Author Topic: Eclipse Phase  (Read 600917 times)

Tim

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #435 on: October 25, 2013, 06:08:44 PM »
This maybe the oldest news that ever news-ed but I am digging this blog. Basically a daily dose of EP content.

About every 5 or 6th thing I like quite a bit.

http://www.farcastblog.com/

Personal Favs -

http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/09/272-jun-ibn-shiloh.html

http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/06/180-echo-point.html

http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/09/248-jules-khyyan.html

Gorkamorka

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #436 on: October 28, 2013, 06:04:19 AM »
Some cool character art that's usable for Eclipse Phase.

More at http://wyv1.deviantart.com/gallery/512476



Gorkamorka (Fridrik)

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #437 on: November 24, 2013, 01:40:11 AM »
This maybe the oldest news that ever news-ed but I am digging this blog. Basically a daily dose of EP content.

About every 5 or 6th thing I like quite a bit.

http://www.farcastblog.com/

Personal Favs -

http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/09/272-jun-ibn-shiloh.html

http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/06/180-echo-point.html

http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/09/248-jules-khyyan.html

That guy is super cool. He does some stuff over on the Shadowrun side too (he was/is pretty active on Dumpshock).

Tim

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #438 on: December 02, 2013, 04:26:42 PM »
The air gap break down -

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/scientist-developed-malware-covertly-jumps-air-gaps-using-inaudible-sound/

Ok if you read the article it is not quite so dire as that but it is an interesting proof of concept.

Kroack

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #439 on: March 11, 2014, 02:30:42 AM »
Necro'ed for my own self interest, also a big hello to the RPPR forums after a long hiatus!

I'm running an Eclipse Phase game. My central idea is kind of a Rendezvous with Rama thingies with exsurgent threats. A big ass military spaceship was subsumed by the TITANs stationed aboard it during the fall, it used its considerable resources to manufacture an army of ex-threats it unleashed upon earth whereupon it pulled the good ole upload millions of mind routine and then reconfigured its engines to blast out of the solar system at ludicrous, baffling speeds, its course taking it well out of the galaxy.

Now, for whatever reason, it's making a return to the solar system.

It's a start, but I need more juiciness to it, you know? If anybody has any ideas where to take it from there, I'd love to hear them.

What I have so far is that this spaceship is pretty much a piece of tech that almost every faction wants to get its hands on, not only is a superweapon in of itself (even without all the supped up titan crap it was and still is an extremely powerful warship) it's also a treasure trove of historical pre-fall stuff, TITAN tech, and perhaps most importantly the ship's blackbox (if it's intact) could be extraordinarily valuable.

So, this creates a sort of cuban missile crisis style arms race where everybody wants to get their hands on the ship... yet it's still an x-threat so it creates a very volatile situation. Now that I think about it, one of the first things I should consider is if this megaship will still have a TITAN on board as it comes back to the solar system or not...

I'm just rambling now, but an interesting idea is if the ship uploaded a Promethean and the infected TITAN and the promethean have been at odds for the last 10 years, a game of digital wits or something like that.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2014, 03:12:19 AM by Kroack »

Ezechiel357

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #440 on: March 11, 2014, 05:02:08 AM »
My first reaction would be that despite all the goodies that could be inside, it is before all a Titan threat. Considering the danger it represents, there should an excellent reason not to blast it in pieces and shower it with EMP/plasma combo.

Greed is not enough to prevent government/corps to take immediate counter-measure. To have the spaceship avoid immediate destruction, it means that every single faction (government, corps, secret society...) with some modicum of resources would decide to hold on. Also it means that teams which would be send to explore would also need some form of guarantee that one of those faction is not going to pull the trigger wheb they are playing minecraft in the spaceship.

So I believe you need to find a good reason for people to believe it is not an immediate threat or it could be contained. It is probably severly damage, possibly large chunk of the hull did loose its protection against solar radiation which acted as intense EMP, therefore frying most/all of the exurgent threat.

Also, to had some tension, the major factions agreed not to blast it into pieces until it reaches a certain point in the solar system. It had an element of time constraint ("once it reaches coordinate omega-one, all orbital weapons will blast it including any ships leaving it). It also adds a dimension of diplomacy to build official expedition teams (but also secret one), or you can also see negociation of salvage rights for various section of the ship.
What if, contraray to your initial statement, the ship is considered "mostly free" from Titan threat as it entered the solar system, it flew through a massive ionic storm frying acting as intense EMP. The "rightful" owner of the ship (whether it is a governement, the shipyard which built it or a merc group or an insuurance company) does not want or have the resources to salvage it, but auction salvaging rights for a share of the findings ? It will give a feel similar to a gold rush.
... until, deep inside the hull, some titan monster is awaken. Or maybe it is a trap and tiny basiliks are creeping into the minds of salvagêrs and at a given time will turn everyone into the crew the ship need to accomplish its last mission: although it looks like a piece of derelict, it is fuctional, like a Deathstar.

