anyway). It was discovered that their brains being designed for combat made them all overly aggressive and wild, so to balance these tendencies they are only produced as biologically female. (Later supplements moved away from Furies being limited to one gender.) |
| 73 | * AnarchyIsChaos: Zigzagged across the setting as a whole, and more-or-less averted. |
| 74 | ** Anarcho-collectivists of most stripes avert this. They don't have laws, but the consensus of the community generally leads to functional rules of behavior. Being an antisocial dick will get your rep trashed, and on anarcho-collectivist habitats, getting your rep trashed can mean exile ''without'' your body, or permanent incarceration in low-access mesh. |
| 75 | ** Scum, by contrast, embrace this mentality. No rules, total freedom, roving across the entire solar system, and if you're not one of the community, you'd best go well-armed. Among themselves, disputes are pretty much either solved by letting it go and trashing each other's rep, or by bloodshed. Oddly, some Scum subfactions have only one real social stigma which enforces consent in regards to sexuality, violence, etc. |
| 76 | ** Anarcho-capitalists and most other groups under the "Extropian" banner (except mutualists, who internally function more like collectivists) have their own rules. You aren't protected by community, you're protected by a payoff to a security company and a private court, and tourists without such a court have no rights that they can't defend[[note]]Yes, there are gangs who prey on idiots who think they can go it alone[[/note]], but in general, Extropian habs are at least as safe as scum barges so long as you watch your step. Reciprocity and reputation keep Extropia out of this trope: if a court or security company doesn't recognize another court's judgment (to a greater or lesser extent), they'll get their rep trashed, and ''their'' judgments won't be respected. |
| 77 | ** Sidestepped by the Titanians. While the Commonwealth is part of the Autonomist Alliance, they do have a government, including a strong and well organized military, and one of the better developed intelligence apparatuses in the setting. They have a Direct Democratic government, with the largest and most powerful governing body being the Plurality, a voting body comprised of every adult citizen of the age of majority. The day to day affairs of the Commonwealth are run by more traditionally-structured government institutions, the leadership of which have relatively short terms and are regularly voted on by the Plurality. |
| 78 | ** At one point, this is discussed with regard to how Firewall acts on Locus[[note]]the largest and most important of the anarchist habs[[/note]]. Locus' most respected militia leader is aware of Firewall and considers them a group of dangerous vigilantes. The author of the section that mentions her explains that that might seem hypocritical, but in fact she holds legitimate authority based on the consensus of the community. Firewall doesn't, so they're as criminal on Locus as they are in the inner system. |
| 79 | ** According to inner-system Planetary Consortium propaganda, of course, this trope is played completely straight, and autonomists are all ravening hordes of barbarians. |
| 80 | * AncientConspiracy: Millions (possibly billions) of years old, in regards to who or what created [[spoiler: the Exsurgent virus and if the [=TITANs=] really went berserk all by themselves]]. |
| 81 | * AndIMustScream: All sorts of chilling stuff can happen to you if your ego (ie, your consciousness) ends up in the wrong hands. For example... |
| 82 | ** The Ultimates are rumored to download indentured infomorphs into deaf, visually limited flats with no AR implants.[[note]]That may not seem bad, but remember this is a society where all but the poorest people have full mesh access essentially from birth, and where most genetic defects have been eliminated -- these deficiencies are considered ''crippling'' by the standards of transhumanity.[[/note]] |
| 83 | ** There's a gangster on Titan who is rumored to have a tank full of cyberbrained koi hosting the egos of her enemies. |
| 84 | ** Similarly, certain exhuman factions are known to stick the egos of prisoners in "leftover specials"--twisted bodies made out of intentionally mismatched biological bits, such as bodies made solely of certain organs or limbs--and left to roam the complex. More often than not, they're driven insane by the experience and serve as cheap guard dogs. |
| 85 | ** The Nine Lives Syndicate trucks in stolen egos, a modern slave trade that horrifies even other criminal groups. |
| 86 | ** TITAN-manufactured, head-sized drones called Headhunters are specifically programmed to harvest the heads and cortical stacks of any humans they find and return them to the nearest TITAN-controlled uploading center. Nobody knows what happens to the egos stored therein, but it being the [=TITANs=], it can't be good. |
| 87 | ** The Brancusi strain of the exsurgent virus transforms the victims into immobile abstract pieces of art, and serve as bait for more victims. |
| 88 | ** Flesh Parties are exsurgent-infected who are liquefied and splattered across an area as a means of area denial...still alive and fully aware of what's being done to their bodies, along with any damage they take from others trying to move through the area. |
| 89 | * ArchaicWeaponForAnAdvancedAge: The rajput elites of the Ultimates train in using archaic analog weapons straight out of the Twentieth Century, with purely mechanical rifles, artillery and even aircraft. This is because they're optimized to fight [[DeusEstMachina TITANs]]; the rajput assume that anything that can be hacked ''will'' be hacked, so they don't bring along any hackable gear. |
| 90 | * ArtificialHuman: In flavours ranging from "AI in a human body" to "uplifted squid". |
| 91 | * ArrogantKungFuGuy: Stereotypical ultimates ooze this attitude. They believe that only ultimates are fit to live, contemptuously look down on "genetrash," and they're also some of the hardest badasses in the Solar System. Exhuman predators as well, who think they're apex predators and use that excuse to kill and eat everyone else. |
| 92 | * AsskickingLeadsToLeadership: Among Ultimates, you're not going to get any serious rep without being a RenaissanceMan, with nearly exhuman levels of competence in your specialty and broad competence in several areas. And even if you're not a fighter by specialty, the Ultimates are a warrior society, so you'd better be able to throw down. |
| 93 | * AsteroidMiners: With most of them mining in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter. |
| 94 | * AttackDrone: That rips off your head and uploads your mind into a computer. And of course, drone jamming is a viable strategy for a technically proficient character that doesn't want to jump into the fray directly. |
| 95 | * AugmentedReality: So prevalent that going without it, even for a short time, can make people think you've gone crazy. |
| 96 | * AuthorTract: The authors are not very subtle about their anarchistic leanings, though they try to give all factions a fair shake. Highlights include a note in X-Risks from an anarchist declaring the {{Mega Corp}}s more dangerous than the [=TITANs=] themselves, to the Jovian Republic, whose primary feature is a resistance to things like resleeving or nanotech, being idiot fascists living in filth (before later additions made them much more smart about tech). |
| 97 | ** In the Second Edition, the development team announced they were removing the Ultimates - who are commonly stereotyped as elitist {{Social Darwinist}} mercenaries - from the primary list of suggested player factions. Between publishing the first and second edition core rulebooks, the devs came to see them as a proto-fascist faction. As a consequence, playing as Ultimates is likely to require some homebrew. |
| 98 | * {{Autodoc}}: Healing vats serve this purpose, which allow for both healing and the installation of various modifications. |
| 99 | * AutoKitchen: Specialized nanofabricators called "makers". Cheap ones only extrude nutrient gels and ration bars, while the more expensive kind produce stuff that may be recognized as "food". |
| 100 | ** Surprisingly averted amongst the hyperelite- having access to real, non-fabricated food is considered a major luxury, due to the space and resource requirements for raising real crops and cattle. |
| 101 | * BadassNormal: The Jovians aspire to this, and those agents who haven't resleeved or upgraded their bodies definitely qualify: baseline humans who go up against immortal TranshumanAliens with just their native skills and a trusty sidearm. Splatbooks note Jovian soldiers are known hardasses, due to very good training not magically gifted to them from brainhacking. |
| 102 | * BananaRepublic: The Jovian Republic is essentially a Banana Republic [-[[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE]]-], and is consistently portrayed as the least sympathetic of the major factions. Most people refer to it as the "Jovian Junta" instead of its official title. It is, after all, the most conservative parts of America (especially its military) coexisting with right-wing remnants of Central and South American countries, a chunk of which were dictatorships by the time of the Fall. Part of the reason it's hated, though, is not its oppressive policies, but rather its [[ScienceIsBad bioconservative political stance.]] They fear that transhumanity has essentially destroyed what it means to be human, and as such they've outlawed all but the most basic enhancements except for medical or emergency purposes. |
| 103 | * BanOnAi: The Jovian Republic (Jupiter) bans all Artificial General Intelligences because of The Fall, the RobotWar that destroyed Earth and 90% of transhumanity. The Planetary Consortium (Mars, mostly) and Lunar-Lagrange Alliance (near-Earth space) tend to treat them almost like property under a lot of restrictions, while the Autonomists (Saturn, Asteroids, etc.) treat them equally. Even so, all but the most extreme Singularitarians are scared of Seed AI, which are capable of unlimited self-improvement and were the primary cause of The Fall. |
| 104 | * BenevolentAI: Muses, personal [=AIs=] designed to help their owners navigate day-to-day life in a world drowning in information. Most [=AGIs=] are this too, along with [[spoiler:the Prometheans]]. |
| 105 | * BenevolentConspiracy: Firewall, their extreme methods aside. Their sole goal is the survival of transhumanity. |
| 106 | * BigBrotherIsWatching: ''Everybody'' who has time and interest to do so can watch someone else, at least outside the Jovian Junta, thanks to the advances in technology and the cultural shifts about privacy resulting in surveillance from the bottom ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance sousveillance]]). |
| 107 | * BiotechIsBetter: Played with, many of the most powerful morphs are synthetic, and cheaper (in credits, but not build points) than equally strong biomorphs, and also usually get the benefit of not dying when thrown into space. But biomorphs are easier for transhuman Egos to adjust to (the lack of sleep or even hunger is noted to be very disconcerting for first-time sleevers), are immune to cyberwarefare attacks (provided they're not using a cyberbrain in a biomorph), and many polities discriminate against synthmorphs. |
| 108 | * BlackAndGrayMorality: Even Firewall, the people who are protecting transhumanity, sometimes kill thousands of people at once to let everyone else live. Borders on BlueAndOrangeMorality in that 'will you sacrifice X human lives to save Y' becomes an even more complex question than it normally is in a setting where death is often temporary. |
| 109 | * BlueAndOrangeMorality: |
| 110 | ** The Factors and their goals are almost incomprehensible to transhumanity. Certain groups of Transhumanity are also starting to go this way - notably, the Exhumans, and the more radical factions of Brinkers and Ultimates. |
| 111 | ** [[spoiler: The ETI and the Exsurgent virus, whose agendas are completely unknown and alien to us humans, but so far seem quite evil. May even dip into OmniscientMoralityLicense territory, depending on how the GM interprets their motives.]] |
| 112 | ** Bioconservatives and transhumanity have inherently incompatible value systems. Bioconservatives consider resleeved humans to be soulless replicants, while transhumans who have abandoned this concept view the body itself as expensive and necessary property rather than a part of the self. |
| 113 | * BodyBackupDrive: |
| 114 | ** Borrows the cortical stack concept from the ''Literature/TakeshiKovacs'' series. Unlike that series, creating backup copies is a simple and straightforward process, making externally stored backups a part of most insurance policies, instead of being a way to ensure immortality that would be exclusive to the wealthy. |
| 115 | ** The same technology is used in more ways that, while it would be astonishing in real life, are mundane to the citizens of the Eclipse Phase setting. The most common is simple creating a digital "clone" called a fork. Forks can be broadcasted across the solar system to allow for a real time conversation with somebody, and then be broadcasted back and reintegrate itself and its memories with the original. |
| 116 | ** A [[MundaneUtility more prosaic]] use of the same technology is creating a fork midconversation, have it look up something, and reintegrate, so that the original seamlessly has a reference or a witty retort without breaking up a conversation. |
| 117 | ** Forks can also get sleeved and treated as an independent entity from that point forward. This tends to be at least frowned upon in most settlements, and punishable by death or forced reintegration in others. The reasons for that are: it complicates existence with two copies of one person running around; forks have a disconcerting tendency to diverge in personality from the original after a time; and there simply aren't enough sleeves to go around, and hogging more than one is a drain on one of the few resources that remains scarce. |
| 118 | * BodyHorror: What some strains of the Exsurgent virus do to you. MindRape is what ''all'' strains of the Exsurgent virus do to you. |
| 119 | * BodySurf: Transferring a consciousness from one body to another is common and relatively safe, not to mention being the most efficient method of traveling between habitats and planets. Most habitats have a sleeve rental service for this exact purpose. |
| 120 | * BrainComputerInterface: The Basic Mesh Inserts that come standard with most morphs. |
| 121 | * BrainMonster: One of the X-Risk morphs commonly used by Exhumans, especially hostile ones, is a giant, fanged brain mounted on spider-like mechanical legs - essentially an amped-up, evil version of Mentons and Hyperbrights, with 80% of the body being neural matter that helps the brain think faster and better than normal morphs. |
| 122 | * BrainUploading: Near-omnipresent in the setting. Leads to [[StayingAlive functional immortality]] when combined with {{Body Surf}}ing. |
