/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

>but by the book the majority were infugees

My impression was that the majority of infugees were people who tried to leave Earth at the last possible moment, when shit got extremely hot, while most physical refugees left in ships and orbital elevators during the earlier months of the Fall.

Okay, I actually checked. The core book gives the number of infugees at 400 million.

Damng, that's like 4/5ths of the entire population. What page is that?

Page 65. Sometimes I think the devs didn't really care that much about numbers, or didn't consider the implications.

On the flip side, isn't the idea of 80% of the species having edited memories a sweet, sweet plot hook?

Proxy
>Once again you intend to use your own assets and mine to run operations against accelerated meditation
>it is your sterling reputation and your ongoing work on the Rortian problem that have seen you extended considerable leeway, in my opinion
>I can make no denial of the validity of your original evaluation and actions against the Ultimate splinter sect discovered in hermitage in the belt
>as you reported, information acquired from their minder forks and aspirants thoroughly demonstrated the potential for recursive self modification in the already heavily altered egos of the "Sweat of Kali" group
>your subsequent covert removal of the -- solitary or small targets you indicate to be of a similar kind was within your prerogative too
>however, it has since come to my knowledge that you have been preparing strikes on at least -- additional binker targets in the trojans, and --- more in the belt

That's weird. Like, right on page 91 it says that during the fall, the population on earth's orbit alone was more than a billion.

I mean, it's totally possible that they were mostly wiped during the fall itself, but it's weird.

The Devs have actually altered population numbers (larger, I think) in eratta before, so it wouldn't be crazy if some numbers were unintentionally or unrealistically low-balled.

Also, context is important, there's a decent chunk of "infugees" who are in Dead Storage to, and don't count as population anywhere.

It's intensely weird to me that there are less than 1 billion people in the setting, given that in 10 years a fair number of infugees can be reinstated and the population was likely over 10 billion.

>a significant number of these targets have been confirmed to be isolated but not at all exhuman buddhist and protestant monastery servers
>several are not brinker stations at all, and carry minders in regular and public contact with the rest of the system
>I know all of this because you pulled in a bunch of my infowar eraser assets to supplement your own, and completely failed to prune their loyalties, or even effectively restrain them from commandeering mesh access
>I also know your brief to them included the explicit intention to destroy these accelerated monasteries (and one accelerated nunnery) before the monks within could emerge having achieved posthuman enlightenment
>I suppose this could be viewed through some warped sense an example of the ever debatable A-threat
>In all honesty, I just don't think you have a clear grasp of what buddhist enlightenment is, what meditation of this sort seeks to accomplish, or that you are aware of the already studied effects of long term, non-sensory meditation
>this is likely because you refuse the help of a muse, background most knowledge not related to micromanaging bug-hunting ops when you don't delete new memories outright, and want to vaporize any computer too big to fit into your braincase

>TLDR: I'm posting this whole debacle to the eye because I won't be dragged down with you, you think that meditating on one's place in the grand scale of the universe will produce exhumans, and we already have lamas here on luna that have meditated for about 800 relative years. They act almost exactly like all the other lamas, maybe slightly less ascetic.

artificial wage inflation as a long term investment in the new economy

There's simply not enough infrastructure to support 10 billion people yet. You could if you put your all into making huge server farms, but there's something fundamental that makes people want to be physically instantiated that makes a shitty case better than nothing.

And then there's this guy Pic related.

>needs decryption key

I like both Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase.

I like Shadowrun's setting a bit more, and I like Eclipse Phase's system much more.

Why can't we have an official Shadowrun release using a modified EP system ;_;

kek. Almost got me.

dis some nice background info here. Definitely should do a writeup to pastebin and stick it with the next thread

I'm not baiting, I honestly like the flow of EP's system, and the way it handles ranged combat and hacking much better than SR, at least 5E (I haven't played the other editions).

oh.

mega.nz/#!kJkAnIBK!MyExF08oHK5PUzutez_2fRCSnlCGs-BjEE_Lgoe41ZY

>just a warning, skills listings use ranks not points

EP's crunch is a lot more lethal than shadowrun. Shadowrun is supposed to be a lot more cinematic and silly so as to enhance the survivability of the characters.

In fact, EP initiative system is very similiar to 4th ed shadowrun.

4th ed shadowrun was a blast, i'm not sure why it needed a 5th ed other than that their sales were lagging and they needed a new revenue stream. (same with d&d)

not to turn this into an edition war or anything.

I know, but I think it's WAY too non-lethal.

I don't know if the previous editions of SR were like this, but in 5E I had PCs who were just starting out rolling 20-30+ soak dice, which is pretty silly.

Absorbing a full shotgun blast to the chest into Stun Damage, if they took any damage at all, just felt wonky.

Reading the rules and fluff just gave me this idea of a much grittier game than what we actually played. I don't know, maybe I was inexperienced, and maybe the previous editions are closer to what I expected.

