Eclipse Phase: alternative rules ?

[silva]

How to setup a sandbox with this game ?

How would a “shadowrunners” type setup fair in the setting ? Who would be the main movers and shakers ? (Consortium vs Autonomists cold war spying sounds a nice high-level one, what else ?)

What about a smugglers setup where players own a small cargo ship bouncing between habitats for profit, adventure and the occasional pirating ? Is it feasible ?

[Antumbra]

I've only ever come across resleeving in the novel Altered Carbon, one of the more brilliantly unpleasant dystopian books I've read recently. Did Eclipse Phase take it from Altered Carbon or is there a common ur-source?

Yes they did, if my memories of the bibliography are correct - though it isn't a new concept in AC of course. Eclipse Phase also has cortical stacks and some Async powers fit the Envoy/Yaroshanko pattern very well.

http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2444 ... ipse_Phase

[silva]

Hey silva, if you ever want to do an OSSR I want it to be "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks."

Why is that, Ancient ? Google tells me its a old D&D module but nothing else.

[Laertes]

After looking it up myself, I totally want to see silva review it too.

[K]

How to setup a sandbox with this game ?

How would a “shadowrunners” type setup fair in the setting ? Who would be the main movers and shakers ? (Consortium vs Autonomists cold war spying sounds a nice high-level one, what else ?)

What about a smugglers setup where players own a small cargo ship bouncing between habitats for profit, adventure and the occasional pirating ? Is it feasible ?

I think you'd have to focus on Gate-jumping. Open-world adventures really need to take place outside of the confines of all of the established strong power structures. You use the various factions as people you meet sometimes and compete with out on the fringes somewhere with weird post-human artifacts and ruins and weird sci-fi plots.

EP specifically says things like "there really aren't space-ships in this setting" and then goes on to mention how ship stuff should just be plot devices because everyone egocasts. The problem with this is that there isn't really any room for unregulated Shadowrun-style crime because there aren't any places to lay low because the setting is a fully rebuilt apocalypse and not a partially-rebuilt one like Shadowrun. This is why you need to get out to the frontier where things are not locked down and it's entirely plausible to go off someone's radar.

[Username17]

I think you'd have to focus on Gate-jumping. Open-world adventures really need to take place outside of the confines of all of the established strong power structures. You use the various factions as people you meet sometimes and compete with out on the fringes somewhere with weird post-human artifacts and ruins and weird sci-fi plots.

EP specifically says things like "there really aren't space-ships in this setting" and then goes on to mention how ship stuff should just be plot devices because everyone egocasts. The problem with this is that there isn't really any room for unregulated Shadowrun-style crime because there aren't any places to lay low because the setting is a fully rebuilt apocalypse and not a partially-rebuilt one like Shadowrun. This is why you need to get out to the frontier where things are not locked down and it's entirely plausible to go off someone's radar.

Actually, one of the biggest problems I have with Eclipse Phase is how "not rebuilt" everything is. The fall of Earth happened not just "in living memory," but seriously like 2 election cycles ago. No one who is too young to remember the fall of Earth is old enough to vote.

The gates and the exo colonies are basically pointless, because non-citizen refugees outnumber natural citizens of every spacer habitat in the solar system 20:1. Seriously. Twenty to one.

If you want to drop out of society, you can just declare yourself to be a new person from Earth or the fringe settlements or some fucking thing and reinvent yourself. It's not even a problem.

The very idea of putting forward the question of "how do you make a sandbox out of Eclipse Phase?" is simply very puzzling. Silva does not know what a sandbox is, because Eclipse Phase is already a world where you can simply announce that you're going to go to the dark side of Titan and start a moisture farm or something. Like Transhuman Space before it, if you want to wander off without a guiding plot, it is trivially easy to do so.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Hey silva, if you ever want to do an OSSR I want it to be "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks."

Why is that, Ancient ? Google tells me its a old D&D module but nothing else.

Hell, I thought you had me on ignore! Let us say that, given some of your comments in this thread, I think it would be funny to see your reaction to it.

