Wednesday, March 21, 2012

First Thoughts: Eclipse Phase

Ok, I will be upfront about this, I haven't played Eclipse Phase as of yet.  I have had the book for a while, and have read a good portion of it, and I have been listening to RPPR's ongoing actual play as well, which has been extremely entertaining.  If you are even vaguely into Sci-Fi, expecially hard Sci-Fi with a touch of of Lovecraft, then do yourself a favor and check it out.

Before I forget, the game itself is published under the Creative Commons License so you can grab the book and everything else here, but the hardcopy is a pretty book and well made as well, for when you are sick of reading off your screen.

The game takes place in the future, a few dozen years after the Fall, which, in a nutshell, is when the TITANs, the advanced AI used on Earth for military planning and so on, reached the Technological Singularity.  This is when the AI start learning so fast and in such large leaps and bounds they effectively become omnipotent.  When this happens they turn on humanity, kill nearly everyone, and then vanish.  No one knows where they went, or what they are up to, but Earth is a wasteland, and due to some of the TITAN creations left behind, an uninhabitable planet.  Prior to the TITANs waking, though, humanity has already expanded across the solar system, as the technology to download your mind/memories into other hardware, so as long as you back yourself up, you can be, for all intents and purposes, immortal.  Most everyone in the universe (save for those in the poorest conditions, or those that don't believe in changing the human form) also has a cortical stack at the base of their neck which is essentially a hard drive that houses themselves, so even if they die, if the stack is intact, they can be resleeved (term for getting a new body), and go from there.

At the core of the game, it is assumed that the PCs are members of Firewall.  A secret group that is the hidden police making sure that the TITANs don't come back, and that what they left behind does not endanger all of humanity.  There is more to the universe though, so it could be played with the PCs as members of a certain community just going through life, or as Gate Crashers, a term given to people that make a living travelling through the Pandora Gates which are stable-ish wormholes from one area to another, could be another planet, galaxy, who knows.  The crashers go through the gates looking for tech or other valuables to bring back and sell, whihc would result in a very dangerous and sci-fi dungeon crawl kind of game, if the GM and the players desired to go that way with the system.

For the GM and players this game and universe have quite a few avenues for exploration over just the type of game.  When your body itself is just another kind of gear you can buy, it opens up a lot of interesting questions that could be explored for groups that are looking for more than a hack and slash.  If you could sleeve into anything, like other humanoids, genderless robots, or even uplifted animals (octopi, primates and birds have been elevated by humanity to have critical thinking capabilities in this future,) what does that mean for how you identify yourself.  Do you still see yourself as strictly male or female, or is gender something that can change depending on your whim?  If you are now an immortal, in a way, do you take more risk, or does the idea of dying over and over again scare you more, and cause you to be overly careful?  Things like these aren't normally brought up in other games, and so it lets Eclipse Phase stand out from other techy, futuristic games.

Do yourself a favor and at least check out the free pfd version, and if there isn't something in the first few short stories or in the descriptions of the types of morphs (bodies) that catches your attention, then no worries, but I would think most would be able to find something interesting.

No comments:

Post a Comment