/egp/ - Eclipse Phase General

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It was touched on in the last thread but what's the birth rate like post Fall?
Seems like post humans don't seem much interested in making new post humans. Even with their extended life spans how long before humanity fades away?

No hard number as of yet, but the "The Lost" side bar info notes that the transhuman population is mostly stagnant, assumed to be due to extreme longevity in the population, highly effective and easily obtainable contraceptives, and general despair/depression due to the Fall.

So uh, who put the rings on it?

You mean on the large one? I'm pretty sure that's just an infected Novacrab. They just have those, I assume. I don't see any rings on the smaller ones.

are these pictures from a new book?

Transhumans are made, not born.

That's not the best impression I get. Seems like it's theoretically possible to make a new person but previous attempts to do so have ended badly

What is the point of make new transhumans when there are already tons of people stuck in info-storage with little hope of ever having a body again?
It would be a waste of perfectly good morphs.

What's the point of making babies now? There are billions of people already. I'm not convinced that people will want to stop having children of their own because of some utilitarian or practical reason.

The current situation is not really comparable. Yes, there are a lot of people, but we still age and die. If you want A) to be taken care of in your old days B) ensure something of yourself, and society as a whole persists, you will need to have children to keep up with the deathrate.

That's not really a factor when most people are functional imortal.

Your points are all fair and rational but I don't think it would stop transhumans from having babies. The desire to reproduce is in all of us. People don't have children in developed countries because they want a caretaker in their old age. They do it because it's the ultimate symbol of love and devotion. They do it because they want a family of their own. I don't see that changing in the 22nd century, functional immortality or not.

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Pretty sure they're still born, you just use exowombs instead of the mother having to eject the fucker from her body. Live birth is only still a thing in neo-primitivist societies.

Well. I tend to think this desire to reproduce is really an hormonal thing, that could easily be "fixed" by just sleeving in an appropriate morph. Plus, it's only been ten years since the Fall, so I think most people are still wary of the risks their potential child could have to face.
But once Mars or Venus will be in a more advanced terraforming stage I could see people wanting a child again.

Functional immortality didn't stop the permanent death of 90% of transhumanity, did it?

How is the population going to grow? Just create forks of people? That's the road to a stagnant civilization if I've ever heard of one

If you create alpha forks and set them free, that's still progress and growth.

Well, a large part of the 10% technically "alive" is still held in info-storage. You can't really make your civilisation grow when the only places you can live are space stations limited in number and ressources.

Right, I agree with that. I'd say that most children in the solar system are either on Mars, Titan, or the bigger/wealthier space stations. I was just contending the notion that transhumans are primarily made artificially now.

Which is a great way to say "fuck you" to those still in cold storage. I really don't think anyone wants the population of transhumanity to expand primarily by way of having copies of everyone, no matter how much psychosurgery you force them to go through to make them "different".

Nobody cares about the cold storage people, except their family, who no doubt will get them out some day.
You don't need psychosurgery to make copies different, by virtue of not being you and doing different things, they'll become different. Doesn't matter if it takes a day or a hundred years for them and you to be as different as you are from your neighbour, everyone's immortal anyway.

I never claimed the transhuman society would remain dynamic with 0 birthrate, but would people really be willing to compete for extremely restricted living space with even more people?

But without aging there's always an excuse to put it off.

There is some stuff in the book about how sleeving multiple forks is considered a really shitty thing to do but if you're hyper-elite or out on the fringe you probably don't care

Resleeving activists be like "People could have used those morphs!"

I'm not convinced, even today we see that that as soon as women are given s genuine choice on wether they have a baby a large percentage choose not to.

To bring it back to the original topic I wonder if in the long term they might face a slower but more dramatic version of the demographic time bomb?

But what if it's my fetish?

Yeah, the kind of guy that buys inner city homes and turns them into luxury condos that no one actually lives in

>the desire to reproduce is only hormonal
Except it's not. Look at all of the people who want children but have trouble conceiving. Hormonal deficiency is one of those reasons why they might have trouble.

Then go get yourself a flat and start pumping out sprogs. Just remember to be rich so you can afford the extra life support

>Flat
>Implying most biomorphs everywhere aren't genefixed

I'm sure they can get their fix when the Carnival stops by.

