/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

I've done that type of story before. It was fun, but I will say unless you want it to get bogged down in the PvP make sure all the PCs are on the same side or inclined to be cooperative.

3d handball is a good one.

Yeah I guess Firewall is pervasisve no matter what is gong on which is good because you can keep them in the far shadows that the PCs only tangently know about and maybe someone associated with the scenario has a connection to

>The mysterious benefactor who dropped the tips was a firewall agent because your goals aligned with his assignment

Just drop them in as rumors and strange news reports.

Same here; I prefer to keep actual TITAN and exsurgent stuff rare and only break it out occasionally. There are enough ways for transhumanity to threaten itself with extinction to keep player characters in Firewall busy, and when exsurgent stuff does feature, it's usually in a shit-has-hit-the-fan-oh-fuck way. I still like to keep my game based on playing characters working in Firewall, just because it provides a relatively straightforward reason for why characters with different backgrounds and ideologies coming together to work as a group.

Though if you had a group of players who were interested in doing a noir Eclipse Phase, it'd probably be a fucking joy to run. I'm a complete sucker for that sort of thing.

Jupiter gravity well politics.

Europa doesn't like being taxed and blockaded every so often. Jovians don't like Europa being liberals.

So this makes for a lot of interesting weird compromises that can occur and have dangerous outcomes.

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IRL pong

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Uplift porn?

Has anybody ever ran a game as Stellar Intelligence employees/agents? Even if you haven't, what ideas do you have for running a scenario like that?

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Camouflage won't help you much when you're firing an anti tank rifle at less than fifty meters.

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see

I'm thinking of running a non-Firewall campaign where the players are dumped somewhere with a broad long-term goal and are free to achieve it however they see fit.

Something along the following lines

>a hypercorp-controlled mining region on an exoplanet rebels and refuses to send their monthly tax through the Gate, players are sent as enforcers/negotiators to bring it back under corp rule, without using WMDs, mass murder or forcibly editing everyones' minds - that's unethical

>same shit, only the players are an anarchist saboteur cell that has to incite a full-scale revolt in a big Martian city-state. again, as quietly as possible

>advance time a couple decades, yet another gatecrashing team is sponsored to go chart an exoplanet continent in detail AND keep quiet about it, only to find a couple of lost colonies and/or tribal sentient aliens. everyone at each others' throats, Deathworld style. no way out for a couple of years due to %insert whatever technobabble is fit for messing with the Gate and shutting it down%

>Darkest Dungeon/Deadnauts style game, involving a massive facility on Earth, full of monsters (whatever shit is left there after the Fall and earlier reclaiming attempts that went horribly wrong) and traps (security systems) that has to be reclaimed fully at any cost

Any advice? Other ideas? I have a feeling that all these will crash and burn.

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Reminder that the ETI is actually Azathoth.

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Yeah. And the Factors are shoggoths, and the Gates can possibly lead to Plateau of Leng, Dreamlands, and Carcosa.. And the both Prometheans and TITANs is Nyarlathothep who's doing it for lulz.

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I think the Firewall theme unites a setting that's otherwise a sprawling space opera clusterfuck.

Make up a weird TITAN paperweight in one sentence, go.

It has less inertial mass when deeper in a gravity well and smells like cinnamon.

When put on top of a paper, it paints it with a deadly cognoweapon, aimed on whoever was last holding it.

Someone sell me on Eclipse Phase

A lame anarchist wankfest full of bullshit ideas, piss-poor writing, rule inconsistencies and holes, and a setting that is a retarded jumble of various tropes and stupid references.

Play GURPS Transhuman Space instead.

It's a paperweight that sells people on eclipse phase?

I actually kinda like the idea that the ETI is Nyarlatothep and the reason why he created the Exsurgents is to put down Seed AIs who could potentially grow to rival the Gods.

It houses an AI that manages indenture auctions.

So it can totally sell people in Eclipse Phase, yeah.

