/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

Isn't a Pod assumed to be less dangerous than your typical Synthmorph?

Hey guys, I was hoping if you lot could tell me if Eclipse Phase is right for me.

I'm wanting to run a planet-hopping, kaiju-hunting game. Is combat in Eclipse Phase interesting? Is it fluid? Is this scenario even appropriate for an Eclipse Phase game?

Synths are associated with indentures now, but pods are still assoicated with simple AI servants that you can ignore.

You're looking for GURPS. This is literally what GURPS is best at. Throw together a bunch of splats and you have a kaijuu-hunting game in space. No, EP is not the right thing for kaijuu, especially if you want to fight them in mecha.

That would highly depend on the Pod or Synth in question.

But that's not what the Social Stigma is about, that's about the fact that cheaply made synthmorphs (Clanking Masses) are discriminated against in some parts of the solar system as poor, working-class refugees. And Pods are discriminated against for being poor, working-class refugees that approximately 10.1 years ago were also just AI servants.

Are there cops specifically made to police pods?

I don't know about Pods, but in the LLA there are totally cops trying to catch rogue AGIs who might be using masked synths or pods.

I wonder if that would fall under some form of identity theft or fraud? After all, if an AGI isn't a person, then any AGI that attempted to exercise legal rights of a person would need to be committing fraud to have documentation. Illegal alpha forking would probably fall under the same banner.

Well, I think the Lunar cops are probably more agitated by an unshackled AGI wandering around, getting stronger (I/E, learning things) - but yeah, pretending to be a person would probably be fraudulent.

Maybe, but that would seem like it falls under something closer to the Titanian Science Police or Oversight, looking more at AGI research programs or general cybersecurity than hunting the 'AIs amongst us'. An AGI that's not attempting to bootstrap themselves has more to fear from the identity theft division than the anti-TITANS brigade.

Whose identity would they be stealing?

Hunt em down, make em sign their paper work, then treat them just like every other digital entity pretending to be a human.

Well, Oversight or MSP don't operate in the LLA - so that would still be some kind of Lunar cops. I imagine you'd probably just bundle that into some domestic intel/law enforcement agency which handles all aspects, people making unauthorized AGI, unauthorized AGIs wandering around - pretending to be citizens, and "foreign" AGIs entering LLA territory with or without authorization, possibly committing immigration fraud.

I'm apparently equal parts blind and incompetent. I haven't managed to find one on roll20 when I looked. Cheers

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Anyone have rituals that they do because of paranoia/good reasons?

Case in point: first thing I do after I sleeve into a Synth is break the access jacks with a screwdriver, shut down the wireless, and print an ecto.

>overdesigned giant drone

For what purpose?

>drone

There's barely enough room for a pilot, and the weight would drag it down anyway.

>pilot

That's clearly an uplifted corvid sleeved into a highly customized avian pod.

If you're going to suggest something like a disembodied brain or digitized consciousness is in that machine, I have to stop you there. That sort of stuff violates the laws of physics.

Are you saying birds can be smart? That's impossible. Only humans are smart.

Well that's were you're wrong, on counts.

Corvids and a number of other animals have displayed intelligences approaching that, or even exceeding, human children. Crows even have proper language.

And it doesn't violate the laws of physics. It violates the laws of computing. Maybe. I don't know if we know that for sure yet.

>Being speciest
Get out of here Jovian scum!

Huh. You learn something new every day.
Still, just sending out drones into the field would be more cost effective, wouldn't you think?

Do I really look like one of those Gekiganger-worshiping morons?

I'm GMing my first Eclipse Phase campaign pretty soon and my two players are dead set on doing a buddy cop type bounty hunter thing, which I totally love, but why would someone need to die in a time when dying is really not such a big deal?

Because if they're alive, they can resist and break something.

Context?

Also, death is preventable, not impossible. Making a backup requires that you be able to trust the agency making the backup, or have the person resources to do it yourself, which might not be the case. If someone doesn't have a backup, they can die if their stack is lost or destroyed, deliberately or accidentally.

So do criminals not backup? Couldn't security just seize their backups?

You can just pop out their stacks, though depending on what they do, they might not have one or have a failsafe.