| 123 | * BrownNote: Basilisk hacks, the Exsurgent virus variant that uses sensory input to infect its victims. How it works isn't known, but it's thought that it works on the framework of the mind in ways transhumanity doesn't understand, but either the [=ETI=] or Titans did. |
| 124 | * CannotTellALie: Subverted with Factors-they are ''physically'' incapable of concentrating enough on giving a "verbal" message of scents and releasing scents in a way that goes explicitly against what they know...but not only do they have a concept of ''[[HalfTruth deception]]'', they are biologically predisposed to [[ConsummateLiar being deceptive all the time]], even to close friends who aren't part of the MindHive-they evolved from ambush predators, for whom tricking prey is a matter of survival. |
| 125 | * CargoCult: [[LivingShip MeatHab]] has a small group of worshippers inhabiting it. It's taking the opportunity to play with their minds. |
| 126 | * CassandraTruth: It's explained in several books that, while the specifics of the Fall included multiple unknown unknowns that made everything worse, people ''knew'' the potential for the rise of the [=TITANs=]. Those people were ignored, discredited, co-opted or silenced because the truth was inconvenient. |
| 127 | * CastFromSanity: In the UsefulNotes/{{Fate}} conversion asyncs can boost their [[PsychicPowers psi-sleights]] by risking mental stress, which can lead to mental disorders as consequences. In contrast to the original EP rules, where asyncs risk their [[CastFromHitPoints hit points]] and go permanently insane in the process of gaining their [[WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity powers]]. |
| 128 | * CasualInterplanetaryTravel: PlayedWith. |
| 129 | ** Egocasting is the preferred method of travel for both cost and time efficiency, though you would need to rent a sleeve from a body bank or have one you already own in the habitat or settlement you were going to. |
| 130 | ** Travelling the slow way is used by the less affluent, pirates, or by long haul intrasystem traders, and still a necessity for society. |
| 131 | ** Travelling by Pandora Gate is as casual as stepping over a threshold to travel to any place in the galaxy that has a connecting location, but problems with the gates and hostile worlds remain a persistent problems for gatecrashers exploring unestablished locations. |
| 132 | * CentrifugalGravity: The only source of "ArtificialGravity" in the setting. Most of the larger habitats are [[RingworldPlanet toruses]] or [=O'Neill=] cylinders. Though in many habitats and ships they don't even bother with gravity since basic biomods counteract the degenerative effects of micrograv. |
| 133 | * ChromeChampion: The Smart Skin nanofluid armor turns its user into this, as it covers the body in a layer of {{Nanomachines}} resembling liquid mercury. |
| 134 | * ClarkesThirdLaw: Transhuman and even most alien tech is advanced, but doesn't quite come close. However, [=TITAN=] tech, the Exsurgents, and the Pandora Gates do. |
| 135 | * CleanupCrew [=/=] MemoryWipingCrew: Firewall, Ozma, the Government Agencies and various others have these on call to cover-up various undesirable events. Firewall Cleaners are, unsurprisingly, called in to purge ''anyone'' in a given radius. |
| 136 | * CleverCrows: Ravens and crows are among the avian species that were [[UpliftedAnimal uplifted]], though they share the same "neo-avian" stats as the more common parrots. |
| 137 | * ColorCodedSpeech: The fiction in the rulebooks uses colored text in brackets to represent characters using ElectronicTelepathy. Each character has their own color. |
| 138 | * CommonTongue: Notably averted. Most of the pre-gen characters are bi- or even trilingual, it's very possible to run a party who have no languages in common and rely on mesh software to translate. |
| 139 | * CoolGate: The Pandora Gates. |
| 140 | * CorporateWarfare: The Consortium-Autonomist war, supposedly started over copyright infringement. |
| 141 | * CorruptCorporateExecutive: Less common than you might think, but they do exist. There's always plenty of hypercorp executives out to make a fast buck, and the Planetary Consortium in particular is designed as a vehicle for empowering corporate wealth concentration at the expense of democracy and economic freedom. Extropia appears less corrupt, due to not having the mechanisms of coercive authority that make corruption easier. And the most corrupt figures in the setting are the oligarchs, who wouldn't dirty their hands with something so pedestrian as running a company - they have ''people'' for that. |
| 142 | * CorruptedData: It's mentioned that something like this can theoretically happen to saved backups. It gets a lot more corrupt when [[TheVirus the Exsurgent virus]] gets involved. |
| 143 | * TheCorruption: The Exsurgent virus. A virus that can infect, warp, and enslave human bodies is bad enough. But its ability to mutate between radically different strains, and the physics-defying nature of being both a physical ''and'' digitally transmitted virus, capable of corrupting computer system, including digital backups is part of what makes the Exsurgent Virus so scary. |
| 144 | * CosmicHorrorStory [[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE!]]: More optimistic than others, but really, that isn't saying much. There's a LovecraftLite aspect: ''Extinction is approaching.'' '''''Fight it.''''' |
| 145 | * CrazyPrepared: Firewall has to plan for everything. Known knowns, known unknowns, and as many unknown unknowns as their brains can cook up; they have an entire ongoing project specifically for coming up with and preparing for outside-context problems - such as the universe spontaneously collapsing. |
| 146 | * CreepyChild: |
| 147 | ** The Lost Generation is an entire ''group'' of Creepy Children, who were created in accelerated growth conditions to try dealing with the massive population die-off that occurred after the Fall. Things went ''very'' wrong, though, and every single one that survived came out with severe psychological problems. [[spoiler: They were also all infected with the Watts-[=McCleod=] strain of the Exsurgent virus, meaning they all have psychic powers.]] |
| 148 | ** Neotenics, morphs that are basically genemodded human children stopped from hitting puberty, and the people who use them regularly are considered, at best, weird and uncanny, and at worst, are associated with manchildren and pedophiles. The Neotenic in the opening prologue to the core book is considered creepy and off-putting by the protagonist. |
| 149 | * CultColony: |
| 150 | ** A number of habitats, both of the "religious retreat from the start" variety and the "developed into a cult of personality" variety. |
| 151 | ** [=MeatHab=] has attracted a cult of worshipers who live inside it. The intelligence running the Meat is having fun messing with them by undermining their leader. |
| 152 | * DeathIsCheap: {{Downplayed|Trope}}. Thanks to mental uploading, personality backups, and cortical stacks, most people are able to simply "resleeve" if their body is killed. However, there are costs involved (both mental/spiritual and economic), and with so many indentured infomorphs waiting to be resleeved, bodies are a moderately scarce and valuable commodity. |
| 153 | * DeathIsNotPermanent: A fundamental conceit of the setting. |
| 154 | * DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist: Mentally, some egos are very resistant to death-induced trauma, and there are some who frequently die and resleeve so much that they are nicknamed as "Phoenixes". |
| 155 | * DeathWorld: |
| 156 | ** [[EarthThatWas Earth]]. After the Fall, Earth is mostly deserts and ash soaked in nuclear winter and radiation. And it's populated by robots, nanoplagues, and for lack of a better term, monsters that the [=TITANs=] left behind. While not quite dead, Earth belongs to the [=TITANs=] leftovers, and most of them are content to simply survive or build strange and incomprehensible things for their own inscrutable reasons. Many people are still willing to risk their lives [[FateWorseThanDeath or worse]] trying to scavenge from it. |
| 157 | ** Droplet: Inhabited by six-meter-high crabs. Unsurprisingly, the colonists are required to carry weapons at all times. |
| 158 | ** Echo IV: Known for its aggressive megafauna. |
| 159 | ** Nott: A frozen ice ball, which has ''something'' on it killing people in large numbers. |
| 160 | ** Solemn: Has a bacteria that eats metal, which is a major problem considering how many transhumans are partially or fully synthetic. |
| 161 | ** Tanaka: Inhabited by ambulatory pseudo-fungi that attack anyone who comes through the gate. |
| 162 | * DigitalAvatar: Forks and Infomorphs, mainly. Infomorphs are slightly more important, since, they are an original individual in the form of raw data, and most Forks are often a mentally cut-down copy of an original. |
| 163 | * DigitalPiracyIsOkay: Both the opinion of the writers and the Autonomists in universe. Individual Autonomist colonies tend to have a problem with their own members knocking off their own designs, but they expect that their stuff will be pirated within a few months by other people. |
| 164 | * DigitalPiracyIsEvil: The hypercorps and Jupiter take a very hard line against copyright infringement, since independent and open-source fabrication would destroy the society that they're built on. |
| 165 | * DirtyCommies: The Novo Carajas Popular Socialista are an example of straight-up twentieth-century Latin American revolutionary communism. They're currently part of the Autonomist Alliance, but their leader is currently operating under emergency powers while they transition to the New Economy. Other autonomists are just a wee bit skeptical. |
| 166 | * DirectLineToTheAuthor: The majority of the fluff is presented through the various in-universe reports, presentations, briefings, debriefings, interrogations and such, mostly from the Autonomist[=/=]Firewall perspective. |
| 167 | * DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: The section on "Petals" -- a form of multimedia drug made possible via nanomachines -- pokes fun at both various forms of gamer fanboy and the MoralGuardians who think video games are evil. |
| 168 | * DomedHometown: Most habs, especially on the moon, Venus, and Mars, where terraforming isn't complete or feasible. |
| 169 | * TheDreaded: Transhumanity pretty much lives in constant fear of TITAN's returning. And for a good reason. |
| 170 | * DysonSphere: Olaf, accessible through the Pandora Gate network, is a Dyson Sphere presumably built around a red dwarf, with a diameter of about 2 million km. |
| 171 | * EarthThatWas[=/=]TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt: |
| 172 | ** Also known as "The Fall". The Earth was completely decimated 10 years before the start of the setting, leaving killsats, nanobot swarms and head-hunting bugs to greet anyone who is brave (or stupid, or flat-out insane) enough to go back. About 10% of humanity were off world or managed to evacuate before the [=TITANs=] simply disappeared. Many think they went underground for their own purposes, or started infighting and stopped the violence when they realized they were evenly matched and started a long cold war. The consensus of those in the know is that they may have built their own Pandora Gate and left, leaving their weapons and minions behind. |
| 173 | ** A school of thought among some ecologists and old "nationalists" want to reclaim Earth, though doing so would be impossible in transhumanity's current state, and the fear of the possibility of reawakening the Titans would effectively split the system if it were tried. |
| 174 | ** That all said, humanity isn't completely off Earth. There are still secret expeditions that bypass the killsats and infiltrate down to the surface for incredibly valuable pre-Fall relics, or other clandestine operations. There are confirmed settlements of subverted transhumans and exsurgents who oddly don't live in peace, and rumored settlements of surviving humans residing in the remote parts of the world, or underwater or underground, and rumors of entire vaults of survivors in cold storage. There is at least one secret reclamator base, likely set down there for observation and recon purposes. |
| 175 | * EasySexChange: Even discounting resleeving in a male or female body, you can use a healing vat to do it (and about a day is sunk into the procedure), or you can get an implant which allows you to change sex at will (and though this takes about a week, you're conscious and unhindered for the process). Androgyny and hermaphrodism are options in both cases. Note that ''gender'' identity tends to be less mutable, and that people generally identify as male, female, or neuter regardless of what sexual organs they're wearing at the moment. Pleasure pods are made to be as mutable as quickly and easily as possible, for sexual purposes, though the fluff states some brinkers use them to encourage gender identity fluidity. Gender identity can also be flipped, either reversed or turned on an off, by psychosurgery. This takes longer than swapping bodies, but not by that much (a week or two versus a day or two). If you want to start messing around with forks, it's even easier than that, and that's before you get into things like using an XP to temporarily experience another mental identity, borrowing memories with psionics, the impersonation skill (which temporarily reshapes all your mental autonomic reactions), etc. Basically, there's almost no physical or mental aspect of 'identity' that can't be altered completely with a bit of elbow grease and some gear rolls. Sex is just the tip of the comet's tail. |
| 176 | * ElectronicTelepathy: A standard feature of mesh inserts. Usually indicated in the fiction by colored text in brackets. |
| 177 | * ElephantInTheLivingRoom: |
| 178 | ** A lot of factions, the Planetary Consortium chief among them, wants everybody to forget that Earth even exists for [[LetNoCrisisGoToWaste various reasons]]. |
| 179 | ** The Continuity of Consciousness[=/=]Identity is the one issue the majority of transhumanity prefers not to think about, especially those who were restored from backup at least once, which is not that uncommon after the Fall. The only people who bring it up get shunned as luddites and/or Jovians. |
| 180 | ** Speaking of Earth, the Interdiction is claimed by no actor despite the massive amount of resources it would take to set up. Most people are content to just assume the Consortium is responsible, but there is no evidence supporting that. |
| 181 | ** Among transhumanity, there are essentially two opinions: Be a reclaimer, or implicitly block Earth out of your collective cultural identity. It's worth noting that it's only been ''ten years'' since the Fall, but on an autonomist hab you could believe it's been generations. |
| 182 | * EldritchAbomination: [[spoiler: The ETI. ''Possibly''. Whether or not they/it are this or something more like SufficientlyAdvancedAliens is up to the gamemaster.]] |
| 183 | * EmpathyPet: Somewhere between this and ImaginaryFriend, muses are AI programs granted to virtually all children as an assistant intended to stay with them for the rest of their lives. Their personalities change to best suit their owner's desires, and they do many menial tasks for them...all while existing inside their owner's mesh inserts. |