So you can several phases:
1: Auction of salvaging rights - the players are a small independant company trying to score big but have to trade favours to get one precious salvaging license. The whole derelict battle ship is stabilised in a far orbit by additional reactors crudely fitted on its frame
2: The gold rush - the team lands, starts to explore andmine and retrieve goodies - and needs to face other teams with slightly more devious methods. Or poassibly a cult who wants to blast the whole thing. Maybe a small "bartertown" is created orbiting around the huge battleship. This phase should last for months. Unknown to everybody salvagers are getting slowly contaminated - especially after several months of exploration without incident, the teams are more laxed and control procedures are getting looser.
The reason exploration would last so long is because the whole hull is unstable and people are not supposed to bruteforce their way in.
As exploration progress, you can start to drop hints: a ship engineer could find the progress towards the system core much slower than expected... almost like the wreckage had been designed to slow down the team. Some "treasure trove" are regularly found be teams. Interestingly, after a thorough examination, those boxes or rooms had in their structure a radiation protective mesh acting like a Faraday box against EMP... some of the goodies are not what it seems.
3: The hidden monster. It is a decoy to encourage people to sent more resources. Some "minor" Titan threats are unleashed but after inflicting some casualties are neutralised. People should feel confident that they have neutralised the last remaining threat. To make it more believable, those threats where partially damaged and less effective that fully operational "monster" to support the hypothesys that the ion storm had a cleansing effect. Of course, those threat could only be found in the deepest of the hull where the likelyhood to be protected was the highest.
Again careful "autopsy" of the remains could detect that those flaws and partial damage were engineered - but it can takes several weeks for experts to reach those conclusions, delaying the warning.
It is the rush to the core. Teams are getting reinforced, working around the clock to be the first one to hit the system core and retrieve the mother payload. Caution is thrown to the window, sabotage becomes another routine activity - more people are contaminated and maybe strange dreams or behaviour are happening from time to time. At the same time, some people are getting a bit suspicious - the players because of what they have found or they are approached to investigate on behalf of suspicious people (and because PCs are on site since the beginning they will blend easily and have connections with others teams). If they are trying to raise the alarm, they will face some surprising resistance: disbelief ("you want to stop the salvaging for your own benefit because your team is behind"), or even assassination attempt from one salvager who left the field earlier (contaminated earlier). They need solid proofs as it has become a very profitable operation.
4: The race to the core. The hull seems to become more unstable, but it is a matter of day until the core system can be accessed. How careless are willing to be the salvagers to win the race ? And new teams arrived: one is planting bombs, the other has the task to stop any team to reach the core. However, no faction has yet decided to pull the trigger as the threat is not clearly identified. It is believed to be some exsurgent threat which can still be contained.
5: Deathstar in action. All contaminated men are turned into drones. Hidden machines and nano-bots start repurposing the battleship for its final mission (Luna ? Mars ?). Uncontaminated men needs to escape before getting turned into drones. Rescue mission to save an important executive or the stack of the son of an influent man - but is he contaminated ? what could do the Titan with the information kept in their brains ? Maybe it is a race to prevent a tachyon communication towards other Titan base ?
6: Destroying the Deathstar: if the cannons and other big missiles are ineffective, a suicide team has to plant the device which can neutralised definitely the battleship before it is fully functional.

One important point to keep in mind, for the Titan to escape all scanning and detection and for the trap to work, it had to keep it presence minimal and very well hidden. So until phase 5, the Titan is not aware of what is happening everywhere in the battleship, it has not spread and activated its nano-bots otherwise even the most basic scan would have trigger warning and massive strike would have followed before the Titan could reactivate any effective defense. This is important that although it is a lethal trap, because of the paranoia around titan infection and safety protocol, it is by no means omnipotent and omniscient otherwise the trap would never has a chance to work.

Phase 6 is obviously action packed - the reason the PCs are hired is because they are the one left knowing the most how to navigate into the hull. If the do not have enough fighting and destruction skills, only one or two of the are hired as guide and other players are running the core of the suicide strike team (of course their ego have been safely backed up before).


I hope it will give you food for thought.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2014, 05:43:49 AM by Ezechiel357 »

Ezechiel357

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #441 on: March 11, 2014, 06:20:05 AM »
An alternative is to use the battleship as a campaingn introduction.

The battleship has re-entered the solar system. In six hours, it will be in range of the whatever massive canon. Nobody wants to take any risk, it will be vaporised. No negociation.

Obviously, the PCs are hired (or ordered) for a high risk/high reward mission: sneak onto the ship, retrieve a piece of data from XYZ terminal and return it before complete vaporization. PCs know better not to ask too many questions for this kind of job. They are hired by a suit, hiding very well who is behind the job offer. It is not a suicide mission but a very hard one, they will have good gear, accurate information and mapping (but it could have been reconfigured).

Run the scenario like a lethal race, with all matter of traps, deathbot and Titan tech. To had a twist, another team is present either for the same data or for something else: teamwork, competition or shoot out can happen.

