Blogs

One of the choices we made when choosing the skills available in Eclipse Phase was to combine running/sprinting with gymnastics into a general Freerunning skill. Our idea was that since many people in EP are sleeved in bodies that are optimized for health and athleticism, there would be a more widespread adoption of athletic activities. When you also take into account that most people live in habitats that are essentially tight and complex urban environments, often having or spun for gravity well-below Earth standard, then the ability to move quickly and athletically through these areas in a style similar to parkour would be commonplace. So Freerunning is the skill you use to run, jump, flip, and otherwise move quickly. (There is a seperate Free Fall skill for microgravity environs.)  

With that in mind, I was pleased to find this promotional Nike video that shows what a transhuman practicing freerunning might look like:

The Runner -Exploit yourself- from BLR_VFX on Vimeo.

• Wormholes and quantum dynamics
• Flexible polymer fiber cameras
• Massive tidal forces in Europa's oceans?
• 21st century lynch mobs
• The cultural impact of exowombs

These and other links can be found at http://delicious.com/infomorph

There's a new post over at the Catalyst Game Labs blog about the upcoming release of Eclipse Phase. It includes two new art previews. The first piece is by Bruno Werneck, who did many of the chapter opener illustrations in the EP core rulebook. This particular image shows a group of shady types breaking in somewhere, complete with a hacker and armed synthmorph. The second piece is by Paul Davies and depicts the interior of a microgravity beehive habitat -- note the winged biomorph, the uplifted neo-avian, and the robotic shells, illustrating a few different ways of getting around in zero-g. 

In anticipation of the core rulebook's release, we've updated and expanded our Creative Commons licensing information.

As previously noted, the Eclipse Phase core rulebook clocks in at a hefty 400 pages. That's a lot of book! Given the intricacies of the game, we felt it was necessary to include a solid chunk of text to the setting as well as details and rules for key technologies. Here's a short breakdown on what the book covers, and how many pages are devoted to each subject:

• Overview: Setting Synopsis, Playing an RPG, Terminology -- 10 pages
• Detailed Setting -- 80 pages   (This breaks down into:)
•      History -- 6 pages
•      Society and Culture -- 32 pages
•      Factions -- 16 pages
•      System Gazeteer --  26 pages
• Game Mechanics -- 16 pages
• Character Creation -- 26 pages
• Sample Characters -- 16 pages
• Skills -- 16 pages
• Action and Combat -- 30 pages
• Mind Hacks -- 18 pages
• The Mesh: computer systems, online research, hacking, AIs, etc. -- 32 pages
• Accelerated Future: various technologies, such as resleeving, nanofabrication, reputation systems, etc -- 28 pages
• Gear -- 56 pages
• GM Info -- 40 pages

Rounding the book out are some tables, a character sheet, references, etc.

The book is over page count from its original specs, but we feel that almost everything in the book is important to the setting and playing the game. It can be hard to imagine or predict how some of the technologies we address will impact human society, for example, so we took a shot at covering that. It can also be a challenge for people to grasp settings that don't have a lot of familiarity, and since Earth is wrecked and off-limits in EP, defining new locales was a critical point. I think we succeeded in reaching our goal of giving players and GMs enough information that they can dive right into the game universe once reading that background.

As I mentioned on twitter, The Eclipse Phase core book was officially uploaded to the printers last night. It's a relief to finally get it off!

The policy at CatLabs is not to announce a street release date until we have absolutely confirmed it, so we can't say at this time what the actual release date will be. We're printing it overseas, which generally takes a couple of months, so please be patient.

The PDF will be available before the book, though I don't have a set date for that yet either. It will be at least a couple of weeks. It's a race to see which we get out first -- the PDF or the freebie Quick Start Rules.

In the meantime, I have a couple of other exciting EP announcements in the works, so stay tuned! Also, we'll be posting more art from the book and eventually an actual PDF preview of the core book. We're also working on the GM Screen and the first couple of sourcebooks, Sunward: the Inner System and Gatecrashing (which deals with exoplanets and the Pandora Gates).

• Posthuman sex as an x-risk?
• Coding bacteria with secret messages
• Designing post-humanity: everyware in the far future
• Growing an interstellar probe
• Tagging tech for guided weapons

These and other links can be found at http://delicious.com/infomorph

• Rotating space elevators
• 10 nifty robot concepts
• Sneaky robot guards
• Using pulsars as an interstellar GPS
• Plastic that grows on trees

These and other links can be found at http://delicious.com/infomorph

• How biotech will drive our evolution ...
• ... and how enhancement will destroy the real you
• Humanity Plus (formerly the World Transhumanist association) launches its new website 
• Hovercraft + ATV = Hoverpod
• A possible path to femtotechnology

These and other links can be found at http://delicious.com/infomorph

Humanity Plus magazine asks several sci-writers, AI researchers, and other tech-thinkers if a Terminator-style scenario is possible. The results range from interesting to humorous.

Well, if someone built a global computer security system and intentionally made it highly intelligent, autonomous and creative... so as to allow it to better combat complex security threats (and ever-more-intelligent computer worms and viruses) ... well, perhaps so. It's not beyond the pale. A narrow-AI computer security system wouldn't spontaneously develop general intelligence, initiative and so forth.... but an AGI computer security system might... and the boundary between narrow AI and AGI may grow blurry in the next decades...

That's from Ben Goertzel's response, and he essentially nails the idea we had with the TITANs in Eclipse Phase.

In a similar vein, take a look at this site: Preventing Skynet.