Author Topic: Eclipse Phase  (Read 600885 times)

clockworkjoe

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #345 on: February 20, 2013, 01:56:58 PM »
yeah I sure want to live there in the creepy nightmare spider silk house

Tadanori Oyama

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #346 on: February 20, 2013, 03:02:28 PM »
I hope we don't use coins or other small objects in the future because my house's floors would be filled with small objects dropped between the threads. I bet everything is velcoable though, that'd be sweet.

CADmonkey

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #347 on: February 20, 2013, 03:06:08 PM »
yeah I sure want to live there in the creepy nightmare spider silk house
And the best part is that the building services (electricity/HVAC/plumbing/etc.) will probably be delivered in tubes woven into the fibrous structure of the house.  It'll be like living inside a living creature! ;D
« Last Edit: February 20, 2013, 03:18:14 PM by CADmonkey »
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crash2455

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #348 on: February 20, 2013, 04:21:25 PM »
And the best part is that the building services (electricity/HVAC/plumbing/etc.) will probably be delivered in tubes woven into the fibrous structure of the house.  It'll be like living inside a living creature! ;D

Can't sleep. . . my house will eat me. . .

Henry Hankovitch

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #349 on: February 20, 2013, 08:25:56 PM »

clockworkjoe

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #350 on: February 20, 2013, 09:01:04 PM »
did you just make a H.R. Geiger image macro or did that already exist

Henry Hankovitch

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #351 on: February 20, 2013, 11:47:24 PM »
Which would be worse?  That I searched for a picture of Giger looking all Giger-ish, and then made a macro on the spot?  Or that I saw that macro like six months ago, thought "I bet this will come in handy at some point," and saved it?

clockworkjoe

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #352 on: February 21, 2013, 12:14:23 AM »
I DONT KNOW

Mixmastermax

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #353 on: February 21, 2013, 01:18:08 AM »
I DONT KNOW

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clockworkjoe

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #354 on: February 21, 2013, 01:41:37 AM »
wait now that i think about it the 6 month thing is way worse because wtf context was it created in the first place

Teapot

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #355 on: February 21, 2013, 11:05:40 AM »
It also looks like the skull of a creature with a listed SAN loss. But I'm liking the idea quite a bit. The real questions I have are about energy and resource consumption in the printing.

And it's based on bone growth. Huh, that's a thing.

beej

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #356 on: February 21, 2013, 03:05:50 PM »
So I need a little advice. 

I'm working up a short to medium EP game.  My initial plan is set in a dyson sphere.  The players gate set up a base camp, explore a little then run them threw a couple of modified Mysteries of Mesoamerica modules.  After that they find some bizarre organic obsidian maglift near the ruins they've cleared out of nasties.  Doing the math I figure there's a station every 5k kilometers (a total of 30K gates..just on that one east to west circuit...maybe increase the distance between stops?) and travel time between stations is about 15 minutes with each train stopping for 3 minutes.  Then game becomes another form of 'crashing' as they hit varies stops and explore...creatures, traps and what not.  Then they bump into other gate crashers.  There are other gates in the sphere and turf war starts to happen as people try and seize the most lift stations...the thought being if you control a station, you control access to whatever is near it.  Also I'm thinking throwing in some primitive societies they have to deal with and maybe defense systems left by the sphere creatures.

One of the initial difficulties I'm having is hiding the fact their in a sphere at the beginning of the game.  I would assume that a team would bring along some sort of probe launcher and fire a drone into the upper atmo/orbit to do surveys of the planet.  With in a few hours they'd think they're on something that was not on an actual planet.  I'd like to delay the revelation of the sphere as long as possible.  Any ideas how I might do that?
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clockworkjoe

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #357 on: February 21, 2013, 03:37:38 PM »
There's a dyson sphere described in the Gatecrashers book. Use that.

Tadanori Oyama

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #358 on: February 21, 2013, 04:25:51 PM »
Have the drones fail to send data. They fire the drone, they watch it go up, and then it doesn't transmit. They try again, watch it with vison enhancement devices, see it enter orbit, but still not data. Mysterious!

blue_hitchhiker

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #359 on: February 23, 2013, 02:30:30 AM »
Quote
One of the things that I keep thinking about when listening to Eclipse Phase APs is how the infugee population might be used in the study of social sciences.

