Eclipse Phase General (also Self-promotion)

I don't understand why not explicitly mentioning Speed in the announcement leads people to assume that they won't do anything to address it.

Given how they've been mentioning in reference to 2e that it incorporates a bunch of stuff from Transhuman into the base game in the FAQ, it seems to me that it's totally possible that they could change Speed in 2e in recognition of that problem.

I'd at least wait until the actual playtest begins and we can see what has actually changed before wholly writing it off.
 
I just got into Eclipse Phase, and I was wondering how this recent new Kickstarter affects things? Like, I feel like I should back it a bit, hell, maybe even at the $100 level due to finding myself with that bit of spending money, but...I am unsure.

Anyone want to help a noob? Like, chances are I will probably do so, but I would like to have a discussion about it before making a big purchase. Because I am neurotic that way.

PS
And does anyone have any RP tips for playing a FBI Profiler as seen through Criminal Minds? Like, I have been skimming the thread, and a lot of the nonsense exhuman philosophies seems like something good for RP. Like, what sort of issues the weakness of the writing can be exploited for that sort of experience?
 
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You don't need to wait for 2nd Ed to play Eclipse Phase. The world is already set and won't be (much) changed in 2nd Ed, and if you play this game it's mostly for the setting.

EDIT: Think about using tools for character creation, it will be less of an headache.
 
So, I have a question here. A what if scenario.

An ISOT situation occurs, and Wh30k's Jupiter replaces EP's Jupiter (and vice versa). The focus here though is on the Eclipse Phase side of things. Wh30K's Jupiter is a forge-world focused on building spaceships. Spaceships with FTL travel at that. It's cultures are also very different from those of EP's Jupiter. The WH tech works, and the EP's Immaterium is very calm.

How are the rest of the groups in the EP Solar System going to react here with this situation and the changes that have just happened to it?
 

As far as I know Jupiter itself is pretty much the same in both universes. I guess you mean the Jovian system and all its moon? Proceeding on that assumption.

It's cultures are also very different from those of EP's Jupiter.
Well, someone just replaced EP's Jovian Junta with a quasi-fascist, militaristic, highly religious state so...that's actually business as usual for Eclipse Phase. The difference is that now they're not bottled up.

How are the rest of the groups in the EP Solar System going to react here with this situation and the changes that have just happened to it?

Uh, panic. The number of entities that can do that shit that Eclipse Phase knows about basically boil down to "the TITANs" so in the short term - panic. You should probably explain what 30k's Jupiter actually has and who is actually in charge there since that seems relevant.

But like in general the important thing is FTL. Effective FTL completely changes the political and military landscape of Eclipse Phase. Everyone wants their hands on it as soon as possible. Everything depends entirely on whether or not they successfully manage to do so.
 
As far as I know Jupiter itself is pretty much the same in both universes. I guess you mean the Jovian system and all its moon? Proceeding on that assumption.


Well, someone just replaced EP's Jovian Junta with a quasi-fascist, militaristic, highly religious state so...that's actually business as usual for Eclipse Phase. The difference is that now they're not bottled up.



Uh, panic. The number of entities that can do that shit that Eclipse Phase knows about basically boil down to "the TITANs" so in the short term - panic. You should probably explain what 30k's Jupiter actually has and who is actually in charge there since that seems relevant.

But like in general the important thing is FTL. Effective FTL completely changes the political and military landscape of Eclipse Phase. Everyone wants their hands on it as soon as possible. Everything depends entirely on whether or not they successfully manage to do so.
Well, 30K's Jupiter had kicked the alien conquerers who taken the place over out of the system, and the planet had a lot of active habitats and ships and shipyards. It was ruled by the people in charge of those habitats and ships/shipyards. Amusingly, there are probably more humans in those habitats and ships than the rest of the solar system. As this is 30K, there is a LOT of activity, with hundreds of active warships (hundreds due to ships coming in for repair and whatnot, with most of them being the weakest warship class in 30K), thousands of minor fueling/merchant vessels, and tens of thousands of small inter-system capable craft.

I imagine the presence of the AdMech would cause a shitload of problems at first though, at least until details start to leak.

But yeah, the OCP nature of this situation is why I'm asking. That their form of FTL utilizes Psykers and sub-species of humanity is also why I ask, as these individuals cannot be cloned as is done with most humans/transhumans in EP.

