/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

How one would defend from a hacker with a skill of 99?

Shoot the hacker.

What if he hacks the bullet?

Antimatter bomb.

Who would even use a hackable bullet?

It's so low-tech he'll never see it coming.

Shadowrun 5 writers?

No wireless access and active jamming, airgaps, sensors on wires and electronics that detect attempts to physically intrude on them, mechanical and biological systems where possible.

Microwave, chemical and thermal sterilization to destroy nanomachine infiltration.

Having your fake vulnerability lead to a completely closed system infected by an Exsurgent strain to fuck over anyone who breaks in.

i.e. go full Rajput on their ass.

>Having your fake vulnerability lead to a completely closed system infected by an Exsurgent strain to fuck over anyone who breaks in.
Preferably, a really nightmarish one like Chrynalus, or that fanmade one that turns you into a living bug hive or one that literally makes you literally puke your guts out or some shit. Just for that extra "fuck you"

hack into ZO and tell all the corps you did something bad, done. Or hack a bunch of torshots if you're going "low profile". Next defense attempt.

>Microwave, chemical and thermal sterilization to destroy nanomachine infiltration
Sounds expensive in the amount of heat you need to radiate.

Just tape UV diodes to all your equipment. Not only will they kill the vast majority of nanomachines, they will also make you look totally radical, dude.

If you're not causing body jewelry to catch fire at a hundred paces, you aren't radiating enough.

I'm talking about the hab.

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How are you making jewelry catch fire? What?

Ever put something metal in a mircowave?

You can put metal in a microwave just fine. What causes an issue is prongs and crinkles (such as in foil) causing electricity to arc

Well, the trouble is that EP plays really fast and loose with how hard/soft it is. Human tech *tends* to be on the firmer side, but nanoswarms at all are pure magitech.

So while they should be critically vulnerable to even small applications of temperature and radiation (and an actual flame would wipe them out), that's less impressive against softer interpretations.

And TITAN stuff is outright space magic reality warping hypergeometry lovecraft science, so it can probably set up a nanoswarm that works better when set on fire and create a plasma elemental that uses the conditions to create a computer made out of lightning...

But it should do something, at least.

Did you read X-Risks?

There's a femto-swarm there. Acts like a nanoswarm, but with an extra load of spacemagic that makes them less vulnerable to fires (any temperature attack only inflicts 1d10), ignore any and all chemicals, corrosives, adhesives, armor mods and guardian nanoswarms, ignore armor and disassemble fucking anything and make it a part of the swarm, and create "strange matter" that creates fucking anti-gravity on the fly.

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There isn't really much of a meaningful defense against a Creeper Exsurgent, at least, not long term.

For human nanoswarms, the standard countermeasure is a zapper, which uses charged surfaces to capture and destroy nanomachines, but there are higher power versions which can make entire rooms no-go zones for (transhuman) nano and microbugs.

ABF

Always
Bring
Fire

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Seems more like

>That girl in an Observer who thinks vintage cyber eyes and Gundam style cyber ears makes her look cute and quirky and unique
>When basically undetectable bioware would do the job better, cheaper, and less obtrusively
Fucking hipster anarchists.

Hey, Retro-chrome is in.

What's with the boat?

Thinking about starting an EP Venusian Politician quest, but I'm not sure whether to start it on /qtg/ or anonkun.

Beats the official TITAN artwork.

And now we're all on watch lists, thanks OP for the image.

You were already in that watch list.

Make enough money to create a small self sufficient hab either in the corona or way out on the brink. Then just chill out and achieve ataraxia. Humanity can go extinct for all he cares, and he doesn't give a shit about trying to improve himself. Just relax, and enjoy the simple pleasures in life.

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This totally has to be a thing, right? Cosmetic or stylized cybernetics even though most implant integration can be masked or relatively small in the setting.

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Hi /epg/, I need some advice.

How one would notice a thing that uses a basilisk hack to make you subconsciously ignore it and everything it does? And how one would suspect the presense of such a thing in the first place?

The person in question can't shut off their sensor feeds voluntarily without immense pain and without damaging themselves, and the thing is non-sentient, but highly intelligent - a predator that hunts, kills and completely destroys the bodies.