What, you don't want the authentic primitive experience? Get out of here you filthy casual

Would having sex with a neo-neanderthal technically count as bestiality?

Nah, sapiens and Neanderthals are close enough to interbreed that's human in my book.

Aww, too bad. The lack of immorality makes it less hot.

There is no lack of immortality, doublepluss hott

>Sleeve in a Fury
>Overpower your neo-primitive object of lust
>Ravish them without mercy
Immorality aplenty, problem solved

Seems so yeah

I wish I had that image/chart that says (paraphrasing) that you can stick your dick in anything, as log as it's old enough and can clearly communicate consent.

I've seen it around occasionally.

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I'm going to play as an AI next session. Some advices? I am currently reading transhuman.

The ol' Harkness Test.

youtube.com/watch?v=lOb112N0lic

As an AI you can expect to be the brains of the team, and as such your goal should be to acquire as many cognitive upgrades as possible so that you can help them more effectively. Standard morphs will work initially but they run into aptitude limits early on, so try to get into a mainframe as soon as possible. Your team probably won't understand because they're not as smart as you, so it's best not to tell them in case they do something stupid.

Probably terrible.

But in fairness, remember that for all the changes, its literally been only ten years since the fall itself. Both society and people are still recovering from that to some extent.

Hell, the Scum barges are basically one gigantic PTSD reaction. A bunch of people who stared death in the face and have decided to fuck, suck and drug that terror away.

I'd expect people to only just now be thinking maybe they can seriously have children again. And that will increase as morph shortages fall.

Make no mistake. Many people will not breed, and those that do might not breed often. But their population growth is still going to make ours look ridiculous. A population that does not die does not need to do much to grow exponentially.

And some factions will be outright encouraging their people to breed. The Jovian Junta (someone mentioned exowombs now, im guessing those guys still do it natural right?) and the Ultimates are two groups i can see that would try to encourage breeding.

In the formers case because numbers will be the only way they can really compete with the monsters of transhumanity - and the latter because the Ultimates are all about the Nietzsch-esque ascension of humanity (which makes their names - Ultimates - so fucking ironic it hurts) and creating something from yourself with the desire that it will surpass you is absolutely their kind of thing.

I'm quite scared of sleeving. This really feels like locking up myself in a tiny storage. It's disgusting.
I prefer to just roam into the local mesh, it's much less a hassle and I can always "borrow" some calculating power when I need to.

The Jovian Republic is noted as being one of the few polities that has positive pop growth from a birth rate as opposed to re-instantiation/immigration like Titan and the PC. I'm sure with a decent population of flats they do do it naturally but I think it was said somewhere that (at least when properly licensed) the JR has some of the best medical technology in the system, including exowombs.

>Jovian Junta

Are you new?

Yeah. To be honest, i didn't even intend to write it. I prefer it when factions in a universe are against one another because they both have reasonable, sensible but opposing viewpoints than because one is flat wrong. And i'd heard there'd been some effort to take the Jovians away from being 'default bad-guys'.

But yeah. I was writing what i was thinking and I've heard Jovian Junta so many times i forget its not their actual names.

What kind of AI? There's a lot of difference between a task-hedonist data work AGI, and an AGI patterned off an uplifted parrot for example.

More a semi-passive lurker.

I like the universe - though some parts never made much sense to me - but i've got most of my knowledge about the world lore from threads like this.

Well, it's a standard muse kaos uplifted to fully fledge AGI. So i assume that she still have some concerns about transhumans, but little sense of propriety when it comes to online ressource. I also decided that sleeving terrifies her. A ghost module is fine, but the inputs of a biological morph is just too much for her to handle. Synths aren't much better, as she has trouble understanding how to body.

Have your read the rulebooks?

So Feeble (SOM)?

Feeble Som (5) and totally inepat at kinesic. If she ever needs to sleeve in a biological morph she will probably just spend the next hours vomitting on the floor and crying.

That overlooks those of us doing it for the greater cause, genetrash.

Pssh, most morphs can reproduce. Even the remade. It's just a question of GSP's for the really poor, and getting supplies as necessary to take care of kids.