I.E. I'm trying to get a baseline for the various groups here beyond "Fuck" and "Burn it with fire!".
 
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But yeah, the OCP nature of this situation is why I'm asking. That their form of FTL utilizes Psykers and sub-species of humanity is also why I ask, as these individuals cannot be cloned as is done with most humans/transhumans in EP.

Says who, exactly? I mean, yes, the Imperium can't clone them - but the Imperium can't backup and restore people. And anyway, I thought that it was only very long range navigation that required psykers to navigate (see also, the Tau, who as far as I know aren't psychic).

Well, 30K's Jupiter had kicked the alien conquerers who taken the place over out of the system, and the planet had a lot of active habitats and ships and shipyards.

You're not giving me a good sense of scale here. Jupiter is big, that could be trillions of people, or just a billion, or whatever. I'm not getting a sense of the amount of habitats or industry we're talking here. Or like...who we're talking about. The AdMech is there but like...is there an effective heirarchy that's in charge? Are the Space Marines who are gonna go try and reconquer earth or whatever? Are we talking pre-Heresy? Post-Heresy? For extra fun, mid-heresy?

Like there's no single big major interactions that I can call out other than waving my arms wildly and saying "FTL exists, this ruins everything for everyone" because there's nothing specific you're saying about 30k Jupiter (just giving EP FTL, no other changes, would cause it to blow up somehow).
 
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Says who, exactly? I mean, yes, the Imperium can't clone them - but the Imperium can't backup and restore people. And anyway, I thought that it was only very long range navigation that required psykers to navigate (see also, the Tau, who as far as I know aren't psychic).

Cloning Psykers tends to result in mutations that require killing said clones as a mercy and a way to prevent warp predators/daemons from popping in and fucking shit up. Even with a calm(er?) Immaterium, AdMech/Imperial history would show that the results of cloning psykers is best responded to by killing anyone insane enough to even try, before then burning the place such things happened at down for good measure. And this response is still the calm and measured reaction here for such situations.

That said, Psykers are likely the easiest group to put into fully artificial bodies without most 'posthuman' antics EP usually has to deal with, as the nature of the Psyker soul makes most of the EP-related post-human behaviors less likely to occur. Not that (most of) the AdMech would be insane enough to try while playing around with Psykers. :shrugs:


You're not giving me a good sense of scale here. Jupiter is big, that could be trillions of people, or just a billion, or whatever. I'm not getting a sense of the amount of habitats or industry we're talking here. Or like...who we're talking about. The AdMech is there but like...is there an effective heirarchy that's in charge? Are the Space Marines who are gonna go try and reconquer earth or whatever? Are we talking pre-Heresy? Post-Heresy? For extra fun, mid-heresy?

Like there's no single big major interactions that I can call out other than waving my arms wildly and saying "FTL exists, this ruins everything for everyone" because there's nothing specific you're saying about 30k Jupiter (just giving EP FTL, no other changes, would cause it to blow up somehow).
Even before the Great Crusade, there were hundreds of billions of individuals (at a minimum) living within the Solar System due to how built up Sol had become (most likely figures were in the single-digit trillions range), and while the great collapse in the Wh30K-verse (before the Emperor started rallying people and getting things rebuilt) did lead to a large chunk of the population dying, the population figures were still in the ranges associated with human hiveworlds. In addition to that, most Imperial ships have population figures in the high-hundreds-of-thousands to millions range per ship, and those tend to be the small ships at that.

So an easy billion individuals is believable as a lowball estimate, and that's not counting the servitors. Numbers are open to being in the ten-to-twenty billion range given all the manufacturing that was taking place on Jupiter due to the easy-radiation-as-a-powersource thing it had going for it, along with the AdMech using human labor everywhere they possibly could.

As for timing, pre-Heresy, before the first Primarch was found.

The big blank atm is 1. most of the factions reactions, 2. how they try and make contact to figure out wtf happened, 3. how they act once they realize something insane just happened and they start getting details regarding 'what', 4. how some of the EP groups try to hinder the new Jovians that somehow are worse than the old-ones, 5. how they try and use this situation to benefit themselves, 6. the newcomers glassing Terra and then terra-forming it, 6. the AdMech remnants wanting Mars in order to rebuild, 7. how the EP factions and newcomers work towards dealing with the issue of food, 8. both sides trying to figure out wtf happened and HOW it happened, and 9. the Void Clans of Jupiter wanting to make use of their ships/shipyards to grab as much power in this situation as they can.
 
