jackgraham's Blog

Eclipse Phase writer and sometime online marketing helper monkey Jack Graham (that's me) will run one awesome session of EP this Thursday, 7/22/2010, at Gamma Ray Games in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.

It'll be at 6:30 pm. Please ping the game store on their Facebook page to RSVP.



Sorry for the short notice on this. I've been doing the Clarion West writer's workshop, and gaming, like sleeping, eating, and shaving my beard, has taken a back seat to writing sci-fi.

We'll be playing Doctrine, the scenario that I wrote for Gen Con this year. Secret Club Date! Sneak Preview! Holy Cats, Octomorph!

Hope to see some of y'all there.

UPDATE: I had to make some schedule changes. Real quick: 2 hour demo is now on Saturday; 4 hour game is on Sunday (same time slots).

Below is a list of Eclipse Phase games scheduled for PAX East. PAX East will be happening at Hynes Convention Center in downtown Boston from March 26-28 (this weekend!). Badges are mostly sold out, but if you've got one, come play Eclipse Phase! I'll be running two brand spankin' new scenarios. The longer event, "El Destino Verde" incorporates some of the background on Mars I wrote for Sunward.

PAX doesn't guarantee table space unless you're running a tournament or paying them for it (weird, right?), so I'm going to be running this in the free play area. If you have a jeejah, I'll be using the EP twitter account to provide more precise location details once I know where I'll be. I'll also be working as a PAX Enforcer all weekend in the tabletop area, so stop by and say hello!

Eclipse Phase Games:

Saturday, March 27
10am-12pm	Hypnagogia	Demo (2 hours)
Sunday, March 28
10pm-2pm	El Destino Verde	Full slot (4 hours)

Demo: I'll be running a new two hour demo scenario, "Hypnogogia."

El Destino Verde: Martian workers with genetic faults in their morphs have been turning to traditional Chinese medicine for a quick fix. But what's the secret ingredient in the special sauce?

Jerry G. on our Facebook page asked, "Any thoughts on how you would do a Borganism PC?" I really ought to be working on the opening fiction for Hotfix right now; thank science for this enticing distraction! So, to complement the GMing posts I've been doing, my first post on being a player...

First off, definitions: a "borganism," according to Wiktionary, is, "An organization of autonomous organisms that exhibit collectivism: individual "units" that have merged to yield a unified construct. Such an amalgam may possess a collective consciousness, arguably an emergent phenomenon of social networking." (I had to look it up, although I had a feeling from the morpheme "borg" what it meant).

Sure, why not? Eclipse Phase is made to allow this type of experimental character. Much of what you need is already in the Core rules, and you can make up the difference with a little help from a cooperative GM. Now if you want to play a Borgy borganism that goes around assimilating people, you're going to need some house rules. But that'd be pretty antisocial for a PC, so let's assume you want to make a colony mind that's friendly toward those outside of it.

The possibility of emergent consciousness fascinates me. Hell, if you believe Marvin Minsky, we're all in effect colony minds made of many agents, and consciousness is just our analog to a CPU scheduler. If you look at it this way, the challenge has more to do with role-play than with the rules. You should lay out for yourself how your colony mind arose in the first place, what its constituent pieces want, and how strong various "factions" within it are relative to others.

Do the mental agents who take an aggressive tack toward the world outside their society of mind hold sway, or is there a faction of mental agents who just want to get along? Do agents that control making long-term plans tend to win out, or is your organism more one that reacts quickly to its environment? Really what you're doing is making a whole bunch of characters, making them share the same body, and then deciding who wins out in certain situations.

As far as mental traits/augmentations, several jump out as useful for representing this type of character: Multiple Personalities, Multitasking, and Oracles. Multiple Personalities lets you give different factions of agents within the character's mind their own skill sets. Multitasking reflects well the multi-threaded nature of the character's consciousness. Oracles is written in the rules as a subservient nano-colony that filters your experiences and reports back, but in a character like this, it could have a will of its own. There are a number of other mental traits and augmentations in the book that could apply if you simply keep their game mechanics effects but change the explanation of how they work under the hood to reflect a colony mind.

