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View Full Version : The Architect's Wish [Eclipse Phase Campaign Journal]



Zavoniki
2013-09-02, 02:45 AM
So I've been meaning to do this even though currently the campaign has been only one session(though that session was... 6 hours I think... it was very long). That's in part because school has started and several of the players are or are going to be far far away. More about that later. First let me intro the campaign and then intro the players.

Intro to Eclipse Phase(Don't read if you know the setting):
If you don't know what Eclipse Phase is, keep reading.

Eclipse Phase is a Transhuman horror science fiction roleplaying system by Post-Human Studios. It is a skill based d100 system where characters are extremely powerful(relative to the things they encounter, starting Eclipse Phase characters might be the most powerful compared to other systems) and death is not permanent.

In the future death has been conquered. Human minds(ego's) are now independent of their bodies(morphs) due to the power of cortical stacks and backups. A cortical stack is a device that exists in most morphs that stores the morphs mind. If the morph is destroyed, the cortical stack store's the ego that was in that morph and been inserted into another morph. If your cortical stack is destroyed, you can be restored from backup, a previous version of you that is stored on a server somewhere. You can also create a copy of yourself, a fork, for whatever purpose you want.

Ten years ago Earth was devastated during an event called the Fall. Humanity had spread throughout the solar system when a few prototype military AI's called the TITANS are activated on Earth. They begin creeping through every computer system on Earth before attacking Humanity for reasons unknown. The difference between a TITAN and a normal AI is that TITANS are seed AI's, intelligence's that have such a capacity for internal improvement that human minds can barely comprehend their power, let alone interact with them without going mad. They create terrible and horrific warmachines and viruses, including the Exsurgent Virus, a virus that can infect through many different vectors and has many different forms(it is a digital, biological, nano, auditory, visual, olfactory, etc... virus at the same time and can infect computers and humans and whatever else it wants) and begin uploading human minds for some reason. Humanity reacts by evacuating Earth and during the chaos several things happen. The TITANS barely strike out to the other place's in the solar system(the moon gets hit a little, and there is a zone on Mars that is no fly on pain of Cosmic Horror Death Monster) and a ring of mysterious hunter-killer satellites appear in orbit around Earth that kill anything approaching or leaving Earth. Also 95% of people die(or maybe 99% or 99.9%. I forget. Its a lot).

The major powers left over are as follows:

Autonomist Alliance: Also known as the Scumswarms, the Autonomists believe that humanity has evolved past the point where they need laws or money or government and aside from that have very little aside in common with each other aside from a love of freedom. They don't like the Planetary Consortium, Jovians, or most governments in general. They do like the Titanian Commonwealth.

Jovians: The Jovians are by far the most conservative and anti-technological faction in all of Transhuman space. Most of their citizens do not have cortical stacks or even modified bodies. They are also by far the most militant faction, having the largest and most well armed space fleet and the largest and most well armed army. They also have the Space Pope with his Space Church. They are also notoriously corrupt and somewhat hypocritical(high ranking military and government officials have advanced morphs and cortical stacks).

Planetary Consortium: Technically they are only the major government on Mars, but they also have a large amount of influence over Venus, Luna, and some parts of the Asteroid Belt. They are the most corrupt government(or not) as it is outright controlled by the Hypercorps, massive super-mega corporations that have private armies and space fleets and finance most of the Consortium's activities.

Titanian Commonwealth: Space Sweden. The Titanian Commonwealth embraces transhumanity and pushes research forward almost haphazardly. It also has a fairly rules light government, with one of their strictest laws being not only mandatory voting, but mandatory discussion about the laws and policies of the government. The most advanced faction and also the faction most likely to make the second coming of the TITANS.

Some other stuff that is kinda relevant.

Gatecrashing: Shortly after the TITANS quieted down on Earth and the fall ended, the Pandora Gates appeared. These Gates teleport you to other planets in other solar systems. Most people assume the TITANS built them and the reason they aren't eating the remnants of transhumanity is because they left the solar system to do more important things.

Uplifts: Transhumanity has figured out how to "uplift" primal animals to sentient intelligence levels, including such things as octopi, birds, pigs, squid, whales, etc... They are considered the property of the corporation that built them in the Planetary Consortium, are shoot on sight in the Jovian areas, and are given rights by most other people.

Space Whales: They don't exist so don't ask about them. No really, they don't exist and are not going to be a part of this campaign unless it involves hunting down and killing all of them. Because no game need Space Whales that live in the Corona of the Sun and feed of its ambient solar energy. Ever. For any reason.

There is of course other stuff(Firewall, the ETI, etc...) but its all secret information that the player characters don't know.

Let's meet the players. Currently there are 3. One of the odd things to note about this game(and why I'm going to probably end up writing 2 different character entries for each player), is that it was originally going to be a one shot so the players were all playing pre-gens I did for that game. They then decided they wanted an EP campaign and I said sure(and luckily had enough time between the first and second session to make up a plot). In any case, their characters are going to change between session 1 and session 2.

E:

E is the only other person who had played Eclipse Phase(He'd run a... 12 or 13 session campaign of it that broke apart) and is a big fan of Altered Carbon and its sequels. E also leans toward the roleplaying side of things, or perhaps more appropriately away from mechanics.

E is playing the Titanian Agent pregen I created which is the social character of the group with mostly social skills and related. His back story has him evacuating from Earth during the fall before he went to Titan to become a spy. Something happened to him during the Fall that he doesn't know about(Edited memories). E's new character will be posted(if it changes) when session 2 happens. E's character is kinda the party leader, mainly because he is the only on attached to a faction(Titanian Commonwealth Intelligence).

OracleofSilence:

OracleofSilence is one of the two who had not played Eclipse Phase but had read the system before and picks up mechanics fairly quickly anyway.

OracleofSilence is playing the Psionic Hacker/Mechanic of the group, Eli Tobin. While he has weapons skill and some useful academic (notably Astrophysics. Remember that), his character shines when playing with the boxes of magic light and thinking up crazy plans. He also sculpts creepy/strange statues. Notably his Psi is only level 1, which just means his mind can do things that shouldn't be possible, but he cannot effect other people's minds.

Slartibartfast:

Slartibartfast is our final player who had never read nor even heard of Eclipse Phase Before. Slartibartfast probably has the broadest experience with roleplaying games out of all of us and always plays entertaining characters.

Slartibartfast is playing the Sniper Octopus, Tanis, the gun toting death machine character. He has a few other skills(sneaking and lying) and has 10 Moxie(lets you cheat a little with die rolls). The backstory of his character is that he's an escaped weapon from a Hypercorp(currently Cognite). He of course has no memory of this(Yay Editted Memories). He likes shooting things up. One of his motivations is Epic Kills.

Finally, in addition to going through what happened each session, I'm also going to be writing down what I learned about running games and running Eclipse Phase specifically at the end of each session. I'm also probably going to split them up into multiple parts because writing down 4-6 hours of stuff into one post is probably too much.

Next Session: Tuesday, October 15th

Sessions:
1: The Jovian Job(E, OracleofSilence, Slartibartfast)
Session 1.1: Not Shady Characters doing Not Shady Things (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=2)
Session 1.2: The Priest and the Holy Water (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=7)
Session 1.3: The Assault on the Castle (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=10)

2: We Are Bad People(OracleofSilence, Slartibartfast)
Session 2.1: The Job Interview (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=17)
Session 2.2: We are Bad People (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=18)
Session 2.3: I'm an Octopus! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=20)

3: Project Sherman
Session 3.1: Please Stop Having Ideas (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=22)
Session 3.2: Whoops! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301101&postcount=23)

Zavoniki
2013-09-02, 02:46 AM
The player's all started out in various places in the solar system when they receive the following message:

Totally not Shady Message:
Greetings. I am sending you this message because I want you for a very specific high paying job. It is a high risk job where you and a few other individuals I have selected will steal something for me. I will pay you quite a bit of money for its delivery. If you accept, farcast to the following address [Insert Address Here]. A full briefing will be there waiting for you.

Obviously, being player characters, they farcast to the location. Their they meet a fork of someone calling themselves Bolivar who explains the job. Bolivar wants them to steal a file from the most secure place in the Solar System, the Castle, the center for all the domestic intelligence that is gathered by the Jovians. He tells them the file he wants them to grab is about something he only has a name for, Project Sherman. The only other thing Bolivar tells them about the file is that it somehow involves an attack on Titan. E's character immediately accepts the job. Bolivar then mentions he will pay them 10 million credits each, and that any other files they grab can be turned into a large amount of @-rep, m-rep, and g-rep. Possibly even c-rep. I think I mentioned 200 rep or so as an average amount of rep, assuming they get a couple dozen files. That got R and J into the job pretty easily. 10 million credits alone is enough to retire for life. With the rep bonus that means a character does not need to work another day or really do much of anything for the rest of their infinite life.

Bolivar then explained the facilities available. They were in an Asteroid that was on a course for Ganymede. This meant they could somewhat adjust its course, they had access to a fusion reactor(read exploding asteroid), and fabbers. Anything they had blueprints of(and because they were pregens they had quite a few) they could make, and make a lot of(they made several hundred Synth morphs for example and armed them all with Plasma Rifles). Finally Bolivar had a small egocasting facility on Ganymede that was not monitored by the Jovians that they could farcast to and sleeve into splicers in order to gather intelligence about the Castle and get more blueprints.

