Eclipse Phase is a "Roleplaying Game of Transhuman Conspiracy and Horror." It's published by Catalyst Game Labs. From the website: "Players take part in a cross-faction secret network dubbed Firewall that is dedicated to counteracting 'existential risks' — threats to the existence of transhumanity, whether they be biowar plagues, self-replicating nanoswarms, nuclear proliferation, terrorists with WMDs, net-breaking computer attacks, rogue AIs, alien encounters, or anything else that could drive an already decimated transhumanity to extinction."

And here's what it says n the back of the book:

"Your mind is software. Program it.
Your body is a shell. Change it.
Death is a disease. Cure it.
Extinction is approaching. Fight it."

I knew I wanted Eclipse Phase as buzz about began to circulate, it wasn't until I began to read the game that I was actually excited about it. I finished it yesterday and it's definitely I'll follow in terms of purchases.

I don't know if it's a game I'd actually play, however.

Eclipse Phase a point buy system. The same pool of points is used to buy attributes, skills, starting monies, and more. There are also Backgrounds (such as Lunar Colonist and Uplift). Each character chooses a Faction to belong to, which is part ideology and part organization. There are also good and bad Traits to select for your character.

The game uses percentile dice. The target number is your character's skill and modifiers apply. There are also margins of success and failure.

Physically, the book is gorgeous. Although some of the art is not to my taste, it's appropriate and evocative. I particularly liked the chapter intros - they summarize the contents of said chapter, along with page numbers, in a visual way. Whomever decided to snug the titles of the character templates right at the top of the page, however, should rethink the approach.

There's quite a bit to the game setting-wise as well. As you can see from the quote above, characters work for an organization called Firewall, which covertly deals with perceived threats. They're a kind of a spy - but they're not working for a government agency. They're working for a loose collective that took it upon themselves to protect humanity.

Eclipse Phase is a transhumanist game. That means characters' bodies don't conform to our 21st century norms. Your ego or self-identity can be house in any number of different forms, ranging from the robotic to altered biological forms to pure digital ones. And you can change your form or morph during the game.

Let's talk about the horror aspect. In my estimation, this mostly comes from the Exsurgent Virus, which was apparently released by a damn powerful group of AIs called the TITANs.

No one is sure where the TITANs came from or why, but all of a sudden, humanity was fighting for their lives. They basically lost. The TITANs experimented on humans for a while, then flee the solar system for parts unknown.

They left behind the Exsurgent Virus. It comes in many flavors. Some change you into...things. They break down your body and mind.

Here's why I say I'm not sure if I'd ever play it: I don't know how well it's free-wheeling nature in regard to identity and self would play for the masses. Characters rarely die. They can make copies of themselves. Gender means nothing. I'm not sure how well players would take to their characters when so much of what a player envisions about a character is mutable.

Also, I don't know how well mystery and conspiracy would play in a game where computers are damn powerful, kind of psi power exists, you can make copies of yourself to go off and do research while you party, et al. I'm not sure they'd hold up too long and if not, well, what's the point?

That said, Eclipse Phase is purdy, full of shiny ideas, and I like it!

Seanchai

...and it's free! Thanks to the Creative Commons licence.

Download it here.

Seanchai, have you read Transhuman Space ? I always liked the idea of TS but I had....issues, with it.

Regards,
David R

Was this actually supposed to be posted on the Reviews forum??

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;350542Was this actually supposed to be posted on the Reviews forum?

I suppose you could move it, but like my previous threads, it was meant to tell folks a little about the game, give them a heads up, and kick off some discussion.

Seanchai

Quote from: David R;350435Seanchai, have you read Transhuman Space ?

I got it when it first came out. Can't remember too much about it...

Seanchai

Quote from: Seanchai;350546I suppose you could move it, but like my previous threads, it was meant to tell folks a little about the game, give them a heads up, and kick off some discussion.

Seanchai

Any discussion topics in particular?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;350608Any discussion topics in particular?

Well, "Here's why I say I'm not sure if I'd ever play it: I don't know how well it's free-wheeling nature in regard to identity and self would play for the masses. Characters rarely die. They can make copies of themselves. Gender means nothing. I'm not sure how well players would take to their characters when so much of what a player envisions about a character is mutable."

