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Transhumanity's Fate (Eclipse Phase, Fate RPG System)

for Generation Lost
Character concept: Hacker-Blogger
Background: Corvid Uplift.
Faction: A blending of Anarchist and Argonaut.
Motivations: +Education, +Open Source, +Religion. (The religion is probably some blending of several religions, including Kopimi) Information must be free. Even if it's dangerous. In fact, especially if it's dangerous.

For Security for a Price
Character concept: Brain-hacker/Psychosugeron
Background: Drifter
Faction: Mercurial or Exhuman. IF the mind is software, THEN it is in dire need of optimization and debugging. Once you do so to a mind, doing so a program is easier.
Motivations: +Personal development, +wealth, -Martian Liberation
 
There doesn't seem to be much more chatter from outside our initial group, so it might just be one game. In that case...with the Lost, there's a danger, I think, of being pulled in too many directions. We have @Kensai's emotional leech, @Estro's ego hunter, @Iron Wolf was trying to make space Hannibal (and not the Carthage kind), @samdamandias has an uplifted hacker....there's ways to tie them together, but we need at least a broad outline.

Fundamentally, what is the game about, what are the characters doing? I'm imagining a game that involves investigating, gaining access to people and materials (and secrets), first and foremost, and also deals with your various personal objectives (which can be intertwined in various ways - in the form of specific people, specific threats, etc). Which means having an impetus to really dig into secrets, rather than just stay home and make some creds. Thoughts?

Here are the aspects I've come up with so far. Come up with some more! We'll pick two of them:
Those who play with the devil's toys...*
Cognite Plans To Brainwash Everyone
You Are Not Who You Think You Are
Cognite's Unrestricted Group Mind Research
Anyone Could Be An Ego Hunter

Humanity Is A Weakness
 
Okay, sorry, I have a few character concepts. After reading about the Lost and aysncs I kinda went a little async crazy. One character would fit in with the security for a price, one is realllllly experimental and would fit in the Lost/Cognite one, and I have one that could work in either with some mods.

Security For A Price
Character Concept: The token Barely-Enhanced
Background: Original Space Colonist
Faction: Argonaut
Motivations: +Personal Career, +Peace, Order, and Good Government, +Bio-chauvinism, +Sentient Rights
Description: Alex Brown never wanted to be a Jovian. During the 17-minute war she fought mostly for survival. The government that rose up afterwards she was forced to support mostly out of necessity. A soldier, then a security officer, she's now finally fled that life and lives on Mars. Her opposition to the Jovian Republic was mostly towards its government, however -- almost a decade of living there has still left her with a conservative stance on morphological freedom compared to most transhumans, and she herself doesn't like to use anything more engineered than a splicer -- not to say her attitude couldn't change.

Both
Character Concept: Async Empath aka Will Graham IN SPAAAAAAAACE
Background: Lost
Faction: Hypercorp [Security]/Brinker [Lost]
Motivation: +Stay Low Profile, +Techno-Progressivism. +Async Registration/Containment
Description: Darshan Wu wants to help people. However, as an Async and member of the Lost, people generally speaking don't want to help him. He's learned to pass off his strange abilities as quirks and a special talent for crime scene investigation. In reality, he can read the thoughts of others and vividly recreate crime scenes in his head. Still, he can't let his talents go to waste when there's bad guys to be caught, including some of his own kind [Security]/he can't let what those bastards at Cognite did to him go, and if they're continuing to do that to others, they need to be stopped [Lost]. He's suspicious of other asyncs, and thinks that maybe one day, they should be registered or contained. This stems from watching the horror of the Lost's escape and the horrors many of them have inflicted -- and a lingering worry that under it all, he might not be so different.

This one's a little weird.

Generation Lost
Character Concept: Async Psychosurgeon With A Double Life aka Hannibal Lecter in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
Background: Fall Evacuee
Faction: Socalite/Exhuman
Motivations: +Posthumanism, +Hedonism, +Async Unity,
Description: To most Scipio Bloom is an upstanding member of society, a psychosurgeon and psychiatrist with a respected practice stretching back to before the fall. However, he has a dark secret: he was infected with Watts-Macleod during the Fall. Oh, and for years, he has been using psychosurgical techniques to modify and change the egos of others, without their consent, in order to spur them to commit dark acts of crime. Not even Scipio is sure if the dark urges to change others were present before or after he was infected; all he knows is he has embraced the new alien darkness that stirs within him, and hungers to know more, in order to further a changeinto something more. To this end, he has obsessively gathered information about the Lost and other asyncs, believing them to be humanity's true next step and potential teachers. Some have been his patients. Ostensibly, he's helping them confront those who hurt them, Cognite. In reality, he hopes that in the process, he can turn his fellow Asyncs to a greater purpose, a final metamorphsis, a becoming. While an exhuman, he prefers unassuming morphs -- to him, the async condition only confirms what he's always believed as a psychosurgeon: the true next frontier in human evolution is not radical modification of the body, but radical modification of the ego.
***​
I dunno if others in the Lost really want to play with Space Hannibal, since he's pretty evil (to people who aren't asyncs, of course) and will probably push their characters to do Bad Shit. He also isn't part of the Lost, although I could drop some of the "socalite by day, exhuman by night" aspects of him and just make him a more general (ie, marginalized) member of the Lost.