The players spend a little bit thinking about what they want to fab but realize that they need more info and farcast to Ganymede. We run through the Alienation and Integration tests and they all pass(I think R got a -10 for a day or something). They then make WIL*4 tests because they realize that these bodies don't have cortical stacks. R fails and loses 1 Lucidity. One of Bolivar's agents approaches them and explains the situation. They have civilians ID's which don't mean much to Jovians. In order to move around they would need citizens ID's, which requires either hacking at a Jovian database somewhere, or several years of military service. The players choose the hacking. The first thing they do is that E gets a weapon(a Laser Pulsar). They then locate a database facility and E and R distract the guards with lying. They then knockout the lab techy inside, steal his Railgun Pistol, and J hacks his way into the database. The Jovian counter hackers consistently roll badly(pretty much for this entire session Jovian Info-War operatives cannot roll under a 90(well they rolled an 89 once... and I think an 88(crit failure))). The players easily get their ID's(way to easily. But that's how the dice fell. In general I rolled badly this session).

Having their ID's the players then go out infoscouting. E hits up bars and other areas with soldiers in them while R covers from inside the Bar and J is outside/nearby if they need a hacker but is otherwise back at their casting facility prepping for if they need to go deeper into the Jovian hyper-security. They learn a little more about the Castle, namely that the outside is patrolled by people, and that its composed of two sections. One of those, the outer ring, has nothing of value. It is a lot of footage of Jovian citizens going about their lives, but nothing valuable or incriminating. Those are all stored in the Inner Ring. In addition they learn that its nearly impossible to get up to the Castle from Ganymede. One shuttle makes the trip every day and it requires a complex system of passwords and background checks to board. I wrote this up so that if the players wanted to infiltrate it from Ganymede it was possible, but would require a lot of prep work.

Then E goes and interrogates a priest... and things happen.

Things I learned: You need to give the players more guidance than I did. I thought that would be a problem here, so I tried to compensate for this. I thought I had with a clear first goal(get a citizen ID) and then several other goals(Find our information on the Castle, get Blueprints). It didn't really work. Also a small error we did later in this session, is that you can't hack Jovian cameras, you have to use Hardware[Electronics] because the Jovians are so paranoid their cameras are not hackable because its a hardline and all the information is moved by person if it can't move by direct wire.

In advice for running Eclipse Phase, try to introduce your players to stuff they can do one at a time. In this session I first had players resleeve, then they used fabbers(and forks). That covers most of the strange things in Eclipse Phase that sci-fi doesn't necessarily cover. Also for Jovian campaigns, remember that there are three parts to Jovian society. The super-militarized citizen area that follows the rules and shoots the Transhumans in the face. You have the elite upper crust spies, generals, and politicians who have probably have more heavily modified morphs than the average Autonomist and Scum even if those mods are things like Reflex Boosters and Neurachem and Bioweave Armor. Maybe even an implanted Railgun Pistol. And then you have the Criminal/Autonomist element that wants things to be better. For an Orwellian society its surprisingly... nice I guess is the word. For all the death and destruction they want to bring, and all their paranoia, the one thing about the Jovians is that they mean well even if their methods are... extreme.

Finally some advice for players. First off your characters do not start with 5,000 credits(for characters made from Transhuman this is 2 CP from your free stuff unless one of your Packages gives you credits.). You have 3,750 and your morph has Medichines and you have Tactical Network software. Tac-Net is super PC hivemind. It lets you talk to people endlessly and smell through other people's noses(and see through their eyes and hear through their ears). And this all occurs extremely quickly(speed of Space Cybertronics). Medichines, for the low price of 250 credits, lets your morph ignore a wound, and slowly heals you over time. Compare this to the Pain Tolerance ego trait, which only lets you ignore a wound, and is 10 CP. Its probably the best gear in any of the books in terms of price to power. Just buy it. If you are going to load up on gear, see if you can load up on blueprints instead. While more expensive, it lets you print out new gear when you inevitably lose your guns and morph and/or farcast away.

Also the GM is not the god of his or her game. The dice are.

Delta
2013-09-02, 03:41 AM
Nice :) Always good to see more Eclipse Phase, wanted to run it for years now but never got around to it.

I'd love to read something about how well the standard rule system works, it always felt a bit bothersome and clunky to me after reading it.

Zavoniki
2013-09-02, 03:55 AM
Nice :) Always good to see more Eclipse Phase, wanted to run it for years now but never got around to it.

I'd love to read something about how well the standard rule system works, it always felt a bit bothersome and clunky to me after reading it.

The rules themselves aren't actually very clunky. Its a simple d100 roll where you are trying to get as close as you, without going over, to the d100 roll. If you hit a multiple of 11(11, 22, 33, etc... or 100(which is actually 00) its a critical. If its over your skill, its a crit failure, if its under, a crit success. That may sound complicated, but it ends up being easy in play.

All of Eclipse Phase's complexity comes from its gear or from the fact that your body is gear. I'm at the point that I can write up an Eclipse Phase Ego(character with no gear) in 20 minutes from scratch. To finish the character requires probably another 1 1/2 to 2 hours just figuring out what gear the character should have. I'll write a more detailed description of how to deal with gear when we get to the players attack on the Castle. The fact that moving from one body to another can lower most of your skills by 5 - 10 is... a bit awkward, or increase it by that much. The base EP character sheet is good about this(they have a morph/gear area for skill bonus), but it is something that is unique about the system. There is also a whole lot of traps you can fall into regarding gear.

Basically using the gear from the Eclipse Phase books, characters can do whatever they want. As a GM, you need to be prepared to deal with that. It's a very high power game.

Lord Raziere
2013-09-02, 04:14 AM
….and the gear in question can be made from any or almost any nanofabber. great.

Transhuman helps with the character creation process, I use the packages system instead of the normal one, and of course it includes various gear packages to help simplify the process. as well having 100 cp to spend on makes it easier to pick things out.

mostly because Aaaah, Big Numbers. it may actually be easy, but its the big numbers thing that makes it seem like a lot of number crunching that my brain instinctively avoids for some reason

Delta
2013-09-02, 04:54 AM
The rules themselves aren't actually very clunky.

I admit, clunky maybe wasn't the best word to use, but I can't think of a better one, either, the system just didn't feel exciting to me (which I guess sounds pretty stupid as well, whatever ;) ). Just looking forward to see how everything worked out for you, and maybe it can motivate me to finally give it a shot myself.

Zavoniki
2013-09-04, 02:42 AM
So part 2 of the first session the party goes after some priests(and steals water).

After getting some basic info from the bar, and then starting a bar fight, E and R go back to base and spend some time networking with the criminal underworld. They learn about a corrupt priest and go to visit the church. They easily spot the criminal gunmen waiting outside but also notice that they aren't stopping people going in to worship. E and R go inside, while J waits outside keeping watch. R keeps watch inside the chapel as E goes into confession. The priest asks E how he has sinned. E tells him that he plots against the Jovian Republic. The priest asks why a Jovian citizen would do such a thing. E tells him he's a Titanian Spy and that if the priest makes a noise he will kill him. After a series of successful Intimidation rolls the priest breaks easily and begs for his life. E quizzes him about the Castle, the Jovian Republic, and the Church. He doesn't seem happy when he hears that the Church is helping people(I understand this is from Altered Carbon where the Church is one of the antagonist organizations, which is not true in EP. While the are corrupt, it is still by far the best part of the Jovians), but they do get another lead. Apparently there is a priest in Liberty City that is addicted to Comfort. The group decides that perhaps they can pressure him for information.

They move toward the church. Now that they are inside Liberty City they have to worry about Jovian security cameras. A quick Infosec check fixes that(This should have been Hardware[Electronics], but it had been too long since I'd read that part of Rimward. Didn't end up mattering as J's character has very high both Infosec and Hardware[Electronics]). They assume the same pattern as before, with J outside, R inside the Church, and E going to confession. The church is empty and R immediately goes to the holy water to splash in it, and spills most of it on the floor. He still splashes around. E meanwhile goes through the same basic pattern with the new priest. This time however, instead of confessing to being a Titanian Spy, he says something else(I don't remember what) that is a lie. Or tries too. A failed Willpower test later and he realizes he can't seem to lie. He and the priest verbally spar a bit more, before the priest finally becomes tired of the games and attacks, throwing a punch at E. Combat begins with the priest demonstrating abilities beyond what they expected(combat armor and increased Speed). E fires a few laser's pulses at the priest and the R blows its head off with a full auto burst. Being PC's they loot the room and take the priests cortical stack(a surprise all by itself) and E remembers the Willpower tests for lying he had to make. He starts searching through the ruined Confession Booth(the priest had punched it, lasers had gone through it, and a few railgun rounds had perforated it) to find a small metallic cylinder. They take that as well.