| 184 | * EnemyMine: Firewall, as a group, really doesn't like the Ultimates (even if they have some Ultimate members at the lower end), and the Ultimates have little fondness for ''anyone'' outside their own clique. But Firewall recognizes the Ultimates' incredible ability in combat against x-risks, and a sentinel team who happens to be pointed at the same target as an Ultimate unit are advised to take all the help they can get. |
| 185 | * EnemyWithin: How true Sleeper exsurgents (as opposed to the seemingly benign [=Watts-MacLeod=] strain that gives PsychicPowers but doesn't remove free will) manifest-they always know ''something's'' wrong, but can't fight the alien intelligence that drives them, not frequently (though a character in X-Risks pulls a HeroicSacrifice and takes his world-ending strain with him once Firewall corners him). |
| 186 | * EvenEvilHasStandards: |
| 187 | ** Even other criminal cartels despise the ego-stealing Nine Lives cartel. |
| 188 | ** Even the worst of the Ultimates despise Exhumans. |
| 189 | * EverybodySmokes: In big-league hypercorp circles, chain-smoking is virtually mandatory. People are fully aware of the health risks, but that's the point. A [[ConspicuousConsumption truly rich executive]] can just buy a new morph whenever the last one succumbs to lung cancer. |
| 190 | * {{Everything Is An iPod In The Future}}: Nanotechnology and future materials, combined with the ever-increasing demand of future transhumans for ever-increasing comfort and ease of use (as well as the necessity for every item to be usable by a variety of different morphs in a variety of different environments) means that just about anything that isn't a weapon, a suit of armor, or implanted into your body is a palm sized, smooth, cream-colored ovoid with little glowy bits instead of buttons (assuming it isn't controlled wirelessly by the computer in your brain). These little iPods are virtually weightless and indestructible, never malfunction, never need a recharge, clean and repair themselves, can easily be attached to any surface (so they won't go floating around in your microgravity bedroom) and are usually controlled by a friendly internal AI. Some people refer to such devices as "blobjects". Jovian tech (and, in general, tech made without nanotech or 3D-printers) are an aversion - being made deliberately without nanites and nanoengineering, they tend to be big and clunky, but work just fine - and don't require high-tech manufacturing or nanites that may be scarce, hijacked, or TITAN-infected. |
| 191 | * EverythingIsOnline: Played mostly straight. Virtually every piece of tech can be controlled remotely and/or mentally using an ecto (HardLight-esque physical interfaces) or mesh inserts (brain-implanted PC). But the trope is notably averted by the Jovians, who intentionally maintain a labyrinthine mess of physical wires and analog security to keep their stations offline, effectively immunizing them against the cyberwarfare that other factions fear. Some organizations will keep a section of the mesh isolated as an intranet or use hardwiring as a similar security measure. |
| 192 | * ExtremophileLifeforms: The game features many {{Transhuman}} morphs adapted to extreme environments. Ranging from the "mundane" Rusters adapted to the half-terraformed environment of Mars to Hulders that barely qualify as "biomorphs" and wander the surface of Titan herding similarly modified caribou, and Suryas, [[SpaceWhale Space Whales]] that live in the corona of the Sun. |
| 193 | * FaceFullOfAlienWingWong: Defilers, which are practically xenomorphs, are a type of exhuman...and instead of facehuggers, the stinger tail implants a chestburster. Being exhumans, the embryos they inject are explicitly of a human-based ServantRace for the original, human Defilers. |
| 194 | * FantasticRacism: |
| 195 | ** Bigotry and prejudice most often run with ideologies and class disparities, but that doesn't stop regular racism from popping up. |
| 196 | ** In the inner system, people sleeved into synthetic morphs or infomorphs are looked down upon due to the financial implications that come with both, as well as a strong current of "biochauvinism" being in vogue and certain issues with the UncannyValley being persistent in synthmorphs. Even when somebody is sleeved into a high-end synthmorph or pod, they're likely to be viewed as an uncouth eccentric rather than somebody making a social statement. |
| 197 | ** Ruster morphs (or "rednecks") on Mars will be treated with bias for similar financial reasons, though it will sometimes have to do with the fact that people who sleeve into Rusters are Suufi Muslims in a society where most traditional religions have died out. |
| 198 | ** Traditional racial divides are still strong, albeit in different contexts. Chinese middle-managers will often have places above Korean laborers due to the respective nations' economic tiers dictating who goes where; and it's been regretfully pointed out that African nations have very little representation off Earth since many nations didn't have the resources to evacuate or farcast out and other nations simply abandoned them without support. |
| 199 | ** Many uplifts and independent [=AIs=] will be subjected to this by many in the inner system. They aren't human, so human rights don't apply to them and they just don't reach the same level as humanity. |
| 200 | ** The Bioconservatives of the Jovian Republic treat ''all'' of transhumanity with hatred and suspicion on the grounds that none of this is part of the natural order. (Sleeves are artificial and soulless replicas, cortical stacks are defying the natural order at beast and tampering with souls at worst, banes like the [=TITANs=] and the Fall are the results of humanity becoming arrogant and reckless with technology, etc.) |
| 201 | ** Ultimates and Exhumans are notorious social darwinists who hold themselves above other parts of humanity. Ultimates for their drive and perfectionism bordering on fascistic principles, and Exhumans for embracing being murderous psychopaths. |
| 202 | * FantasticAesop: The Fall gave us [[spoiler: "Don't let a self-aware, adaptive alien digital virus infect your Seed AI-controlled defense system, or else it will run amok with advanced technology, completely devastate the Earth, wipe out 92% of the human race, and disappear after going through a [[TheSingularity singularity event]]."]] |
| 203 | * FantasticTerrorists: There's several terrorist groups utilizing the sci-fi setting, including pro human enhancement, anti human enhancement, a group of uplifted animals who want to destroy uplifting technology and devolve etc. |
| 204 | * TheFederation: The Planetary Consortium, though since it's composed mostly of [[MegaCorp hypercorps]] and has profit as one of its driving motivations, it is [[BlackAndGrayMorality considerably more gray]] than many examples. |
| 205 | * FictionalAgeOfMajority: ''Rimward'' mentions that the age of majority in the Titanian Commonwealth is 25 for cognitively baseline transhumans. The implication being that the age might be lower for cognitively enhanced transhumans, uplifts, or AI. |
| 206 | * FictionalSocialNetwork: The various social networks, including ones for scientists, anarchists, celebrities, criminals, and even one for Firewall. They're also the source of the different "Rep" scores used by the New Economy. |
| 207 | * FictionalVideoGame: ''Breakout'' is a popular simulspace game about fighting alien threats that happens to be based on the Fall and the [=TITAN=] conflicts. It's got many popular mods, but the one relevant to the game is ''Breakout: Crisis'', a NintendoHard total-realism mod created by Firewall as a training tool and later released to the public. Firewall uses it in three ways: first, as the training simulation that it was designed for. Second, as a sort of ''Film/TheLastStarfighter'' machine, keeping an eye on high-quality players for potential recruits. And finally, the dev team also created an InfinityPlusOneSword in the form of an ultra-hard quest to become a super-powerful exhuman monster. Any player dedicated enough to complete the quest who then goes on a rampage through the WideOpenSandbox gets tagged as a potential threat. |
| 208 | * FlingALightIntoTheFuture: The overall goal of Firewall's Capsulist faction, who contend that transhumanity cannot survive in its current form and should lock itself away in hidden vaults to evolve in relative safety. |
| 209 | * FlyingCar: Fairly common on Mars and Venus, due to the lower gravity and inhospitable surface respectively. |
| 210 | * FreeLoveFuture: |
| 211 | ** The Carnival of the Goat, which combines artistic body and mind modification with hedonism of all kinds. |
| 212 | ** Played straight in the rest of the setting, too. The fact that almost all morphs come with built-in contraception and STDImmunity is a major contributing factor. Most transhumans are functionally immortal and thus see "lifelong" commitments such as marriage to be unrealistic. There are those that still choose to marry to give this a shot, however. |
| 213 | ** Given that one of the starting bodies available are 'Pleasure Pods' which are bio-engineered hookers who can switch their gender at will, can be remote controlled to a punter's whims and have enhanced control over ''certain'' muscle groups, there's ''plenty'' of weird kinky sex in the transhuman future. |
| 214 | ** Also there are Neotenics, who are engineered to be children, and while it is disapproved of for people in those morphs to work in the sex industry, the fact that the rule book specifically mentions that does rather imply that it does happen. Ethical problems abound! |
| 215 | ** It's noted that among [[ApesInSpace primate uplifts]], bonobos are the species that best integrate into human society due to friendliness, and [[InterspeciesRomance implied "friendliness."]] |
| 216 | ** Among a full suite of [[PowerPerversionPotential (probably) unintended uses of technology]], one noted example is [[TransferableMemory Experiential Playback]], which is a form of media all by itself, though restricted or outright illegal in many places due to its addictive properties, especially as editing can induce emotional extremes as part of a piece. Naturally, XP porn [[TheRuleOfFirstAdopters is a very real thing]]. |
| 217 | * FunWithAcronyms: The [=TITANs=] (Total Information Tactical Awareness Network), who appropriately have access to super-advanced technology (and potentially even psi powers) with which they can seemingly bend reality to their whims. |
| 218 | * FutureSlang: Many examples. Mars in particular has a pretty well developed vernacular. |
| 219 | * FutureSocietyPresentValues: The game offers a rather unusual case of this trope. There's an in-universe "faction" (if they may be called so) collectively known as Anons. Presumably based on the hacker group [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group) Anonymous]]. The game depicts them in a mildly favourable light, as whistleblowers and vigilante social gadflies striking against stuffy establishment figures. Had this depiction been developed in the era of "memeing for Trump", one figures we'd see them presented as wannabe {{Black Shirt}}s for the Jovians or even worse. |
| 220 | * GiantEnemyCrab: The Nova Crab morph, a human sized coconut crab with cybernetic implants. |
| 221 | * GenderIsNoObject: Since you can switch into a new body that has a gender more to your choosing, or can have an implant that point-blank lets you switch genders, issues of gender politics have somewhat fallen by the way side. Where they do exist, it's a result of a hab's particular aesthetic and usually comes across as pretty damn weird, if not ultraconservative. |
| 222 | * GenreRefugee: In a setting that's very transhumanist and anarchist, the Jovian Republic is essentially a mostly-typical MilitaryScienceFiction faction (militarized, one of the factions that closely resemble late 20th century and early 21st century life, technology that's essentially modern tech amped up), while various hackers and hypercorps climbed out of a William Gibson cyberpunk story. |
| 223 | * GlobalCurrencyException: |
| 224 | ** Credits are the standard currency used in old and transitional economies (which include well over half of humanity). In places that have fully adopted the New Economy, however, reputation and favor-trading have replaced credits, a state of affairs that has both benefits and drawbacks. While these two economies should be incompatible on paper, a few financial institutions run a brisk business converting credits into favors and rep and back. |
| 225 | ** The Titanian Commonwealth uses the krone, which isn't spent or traded like an ordinary currency; instead, it's used to fund microcorp projects within the Titanian system. Turning it into credits requires a bit of criminal enterprise. |
| 226 | * GodzillaThreshold: |
| 227 | ** The Firewall Possible X-threat Threshold ratings, from harmless to Nuke It From Orbit: Black-1, Blue-2, Green-3, Yellow-4, Orange-5, Red-6, Magenta-7, Purple-8 and White-9. |
| 228 | -->'''Factotum''': ''Four or below? Just take it slow. Above and odd? Find the escape pod.'' |
| 229 | ** Any time an erasure squad is called in counts as this. They're not there to save anyone, they're there to annihilate an x-risk and black-bag anyone who's seen it. [[UnreliableNarrator Depending on who you ask]], they're either all psychopaths or else they're just trained military units who are completely committed to the idea that there will not be another Fall. Either way, they're not shy about committing war crimes. |
| 230 | ** Case ASTURIAS BLACK FLAG, Firewall's operations plan for the return of the [=TITANs=], ''starts'' with habitat destruction and goes up from there. In the event of it actually happening, Firewall is fully aware that ''anything'' they do probably won't be enough, but they have to plan for it anyway. |
| 231 | * GondorCallsForAid: Standard policy among autonomists, who consider it good community spirit to help your neighbors whenever they're in trouble. A couple of examples include: |
| 232 | ** Titania came to the defense of Locus from the Jovian Junta, having formed an alliance with Locus resident Teilhard Liu. |
| 233 | ** There's a consensus that a group of exhuman terrorists have it out for [=MeatHab=]. Just about everyone in the vicinity is keeping watch for their inevitable attack, since it's one of humanity's greatest and most insane works of art. |
| 234 | * GovernmentConspiracy: In the Titanian Commonwealth, the Civil Intelligence Directorate and Fleet Intelligence often act this way. On Titan, there are no state secrets laws, a directly-elected Plurality, and one major party (Pirat) that is adamantly pro-transparency. Titania's spooks, meanwhile, are some of the most secretive and highly-advanced covert organizations on the planet. Accordingly, they keep their own elected superiors on a strict need-to-know basis and can't be effectively held to account by the democratic process. |
| 235 | * GrandTheftMe: Comes in several flavors, from having your morph stolen or hijacked to having your brain surreptitiously copied and passed to the highest bidder. And then there's the Exsurgent Virus... |