This ends in fire, because the 30k guys are going to look at the comparatively tiny stuff EP humans build and be all like "that's cute, but the adults are here now" and then get ganked in their overconfidence by Exsurgent.

Exsurgent is around necron-tier bullshit at my best estimate.
 
he great collapse in the Wh30K-verse (before the Emperor started rallying people and getting things rebuilt) did lead to a large chunk of the population dying, the population figures were still in the ranges associated with human hiveworlds. In addition to that, most Imperial ships have population figures in the high-hundreds-of-thousands to millions range per ship, and those tend to be the small ships at that.
1. Population in Sol System before Great Crusade has to be pretty small - simply due to lack of supply of food. There is no farm-worlds in system. Terra and Holy Mars are deserts. There no mentions of Venus in WH. Jupiter Void Clans has to be self-sufficient, and it not leads to billions of population.
If we talking during Great Crusade, when population probably was imported to fuel war effort, Sol was supported by food import, and if inserted in EP probably has to seize all food production in system, and still be starving.

2. Using Rogue Trader RPG, crews for 40k ships are in 100k range for battlescruisers. 30k has bit more advanced tech, so probably biggest ship of that era has compatible crew.

6. the newcomers glassing Terra and then terra-forming it
You have two 6 points.
While it's not Holy Terra yet, glassing it is an option, but i doubt that Jovians has terraforming tech.

7. how the EP factions and newcomers work towards dealing with the issue of food
Presumably, new leader - most seniour tech-priest, halts majority of operations, puts majority of population on ice one way or another and retools shipyards to produce industrial farms using biomass taken from EP citizens.

9. the Void Clans of Jupiter wanting to make use of their ships/shipyards to grab as much power in this situation as they can.
Well, they have enough ships to put a gun to the head of every settlement, so they can just follow standard procedure of conquering newly discovered human colony
 
Using what delivery system? Sub-light missiles? They way too slow and low-numbered to saturate CIWS and overload Void shields of imperial ships , who engage on somewhat bigger scale.

They're going to take one of the Exsurgent Basilisk Hacks they've developed an immunity to due to antivirals (it is noted that there's a constant arms race between Exsurgent and antivirus designers), one of the ones which causes 'mere' mass suicide or something, and just put it on the side of their habitat. Being more primitive in Eclipse Phase doesn't make you safer, it just makes you less of a target and far more vulnerable when you become one.

And Eclipse Phase has as an underlying theme the idea that people will attempt to weaponize what they don't understand to their own political advantage, often with horrifying terminal effect as things go wrong. "Shit, we just killed the entirety of Jupiter and now there's a huge power vacuum" is the most interesting possible scenario as well, because Eclipse Phase is often better if you can go "crap, we succeeded too well."
 
They're going to take one of the Exsurgent Basilisk Hacks they've developed an immunity to due to antivirals (it is noted that there's a constant arms race between Exsurgent and antivirus designers), one of the ones which causes 'mere' mass suicide or something, and just put it on the side of their habitat. B
It has to bypass servitors manning the auspexes to infect actual crew.
Also, that it's super-early stages of Great Crusade and Cult Mechanicus did not yet lost data that survived Age of Strife, where humanity was fighting Men of Iron and various Chaos-based threats - it's possible that there are some knowlege about basilisk hacks.

But in case if it works, it kills ship that was observing that one habitat. It won't spread, and Cult Mechanicus will figure out problem, even if takes couple of tries.
I doubt that plan to paint such hack on all habitats is feasible.
 
It has to bypass servitors manning the auspexes to infect actual crew.
Also, that it's super-early stages of Great Crusade and Cult Mechanicus did not yet lost data that survived Age of Strife, where humanity was fighting Men of Iron and various Chaos-based threats - it's possible that there are some knowlege about basilisk hacks.

But in case if it works, it kills ship that was observing that one habitat. It won't spread, and Cult Mechanicus will figure out problem, even if takes couple of tries.
I doubt that plan to paint such hack on all habitats is feasible.

The servitors wouldn't even be a speedbump if this were one of the nastier strains, the sort that start out as a visual brainhack that exploits your vision centers, converts into an adaptive computer virus in the cybernetics of a morph/servitor propty hacks the ship's intercom to transmit audio that jacks the audio wetware of the brain and trigers actiual biological virii to spawn in the hearers.

