An excellent interview of the Catalyst guys behind Eclipse Phase, talking about their game and prospects for its IP:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSA3k9adrFs

So what do you do in this game. Their answer doesn't really tell me what you do in enough depth for me. What/who are the antagonists?

The Game

Humanity stands on the cusp of a new age, with accelerated technological growth converging toward a singularity point, promising an undreamt-of future. Despite the ecopocalypse and social upheavals on Earth, humanity has conquered the solar system and partially terraformed Mars. Advancements in biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science have transformed our lives. Everyone is wirelessly networked with the world around them, AIs process vast amounts of information, and nano-fabrication enables people to “print” complex devices from the molecular level—at home. Biotechnology allows people to genefix, enhance, and clone their bodies, while others pursue body modifications to adapt to new environments or make themselves into something no longer quite human. People’s minds and memories can be digitized, uploaded, transferred over long distances, and downloaded into new bodies (biological or synthetic). Death has been defeated—for those who can afford it.

From within, disaster struck. Transhumanity reaped the rewards of its arrogance when conflict spiked between the battered nations of Earth, already weakened by decades of climate catastrophes and other disruptive factors. Rampant netwars soon exploded into physical conflicts with spiraling body counts. In the midst of these aggressions, a group of military AIs known as TITANS quietly achieved full sentience and autonomy, and rapidly began exponentially incrementing their own intellectual growth. The AI intelligences spawned by this hard-takeoff singularity quickly turned against transhumanity, enveloping the system in unprecedented levels of violence, disaster, and warfare. What began as a whirlwind of conflict between political factions, revolutionaries, and hypercorps soon escalated into a struggle between man and machine.

In just a few years, transhumanity was nearly wiped out with nuclear strikes, biowarfare plagues, destructive nanoswarms, infowar attacks, mass uploads, and other unexplained singularity events, ripping the superpowers of old to pieces. Our planetary home—Earth—was transformed into a toxic and strange hellhole, while many major habitats were left frozen sarcophagi in the vacuum of space. Just as quickly as they came, the TITANS disappeared, taking millions of uploaded minds with them, leaving behind a network of wormhole gateways. Known as Pandora Gates, these poorly-understood devices allow instantaneous teleportation to distant star systems—often one-way and/or fatal. Though only a handful of Pandora Gates are known to exist—each highly contested—the foolish, brave, curious, and desperate are already risking certain death to enter and explore what lies beyond.

In the aftermath of the Fall, transhumanity lives on, divided into a patchwork of hypercorp combines, survivalist stations, transhuman faction species, and city-state habitats. Under the oppressive police states of immortal inner-system oligarchies, advanced technologies remain highly restricted, and refugee infomorphs are held in virtual slavery or resleeved in robotic bodies and forced into indentured labor. In the outer system, rebel transhuman scientists and techno-anarchists struggle to maintain a new society—from each according to their imagination and to each according to their need. And on the fringes and in the niches lurk networked tribes of political extremists, religious fanatics, criminal entrepeneurs, and bizarre posthumans, among other, stranger, and more alien things ...

Though most claim the Fall was carefully orchestrated by the out-of-control TITANS, others whisper that the driving powers behind the wars—both AI and transhuman—were infected by a mutating virus with multiple infection vectors—biological, information, nano—dubbed the Exsurgent virus. Whatever its source, this virus has been known to sometimes transform its victims into something unexplainable ... something monstrous and reality-altering. Whatever the truth, the remnants of the TITANS and this virus were left to the desolated ruins or driven to the edges of the system, where they remain hidden away in dark corners, quietly waiting to infect the minds of the scavengers and explorers who find them ...  



System

Eclipse Phase uses a variant d100/percentile system with some twists. The game is fast and simple, streamlined so players can dive into the world and action without being burdened down by complex rules.

Selling Points

For Players

    * The ability to switch your body at will, from genetically-modified transhumans to synthetic robotic shells, optimizing your character for specific missions.
    * The ability to back up your character’s mind and be restored from backup in the case of death--a built-in system of “save points” and functional immortality.
    * Characters are skill-based, with no classes, so players can customize their team roles and specialize in fields of their choosing.
    * A focused set of psi rules enable some characters to enhance their cognitive abilities.
    * Playing a role in a secretive and dangerous conspiracy that seeks to save transhumanity.

For Gamemasters

    * A setting custom-built for numerous scenario types, from faction-based intrigues to high-tech dungeon-crawls, from mind-scarring mysteries to dangerous exploration of alien worlds via wormhole gates.
    * An eclectic assortment of intriguing factions, from techno-anarchists to future-chasing hypercorps, from soul-trading criminals to uplifted animals.
    * A range of NPC antagonists to choose from, including rogue AIs, extreme posthuman factions, stand-offish aliens with their own agendas, and transhumans infected and transformed by the virulent Exsurgent virus.

For Retailers

    * Eclipse Phase will be released as a hardcover, full-color core rulebook.
    * The core book is just the start of a new supported game line that captures the essence of a popular new genre of science fiction.
    * Brought to you by the people who were the driving force behind the changes made with Shadowrun, Fourth Edition.

Source

So, in other words, as far as goals are concerned, you seem to have a lot of choices. Survival, exploration via worm holes, conspiracies between competing factions of transhumanity... there's a lot of possible stuff to do here.

"ecopocalypse"?

Quote from: RPGPundit;321142"ecopocalypse"?