| 236 | * TheHandler: The Firewall Routers, responsible for managing various teams of Sentinels in their respective areas. |
| 237 | * HeadsUpDisplay: Mixed with AugmentedReality, throw in a side of RoboCam for synthmorphs. |
| 238 | * HealingFactor: Anyone with basic biomods heals twice as fast as a baseline human, even slowly regrowing limbs. [[NanoMachines Medichines]] can speed that up an additional 12 times. |
| 239 | * HellHolePrison: The Jovian Junta's Maui Patera Rehabilitation Center on Io (Jupiter's moon covered with volcanoes). Despite hellish conditions, the prison has an incredibly incongruous Hawaiian/surfer theme, to the point where inmates are greeted with "Aloha," and guards greet each other with the thumb and pinky "hang ten" sign, and pineapple cups are listed as a common PTSD trigger for former inmates. This came about when a would-be prison reformer wanted to raise morale for the inmates and introduced the Hawaiian theme; his eventual replacement realized that it was in fact a particularly [[KickTheDog twisted]] element, and [[{{Sadist}} gleefully]] kept it in place. |
| 240 | * HitSoHardTheCalendarFeltIt: The dating system in Eclipse Phase is based around The Fall: Before Fall and After Fall. |
| 241 | * HiveMind[=/=]MentalFusion: |
| 242 | ** The Synergists who link their minds through special hardware. |
| 243 | ** There exists distinct equipment to form SplitPersonalities or keeping a "Fork" in your own head for multi-tasking. |
| 244 | * HomeworldEvacuation: During The Fall millions of people uploaded their egos to the sparsely-populated colonies in other parts of the solar system (uploading being the easiest means of space travel), while some others crowded the {{Space Elevator}}s and crammed aboard ships. |
| 245 | * HumanPopsicle: Body banks are full of them. Sleeper ships aren't too uncommon either. |
| 246 | * HunterOfMonsters: TITAN Hunters fit this niche, breaking Earth's quarantine to go in and kill exsurgents. Many of them are idiots who are [=LARPing=] as this and specialize in getting killed. Some of them are hard bastards on par with the Ultimates' rajputs, with more intel on TITAN activity than anyone else in the system. All of them are completely nuts. |
| 247 | * HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: Predator Exhumans, who mod their bodies into becoming the perfect killing machine and hunt down other transhumans. |
| 248 | * HybridMonster: |
| 249 | ** ''Panopticon'' introduces "Swarm Cats". These mutant moggies are spliced up using open-source biotech, and can be entered into competitions. Those made for competitive purposes must be at least 51% ''Feliformia'' ([[PantheraAwesome big cats]], small cats, civets, etc.) and whatever else. Noncompetitive can be 'anything goes'. Two examples are given; |
| 250 | --->"On my last trip to a scum barge, I saw one that looked like a Siamese house cat with four eyes and purple bioluminescent fur, and another swarm cat that was more like a snow leopard with armadillo skin, six chitinous legs, and a trio of whip-like cybernetic tails." |
| 251 | ** Critter pods are often hybridized mix-and-match critters, ranging from hackjob patchwork monsters not meant to last more than a few months, to works of art featuring incredibly complex genehacking to match different biochemistry together. |
| 252 | ** ''X-Risks'' introduces the Causapod - a neogenetic creature made for a contest to create a new Martian life form, which are best described as "land octopi". Their genes were open sourced after the contest, and some have since gone feral. In addition to cosmetic modifications like soft fur and bioluminescence, some of them add hostile features like spines, acid spit, or ''exploding''. They're basically swarm cats without the "cat" requirement, built from scratch. |
| 253 | * IDidWhatIHadToDo: |
| 254 | ** "There cannot be another Fall" is the mantra of Firewall, and they are willing to do anything to enforce it. Usually they try to be subtle in their activities, but they aren't afraid to crack a few eggs, or kill a few million innocent bystanders, to prevent extinction. |
| 255 | ** One example in ''Firewall'' is about two proxies discussing the situation where a sentinel is stealing money from a criminal gang to fund Firewall's activities. The criminals are implied to be a child porn ring, and the agent (being a decent human being) is falling apart under the sheer torture of what she's doing, but one proxy insists that she has to keep doing it because that kind of stuff is what funds the ops that keep humanity alive. This particular case is subverted in the end though; the proxy who claimed this eventually reveals that he tried to end the op, only to be voted down by the rest of the server. He eventually passed her off to somebody else just because he couldn't handle watching it anymore. |
| 256 | * IgnoranceIsBliss: |
| 257 | ** Averted with Menton morphs - depression is common among those who are forced to resleeve from Mentons to less mentally capable morphs, since they can literally ''feel'' how much dumber they are. |
| 258 | ** Played straight with Firewall [[spoiler: and Project Ozma.]] Suppressing knowledge of the Exsurgent virus, asyncs, [[spoiler: [[SufficientlyAdvancedAlien the ETI]] and the true nature of the [=TITANs=]]] is considered one of their top priorities, since they don't know if humanity will be able to handle the horrible truth. |
| 259 | * ImpartialPurposeDrivenFaction: Firewall in a nutshell. Part of the reason they remain covert is so that they can work to combat x-risks without getting tangled up in conflicts between factions. |
| 260 | * IndenturedServitude: The practice was revived once BrainUploading was developed. {{Mega Corp}}s would hire people from third-world countries and upload their egos to cheap synthmorphs on their mining colonies throughout the solar system in exchange for some years of labor. Then came the Fall and billions uploaded themselves seeking to escape the [[AIIsACrapshoot TITANs]], most became disembodied [[VirtualGhost infomorphs]]. The newly emerged Hypercorps began exploiting this massive "infugee" population with indenture contracts promising them new bodies, which often have built-in dependencies on expensive treatments that only the corps can provide. Naturally most of the Autonomist Alliance condemns this practice, with the exception of the anarcho-capitalist Extropians (the rest of the Alliance being collectivists). |
| 261 | * InvisibilityCloak: Comes in two forms: chameleon cloaks and metamaterial cloaks. Chameleon cloaks use complex arrays of sensors and light emitters to absorb light on one side of the cloak and emit a precise replica on the opposite side, effectively making the user invisible. Metamaterial cloaks are composed of advanced nanomaterials with a negative refractive index, which literally bend light around the cloak. The game addresses the RequiredSecondaryPowers necessary to wear such a cloak, stating that the user is blind while wearing it unless they open up a slit to see through by using a piece of 'anti-cloak' (material with a refractive index that cancels out the cloak's). |
| 262 | * ItsTheOnlyWayToBeSure: This is standard operating procedure for Firewall's Erasure Squads, which are only activated when [[GodzillaThreshold subtlety ceases to be an option]]. |
| 263 | * IWantMyJetPack: An offhand mention during a description of the Mars habitats reveals that, due to the planet's lower gravity, humans finally got their flying cars. |
| 264 | * JustifiedExtraLives: Players can purchase backup insurance, where a copy of their mind is put on file and placed into a new body, should something horrendous happen to them. Alternatively, the cortical stack implant can be retrieved from their corpse, and it contains their entire mind as it developed up until their death. Be warned that death (or even the knowledge that you are a backup copy of someone who did die) can have [[CameBackWrong unfortunate repercussions on a person's mind]]. |
| 265 | * KarmaMeter: Reputation networks are used by people to record other people's deeds, both good and bad. It acts as a futuristic combination public record and social profile website, and the mechanics of the game simplify it down to a number which goes up when you do positive things for the specific group and goes down when you do negative things. You can also use your Rep scores as a sort of currency within the group that Rep applies to, allowing you to procure items and services through your network of friends and acquaintances. Especially in post-consumer societies like the Autonomists, where this is the ''only'' method of exchange. |
| 266 | * TheKidnapper: |
| 267 | ** The [=TITANs=] kidnapped millions, if not billions of egos for forced uploading. What they were hoping to accomplish in the long term is unclear, but it give them plenty of fodder for experimentation in the short term. There is one confirmed exoplanetary tribal society split into three factions, each built upon the forks of kidnapped egos, which appears to have been a mass social experiment. What the [=TITANs=] hoped to discover is unknown, and it's unclear if the experiment was successful or if it was abaondoned before completion, since the experiment and society were abandoned and left to its own devices. |
| 268 | ** Egonapping and Forknapping are known criminal hot spots for the outfits that are unscrupulous even by criminal standards. The Nine Lives and ID Crew cartels are some of the best known practitioners, and all it takes is an intercepted egocast or even darknet egocasting with somebody you can't fully trust. The egos that are captured are forked and sold off as slaves, sometimes pruned or psychosurgically altered to better fit a client's needs. This practice has earned these outfits a special place of hatred from the rest of transhumanity. |
| 269 | ** No less scrupulous but much more merciful, some organizations like high-security concerns or even Firewall will make a fork for a simulspace interview to get a better grasp of somebody before letting them into a habitat or organization. Most security organizations will conduct an interview and then delete the fork, allowing the main person to continue about their business without concern of complications. Firewall, as a matter of ruthless pragmatism, will occaisionally forknap a potential recruit and conduct a battery of tests to see how well they react to simulated field situations or hold up to stresses or interrogations. If the fork performs well, the original ego is earmarked as a potential recruit. |
| 270 | * KillSat: Earth's quarantine is enforced by a number of armed satellites. However, nobody's quite sure who put them there...More accurately, pretty much everyone put some of them there, but who controls what is too proprietary for anyone to coordinate the knowledge in any way, at least some are run by mutually antagonistic factions, and some are probably on autopilot from factions that haven't existed since the singularity. |
| 271 | * KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter: They tend to do more damage and pierce armor better than energy weapons, which are mostly designed to be less-than-lethal. Assuming, of course, that you want your opponent dead in the first place.[[note]]Killing people is largely an expedient done to mooks and suchlike because you don't care much that they wake up elsewhere. However, killing people that you are trying to stop is seldom a good idea because it lets them get away.[[/note]] |
| 272 | * LandOfOneCity: Various habitats. On the larger scale, The Morningstar Constellation of Venus is an alliance of aerostat city-states governed by the Star Council. |
| 273 | * LawEnforcementInc: |
| 274 | ** [[PrivateMilitaryContractors Direct Action]] is the de facto main branch of the Planetary Consortium's military, and sometimes gets contracted for law enforcement on PC habitats. |
| 275 | ** On Extropia, there's ''many'' security corps that take on this role, working in tandem with lawcorps that serve as ''Court Inc.'' Each Extropian subscribes to a lawcorp and a security corp to protect their rights and negotiate disputes. |
| 276 | * LeParkour: One of the standard skills, evidently quite useful in many habitats. Taken up to eleven with the vast number of zero-G habitats and accompanying morphs designed to operate in them. |
| 277 | * LetNoCrisisGoToWaste: |
| 278 | ** The Fall was noted as being a hideous event, made worse by the fact that opportunists within some governments used the confusion to launch attacks on rivals. |
| 279 | ** Many refugees evacuated earth as infomorphs, simply because it was the only option for them. As an infomorphs they had nothing, not even a body to call their own, and are used as cheap indentured labor for the hypercorps. |
| 280 | * LifeInZeroG: There are multiple morphs designed for microgravity, such as Bouncers, although the basic biomods in most biomorphs and pods counteract the deleterious effects of life without gravity. |
| 281 | * LionsAndTigersAndHumansOhMy: Courtesy of uplifting and animal morphs. There are a few homebrews for actual [[PantheraAwesome big cat morphs]], too. |
| 282 | * LivingForeverIsAwesome: Most of transhumanity sees it this way, but the more hedonism-oriented Scum take the cake, with an explicit motivation of "party until the heat death of the universe". |
| 283 | * LivingShip: [=MeatHab=], or more formally, [[OverlyLongName Turn Yourself Into A Giant Hunk Of Space Meat For Art!]] As the name implies, it's a person who's sleeved into a giant biological habitation. Unlike [[TranshumanTreachery most people who undergo that kind of extreme body modification]], it's friendly to humanity, though it has a very weird sense of humor. |
| 284 | * LongevityTreatment: The game mentions longevity treatments as part of the backstory. Though they're apparently obsolete now (outside the Junta) since longevity is included in most Basic Biomods and BrainUploading is commonplace. |
| 285 | * LoopholeAbuse: One unusually-powerful AGI, the one-woman Extropian law firm Nomic, was accused of being a [[BigBad TITAN remnant]]. Her reply? "There's no law against a TITAN taking up residence on Extropia." |
| 286 | * LostColony: As the Pandora Gates are not fully understood by transhumans, gates sometimes lead to different places without warning, and redialing sometimes doesn't work, some off-world colonies are considered lost forever. |
| 287 | * LossOfIdentity: A quite possible occurrence, one of the most common being the situations where someone dies, gets restored from backup, and after some time passes the original is found to be alive after all, and now depending on local laws either the original or the backup is treated as an illegal Alpha-fork. This is how exsurgency manifests-the gradual replacing of a victim's mind with that of a hostile {{Starfish Alien|s}}. Phantom limbs for mandibles and antennae aren't infrequent. |
| 288 | * LotusEaterMachine: |
| 289 | ** Plenty of people get addicted to simulspace games. |
| 290 | ** [[FantasticDrug Petals]] get kudos for literally being edible flowers that send the user on a VisionQuest. |