They find a few things, mainly a Plasma Rifle and a small encrypted data chip. R borrows the Plasma Rifle and J to go rob a store of all its water(a surprisingly valuable commodity). It turns out that Jovians are just as easily scared by Plasma Rifles from the shadows as anyone else is. They return to base and R dumps all the water in a tub and splashes around. It makes him feel less like a Splicer and more like an Octopus. I really wish I had a recording of the sounds that were made to try and imitate a man splashing around in a tub who is actually an octopus trying to be more like an octopus. Hopefully that sentence gives you an idea. J tries his hand at breaking into the data chip and crit fails his roll, causing it to self destruct. He also examines the cylinder and confirms the groups suspicions that it is a TITAN artifact. The group then returns to a bar and plants MRDR in the drink of one the patrons. A bar fight ensues. E and R knock out a Jovian soldier and interrogate him about the Castle, but learn nothing of interest, and so just leave him there, claiming that they were from the Republic of Antares(something that had started earlier with the priest but I honestly don't remember how). The group then went to plan their attack on the Castle.

General Things I learned:

Just because you plan for something doesn't mean it will happen. The priest had a pile of blueprints and himself was going to be a source of information on the Castle, but it didn't end up working out that way. In general I needed more plot hooks on Ganymede than I had. The players didn't really have a direction to go in after the priest, which was entirely my fault. If that had been the whole session, it would have been a failure. Luckily there was something else for them to do, the main goal, but the idea was for them to do side quests and collect rewards till they felt ready to attack the Castle, with a time limit of 60 days on that.

Making a Character in Eclipse Phase(long):

One of the things I hear a lot about Eclipse Phase that is partially true is how hard it is to make a character. That's not true. A lot of the difficulty comes from there appearing to be so many parts to manage(morph, ego, aptitudes, gear), when in reality it comes down to two parts. You need to manage what your Ego has, and what your Morph has. This means you get to split character creation into two parts, which greatly simplifies it. Finally Transhuman recently came out and it has a wonderful Package system for creating characters that makes it much simpler and easier so I do suggest checking that out. The only confusing part I found was that they don't make it clear what the skill numbers in packages are. They are not your rating in the skill, they are the amount of CP that package gives you towards the skill. Remember that skills start at the skills aptitude rating and then go up by 1 CP per level until level 60. For 61-80, its 2 CP per level. CP cannot raise a skill above 80. The rest of this is going to be written assuming you are using the baseline, 1000 point character creation schematic.

The first thing you are going to build is your Ego. Don't worry about credits, gear, morph, rep, or pretty much anything other than Aptitudes and Skills for now, as you can do Traits at the end. First you should have an idea of what character you would like to play. Then you go through Background and Faction and set up your Aptitudes(using however many Free Points you wish). If you want to play a Psi Character, you should spend the points on the Psi trait now. Then spend the required points on skills(400 on Active, 300 on Knowledge). You can then take the remaining 300 points and round our your Ego on skills you missed, Traits, and Moxie. Save between 30 and 100 points for Morph and Gear. Then you are done. Write it down. Breathe a sigh of relief. Now spend your CP on the Morph you want and convert the rest of it into credits and finish your character. I would suggest against buying gear that you don't need that isn't implanted into your morph, and even then would suggest against it. Your gonna lose your first body eventually and if you sunk 100 or even 200 CP into it, that's gonna hurt. Less is More.

Example Character:

I'm gonna go through an example character here so that you have something to follow along with. Let's make a Gunbunny Mercenary character who is only out looking for his next paycheck. . The first part of building an Ego(to me at least) is to choose your characters Background and Faction. This also helps build your characters identity because it tells you where they have come from, and what they are doing right now. Let's make him a Fall Evacuee, a rather depressing background considering everyone he knows is probably dead(for real). Ohh and they may have been mindraped. This gives him + 10 Pilot[Groundcraft], + 10 Networking[Field], and(most importantly) +1 Moxie. As a disadvantage however you start with half credits. Not to big of a deal actually. When choosing a Background I tend to go with what gives you the skills that character would want the most. This tends to give you a background that would fit that character. If you don't have a solid grasp on what they would want, Fall Evacuee and Re-Instantiated are good options, because the extra Moxie is always nice. You could also look in Transhuman, which has a lot of extra stuff. Remember that Background and Faction and Faction bonuses are applied before you spend any points on skills, so they don't let you raise those skills above 80, they just naturally start highter. Now he or she needs a Faction. Unlike with Backgrounds I would choose a Faction you want to play, because Factions have a lot of advantages and disadvantages within the setting. For example, while Jovian seems to be a good background for our Mercenary(weapon skill bonuses and as a Mercenary he would be resleeving a lot making the disadvantage almost non-existent), you would be hard pressed to find a Jovian mercenary. Most Jovians spend their time in the military and most hypercorps and other agencies would not hire a Jovian merc, assuming they were a spy. Instead let's go with Ultimate, a good faction to pick if your not sure what Faction you want. Ultimate's are a group of people who seek to push Transhumanity farther and push themselves to the brink of what they are capable of. They also tend to be loners and not interact with one another that much. Each Ultimate's goal is to become the best at his job. Ultimate Mercenary companies are also a common occurrence throughout the Solar System so it fits the character concept. Ultimate gives you +10 to two skills of your choice and +20 to a Networking[Field] skill.

So after Background and faction we have the following:
Background: Fall Evacuee(+10 Pilot[Groundcraft], +10 Networking[Field], + 1 Moxie, Half Credits)
Faction: Ultimate(+10 to two skills of your choice, +20 to a Networking[Field] skill)

If you are using the Transhuman package system, these two fields will be filled in depending on the packages you choose.

Next we determine aptitudes. They are: Cognition, which is how smart and intelligent your character is, Coordination, how good your character's hand-eye coordination is(this is the stat most weapon skills are based on), Intuition, how creative and quick thinking your character is, Reflexes, how agile and dexterous your character is(this is the dodge bullets stat), Savy, which is how socially astute and charismatic your character is, Somatics, which is the hardest stat to understand(I only kind of get what it is. As best I can understand it is a combination of Strength and Endurance from DnD and other D20 systems.), and finally Willpower, which is how resistant to mental trauma your character is. They all start at 15 and in general you don't really want any to be above 20 or 25. This is because most Morphs have an Aptitude Maximum of 30, which means any Aptitudes above that maximum are reduced to 30, and give +5 to some stat, or even +10. You can shift your starting stats around by reducing a stat by 5 and increasing another by 5 and can do this as many times as you want. I suggest keeping your Willpower at at least 15 if your GM likes horror.

Let's do Gunbunny's stats.

COG: 15
COO: 15
INT: 15
REF: 15
SAV: 15
SOM: 15
WIL: 15

Gunbunny doesn't need high COG or SAV, so let's reduce those by 5 and increase COO and REF by 5. In addition let's make SOM 20 by reducing SAV to 5. Gunbunny shouldn't need to talk too much. We might later spend free points increasing SOM or maybe REG, but probably not, as 20 should be high enough. Gunbunny's new stats:

COG: 10
COO: 20
INT: 15
REF: 20
SAV: 5
SOM: 20
WIL: 15

Now is when I would spend any of the 300 free points you have on stat increases if you are going to. Its quite expensive(10 points per level increase and you want to be moving stats up and down in levels of 5, so that's 50 points). For Gunbunny, we are happy with his stats so lets move on to skills.

You have 400 points in Active skills you need to spend. Active skills are the ones that are not Academics, Art, Interest, Language, Profession. As a combat character he is going to want at least one weapon skill, probably 2, and Fray. In addition, as a general rule, I like giving all characters I make decent Fray and Perception. Because he is an Ultimate he gets too pick 2 free skills to increase by 10. Let's make those Beam Weapons and Kinetic Weapons. Let's give him Beam and Kinetic Weapons at 80, as those are to 2 most common types, then Fray at 80 and Perception at 60(right below the 2 points per level cut off). This ends up costing:

Beam Weapons starts at 20(COO)+10, so 30 points to 60 then 40 points to 80 is 70.
Kinetic weapons is the same as Beam Weapons(70)
Fray starts at 20(REF) is 40 points to 60 then 40 points to 80 is 80.
Perception starts at 15(INT) and so costs 45 points to raise to 60. This gives us: 70+70+80+45=265. 400-285 is 135 points left to spend. The other Active Skills I would look at for a combat character are Unarmed Combat, Demolitions, Seeker Weapons, Spray Weapons, Blades, and Throwing Weapons. Characters with spare points in general should look at picking up Free Fall and Freerunning for when they need to parkour. We can almost gurantee that Gunbunny will need to subdue people so lets give him Unarmed Combat at 60 and hope that that is enough. As SOM is 20 that's only 40 points. This leaves 95 points. Demolitions is a COG skill so we might leave that to another party member. However Throwing Weapons is what grenades use and is a COO skill. Let's raise that to 60 also, reducing us to 55 points. Let's split the remaining 30 25 between Free Fall and Freerunning(as failing a Freerunning check tends to be less lethal). This makes Free Fall REF + 30 or 50 and Freerunning SOM + 25 or 45. We didn't put anything into Pilot Groundcraft but should still mark it down. In addition we have two floating +10's to Networking[Field]. Networking is SAV based, so we should put these both in the same area and get 25. This depends on how we want to flavor the character. We could do Networking[Criminals] for the Criminal Mercenary or Networking[Hypercorp] for the Corporate heavy hitter. Let's go with Networking[Hypercorp] because you can more easily persuade Criminals with big guns that you can giant mega-corporations. This gives us the following set of skills:

Beam Weapons 80
Fray 80
Free Fall 50
Freerunning 45
Kinetic Weapons 80
Networking[Hypercorps] 25
Perception 60
Pilot[Groundcraft] 30
Throwing Weapons 60
Unarmed Combat 60

70+80+30+25+70+0+45+0+40+40 = 400

Now we get the 300 points of Knowledge Skills. Knowledge skills are what rounds out your character and represent what he knows and what he's studied. They can also be very useful. Generally you never roll them until you really need too(like so, make an Interes[TITANs] roll to know that the swirling screen is a basilisk hack, or make an Academics[Astrophysics] role to know where Titan is right now relative to Ganymede). Another thing to note is that every character gets a Native Language equal to 70+their INT score. While it might seem like there are not many that would be useful to a Gunbunny, there are three right off the bat that I would look it, all Profession skills. They are, Profession[Squad Tactics] which represents how well your character understand small scale infantry tactics, Profession[Military Ops] which represents how well your character understand military procedures and larger scale tactics and strategy and Profession[Security Ops], which represents how well your character knows how manned security is set up. There is a separate skill, Profession[Security Procedures] for how digital security and cameras are set up. In general if a Profession skill is not in the book and you want, ask your GM. They may either know where the skill actually is(for example Security Procedures is badly named) or may let you add it in. It might also be too specific or too general. For now lets give Gunbunny Squad Tactics and Security Ops at 60, to represent his mercenary experiences. Profession is COG based so that costs us 50 points each. With the remaining 200 let's round out the character. As an Ultimate he would want to strive to be the best Soldier/Mercenary he could be, so let's look into some Academics that represent that. We'll give him Academics[Military History] which is an Academics branch that doesn't exist but easily could. We'll also give him that at 60(I tend to put skills at either 60, 70 or 80. You don't need to). That's another 50, leaving us with 150 points. Let's look at some Interests now. What does this character like. The difference between an Interest and Academics, is that an Interest's tend to be things that aren't taught. We want a roleplaying excuse to make quips and quote movies. So lets give him another custom Interest, Old Earth Movies. Let's make this 80. Interests are another COG skill, so its 50 points to 60 and another 40 to make it 80. That's 90 points. That leaves us 60 points. Let's spread that between two languages and give our Gunbunny Native Language[English]. Lets give him say... Russian and Japanese and throw 30 points in each. Languages are Int based so that gives us 85 in English, and 45 in Russian and Japanese. Collecting all these skills up we have:

Academics[Military History] 60
Interest[Old Earth Movies] 80
Language[Japanese] 45
Language[Russian] 45
Native Language[English] 85
Profession[Security Ops] 60
Profession[Squad Tactics] 60

Before we spend the 300 free points, let's recap the character currently:

Name: Gunnbunny McMovieQuotes
Background: Fall Evacuee
Faction: Ultimate

COG: 10
COO: 20
INT: 15
REF: 20
SAV: 5
SOM: 20
WIL: 15

Active Skills:
Beam Weapons 80
Fray 80
Free Fall 50
Freerunning 45
Kinetic Weapons 80
Networking[Hypercorps] 25
Perception 60
Pilot[Groundcraft] 30
Throwing Weapons 60
Unarmed Combat 60

Knowledge Skills:
Academics[Military History] 60
Interest[Old Earth Movies] 80
Language[Japanese] 45
Language[Russian] 45
Native Language[English] 85
Profession[Security Ops] 60
Profession[Squad Tactics] 60

Your 300 free points can be spent on anything. The first thing I would do is put points into any skills you think need to be better. I think our merc needs Freefall and Freerunning to be at 60, which would require 25 of our 300 points. Let's do that. Then we'll look at Traits. If you don't have a good idea for what traits you want, and have spare points, I'd suggest picking up Pain Tolerance and Trauma Tolerance(from Transhuman). These traits make your character much more resilient to psychological and physical damage. Let's grab both at level 2 for 40 points, putting us at 235. Remember you can only have 50 points of Positive traits and 50 points of Negative traits. We won't buy any negatives yet because we aren't hurting for points. Because we have so many, let's also burn the massive amount of points needed to boost us to 10 Moxie, which is the most any character can have. Moxie is amazingly useful and makes your character's life much easier. It costs 15 points per point, and every character starts with 1 Moxie. We start with 2 because we are a Fall evacuee so we only need to buy 8 levels. 8*15=120. 235-120 leaves us with 115 points. Let's spend some of those on getting Seeker and Spray Weapons to 60 so that our character can use almost any weapon he comes across. Those are both COO so start at 20 and cost 40 points to improve to 60. So subtracting 80 from 115 leaves us with 35 to spend on Morph and gear. Let's put all this together to get the finished Ego:

Name: Gunnbunny McMovieQuotes
Background: Fall Evacuee
Faction: Ultimate

COG: 10
COO: 20
INT: 15
REF: 20
SAV: 5
SOM: 20
WIL: 15

Moxie: 10

Ego Traits:
Pain Tolerance(Level 2)
Trauma Tolerance(Level 2)

Active Skills:
Beam Weapons 80
Fray 80
Free Fall 60
Freerunning 60
Kinetic Weapons 80
Networking[Hypercorps] 25
Perception 60
Pilot[Groundcraft] 30
Seeker Weapons 60
Spray Weapons 60
Throwing Weapons 60
Unarmed Combat 60

Knowledge Skills:
Academics[Military History] 60
Interest[Old Earth Movies] 80
Language[Japanese] 45
Language[Russian] 45
Native Language[English] 85
Profession[Security Ops] 60
Profession[Squad Tactics] 60

That is a complete Ego, and we still have 35 point to spend. Let's make the Morph. For the Morph we want something cheap that has decent durability but doesn't need to have super high stats. Lets give him a Synth Morph, the basic robot body. That costs 30 points and then we can convert the rest to credits. That gives us 7,500 credits to equip this character. He already has some armor, but we probably want him to be at 10/10 at least. He also needs a decent gun and some ammo. The first 2 things we are buying are Medichines(250 credits) and Tac-Net(1000 Credits). With Medichines(and being a Synthetic Morph and the 2 levels of Pain Tolerance) our character can ignore the negative modifiers for up to 4 wounds, which, considering a character should have 0 durability at 5 wounds, means he can keep fighting till he dies. Tac-Net is the PC hivemind plus a lot. You get to make Perception checks through other people's sensors and fire some weapons at targets they can see. It's pretty sweet. We now have 6,250 Credits. Let's look at armor. Because we are Synth we can get a Light Combat Shell for 1000 credits, improving our armor to 14/12. That should be enough for a starting character, especially with Fray of 80. Let's look at Weapons. We can't get a good Beam Weapon and still afford the power pack so let's settle for something Kinetic. We also can't get a Railgun for the same reason, but a normal Automatic Rifle should be enough and only costs us 1000 credits. We now have 4,250 credits remaining. We only really need ammo, and with normal ammo costing 50 credits for 100 rounds, let's buy 500 rounds. That leave's us 4,000 credits which we should keep as spending money. You can go overboard with gear, but generally you want to buy it on an as needed basis. The only things you can't really buy as needed are additions to the morph, but at this point all we really want is more armor(which we can buy if we need it) or Speed Boosters(which are expensive). There is a lot of gear, but one of the things about Eclipse Phase is that you will eventually have to leave your gear behind. Being a Synth gives us +5 to SOM and +5 to another attribute. Let's make it COO so we shoot better. Morph bonuses are applied AFTER everything else and can boost starting skill scores above 80. The final thing we need to allocate is Rep. All characters start with 50 rep to spread amongst the various rep networks. Let's put 30 in C-Rep, the rep that governs Hyper-Corps and 20 into U-Rep(introduced in Rimward) the rep that governs the Ultimates. Our Final Character then Becomes:

Name: Gunnbunny McMovieQuotes
Background: Fall Evacuee
Faction: Ultimate

COG: 10
COO: 20
INT: 15
REF: 20(+5 Morph)
SAV: 5
SOM: 20(+5 Morph)
WIL: 15

Moxie: 10

Ego Traits:
Pain Tolerance(Level 2)
Trauma Tolerance(Level 2)

Morph: Synth
Speed: 1
Initiative: 7(INT/5+REF/5)
Armor: 14/12

Durability: 40
WT: 8(Durability/5)
DR: 80(Durability*1.5 for Biomorphs and Durability*2 for Synth Morphs)

Lucidity: 30(Willpower*2)
TT: 6
IR: 60

Credits: 4,000
Rep:
30 C-Rep
20 U-Rep

Active Skills:
Beam Weapons 80(+5 Morph)
Fray 80
Free Fall 60
Freerunning 60(+5 Morph)
Kinetic Weapons 80(+5 Morph)
Networking[Hypercorps] 25
Perception 60
Pilot[Groundcraft] 30
Seeker Weapons 60(+5 Morph)
Spray Weapons 60(+5 Morph)
Throwing Weapons 60(+5 Morph)
Unarmed Combat 60(+5 Morph)

Knowledge Skills:
Academics[Military History] 60
Interest[Old Earth Movies] 80
Language[Japanese] 45
Language[Russian] 45
Native Language[English] 85
Profession[Security Ops] 60
Profession[Squad Tactics] 60

Implanted Gear and Morph Traits:
Medichines
Light Combat Armor[14/12]

Gear:
500 rounds of Normal Ammo

Weapons:
Automatic Rifle[AP: -6 2d10+6 Firing Modes: SA, BF, FA]

This character will also have a muse(every character has a muse, you don't need to buy one. Buying another muse costs 5,000 credits):
COG: 10
COO: 10
INT: 20
REF: 10
SAV: 10
SOM: 10
WIL: 10

Skills:
Academics[Psychology] 60
Hardware[Electronics] 30
Infosec 30
Interface 40
Profession[Accounting] 40
Programming 20
Perception 30
Research 30

3 Knowledge Skills at 30

This character will also need 3 motivations. Those however highly depend on player and campaign. For this character I would suggest: +Big Scores(he likes making lots of money), +Self-Improvement(The basic Ultimate Goal) and probably a - on something more campaign related.


