/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

5/5

Donezo.

I'd still prefer if people visit the site directly though, the views give me a clue as to what kind of stuff people are more interested in.

Not that I always understand it, for instance Stack Encryption is very popular, but say, Heartbeat Sensor is pretty average, maybe even below.

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seek mental help

You do realize that Jovians die when they are killed?

A Futura acquaintance of mine can't wrap her head around that fact, that's why I'm asking.

I mean, I wouldn't go advertising your friend as a potential...Loss, especially if they can' or don't grasp the basic concept that other people are still living things that you just don't kill on a whim regardless of their ability to make backups.

That said, returning back to meta. Does it make sense to say that the general masses who don't have vast amounts of money to throw around wouldn't have backups in a way like most people probably can't, or don't have insurance?

I think backup should be cheap enough for most to have. Secure backups on the other hand...

Yeah, Im totally sure people don't get tricked into buying backup insurance at a 9 lives front and have their backups forked and mind fucked into oblivion...

I wonder if there would be open source back ups.

Problems with the setting, expanding from my previous post in previous thread

-setting has run its course.
-by this point it is obvious that developers haven't though most things out:
-one of the main villains in the setting, Jovians, are the good guys
-most other factions are rather bland, idiotic or boring. Anarchists actually give a feel of being villains or ultra-moronic level fools.
-reputation system seems like total dystopia, while it is praised in the books.
-bio-conservatives should be cherished by most of population in light of the Fall
-no campaign setting rulebooks for campaigns where players play as Ozma, Oversight or Jovian special forces/intelligence
-not much more can be added to the setting, maybe more exoplanets but that will change it into space opera
-authors said there will be no revelations as to what Ozma is or TITANS.
I think EP is now stale.

>Not just writing your own material
Come on step it up

Failing that, I'm sure there's still more stories to be told in the setting. You don't need a constantly evolving world to run good games, unless for some ungodly reason you're REAL in to the metaplot.

I mean, if a brinker hab can maintain it's own backups I don't see why anarchist couldn't just maintain their own servers for this purpose.

Ultimately it comes down to whom you trust with your soul and that depends on whether or not you think how much you pay someone factors into it (among many things).

That said, as I've only started getting into the lore itself, to help me get a "sense of scale" as it were to how various augmentations are handled is it safe to say not everyone is going to be running around with things like medichines? Obviously if you're a case wearing begger on the streets of Noctis that's one thing but would things like that be out of the reach for most generally well to do people? I get the idea that some bodies and augmentations would be like the difference between affording a Honda Civic and a Lambo but then it's not explicitly said most people pay a visit to their local body bank when they have their legs broken not that I wouldn't assume such clincs exist for people who can't heal on their own.

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What happens if you want to reintegrate your fork and your fork would rather stay an individual, concerning matters of law? Haven't read too much of the lore yet, but I don't remember having seen anything about that yet, just that some factions don't like forking. Would those factions sunward assume your fork is your property and you can do with it as you please?

Most factions sunward wouldn't even let you legally make an Alpha fork I think.

Ultimates are #1

Jovians don't even make the list.

Ultimates are little bitches

Go TITAN or go home

I make logfile of H-rep not for stealing your visitors. :) It's just for those people who prefer to have all interesting materials saved somewhere on HDD.

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>Does it make sense to say that the general masses who don't have vast amounts of money to throw around wouldn't have backups in a way like most people probably can't, or don't have insurance?

Entry level backup insurance is 250 credits a month, (1/4th of the monthly earnings of a rep level 3 individual) which means someone is keeping a secure backup which is updated 1-2 times per year. If the stack can't be easily recovered they won't really try. That's about as expensive as a capsule to sleep in, but a lower priority.

That means that a lot of people ( rep level 1 or 2) will probably not be able to easily afford that, which means they're relying on pro-bono stack recovery in case of death. Probably by family members or friends or something.

That said, the income tables are kinda dumb, but give some frame of reference. Looking at them in combination with NPC file 1, it means that Indentures, Criminal thugs or dealers, or similar lower income people can't, while someone more middle class like the Hypercorp General Associate can. This is a pretty flawed analysis for a few reasons though, as bodyguards and police officers wouldn't be able to afford backups (though maybe they get one from their employer), which doesn't jive with the core rules talking about police.

It really matters where you are. In much of the inner system alpha forks are illegal to make, but in some places they are their own legal person and you couldn't force them to merge any more than any other person. Beta forks are similar, but there are places where they are legally the property of their originating alpha, and could be forced to merge.