I still had tons of fun with the system, but it felt weird.

I was more saying I expected 1 billion to be alive by now.

Well, the thing is people haven't really been having any kids.

The more advanced a civilization, the lower its fertility rate.

When people are too worried about working to pay off their indentures, experimenting with new sociol-politcal systems, researching new technologies and just trying to find purpose in their immortal space life, they won't really be thinking about having kids.

...new morphs and servers?

Yeah, you can break the game pretty hard, but you shouldn't be trying to break the game, thats a sign that your players aren't really mature.

shadowrun isn't really meant to be that mature, desu. Just don't let your players run roughshod over anything you throw at them and you should be fine.

I mean, crunch is part of the game, right?

What do you mean?

I don't know if this is what you were refering to, but if I were going to make new sourcebooks I'd start with transhuman 2, with more morphs and character options, then start making individual sourcebooks for specific locations like mars, mercury, venus, jupitor, ect.

There's been a bit of demand on the Forums for a Slice of Life type Panopticon v 2 which apparently the devs have been bandying about before. More development on culture, media, consumer goods, just what people are doing with their life - that kind of stuff. Interestingly, the internal name they used for this is apparently "where do babies come from?" so it could even serve as a way to tighten up some vagueness in the setting. Maybe give some more page space to cities/regions which didn't get as tight a focus as some area (Like major Lunar cities getting way less coverage in Sunward than the Martian ones... despite some of them being more populous and diverse).

My personal hope is also we get some tighter vehicle rules/options and some focused ideas on vehicle customization - but that might be in Space Combat.

I was explicitly referring to indenture being compensated. It was something along the lines of the PC and MC benefitting in the long run from taking few enough indentures to provide offer even semi-okay contracts and compensation and putting most of their resources into developing the aforementioned infrastructure. The people alive AF are likely to see mars terraformed and the untold billions revived, and at that time mars could quickly switch from a sparsely populated planet that had to suck dick to get a body to a planet of people just now given a body, a suburban home, and a stipend for their fork's work in the colonies, because shit is cheap with femtofab and mastered gates. With patience the Hypercapitalists could turn most of the former population of the world into a pet middle class that sincerely loves them, and everyone they've ever fucked with into a marginal minority.

>the untold billions revived

What untold billions? There's like 50 million infomorphs not accounted for in the setting, but that's about it, unless you're referring to the people who died during the Fall, but those have probably been force-uploaded by TITAN drones already.

Meanwhile Titan does the opposite, and with luck they will have instantiated all of the consortium's scraps and built crowed, janteloveny, space northern europe around saturn, possibly excelling technologically, but always having to deal with the adamantly flighty autonomists and assorted lunatics in the untamable space siberia that is the outer rim, with the ultimates playing mongol and Jove being their space southern europe. They will have to bargain with either Battachya the Great or Batman bin Superman for access to gates, the space Pope or the space Medicis for access to the inner system, and both sets will control their flow of resources. Jove has no gates, no infugees, and no fucking chance. By the time they could built a fleet that could conquer the system, or anything outside their gravity well, the rest of the system will be using gate technology like we use sliding doors, and they are fundamentally opposed to getting good enough for true long term development of their planet, or living long enough to even be germane to system politics. If anything, their morale will fail before the siege ends, because all of the the fall survivors' grandchildren will be dead and gone in a relatively short time compared to the rest of the system, which can hold the line just by carrying on as they already intended to. Or maybe TAHI will steal some femtotech, turn jupiter into a ringworld and all the happy jovians will laugh at all the stressed out transhumans from their country sized family holdings on the arbor loop while mile long dreadnaughts patrol the gravity well. just my thoughts on the system's trajectory I suppose.

>untold billions
>50 million infomorphs
with the right psychosurgeons we can split the difference

But then how would you maintain the sado-masochistic power structure the elites need in order feel valued? How could you maintain the enforced hierarchy without slave labor?

The whole fucking point of capitalism is to give one man the power to command and influence others, its literally the basis for all inequality in our society.

The hypercorps are trying to create the least egalitarian society possible in order to control the one resource that is truly worth a damn, other trans

I can easily see this happening.

Titans and Anarchkiddos are just to flakey for my taste, their hearts are in the right place, but they are just too fragmented and out there to really make much of a difference.

The really sad thing about the jovians is that they are living in very resource rich environment, with plenty of volitiles, metal, and hydrogen.

Unless the Titanians really made a push to take control of the Jovians habitats and territory, they will almost inevitably fall to the Planetary Consortium.

Another thing to consider is that Titan is going to run out of real estate a lot faster than Mars is, while Jupiter's moons have plenty of room for expansion underground.

If the Junta can manage to expand faster than the PC or the Commonwealth, they might stand a chance in the long term.

