Eclipse Phase

Eclipse Phase. Torrent, creative commons license, so don't kill me please. Think Cthulhutech with less NGE and more GITS.

Issues I have with firearms rules:

• Railguns insufficiently powerful, restricted to two ammunition types.
• No coilguns.
• Heavy pistol more powerful than SMG.
• All pistols have automatic fire.
• No real point to energy weapons since firearms have longer range and are capable of more damage and AP whilst carrying more ammunition.

Thoughts on the game?

It's okay, but sort of boring. There are only two levels of danger- EVERYBODY GONNA DIE and "eh, I'll be fine, let me download."

It's the reason immortal characters aren't fun in any fiction, regardless of type.

Odd, I could have sworn death and resurrection caused SV to the ego and cost about 5,000 credits per morph. Kind of like casting resurrection in Dn D.

SOM x 3 test for resleeving, where anything but Extreme or Critical Success results in -10 to all physical actions for a day or more. This is followed by an INT x 3 test for alienation, where failure results in one or more stress points per full 10 Margin of Failure. This is followed by Continuity Stress, which is dependent, but most likely 1d10+2 SP. (Violent/sudden death + 1 SP per MoF[LUC], or continuity-less backup of >1 day without knowledge/certainty of own death)

Assuming average stats, you're likely to suffer -10 to all physical actions for a day, no alienation stress, and 1d10+2 SP.

This is assuming they're sleeving into a clone of their own body. If they don't get a clone of their own body, they'll probably rack up a few more SP. The cost of the Morph must be factored in too. (of course, that benevolent terrorist organization Firewall has a tendency to handle that expenditure)

edited 15th Oct '10 6:40:17 AM by LatwPIAT

Yay, another game added to my collection of books I want to use but can't

OP's link got shut down by the Feds, so use an alternative such as this site[1],

A few bad apes and they spoil it for all of us, eh?

I've personally had a rather strong disinterested, even distaste for Eclipse Phase's settings and characters. I think like Mr.Cales was saying i'm just not fond fiction with immoral characters. When everything is possible, nothing is interesting.

However I do really like game system. It's a nice straight forwards D100 (i.e. a pair of D10's) roll down percentile system. 'Fate points' are done by a really clever mechanic. If you stat score is 56% and you roll a 73. You have option to 'flip' the the result to 37.

Doubles can't flipped and act as the critical successes or fails. A roll of 99 is your absolute worst result while a roll of 00 is the absolute best, since it's literally a zero.

edited 6th May '14 7:17:21 PM by joeyjojo

So umm, now that I have actually read the book...

<_< I have to disagree with you and Mr. Cales there. Yes, everyone on Eclipse Phase is immortal, but it doesn't remove consequences from death, I can see more problems with dying than rules PIAT there listed. Also, everyone is immortal. Including people you kill :P Maybe they won't remember it or even care much, but yeah, I can't see how GM would fail to take advantage of downsides of that everyone can upload their mind to new bodies

edited 31st Jul '14 1:23:44 PM by SpookyMask

I think is just the authors' heavy techno progressivism bias that is the problem. The Jovians for example are portrayed as backwards bigoted luddites for restricting tech growth after out of control robots have destroy the earth. It can all be a little hard to swallow.

It true the cloning or 'forking' does make for some interesting RP potential.

I remember reading about a GM who's party was on a treasure hunt for some alien artefact, after finding said artefact one of the party members revealed that he was a secret member of firewall to the group and depresured the ship TK Ping them to stop them it being sold as planed.

They had to role play waking up and being told about the 'accident' that had costed them the artefact.

edited 31st Jul '14 10:22:22 PM by joeyjojo

"Games Workshop made it big with Catholic space Nazis, what can we do to keep up?"
"How about Catholic space neocons?"
"Brilliant!"
- probably not Posthuman Studios, but who knows?

^^Technically speaking, earth was destroyed by out of control god level AI capable of creating nanoplagues and such capable of hijacking those robot bodies And even Jovians use backupping and other transhumanism stuff, just to much lesser extent, "flats" aren't exactly regular humans, they are morphs that aren't genetically modified.

Though I can understand what you mean. The only two non transhuman factions are the faction that is described as fascists clinging to old values and economy Jovians and Bioconservatives are basically terrosists, though you can assume less radical people like that DO exist, book just never goes into much detail about that.

However, I think its pretty understandable since the Eclipse Phase is about transhuman society and such. Its not like Shadowrun or Cyberpunk R Ps which use Cybernetics Eat Your Soul trope heavily.(with former it being literal and latter it being "You go crazy" variant) In Eclipse Phase EVERYONE is transhuman and it is widely accepted, so people with opposite opinion are the far in minority and seen as strange.

Soooo yeaaaaaaah, if you don't like the game for heavy transhuman stuff, then yeah, you aren't going to like it ever since the whole point of it IS the transhumanism stuff. I do find it enjoyable how there seems to exists the rp for every niche. Cthulhu mythos rp, zombie rp, western rp, anime rp for pretty much every genre and cliche, cyberpunk rp, viking rp, etc, with this one filling the transhuman rp niche.

Plus its not like there aren't extremists in other direction, Ultimates sound kinda like... Well, umm... Yeah, I'm not sure whats actually good word. I mean, I don't think they are trying to "cull the weak", but they are certainly heavily elitists...