[silva]

Yeah I agree with you Frank, Eclipse Phase looks like Shadowrun in the stars (in a "this is a huge sandbox playground!" sense). My question was more the experiences people had with it. How it went out, who were the movers and shakers, what kind of activity the group undertook, etc.

After reading it a bit more, I think a freelancer salvage and rescue crew that doubles as Firewall agents would be a nice starting setup. Perhaps beginning in a more traditional millieu (like Mars, Luna or other gravity-laden socially-conservative habitat) and then thrusting out to the really radical shit (beehive zero-g habitats, post-scarcity / rep-based / anarchist societies, etc) would be interesting. All the while probing for rogue TITANs and Exsurgent virus vestiges in derelict stations and habitats, etc. Campaign would be a mix of salvage gigs for profit, and covert Firewall missions.

But the question remains: Whats a better name for Firewall ? I refuse to use a supposed century old IT term for a far future organization. Delta Green is awesome. X-Com too. Double Cross idem. But Firewall is silly as hell.

Also: I thought about stating the Fall hapenned 20 or 30 years ago. I find the default time given (10 years) too short for the kind of fast sedimenting of different societies the game proposes. What you think ?

[K]

I think you'd have to focus on Gate-jumping. Open-world adventures really need to take place outside of the confines of all of the established strong power structures. You use the various factions as people you meet sometimes and compete with out on the fringes somewhere with weird post-human artifacts and ruins and weird sci-fi plots.

EP specifically says things like "there really aren't space-ships in this setting" and then goes on to mention how ship stuff should just be plot devices because everyone egocasts. The problem with this is that there isn't really any room for unregulated Shadowrun-style crime because there aren't any places to lay low because the setting is a fully rebuilt apocalypse and not a partially-rebuilt one like Shadowrun. This is why you need to get out to the frontier where things are not locked down and it's entirely plausible to go off someone's radar.

Actually, one of the biggest problems I have with Eclipse Phase is how "not rebuilt" everything is. The fall of Earth happened not just "in living memory," but seriously like 2 election cycles ago. No one who is too young to remember the fall of Earth is old enough to vote.

The gates and the exo colonies are basically pointless, because non-citizen refugees outnumber natural citizens of every spacer habitat in the solar system 20:1. Seriously. Twenty to one.

If you want to drop out of society, you can just declare yourself to be a new person from Earth or the fringe settlements or some fucking thing and reinvent yourself. It's not even a problem....

The political factions have nothing to do with EP. Literally nothing. It's about the tech.

This is a libertarian paradise where temporarily owning a few cornucopia machines means that you don't need a society to provide food, protection, or entertainment. For fuck's sake, the default premise is that 4-6 randos can stop civilization-ending Singularity events, and that's because matters like "resources" and "labor" have been taken out of the economic equation entirely by the endless resources of space and nano-fabricators.

This means that trying to fuck off to anywhere in system is a non-starter. There are thousands or tens of thousands of personal sensor arrays sucking up all the data that can be seen from space, and that means everyone knows where everyone is all the time. Trying to escape from a habitat with some paydata means that everyone with even a little resources knows that your ship left and where it is at all times. This is not like Shadowrun where going into the Barrens and outside of the corpsec sensor nets means that you are basically invisible.

Sure, all of the people gathering this information don't care about you if you don't actually do anything shadowrunner-esque. The default EP setting is a Firewall team who is basically given a free pass to travel around and cause trouble as long as good is being done, so not being anonymous is no problem at all. Asteroid Mining Habitat #34094 doesn't give a shit that somewhere in its database is the location of some Firewall team in the same way that it doesn't care about water cargo freighters entering Mars or luxury yacht racers around Titan.

In fact, you explicitly have reputation scores with all the factions because everyone who might care actually does know what you are up to at all times.

This is why the systems past the gate are the only option. There, you might have a chance to piss people off because there might only be a single sensor array in the whole system that needs to be hacked so that you can escape, and even if that is not true you are only a few gate-hops away from where it could be true.

[Username17]

There are thousands or tens of thousands of personal sensor arrays sucking up all the data that can be seen from space, and that means everyone knows where everyone is all the time.

