Eclipse Phase

[Jace911]

So I've been planning on running Anders Sandberg's "My Invisible Friend" scenario as a sort of introductory game for my roommates and friends who have never played EP before. I'm planning on using the current Eclipse Fate iteration Posthuman released last year, since it seems mostly functional except for Psi, but what I've been working on is tweaking and modifying the scenario to fit my own preferences as I flesh it out, since Sandberg's scenarios are more freeform and leave a good bit of the heavy lifting for the GMs (Which I personally like, because it gives me room to be creative!).

Most of what I've added are background politics between the Militia and Security, the former of which is secretly backed by Martian Oversight and the latter is being armed and supplied by the LLA, but the major change is this: rather than being Firewall sentinels sent to follow up on leads left from "Think Before Asking", the party are a group of inner system mercenaries hired by one Doctor Driscoll-Toyoda to board the station and rescue his colleague Doctor Elliot Dones. One player will be playing Toyoda and will get a special brief, while the others are allowed to make their own characters as they see fit; the Toyoda player will be playing the role of their client, while they are the professionals.

The twist is that "Toyoda" is not really Toyoda, but someone who is very interested in finding out what Dones knows about Toyoda's work with Seed AI and whether a similar project is being undertaken on Heinlein. Their employers, whose name has been psychosurgically removed to preserve OpSec, has ordered them to board the station, locate Dones, find out what he's been working on, and neutralize or obtain any dangerous information or materials before someone else gets their hands on it. Of course things will be complicated when they get on board and find that Dones has been arrested, leaving a bunch of scared kids and a message begging his "dear friend" to save them instead of him.

At first I planned on having the Toyoda impersonator be a Firewall Proxy, with the reveal in the epilogue of the scenario, but then I realized that it would be awesome if they actually turned out to be an Ozma agent acting on intel from one of their moles in Firewall; kind of like the big twist at the end of the Know Evil Earth one-shot, "Ozma thanks you for your service" and all that. The new players wouldn't necessarily get the full impact, but the ones who have read the book and know about Firewall and Ozma would hopefully be surprised.

Thoughts?

[trinite]

So I'm going to run my "Futurama" intro scenario this weekend, and I'm still working out a couple of things. I'm trying to decide how I'm going to do character creation for PCs that haven't lived in the EP setting. Ross, I'm re-listening to "A Glorious Fall" and trying to figure out how you did the characters in the tutorial section.

My basic idea is to have them each pick one of the standard Aptitude arrays from Transhuman, and maybe three to five skills to put points into that represent the character's pre-cryo background. Then I'll give everyone maximum moxie to use throughout the intro scenario. Does that sound like a good idea?

[Alethea]

Some skills, like Fray, Freerunning, Blades, etc. ought to still be available, beyond those three to five skills - sure, the characters might have an archaic style using them, but they would still work.

[clockworkjoe]

So I'm going to run my "Futurama" intro scenario this weekend, and I'm still working out a couple of things. I'm trying to decide how I'm going to do character creation for PCs that haven't lived in the EP setting. Ross, I'm re-listening to "A Glorious Fall" and trying to figure out how you did the characters in the tutorial section.

My basic idea is to have them each pick one of the standard Aptitude arrays from Transhuman, and maybe three to five skills to put points into that represent the character's pre-cryo background. Then I'll give everyone maximum moxie to use throughout the intro scenario. Does that sound like a good idea?

That could work - Transhuman has a lot of tools for alt chargen. You could do lifepath blocks in segments as well. For each scene/encounter, give the PCs one lifepath segment and let them use their skills from that to overcome that challenge.

Or you could do simulspace training and give them fake or skillsoft skills so they can try out mesh hacking, combat, etc.

[trinite]

So I'm going to run my "Futurama" intro scenario this weekend, and I'm still working out a couple of things. I'm trying to decide how I'm going to do character creation for PCs that haven't lived in the EP setting. Ross, I'm re-listening to "A Glorious Fall" and trying to figure out how you did the characters in the tutorial section.

My basic idea is to have them each pick one of the standard Aptitude arrays from Transhuman, and maybe three to five skills to put points into that represent the character's pre-cryo background. Then I'll give everyone maximum moxie to use throughout the intro scenario. Does that sound like a good idea?

That could work - Transhuman has a lot of tools for alt chargen. You could do lifepath blocks in segments as well. For each scene/encounter, give the PCs one lifepath segment and let them use their skills from that to overcome that challenge.

Or you could do simulspace training and give them fake or skillsoft skills so they can try out mesh hacking, combat, etc.

I'm planning to do that in the follow-up adventure, if the players want to continue with the characters. I'll have them choose "lifepaths" as skillsoft/XP training on a Firewall simulspace server.

[trinite]

My intro scenario went very well! They got to play around with stealth, combat, fabbers, infosec, simulspace, and surveilance tech. Unfortunately half the group had to leave before the end, and they took all the combat skills with them, so the final showdown with a TITAN hunter-killer was a little anticlimactic. But everybody had fun!

[Vivax]

So I'm going to run my "Futurama" intro scenario this weekend, and I'm still working out a couple of things. I'm trying to decide how I'm going to do character creation for PCs that haven't lived in the EP setting. Ross, I'm re-listening to "A Glorious Fall" and trying to figure out how you did the characters in the tutorial section.