The important bit of this scenario is the data. As an advanced battleship, it contained a prototype of emergency shuttle - possibly resistant to Titan infection. Which means possible survivors - at least stacks. That's the hope of the Man-behind-the-curtain. He/she would like to retrieve a son/lover/last heir or maybe a unique prototype of an awaken animal. But he needed confirmation if the shuttle had been activated.

Assuming they succeed, PCs will be paid and several months might go by and other scenarios can occure. Then, they will be contacted by the same suit to go onto an exploration mission. The data contained the location the shuttle escaped as well as enough navigation vectors to narrow down the possible location to something small enough to be explored. Still, several options exists for its current location: amongst an asteroid belt, within a gas planet, or amongst a vast floating wreckages of many ships, used as supply by some Titans.

So after the initial scenario, it becomes an exploration in an unmap/unknown zone of space. Maybe a forbidden zone. So PCs will have to follow bread crumbs, possibly discovering hidden communities and dangerous places - if they want to hide, these communities have surely good reasons and would like to maintain their secrecy.

Finally, discovery of the missing shuttle. Is it a trap laid by titan ? Did the survivors settle on a place and were able to survive with whatever resources they found ? Are they monitored by titan using them as unwarae lab rats to understand human nature (maybe a world like Dark City - highly recommanded movie for a strange world set in Eclipse phase, there is all the technology to do that). Or what if using the prototype technology of the shuttle the survivors managed to subdue titans or even merge with it creating monstruous hybrids with their own goals, different than Titans, but not human either (like merging both in one hive mind) ?

Okay, I think that's all for now.

Kroack

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #442 on: March 11, 2014, 06:14:14 PM »
Woah. Thanks for the great responses. Now that I think about it, I do like the idea of a sort of TITAN trojan horse, perhaps the TITAN influence on the ship is in fact an incredibly closely kept secret and most people believe the ships was overtaken by exhuman, pirates, anarchists or whatever right around the time of the Fall, so it still represents an incredible find yet most of the Hypercorps, Firewall, and governments dunno about the TITAN influence?

If that's the case, I'm gonna need a way to draw the players into the action. I'm thinking maybe an incredibly powerful firewall proxy or member of a hypercorp has gone missing and the players are sent in to investigate, they uncover deep seated plans to infiltrate the ship and bring its systems online for extremist or malevolent ends?

I want the campaign to center around efforts to control the ship, yet not introduce it until that Holy Shit session, you know?

Leshrac

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #443 on: March 15, 2014, 02:38:27 AM »
I tend to be a bit of a FATE pusher which I want to acknowledge as I start this post.

That being said..if you found the mechanics and engine of Eclipse Phase to be too dense for you I strongly recommend looking into  Nova Praxis.  Its Transhumanism in FATE.

It doesnt have quite the same level of flexibility as Eclipse Phase (I do not believe it has uplifted animals in its options)..but it gathers alot of the transhuman ideas into a math light story heavy system.

-----

I really should give eclipse phase a try at some point.  its always seemed to deep for me but considering how many games I have under my belt id bet as soon as i get into it all of it will click together.

Nulzilcho

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #444 on: March 15, 2014, 06:10:54 AM »
On that note there is the Eclipse Phase/Fate conversion guide that's currently in the pipe (there's a sub-forum for it on the official site) and for those that can't wait there's a fan-made hack by Martin Nerurkar (although not really knowing a lot about Fate someone else would have to vouch for it).

constructacon

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #445 on: March 28, 2014, 04:01:36 AM »
i am planning on running some eclipse phase for my group, leading up to my attempt at my take on know evil. does anyone out there in the interwebs have any ideas/suggestions. i plan on running them through "through a glass darkly" tonight as the first in a series of warm up games, to make sure that the players are playing the characters they feel comfortable with.

clockworkjoe

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #446 on: March 28, 2014, 01:18:45 PM »
There's an outline of the entire campaign here http://prezi.com/kx1vvhzwwcoe/three-wise-monkeys/?kw=view-kx1vvhzwwcoe&rc=ref-436096

Also, I would recommend running a pre-written adventure like Glory or Continuity or something like that - easier to run a new system with a published adventure, in my experience. Have you listened to a Glorious Fall? I designed the intro specifically to teach the rules to players.

Gorkamorka

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #447 on: May 28, 2014, 10:43:42 AM »
Posthuman Studios are taking an firm stand on some subjects on their forum.  It's creating some chatter on there and Reddit.

EDIT: 2/3 of the reddit comments have been deleted, so that discussion has become illegible.
« Last Edit: May 28, 2014, 11:24:17 AM by Gorkamorka »
Gorkamorka (Fridrik)

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #448 on: May 28, 2014, 11:18:35 AM »
I've never even heard of that. Apparently I am really out of the loop. I wonder why it became such an issue on their forums to begin with. I wouldn't think transhumanism would attract that like of individual.

Kamen

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Re: Eclipse Phase
« Reply #449 on: May 28, 2014, 05:53:34 PM »
You would think, wouldn't you? My GM frequents the EP forums a bit and he's mentioned to me a few cases of MRAs before, but they usually got nipped in the bud by the Posthuman guys. Still, more power to Posthuman, I like those guys a lot and this is just one more reason.