Ok so that ended up being longer than I intended. In general here are the steps I follow for making a character:

1: Concept
2: Faction and Background
3: Spend Active Skills Points
4: Spend Knowledge Skill Points
5: Spend Free Points
EGO DONE
6: Buy Morph
7: Buy Gear
MORPH DONE

1-5 put together takes about as much time for me as 7 does. But maybe that's just me.

Some other general advice:
Characters should have Fray, Perception, a Weapon Skill, and decent Willpower.

If you have spare points, look at Free Fall, Freerunning, Pain Tolerance, and Trauma Tolerance.

Every morph should have Medichines and every character should have Tac-Net.

Remember that software goes with you. If you want to keep your cool gun, buy it as a blue print(one cost category higher). Then if you switch bodies you can try and find a fabber and print out your gun. In fact you could print one out for each party member. To encourage this I would suggest that GM's house rule that buying the blueprint of something also means that Characters start with a copy of the item(I didn't do this but probably should have). Sometimes this doesn't make sense(J started with the Blueprint for Synth morphs).

Don't buy too much gear at the start, spend your points on Skills and Ego traits. You may suffer a bit in the beginning but just remember to loot the corpses of the dead and you should be fine.

If you need a quick boost in combat, buy some MRDR or Kick(Or both). They are cheap and increase your speed by 1(which effectively doubles(Or triples if you take both) your actions per round). Of course be prepared to dump those morphs if they become addicted.

Remember that your Morph is piece of gear and treat it like a piece of gear. It can be lost, destroyed, given away, borrowed, stolen, and sold just like anything else. Your Ego is what you want to protect, not your Morph.

Slartibartfast
2013-09-04, 05:41 PM
For those of you who forgot, back in the first half when we got our fake IDs E asked J to hack in a new organization, the Republic of Antares. J labeled a bunch of locations and people as being connected to this fictitious rebel group, but when we raided the church E left a Republic of Antares mark. The thing E tried to lie to the priest was that he was an agent of the Republic of Antares, and some ridiculous add-on about how the Republic was going to leverage its resources to screw the priest over or something.

So in other words, E just invented a new secret society and gave it enough clout to be believable. Don't worry, wait until the next part. It gets worse.

For those of you wondering, I'm R. Hi guys!

EDIT: (see post below) J is right, E lied about being non-transhuman. Which is really dumb. The only known non-transhumans in the universe is basically the Titans that ate Earth. And they're a nanobot swarm.

OracleofSilence
2013-09-04, 05:44 PM
And I'm J. The thing E actually tried to lie about was being non-Transhuman. Which is really dumb.

Edit: We never planted MRDR in the drink, although we did plan to, E convinced one of the marines that some other marine was hitting on his girlfriend.

Also, it was Slartibartfast that stole the water.

Zavoniki
2013-09-11, 09:04 PM
So I got busy(and bitten by a dog) but there is going to be a new session this Saturday. So to finish this up before then I present to you the conclusion to the first session,

How to Annihilate a Jovian Star Base in 4 Easy Steps:

Step 0: The Supplies

So we return to our group as they gather their supplies. A lot of credits and g-Rep(Criminal Rep) is burned off as they acquire the blueprints for several items. They end up only really needing 4 items aside from themselves. Those items are:


Blueprints for Synth Morphs
Blueprints for Plasma Rifles
Blueprints for Hardsuits
Blueprints for Quantum Communicators


We screwed up the rules for Quantum Communicators a little bit(the players did not have a q-bit reservoir so their communicators shouldn't have worked. It's not a big deal as they were not needed for a key part of the plan.). As to what they are going to do with these items, well, Slartibartfast forked himself several hundred times(Beta forks, though this should have been Gamma or even Delta. Again it didn't matter) and they were inserted into the Synth Morphs, who were then given Plasma Rifles and Hardsuits. The players suited up with Hardsuits and Plasma Rifles in addition to their weapons. This was their gear.

In addition to their gear, they also knew some things about the Castle. They knew that their was a field of deadly hunter-killer satellites armed with powerful anti-starship weaponry that would annihilate any unauthorized space object that approaches the Castle. The Castle itself has an armored hull capable of resisting anti-matter missile strikes(well maybe one strike) but it is not monitored electronically. Instead manned teams must manually walk the exterior hull. The structure is two spinning rings connected by transportation tubes. The Outer Ring contains little that interests the players so its the Inner Ring they need to get to.

Step 1: Distraction

The players plan involves jumping from their Asteroid to the Castle a few minutes after Slartibartfast's forks make the jump. The forks assault the Outer Ring en masse, searching for airlocks and burning through to attack and slaughter. Meanwhile the players make their way long the Outer Hull and one of the transit tubes toward the Inner Ring. Right before they attack the Inner Ring they signal the fork they left on the asteroid to blow up the Fusion Reactor with a Plasma Rifle. The exploding shards of asteroid and hordes of psychotic robots armed with superheated death are the distraction the players need to attack their target. Thus comes step 2.

Step 2: Find your Objective

With their distraction in place our team of intrepid heroes quickly clamber across the hull toward the Inner Ring. Right as they reach it the climb inside a transit tube and blast the guards to death in a single combat round. The guards would have shot back and sounded the alarm, but were dead. OracleofSilence hacked the door open and they were into the much more heavily fortified Inner Ring. The players moved along the corridors and burst into a room that contained a computer, a technician, and some guards. A few seconds later it contained the party, a computer, and some dead bodies. Eclipse Phase combat can be quite lethal when people are making Armor Defeating called shots with Plasma Rifles and Sniper Railguns. OracleofSilence hacked into the database to learn that the file they wanted was contained in the Command Center at the Center of the Inner Ring. They quickly moved along the corridors to the Command Center and using sensors and Tactical Network, launched a surprise attack at the eight or so guards in the Command Center. Unlike the other armed soldiers the encountered, a few of them survived to miss their shots at the party before being gunned down. The party then quickly searched through the cabinets until they found the piece of paper they were looking for. It had a simple note, stating that a Jovian Special Forces soldier had gone rogue after serving on Project Sherman and was suspected to be hiding near Liberty City. They each snapped a picture of it with their minds before moving onto Step 3.

Step 3: Evidence Erasure

Ideally you would then like to remove all evidence that you were here, but the party didn't have that option, so they settled for the next best thing, making it impossible to know what they stole. They took pictured of many other files before using their Plasma Rifles to light every file in the Command Center on fire. And some of the metal cabinets. This was one of the shorter steps and lead to Step 4 very rapidly.

Step 4: Escape

The party welded all the doors into the Command Center aside from the one they used shut using a combination of Hardware[Electronics] and Applied Plasma Rifle and then performed a time honored adventuring ritual many people know as Run Away Swiftly. They dodged gunfire as they sped down the hallways of the Castle, desperately hoping to get outside as gunfire whizzed past them. Finally they got outside and I got to ask a question that I had asked during the planning process that was never answered, how do you get off the Castle. They decide to farcast and E provides them with the location of a Titanian Intelligence server on Titan. I ask for an Academics[Astrophysics] roll at -60 to know the location of Titan from Ganymede right now. So of course OracleofSilence rolls an 02. OracleofSilence and E jump off into space and shoot a Plasma Rifle into their chests before farcasting away while Slartibartfast sends his morph on a suicidal attack into the pursuing Jovians before he farcasts away.

And something else happens but I realized that I forgot a scene between the escape and what happens so I'm going to end it here.

What I learned:
Sometimes players get lucky. I was a bit worried after running this because I thought that I had made the scenario to easy but that really wasn't it. What happened was that the players rolled decently and used Moxie when it was appropriate and I rarely rolled anything below 80. That is going to make pretty much any scenario a walk in the park. One of them also succeeded on a 10% roll, which may have been a bit lucky. I also learned how lethal Eclipse Phase combat is and I am looking forward to inflicting that on players. If you are going to run or play in Eclipse Phase I highly suggest carefully reading the combat section. It is a very lethal system and you want to know how to maximize your chances of survival/killing your players Morphs.