I would submit that actually the fact that there are thousands or tens of thousands of personal sensor arrays sucking up all the data that can be seen from space means that no one knows where anything is at any time.

The panopticon technical infrastructure exists, but the governmental oversight of that panopticon does not. Big Brother sees all, but watches nothing. If you want to dump a bunch of fake data into the system reporting yourself dead in a dozer accident on Mercury, you can just do that. You can print yourself up some fake credentials from pretty much anywhere and skate by for hours or maybe forever.

If you show up on Mercury and flash some credentials you claim are from Titan, the phone call to check up on whether you were telling the truth has a 160 minute delay between each question and answer. With the most trivial of forgeries and research, you could keep a grift going for weeks against people who were actively suspicious.

You're basically living in the days of the golden age of piracy. If you can forge the seal of the empress of Spain, you can take over as governor of a colony and run it to your heart's content for quite a long time.

-Username17

[silva]

I think its a mix of what you both (Frank and K ) said:

Inside a given habitat the "sousveillance" tracks all your steps (and there are enough AIs in place to fucking watch the vidscreens) just like K said. But cross-habitat its pretty easy to forge anything you want, like Frank says. In fact the game states pretty much exactly this in some passage, something like "the Lunar customs official can only trust the tourist at his front was checked by the officials of his original habitat, because there is no such thing as a "international" network in place to verify inter-faction data, or in the cases there is, the lag is too big as to make the process very prone to abuse".

[K]

There are thousands or tens of thousands of personal sensor arrays sucking up all the data that can be seen from space, and that means everyone knows where everyone is all the time.

I would submit that actually the fact that there are thousands or tens of thousands of personal sensor arrays sucking up all the data that can be seen from space means that no one knows where anything is at any time.

The panopticon technical infrastructure exists, but the governmental oversight of that panopticon does not. Big Brother sees all, but watches nothing.

Everyone is in EP is Big Brother because you don't need a government apparatus. You build a million AIs with some resources you carved out of an asteroid and they do all the work because governments are only needed to enforce weird little artificial distopias like the ones that have Zeroes.

This is not the golden age of piracy because simply sitting you in an airlock for three days until your credentials clear and double-clear is really a thing that people can and will do. The whole resleeving and fake ID is just to have something to pass around the local bar because station security checked your real ID already and knows everything about you.

At best, station security got a message from Firewall that confirmed your fake ID. This means that actual shadowrunning where you are an independent contractor is right out, but being a company man is still in. This is why "Firewall agents" is the default setting, but only because it's the most fun of the "agent" options.

[silva]

What K said. Except the inter-habitat/societies part is more nebulous because they cant (or purposefully dont) do cross-habitat/societies check, or there isnt a consistent inter-habitat ID registry. So its not hard to enter a new habitat with fake ID. Once youre inside though, good luck trying to cheat the system.

*EDIT*

What about the new name for "Firewall" ? Anyone ?

[silva]

Hey silva, if you ever want to do an OSSR I want it to be "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks."

Why is that, Ancient ? Google tells me its a old D&D module but nothing else.

Hell, I thought you had me on ignore! Let us say that, given some of your comments in this thread, I think it would be funny to see your reaction to it.

Color me curious. Ill take a look at it.

[Leress]

What about the new name for "Firewall" ? Anyone ?

Aegis.

[virgil]

What about the new name for "Firewall" ? Anyone ?

Aegis.

Global Transhuman Frequency?

[K]

What about the new name for "Firewall" ? Anyone ?

Aegis.

Global Transhuman Frequency?

Titanomachy. You know, because the killer-god AIs who brought all the bad tech are called Titans.

[Username17]

Aegis.

Global Transhuman Frequency?

Titanomachy. You know, because the killer-god AIs who brought all the bad tech are called Titans.

No, the bad super machines are called TITANs, the Titans are communist space Swedes from Saturn. Because that's not confusing at all.

-Username17

[silva]

Yeah, Titans and TITANs, Jamming (the ECM) and Jamming (the riggers), etc. They were very unfortunate in their choice of words.


About the new name for firewall, I really like Titanomachy and Aegis. Thanks, guys.