Exsurgent is bullshit like that. It's basically warp mutation nonsense that transmits more virulently and isn't stopped by gellar fields or hexxagramic wards.

If this were a 40K Ordos Malleus facility, I'd say they stop anything short of a full exsurgent TITAN AI with low to acceptable loss at worst.

30k stuff however, does not have that level of resistence/preparedness for chaos bullshit, IIRC.
 
Trying to wrap my head around rep based economy.

It is basically a (or several stacked/concurrent) credit economies with rep determined by your (perceived) willingness to repay value invested in you. Value is loosely defined rather than being specced to any specific currency.

Like with credit scores, the best way to raise rep is to make steady use of it and repay in a timely manner.
The best way to quickly raise rep is to find a bunch of folks with decent to mid high rep who are willing to trust you enough to vouch for you and lend them their credit (at the risk of tanking their scores if you don't repay sufficiently in time).

... so potential storyline bait where some org or other runs a rep farm (think mmorpg gold farming) and the Pcs have to subtly investigate and or sabotage and or take over it over.
 
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Rep economies are one of the few non-mechanics that I dislike. It's basically a gift economy swaddled in words like cornucopia machine to make it work. It has its place, sure, but I don't think it should be out and out better than the Martian system.

Bias as I am, the transitional economy seems to be the one that makes the most sense, yet it's portrayed as utterly temporary, even in the name. Yay.

Of course, the dominance of rep economies is mainly due to the anarchist fellating EP does at times.
 
What I literally can not grok is how rep based economy can be said to be anything but hypercapitalist free market (admittedly having abandoned currency for arbitrary and fluid definitions of value).
 
Trying to wrap my head around rep based economy.
I imagine it works like this: due to cornucopia machines only real thing you spend is your time.
Say, for example, you are a citezen of Sufficient Velocity habitat.
And Acatalepsy PMs you one day and asks to do something related to your expertise. You chek his profile and see that he long-ter member, has lots of likes and actively participates in administative functions. You decide that he's trustworthy enoug and you daon't have anything better to do today and help him. In return he gives you 20 likes.
Now, if you want to ask somebodu else do something for you they will also see that you have likes from member of ruling committee and therefore also trustworthy.
But if it will be some yesterday registered noob you far less likely to spend your time on him.
 
Bias as I am, the transitional economy seems to be the one that makes the most sense, yet it's portrayed as utterly temporary, even in the name. Yay.

I think I remember a line from one of the corebooks that the transitional economies don't consider themselves as such. It's an outer system term being imposed on them.

Or maybe I'm imagining that it's been years since I've read through some bits of some of the books.
 
Transitional economies make logical sense to me, I have to admit, if only because there's a clear line of logical progression from our current system to them.

Reputation and favour-trading being able to secure things that no amount of money can buy is fairly intuitive. People do it all the time, helping out their friends and neighbours on the implicit understanding that they can expect to be helped in turn at some point down the road. I just... don't really see how you can use that to replace the actual economy outright.

Of course it doesn't help that Eclipse Phase keeps claiming to have a post-scarcity world and then utterly failing to actually make things post-scarcity, but I suppose that's just to be expected...
 
Trying to wrap my head around rep based economy.

It is basically a (or several stacked/concurrent) credit economies with rep determined by your (perceived) willingness to repay value invested in you. Value is loosely defined rather than being specced to any specific currency.

Like with credit scores, the best way to raise rep is to make steady use of it and repay in a timely manner.

Imagine that your credit rating pulled double duty as your Reddit karma, so your ability to skip in queues and take out loans is based on whether you've posted enough dumb memes lately. (Only it's not just your karma, but the weighted sum of the karma of all the people on your friend list, so downvoting your friends is like burning money.)
 
So why wouldn't some Hypercorps (or, hell, nation state intelligence service remnant) pick out suitable infogees, provide them with skillsofts that'll make them valuable to any ouster hab and send them on their way outsystem with subtly hacked in directives to build up rep and connections, and be ready to offer utter and complete assistance to someone with the proper credentials at some undetermined point in the future? Or, hell, use them as agents of influence in the outer system habitats?

It's a long term investment, but what can a habitat do to protect itself from that kind of thing?

And again - the plot/story hook is obvious: Let the PCs stumble on such an operation.
 
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