Any scenarios to run for a new eclipse DM? just bought my book today and ive read more of this in one day than months of obsessing over delta green

>the fictional people i root for aren't universally loved by everyone like they ought to be in this work of fiction

It'd make it a lot easier to buy the idea that the Jovians are paranoid and intolerant crazies if they starting event for the whole game wasn't a complete vindication of all their beliefs. Seriously after what happened with the TITANs why in the fuck should anybody trust anything even faintly transhuman? The Jovians are right, this technology is potentially obscenely dangerous and should be treated like nuclear weapons not distributed willy nilly to anyone who wants to have more dicks.

*if the starting event

Wanting to have more dicks isn't dangerous in the slightest. Wanting to build Seed AIs is dangerous.

Hell, that's not even really true. It's dangerous because there's a massive alien intelligence intentionally fucking it up.

If you want to argue philosophy about bioconservatism that's one thing, but claiming that any amount of transhumanism is dangerous is patently false.

Think Before Asking

I feel like you're missing the point - it's not that the Jovian response is unreasonable, it's that "arm up and bunker down" isn't the only response people have to disasters. There are people who are going to use this as an opportunity to flourish on their own terms (the Planetary Consortium, who have set up their own new order to fill the void), there are people who are going to go "well, the old order is gone, time to try something new" (hence, Scum) and everything in between. I vaguely recall that it even addresses this in the core rulebook at some point - people have reacted to the tragedy of the Fall in different ways.

I know that it can be hard to sometimes accept the idea that other people aren't going to react in the same way to events that you would.

>Wanting to have more dicks isn't dangerous in the slightest.
Giving people the ability to create whatever sort of biological lifeform they want isn't potentially dangerous? You see this is what I mean, most people would recognize the problem with that so soon after the Fall, it wasn't ancient history. They'll probably have known about a guy who got basilisk hacked into fabbing viruses when he just said he was going to fab up a new body for himself with 12 dicks.

>Wanting to build Seed AIs is dangerous.
>Hell, that's not even really true. It's dangerous because there's a massive alien intelligence intentionally fucking it up.
Why would a Seed AI be so harmless by itself? We have no way of knowing what they'll evolve into and therefore no way of controlling it, you're just putting your faith into the idea that incomprehensible super intelligence will see some value in us or even less likely have some sort of sentimentality for it's creators when we just don't know that. Better to just keep that shit under lock and get by without god-machines running the show, is that really so hard?

>If you want to argue philosophy about bioconservatism that's one thing, but claiming that any amount of transhumanism is dangerous is patently false.
Look at how dangerous humanity has been just with what they had up til the 21st century, imagine how much worse the situation would be with a bunch of god damn supermen running around with the abilities of gods but the egos of mortals, can you not see how disasterous that would obvioulsy be? If a Flat like Oppenheimer could cook up a nuke what sort of horrific new weapons could a sufficiently dedicated Neurode cook up? They're all brain!

Problem is they're always depicted as the indisputable bad guy in the setting like their response is somehow unreasonable even though it's far and away the most reasonable. If some horrific event just almost wiped out the species wouldn't the logical response be to try and restrain what it was that almost wiped out the species rather then continue to give it largely free reign?

>I know that it can be hard to sometimes accept the idea that other people aren't going to react in the same way to events that you would.
I think that applies to the authors of this game much more then me or this guy , they constantly depict the jovians and their views as just wrong even though they'd be the most logical response by far.

How many Jovians does it take to screw in a light bulb?

If you're so worried about being out thought, maybe it's time you start making yourself smarter. If you're not bootstrapping yourself to Seed AI then why exist? To continue propagating Homo Sapiens ad nausem? You have kids hoping they'll be better than you, not worrying that they're literally being created just to supplant you.

you've just reiterated your general opposition to transhumanism and agreement with the jovians. The jovians reject the central conceits of the setting and are fatally hostile to every civilization in the setting other than themselves, so it figures that they get little sympathy from the other humans in the system. It also figures that you agree with them so wholeheartedly that this to you is unreasoned bias on the part of the authors. Its inconceivable that this might be the response of polities that have to share a system with the jovians, whose stated goals are at best to fortify jupiter and wait until the rest of humanity dies, at worst to actively try to exterminate their neighbors. This does not engender cooperation

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>If some horrific event just almost wiped out the species wouldn't the logical response be to try and restrain what it was that almost wiped out the species rather then continue to give it largely free reign?

It would be A logical response, not the ONLY logical response, you silly billy. Not to mention that there are varying degrees of "what technology can we let people use" and "how can we police it" in the setting.

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The thing that almost wiped out humanity was specifically Seed AIs, and all of the major factions will shoot you and delete your backups if you seriously talk about giving them free reign.