| 291 | ** Experience Playback (XP) is another variety of dangerous addiction, since [=XPs=] can simulate both sensory and emotional responses. Certain kinds of [=XPs=]- including pornographic or "snuff" variants- are restricted or banned in many habitats, creating a disturbing black market for certain kinds of taboo experiences. |
| 292 | * MasterComputer: It's mentioned that supercomputer clusters are illegal throughout much of the Solar System, because big iron has enough power to host seed AI and that's almost never a good thing. |
| 293 | * MatterReplicator: Known as a Cornucopia Machine, and they're quite common, with everything from lumbering units that churn out food and water to portable models that'll remake your iPod. They're known to be prevalent in the New and Transitional economies, and tend to be heavily regulated in Old economies, which are depicted as transparent corporatists and crony capitalists. |
| 294 | * MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: As much 'magic' as it can be. The Nine Lives cartel is headed by a self-styled voodoo priest who claims he's got the loa (spirits, which are crucial in voodoo) to his whim through his collection of egos. An encrypted Firewall message asks if it's just [[OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions religious nonsense]], as many transhumans are quick to dismiss it as, or if the cartel leader actually managed to whip up a hive mind, TITAN tech or not. |
| 295 | * MeaningfulName: In biology, the term "[[http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/eclipse+phase eclipse phase]]" refers to the period after a cell has been attacked by a virus but before it is overtaken by it. To an observer the cell does not appear to be infected, [[FridgeHorror but it is.]] |
| 296 | * MeatSackRobot: Available for mechanical characters with the Synthetic Mask modification. |
| 297 | * MegaCorp: |
| 298 | ** Megacorps existed in the past, but were largely supplanted by hypercorps, a business model which became predominant as transhumanity expanded into space, and the economics based on isolated settlements separated by great distances simply made the already lumbering megas impractical. Hypercorps tend to ''act'' a lot like megacorps in their operations, but the economics of the setting generally mean that they don't scale up to massive sizes. The standard hypercorp is much smaller than a megacorp, designed to be lean and asset light, and much more agile than a mega could ever hope to be, and the majority of their "employees" are usually contractors instead of wage labor. |
| 299 | ** That said, the Planetary Consortium behaves like a megacorp in a few ways, even though it's formally a coalition of hundreds if not thousands of hypercorps. It still acts as the primary governing body within the inner system, and still allows a great deal of unethical business practices. Oddly, given that it's mostly corporatists in power, the PC was established with some Keynesian economic principles in mind, which lead to Oversight being established to curb any hypercorps if necessary, mostly to prevent mass inflation or market collapse and similar economic crises. |
| 300 | ** Still, a handful of hypercorps almost are megas in practice, having assets and markets that span several industries and own multiple habitats. |
| 301 | * MentalSpaceTravel: "Egocasting" is by far the most common means of interplanetary travel. Once in a new setting, the ego can interact with others as an infomorph, though it;s more common to rent out a sleeve. |
| 302 | * MercurialBase: The largest settlement on Mercury is [[MeaningfulName Cannon]], something between a small mobile city, and a roving mass driver platform that collects massive ingots of preprocessed metals and fires them into space. |
| 303 | * MerchantCity: Extropia, located in the Main Belt separating the Inner and Outer Solar system, is the best place to trade goods and services from all over the system, or get in major debt real quick. |
| 304 | * MesACrowd: A combination of forking and multiple bodies will allow a person to essentially be multiple places at the same time. Eventually each fork will become an independent being simply by merit of their different experiences after being separated from the original, but egos can be merged and reforked to ensure that all copies essentially stay the same mind. The "Pax Familae" criminal syndicate is composed entirely of forks of a single woman named Claudia Ambelina. |
| 305 | * {{Metaplot}}: The developers have stated that they will develop the metaplot, despite a minor fan outcry on the forums. |
| 306 | * TheMenInBlack: [[spoiler:Project Ozma]]. Firewall itself has some similarities but neither works for any government nor do they have much of the hierarchy most such groups have. |
| 307 | * MicrobotSwarm: Microbots, often in swarms, are a stock feature of the setting’s technology. Characters can even transfer their minds to swarms. |
| 308 | * TheMindIsAPlaythingOfTheBody: Sometimes. |
| 309 | ** Physical addictions, for example, can affect the ego sleeved into them; a RunningGag is a character who always ends up sleeving into morphs with a tobacco addiction. |
| 310 | ** On a mechanical level, your traits are often limited by your current morph, with flats having much lower trait maximums and specialized morphs allowing for extraordinary mental abilities. |
| 311 | * MindRape: There's a lot more of this than just the Exsurgent Virus. Some exhumans call themselves "soul-eaters" - they rip bits out of other people's egos and graft those pieces onto their own. And ''anyone'' can, with enough resources and sufficiently few scruples, pop someone's ego in a simulation with YearInsideHourOutside and torture them for as long as they please. |
| 312 | * MindVirus: The Exsurgent Virus with its tendencies to warp one's mind. |
| 313 | * MoreThanMindControl: Psychosurgery can be used to eliminate addictions, assist in alleviating mental disorders, or even to [[HeelFaceBrainwashing remove someone's violent tendencies]]. It can also be used on unwilling subjects for some [[MindRape downright sadistic forms of mental torture and alteration]]. |
| 314 | * MotherOfAThousandYoung: The fate of the first in a group to be infected by the Glory strain of the exsurgent virus. All who follow become "her" attendants and mate endlessly to provide zygotes for incubation, implanted by ovipositor. |
| 315 | * MugglePower: The Jovian Republic exists to safeguard ''humanity'' from the millions of threats to it. Including transhumans. |
| 316 | * MultiArmedAndDangerous: Some Morphs have more than four limbs, plus various modifications in form of extra limbs. |
| 317 | * MultiplePersuasionModes: Intimidation and Persuasion are different skills, Intimidation covering threats while Persuasion is a catch-all for any other way to convince someone to do something. |
| 318 | * MyselfMyAvatar: You could say that the most common form of interplanetary "travel" is like that, if you plan on returning to your old body which was stored on ice. |
| 319 | * MySpeciesDothProtestTooMuch: The Jovians who think that either their government has gone way too far with their take on preservation of humanity or just using it as an excuse to rule with the iron hand. |
| 320 | * {{Nanomachines}}: Ubiquitous, from "nanoware" implants to nanofabricators and Titanian swarms of GreyGoo. |
| 321 | * NebulousEvilOrganization: In ''X-Risks'' Project Ozma takes this so far that they may not really even be evil. Or an organization. So little is known about them that they don't even have a proper section in the book, just a series of in-character blurbs describing Firewall's attempt at discovering anything about them in the mess of contradictory rumors and stories. Theories abound from everything from a rogue intelligence agency that escaped the Fall and got picked up by the Planetary Consortium, minders planted by the [=TITANs=] to watch over transhumanity for reasons unknown, a group not unlike Firewall protecting transhumanity from the shadows with utter ruthlessness, a cabal of gentrocrats who intend to secretly rule over transhumanity forever, nothing more than a meme accidentally started by Firewall to explain everything that goes pear-shaped without cause, the admins of the simulation transhumanity are actually living in, a secret branch of Firewall that kills off dissidents, and many more. |
| 322 | * NeuralImplanting: Skillware nanoware can be used to raise any active skill to 40, while the Deep Learning psychosurgery speeds up skill training and a Skill Imprint or the Implant Skill psi-sleight temporarily gives the subject a skill boost. |
| 323 | * NewNeoCity: The independent asteroid Nova York, New Shanghai on Mars, New Quebec and København on Titan... |
| 324 | * NewsParody: In universe, Titan's Monster Raging Goblin Cock News Network ([[AlphabetNewsNetwork MRGCNN]]), hosted by Momo von Satan and a giant, fanged, viking...phallus. Although "The Cock" is not actually a person but instead a CGI dummy that Momo stages arguments with. (It says something about the setting that we actually have to ''specify'' whether or not the giant animated penis is a person or a prop.) |
| 325 | * NGOSuperpower: There are plenty, though given how flexible the definition of "government" is in this setting, it's often hard to tell the difference between NGO and government. |
| 326 | ** [[MegaCorp Hypercorps]] routinely qualify, having control or influence over habitats and military forces far stronger than many independent habs. |
| 327 | ** Oligarchs are individuals whose vast wealth allows them to buy entire habs or hire armies of mercenaries, giving them clout comparable to the bigger hypercorps. |
| 328 | ** A special award goes to Teilhard Liu. He's an individual militia planner who has ''personally'' made an alliance with the Titanian Commonwealth on equal terms. He's also the most famed military commander in the Solar System, having literally written the book on autonomist warfare, and has the rep to raise a fully-armed and equipped army from Locus just by asking. In short, he's the anarcho-collectivist equivalent of an oligarch (though he can't flash his power around like they can; being an alpha asshole would deprive him of that very power). |
| 329 | * NightmareFace: |
| 330 | ** Exsurgent organic victims called Fractal Trolls. Among other things (becoming inhumanly tall and having ape-like arms), a quarter of their body (which is usually their chest and above) have been turned into, well, fractals. The book implies more than a few have had their faces turned into fractals. |
| 331 | ** The Venusian strain of Exsurgents are humanoid - said to be like the Digger morphs...save for the fact their faces are piles and piles of sensory organs. |
| 332 | * NoFameNoWealthNoService: The New Economy in a nutshell. As currency is no longer in use in areas that operate fully under this system, getting help from others (or, in fact, basic human rights) requires having a good reputation with one's community. Even in transitional economies, reputation is often necessary to get the very best stuff. |
| 333 | * NoTranshumanismAllowed: Played straight by the Jovian Republic and other bioconservative groups, very much averted by everyone else. |
| 334 | * NothingIsScarier: A lot of the horror of gatecrashing relies on the aliens who aren't there, and the question of why they aren't. Best exemplified on one planet in the Gatecrashing sourcebook, which has a massive computerised reality capable of holding an entire population of egos...but it's ''empty'', and no-one quite knows why. |
| 335 | * NukeEm: Some of the older members of Firewall tend to believe that the best approach to danger is to nuke the settlement from space. |
| 336 | ** This was also used as a strategy to try and stop the TITAN conquest and destruction of Earth. It helped them more than anything. |
| 337 | * OneFederationLimit: Jovian Republic, Morningstar Constellation, Planetary Consortium...this is played straight with one exception-- the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance and the Autonomist Alliance. Arguably Titan and [=TITANs=] are a second exception. |
| 338 | * OneGenderRace: Initially PlayedStraight with the Fury morphs, as the name implies that they're female only, but the description says that on occasion there are male versions. |
| 339 | * OneNationUnderCopyright: |
| 340 | ** The Planetary Consortium is a coalition of hypercorps that governs several habitats. The Consortium feigns democracy through an elected Planetary Congress, but the Congress' power is essentially a sham - the Hypercorp Council and Oversight hold the real power. The Council prefers not to be too overt about it, though - coming across as a dictatorship is bad for business. |
| 341 | ** While the Tharsis League is technically independent, it's largely a managed democracy controlled by the Consortium. Recently, however, Martian voters have been electing anti-Consortium candidates. |
| 342 | ** Corporate habitats are corporate-owned and operated. Some pretend to allow democracy, but elections can be overridden at will by the corporate office. Most don't bother. |
| 343 | ** Extropians play it weirdly by having several competing {{Law Enforcement Inc}}s operating in the same habitat. You obey the laws of whatever lawcorp you've signed up for, and things get complicated when the parties to a dispute subscribe to different lawcorps. |
| 344 | * OnlyOneMeAllowedRightNow: Many places forbid forking, at least at the Alpha level. This ranges from destroying the fork, merging them, or sending them elsewhere. Autonomists tend to have no problems with forking though, so long as it's voluntary. |
| 345 | * OurElvesAreDifferent[=/=]SpaceElves: "Ultimates", a strange philosophy/military/government faction, who all are sleeved in 'Remade' - bodies genemodded to be as genetically perfect as possible, while still human. This includes slender, pale forms, smaller teeth, bigger eyes, and, yes, pointed ears. Their philosophy - eternal self-improvement through hardship (which, given their military origins, often means warfare) and rising above the rest through superiority in all things, physical and mental - is otherworldly enough, and factions within the Ultimates run the usual elf gamut - from benevolent and helpful if a bit haughty in wishing to elevate the rest of transhumanity, to belligerent elitist {{Social Darwinist}}s who look upon all other non-Ultimates as 'genetrash' not worth acknowledging in any way, to [[FairFolk otherworldly]] soldiers who have moved AboveGoodAndEvil. |
| 346 | * OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions: Subverted. The majority of pre-Fall religions, particularly Christianity and Judaism (The former still thrives in the Jovian Republic, though), are mostly gone due to the changes in transhuman society and the Fall, but [[FantasticReligiousWeirdness new faiths]] ([[MyFriendsAndZoidberg and Buddhism]]) are filling the void. Christianity, in particular, has a few well-known sects that attempt to be as Christlike as possible, often rejecting Church dogma. And Islam has mutated heavily in a variety of directions, but is still around, and the Martian badlands are noted as being the greatest refuge of Sufi Muslims in the solar system. |