He might actually work better as an NPC that sort-of fills the role of a Proxy , some guy who's treated all of the PCs and is now manipulating them to a dark end. I dunno if you want to go that route though @Acatalepsy.
 
I had assumed that there would be more of a run on it considering it being EP but if you would still take one as mentioned on the chat I would throw my hat in the ring and would be okay with either of the directions if you split or if you combine. But I have no problem with stepping back if you prefer a 5 player group over two groups of 3.
 
Ultimately it comes down to (1) wanting to play and (2) being involved and active in making it happen.

I plan to continue with the character creation discussion soon. My tentative target is to have IC thread(s) up by the end of this week. Apologies for the being a bit terse, I've got a some things to take care of IRL.
 
I'm somewhat familiar with Eclipse Phase's setting, but know pretty much nothing about FATE's mechanics. Would it be possible for me to join, or am I going to be out of my depth here?
 
FATE is rather simple mechanically.

The main thing is the meta-game currency of Fate Points, which you can spend to compell someone to act according to one of their aspects, or to give yourself a bonus for acting according to one of your own aspects.

For example, Skuli the raven might have an aspect of Information Must Be Free. If I'm trying to keep a secret, someone can compell me and say "I'll give you a Fate Point if Information Must Be Free gets you into worse trouble." However, if Skuli is trying to break a story about something shady going on with Cognite, then I could spend a Fate Point to get a bonus on spreading the news.
 
samdamandias said:
FATE is rather simple mechanically.

The main thing is the meta-game currency of Fate Points, which you can spend to compell someone to act according to one of their aspects, or to give yourself a bonus for acting according to one of your own aspects.

For example, Skuli the raven might have an aspect of Information Must Be Free. If I'm trying to keep a secret, someone can compell me and say "I'll give you a Fate Point if Information Must Be Free gets you into worse trouble." However, if Skuli is trying to break a story about something shady going on with Cognite, then I could spend a Fate Point to get a bonus on spreading the news.
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Ah, alright--so do we select these aspects for ourselves in chargen?
 
ChineseDrone said:
Ah, alright--so do we select these aspects for ourselves in chargen?
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Yep. The two most important aspects are your High Concept, which is sort of what you wan't your character to be, and your Trouble, which exists to hook you into adventures.

An important thing to keep in mind about aspects is you want most of them to be something that could hurt or help depending on the situation.
 
(I can't blame IRL for the latest delay. I can, however, blame Batman.)

ChineseDrone said:
Ah, alright--so do we select these aspects for ourselves in chargen?
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I am, in fact, about to explain how that works right now.

First: Character background and concept! Come up with these things -

Character Concept: One sentence, short description of the concept that outlines what's most salient about the character.
Background: Your Eclipse Phase background (example here). Write a brief statement on how that impacts your character today.
Faction: Same deal, different list (faction list here). Brief statement on how your faction - what debts you owe, who you look up to, whatever.
Motivations: Pick some motivations and/or memes! Some examples are here, though for Fate purposes these can also be things like +Revenge or +Finding the Truth or -Personal Responsibility. PIck one to three, write a brief statement.

Name: If you have a name at this point, good, though for some people the name might be the last thing. Name could also include aliases or codenames.

Second: Character Creation Phases! In Fate terms, a phase is an adventure or incident that involved your character. Here is some generic advice for doing the phases, though we're not following it exactly, I still highly recommend reading it. For each phase, write down a paragraph or so of 'what happened'. The phases are -

(1) Fall Phase: Write what happened to your character during and after the Fall of humanity. Were you in the outer reaches, watching helplessly as civilization destroyed itself? On the frontlines? Were you an infugee, who spent years afterward as an indenture?
- If you're a Lost, this is your Escape Phase; the transition from a virtual hell to a real one. Your release - accidental or otherwise - into the solar system. What did you do, what did you think about this strange new world? Who did you meet to help you, what enemies and challenges did you face?
- If you're an Infolife that post-dates the Fall, this is your Creation Phase. Similar to the Escape Phase, this is who you were created by, why, and your reaction to the circumstances of your being.