And, "Also, I don't know how well mystery and conspiracy would play in a game where computers are damn powerful, kind of psi power exists, you can make copies of yourself to go off and do research while you party, et al. I'm not sure they'd hold up too long and if not, well, what's the point?"

Seanchai

Damnit! I still need to go ahead and actually review this sucker.  Its all transhuman and shit but Baugh manages to somehow get sticky smelly fingerprints all over the background text and the percentile mechanics version of shadowrun is mostly functional with a few hiccups.

I believe the setting was horribly mishandled, mangled even by handwavium technology and smug holier than thou political correctness in the history sections.

The Gaming Den did a number on the mechanical aspects of the game, including a number of items I had missed in my readthrough, and a few I noticed.  God, I'm months behind on my lazy ass layabout hobby habits!

Good question.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Spike;350639I believe the setting was horribly mishandled, mangled even by handwavium technology and smug holier than thou political correctness in the history sections.

Do tell, what kind of political correctness?

RPGPundit

Let me see:

So, Earth was destroyed by a Total War of All against All, AND the inclusion of post-singularity 'skynet' AI's (TITANS)...who were created by aliens just wipe us out or something...

... but also we didn't pay enough attention to the environment, so even without that we would have been destroyed by an eco-disaster.


In a world of perfect cloning and body swapping, where death has been defeated there is a policital faction the players can join that is worried about....  universal health care?


More curious than offensive, to me anyway: The 'soldier model' body you can upload into (the Fury) is only made in female models because they can better handle the aggressive hormones or some crazy shit.  

Little gems like that are scattered all over the place, I eventually gave up on reading the backstory, which was way too long for too little detail anyways. Most of the setting is made up of handwavium and nonsense anyway, with an over reliance on 'science as magic'.  A primary WTF moment in that regards was the very crappy Psionics.  A nano-virus re-writes your brain to give you lame superpowers. Fine, I'll give you that macguffin, but somehow when you change bodies, your downloaded datafile brainscan manages to carry that change from body to body. So, essentially, its psychic SOFTWARE, not hardware.  And because its so high-tech alien/AI crap, no one can actually pinpoint what the changes are to undo them?

Look man, a Gun is magic to a stone age primative in the bush, but once you've shot his buddy he's got a really good idea of what the gun actually did to kill the dude. Effects are a hell of a lot easier to decipher than mechanics.

Quote from: Spike;350799... but somehow when you change bodies, your downloaded datafile brainscan manages to carry that change from body to body. So, essentially, its psychic SOFTWARE, not hardware.

Most of the stuff you mentioned didn't bother me at all. This one gave me pause. But it only works in organic bodies. And the Psi is...different than in other sci-fi games.

Seanchai

MOst of all the setting, as presented, is incoherent... and the PC drive behind it didn't help.

There are many elements to this incoherency that creep up on you as you read the book. Maybe not for you, but for me.   I just pointed out a couple of obvious 'wtf' moments that I recalled off the top of my head.

There are others, of course.  Issues with the so called population problem (not enough... so much so that they tried force raising children in AR, but somehow wound up with nothing but sociopaths... which makes less sense the more they dwelt on it, btw. At face value I accepted it, for the record), but they abandoned millions of 'refugee' cortical stacks (all retreivable) in storage or in the space elevator... or the utter lack of any reasonable attempt to establish a beach-head on the otherwise abandoned earth despite the canonical presense of stuff worth getting (thus an excuse to send player characters on 'suicide' missions, apparently).

Hmmm I had picked this up a while back because it looked very nice, but haven't had time to read it...and figured it would never get actually played, like many RPGs that are beautiful in conception/execution but impossible to translate to a table of players who don't buy their own rulebooks.

That said, despite your dislike of various elements in the game (which it seems is evidently a taste issue) you're discussion of it has actually tweaked my interest in reading and maybe even playing the game...it sounds fresh in a way I haven't seen RPGs try for in a while now, and maybe even manages to make the transhuman genre more entertaining that GURPs Transhuman Space failed to do (to me; I also love that setting, just found it did little to stimulate me to run games using it).