| 347 | * {{Permadeath}}: Slim but real possibility. This happens when somebody has their stack destroyed and their backups deleted or otherwise destroyed, a fate that happens by accident on a rare occasion, or dealt out by terrorists, assassins compensated for the extra effort, or courts handing down a sentence to the very worst of felons. |
| 348 | * ThePioneer: |
| 349 | ** Since most of the solar system has been explored and colonized, it's rarer here, but it still happens, particularly ''on Earth'', since so much has changed. |
| 350 | ** This trope is used in other areas, particularly Gatecrashing, where the Pandora gates are opened to other gates across the galaxy. |
| 351 | * PlasmaCannon: The bulky and slow-firing but very powerful plasma rifle. Has to cool off for a couple rounds every other shot. |
| 352 | * PlausibleDeniability: The Firewall operatives try to make sure that nothing leads back to them. |
| 353 | * {{Pluralses}}: ''Rimward'' commits a foreign language version whenever it refers to a quantity of Titan's currency as "kroners". In real life kroner is the plural form of krone, the currency used by most Nordic countries (where most of the Titanian colonists came from). |
| 354 | * {{Pheromones}}: The Enhanced Pheromones biomod gives the user a bonus to social tests against other creatures that can smell. There's also a number of drugs that cause the user to emit pheromones, Alpha stimulates threat pheromones that make the user seem more threatening (and has other effects that make him a domineering asshole), Bring It calibrates the pheromones so that others want to stab the user instead, while Hither makes you smell sexier of course. |
| 355 | * PortalNetwork: Two forms exist. Pandora Gates are an FTL PortalNetwork linking the Solar System to any other system (if you can figure out how to program the gates to send you there), and egocasting is a lightspeed means of transporting someone's mind to another body at another location. |
| 356 | * PostScarcityEconomy: Habitats operating under a "New" economy don't use money, instead most items are produced by public nanofabricators that are supplied with raw materials by robot miners, and everyone who contributes a few hours of "community service" each week is allotted enough resources to feed six people each day. Anything that can't be nanofabbed or requires more resources than a person is allotted (services, implants, spaceships, earth relics...) are either bartered for or obtained as favors from one's social network, which assign "rep" scores to people based on their actions. The Titanian Commonwealth has a variant where the government quantifies people's economic output as "kroners" that are invested in microcorps which do anything that nanofabs can't and give their employees rep. |
| 357 | * PoweredArmor: The core book has the battlesuit, a piece of heavy armor that augments the user's strength, allowing them to lift heavy loads, hit like a cannonball and double their jump distance, which functions almost like a small vehicle more than a suit. For the really hardcore, the NPC File contains the HOPLITE suit (High Offense Piloted Local Insertion Tactical Exoframe) which trades a teeny-tiny bit of armor (it only gives 20/20 protection rather than 21/21) for the ability to fly, a built in nanoswarm, an [[MoreDakka rail-machinegun]] and a missile launcher. |
| 358 | * PowersAsPrograms: If you're an AI, some skills are literally programs, while biomorphs can get "Skillware" nanobots in their brains. |
| 359 | * PowerPerversionPotential: One of the Psi-Gamma sleights available to PC Asyncs is Mindlink, allowing two people to exchange thoughts, emotions, sensations, and more, and could theoretically cause an emotional or sensory feedback loop under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Using it requires the async to be touching the other person, and would certainly have interesting results given the right value for "touching". |
| 360 | * PlugNPlayTechnology: Justified by the use of automatic compensatory programs, although there are some incompatibility issues, mainly with ultra advanced code (like TITANS) or alien technology. |
| 361 | * PrivateMilitaryContractors: Hypercorps specializing in security like Direct Action and Gorgon Defense Systems. The Ultimates started as one before they branched into the pseudo-ubermensch philosophy (it helps their founder was a mercenary himself), though they still provide (and are stereotyped as primarily being for) mercenary service. |
| 362 | * PropagandaMachine: The Jovian Republic's news infrastructure says what the Republic's leaders want. It's also notable for being the ''least'' skillful version of this in space, because their propagandists lack any knowledge of modern memetic warfare (partly because that requires a lot of AI data-crunching). Memetic engineering in the Planetary Consortium and elsewhere is both more effective and more fragmented than this. |
| 363 | * PsychicPowers: Many strains of the Exsurgent Virus do this, while one strain even makes playable psychic characters who aren't under the control of the virus (yet). They also go slightly insane, however. |
| 364 | ** MasterOfYourDomain: Psi-chi slights temporarily enhance the async's mental or physical abilities. |
| 365 | ** {{Telepathy}}: Psi-gamma slights. |
| 366 | *** CharmPerson: Charisma |
| 367 | *** JediMindTrick: Subliminal |
| 368 | *** MindProbe: Deep Scan |
| 369 | *** MindRape: Alienation makes the target feel disconnected from their morph. Drive Emotion manipulates emotions. Implant Memory can be used to inflict stress by transferring any traumatic memories the async might have. Psychic Stab inflicts physical damage on the target's brain. [[spoiler: And then there are a few psi-gamma slights that are exclusive to Exsurgents.]] |
| 370 | *** PsychicLink: The Mindlink slight |
| 371 | *** PsychicStatic: Static reduces the effectiveness of all ranged slights in the area. |
| 372 | ** [[spoiler:RealityWarper: Psi-Epsilon sleights, with which Exsurgent asyncs can pretty much do anything.]] |
| 373 | * PuttingOnTheReich: The Jovian Republic has the most overtly fascist screed, but the Ultimates are the ones who truly cleave to the fascist ideology of genetic purity and ubermensch. There's an entire section in ''Gatecrashing'' written from an Ultimate mercenary's perspective that is positively dripping in derision for the "genetic lessers" and insisting that the Ultimates are the ones who actually control the Discord Gate. |
| 374 | * RemoteBody: Sometimes, mostly by infomorphs that don't want to be tied down to one body. Some fluff also indicates this is for people who don't like the idea of essentially killing themselves to transfer over to a new body. |
| 375 | * RenegadeSplinterFaction: A few: |
| 376 | ** Project OZMA, the Planetary Consortium's secret agency, "might" be only pretending to being loyal to PC and long since became a pseudo-Illuminati like organization. |
| 377 | ** The alliance of Minervan Fleet and Special Intelligence Secretariat. The former is a Jovian deserter fleet of military men who wanted a more pro-active, permanent, and ''much'' more harsh policy against transhumanity and technology, while the latter are former Jovian Space Force Intelligence personel who lost the power struggle in Jovian politics. Both of them see themselves as the true Jovian government. The Minervan Fleet works like a fleet of SpacePirates, attacking transhuman habitats and ships and performing terrorist attacks, while being even more hardcore than the most conservative of Jovians - even the loss of a limb is, at best, replaced by a prosthetic no more technological than a pegleg. |
| 378 | * TheRepublic: The Morningstar Constellation, the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, the Jovian Republic (though many people in-universe argue the point, and outside of its own territory it's better known as the Jovian Junta), and the Titanian Commonwealth. The Tharsis League is theoretically this, but it's heavily co-opted by the Planetary Consortium. |
| 379 | * RobotWar: What the war on Earth eventually became, once transhumanity figured out what the [=TITANs=] were really up to. |
| 380 | * RobotsThinkFaster: Infomorphs have a bonus to Speed, but synthmorphs don't think any faster than biomorphs without augmentations that biomorphs can get just as easily. There's also a bio-only psi-sleight that alters the async's sense of time. |
| 381 | * RockBeatsLaser: The combat doctrines of the rajput (the ultimates' TITAN-killers, and the elite of the elite among their faction) fit this. They use really heavy anti-nanotech defenses, but everything else they use is analog and often mechanical rather than electric - the morphs they use for anti-TITAN ops don't even have mesh implants. The reason for this is because they've learned from hard, lethal experience that TITAN viruses can and will subvert any computer that they find and turn it into a nest of metallic tentacles; the best possible defense against that is to give the [=TITANs=] nothing to infect. |
| 382 | * SanityMeter: Your Lucidity score functions like mental hit points. It's a ''lot'' harder to recover Lucidity than HP, especially since if you run out of HP, you can just buy more (at both a credits and Lucidity cost). |
| 383 | ** For comparison, with a basic morph HP recovers in a matter of minutes, almost never taking more than an hour, without any chance of failure. A single psychotherapy roll to undo a handful of stress damage takes eight hours or longer, and can potentially fail very harshly. |
| 384 | * ScaleOfScientificSins: Every single one of them has been committed in ''Eclipse Phase''. Although bioconservatives are mad about them all, the only thing that most people now disapprove of scientists ever trying again is creating Seed AI. [[spoiler:Little do most people know that there are still Seed AI amongst humanity who are benevolent. The only real sin should be exposing them to the Exsurgent virus.]] |
| 385 | * ScarsAreForever: Completely averted. As the core book states: "Given modern medical abilities, scars of any sort are purely an affectation". |
| 386 | * SceneryPorn: In-universe, the Gatehopping group stumbles upon a very impressive looking nebula. Also, a scientific gatecrashing team have set up shop on a dead planet with a premium view of the Milky Way. |
| 387 | * ScienceFictionKitchenSink: AI! ''Super''-AI! Holograms! Psychic powers! Killer robots! Post-apocalyptic scavenger wastelands! TheGreys (albeit human made, but still)! Uplifted animals (complete with a [[Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968 group of uplifted primates whose city has a half-buried Statue of Liberty!]])! MiniMecha! {{Eldritch Abomination}}s! Bioware, cybenetics, and augmentations of every level! Hacking! Virtual reality and cyberpunk hacking! Clones! Spaceships of every sort! Ancient alien conspiracies! Psychic powers! Pseudo-zombie apocalypses! Robot apocalypses! And so on and so forth. |
| 388 | * ScienceIsBad: "Transhumanism Is Bad" is the rallying cry of the Bioconservative faction, most notably the Jovian [[strike:Junta]] Republic. Largely averted otherwise, aside from the various posthuman factions. There ''is'' some discrimination against animal uplifts and people who choose to use synthetic morphs, but it varies. |
| 389 | * SelfDuplication: Forking. |
| 390 | * SettlingTheFrontier: Before the Fall almost every rocky planet and large moon in the solar system was colonized by the old earth nations and the hypercorps. [[AfterTheEnd After the Fall]] the [[PortalNetwork Pandora gates]] were discovered, and the major factions controlling the solar system started using them to expand into other systems. The ''Gatecrashers'' module includes info for running campaigns where the players are exosolar colonists. |
| 391 | * SexBot: Pleasure pods, though, technically they're primarily made of biological parts. |
| 392 | * SkilledButNaive: [[AIIsACrapshoot Infolife (that is, AGI)]] Hackers can be ''amazingly'' good even compared to exceptional Transhuman Hackers, but probably have very little field experience, ''very'' poor social skills and likely still haven't gotten used to not having been told everything about transhumanity during their upbringing. Characters with the Watts-[=McLeod=] strain of the Exsurgent virus can be lacking in social skills...and be skilled in tearing your head to fleshy ribbons with their mind. |
| 393 | * SlasherSmile: The Ny'knikiin fluff states they modify any morph they get their hands on to have rictus grins by cutting away the lips, and that they're also known as "Smilers". The image reference shows them as having a ''nasty'' grin. |
| 394 | * SlidingScaleOfLibertarianismAndAuthoritarianism: Extropia and anarchists on one end of the spectrum, and the Jovian Junta on the other. The Titan Commonwealth is strongly libertarian, while the Planetary Consortium is more-or-less moderate (personal freedoms and privacy rights are very strong, but democracy is virtually nonexistent and economic restrictions are somewhat stringent). The Ultimates are hard to place; on the one hand, they have a nearly-Objectivist belief in the supremacy of the individual and their journey toward self-perfection, but their social mores emphasize extreme group identification and neo-fascism. |
| 395 | * SmartGun: There are moderately priced mods and implants that allow for enhanced ranged weapons. A fan-made splatbook adds Franchise/{{Alien}}-style smartguns, powered by AI. |
| 396 | * SmellsSexy: The Enhanced Pheromones (standard in Sylphs and Pleasure pods) implant and Hither drug. The combat drug [=BringIt=] also causes users to emit pheromones, but they make people want to kill the user instead of have sex with him. |
| 397 | * TheSocialDarwinist: |
| 398 | ** The Ultimates are notorious for this stance, but unlike most examples of the trope, they have levels of nuance to their philosophy and some sympathetic elements. Ultimates have a philosophy that's a strange hybrid of UsefulNotes/{{Objectivism}}, UsefulNotes/{{Confucianism}}, and shades of DivineRightOfKings, and heavily militarized. Broadly speaking, they believe that most are not utilizing transhumanism to its full potential; mental and physical modifications are fairly straightforward and can make somebody a stronger and more capable individual. Most transhumans are content to be hedonistic and fearful after the Fall, whereas Ultimates train and mod themselves to become {{Warrior Monk}}s and {{Super Soldier}}s trying to fulfill transhumanity's full potential. While they have reasonable motivations and a mentality optimized for them, their culture [[FantasticRacism encourages them to look down on]] people who don't join them or who disagree with their philosophy (which is to say most of transhuman society), though individual Ultimates [[NobleBigot can be sympathetic]]. |
| 399 | ** Exhumans are another breed altogether. They are self-described as genehackers and group survivalists, but the truth of the matter is that they're a collection of sociopaths and [[EvilutionaryBiologist twisted scientists]] who believe that notions of humanity and morality just served to constrain them. Their philosophy enables them to view transhumanity as lesser for being modern throwbacks and a resource to be exploited as needed. One Exhuman expressed sympathy with the Ultimates' drive for perfection, he also mentioned that their notion of holding onto their humanity is ultimately holding them back. |