Having to take out a cluster of moons and asteroids is lot harder than just annihilating one planet.

Perhaps part of what keeps the PC at bay is that Titan is too far away.

Well, that, and the Titanians have way better military readiness.

Lets say WW1 and 2 happen simultaneously in 1919, immediately followed by the stock market crash, great depression, with TB thrown in to kill off rich people. Then oligarchs of 1930s america worked together to build every public project through to now on credit they granted themselves. Would it make sense for them, having built all the new deal dams and power grids and subsidized crops, all those marshal plan suburbs and highways and subsidized crops, all the rockets and computers and harbors and phone lines, with the express purpose or resuming civilized society, but instead decided that they would feel wealthier by comparison if they kept the population back at the standard of living they started with, and used all their discoveries to automate the whole of america to produce things they don't want and the population can't afford.

teh thread dieded

Nigga wtf are you talking about?

Our government built those things, if those projects were run by capitalists they'd be a lot different in how they operate.

The hyperelite just generally want a society that can support their decadent tastes and fufill their every desire, if they wanted to help people they would have gone into civil service.

they use automation as a means of providing goods to the masses, since there is no way of mass producing the goods they consume for themselves.

Everything the wealthy have that distinguishes them from the poor takes the labor of dozens or even hundreds of people working in concert in order to build something that they can only keep for themselves.

If the hyperelite insisted on mainting Intellectual property laws and allowing indentures when the nanotech revolution came, why on earth would they change their ways when they have access to even more advanced tech?

If anything, they would probably insist upon using the tech to make their world even more dystopian than it already is.

Is that a bunch of habitats attached to a space elevator with gravity provided by the gas giant below them? Am I interpreting that image correctly?

because capitalism isn't S&M, its business. Hyperelites might want to keep things as squalid as they can to feel richer, but the actual oligarchs understand that they are selling a system of government as their product. The only thing that keeps them on top of the commies is offering something that can pass as a higher standard of living, and if they can't their customers will turn on them.
They must remain competitive, and they are already having to fight the current of technological advancement, so making the jump to the new economy with an infinite rep score for having rebuilt civilization and given it to transhumanity. The perks of being the God Aristocracy of Mankind should really be sufficient.

that's a bunch of some femtotech bullshit attached to some more femtotech bullshit, yes.

People are not property.

>People are not property.
You just keep telling yourself that, cute little rodent, and run the race like you're supposed to. There's cheese at the end!

What I see is a society that literally charges you for the air you breath, lays claim to the ground underneath your feet, lays claim to the product of your labor, and gives you absolutely nothing in return.

talking to a neet nigger

The problem, as I see it, with the TC and Locus, is the numbers. How do you make a society like that work, in terms of space, resources, labor, etc.?

How exactly do you ration your space, your labor, your expertise? Everything up until now has been theory, with no actual data on what a post scarcity societies economy would look like.

If you could provide some numbers, you might be able to take this mean out of the closet and into the daylight.

*mean
>meme

nigga that sounds boring as fuck.

Print more morphs and planet guides.

I was unaware space elevators were femtotech.

>Print more morphs

I mean, it's been awhile since we got new morphs, and unless there's some real driving reason to produce more I suspect we won't get a few for a time - there's always the Morph Creation rules to fill in gaps you have.

>planet guides.

Well, personally I hope this would be kind of like that. It would be an excuse to go back to places like Venus or Luna who didn't get as much focus in say, Sunward compared to how much was spent talking about the nitty-gritty of neighborhoods and subcultures and industry and stuff in like, Martian or Titanian cities. They can't like, continually print refined books on specific planetary bodies, that probably reaches a point of too much details or just, not enough to work with. Like, between on Neptune and Uranus there are like what, three major permanent habs, one of which is a vague and mysterious secret for GMs to play with? That kind of thing would barely fit a PDF/PoD, let alone a full book on its own.

panopticon has shit to do with planetary factions/locations.

Look at Rifts, they made 2 sourcebooks on Canada alone. You'd have to burn through Luna, Venus, Mars, Earth, Mercury/Sol, Jupiter and Neptune/Outer Systems before you even start to run out of source material.

*Neptune
>meant Saturn

I mean, hell, I wouldn't mind writing some adventures for EP, but there really isn't any getting past the front gate at these places, you either show up with an army of fans and some popular fan fiction or you're shit just gets tossed.

I mean, Panopticon is explicitly a Vol 1, and it was Habitats, Uplifts and Surveillance, not necessarily directly related concepts. Actual detail of what life is like in the setting besides just snippets for funsies could be useful and interesting.

>Look at Rifts

Yeah, because Rifts is a sterling example of what RPGs should be like.

>Rifts is a sterling example of what RPGs should be like.

It really is. At the end of the day RPG's are about having fun with a group of your buddies and escaping the day to day grind of life in the suburbs.