>one player picks an AI and plays it like an insufferable smug number-wanker he is himself, absolutely no distinguishing features. acts like he's clever all the time, when his errors are pointed out, enters full passive-agressive mode, has zero grasp of team play or basic human moral,
>another player starts with a 90 in "interest: ancient memes" and proceeds to spout them all the time. his character is a "detective". when presented with a murder mystery, loudly states "I wish this shit would end"
>the third picks a phobia as a negative trait. it's a phobia of kangaroos. when told to pick something more sensible, picks a phobia of sharks
>forth and fifth just disappear after one game
>the first three keep initiating PvP whenever I bring in other people. other people quickly walk away

I wish I was lying. I'm starting to think that if it's either this, a bunch of randos who will all flake out or treat the game like it's D&D, or no game at all, I'll choose the latter. Holy fuck.

We told you last time, the solution was to have him get raped by kangaroos in simulspace

He was the least annoying one, though. I just needed to vent somewhere.

Do you think EP could be easily adapted to GURPS, as it is, the system's Shadowrun, with CoC bolted on, the setting's neat though

see

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The first one is pratically the first episode of Dark Matter
Happened to me too, pratically the same shit, but i was playing D&D 5E, i decided not to play until i find someone better.

On the third one, I'd recommend holding off on advancing the game setting by a couple of decades for that. The amount of work that'd require to hand-wave having lost colonies is significantly less than the amount of work you'd have to do to roll forward time a couple of decades and come up with new technologies, new political groups, and the like.

Depending on who is the one doing the sponsoring, you could tie the sponsor to the lost colonies. Perhaps the initial colonisation was something of an experiment in using bleeding-edge and rather poorly understood stuff to aid in colonisation by some group within a hypercorp. operating under a "it's better to seek forgiveness than ask permission" mindset. When they're found out, everyone involved has their contracts terminated and, years later, some accountant decides that maybe it's possible to get some extra cash by sending a team out to see what the fuck they were actually doing out there. The players are required to keep it really fucking quiet because the sponsor doesn't want anyone else to know about what happened there, both because it'd be a bit of a PR nightmare, and because if there's anything actually worth developing there left behind, they want first dibs on it.

Just make sure you sort of hint to the players what game you're hoping to run, as I imagine some players might get a bit pissy if they sink a lot of stuff into things like Networking and various Reputations for a game to suddenly be "you're stranded on a planet for X years, good luck".

Good call. Though investing into Networking and Rep can be worth it in the case when the players aren't trapped, but have to actually be there and have an incentive to stay, like in the second one.

Hand-waving lost colonies can be harder then it sounds. Afaik the Gates weren't around since after the Fall, and this really limits ways a colony can be lost in under ten years. Maybe it isn't lost, it's abandoned on purpose, and records about it are erased.

You couldn't play hockey on europa's surface unless you were synthetic

5.4 sieverts per hour, on a good day.

So you're dead in 20 minutes.

Finally got around to reading revelation space series and it's basically eclipse phase: the books

or probably more accurately, eclipse phase is revelation space with lovecraftian space cthulhu's thrown in

they even directly lift some of the factions - ultras for example - directly out of revelation space series.

which is why you play in one of the habs built into the ice.

A good hundred plus meters of ice and the hab walls should keep that from being an issue.

Is there uploading in Revelation Space?

>Hand-waving lost colonies can be harder then it sounds.

Yeah, it can be hard, but "how the colony got lost in so short a time" could be an interesting thing to consider from a plot viewpoint - what caused a colony to be abandoned in such a short amount of time? What kind of shit went down there? That's a question that the player characters find themselves asking in the game.

Whereas moving the setting forward ten years in a way that's interesting is going to require you explaining to the players all the changes you've put in for the next ten years. If it's basically "no changes whatsoever" (which would be the easiest way of doing it), then it's not really adding much beyond the length of time for a colony to be lost. It's just adding more work to justify something that could otherwise be an extra piece of the plot puzzle.

yeah, basically the exact same set up as there is in eclipse phase - even alpha and beta clones

In one of the stories the protagonist temporarily overwrites his personality with someone else's memories, although that kind of backfires on him and destroys / completely changes his original personality when he regains the old memories he overwrote in addition to keeping the new ones.