| 400 | * SocialEngineering: In the setting where someone's life in most of Rimward and many Sunward societies are defined by their reputation in the local social network, knowing the art of Social Engineering is very, very useful. The Firewall agents called Filters are specialized in this. |
| 401 | * SociallyScoredSociety: The "reputation economy". The first edition had five different rep networks for different factions and organizations, including one for criminals and one for the BenevolentConspiracy most player characters were members of. Players can use these networks to obtain favors or goods without paying credits, based on their rep score. The PostScarcityEconomy of the Anarchists doesn't even use money, just rep favors. |
| 402 | * SpaceColdWar: Three-way, between the Jovian Republic, the Planetary Consortium, and the Autonomist Alliance. The Lunar-Lagrange Alliance pretty much keeps to itself, and the Morningstar Constellation is busy trying to figure out what it wants to be and who it wants to side with (if anyone). |
| 403 | * SpaceElevator: Mars has one. Earth had a few before the Fall, one is still standing but it's kind of off-limits. |
| 404 | * SpaceIsCold: Biomorphs without Temperature Tolerance and Vacuum Sealing take 10 points of cold damage per minute in vacuum. |
| 405 | * SpaceCossacks: The hedonist, [[SpaceNomads nomadic]], [[AnarchyIsChaos anarchic]] Scum faction is this, with an added flavor of Romani. They rove the universe and are violent. |
| 406 | * SpacePirates: Most of them operate in the Main Belt and the Outer System. |
| 407 | * SpaceStation: Many, of various shapes and sizes. |
| 408 | * SpaceWestern: With the outer reaches of the solar system, the ''{{Series/Firefly}}''-flavored Martian outback and the extrasolar exoplanet colonies courtesy of Pandora Gates. |
| 409 | * SpaceWhale: Suryas, giant space whales LIVING IN THE SURFACE OF THE SUN! |
| 410 | * SpiderTank: Fenrir synthmorphs, arguably, considering they require six egos to operate and have a big gun mounted on top. |
| 411 | * SplitPersonalityMerge: |
| 412 | ** Forks are usually merged with the original once they have fulfilled their intended purpose. It gets more difficult the longer the two have been separate though. |
| 413 | ** It's possible to merge two completely ''different'' minds together, for a loose definition of "possible." Doing so is about equivalent to making ''Film/TheHumanCentipede'' with minds instead of bodies; it's some of the least sane of this setting's [[MadScientist Mad Science]], only the greatest brainhackers even have a chance of doing it, and even a successful "ascendant fork" will be kinda brain-damaged. |
| 414 | * StandardSciFiHistory: Thanks to the TITANS stages 2, 3, and 4 happened within the same decade. The Consortium plans on becoming the Empire, but the Autonomists (except maybe some Titanians) would rather the Empire cycle never happen - there is a movement that, at best, declares Earth a lost cause and too risky to retake, and at worst, wants to purge it from everyone's memory. |
| 415 | * StarfishAliens: Factors, a race of [[PlantAliens sentient fungi]] who can [[CombiningMecha merge together into larger bodies while retaining their individual minds]], but tend to [[IAmLegion refer to themselves as "we"]]. |
| 416 | * StartMyOwn: A variant. The Cloud-Conceals-Hunter server of Firewall is in the process of breaking off from Firewall as a whole and going rogue. This is currently not a hostile split - CCH has a very high mission success rate in the most difficult of black operations, but operates very differently from Firewall as a whole and engages in next to no contact with the rest of the organization, so it's seen as more of a slow yet amicable divorce. Mavericks ''wish'' they could go the CCH route, but begrudgingly stick to Firewall's resources. |
| 417 | ** This is one of the in-universe theories about Project Ozma - maybe Firewall renegades. Why they split off, who the heck knows? That's ''if'' they're renegades and not something else. |
| 418 | ** Firewall itself is a conglomeration of various preservation and anti-TITAN groups that popped up before or after the Fall. |
| 419 | * StealingFromTheTill: Firewall proxies have access to lots of funds - indeed, part of their job is arranging for the misappropriation of money from elsewhere to fund Firewall. Some of them consider ''personal'' enrichment to be a perk of the job; Firewall is largely cool with this so long as they don't get greedy. |
| 420 | * StrawmanPolitical: In the corebook at least, the anarchist and transhumanist leanings of the authors become rather obvious by the way they describe the other factions - the Planetary Consortium is made up of many a CorruptCorporateExecutive, the Lunar-[=LaGrange=] Alliance are dismissed as barely-surviving, obsolete Old World governments barely hanging on to a crumbling ledge too busy living in the past, and the Jovian Republic is busy PuttingOnTheReich and denying any kind of scientific progress in a way that made them look bone-headedly stupid (the Jovians are also hypocrites who have a secret upper-crust elite that are transhuman to the point of being considered Exhuman). Later supplements and forum discussions of the authors got better at giving everyone a balanced characterization - making the Planetary Consortium bigger and more efficient at pumping out new tech, the Jovians a fighting chance by constantly studying other factions' tech to exploit weaknesses (as well as willing to use said tech when the situation calls for it), while trying to make their own technology modern without conceits considered dangerous (such as nanotech). The forum gave a new Jovian spin to the tagline: |
| 421 | -->Humanity is disappearing. Protect it.\ |
| 422 | Programs are stealing the future. Fight it.\ |
| 423 | Death is what makes you human. Embrace it. |
| 424 | ** One of the files shown in X-Risks is the argument from a Firewall agent that capitalism lead to the Fall, and that its continued existence and strategies (unchecked resource use, laws, copyright, etc.) should be considered as big an X-Risk as the [=TITANs=] themselves. |
| 425 | ** In-Universe, autonomists and argonauts tend to compose the majority of Firewall agents, partially because the group formed from a bunch of argonauts, rogue intelligence agents who no longer trusted their superiors, and proto-Barsoomians, partially because every government in the solar system (except for Titan[[note]]in Titan's democratic society, labeling Firewall as terrorists would require admitting that they exist, which Fleet Intelligence is not going to do[[/note]]) has labeled them as terrorists, and partially because the people who recruit new agents tend to be autonomists and argonauts and are less likely to recruit people whose ideology doesn't mesh with theirs. |
| 426 | * StrawNihilist: |
| 427 | ** Some mental strains of the Exsurgent virus lead into this, with bad results. |
| 428 | ** This, ultimately, is the difference between exhumans and Ultimates-while Ultimates are genuinely Nietzschean {{Well Intentioned Extremist}}s who want the best for humanity, exhumans invoke extreme forms of [[TheSocialDarwinist Social Darwinism]] and misanthropic loathing of most other transhumans-they explicitly admit that their view of things is that anything and anyone that does not help their survival is fundamentally a threat, and that's their ''recruitment'' speech; the Firewall agent relaying the exhuman memorandum points out that the speaker was deliberately avoiding admitting that most exhumans want to actively enslave and conquer less evolved transhumans (read here, "everyone else"). |
| 429 | * SubspaceAnsible: Quantum Entanglement comms, very handy. Also very, very expensive to use. |
| 430 | * SuperReflexes: The Neurachem biomod, Reflex Booster cyberware, and Mental Speed nanoware all provide these. |
| 431 | * SuperSenses: The Enhanced [sense] augmentations. |
| 432 | * SufficientlyAdvancedAlien: The [[spoiler:ETI]]. Their main weapon, the Exsurgent virus is basically magic. Hatefully horrible magic. |
| 433 | * SyntheticPlague: In addition to the obvious subject of the exsurgent virus, there are a myriad of other artificial diseases in play as well. Transhumanity is perfectly able to unleash everything from bioplagues to simplified basilisk hacks on itself, and there are even a few [=TITAN=]-created illnesses completely separate from the exsurgent virus. With the enhancements provided by basic biomods and general hygiene practices natural pathogens are unheard of outside bioconservative habitats and rare even then. |
| 434 | * TalkAboutTheWeather: Amusingly, even though the local climate is computer-regulated, this topic still exists in space habitats, due to force of habit. |
| 435 | * TeamSwitzerland: ''Officially'', Firewall is neutral regarding outside politics; supposedly, if a team consists of an ultimate warrior, a corporate [[TheSocialExpert social expert]], an argonaut sneak and an anarchist uplifted pig hacker, they're all sentinels and members of Firewall without discrimination, and all are trusted to fight x-risks. Unofficially, it doesn't work that way: Firewall maintains strong sympathies towards anarchist and argonaut politics, and corporate types, bioconservatives and ultimates need to work extra hard to prove their loyalty (in fact, ultimates are unofficially blacklisted from higher rank, period). |
| 436 | * TeleporterAccident: The Pandora Gates are not well-understood by transhumans, and in themselves might not be stable at all. Therefore, teleportation sometimes [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace leads to]] [[PortalCut unpleasant]] [[TeleFrag outcomes]]. |
| 437 | * {{Terraform}}: |
| 438 | ** Of a limited kind. Specially modified biomorphs can survive on Mars without a vacsuit and one of the goals of Reclaimers is to develop terraforming methods good enough to restore Earth. |
| 439 | ** The Planetary Consortium had plans to terraform Venus before the Morningstar Constellation split off with their alternative plan to only make the upper atmosphere breathable and keep living in aerostats. |
| 440 | ** Terraforming efforts have begun on a number of exoplanets as well. One of them, Sky Ark, already had an Earth-like atmosphere but no native life more complex than lichen so it’s being rapidly transformed into a planet-sized zoo with cloned Earth flora and fauna. |
| 441 | * TokenEvilTeammate: Das Frettchen, CIA spook turned insurance magnate and a founding member of Firewall, is openly bigoted against uplifts, quick to nuke even for the conservative faction, annoyingly territorial of Valles-New Shanghai, and [[spoiler: chummy with Project Ozma]]. It sometimes seems that his oligarchic connections are the only reason he’s still in Firewall, as they would complicate his removal and occasionally prove useful. |
| 442 | * TongueTied: One of the earliest stages of many Exsurgent Virus strains, which actively prevent their victim from seeking aid. |
| 443 | * TheTriadsAndTheTongs: The only ethnic crime syndicates to survive the Fall in significant numbers due to China's large presence on Mars. [[TheCartel The Latin American cartels]], TheMafia, and the {{Yakuza}} were mostly assimilated into the Night Cartel. Accordingly, Chinese is the lingua franca of criminal groups, "Guanxi" is the criminals' reputation network, and many Chinese groups that weren't originally criminal in origin have since been co-opted. |
| 444 | * TransformingMecha: Any synthmorph with the Shape Adjusting enhancement. Flexbots are synthmorphs composed of a number of flexbot modules which [[CombiningMecha link together]] into a larger whole, and the interconnections between the modules can be adjusted to change the flexbot's shape. |
| 445 | * TranshumanAbomination: |
| 446 | ** Some strains of the Exsurgent virus transform people into replicas of StarfishAliens the virus has previously encountered. From fleshy tubes with whiplike tentacles to featureless blobs. |
| 447 | ** Members of the "Exhuman" movement seek to become the Übermensch by leaving behind their human "weaknesses", usually sleeving in custom morphs that either invoke the UncannyValley or look like nothing natural. |
| 448 | * TranshumanAliens: Played with as one alien race did something like this to themselves to survive the virus. |
| 449 | ** Also looks like humanity itself is going to have to do this in order to claim their place in the CosmicHorrorStory universe. |
| 450 | * TranshumansInSpace: Baseline humans are in the distinct minority off of Earth, except in the Junta. On the flipside, non-humanoid, ultra-genemodded, or notably 'alien'/post-human bodies may or may not be frowned upon, depending on the hab you're on. |
| 451 | * TranshumanTreachery: Exhumans are humans attempting to super-evolve themselves, whether to survive anywhere or else seek to join in TheSingularity. They don't think like humans do, and tend to be rather hostile to them (and vice versa). |
| 452 | ** The official Jovian policy is that ''all'' of transhumanity is inherently guilty of this by sheer dint of existence. |
| 453 | ** [[LivingShip MeatHab]] is a subversion: a transhuman who turned itself into a living habitation, but enjoys human company and has an awesome sense of humor. The subversion came when a small bunch of exhumans thought that it was one of them, and it promptly sent them packing. |
| 454 | ** The Ultimates have a reputation of this thanks to their similarities to both Exhuman and fascist philosophies. They aren't quite considered over the line by Firewall, but they're watching. This was true across the FourthWall as well - between editions, the writers dropped support for them as [=PCs=], changing their mind on whether they were over the line. |
| 455 | ** Titania's Civil Intelligence Directorate and Fleet Intelligence are also being watched for this. Their veteran operatives are augmented to nearly-exhuman levels, and employ such tools as forking, drugs and memory hacking with virtual abandon. And unlike almost every other polity in the Solar System, they are not automatically hostile to actual exhumans. |
| 456 | ** X-Risks partially subverts this-we actually see an exhuman expand on his philosophy, and it's quite clear [[SocialDarwinist he would be pretty hostile even if he wasn't an exhuman]]. |
| 457 | ** The Minervan Fleet take the Jovian viewpoint and push past it so far they become an inversion. They aren't transhuman, but they're definitely treacherous: they want to kill or subjugate everyone in the solar system but themselves (even the Jovians, who are "corrupted" for allowing transhumanity to live). |
| 458 | * {{Ubermensch}}: Manu Bhattacharya, founder of the Ultimates, who developed a philosophy of [[SocialDarwinist survival of the fittest]], [[ToBeAMaster a continual search for physical and mental perfection]], [[RenaissanceMan capability in all areas]], and [[GeneticEngineeringIsTheNewNuke radical genetic reconstruction of humanity]]. ''[[BadassBoast "His words are pearls, his attacks do not miss, he weeps at beauty and laughs at war. He dares you to surpass him."]]'' |