>imagine how much worse the situation would be with a bunch of god damn supermen running around

The world has got progressively safer since the end of world war ii.

Two

One priest to condemn it as dangerous technology and ban it from use by the public, and one politician to use it while he laughs at poor people.

>If some horrific event just almost wiped out the species wouldn't the logical response be to try and restrain what it was
Just like the logical response to the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings would be to ban all nuclear technology.

Yeah, there are people who more or less think that, and it's not an entirely unreasonable stance to take given that nuclear power contributes to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. However, the inconvenient truth is that it's not realistically possible to maintain our current quality of life without it, as the energy requirements to run our society in its current form simply cannot be met otherwise.

Jovians aren't depicted as ass-backwards luddites because the authors need a strawman for their anarchist self-inserts to whack at, but because the technologies they eschew are a hard requirement for the sort of low or post-scarcity societies everyone else is running. Conversely, everyone else isn't fucked in the head because they keep using those technologies; the quality of life enabled by them is just too nice to give up. Just like our current quality of life is too nice to give up for the green agenda.

There's also the fact that not all of the technologies the Jovians reject contributed in any way to the Fall; they're just sort of tangentially related to those that did. Which makes their stance essentially the same as being against nuclear power because nukes make big booms.

Topic: criminal justice

How does prison or other criminal punishment work in EP?

Due to the lack of physical space for imprisonment/detainment, I'm going to say punishment is EGO-based in EP. Pretty sure the books had some words on this, but my memories of that time are fading.

It'll differ between Habitats, Swarms, and colonies though. That's one thing I can guarantee you.

Probably by putting your stack in storage for a period of time like in Altered Carbon. Maybe plugging you into an isolated virtual environment if the goal is also rehabilitation. It would be way cheaper than maintaining an entire physical prison infrastructure.

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Yeah, there are people who more or less think that, and it's not an entirely unreasonable stance to take given that nuclear power contributes to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. However, the inconvenient truth is that it's not realistically possible to maintain our current quality of life without it, as the energy requirements to run our society in its current form simply cannot be met otherwise.

Quite a bullshit as there are first world countries who don't use nuclear energy.

>The world has got progressively safer since the end of world war ii.
Not correct, ever heard about MAD?

Also without industrial revolution there would be no World War 2 and people would still work 5-6 hours per day with 3-4 months of holidays.

Iceland, Denmark and Australia. That's because large-scale renewable energy production is actually viable there: Iceland has access to geothermal power, Denmark is fucking windy and Australia has nothing but coastline.

If you necessarily want to include Eastern Europe into first-world countries, the point is rendered moot by the fact that they export huge amounts of electricity from Russia, a good chunk of which is produced using nuclear reactors.

>Technology can be dangerous
>Therefore having almost any advanced tech is dangerous

They are hardcore reactionaries at best, and authoritarians using paranoia as an excuse to dominate their subjects at worst. Just because they have a reason for what they do doesn't mean that everyone should agree with them. I think that people like to team up with the Jovians because "muh stronk" but most people who see themselves as conservative would fit in better in the LLA

Psychosurgery is the answer.

>military ASIs did some bad shit
>we have to stop genetic engineering things!
Fuck off retard.

The answer to the fall is "don't make ASIs", exactly as the ETI intended.

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>yfw when the ETI created the Exsurgent virus to preemptively save galactic life from runaway AGI paperclippers

>If you necessarily want to include Eastern Europe into first-world countries, the point is rendered moot by the fact that they export huge amounts of electricity from Russia, a good chunk of which is produced using nuclear reactors.

Where did you get this shit from ?

Czechs and Slovaks have nuclear reactors. Poland doesn't import electricity from Russia and has no atomic reactors. It is simply using its own natural resources like coal.
In fact Poland exports more electricity than it imports.

The bottom line is, you don't need to have atomic energy to be first world country.

>>Therefore having almost any advanced tech is dangerous
Jovians aren't against "any advanced tech".
They use plenty of it and even develop some themselves.
>and authoritarians using paranoia as an excuse to dominate their subjects at worst.

What paranoia ? The Fall did happen, and a brief look at scum barges and anarchist settlements should tell you all you need about allowing access to technology without restrictions.

>military ASIs did some bad shit
>we have to stop genetic engineering things!

If you read the setting the world was turning to shit already before ASI due to advanced technology.
For example gangs would mass print guns and ammo for their wars using cornucopia machines.

As to genetic engineering, it makes sense to restrict technology allowing mass production of custom diseases and viruses, doesn't it?