I've always thought of Role Playing Games as church for people who don't go to church.

Don't pull the "just have fun" card.

Rifts is a jumbled mess as a setting, even if it has many cool ideas, and is objectively bad from a game design perspective.

Trying to make sense of the Rifts core rulebook was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had with this hobby.

All true.

It was still fun.

what is the product of a transhuman's labor?

matter

But how do you like SR's setting? It's pants on head retarded. We've had this conversation a bunch of times here.

How many new morphs do you need? You can make anything you want with the rules from Transhuman. The only thing that might be nice is more implants. Morphs for specific localities are acceptable, as long as the fluff doesn't suck. That reminds me. I should stat up robo-Huldra so they don't both need TITANtech and defy common sense.

>the Junta
Where the hell do you think you are? Go back to the forums with that shit.

Dank memes.

What do u mean? He is just honest.

Shhh, don't upset the cancer enthusiast.

Is there any example of dank memes in the setting? And better yet, would the legacy of Harambe continue over 100 years later?

Basilisk hacks.

I feel precisely the opposite. I like EP's setting much more, but the system is kind of trash. I much prefer Shadowrun, or GURPS.

There's a GURPS version of EP

Alright /epg/, how do we fix Jovians?

Waifus.

Neutering them, presumably, like you fix anyone else?

Posthumanism.

I've had a hypothesis on the backburner for a while concerning the purpose of the Exsurgent virus. I think that it's the ETI's way of forcibly uplifting civilizations either directly (by infection, psy, etc.) or indirectly (by fending off infection, developing countermeasures, etc.) in a way that isn't just piggybacking on an ASI.

...

Jovians are fine. Just make them slightly less draconian if you really feel the need.

I have a theory I'm planning to use in my current game. The Factors ARE the ETI.

They created the Exsurgent Virus as a means of assimilating other species into their "family" for lack of a better term. But the AI went rogue and refused to co-operate. The Bracewell Probes were designed to assimilate species when they were considerd advanced enough (The invention of the TITA Network for transhumanity).

This explains why factors are found on planets the TITANS were found (doing research on them), why they warn us away from the Pandora Gates (It's TITAN tech) and why they have a fear of AIs.

Another theory I have is that the ETI did this as part of a reality show on a much grander scail.

>But how do you like SR's setting? It's pants on head retarded. We've had this conversation a bunch of times here.

Holy shit, man, that's a cool fucking OPINION you have there, bruh!

Cyberpunk

What sort of expertise could an AGI actor bring to a team of Firewall sentinels?

>Step 1: read all the books. If cancer enthusiast skip to step 3
>Step 2: be content that they have flaws like every other faction. Stop
>Step 3: Get butthurt that the conservatives aren't also flawless, perfect and actively fighting everyone else
>Step 4: Quit and play 40k

Loaded with the right apps, a Humanities Infolife built for media savvy would be a terrifying face and social engineer.

Armed with an Impersonate upgrade, and a package of Tracking, Spoofing and Sniffing software, this could turn even the most socially inept infomorph into a master actor - if you're already a master actor (with high skills in Impersonate, Deception, etc and Art: skills to Complement) you'll be a wizard who can impersonate anyone you like online. Combine with behavioral psych and kinesics softs to deeply analyze targets - never be surprised when pretending to be someone.

In a world of mesh communication, a properly equipped actor could basically be anyone, and with the right tools they can follow through on such things by accessing computers like a legit user who belongs there.

BTW, while we're yakking (but not really) about additions to the game, now that Software plug-ins and Eidolons are a thing, devs could stand to throw a few more of those in - play with some things being digital.

I wonder if we'll see a lot of new gear in the Criminal hardback?

I wanna see folding gear like in SR. A Monofilament Sword like Corvo's.

>this could turn even the most socially inept infomorph into a master actor

Could this turn even the most socially inept player into master actor character, that's the question.

Collapsing weapons, stealth weapons, those would be neat. New toxins/poisons/drugs.

Panopticon already covered a lot of stealth/disguise implants, but some new weapon implants, or other dirty tricks for crime and "illicit" implants would be interesting. And just softs and gadgets that people use to do crime.

Which really is what I want out of the Sourcebook, I hope they spend time discussing extant criminal groups and describing how they actually go about some of their operations and what kind of operations they do - and how they pull them off this stuff in the future with all kinds of online shit and sensors and whatever.

Like, how do you steal a fabber that "falls off" the back of a martian truck if say, the truck is loaded with spimes and sensors to track inventory, the fabber can be meshed or armed with a simple ecto that has an RFID range of kilometers or covered in taggant nanos. I could, like, in a game assemble a plan to do this, but what sort of methods does organized crime do to persistently do this? How do cops try and stop them?

Maybe it's just an academic interest thing, since I'm a CJ major

>monofilament
A sword made out of fishing wire isn't going to do much, whether or not it can fold.