Sleeves are a lot safer when you accidentally poke something nasty and the local mesh goes to hell.

Really, the original core rulebook doesn't have as much good data as later books; it's broad strokes, a little too political, and generally more of a starting point.

The other books, especially Firewall and Panopticon, are better IMO.

Only the core one. Im guessing as states, that later ones get more in-depth.

Ah well. I just lost myself to reading PDFs for the night. RIP free time!

No, I mean there's a negative trait called Feeble, which makes you take an aptitude at no higher than 5, unable to raise that aptitude, and the aptitude max is always 10, no matter the morph. It's actually rather underpriced for all of the things it imposes. Then there's Incompetent, which means that you can't ever buy a certain active skill and have a -10 penalty for defaulting to a related skill.

I took both. Plus some "no morphs allowed" negatives.

Feeble, Incompetent, and Morphing Disorder II to get the max 50 CP bonus? Sounds good to me.

If you ever do need to sleeve my recommendation is a swarm morph, its very similar to being connected to the local mesh and its very easy to connect when neccesary

Reminds me of some characters I've randomly rolled before.

Oh, I didn't thought about it. But it's actually a great idea, thanks!

I'm trying to figure out how to make an aristocratic occultist style hyperelite async. I figure its at least a viable concept.

Wheren't the Hyper-Elite "mostly" safe from harm because they flew the earth at the first sign of defeat? If I recall you need to have had contact with Exurgent manifestation to develop async, is that right?

Yes and no. WML is a specific "benign" strain of the exsurgent virus, or, more properly, a whole bunch of closely related but minutely distinct sub-strains. Contact with a TITAN artifact might spread WML, but so might being in contact with a recently infected async or your hab being infected with a WML nanoplague. Or a thousand other scenarios including deliberate self-infection.

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Hrm, I wonder if we'll get any macro or mega scale threats in X-Risks, or if it'll be smaller shit, at most a Large warbot enemy or something.

Bugchasing

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Can a muse be put into a morph?

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Nope, ALI can't sleeve into full brains, cyber or meat. They lack the extended codebase to make up for all the stuff your brain knows how to do, which an AI doesn't.

This is why almost all AGI have "legacy peripherals".

Such a shame that game got canceled by the economic crisis...

Muses are AIs, which means they can be downloaded into pods and synthmorphs, but not biomorphs. (EP page 264)

Addendum, is right, Pods actually used to be AI driven mostly, not sure why I tacked cyberbrains on there.

Probably because the inverse is not true, I/E a transhuman level AGI can't jump to something without a full Cyberbrain but an ALI can operate a drone. Or I'm just tired.

ITT: user realizes that you can physically fuck your muse.

>physically fucking your muse

pfft, weak. Muse lives in your Mesh inserts, all you need to do is rent an appropriate Simulspace and you can take care of all kinds of masturbatory needs. Without waiting for a healing vat to adjust the Pleasure Pod to look like Muse's avatar.

Even if they couldn't actually use the Cyberbrain they also have a Puppet Sock, the Muse could just drive it from your mesh inserts anyway, probably easier than rolling the dice on those Alienation and Integration checks

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>the team is sent to a tropical exoplanet to recover notes from a research facility
>the facility belongs to a colony of exhumans who apparently got most of their ideas from watching Godzilla movies

I'm pretty sure the Jovian Junta also has access to exowombs and is fine with the use of them, though there are still a lot of people doing it the old-fashioned way there.

So... Sky Ark?

With a few key differences. In particular, your client wants to know what research they did in order to create skyscraper sized biomorphs.

This is "sexy" ; from which book does it come from ?

Your muse is basically an extension of you, like an imaginary friend that is also a personal assistant. So fucking it is just an elaborate form of masturbation

Have you guys ever run Eclipse Phase for folks who aren't intimately familiar with some of its more dense concepts, i.e. transhuman technologies, post-scarcity, etc.? I've been thinking of running it for a group of friends, but they've only played D&D and WH40k RPG before. They're all busy with irl stuff so I can't just tell them "read the books", so it falls on me to introduce them to the setting. What do?

I'm definitely going to set the first game somewhere in the inner system so it's not as fucking weird as it is rimward. Firewall won't be involved, at least not at first.