Dealing with Gear and Technology in Eclipse Phase:

It can be hard to wrap your brain around the Technology in Eclipse Phase. It is quite advanced. As a basic note, you can't die, and your mind can do anything a smartphone could do today, like take video, picture, or connect the Internet. Or store documents. Or play games. That's a baseline Flat morph with Mesh Inserts and a Cortical Stack. That's not counting Basic Biomods, being not a Flat, or any of the stranger technologies and gear out there. Gear is to me, the hardest part of any character. What do I want this morph to be modified with and what does it have with it?

Every character should have Tactical Network software(PC-HiveMind++ edition) and Medichines. These are basic tools that make your life easier(everyone can make Perception checks through Joe's eyes) or are ludicrously cheap for what they give you(250 credits for Ignoring 1 Wound and being able to rebuild your body from a near death state). Aside from that I would just say that you can find a piece of Gear that does whatever you want. It's really easy to overbuy and over-acquire gear. I would try not to because at some point your are going to lose your morph and then you will be sad. I mentioned this in the making a character in Eclipse Phase post I made earlier but it is worth mentioning again. Don't overspend on gear. You want to get enough Gear to do the mission/adventure/whatever and no more. If you always want to have access to something, get a blueprint of it.

All this gear can make it difficult for a GM to write out an adventure or even think of one without getting blindsided. For example there is gear or combinations of gear that lets you do the following: See through walls, see electrical currents, dissolve bodies to the point that they cannot be detected, prevent DNA testing from being done with biological samples from an area, make 2km of nano-fiber rope, survive the vacuum of space for several years, live in the corona of the sun(#SPACEWHALES), have multiple Ego's in your body, prevent someone other than you from using your gun, and talk instantly over any distance. That's just some of the stuff gear can do. As a GM you just need to be aware. I would read through each books Gear section so you know what can be done and what each piece of gear does. I would also try to avoid writing challenges with solutions in mind. Consider a classic scenario, the bank heist. I would write up the bank and its general security arrangements without thinking about how the players are going to defeat them, or if you are going to think like that, put in measures to stop them. Eclipse Phase is a high power game, like Exalted or higher level/tier DnD. Your player's have access to lots of resources and skilled characters so in general if you are deciding between making something harder or easier you should air on the side of harder.

I tried doing that with the Castle heist, each time throwing more and more soldiers at the players. I didn't even scrape them. If I were to run that scenario again I would probably triple the number of enemies at each encounter and increase the variety of enemies. Part of this was hampered by the enemies being Jovian, as you can really only throw unaltered Flats or Splicers at your players, not anything with Speed 4, 100 Fray, and Armor of 50+, not to mention 3 or 4 weapons. There were also no digital security measure because the Jovians are paranoid. Another big factor here was the fact that if someone takes 2 wounds from a single attack they have to make a SOM*3 check, with the wound penalties, or fall unconscious. Unconscious people can be shot in the head very easily.

tl;dr Gear is hard to deal with, both as a player and as a GM and they isn't an easy solution. The problem is that each piece of Gear tends to be fairly specific in what it does, so there isn't a general rule for dealing with it. The solution is to read all the Gear entries, which isn't really a great solution. Eclipse Phase is a high power game and if your are going to play it you need to be prepared for that both as a player and as a GM.

Delta
2013-09-12, 05:27 AM
Great read, as always. Makes me want to run a EP game even more.



We screwed up the rules for Quantum Communicators a little bit(the players did not have a q-bit reservoir so their communicators shouldn't have worked. It's not a big deal as they were not needed for a key part of the plan.).


Since I don't have access to my books atm, would it be too much to ask you to run down how Quantum Communicators work in the game? I just remember that they rubbed me a very wrong way when first reading about them and thinking that I'd probably ban them from the setting if I ever run it, but I don't remember the details.

Lorsa
2013-09-12, 09:29 AM
There is both the quantum encrypted communication that you can read about on wikipedia (which is basically just extremely good encyption) and quantum entangled communication. You know, the usual sci-fi stuff where you use quantum entanglement of particles to send information. Unlike some other sci-fi things (such as ME), every piece of information sent takes up one particle-pair (a qubit) and leaves them unable to be used again so eventually you'll run out of those. Entangling particles isn't trivial either, which means it's quite expensive to buy q-bits so it used almost exclusively for gatecrashing.

It's a bit magi-tech, Eclipse Phase has it's share of those but at the same time manages to be more down-to-earth than many other sci-fi settings.

EDIT: Buying a low amount of qubits is actually only high cost.

Delta
2013-09-12, 10:25 AM
Yeah that's what I remembered, personally I didn't like the quantum entanglement "instant" communication because either relativity or causality have to go out the door once you allow that, most settings simply ignore relativity in that regard but EP looked like one of the few that tried to actually stay compatible with what we know of our universe. The Pandora gates are just as much of a headache on an objective scale, but the problems that arise there can be avoided rather easily compared to "instant" communication over more local distances.

So I think I'd rather stick with lightspeed limited information transfer if I ever get around to running EP, but that's really not that huge of an issue.

Slartibartfast
2013-09-13, 01:43 AM
For those of you wondering, those NPCs we mowed through were actually significantly dangerous if they ever got a shot off and hit. Most of them had Missile Launchers, and the rest primarily plasma rifles. Scary stuff.

We spent a lot of that mission wishing we had Demolitions so we could rig plasma rifles and missile launchers to explode, but didn't want to risk blowing ourselves up untrained. Projectile weapons was sorely missed as well, because you can't fire a missile launcher untrained without a chance of killing yourself. Which is why at the end my gamma fork duel-wielded missile launchers in melee to make sure himself and everyone around him was blown to tiny bits. Tanis is very thorough.

And all in all, i am quite pleased with an army of my forks tearing through the side of a star base and running amok.

EDIT: @Delta: Instant communication is actually possible using means like quantum entanglement. It's just rather awkward to do. In the hyperfuture, this is apparently merely awkward instead of infeasible.

Causality is in no way infringed upon by this method. Quantum entangled particles simply change to match the state of their fellow particles. Each particle has multiple states that can be synchronized, so you can do quite a bit better than a binary stream of information through entanglement.

Time is more or less irrelevant to the issue. It's simply a game of Mirror that happens regardless of intervening space.

It also depends on what you mean by "instant" over a "local space". For most definitions of "local space", the speed of light is sufficiently instant.

Delta
2013-09-13, 02:33 AM
EDIT: @Delta: Instant communication is actually possible using means like quantum entanglement. It's just rather awkward to do. In the hyperfuture, this is apparently merely awkward instead of infeasible.

Causality is in no way infringed upon by this method. Quantum entangled particles simply change to match the state of their fellow particles. Each particle has multiple states that can be synchronized, so you can do quite a bit better than a binary stream of information through entanglement.

Time is more or less irrelevant to the issue. It's simply a game of Mirror that happens regardless of intervening space.

It also depends on what you mean by "instant" over a "local space". For most definitions of "local space", the speed of light is sufficiently instant.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Quantum teleportation does indeed work "instantly", but it's impossible to transfer information that way because the state of one of the qubit alone does not carry information, you need more data for that and that data has to be transferred traditionally, so you will still not be able to transfer information faster than light, the big advantage of this method is what Lorsa said, it's that your message cannot be intercepted on its way because part of the message doesn't travel between A and B.

If it did work like that, it would very much violate either relativity or causality, because with relativity, in certain situations I would be able to answer to a message before it has been sent which makes for some awkward situations that I'd like to avoid.

But this is already taking this WAY offtopic, if there's any interest in an FTL discussion I think we should make an own thread for that, I really just wanted to know whether there's "instant" communication in EP because I didn't remember.

The Grue
2013-09-13, 01:51 PM
Gosh I'd love to a chance to play EP...

But until that happens, I'll settle for living vicariously through this campaign journal. :smallbiggrin:

Zavoniki
2013-09-29, 08:30 PM
Well after a LONG LONG wait, session 2 happened and session 3 should happen this Tuesday. The second session... some things happened and the players were bad people.

This session only had Slartibartfast(Tanis) and OracleofSilence(Eli) in it. Without further ado:

Part 1: The Job Interview

The party arrives at Titan and is split up. E goes off somewhere(IE wasn't here this session) and Tanis and Eli find themselves in a server somewhere, existing as infolifes and separated from their muses. Tanis wishes for water and Eli uses his programming skills to attempt to create some. In the process of hacking the server to gain the necessary permissions, he is detected. The person who detected him asks what he's trying to do by grabbing computing power and when Eli explains he's trying to make water, the person relents and lets him have some. One Programming check later and there was some pretty obviously fake water. Tanis was still happy to have something to digitally swim around in.

A short time later a request pops up asking them to move to a different server. It also says that if they don't move over they will be forcibly moved over, with the implied threat of psycho-surgery hanging in the air. They find themselves in an extremely well programmed simulspace environment that is almost indistinguishable from a lush, tropical coral reef. Swimming in the coral reef, aside from digital fish, is a Squid, clearly the digital of avatar of something. Thus begins their interrogation/interview. Interrogview? The squid first explains that they detected explosions and robot attack drones assaulting the Castle, along with media coverage of such an attack. The players have clearly just come from Ganymede, where the Castle is and shown up on a secure and secret server. Eli snarkily comments that where else would they be, that's what secure servers are for.