The context is two brothers, one died during the fall, one was evacuated, both ended up on an argonaut base owing the argonauts some favors (dead guy was sleeved into their spare daitya) So they were "problem solvers" ie, you need someone gone we get them gone.

Run it like Hyperion Cantos, they need to kill a guy temporary, or rather, they need to kill his last few hours.

Kill him before he finds a black market backup station (or maybe he carries a file that can't be transferred, I dunno?) and delivers some juicy info to the bad guys (or maybe you're the bad guys without knowing it?).

Run that shit like 24h, every minute counts.

They can backup, but if they can't trust a legal backup provider (because cops) they need an illegal one - like the Triads, or Nine Lives. This is not without certain risks, so it's possible that they might just chance it, especially if they were between locations/employers.

How does resleeving from and into morphs with Eidetic Memory work?

Does a character sleeving into a morph with the upgrade become able to perfectly remember everything in their memory from before having the implant?

And regardless of that, do they retain the photgraphic memories they acquired over the course of living in the eidetic memory morph after sleeving out of it?

It would also depend on who they piss off I think.

If they're wanted by the hypercorps, I don't think the autonomists would care too much.

Well this is a great idea.
Someone could've found out about something and a backup of him is due in 24 hours.
You have to stop him from backing up that last day, because then you'll be discovered.

Work-safe board, you dipshit.

Then stop stealing all the good clients, revival bitch.

don't you see? the nipples are covered.
that makes the ungodly abomination that is the female chest, completely harmless and a-ok.

She would probably be reprimanded by her supervisor if she tried to get dressed

>AF 10
>Wearing clothes

...

Hey /epg/, what elements of the Eclipse Phase setting do you think are underutilized, by either the writers or GMs?

Physics doesn't say much about disembodied brains except maybe Boltzmann brains. I'm pretty sure it's not a Boltzmann brain in there.

Space combat, though rumors of a splat in the works about that exist.

Rumors nothing, it's on their official list of projects in development.

Just in very early stages.

So EP twitter just sent out this fan compilation of future-slang. What do we think?

docs.google.com/document/d/15_bMdNRkjvGxhFm0Xj91gA18PIrOtEpVfzLfDUraK1Q/mobilebasic?pref=2&pli=1

>>docs.google.com/document/d/15_bMdNRkjvGxhFm0Xj91gA18PIrOtEpVfzLfDUraK1Q/mobilebasic?pref=2&pli=1
>Bat: Vagina
It's shit.

Bounty hunters are pretty common in EP as Ego Hunters. I think they're more about tracking down specific instances of people though, rather than trying to inflict real death. I ran a similar game except it was NQPD detectives working on ego crimes.

I think bounty/ego hunting is largely ego retrieval.

>Sent a beta fork to a meeting but it failed to check in?
Send in ego hunters to see if it went rogue, got captured, or what.

>Indenture running off with corporate property and an incomplete contract?
Recover the body with ego hunters. See if the ego will continue working, or reinstate a new copy.

>Want to know what happened to some family members during the fall?
Get an ego hunter to see if they can find them in cold storage, or discover enough to place their stack on earth.

etc. Actually killing people completely likely goes beyond the remit of most ego hunters. Ego Killers do exist as well, but they mostly operate by having a lot of contacts with backup agencies and the hacking abilities needed to corrupt secure backups. Memory removal is probably something some of them do.

I actually really like this kind of setup for games. It's good for exploring just how nasty humanity can be with transhuman tech. Brushing shoulders with 9Lives or Exhumans, or other unsavory types in the ego trade, and so on.

The Panopticon. It changes practically everything about how secrecy works, but most prewritten games have some way of avoiding it rather than embracing it.

You could get something out of someone being temporarily dead. You can steal/destroy their stack and then what they remember depends on how frequently they backup. Most people only do so every 6 months. Only people with risky jobs do so more, which is usually weekly, although may be daily.

>an AGI Ego Hunter uplifted from a Barsoomian loper AI

Is this workable, or is it bad?

What do you mean by loper AI?

Oh, it's doable. The only real holdup is Emergent AGI is Eidolon/Infomorph only (to start)

The Wild Artificial from X-Risks.