>some strains of the exsurgent virus create xenomorph colonies
>some strains act like Corprus disease and create sleeper cults and crazy mutants
>some strains give you the Mystical Eyes of Death Perception
>asyncs
>basilisk hacks

So this is the default way to insert pop-culture references into the setting, right?

Yes. And, it's the second type of handwavium in this game.

>How one would notice a thing that uses a basilisk hack to make you subconsciously ignore it and everything it does? And how one would suspect the presence of such a thing in the first place?
You wouldn't, that's the point of Obfuscate.

Well, one way would be for some sensors to pick up the presence of the thing without actually showing it, and without making it obvious enough that someone who fell victim to the hack would instantly make the connection and ignore it. Then the victim might become concerned enough to investigate the phenomenon despite the subconscious urge, and show the alarming readings to other people, eventually leading to the discovery of the thing.

Or if you prefer, the weak point of this sort of hack is that the victim must be smart enough to be able to follow the order/compulsion.
In a detective novel, an accomplice to a murder might let slip some seemingly irrelevant information that turns out to be a clue to solving the murder, simply because he doesn't understand he wasn't supposed to share this information. He might also fail to destroy some physical evidence because, once again, he doesn't realize that this evidence could lead back to the murderer.
In the same way, the victim of this basilisk hack may not understand he is supposed to ignore a phenomenon that turns out to be linked to the obfuscated thing because he can't see the link, and he would readily analyze and share indirect evidence of the thing's presence.
He is nothing more than the thing's accomplice in covering up its existence and actions, and a human accomplice can slip up in many ways.

Make a non-neuromorphic AI to find it.

Huh. Looks like I wasn't exactly clear.

The thing only makes everyone ignore it and its actions, not the consequences.

For example, people will ignore The Thing attacking, killing and completely devouring the body, but they will notice that someone is missing without a trace. Or that the door is open when it was supposed to be shut. Or that the motion alarms are blaring when there is seemingly nothing in the room.

Of course, the thing is really smart and uses ambushes and stealth a lot, so it will try to be subtle.

And, the hack is audio-based, so properly deafened (earplugs won't do, but piercing your eardrum or something similar will) people can see it no problem.

AIs, synthmorphs and non-internal nanotech are not available in this scenario because reasons.

Take audio recordings and look for weird shit in the Fourier transforms. You could do this with a laptop from the year 2000.

You're doing the False Hydra flavor of the month shit, aren't you? I'm getting a little tired of seeing people trying to crowbar it into every game.

What?

Realistically, people who are unconsciously suppressing knowledge/awareness of something will also trivialize the consequences.
So for example, they wouldn't freak out when someone goes missing because they actually saw the corpse being devoured and so they know where he went on some level. If pressed about the disappearance, they would cook up a false memory or theory that he went to the toilet or something ("but he's not in there" "gee, I wonder where he wandered off?")
Similarly, they wouldn't be confused by the alarms blaring in an empty room (though they would likely sound confused trying to explain WHY they are going off) and they would almost certainly overlook the fact that the door was opened.

But yeah, I assumed the basilisk hack was even more advanced than this.

Just a reminder that Jovians are the only sensible people in the setting.

>AIs, synthmorphs and non-internal nanotech are not available in this scenario because reasons.

Stupid reasons of weak creativity. Or you're playing a jovian citizens game for some reason, which would be kind of weird. You'd just report weirdness to your local authorities who would get some black bags involved.

>The thing only makes everyone ignore it and it's actions, not the consequences.

Not really how basilisk hacks work. You'd be much better with TITAN bullshit Psi-Epsilon perfect invisibility or ignorance, Basilisks require a period of time to expose the victim to if they fail the resistance check before it sinks in.

I mean, there are probably things you can't replicate with bioware. Having a fucking sword folded up inside your arm is one of them I'd imagine. There's also probably a higher ceiling on strength/durability with hardware implants.

Wrong, exhuman trying to become Seed AIs are the only reasonable people in the setting.

I won't go into details, but no, they are present in the game, just banned by local authorities and this is heavily enforced, and no, it's not related to Jupiter in any way, and the place has a relatively small population and had almost no connections to the outside world until recent times.

Your muse, with its non-human architecture generally isn't effected by basilisk hacks which work on humans.