Alternative lost colony scenario:

What if at least one gate existed before the Fall? Possibly on Earth? That would even explain how it got lost, if it was not directly accessible from other gates. It would also have interesting implications for the TITANs.

No. That's the Gatemaker or associates. Whatever it is, the Exsurgent ETI is clearly not Azathoth-tier.

The Exsurgent ETI is either late-first or second singularity and is scared of first singularity intelligences that might catch up and overtake it.

I like to put it at 47° 9′ S, 126° 43′ W

Why do you need such a long amount of time for a colony to have become "lost"? A gatecrasher colonist team goes through, nobody hears from them for a while, people who try to dial in find that they're locked out and can't connect to it. People try dialling it a few more times to check in, still no luck. Attempts to connect to it become fewer and fewer because there's other shit to do with your gates.

Then one day somebody decides to try and connect to it, and it accepts the connection. Planet with mysterious lost colony on the other side. Nobody knows what happened. Go explore, go find out what the fuck was blocking the incoming connections, try not to panic.

I was under the impression that the intention was for the colony to have had significant social development independent of the solar system.

There are plenty of brinkers though, so I don't know why the focus on a colony in particular.

Yeah, I don't think it makes much sense when the solar system clearly has lots of different social models and systems spread throughout it. Needing social development independent of the solar system is pretty odd given the general lack of homogeneity in how social systems have sprung up within the solar system in the wake of the Fall.

Just so we're clear, there are sun whales, scum orgy colonies, hypercapitalists, neo-primitives, new age hippies, people who want to turn into things that eat other people, a South American dictatorship IN SPACE and a crime family that's run by copies of the same person that have sprung up within the Solar System in the wake of the Fall.

If you went "this colony has been lost for a few years and they practice auto-fellatio as a religious sacrament to the local moon god using specially designed morphs" it wouldn't honestly be that bizarre. You don't need to fluff out an extra ten years worth of technological improvement and societal advancement in order to justify weird shit that wouldn't really be out of place in 10AF.

Hell, the game already has "lost colony got weird". Synergy,

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The Fall is actually the Day When The Stars Were Right, for those in the know. It could have been prevented, but the nations were too absorbed in conflict with each other. Many groups tried to stop it, but to no avail - it was too late, and individually, they were too weak.

Afterwards, there was no point in trying to conceal a supernatural near-extinction level event, so the next best solution is to cover it up, so that everyone thinks it's a disastrous AI accident. Partially, it was the truth - artificial minds are corrupted as as easily as natural, if not easier; after all, they didn't evolve to have natural defenses against the unnatural as mankind did. And when the seeds of corruption are planted, no amount of recursive self-improvement will stop it - even worse, it will only strengthen it by orders of magnitude. The outcome is, sadly, known to history. When the fateful day came, near-godlike intelligences turned to support the beings from beyond space and time, and ruin has come to mankind.

Shards and splinters of Majestic-12, forgotten but undefeated, infiltrated the remaining power structures and consolidated a new position. Under a new name, taken from ancient digital archives, they serve Planetary Consortium, but ultimately their mysterious agenda is known only to themselves. Dark vaults, filled to the brim with impossible artifacts, are opened, dust is brushed off the covers of horrifying grimoires written in human blood on human skin, and the chants in languages long forgotten are sung again, resonating in the very fabric of reality.

There is hope, howewer - those who fought the unnatural from the very beginning, trying to protect their people, are not gone yet. Groups of occult resistance, those that once were known as PISCES, Delta Green, Section Dispary and Gruppe Rubin, united to form Firewall, sworn to never again divide - in space, there is no borders and no nations. Without banners, without masters, every day they try to ensure the survival of the species against impossible odds, and conceal the horrifying truth - the stars are right, out of their infinite black abyss they look back with hungry eyes, and there is no place for humanity in their vision of the universe. Their fight is hard, they are hunted by both followers of the unnatural and their own people, but still they press on, because there is simply no other choice.