> and a brief look at scum barges and anarchist settlements should tell you all you need about allowing access to technology without restrictions.

That it allows smaller and less centrally organized social groups to not only persist in space but have large amounts of time free for leisure and intellectual pursuits?

Tavern in transhuman era.

You could make a long list of cons for every major technological advancement in humanity's history starting right from fire. Any line you're going to draw between "safe" and "unsafe" technologies is going to be completely arbitrary at best.

Hostile pod.

But you do need to be quite lucky geographically or just not care about the environment.

>For example gangs would mass print guns and ammo for their wars using cornucopia machines.
They do that already.

>Not correct, ever heard about MAD?

Mutually Assured Destruction saved the world from a conventional war between the Soviet Union and the United States, a conflict which would have made World War 2 look like a playground argument.

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How do you convince your friend that turning his hab into a robot ecosystem is clearly a bad idea?

You don't. Slot him and extract his Stack. Run some diagnostics and sims to make sure he's not been hijacked by an Exsurgent strain.
If he has? Hope he was a jerk 'cos now you need to dispose of him safely and ethically. Your choice.
If not? Erase the last few hours of his memory and say he killed himself. Pay for his resleeve and hope the psychosurgery will stop him from trying this again.

Alternatively.
Be a good fucking friend.
Find out why he wants to do this.
If he wants to do it for lols/shiggles, then see if you can't help him set up a step-wise simulation to explore the effects of the proposed ecosystem.
If he wants to do it because of underlying reasons e.g. Wants to play god, Needs this to work to prove that he has worth to the hab, anger at the "System". Then try to have a talk with him. See why he wants this so badly. Be understanding.

What's the worst that could happen?

Oh, I dunno, maybe a second fucking Fall?

That second bit sounds a bit too tedious for a high-powered hypercorp baby like me. Just killing him looks like a good plan. Thanks.

That woman is clearly not hungry.

>Jovians are the good guys
From one point of view. They're definitely not the bad guys, though.

>anarchists actually give a feel of being villains or fools
Good. That means that you can think critically.

>reputation system seems like total dystopia
That's because it is. Reputation is a shitty wealth distribution system. Downplay what you can do with it anywhere except with people who eschew capitalism in all forms.

>bioconservatives bla bla
I really dislike this "bio"-conservative label because it encompasses the reasonable raction to the Fall, which is technological precautionism/conservatism, with biological conservatism, which is not a reaction to the Fall. It's just much more vocal because the stuff it disagrees with is necessary and widespread due to the infugee problem.

>-no campaign setting rulebooks for campaigns where players play as Ozma, Oversight or Jovian special forces/intelligence
That's because all of those are single-faction groups and the devs' stated goal is to promote discussion and roleplay from different points of view and ways of thinking. Just do it yourself, faggot.

>-not much more can be added to the setting, maybe more exoplanets but that will change it into space opera
You can add as many habs of any type that you would like. There are plenty of nice places in the Solar System that haven't been mentioned. This is, of course, within the default setting. You're free to stop being a whiny bitch and writing your own setting.

Who would you say are the good guys? Because I personally think it's the Rortians

Not him, but there are no good guys in Eclipse Phase. This setting has outgrown the juvenile belief in 'Good Guys'. There are only bad guys and other bad guys.

OZMA

TITANs did nothing wrong.

The Factors

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Would a morph/ego ever fork their Muse into a Creepy just so they could have a pet? Would they (Delta) Fork themselves into it?

I mean, I'm pretty sure the Creepy has it's own AI.

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>It'd make it a lot easier to buy the idea that the Jovians are paranoid and intolerant crazies if they starting event for the whole game wasn't a complete vindication of all their beliefs. Seriously after what happened with the TITANs why in the fuck should anybody trust anything even faintly transhuman? The Jovians are right, this technology is potentially obscenely dangerous and should be treated like nuclear weapons not distributed willy nilly to anyone who wants to have more dicks.

You do realise the TITAN's went crazy because they got infected by some multilevel-memetic virus?

Except that's only known by a small number of people. The official story is that the TITANs attacked Earth because that's just what posthuman AI do.

The little things in life:
Finding new things to grind into your nutri-gruel to make it taste better. End up keeping a journal so you know what tastes better and what doesn't. End up publishing on the Mesh for shiggles. Get an okay following. They post some of their own recipes. Get your muse to collate that shit. Give proper credit where due to avoid getting dinged. One day get asked by someone how to prepare nutri-gruel using just these trace chemicals. You tell them you'll get back to them as you turn to the flasks of fermenting nutri-gruel laced with different enzymes, the ones made without any microbes for those people whose habitats outlaw anything resembling a bioweapon, and finally the simulation you're building up to model how exotic materials you can't materially get would interact with the nutri-gruel based on the data you have already personally collected on flavourings you do have access to.

