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YOU HAVE TWO MESSAGES WAITING. PLAY?
So you did resleeve. Figured you would but thought I'd check anyway. Sorry I couldn't track your stack, friend, but I'm an independent contractor, no matter what Firewall says about what's going on. My priorities are still wallet first, morph second, you third. Anyway, I saw your team's signal go flat and figured it was about time to make myself scarce. If you resleeved where I think you did, I'm pretty close. Don't expect to see me, though-- I'm keeping a low profile. Owe some money to some bad people. You know the story. Anyway, just thought I'd check in, even though I know we're not supposed to. Come find me at our usual spot... that is, if your last backup remembers where that is.
MESSAGE LEFT BY [NAME WITHHELD]. PLAY SECOND MESSAGE?
Hello. You have awoken. We would tell you what killed you, but that information was lost with the rest of your stack. Your new stack has been hard-programmed with a location. You will receive more instructions upon your arrival. Be assured that you are needed and without you, one more domino will fall in the long chain that leads to transhumanity's destruction.
Please be prompt and prepared. Thank you.
MESSAGE LEFT BY [NAME WITHHELD]. END OF NEW MESSAGES.
Eclipse Phase is the game of looking forward and regretting the impulse. It's the game of "the ends justify the means", even if the means involve the murder of thousands. It's the game of being uncertain of who you're even pretending to be and looking into the mirror and not recognizing the face. It's the game of near-constant death and revival, and the consequences of such.
It's the game of transhuman adventure and horror, and it's fucking great.
Have you ever wanted to play a swarm of microbots whose only goal in life is to become the richest "man" in the Solar System? This is your game. Have you ever wanted to be a six-foot-tall sentient octopus in a space-suit fixing the microwave emitter array on the side of a salvaged lifeboat? We've got it here. Have you ever thought about just how cool it would be to get eviscerated by a dozen buzzsaw wielding killbots and then wake up in someone else's body, (nearly) good as new? You can finally live out that sick fantasy.
Eclipse Phase is vertigo: the warring emotions that come from knowing you shouldn't do something and wanting to anyway. Eclipse Phase is the roleplaying game for skydivers and stunt pilots, because there's no time for planning when something vicious, armed, and utterly alien comes hurtling at you from the depths of an alien jungle.
As the book has it:
Your mind is software. Program it.
Your body is a shell. Change it.
Death is a disease. Cure it.
Extinction is approaching. Fight it.
Now for the real talk:
Eclipse Phase is a under-percentile d100 roleplaying game developed by Rob Boyle and his company, Posthuman Studios. It draws its gameplay largely from various incarnations of GURPS and allows for a wide variety of customization and individual play styles. When everything is added together, it all seems rather complex (and sometimes it is!) but almost every roll boils down to trying to roll under a Skill score that has a modifier applied to it.
Characters are equally complex-looking but fundamentally simple: each character has seven aptitudes (the game's equivalent to stats or attributes), an average of 20-30 different skills, and usually a couple of traits to top it off. Oh! Each character also simultaneously occupies two separate stat-profiles: the
ego and the
morph. Your ego (AKA your consciousness, synchronized and downloaded) holds all of your stats and is the major part of your character, but your morph (AKA whichever body you've decided to sleeve into this week) also plays an important part in determining the final modifiers to your skill tests and the upper limits of your aptitudes. For example, Flat morphs (basic humans without any form of genetic or cybernetic modification) have an across-the-board aptitude maximum of 20, which means that if your Cognition 35 xenobiologist sleeves into one, you're going to be thinking a
lot slower than usual. But, like I said, it's actually fairly simple, at least once you get out of character creation.
Now, for how we're going to run this PbP, as, yes, it is rules-heavy and yes, GM interaction is sometimes key:
- Every player is required to make at least one post a day. No exceptions, barring personal crises. At the very least, post to give me permission to run your character for the rest of the day because you have to run your pregnant dog to the vet.
- To streamline the often overwhelming number of skill rolls a character might have to make, I'm going to allow players to, for the most part, roll their own in non-combat settings. I'll expect you to honestly report rolls and to add appropriate difficulty modifiers, but I'm not going to be a jerk about it. I'd rather the story move smoothly than the game get bogged down in two-week-long roll disputes.
- IC thread will be strictly IC, OOC will be strictly OOC. If a combat is conducted, we will convene in the OOC thread (or, possibly, an IRC channel) and roll it out as quickly as possible. We will then play the results in the IC thread. This will also be the only time the "post every day" rule will be lifted. I know this isn't how it's usually done, but the stilted waiting-game that most PbPs suffer in their combat sessions is detrimental to both the tone of this particular game and to my own mental health.
- I fully expect this to have a rotating cast as people stop playing, get kicked off, or have their schedules change. This game is perfect for that. If you want to come in after the game starts, just PM me. We'll work something out.
Below is a list of links that you will find helpful in creating your characters. The rulebooks are, in fact, free to be downloaded and shared under a Creative Commons License, and I have linked to Rob Boyle's own webpage where he lists the torrents for the core book and its various supplements. I recommend reading as much of it as you can, but don't worry too much about it. Everyone has to start somewhere. Try to get at least through the mechanics chapters in the core rulebook, but I will be posting a shorthand guide in this thread before we begin. I'd appreciate it if you would also read the fluff; as I mentioned before, it's quite good and integral to your enjoyment of the game itself.
Rob Boyle's blog with free rulebook torrents!
Useful Eclipse Phase resources (and yes, I know about half the links on this page are dead)
The unofficial Eclipse Phase wiki
A character creation spreadsheet (download v.70). Works in Excel, supposedly. Try at your own risk.
Chuck's Eclipse Phase Wiki
A really good example of a character profile (thanks Leper!)
I'm looking for 3-6 players to join me on a dangerous one-way trip into the silicon bowels of the singularity. Your characters are going to die, go insane, and turn on one another in the absence of better options. They will be mutilated, tortured, asphyxiated, vaporized, incinerated, mashed, bashed, turned into stew, and occasionally shot. If you end up with your character's ego occupying the body of a one-winged cybernetic raven with a drug problem at the end of all of this, you'll be one of the lucky ones.
Now sleeve in and get ready. Do you
really want to live forever?