Anyhoo, more on "death being boring" accusation, 1) You still die permanently if you don't have a backup 2) Lots of things in "SPOILERS" section of the book are pretty permadeath causing 3) There are more horrifying things in setting than dying, mostly found in "SPOILERS" section :P

It kinda makes me wonder if you have actually read or played the game or if you just had GM who didn't know what to do with it <_< I mean, yeah, death isn't big deal, but death still has a lot of roleplaying potential, like the example you brought up, and it still has some very bad consequences especially if you keep dying. If GM treats the death as having infinite lives in video game, they are doing it wrong

And SPEAKING of space Catholics, I'm bit annoyed by how scifi writers seem to always use the setting as chance to display their biases about religions I'm apathetic when it comes to religion, but I'm bit skeptical about how apparently almost everyone in future being atheist with most of old religion(read: Christianity and sometimes other Abrahamic religions as well. Maybe they sometimes mention one of other big religions, but that doesn't happen very often) people being considered weird and maybe Buddhism being the lucky religion(though Buddhism is more of philosophy really, but its always mentioned in context of religion) to do well. And that model seems to apply most scifi settings created these days, other religions are lucky to be mentioned and I'm pretty sure writers don't actually know how religions they mention work... People like to believe in whatever makes them feel better, the progression of science doesn't inherently make people less likely to believe in stuff, it makes them more likely to change their beliefs to fit the world so they can continue feeling better

edited 1st Aug '14 2:45:46 AM by SpookyMask

I'll admit right now I've never played it. My group won't touch anything that doesn't have dungeons and/or Dragons attached. :P

Anyway you're right to say that the transhuman doesn't necessarily make things boring, for reasons mentioned. But it does make the things fundamentally different. I find it makes characters harder to relate to if they're no longer more strictly speaking motral.

Still there is a lot to like about the the game system despite my personal gripes. The system is beautifully done for its its elegant blackjack roll as high as possible under your stat resolution system and there is just so much detail and meat to setting and character creation. Any system where you play a psychic cybernetic enhanced generic engineered octopus is good in my books.

edited 2nd Aug '14 12:13:58 AM by joeyjojo

"No longer more strictly speaking moral"? .-. Yeaaah, if you think that transhumanism is inherently immoral, ya probably won't really be ever interested in this game setting wise <_< I'm personally more of "Eh, I don't think humanity should be improved with technology, I'm more interested in what will happen to us by natural evolution", but I don't think that idea of improving humanity by technology is automatically bad thing even when it goes to Ghost In The Shell technology even if I personally wouldn't want that kind of future. I mean, honestly, uploading your minds into computers, making yourself immortal and stuff, there isn't really objective reason why it would be a bad thing. If improving humans is itself immoral, then using medicine or glasses is as well. If uploading yourself into a computer doesn't make you crazy and evil, and there are no real drawbacks, then logically there can't be nothing really wrong with it.

Plus, you can have your morph be robot spider/modified giant coconut crab/kite/etc, thats cool

edited 1st Aug '14 11:43:37 PM by SpookyMask

Eh, sorry I meant to write mortal, not moral. That was my mistake.

The different a t makes.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh

Yeah, that makes more sense xP Its kinda hard to relate to mindset where permanent death is considered to be "rare" and setting where there was brief period of time when suicide was considered to be hobby before people thought it was distasteful since the Fall killed 9% of population

edited 2nd Aug '14 12:23:30 AM by SpookyMask

It's important to remember that though death is usually not permanent, it's meant to play heavily into the horror of the setting. You are Functionally Immortal in a universe full to the brim of Fates Worse Than Death

edited 6th Aug '14 11:04:27 PM by Lanceleoghauni

Where's the uplifted elephants? Uplifted cuttlefish? They need to add those.

And they should release a setting in the future where they finally managed to uplift bears and cats. And dogs.

Dead. Along with most of the earth most like.

I would imagine elephants are extinct, can't really see them getting on a space ship.

You can't tell me they didn't digitize their genomes. There's no way. :/

And there's still uplifted blue whales around, so I don't see why not.

And they could always slice miniature elephants.

edited 25th Aug '14 2:31:31 PM by CassidyTheDevil

The uplifted blue whales are rare as hell though. And you have to remember that earth was unstable for a long time before the fall. Even if it had been digitized, there's no reason to believe the controlling parties would share that info, or that they survived the fall.

Man now I've got doctor octagon stuck in my head.

It's down played but most of earth'a animals are long long gone. I'm sure somebody was able to save elephant dna from scanning a panio or something. But rebuilding one going to be on the bottom of list to priorities. There're not exactly the most space friendly of choices.

The cetaceans only got uplifts because of aquatic environments. And the sun. (Assuming they used cetaceans as a base for the surya)

First off, most of the survivors of the Fall farcasted and resleeved, IIRC. Secondly, why couldn't they get on a spaceship, regardless?

..Why? :/

Lack of manipulators, and sheer bulk do not coincide well with the vast majority of habs. They'd be pretty much limited to gravity wells

Elephants are not space friendly because they very large and take up a lot of room.

edited 25th Aug '14 10:58:03 PM by joeyjojo

It's possible uplifting was done some time after elephants were wiped out and they just never got around to it. I don't remember off the top of my head but I doubt uplifting is still done on any large scale. "not enough people" is not an issue, it's the lack of BODIES that's a problem.

edited 26th Aug '14 12:43:50 AM by Lanceleoghauni