That's fine. It would probably get ripped out of the bot before it got uplifted, anyway.

...

Using rep&networking to recruit quick short-term allies, social networks in general, memetic conflict, Edited Memories trait, more mundane applications of psychosurgery, non-Firewall plotlines

Alright, genius, what's your future-slang like?

Emergent AGI backround gibbs you by 15 CP.

Some of these are actually pretty funny.

Fuck off to >>>r/sharia

Pretty bad, I wish those meme spouting faggots at RPPR weren't considered the canonical example of Eclipse Phase play

Schway.

Look, if any future slang makes me give an involuntary shudder and gives me an urge to punch whoever invented the slang, it's failed.

Schwarbage.

I pretty sure, there is no official answer. Both options are possible.

I read Eidetic Memory is "perfect memory recall" - and yes, I surmise, it would work retroactively. Maybe not instantly.

Then again... Maybe Eidetic Memory changes the way your memories are written, how they settle in and interconnect. So they had to be formed under Eidetic Memory to reliably bring them back.

Apologies, that's not a question I can give a clear answer to.

Tofts, as in "he's tofts." Slang for Immortality Blues. Originated from having resleeved 'too often.' Many claim it stands for 'Too Old For This Shit.' See BACKROnym.

I'm thinking about running this game but haven't played it before, and one thing I'm wondering is: how necessary are maps? One of the reasons I'm moving away from Pathfinder is that I don't want to fuck around with maps in roll20.

Unless if you really need to keep track of people and their positions, like during a chase or in a labyrinthine section of a hab, no.

I find large scale maps for the local hab or surface area is nice for orientation, but you don't really need combat maps.

Pathfinder or D&D style gridded combat is super awkward for EP, because you can easily have multi-kilometer engagement ranges on planet surfaces. A local map with a rough scale is generally what I use, just to keep things straight.

You don't even need that for simpler fights, in my experience EP combats are either short range fuck-fests which end by the speed three action phase, where maps aren't important as no one has time to move much. Or they're prolonged games of cat and mouse which ends up a fuck-fest of stealth signals and recon drones, and a map is nice to keep track of the overflying or creeping drones. Either way, its fairly stressful and a big mess of plans falling apart.

PRIVILEGE: a morph's advantageous qualities.
>"What's your privilege?"
>"Circadian hack plus hibernation mod. I've also been told it feels great as the big spoon."

COGNITE MADE ME DO IT: said by people who have done something extremely foolish, a way of saying "the thought process I had at the time isn't something worth explaining"
>"I swear. I wasn't trying to fuck her or anything! Cognite made me do it!"

CCTV: Mnemonic Augmentation cyberware
>"Wait a sec, I've caught him doing that on my CCTV, I'll show you."

This is pretty fun I think /epg/ could make a pretty nice assortment of slang on its own

That just means it's the slang of the faction you don't self-insert as. Go ahead and make your favorite faction's, and don't forget to add derogatory terms for presumed self-insert factions of people inventing the slang you dislike

No, really, if your vagina looks like pic related, get into a healing vat and stop fucking bruisers.

I came up with a couple thinking about it.

ACTION FIGURE
A combat-rated or specialized pod. Usually operated by Puppet-Sock.
>"It was going well, but then the Security team started playing with their action figures"

BURNING DELTA
Wasting time, effort or energy. Comes from "Burning Daylight" and Delta-V.
>"Let's pick up the pace, we're burning delta here!"

FRACTAL
Firewall slang for something (usually a mission) gone really wrong. Comes from TITANs use of fractal technology and shapes.
>"It should be a piece of cake, but if one of us goes down then the whole thing will go fractal"

I don't disagree. I just think that could well be a common condition in some factions in Eclipse Phase of all settings, and hence that the term could be used there.

I like the action figure one.

>Using rep&networking to recruit quick short-term allies
That seems like a really neat supplement idea. OR maybe a fan made one. Some sample characters you can call up, tables you can use to make a quick one on the fly or at least spark ideas.

BIRDBRAIN:
Someone extremely adept at zero-g and/or three-dimensional orientation. May also be used to describe a good pilot. Not popular among neo-avians.