LOL yeah. The term jumped at me too. I took it to mean the complete and utter destruction of Earth's ecosystem.

Read a Peter F. Hamilton novel to get an idea of how much scope a setting like this can have. I'm certainly interested in this RPG, although I fear it won't be gritty enough.

From this Eclipse Phase thread:

So I managed to be one of the lucky few at Gencon to pick up the Eclipse Phase book. Here is my short review of the game, but please note I have not yet had time to fully read the book and this mostly consists of skimming.

Base Mechanic:
In the most basic terms you could look at Eclipse Phase as a redone version of Shadow Run, but the more you look into the book the more that starts to fall away. The first major difference between the two is the dice mechanic (d100), which is a roll under system. You score crits with double numbers (11,22,33) and they are considered a success or failure depending on if you would have normally succeeded with that number. A 00 is always a success and a 99 is always a failure, oddly enough both are crits.

Character Creation
Tthere are no races in Eclipse Phase, since you can change bodies at will it doesn't matter what you were born as only what you are at the moment. With that in mind backgrounds such as Drifter, Lost, Hyperelite, Infolife, Lunar, Socialite, etc give you your advantages and disadvantages. These basically effect positively and negatively your skills. You then get 105 points to distribute among your 7 aptitudes which make up your mental stats. After you have determined these you get 1000 Character points for everything from skills to credits to Moxie. Moxie is basically edge, but it does a few more things. Next a character will choose which Morph (body) to use at the start of the game. Each of which grants you certain advantages, but cost various character points to own. Finally you can then purchase traits which are your normal things like Ambidextrous, danger sense, faster learner and stuff like that.

Sub Systems
Eclipse Phase does not contain subsystems like Shadow Run, instead Psi and Hacking are built into the main system. Psi is Eclipse Phase's version of magic, which can only affect people at a short range or touch. It also primarily affects the mind of an opponent or self. Don't expect to summon monster or throw fire balls with this, its very subtle. Hacking is no longer a separate subsystem you simply use your same stats on the net as in person, which is very nice.

Fluff
Overall the fluff seems to be pretty solid. Following a darker path of a singularity humanity was nearly wipped out by Sientiant AIs called TITANs (Which the USA made (Which is terribly unoriginal.)) and now hovers around only 500 million people in the solar system. Now humanity is trying to recover from what they call the Fall, which was ten years ago. Most people live either on the Moon or Mars with various other colonies out in the solar system. These consist of City States run by corporations. (What is interesting is how similar this fluff is to the Alpha Omega RPG, but instead of being on Earth its in space.) The main point of the game is that your character works for a secret organization called Firewall which is supposed to protect humanity from internal or external threats. So instead of running for one of many corporations the fluff is more orientated for you working for Firewall, but it does outline many other organizations and city states so it doesn't limit you to just Firewall.

There is currently one Alien race that humanity has encountered, a race of fungus snail like creatures that claim to represent a large number of other races. The race is currently peaceful and does not appear to have craft faster than the speed of light, but their frequent appearances lead many to speculate that they have the technology. Mostly the Factors, as the are called, try to steer humanity away from high level AI otherwise they seem content to simply watch humanity grow.

There are a few small issues with the fluff, such as the author's bigotry against certain religious groups showing through and the strange and unexplained dissapearance of major nation states when the fall occurred, but most of these fluff issues are easily ignored and replaced with less inconsistent ideas.

Summary
Overall its a good book with some slight rough edges. Ironically I may just not run with the main fluff at all since this book is nearly perfect for a Mass Effect conversion all I need to do is replace morphs with races and its basically all done for me.

If you have any questions just ask and I'll see if I can answer them.

Reading what you have posted along with some digging on my I own. I am very interested in this game. Which is surprising to me. As most transhumanist writing/games usually dont do much for me.

Quote from: Ronin;321310Reading what you have posted along with some digging on my I own. I am very interested in this game. Which is surprising to me. As most transhumanist writing/games usually dont do much for me.

It is surprising for me too, actually.

I portray myself as more of a fantasy enthusiast than a pure hardcore Sci-Fi kind of guy. But somehow this game does it for me.

I've always been interested in, though not automatically supportive of, the concepts of transhumanism, cybernetics, nanotechnology and so on, so forth. These are fascinating on an ethical and philosophical level at least, not even talking of the actual ground-breaking medical and more broadly scientific implications of the research surrounding these topics.

I guess it all seems to come together with this game for me. The fact that some of the designers were involved with Shadowrun, which I would qualify as a Fantasy game rather than a hard Sci-Fi one, may participate to this feeling of mine.

I hope the game delivers. I'm still not 100% convinced it will do it for me, but it's getting closer the more I find out about it.

The part I don't really like is the explicit declaration from the authors that there will be a metaplot later on. BUT if it doesn't suck, I could still use it as a toolbox of sorts. So ... that's not entirely a negative for me, especially since the CC license will allow you to develop your own fan content for the game.

Quote from: Benoist;321313The part I don't really like is the explicit declaration from the authors that there will be a metaplot later on. BUT if it doesn't suck, I could still use it as a toolbox of sorts. So ... that's not entirely a negative for me, especially since the CC license will allow you to develop your own fan content for the game.

That's the fascinating thing for me, even above the setting. This is a pretty daring move for as relatively large a company as Catalyst, and I look forward to seeing how it goes (as I try to figure out how I'm going to fit it into my future budget...)