The fate of all mankind rests in the hands of terrorists, criminals and traitors. You are one of them, or will become one, regardless of what you are now. The Enemy, the only Enemy that ever mattered, has finally awoken, and it's out to get you. It's only a matter of time before it turns its devastating gaze to you. You will lose your memories, you will lose your mind, again and again and again, if you choose to fight, but you will lose everything if you turn back. Are you a bad enough dude to save the world?

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What do you guys think would be a good rule of thumb for a tactical nuclear weapon? Obviously the game has the AM Grenade as your "drop rocks on us, everything dies" trick, but y'know those might be hard to move around. Zone Stalkers at least references that tactical weapons were used in the Fall to try and deter TITAN advances.

Like for damage or what? They'd be pretty small and light thanks to advanced manufacturing techniques, so putting one in a standard missile should be possible.

Something a little larger like a Satnet in a can rocket is basically a crew served ICBM, but that's less useful than it sounds.

Yeah, damage, if anybody had any insight on effective radius or anything because as you say, advanced manufacture might make them more portable or efficient than the theoretical "suitcase" nukes we have today.

Mostly I'm just workshopping some ideas here, seeing if it's worth noting.

It would be a lot of damage, too much dice.

I'd say it would have three blast zones; it would outright vaporize everything with a chance of (100-energy armor/10) in the innermostground zero zone and deal a fuckton of damage to the rest, same except the chance is (100-energy armor) in massive destruction zone, and just deal a fuckton of damage in the outermost partial destruction zone.

Might as well just use the benchmark of X-Ray sensors, which doesn't penetrate a DUR+Armor of 200 or more.

>bad guys use TITAN magic to incude gray goo event on some remote habitat
>firewall sends PCs to investigate
>they have to fight of the nanoplague before it eats all the leads
y/n?

>>one player picks an AI and plays it like an insufferable smug number-wanker he is himself, absolutely no distinguishing features.
So he roleplays perfectly by not role playing at all. Let it be said that the in game prejudice against AI is for them being number-wankers, and you can freely smack him with the cultural portions of the game, as this is backed in the basics of the character creation stuff

nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

>Firewall-wank
Worse than Jove-wank.

That may be erasure tee am territory, so have the players ready with their best /technically not an exhuman,just trans-killbot/ characters. I love to think of proxies managing their assets and dreading the prospect of their sentinels and erasers ever meeting on an op and likely destroying the Galaxy.

That's because it's really cuthulutech wank. If we cared about fleshing out firewall as a morally gray, nuanced decentralized organization with willful operatives and various conflicting currents as much as we did justifying Jove's absurd characterization with equivocation about starship troopers and calling it fixing we would produce much more varied threads.

Is it possible to even ask bout EP around here and have a response that isn't full of snark or overwhelming bias towards a particular aspect of the game?

I know this is Veeky Forums but I'm bored enough to try asking anyway.

So besides the original character creation system, which is better: Packages or lifepath?

Depends on what you're doing. Life Path is more entertaining, but packages is good for short, directed creation - especially for NPCs.

it's not too unbalanced the lifepath system?

I mean, if you roll over on a skill, you just move the points elsewhere. I typically try to move it into the same type of skill, but I don't remember if that's actually required.

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The DUR + wound system feels kinda clunky and tacked together. I'm thinking about leaving only Wounds.

As in, every morph has a wound threshold, if it is hit for that amount of DV at once, it gets a wound, two times that - two wounds, the usual. Five wounds and the morph's KO'd, eight wounds and it's dead. Synths get ten wounds before destruction. Getting hit and not getting a wound means either shrugging it off or sustaining negligible injuries. Yes, that boosts survivability, but not much.

Thoughts?

Armor cap is harder to define this way, but maybe it's possible to just get rid of it and enforce layering penalties.

Or, leave the cap at WT*5. Doesn't really change anything.

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