The squid continues pressing them, trying to get at their reason for attacking the castle, who hired them, etc... The players relent and tell him that they were hired by someone to retrieve a file from the Castle about something called Project Sherman that relates to an attack on Titan. The person promised them 10 million credits each for this information, to which the squid asks if they really believed him. The players said no they did not, but they went with it anyway. The players also send the squid some of the files and evidence they collected from the Castle. The squid eventually tells them that he is impressed and that even though they have interesting and unorthodox methods, to say the least, he would like to hire them on as contractors to the Titanian Commonwealth's intelligence branch. The players accept and receive 50,000 credits and 200 @-Rep for their attacking the Castle and bringing back a lot of incriminating files on the Jovian Republic.

After that they players head to Ceres to meet with their original employer, Bolivar. This happened in the first session, but I felt like it made more narrative sense to put it here, where it chronologically happened. The players showed him the file which stated that James Athens, Jovian black-ops soldier, left his post guarding Project Sherman and ran to Ganymede and Liberty City. All Jovian troops are under orders to arrest him on sight, and if he resists or they are unable to, to kill him. Bolivar is impressed with this information and asks the players if they want their reward now, or if they would like to another job for him first. They agree to do another job. He tells them that he wants them to retrieve James Athens from Ganymede and save him from death by Jovian rifle. He also tells them that he is a deep cover Titanian Spy. E tells him that he is also a Titanian Agent, and that he's never heard of Bolivar. Bolivar just reiterates Deep Cover.

After reequipping themselves and finding new morphs, Tanis and Eli farcast back to Ganymede into some familiar Splicer Morphs in order to find James Athens and stop Project Sherman.

In part 2, the players are bad people.

What I learned:

This part of the session was mostly getting the players into the mission-giving organization. For Eclipse Phase this is generally Firewall but I have a small personal bias against using organizations like Firewall or Delta Green to make players cooperate together. It feels a little to much like you are all in a tavern together and get a quest. I much prefer something to emerge over play. In this case the players got into a situation where the escape route they picked lead right to an organization, in this case the Titanian spy network, which works great as a player mission giver.

I also learned that players are incapable of not being snarky. Or maybe that's just my group. It leads to very entertaining sessions.

Zavoniki
2013-10-02, 08:08 PM
And now we come to the players being bad people.

Part 2: We are Bad People:

The first thing Tanis and Eli do on Ganymede is survey the resources they have available. The have a Railgun Heavy Pistol, a Plasma Rifle, a Titan Cylinder that makes people tell the truth when they are within a certain, small, unknown distance of it, and the Cortical Stack for the priest they murdered last time. They decide that the best course of action, after reviewing my beautiful map of Liberty City(read... badly drawn), was to psycho-surgically torture the priest for information. Eli was in charge of this as he has the Psychosurgery skills. They turned up the time acceleration to 60x and spent some g-Rep to grab a small server to load the priest up as an infolife.

They loaded up the priest and Eli first started prepping for interrogation. He also ignored safety protocols to get a +20 to the roll, and, more importantly, increase the amount of Lucidity damage the Priest takes. He succeeds on the rule and gives the Priest a few traumas. Then, to make Tanis's job easier he decided to apply simple psycho-torture, again with no safety protocols. By the time Tanis get's to the actual interrogation the Priest has 4 traumas and is terrified of the Mesh and digital life forms because he now associates them with having his psyche tortured for weeks on end(despite it being only a few hours in real time).

Tanis easily breaks the nearly insane priest who begins rambling on and on about how he's not a priest he's an ex-Jovian special forces trooper who became a priest after he took a Titan artifact from a site the Jovians were investigating and used it to become an interrogator and get promoted. Eventually he couldn't handle the stress of lying in the presence of the device and retired to become a priest who used the device to help with confessions and was occasionally brought in to contract interrogations. Tanis nods with all knowing octopus in a human body wisdom, and then asks about James Athens.

The priest explains that James Athens is a famous Jovian soldier who has saved the Republic multiple times. He was a patriotic, loyal, skilled hero up until a few days ago when he left his post and a kill/capture on sight order was put out on him for some unknown reason. The priest then begs for his life and starts stammering out that he doesn't know whats going on, please let me go, I'm sorry I'm a bad person, and screaming digitally. Eli performs a final surgery to suppress the priest's memories of the event, which finally puts the priest over his Lucidity score in terms of Stress. I was too lazy to look up what that meant in game terms especially seeing as the priest was not too important of a character. I also forgot to give the priest a name.

The players put the priest back into his Cortical Stack and then go back to their base of operation before searching more for James Athens.

Some things the players thought about and didn't do:


Put the priest in a Splicer Morph tied to a chair.
Put the priest in a Flat Morph.
Put the priest in a Flat Morph with its legs and arms cut off.
Put the priest in a Flat Morph with its arms and legs cut off and then torture him more.


To quote Slartibartfast when I asked him about it later:

oh yeah can't miss that
that's a good one
i still like that plan
might've done it if you could fabricate more morphs
*we
i wasn't about to expend a limited supply of flats yet though\


In conclusion, the PC's are bad people. They had a debate not on whether or not to torture a priest(even if he wasn't exactly a priest), but how to torture a priest.

What I Learned:

Sometimes your players torture priests. I never intended the priest to be a font of information, but I had him written in as ex-special forces so while he doesn't get any specific information about where James Athens is he does know who he is. I'd never planned for this to be how the players got that specific information, but being flexible is important. Also watching your players torture a priest, however horrible it is, is quite entertaining. I guess I too am a bad person.

Slartibartfast
2013-10-02, 08:21 PM
As an octopus, when I suggested we put him in a limbless flat, I used the words "put him in a flat and cut off all his arms". I love when little things like that can make all the difference in the world.

This session was the point where I finally started getting used to Tanis's basic character and personality and I started feeling his backstory (escaped bioweapon) and playing it up. You haven't seen it yet? Don't worry though, that's because it happens in the next section. Yes, this session gets better. We even make callbacks to priest torture!

Zavoniki
2013-10-08, 12:44 AM
Part 3: I'm an Octopus!

Now armed with more knowledge of James Athens than they had before and a blacker sense of morality than before, the part now attempts to find James Athens. They come to a beautiful hand drawn map of Liberty City I made(or... not so pretty) and making their Security Ops and Squad Tactics checks to take the data they have and turn it into a location for James Athens. They learn that there is no way he can be actually in the city, and therefore must be in the tunnels that surround the city. They also learn that the Jovians are sweeping these tunnels and so if they are going to find him they need to move quickly.

Eli comes with a crazy plan to find James Athens. He used Enhanced Creativity and Predictive Boost to create a strange infographic to spread throughout Liberty City that would be make sense to James Athens. He did thus of course by rolling another 02 on a -40(or maybe -60) check. It took the players a little bit to figure out what to do from here. They had(they assumed) one way communication with James Athens. They could send things to him but could not receive them. They took a few minutes to figure out their plan.

With Tanis covering him Eli set a meeting point for meeting James Athens. When he got there all he found was a scrap of paper with the coordinates to a different part of Ganymede, out in the tunnels. The two of them paused for a while as they spent a few minutes thinking up a plan before realizing that they lacked information. So what do they do? Eli goes on overwatch mode and Tanis grabs the Plasma Rifle and Rail Pistol and goes to the location.

Once there he finds a network of maze-like tunnels that are being combed by Jovian soldiers. So of course Tanis walks up to them, tells them that he is Jovian Black Ops sent by the Black Ops priest they tortured. A few awkward deception checks later(and even more lying) and the Jovians believe him and escort him further along the tunnels to more Jovians. It as at this point that Tanis realizes a problem with this plan. Assuming John Athens is here, the Jovians will kill him before he can talk to them. So he devises a cunning, if desperate plan, and orders the soldiers to watch the perimeter while he flushes James Athens out. They leave to do just that and Tanis moves further into the tunnels.

Tanis encounters a metal bunker with a door. He opens the door and encounters an armed Splicer Morph who immediately asks him who is and then... the following exchange occurs. This is written from memory so it may not be exactly right.

Man: Who are you?
Tanis: I'm Tanis! I'm an Octopus!
Man: Uhm... ok... Why are you here?
Tanis: I'm looking for James Athens!
Man: I'm James Athens!
Tanis: I'm here to lead you to safety!
Athens: Where is that?
Tanis: Hurry there are Jovian troops everywhere.
Athens: Really who are you?
Tanis: Tanis. I'm an Octopus!
Athens: You seem really chipper considering the situation!
Tanis: I just tortured a pries! And deceived some guards!
Athens: ... I might be safer with the Jovians.
Tanis: Come with us we're with Titanian Intelligence.
Athens: ... ok... I'm still not sure about this. This place is surrounded.
Tanis: What's in those crates.
(Eli over Tacnet): Explosives.
Athens: Explosives and Weapons
OracleofSilence to the GM: Can I make a check to override Tanis's mouth.
GM: No.
(Eli over Tacnet): Called it! Say called it.
(Tanis over Tacnet): No
Tanis: Excellent.
Athens: I'm scared.
Tanis: I'm an octopus.