And then the realisation hits you like an numinous experience.

Your entire life now revolves around flavouring nutri-gruel.

Shit was hitting the fan between powers on Earth well before the involvement and infection of the AI's. The Exurgent infection certainly made it worse, but the setting implies transhumans were well on their way to permanently fucking things without any help.

Obviously its the Anarchists living outside the reach of the man with their perfect systems and utopia and morally best government which works because economics is hard and we're not saying this is for everyone but if you don't want to live like us you're a morally deranged psychopath and how the fuck did any of these expensive space station habitats get built on good feelings and how are we supplying them and actually has it occurred to anyone that creating a system where people who have minority opinions in a settlment are automatically punished/made destitute for it might create a seriously repressive environement oh well its alright because we're so much better than all those wage slaves.

*COUGH*

Sorry.

Honestly the setting seems deliberately setup as a bit of a tinderbox - to an almost bizarre degree to be honest. So its not easy to claim good guys specifically once you discard some of the really cartoonish writing - but personally I like the Ultimates and the Reclaimers.

Biggest criticism against the Ultimates is that they're brutal. Considering this is a setting with more or less literal immortality, and alien machine gods trying to rape society - i'm calling okay on a bit of brutality.

Hell, one of the big examples against them from the books - to show theor evil side - is some survivor from the Fall describing how she was one of the people trying to escape on Space Elevator when the Ultimates mowed down a crowd of hundreds of people with heavy weapons before digging the stacks out of them.

(CONT)

Except they were doing this because this was at the last space elevator out of the place, and there was no way for everyone to fit. And they'd already spent time, sweat, blood and lives (and actual lives, since these are TITAN-Brand 'Rip-Yo-Head-Off-And-Steal-Your-Ego' machines) defending the Space Elevator from attack while refugees escaped.

And obviously, the only reason that a version of survivor was alive to badmouth them - and not in a TITAN Hellcube - was because of their decision. A horrible brutal decision that makes 100% sense considering the horrible circumstance. Not that anyone points that out to the poor, ungrateful refugee.

They're not nice people, but barring a handful of possible scenarios they're more necessary than harmful to the immortal human race.

As for the reclaimers, i like that they have a firm, fixed, incredibly difficult goal in mind and don't really give a shit about anything else. It's refreshingly straight forward.

Most of the other factions are so all over the place and multifaceted that its almost as hard to figure out what the hell they might want from the future, let alone whether or not they're benevolent. Those two are at least reliable, even admirable.

Morphs are still a really rare resource, and there are still a huge amount of people in storage (though the majority now are gonna be mostly unskilled).

Chances are any serious crime just gets your morph confiscated and given/sold to someone more deserving/with relatives willing to pay.

That was pretty horrible, but the whole Fall was at least that bad, and they weren't wrong. Better to have some bad memories and get off earth vs becoming an ASI's fucktoy until the end of time.

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Well, the books touch on it a little here and there - but basically, punishment is going to depend heavily on three factors: resources of your polity, values of the local culture, and organization of your local polity.

For instance, in Extropia, they've got plenty of money and space BUT the local legal structure is all in agreements between parties and external negotiation/arbitration. While you might get sentenced to menial labor or sex work to pay back the damages on a tort or contract break, you might easily be able to work or psychosurgery or otherwise suppress the memory right away. The extropian ethos has no interest in you suffering for crime - you just need to pay back your dues on an injured party. In a way, justice is very restorative there.

Meanwhile, In say, the Jovian Republic, we know they run one of the few physical prisons left in the system. They have real estate to spare on the hellish moons of Jove, and culturalyl their people are averse to mind editing and cold storage. If they have any glimmer of the traditional American structure, inflicting such punishments may be seen as cruel and unusual, reserved only for the most heinous "non-persons". Their justice will be very retributive, and probably focused on either form of deterrence to remind you that if you just stay loyal and fly the straight and narrow your Republic will be safe, and if you don't you'll do crack rocks on an irradiated, poison volcano moon.

Capital punishment I expect is very rare, as while in general there's a lot of people still in dead storage, there's way more people who are permadead. So killing somebody permanently who hasn't done that to anybody else is the serious business. I suspect as others have said, direct forms of correction via Psychosurgery or incapacitation are the most common since you can incapacitate a mind indefinitely with very little setting resources.

science ain't free. the research of ayyyliums gotta be litterd with the cytoplasm of factors