- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
So, I've seen a few other players and fans crop up on this forum, quite possibly the only thing about the members here that has surprised me given its subject matter and the developers, and I figured I'd make a (very crappy) OP about it.
So, for those unfamiliar with Eclipse Phase (or EP for short), its a tabletop roleplaying game based around a percentile system and with no classes. Setting-wise it takes place in the far-future of (mostly) the Solar System ten years on from an AI rebellion that was both triggered by and triggered the technological singularity. Roughly 90% of mankind died along with Earth, the refugees fleeing to what were at that point tiny little outposts all across the Sol system. To make matters worse, the AI (known collectively as the TITANS) weren't defeated but just disappeared one day, leaving all sorts of toys, booby-traps, and other human-killing things around. Now, mankind isn't doomed because in the aftermath of that disaster the various technologies that the elites on Earth had been hoarding mostly to themselves such as consciousness transference (known as resleeving in the game), cloning, and a wide array of other transhuman and posthuman technologies including gene editing, nanofabrication and nanotech in general got widely distributed across the remnants. You also have various uplifted species of animal such as cetaceans, various primates, pigs, and octopi, but despite everything they're still a very small minority, along with true AI that have strict shackles in place to prevent another snowball. And yes, all of those can be valid PC's, along with your basic transhuman.
Oh, and you know how I said mankind wasn't doomed up above? WRONG. Turns out that the Sniper from TF2 was right about someone always wanting someone else dead, and there's a lot of reasons for that in this case beyond mere resource constraints. See, when mankind split, we took our politics with us, and you've got everything from actual anarchists and their commune habs to full on murderous warmongers convinced the rest of transhumanity needs to be forcibly purged of weakness in case the TITANS come back. Throw in the corporotocracy of the Planetary Consortium that rules Mars and the ancapistan called Extropia in the main belt and you have lots of "fun" times. There's also various minor factions and criminal gangs, but I don't want to make my OP more of a documentary than it already is
Of course there's actual governments still with the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance that controls Luna, the Lagrange stations, and the stuff still in Earth orbit, the Morningstar Alliance that's a confederation of various Venusian aerostat habitats, and out rimward you have the Jovian Republic and the Titanian Commonwealth. The latter two are where the politics of the writers really show through, with the latter being Space Sweden meets Space Canada and Space Scotland, just with actual refugees who don't feel like integrating, but unlike in those actual nations where its free shit 24/7, when your primary means of social advancement is a social media score akin to that one planet from The Orville, turns out a bunch of refugees with minimal skills aren't getting a whole lot of likes, upvotes, or government assistance, which the writers just sort of gloss over sadly. The former is even more hilariously badly written, with the authors swinging wildly between them being akin to Paul Verhoeven's take on the Federation or a failed Space North Korea in the truest vein of SJW's not wanting to make their ideological foes a threat.
Now, with all that out of the way, who can you, the player character, be? Just about anything, really. Killbot-for-hire, dolphin oceanographer on Europa, and yes, tranny whatever. Fortunately the overall social dynamics of the setting can be summed up as "the SJW's got what they said they wanted and now everyone's too busy with their lives to give a shit about people's pronouns or what they've got between their legs or who they fuck", so you better have an actual personality to go with it.
So, any of the other Kiwis feel like chipping in?
So, for those unfamiliar with Eclipse Phase (or EP for short), its a tabletop roleplaying game based around a percentile system and with no classes. Setting-wise it takes place in the far-future of (mostly) the Solar System ten years on from an AI rebellion that was both triggered by and triggered the technological singularity. Roughly 90% of mankind died along with Earth, the refugees fleeing to what were at that point tiny little outposts all across the Sol system. To make matters worse, the AI (known collectively as the TITANS) weren't defeated but just disappeared one day, leaving all sorts of toys, booby-traps, and other human-killing things around. Now, mankind isn't doomed because in the aftermath of that disaster the various technologies that the elites on Earth had been hoarding mostly to themselves such as consciousness transference (known as resleeving in the game), cloning, and a wide array of other transhuman and posthuman technologies including gene editing, nanofabrication and nanotech in general got widely distributed across the remnants. You also have various uplifted species of animal such as cetaceans, various primates, pigs, and octopi, but despite everything they're still a very small minority, along with true AI that have strict shackles in place to prevent another snowball. And yes, all of those can be valid PC's, along with your basic transhuman.
Oh, and you know how I said mankind wasn't doomed up above? WRONG. Turns out that the Sniper from TF2 was right about someone always wanting someone else dead, and there's a lot of reasons for that in this case beyond mere resource constraints. See, when mankind split, we took our politics with us, and you've got everything from actual anarchists and their commune habs to full on murderous warmongers convinced the rest of transhumanity needs to be forcibly purged of weakness in case the TITANS come back. Throw in the corporotocracy of the Planetary Consortium that rules Mars and the ancapistan called Extropia in the main belt and you have lots of "fun" times. There's also various minor factions and criminal gangs, but I don't want to make my OP more of a documentary than it already is
Of course there's actual governments still with the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance that controls Luna, the Lagrange stations, and the stuff still in Earth orbit, the Morningstar Alliance that's a confederation of various Venusian aerostat habitats, and out rimward you have the Jovian Republic and the Titanian Commonwealth. The latter two are where the politics of the writers really show through, with the latter being Space Sweden meets Space Canada and Space Scotland, just with actual refugees who don't feel like integrating, but unlike in those actual nations where its free shit 24/7, when your primary means of social advancement is a social media score akin to that one planet from The Orville, turns out a bunch of refugees with minimal skills aren't getting a whole lot of likes, upvotes, or government assistance, which the writers just sort of gloss over sadly. The former is even more hilariously badly written, with the authors swinging wildly between them being akin to Paul Verhoeven's take on the Federation or a failed Space North Korea in the truest vein of SJW's not wanting to make their ideological foes a threat.
Now, with all that out of the way, who can you, the player character, be? Just about anything, really. Killbot-for-hire, dolphin oceanographer on Europa, and yes, tranny whatever. Fortunately the overall social dynamics of the setting can be summed up as "the SJW's got what they said they wanted and now everyone's too busy with their lives to give a shit about people's pronouns or what they've got between their legs or who they fuck", so you better have an actual personality to go with it.
So, any of the other Kiwis feel like chipping in?