>"Nice flying, birdbrain!"

HELLFARM
Massive inter-connected computational center. Enough advanced hardware to run a Seed AI, hypothetically.

>"That's when we stumbled on a hellfarm. No time to get through that shit, we just scorched it to be certain.

BOG
An area-denial tactic/weapon, which involves over-saturating an area with heated gases, airborne particles and flexible cover sheets, impenetrable in multiple visual spectra, sound generators and every other imaginable, sometimes improvised method to render any attempts to navigate or scan the given space impossible.

>"Tell the commander, the whole station is a bog. Bloody ayys."

AYYS
Members of Autonomist Alliance, as well as unaffiliated anarchists. Rarely, actual aliens.

If an AGI isn't a person, then it isn't committing any crime, let alone fraud. The person who created it would be considered responsible, either directly or through negligence. At least, that's how I see it. Same deal for other legally non-person intelligences, like forks or muses.

I'm trying to solve the skill bloat problem. And it is a problem, don't deny it, /epg/.

How merging certain skills based on the same aptitude into one (like Climbing (SOM), Swimming (SOM) and Freerunning (SOM) into Athletics (SOM)) would work, if I lower the starting CP amount?

I like those. I feel like 'fractally fucked' is a thing as well.

SLEEP ON IT
In a time of regulated circadian rhythms and beings with no need of sleep, 'sleeping it over' means taking an extraordinary long time to decide or do something. Especially used by synthmorphs and AGIs.

...

CANCER ENTHUSIAST
Vocal Jovian sympathizer or person who willingly emigrates to the Republic.
>"The elevator out is that way, you fucking cancer enthusiast."

FOREVER LAG
The state of being there physically in some form of dead digital storage and presumably not being resleeved until the heat death of the universe
>"If you ever want to try and top the IRL FPS highscore, get a good lawyer or you get forever lag."

WHO RESET THE FUCKING CALENDAR
The question everyone in game is afraid to ask.

299792458
meters travelled by light per second, dank meme related to exhumans
>"these days I just wanna say fuck it and take the 299792458m walk"

I like the first two, though I'm not sure I appreciate the dankness of the last one.

That's actually as intended, since it's a 1488-9/11-420 kind of dank.

Here's a couple more.

BOILER
Martian slang for an exowomb or healing vat growing a morph for resleeving use. A BOILER ROOM is any enclosed morph house or facility. "Hitting/Going to" the Boiler Room refers to the act of stealing a morph.
>"We're gonna hit the boiler room soon, get us some premium Rusters."

FACTORY
A item which is relatively new, and as such hasn't been modified or broken in yet. Usually refers to hypercorp designs which still feature DRM or other IP protection. From both "Factory Reset" and "Unsatisfactory".
>"Man, this body is still factory. I need to get some implants and take out the GRM."

MAJOR TOM
Someone who has started drifting off into space without being appropriately anchored to a ship or hab.
>"Hold on tight as we pop the airlock, you you'll be Major Tom."

PAPERCLIP
A really primitive or shittly made AI, usually one which is poorly socialized. These kinds of poorly made AIs can become PAPERCLIP MAXIMIZERS. Also "CLIP" or "CLIPPY".
>"Have you met that guy's muse? Such a paperclip."

>Boiler Room
Isn't that "PUPPET HOUSE" already?

>PUPPET HOUSE
You mean a skin store?

...

LAG
Sleep.
>"I need to lag for a while"

Operation Spider Cup: putting a bad thing into a sample container

True story, my players came up with this.

Is it a Void Spider?

>If you're going to suggest something like a disembodied brain or digitized consciousness is in that machine, I have to stop you there. That sort of stuff violates the laws of physics.

It's also a fundamental truth of Eclipse Phase that not only can we digitize the consciousness, we can project it across great distances, edit it (albeit poorly) copy it, upload it into other kinds of bodies, and even store it in a space as small as a grape.

Uplifts are also a thing, corvids whose bodies and minds have been manipulated to be on par with human consciousness. Their egos can ihabit humanoid bodies, and human egos can inhabit corvid bodies.

Sounds to me Eclipse Phase isn't your thing.