One of the problems with the study of Economics, Political Science, International Relations and even Game Theory, is that only history is your laboratory.  We would not know what would have happened had politician X not adopted Policy Y during this crisis or that war.  There is no control group in history. 

However, having a population of infugees hanging out in a purgatorial simulspace server, hoping for a chance to be useful enough to merit a case morph, gives the perfect laboratory for a mad social scientist.

Some of the ways I see it playing out are:
1) A simple experiment about a particular economic theory.  You set up two identical servers with one difference in how the economy works and watch them play out in accelerated time.

2) You keep restarting, by erasing the memories of the infugees tinkering with your economic system to make it perfect.  Maybe an Andrew Ryan from Bioshock type, desperately trying to bring Atlas Shrugged to life. 

3) You could re-stage historical conflicts.  Maybe force the infugees to keep reliving The Fall, trying to figure out just what kind of weapon could have halted the TITANs, what tactic might have saved more of transhumanity, or  if the controversial nuking of the Huairen Air Base slowed the TITANs or was solely an act of Western aggression. 

3a) Or maybe the hyper-elite CEO of one of the major military contractors that designed the TITANs copes with his guilt by becoming eerily obsessed with some other war.  He has is secret server of infugees that he saved from TITAN upload and treats it like his own private war miniature set.  Forcing the infugees to refight the Battle of Yorktown, The Somme,  D-Day, or General Scharzkopf's feint during the First Gulf War. 

The idea is take your mad scientist archetype and apply it to something we cannot scientifically test, but could if we could create perfectly controlled worlds.  It takes the idea that we could learn so much if we could just do horrible things to people and uses infugees to stand in for the knee-jerk hate that most players have toward slavery and the like.

I like this idea. It sound like an especially good way to introduce new player to the setting. Run them through a Fall wargame, one where they can "win," then dump them out of the simulspace into AF 10 to learn the horrifying truth. It could get them used to the mechanics and simpler tech before dropping the heavy transhumanism on them.

Also, because I like to torture players, I'd have it so that the main criticism of the simulspace historical exercises is that their findings aren't applicable to the real world. The criticism that the variables aren't controlled or simulated accurately enough really can't be refuted; the problem in the first place is that reality is largely unquantifiable itself.

However, what if one ego always rose to the top of every simulation? No matter how many times the historical period was repeated, no matter the conditions, this one personality ended up as a major leader. Would sleeving him into a morph and seeing if he could do the same IRL prove the validity of the simulation? What if a scientist, desperate to secure more funding for his indentured experiments, gave his proof of concept back all the memories wiped away from his previous selves, to secure an edge? You'd have Alexander the Great, Hitler, Jesus, and every other major shaper of world history rolled into one, likely insane, ego.

However, what if one ego always rose to the top of every simulation? No matter how many times the historical period was repeated, no matter the conditions, this one personality ended up as a major leader. Would sleeving him into a morph and seeing if he could do the same IRL prove the validity of the simulation? What if a scientist, desperate to secure more funding for his indentured experiments, gave his proof of concept back all the memories wiped away from his previous selves, to secure an edge? You'd have Alexander the Great, Hitler, Jesus, and every other major shaper of world history
I think that introducing this messiah-type leader figure could be a great exploration of some of the more darkly bureaucratic and political aspects of Eclipse Phase.  I imagine it as sort of Enders Game meets Dr. Strangelove idea:

After years of running various simulations of historical battles Prof. Evil Von Crazy or whatever is losing the support of his patron (a hypercorp, a neo-university, a cyber-thinktank, the LLA, whomever).  He IDs this singular figure whose natural leadership and cunning instincts have turned the tide in many battle-sims.  Additionally, since this leader is time accelerated he has been learning military theory by trial-and-error first hand for decades.  Often leading, what should have been, the losing side to victory (ala Valley Forge, the Battle of Agincort, the defeat of the Spanish Armada). 

So you have this brutal gauntlet that has given rise to an incredible leader, one who, it seems, from testing , could have turned the tide during The Fall.  So what do we do with this EP version of Ender Wiggin, certainly not place him in charge of the various defense forces or security programs.  Instead he is a tool that the various players will use to their own advantage.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2013, 02:33:17 AM by blue_hitchhiker »