10
« on: June 25, 2013, 10:37:14 PM »
This past weekend I introduced some of my gaming buddies to Eclipse Phase with a one-shot sequel to Know Evil. I called it Puretide's Gambit (or If It Weren't For Yelena Chikako, The Earth Would Already Be Reclaimed). Girard, after three years cultivating favors and studying astrobiology at TAU, uses his familiarity with Firewall protocols and extensive contact network to find a motley band of sentinels who have found themselves on Firewall's bad side. With promises of restoring their standing with Firewall, he recruits them to repeat Manjappa's plan to reclaim the earth.
As a first run, some elements went very well, while others brought to mind just how terrible I am at one-shot games.
The opening portion of the game went exceptionally well, as the team spent the seven-month trip from Luna to Oberon planning their heist. The objective: break into the secured servers of Chat Noir (the same place that houses power for the habitat and other essential systems and, thus, the most secure place on the habitat) to steal the super-secret plans for the cylinder. As I figured it, EXOtic Bio-Solutions was a Manjappa front group and disbanded once the cylinder was delivered to the inner system, so the only place where the plans could be found would be in the Love & Rage Collective's "No Really, Everything That Comes Through The Gate Is For The Good Of Transhumanity" trash bin.
The question, of course, is how does a autonomous collective hide its hypocritical super-secret project files from the public while maintaining that they are a transparent organization, fully subject to the oversight of the masses? The answer I chose is: Hide it behind a Reaper-morph guarded by an AI that blocks any connection from anyone without 80+ @-rep. The cutoff point for a level 5 favor (at base Networking) seemed a good starting point for allowing access to this security. The additional security of a network of eight cameras outside the lockbot-guarded door behind which the Reaper lurked would prevent casual security jobbyists (job-hobby, the only employment most autonomists know).
The plan was to unleash a large squad of Kaos AIs from a disposable ecto with instructions to jam the cameras and turn them away from the door so that the lockbot could be disposed of by a plasma rifle, then have the character with 80 @-rep (which I, admittedly, didn't see coming when designing the scenario) jam the Reaper and have it open the door. Then the hacker character would move in and use the passcodes which "Proxy Puretide" (Girard) had obtained to access the secret blueprints.
The plan quickly fell apart (in typical Know Evil fashion) when not one, but two of the Kaos AIs critically failed their hacking checks to access the cameras, thereby telegraphing their presence to the entire security jobbyist community. However, this allowed the hacker to, very publicly, defeat the Kaos AI and earn some @-rep. The plan had to change, so after some purchases, the hacker proceeded to use another disposable ecto to hack the cameras' systems and force a reboot. The autonomist smuggler jammed the reaper and opened the door to allow the hacker's newfound casemorph body with kill switch and neutrino transceiver to run in, obtain the files, and transmit them out. A lucky critical success by a jobbyist got the cameras restarted just in time to see the autonomist's jammed reaper melting the intruder into slag. So yes, their failure resulted in them *gaining* rep for their crimes.
I need to better develop the trip to Solemn with the astrobiology specialist (pruned fork of Girard), and then to earth via transorbital shuttle hidden in mass driver ammo (it's tough to have an idea of how many exsurgents to send after a group for their first real combat), but the wacky hijinks of "Sure, we *could* just farcast out with this farcaster we brought with us, but we *do* have this shuttle, so we might as well just try and see if we can beat the killsats (spoiler: they didn't even get *that* far) and make it to Luna so we can keep these morphs," was certainly amusing. It held my attention like driving past a train wreck.
One player spent over 100 points on his morph, then didn't even use it, since it was a synth so he didn't dare bring it to Solemn, and he didn't want to lose it long-term, so he didn't bring it to earth.
I would be interested to hear if any more-experienced EP players/GMs would agree with my setup of an autonomist super-secret facility security, and from Jason if this sounds like the way Girard would go about repeating Manjappa's plan.
Show Posts