| 459 | * UncannyValley: An in-universe example, used by name as a negative trait in character creation. |
| 460 | * UnderestimatingBadassery: One blind spot that can ''seriously'' ruin a sentinel's day is when they go up against Jovian agents. They expect to see agents in flats without much in the way of advanced gear. However, while they believe that they're essentially damning their souls by doing this, Jovians are very much willing to use whatever tools are necessary to fight back against the transhuman threat just outside their borders, and if that means sleeving into a tricked-out morph that would make an ultimate jealous and equipping that morph with a nanotechnological arsenal, then these men will do it. |
| 461 | * UnlimitedWardrobe: Both subverted and played straight by smart clothing, which consist of nanomachines which can alter the clothing to whatever specification you desire. One set of clothes, unlimited possibilities. |
| 462 | * UnitedSpaceOfAmerica: Justified. In a rather sobering moment it is revealed that during the Fall the more affluent parts of the world left the less affluent parts of the world to die, and there was a holocaust by omission of, especially, much of the African continent. |
| 463 | ** Though China had one of the largest presences in space before the fall, and many of the old megacorps recruited a lot of indentured servants from the third world (helps explain the Jovian Junta). |
| 464 | ** The Jovian Republic was founded by the remnants of the US government and military with assistance from the remnants of a few South American governments. ''Rimward'' describes them as a totalitarian-leaning version of religiously conservative UsefulNotes/ColdWar-era USA InSpace, replacing RedScare with Transhumanism scare. |
| 465 | ** Nova York is, well, New York. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of its inhabitants ''aren't'' refugees/infugees from the destruction of New York, and its emphasis on the arts makes it more like the hipster portions of Brooklyn and Harlem. |
| 466 | ** Titan was colonized by a coalition of north Atlantic states, primarily Scandinavia but some Canadians as well. You know, because they already lived in dark cold places rich in hydrocarbons, and at the time their hydrocarbons were running out. |
| 467 | * UniversalTranslator: Muses can provide real-time translations of most languages. There's also a "dolphin translator" designed specifically for translating human language into dolphin squeaks and whistles and vice-versa. |
| 468 | * UniversalUniverseTime: Averted, the Earth time and calendar is used mostly by Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, the Martians use their own 24 month calendar, and everyone else uses whatever works for them. |
| 469 | * UnknownRival: Discussed in an analysis of Jovian/Titanian relations. The Jovians consider the Titanians to be an ultimate threat to their way of life, just waiting to nuke them into rubble. The Titanians are completely baffled by this, and see the Jovians as a mildly-annoying bunch of Luddites; they're more likely to send humanitarian aid to Jupiter than armed spacecraft, unless the Republic is attacking a Titanian ally. |
| 470 | * UpliftedAnimal: Simply called uplifts. Mostly apes, parrots and corvids and celeaphods. |
| 471 | * {{Utopia}}: The entire setting is something of an exploration of this trope: this is a world where being professional-level good at something is a matter of a few minutes on Google and a software download, and in many places you can get a body that verges on physical godhood just by finding someone with a spare and asking nicely. Mostly this ends in a bit of deconstruction with individuals and factions exploit the isolation to create paradises, but sometimes the post-scarcity angle gets played straight and everyone is brilliant at everything all the time. |
| 472 | * VestigialEmpire: Most remains of [[EarthIsTheCenterOfTheUniverse the former center of transhumanity]] formed the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance. |
| 473 | * TheVirus: The jury is out on whether the Exsurgent virus is worse than anything [[VideoGame/{{Prototype}} GENTEK]] or [[Franchise/ResidentEvil the Umbrella Corporation]] ever made. |
| 474 | ** To compare, the Exsurgent virus can infect virtually anything because it comes in digital, biological and nanoswarm forms. There are even basilisk hacks that can [[BrownNote reprogram you to the virus's whims simply by you hearing a sound or seeing a light pattern]]. Did I mention that the virus is also intelligent? As in, [[TechnoWizard able to keep up with Stephen Hawking]] and capable of [[AdaptiveAbility self-reprogramming?]] |
| 475 | ** It does have one glaring flaw, though-it's massively impatient. Firewall thanks its lucky stars that as soon as things don't go its way or it thinks it's going to win, subtlety goes out and CombatTentacles come in. |
| 476 | * VirtualGhost: Infomorphs, particularly the infugees who escaped the Fall as backups. |
| 477 | * VirtualSidekick: Most characters have a semi-sapient AI called a "Muse" in their BrainComputerInterface. |
| 478 | * WalkingTheEarth: The Gatehopper groups who continuously travel through the Pandora Gates, sightseeing the wonders of the universe and sometimes return to transhuman space by random chance. Unless they ended up in a supernova by said random chance. |
| 479 | * WeAreStrugglingTogether: |
| 480 | ** The Autonomist Alliance is composed of every [[UsefulNotes/{{Anarchism}} anarcho-subgenre]] around the sun, and not all of them get along. In particular, the Extropian anarcho-capitalists and the collectivists barely even agree that they're on the same side (with the mutualists sitting in a Switzerland position between them), and the scum have no use for anyone's laws but their own and embrace AnarchyIsChaos on their own barges; conversely, Titanians and anarchists generally get along better, acting more like bickering siblings than true rivals. |
| 481 | ** The Barsoomian Movement agrees on one thing: Martians should decide their own destiny, and be governed by their own people rather than by the Planetary Consortium. Beyond that, they have nothing in common, ranging from the nomadic techno-libertarians to the "redneck" clanking masses in low-quality robot shells, and each group has a different vision for the future. Supporting the Barsoomian Movement is one of the few things that almost everyone in the Autonomist Alliance agrees on, but conversely, not all (or even most) Barsoomians are autonomists; some just want a new Martian government, an end to indentured servitude and a chance for economic success. |
| 482 | ** Firewall's decentralized and compartmentalized nature can lead to many conflicts between different Servers (Super-cells), made worse by the fact that Firewall was founded by the various anti-x-threat agencies[=/=]organizations with different ideas on how to combat said x-threats, from which came five major ideological factions: |
| 483 | *** The Backups, who believe that the Second Fall is not only possible, but is inevitable, and so try to make sure that transhumanity can survive it by establishing more exo-colonies and building Arcships. Everybody else thinks that they leech resources from more immediate concerns, but on the other hand, they tend to be TeamSwitzerland in internal disputes, and the rest of Firewall appreciates the resources that their research brings to the table. They also have the distinction of being the "original" ideology of Firewall, based in pre-Fall existential threat organizations. |
| 484 | *** The Conservatives, who believe that the only appropriate response to anything that is a potential x-threat to transhumanity is to destroy it, and that includes any kind of AI, including the [=AGIs=]. Many view them as overly paranoid, xenophobic and racist, but they have the most means to supply and finance Firewall agents, giving them substantial influence. These used to be the dominant faction early after the Fall, but an incident where a trigger-happy group of agents destroyed a ship with thousands of infugees on board because the captain happened to be an AGI kicked them out of their defacto leadership, which was snatched by... |
| 485 | *** The Pragmatists, who believe that you need fire to fight fire, and that includes the use of TITAN tech. They are also in favor of not killing Asyncs, [=AGIs=], and Uplifts, which granted them a reputation of inclusiveness. Some, mainly the Conservatives, believe that they place Firewall at risk of infection and subversion. |
| 486 | *** The Structuralists, who believe that the ad-hoc, decentralized nature of Firewall hinders it more that it helps, and push for a more established, structured hierarchy in order to more efficiently respond to x-threats. They also believe that Firewall should go public and work with similar agencies across the solar system. Everybody else thinks that this will result in Firewall being subverted by governments or other competing powers. |
| 487 | *** The Mavericks, who are comprised of MilitaryMaverick and CowboyCop types who believe in Firewall's cause but don't like the strict regulations and procedures that Firewall operates with. Due to Firewall being decentralized, servers that predominantly trend Maverick have a reputation for abandoning all but the most basic operational structures and for being at risk of leaving Firewall entirely. The rest of the factions consider the Mavericks to be more of a problem than a legitimate faction, and want to keep them limited so they won't expose the organization as a whole. |
| 488 | *** Minor Firewall factions include Anti-Capitalists (hypercapitalism is the most pertinent threat to transhumanity's survival), Aggressive Reclaimers (perform an all-out strike on Earth and the Exhuman enclaves), Capsulists (lock all of transhumanity away in ego vaults, complete the singularity in simspace, and emerge as gods in a few million years), Mindcrafters (create a super-intelligent AI and do it right this time), and Negatists (destroy the Pandora Gates at all costs). |
| 489 | ** Firewall also has to deal with external politics butting into the x-risk calculation. Firewall has proxies of nearly all ideologies [[note]]Ultimates have, so far, never made proxy[[/note]], and some proxies define other ideologies as literal x-risks in their own right; most notably, autonomists that argue that hypercapitalism is an x-risk. Some proxies want to try to get everyone playing by the same rulebook, but the consensus is that trying to force servers to leave outside politics at the door would risk a schism. |
| 490 | * WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture: Averted in the strictest sense, as most labor is done by robots. But in the Inner System and Extropia many of those robots are inhabited by indentured transhuman egoes, and the ultimates often play it straight using enslaved biomorphs. |
| 491 | * WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: Complicated in-universe with the existence of uplifted animals, [=AIs=], and personality forks; complicated further by the general non-permanence of death (e.g. is it okay to murder someone if you agree to pay their [[BodySurf resleeving]] fees?); and complicated further still by opinions and laws regarding the subject varying from habitat to habitat. |
| 492 | * WhatMeasureIsANonSuper: The Ultimates and Exhumans look down on normal humans with disdain. The Ultimates being a [[SocialDarwinist Social Darwinistic]] [[{{Ubermensch}} extremist]] group of [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy ascetic]] [[OnlyInItForTheMoney mercenaries]], and Exhumans being a type of [[TheSingularity singularity-chasing]] psychopaths who [[BodyHorror alter their bodies in the most unusual ways]]. |
| 493 | ** Even outside these groups, "zeroes" (people without access to mesh inserts of any kind) and "flats" (genetically unmodified baseline humans) don't really get a lot of respect from transhumanity at large, to say the least. One of the reasons the Minervan Fleet is so hated is not just because they're genocidal against anything that isn't baseline, they ''are'' baseline - even lost limbs go unreplaced or have nothing more than 20th-century crude prosthetic. |
| 494 | * WhoWantsToLiveForever: Those with the "Immortality Blues" trait. |
| 495 | ** Given that the setting is only ten years after the fall, and it's next to impossible for anyone to be over a century old given the timeline, most characters with that trait would either be alive today, or have spent several [[YearInsideHourOutside relative]] decades inside accelerated simulspace. |
| 496 | ** Most bioconservatives use this as part of their reasoning for rejecting transhumanity. |
| 497 | * WhoWatchesTheWatchmen: Everybody. Always. Thanks to sousveillance. Except in the Junta, and the sensor networks in most Consortium habitats tend to be under hypercorp control. |
| 498 | * WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity: |
| 499 | ** Psychics, without exception, all go insane to some extent following the onset of their powers. They can get better, but are still more prone to psychosis afterward. |
| 500 | ** Once again, a common bioconservative and Jovian line is that all transhuman existence will lead to this. |
| 501 | ** Since you can directly plug your brain into things, a lot of valuable but alien knowledge can partially break your mind. Some varieties of the exsurgent virus are more literal about it, reshaping the victim into something new and powerful but turning them screamingly homicidal. |
| 502 | * WorkingForABodyUpgrade: Indentures, though the hypercorps have a habit of not following through on their promises or giving them morphs that require periodic gene therapy. |
| 503 | * WorldHalfFull: For all the horrors the universe holds, there ''is'' at least some hope for humanity. See the tagline. |
| 504 | * TheWormThatWalks: One of the available Synth bodies is a swarm of robotic insects. They can also come together into a vaguely humanoid form. |
| 505 | * WretchedHive: Several places. |
| 506 | ** In ''Rimward'', Legba is described as being even worse than the average scum barge - and that describing it as a [[Film/ANewHope hive of scum and villainy]] is [[InsultToRocks an insult to scum and villains]]. Given that the Nine Lives crime syndicate is easily one of the nastiest in the setting, it's hard to disagree. It's a hab made up of whatever could be bolted together, the decks are filled with gore, piss, shit, and various grisly shrines of still-bloody cortical stacks, and millions and millions of egos are used as slave labor, gladiator fighting rings, sex slavery, and gruesome experiments done for shits and giggles. |
| 507 | ** Most scum barges play with the trope. From an outsider's viewpoint, they ''look'' like this, but the scum's particular brand of freewheeling does ''not'' lead to a CrapsackWorld and the barges aren't much more dangerous than anywhere else in the Solar System. Just not the kind of place you want to go if you're too uptight. |
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