Tanis explained the escape plan then. He would scatter the crates around the tunnels and then tell the Jovian soldiers that he found these strange, clearly explosive crates that need to be disarmed very carefully or they will explode and bring the tunnels down on all of them. He gives them complex instructions and sets the crates in such a way that there will be a hole in the perimeter. The Jovians don't follow the instructions very well and a few of the crates detonate. Athens and Tanis escape in the chaos.

Back at base Athens explains why the Jovians are after him and why he defected. James Athens is a decorated Jovian soldier and as a cushy job before retiring he was asked to provide security to a secret Research Lab on Io. Something was off about it and Athens investigated. What he learned was that the Jovians were creating something called Project Sherman that would launch a Nanite Bomb capable of not only igniting the atmosphere of Titan, but jamming any non-quantum comm signals being sent out. It would also eat all Cortical Stacks, Cyberbrains, and other ways of storing Ego's. Clearly TITAN tech, though Athens was unable to find anything aside from the nanotechnology beyond humanities abilities that would suggest it was TITAN tech. Eli is convinced that it is. Athens explains that there were two rooms he was not allowed in, one that had the bomb it and another room. Finally he mentions that the scientists at the facility were oddly dedicated to their work.

The party plus Athens farcasts to Titan where the go about reviewing the intelligence they have gathered. Titanian Intelligence tells them that there next assignment will be an assault on the Io facility with the goal of destroying the bomb. The party will be given any and all resources Titan can provide. They are to do whatever it takes to take out the bomb and ensure it cannot be rebuilt.

What I learned:

The tunnels around James Athen's hiding place were originally intended to be a combat/stealth encounter where the player's cut through a group of Jovians, grab Athens, and then avoid the rest. It did not turn out the way. I guess the big lesson here is adaptability and flowing around your players. They didn't want to run it as a combat encounter so I didn't. Instead it was, you encounter a group of soldiers. Generally I prefer to let the players do something before I call roll for initiative(unless they get surprised or similar) because a lot of the time their one action changes the situation. In this case it was Deception that caused a change in venue.

Also remember that player characters can be a bit... psychotic in person. I had quite a bit of fun roleplaying a hardened Jovian spy who encounters and octopus in a Splicer morph that exclaimed about torturing priests. Somethings they just don't cover in basic training.

Slartibartfast
2013-10-08, 12:52 PM
I actually completely expected that check to fail and everything to devolve into combat. I just recognized that there were gonna be a lot of guards around and that fight might not be too healthy, even for a fairly expendable splicer morph. So I told the most brilliantly ridiculous and unverifiable lie I could. It meant I didn't get any fun with abusing my dual-wielding death slinging, but the hilariousness of abusing the Jovian command structure was well-worth it. And besides, my chat with James was priceless.

Zavoniki
2013-10-14, 12:12 AM
And now session 3 begins and the main plot is almost revealed. And a lot of people are shot multiple times.

Part 1: Please Stop Having Ideas

When we last left our player characters intrepid heroes they had just returned from rescuing James Athens. James Athens has told them that Project Sherman is being built in a small, secret Jovian research lab on Io. Nearby are an Antimatter Accelerator(Particle Accelerator used to produce Antimatter) and a Prison containing many of the Jovian Republics most hated and violent criminals. Unless they want to dig through the earth the only entrance to these places is through a small but heavily fortified landing pad. With this information, and a basic map of the facility, the party begins to plan.

For this mission they are given whatever morph they desire and whatever gear they desire and some fabbers. So Eli sleeves into a very powerful Fury and Tanis into a heavily upgraded Takko(robot Octopus). Their first order of business is figuring out what to do with the fabbers. They quickly spring upon the idea of using the fabbers to arm the prisoners and use them to attack all the Jovians. However they start squabbling when trying to figure out how to ensure the prisoners don't start attacking them and how to farcast off only the political prisoners and not the violent ones. They also firmly establish that they are building drills using Spiral Power the fabbers.

They also investigate the local terrain and at one point debate drilling a path between the secret lab and one of the numerous volcanoes that dot Io. Also in the section of booms they try to figure out a way to rig the Antimatter Accelerator's supply of Antimatter to explode. They don't figure out how to do so without alerting the guards, but they do make it their fail safe plan. They also fab lots and lots of explosives. Because you always need more explosives. Remember this. It's important for later when they need more explosives to blow up a bomb.

Their final plan becomes the following. They will drop themselves and the fabbers onto the planet. After making some cheap bodies and giving them beta forks(actual beta forks as these aren't being sent on a suicide mission) to oversee the fabbers which begin digging down towards the prison and building a farcasting facility capable of punching through the Ionian atmosphere. While this is happening they will infiltrate the secret lab, which is not on the unified Jovian security network, and disable or destroy Project Sherman so that they will not have to worry about the nearly literal ticking time bomb.

After this they will enter into the Prison and overwhelm its guards and security systems, arm the prisoners, and then defend the farcaster until the prisoners they want are farcasted out. While this is happening they will attempt to infiltrate the Antimatter Accelerator so that they can blow up it if things start going badly. Once everyone they need is safe they will destroy the gear(or not depending on how... nice the remaining prisoners are) and set their morphs to explode before farcasting themselves back to Titan. They are joined by James Athens, who they have been told has been illegally and unknowingly forked by Titanian Intelligence and his Fury Morph has a kill-switch that either of them can activate at any time in case this is a trap.

They say no plan survives contact with the enemy. This plan did not survive contact with the party.

What I Learned:

High Credit EP characters.

I'm going to write more here when I am less tired. Come Back Later.

Zavoniki
2013-10-23, 05:58 AM
Part 2: Whoops!

When last we left our heroes, they had just finished planning their assault on Io in order to prevent an attack on Titan. They had no idea what this attack entailed, so in order to prevent what they assumed were giant meat warriors, they came up with a plan. To continue the reference, Tanis's Takko has a maneuver jet. But he doesn't have any swords. Instead both he and Eli are simply covered with guns and rockets. Not close to enough to feel comfortable, but there is a limit to what even a robot octopus and his heavily modified female warrior companion can carry.

They find themselves resleeved in an anti-matter courier that is going to pass Io and are given it, their three morphs, and a few Fabbers to find out what Project Sherman is and destroy it. They have also added the secondary objective of freeing all the deserving prisoners from the prison on Io. They quickly decide to have the courier explode due to engine failure(antimatter is notoriously explodey) and use its explosion to cover them dropping everything on Io's surface. So Tanis uses his gunnery skill to attempt this. There are some minor complications when Tanis fire's James Athens to almost the other side of the planet, Eli off into space, and himself and the fabbers into almost the right place. Eli is able to correct with some use of freefall and a lot 3D maneuvering while James is left to walk a really long way on a planet known for Volcanoes.

Knowing that they might be on a clock and that it will take weeks for James Athens to join them, the party fabs their way into the tunnels connecting the many facilities they want to explore and make their way to the Secret Lab. As they do they plant explosives on the tunnels leading to the Lab, hoping to prevent the attack on Titan. They blow through the door and guards immediately come at them. The guards are moving at Speed 2 and have a single gun each. The party is moving at Speed 4 and is covered with guns. The guards quickly become vapor in the air and the party moves on. They terrify and interrogate a secretary and learn very little about the facility aside from only two people have left it in months, and one of those people was James Athens.

They start exploring the facility and surprisingly find an active mesh, but are hesitant to log on for fear of the exsurgent virus. They find a pair of rooms that are clearly Faraday Cages and try to gain entrance, but are unable to. They mark them for later interest and continue cautiously exploring. Around the next corner they find the rest of the facilities guards, who begin another firefight. They spend their first action taking down the big guy with a rocket launcher and in return Tanis takes a plasma shot to the robo-face, which severely injuries him, though being an enhanced robo-octopus he feels know pain. In return the players launch a massive barrage of rockets, bullets, and some plasma, that vaporizes the remaining guards with little difficulty.

They start exploring the nearby rooms and debate whether or not they should blow doors down with explosives in case there are more guards, or whether they should pick the locks electronically. They open a room and find beds. Lots of beds, and a few personal computing devices. They give it a half hearted search and then move on. The next room they get to they decide to blow the door. Unfortunately for our party that door happened to lead to one of the facilities armories. This particular armory was filled with rocket launchers, high explosives, mines, and things that go BOOM. The room filled with rocket launchers exploded quite spectacularly in a spray of red. I had to draw red all over that section of the map and it was fun.

What I learned:

dealing with high credit characters. Tired. Will fill in later.

Slartibartfast
2013-10-30, 05:35 PM
I suddenly believe that SnK motivated this entire campaign. Zav just wanted to say "attack on titan" as many times as possible. That is why we are playing this game.

OracleofSilence
2013-10-31, 01:30 PM
Actually, you stumbled upon a plot that Zavoniki and I were thinking about. Except the entire thing was even more of a giant series of puns.