It paints the monster with an abstract representation that gets through the hack's filter so you know where to shoot.

Alternatively, you just have the people who resisted the hack do this.

You can have arm blades like Alex Mercer.

Also anyone with Oracles would probably be able to detect it, or at least know something really weird is going on, as the oracles keep bringing something they can't really see to their attention

If you're an exsurgent maybe.

Blade arms appear in the illustration for the Liquid Steel morph, a non exsurgent synth for people who want to be a Terminator

So it's a neoprim hab?

>exhuman
>people

The only people in the setting are living around Jupiter, and you know it.

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Something along the lines of "JESUS FUCK I DONT WANT TO DIE WHY DID I GET MY CORTICAL STACK REMOVED FUCKING RELIGION SORRY JESUS"

Survivor accompanying the server on an extended earth mission, linked up shortly after they got planetside. Extended mission because we can't get back up the tower thanks to nanoswarms. Think fallout, with more tears and lovecraftian what the fuckery.

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Sorry, but it's not a motivation unless it's expressed in plusses and minuses

Fine, rules lawyer.

+Running
-Past
-Future

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Explicitly stated to be a thing among Scum. Probably some other groups of anarchists too.

There's not much point in having a blade in your arm besides concealment, and detecting implants and cybernetics is fairly trivial in-setting. But it's a good point on a general note.

I'm curious, what are your guys' experience with running Eclipse Phase for people that are either new to the setting, or don't really have a lot of exposure to cyberpunk/sci-fi stuff? I know here and on the EP forums we always talk about really dense socio-economic and scientific stuff, but have you run the setting in ways where a normal person from the 21st century wouldn't feel completely alienated?

Hard mode: you didn't set your "beginner game" in the Jovian Republic, pre-Fall Earth, or used the "cryogenically frozen 21st century people" card.

Stay mad, Rob.

I've never run it before. Honestly, I think my personal opinions would poison the campaign, preventing the authors' vision of the setting from coming to fruition.

>don't really have a lot of exposure to cyberpunk/sci-fi stuff
You needn't have read the Sprawl trilogy or played Shadowrun to have an idea of what cyberpunk is about. Most of modern sci-fi, including the mainstream stuff is really fucking pessimistic, so people tend to be at least passingly acquainted with the basic tropes. Capitalize on that. The first campaign I ran for my group of EP first-timers was set in urban Mars. Basically just Futuristic City Adventure: Red Planet Edition. Nothing too weird or unfamiliar aside from stuff like AR, muses, the mesh and resleeving. Introducing them to the wider solar system felt easier after that.

There's that trio of unofficial adventures set in Olympus if you want to do the same, though I don't know how well they're suited for beginners.

I feel that setting a beginner game in the Junta is a bad move, because your players will inevitably pick up the idea that transhumans are the enemy and that transhuman technologies are unnatural and wrong, which fairly heavily goes against the intended spirit of the game.

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>including the mainstream stuff is really fucking pessimistic,
It's not exactly the "We've have a nuclear exchange every decade or so" pessimistic you get with older fiction.

It's funny how nukes have very gradually gone from "The ultimate weapon" to "Anyone actually considering using them is probably insane" in the public conciousness.

Does it still count as hardmode if I started the game on pre-Fall Earth, had things go very rapidly from "Brushfire wars elsewhere, probably won't spread here" to "OH SHIT HEADHUNTERS" in the space of about an hour out of game, made them dodge headhunters, pods, and freaks to get to an egocasting station, explicitly mentioned that everyone in the station got headshotted and stack-popped after the upload, and then picked up ten years later on Mars after that prelude?

I still think they're a pretty great weapon. Maybe not the ultimate, but damn great nonetheless.

That's actually a pretty good way to do it.

I just forced all my players to read all the rulebooks except the GM sections.

Worked pretty well.

+JESUS FUCK I DONT WANT TO DIE
-CORTICAL STACK REMOVAL
-RELIGION
+JESUS

That's clearly not a biomorph either.

You can always use masked version.

That's because it's actually ultimate.

+beer
+guns
+kickass explosions
-exposition

Oh shit, it's the Baywoo AI. Run, before it blows up the hab!

What does a masked flexbot look like? A bunch of dwarves stacked on top of each other in a suit?

Human centipede.