(2) First Adventure / Joining Up: This is your first adventure. For Security For a Price, this is how and why you're working the merc business. What job got you noticed, what connections did you lean on - or who leaned on you? For A Generation, Lost, this is going to be something that determines, in large part, what we're doing as a game, so think about it carefully. Write out a paragraph or so of your adventure/experience.

(3) Crossing Paths, Part I: Now, take a look at someone else's phases, and figure out how you were involved in that. It could be

(4) Crossing Paths, Part II: Do that last one again, but with a different person.

Third: Aspects! See that stuff that you just did? We'll use that to create aspects. Aspects are basically...parts of the world or character that we're going to say LOOK AT THAT, IT'S IMPORTANT. They make you better, they make things go wrong in dramatic ways, and they make the story focus on those things. Here's some advice on making aspects.

Two aspects are especially important.

First, your High Concept is your character in a nutshell. If could be something like Coldblooded Sniping Machine, or Lost Ninja. It's also one of your best ways to mark things as important. If you say that your character is a Renegade Sun Yee On Enforcer, you've guaranteed that the Sun Yee On triad is going to factor into the story. If you want to make your character The Best Ego Hunter On Mars, you are, and you'll have the rep (and rivals) to match. If your character is an Escaped Hunsi Industries AGI, then you've created a new faction (Hunsi Industries) and guaranteed that they're going to be in the story.

Second, your Trouble. Your trouble is some aspect that makes your life more difficult. All aspects are double edged, but the Trouble is mostly bad news for your character. It's something that makes their life more complicated. Personal struggles or doubts, problematic relationships, damaged reputation, lingering debts, inner demons, etc.

After those two, you should have two more aspects, which could be something like motivation, ideology, reputation, or mannerisms, or things you're lucky/unlucky/good/bad at, or connections/enemies you have. Ideally, several of those at once. Remember that aspects are part of how you build out the world (while making sure that the world remains connected to the character).

Fourth: Skills! I'll talk about that sometime tomorrow.
 
So, first up, my characters escape phase.

I was later told that the transition between the Simulspace and reality was to be smooth, planned out as it was. That was, of course, before the whistleblowing and media attention forced the early closure of the project. How it actually happened was something else. Just hanging around with my friends, doing a bit of target practice, and then I was floating in a healing vat, with a Dr. MacLeod pulling me out of the white gel. There were... six or eight of us in his group and I was one of the last ones he took out. The room we were in had... Hundreds, thousands, all lined up and yet he only chose our group. I only recognised two people in there, one guy from my geography class and another who lived maybe six doors down. He talked with amazing confidence, even as we were escaping and guards tried to stop him and us from escaping. He must have been either an Async or a quite able psychosurgeon, as he just told the guards to hand over their weapons and they did. The, with no delay, he shot both of them in the head, calmly ripped out their cortical stacks and proceeded on. Nothing too shocking, I'd seen similar events in the simluspace's alleys and dark corners, but the complete lack of reaction on his part.... It was unfathomable with how our minders always fussed about behaving and kindness and all that... We would be taken to a small shuttle by him, before he grinned at us and said the last sentence before I left Phobos.. I'll never forget it, not willingly at least.
"The technical term for what you can do is the Watts-MacLeod virus, and for that you can thank me."


I'll alter it if you want, Acatalepsy, but here it is . First stage of the character creation.
 
Estro said:
I'll alter it if you want, Acatalepsy, but here it is . First stage of the character creation.
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It's not just me that matters. It's everyone else. Anyway, we seem to be in a bit of doldrums, but I'm pinging anyway and encouraging everyone to suggest ideas, plans, villains, groups, etc. The whole point of Fate is that the GM isn't the sole creative authority here.
 
Someone is playing around with watts and wants to get a few more lost as test subjects?
Somatek would be quite interested in the interaction between Psi, Animal uplifts and what happens if you infect someone before you uplift them while for one of the classics the Ultimates could be around , even if they are not quite ideal for Venus but Psi might be what some of there members see is usual step for human improvement.
That would go more for "stop others from making the same mistake"
 
Estro said:
Dr. MacLeod
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Hello I missed this the first time around that is, like, asking for an aspect/relationship/thing going on.

Scia said:
Somatek would be quite interested in the interaction between Psi, Animal uplifts and what happens if you infect someone before you uplift them while for one of the classics the Ultimates could be around , even if they are not quite ideal for Venus but Psi might be what some of there members see is usual step for human improvement.
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Somatek is a classic villain. It helps to tailor things narrowly to a player, so an individual uplift player would probably end up creating their own challenges pretty quickly. That said, one of my unused game design things involves Project VOCIFEROUS, the attempt to create avian uplift hive minds. That would be fun to bring into this.

