Couple ideas for plot hooks / settings [thematically fit for Eclipse Phase]

[Adarchi]

I was reading this article http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26597-watch-a-tapeworm-squirm-through-a-living-mans-brain.html?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2014-GLOBAL-hoot#.VG_tD75ReJU about a tapeworm that had taken up residence in a man's brain and started thinking this might work for an Eclipse Phase setting. However, instead of the players being infected, why not have the players setting set place inside of an AI or alien brain. Image something ("the facility") is dug up by Firewall and investigated over several years, but nothing ever happens. Finally, Firewall decides that it is either dead, dormant, or non-functional and assigns the PCs to enter the "facility." Once inside, even the most innocuous movements and prodding cause huge repercussions on the outside (destroying space stations, shooting out massive kill rays into the depths of space, etc).

Communication to the outside should be sporadic and extremely urgent (..shhhhhh.. TURN IT OFF! A REFUGEE SHIP WAS JUST ANNIH..shhh) causing the PCs to become more and more exploratory. This causes even more problems as the PCs unwittingly are causing a seizure in some alien or TITAN technology which is extremely powerful but was just minding its own business contemplating the eons, or playing space battleship with a forked version of itself).

Depending on the direction, the PCs could eventually be "extracted" which is terrifying but causes them no extra harm and then the "facility" launches itself off in some crazy way (a shifting of colors, watching it fold itself in a fractal origami pattern until it hurts to look at, etc). Or the PCs could be sealed off in a specimen jar and placed among other entities.

A second idea I had occurred when I inadvertently looked at the sun before I looked away by habit. Suddenly the whole concept seemed incredibly scary - there is an omnipresent thing in the sky which will cause permanent injury by looking at it for too long. Of course it is common place so no one thinks to speak of it except to teach children. What if there were other objects out there like this? Or what if only certain communities knew about them and didn't think to tell others? Think of some no-man's-land where against all odds, a thriving colony is discovered. The PCs are sent in with some high-tech blocking suit (tech jargon ho!), to try to make contact and find out how the colony is shielded only to discover that it is a cultural artifact - don't look (hear, smell, touch?) the object. Maybe it's a monolith, maybe it's like the sun but not.

Hope someone is able to use some of this!

[trinite]

Man, those are cool ideas. Here's one I came up with:

Digital Samsara, aka Brute-Force Enlightenment. The rulebook mentions that Hinduism is one of the few pre-Fall religions that is still popular. One hyper-elite practitioner decided to experiment with the idea of Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth that can eventually lead to enlightenment. In the traditional view, one lives out lives in sequence, one after the other. But what if one could take those serial processes, and run them in parallel? As an experiment, he created 100,000 identical simulspaces, and populated each of them with an alpha fork of himself. Then for each fork he ran an identical simulation of a human lifespan in accelerated time, and at the end reintegrated all of the forks into a single ego. Viola, instant Moksha, right?

Well, what came out of there certainly wasn't a normal unenlightened human, that's for sure. It certainly seems to think that it's become enlightened. And after it convinced the original version to integrate as well, it controls the resources needed to enlighten others. The marketing campaign for the Digital Samsara Experience has already begun...

[applewood]

In honor of Ebola season

My next one shot: "Blood; Covered in Screaming." Titan nanophages have infiltrated a blood-bank medical facility.  All morphs treated with biologics from the facility become infected.  During the next 24-36hrs the nanophages replicate undetected, whereupon the patients undergo a coagulation crisis.  The cellular structure of the morphs become jelly and collapse under stress.  All fluids are contaminated infectious. The PC's have to contain the infection, mitigate loss and probably coverup the Titan presence.