But I have a feeling what you're really after are some ideas for physically representing the character's mental state, and here you've already got three good options in Core rules (and again more, if your GM is on board):

• Swarmanoid. The most obvious morph choice. In a character based on an emergent social consciousness, you can presume that rather than a single ego having been downloaded into the swarm, this particular swarm had been  programmed to operate autonomously (perhaps under the control of a number of pre-sentient AIs) and then, through complex interactions of the various agents, emerged to consciousness on its own.
• Flexbot. Similarly, a flexbot doesn't have to have been created in one piece. It could have started out as part of a swarm of autonomous bots that emerged and joined together to make a colony.
• Multiple pod morphs. This is a high-CP option, probably most appropriate as a long-term goal for a singularity seeker or similar character. Basically, take a bunch of pods (and/or synths) and equip them with ghostrider modules and puppet socks (which I think all pods come with stock anyway). Install a non-sentient AI in their cyberbrains to control autonomic functions. Then have a body-hopping infomorph that lives in one of the ghostrider modules and uses jamming/teleoperation on the rest of the bodies to control the group. That would be the game mechanics explanation; you're of course free to say that the consciousness is spread over the bodies and contributed to in varying degrees by the controlling AIs.

Hope that helps! Happy hiveminding!

Here's the second in a series on running Eclipse Phase. Advice here is based on our experience running our own EP campaigns and shouldn't be taken as a canonical interpretation of the rules. Hopefully it will be helpful to GMs feeling their way around situations that the rules don't yet cover in detail.

Someone on the forums asked how one identifies TITAN technology. How difficult you want to make it to identify and work with TITAN technology will depend a lot upon your players. Some TITAN tech might look quite innocuous to someone who doesn't know what they're dealing with -- part of the reason it can be so dangerous.

Here are some ideas to try on, though:

• Appearance. Can be weirdly designed, mindbendingly difficult just to look at (a la the Pandora gates), or other wise alien-looking.
• Composition. Unusual chemical composition, advanced materials, novel crystalline structures, etc. can clue science-oriented characters in to the fact that they're dealing with something beyond H+ technology.
• Freaky When Activated. Some TITAN tech doesn't look like much until it's active and releasing swarms of femtobots or liquid metal hunter-killers.
• Hostile Device. Most devices are self-documenting to some extent and have a device AI to which you can talk. Ones that don't might be trouble.
• Infectious. The tech has some ability to infect unfortunate victims with a strain of the Exsurgent virus.
• Infosec Attacks. Some TITAN tech will actively make Infosec attacks on nearby devices -- including PCs' headware! Jamming them with Interfacing or isolating them behind RF shields can contain this problem, but if a device starts attacking people over the Mesh, odds are it isn't friendly.
• Not in Databases. Read the description of Repair Spray, a very common item. Computing power is so vast in EP that for a can of repair spray to maintain a massive database of device schematics used to repair common objects is no problem. Unique/novel devices don't show up in any database, making them suspect.
• Possession is 9/10ths. If the freakish exsurgent monster your sentinels just took out has something on them that looked like a cross between a Mi-Go brain cylinder and an IR-spectrum glow stick, it warrants suspicion.
• Psychically Active. Some TITAN techs are nothing to write home about physically but reveal their secrets to characters with sleights like Grok. One of the reasons we included psychic PCs in the game was because their powers provide another channel for GMs to give PCs info about the bizarre alien & TITAN techs they might come across.

Check out the skill sets on some of the characters like the Xenoarcheologist who have both async powers and lots of science skills for an idea of how PCs might go about analyzing and identifying TITAN tech.

Dealing with TITAN tech is a challenge for your players. If you have a group that wants to shoot at stuff and not think too hard, make it easy (although in this case, I'm not sure why they're playing EP, as it doesn't reward gun bunnies much). If you've got a group that will enjoy performing nanodetector scans and chemical analysis from a distance while a servitor bot remotely prods at the thing for them, trying to unlock its secrets, make it harder and dish out clues slowly based on successful Academics, Interest, and/or Profession tests.

Finally, the game gives you many opportunities to throw out some red herrings. Could be the potentially dangerous object they're investigating isn't TITAN tech at all, but Factor tech, or a relic of the Iktomi. Keep the players guessing; paranoia is an important part of the game.