My basic idea is to have them each pick one of the standard Aptitude arrays from Transhuman, and maybe three to five skills to put points into that represent the character's pre-cryo background. Then I'll give everyone maximum moxie to use throughout the intro scenario. Does that sound like a good idea?

I had players in a similar situation. We built characters using 500 points, representing what was recovered post-cryo (because imperfect cryotechnology would probably cause brain damage). Once they got acclimated to the rules and the future I gave them another 500 points to play with, representing repaired brain tissue that was grown on-spec to allow rapid learning.

[trinite]

So I'm going to run my "Futurama" intro scenario this weekend, and I'm still working out a couple of things. I'm trying to decide how I'm going to do character creation for PCs that haven't lived in the EP setting. Ross, I'm re-listening to "A Glorious Fall" and trying to figure out how you did the characters in the tutorial section.

My basic idea is to have them each pick one of the standard Aptitude arrays from Transhuman, and maybe three to five skills to put points into that represent the character's pre-cryo background. Then I'll give everyone maximum moxie to use throughout the intro scenario. Does that sound like a good idea?

I had players in a similar situation. We built characters using 500 points, representing what was recovered post-cryo (because imperfect cryotechnology would probably cause brain damage). Once they got acclimated to the rules and the future I gave them another 500 points to play with, representing repaired brain tissue that was grown on-spec to allow rapid learning.

I just gave them 6 skills each, with an array of 40, 30, 30, 25, 20, 15 points. In retrospect, I'd rebuild the characters with more skills and higher ratings, so they don't get quite as frustrated by failed rolls. But I did give them 10 moxie so that they could practice using it, and that helped. I learned a valuable lesson, that every character should have a method of participating in combat even if they don't have weapon skills (through distraction, environmental hacking, bot jamming, etc.).

If they want to continue with the characters, I'm going to give them packages from the Tranhuman package creation system, representing rapid XP/skillsoft training in a controlled Firewall server.

[Gorkamorka]

From Wizards of the Coast of all places



Source:http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/modern-magic

[Alethea]

Is that like the Fenrir version of a Takko? That's awesome!

[Gorkamorka]

Eraser squad about to go to work



Artist deviant art http://johnsonting.deviantart.com/gallery/

[Alethea]

The world of Eclipse Phase approaches faster than I thought:

https://thestack.com/world/2015/10/12/ion-based-data-allows-atom-sized-storage-cells-that-simulate-brain-structure/

http://www.gizmag.com/miniature-particle-accelerator/39741/

[Mckma]

Looking for ideas to help flesh out a scenario I want to run.  It's a one-off for 4-6 hours spread over two sessions.  As far as inspirations, I'm pulling somewhat heavily from things like the Matrix, Inception, the Mall Cops game Ross recorded years ago, and the most recent Doctor Who Christmas special.

Rough outline:
The players are agents deployed to investigate an x threat that turns out to be a TITAN generated simulspace that basically hacks the brains of those who are in it to make it feel "real" (i.e. they don't think they are in simulspace).  The space is constantly being tweaked and modified to be as appealing as possible to the inhabitants so they don't realize it (a la DW and Mall Cops).  As the PCs investigate the situation there will be various levels of nested spaces (a la Inception) with the ultimate upshot being that they realize the game started with them already in the simulspace.  The goal will primarily be about "escaping" the nested spaces and trying to destroy whatever server bank the space is stored on. (I think Caleb actually had a similar element of nested spaces in one of his games).  The "lingering horror" I want to leave with the characters is the constant paranoia or question as to whether they "really" escaped or not.

"Scary" Bits (things I want to cause the players discomfort)

• Did they really make it out or not?
• As they are investigating and realize they simulspace adapts, can they really trust what they have discovered or is it just the space trying to entrap them further?
• What is the TITAN's purpose in it?  Ultimately I think this question is scarier if left unanswered (kine of incomprehensible Old Ones status)
• General backdrop of existential/perception horror.  What does it mean to give into/embrace the madness/simulspace?  What does it mean if one can't trust their own senses/perception? etc.

So that's a lot and pretty vague right now, but I'm looking for ideas on how to tighten it up and flesh it out.  My hope is to give only enough answers to get the players hungering for more and leave a lot of questions up to their imagination (without being frustrating).  So I'm definitely down to cut some stuff, but don't want it to devolve into a simple "here's a scary monster, find it's weakness then fight it."  I'm thinking about trying to tweak it a bit in play to emphasize or feed into the things players fixate on (as the TITAN would adapt the world to keep them trapped), but not sure how to play that out.

Any suggestions on how to bring this all together?

[clockworkjoe]

Have you read Think Before Asking? It's a free download so I would start there.

Make each layer of the simulspace distinct and imperfect - TITANs be imperfect machine gods anyway, so there's something wrong with each layer. A color can't be rendered right, smells are wrong, all music sounds the same.

When they get out, introduce something that triggers memories of those flaws. Leave it ambiguous.

[Alethea]

Railguns are in the wild now:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/19/3d-printed-handheld-railgun/