Scia said:
Somatek would be quite interested in the interaction between Psi, Animal uplifts and what happens if you infect someone before you uplift them while for one of the classics the Ultimates could be around , even if they are not quite ideal for Venus but Psi might be what some of there members see is usual step for human improvement.
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Ultimates I feel like are at their most interesting when they verge into exhuman territory. I'd rather they be renegade contractors stealing Cognite, or working with Cognite to develop cognitive mods to match W-M than directly infected, if that makes any sense.

edmantgoog said:
so it is 3 in the moring and im a out to go to bed but do you have room for one more?
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Get some sleep, work on your spelling, come back, contribute to the game.
 
Super busy the last few days and haven't finished the required reading but I'm making progress and hope to contribute, is there anything your looking for in particular from a perspective player?
 
Zedalb said:
Super busy the last few days and haven't finished the required reading but I'm making progress and hope to contribute, is there anything your looking for in particular from a perspective player?
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Specifically? Well, at this point we have two sort of developed ideas. Which are you interested in? What possibilities do you find interesting/exciting about them? What kind of character and character interactions are interesting? What aspects do you think your preferred game should have?
 
Acatalepsy said:
Specifically? Well, at this point we have two sort of developed ideas. Which are you interested in? What possibilities do you find interesting/exciting about them? What kind of character and character interactions are interesting? What aspects do you think your preferred game should have?
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I find a lot of it exciting.

I study psychology for fun, and defining humanity has been a big thing in my life.

It ties into a lot of my fighting with depression, and my identity as a sheep dog.


I think this shadow war would be interesting to have someone who feels very deeply and suffers from being very human as people grow more cold and machine like, literally and figuratively.

Not quite a priest, but someone seeking to save there soul.

Redemption, that feels right.

I think I want to play a bad guy trying to change his way, someone in the worst of it who has realized they don't want to be.

Who has seen the evil in it.

Cognite's Unrestricted Group Mind Research

Seems an aspect I'm drawn to, maybe a researcher, who has truly wrecked some humans, destroyed minds ruined the human soul.
And feels regret and wishes to atone.


However as I said I'm still reading the source material so I am hesitant to give to much detail.
 
Acatalepsy said:
Project VOCIFEROUS, the attempt to create avian uplift hive minds. That would be fun to bring into this.
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O hai Huginn and Muninn.

I'm having a harder time coming up with Fall and First Adventure for Skuli than I am for my unnamed concept for Security For a Price

Fall Phase: The Fall was swift. The Fall was brutal. And through that short time, Skuli was there, fighting with the most powerful weapon she knew: Information. Which places are safe. What egocasting stations were still up. The plight of the infugees as they flooded the databanks of mars.

Aspect: Knowledge is Power

First Adventure: It wasn't like those plans were secret-secret especially since they were based off of an open source design. But turns out that some people really don't like muckrakers.

Aspect: Known Muckracker

Kinda worried that all her aspects so far tie into the muckraker side of things instead of the hacker or corvid uplift
Fall Phase: He was in the far reaches, doing some work for a wealthy eccentric who wanted to experiment with thermal computing. The news trickled in slowly, of Earth, of the TITANS, of a world torn assunder. It was the first time he really used that parallel processing, one mind mourning the senseless death of a world, the other already compsing the report about how this would or would not affect the timetable for deliverables.

Aspect: Will This Affect The Bottom Line?

First Adventure: No guns, no crazy adventures, nobody after him. Just two weeks in a simple room with ample food, water, and time. Time enough to put what he learned into practice, and pray to non-existent gods when he hit compile.

Aspect: I Hack My Own Brain (Not sure if this is too broad of an aspect. I mean, it could be used to justify almost anything.)
 
Acatalepsy said:
Hello I missed this the first time around that is, like, asking for an aspect/relationship/thing going on
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Yeah, that was the bit I wanted to check was okay. MacLeod and Watts have had to be people at some point, right? And what caused them to have that strain named after them? I'll get the second stage done in a jiffy.
 
Acatalepsy said:
Hello I missed this the first time around that is, like, asking for an aspect/relationship/thing going on.



Somatek is a classic villain. It helps to tailor things narrowly to a player, so an individual uplift player would probably end up creating their own challenges pretty quickly. That said, one of my unused game design things involves Project VOCIFEROUS, the attempt to create avian uplift hive minds. That would be fun to bring into this.



Ultimates I feel like are at their most interesting when they verge into exhuman territory. I'd rather they be renegade contractors stealing Cognite, or working with Cognite to develop cognitive mods to match W-M than directly infected, if that makes any sense.



Get some sleep, work on your spelling, come back, contribute to the game.
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ok just woke up and wanted to know if, it was a yea or ney on the room for one more?
 
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