Being a science fiction fan, I was somewhat interested when I heard of Eclipse Phase.  The book is available for free legally, so I checked it out, and it seemed rather in the vein of Transhuman Space -- new social structures, mind uploading, AIs, uplifted animals, hypercorporations, colonized solar system -- plus an Earth-killing disaster and more soft sci-fi elements (warp gates, limited alien contact, psionic powers).

What I'm curious about is has anyone played it, or given more attention to how the game works in practice?

Here's a rather gushing description from another site.

Quote from: MJ12 CommandoThe Eclipse Phase game just came out, if any of you like PnP RPGs. It's wonderful. As a short plot synopsis, the world starts going cyberpunk, with the rich getting richer (and smarter, and stronger, and longer-lived, and better-looking) and the poor getting angrier, things start going badly for people, the US builds [strike]SkyNET[/strike] the TITANs to deal with the uppity poor people instead of wasting transhuman lives. As you can guess this doesn't turn out very well, and in a few years 95% of the human race is dead, Earth is not only suffering from nuclear winter, several 200 kilometer-wide blast craters, and a dearth of life, but has also been quarantined and abandoned, and an organization called Firewall has evolved to meet the challenge of any threats which endanger all of transhumanity.

And that's where the player characters come in.

Why you should get it:

1. Creative Commons License (legal to share and/or download!)
2. Transhuman post-apocalyptic roleplaying!
3. Enjoy horror... in SPACE
4. Heavily hard-SF inspired
5. You can play an uplifted octopus
6. You can play an uplifted cyborg octopus who wields 3 assault rifles firing explosive bullets that have underbarrel smart missile launchers that fire fuel air explosives.
7. Fight horrible AI gods!
8. Lots of cool toys to use, bodies to swap into, and places to go.
9. Rules support for swapping bodies, post-scarcity economies, and other neat stuff.
10. It's like someone took Call of Cthulhu, Transhuman Space, the Terminator movies, and Hunter: The Vigil and threw it into an awesome BLENDER.

And I did say it was legal to share, yes? So legal, in fact, that I'll even give you a link to the game below. If you like it, though, go and buy the PDF or the print version. The art's great, the writing's good, and the rules are slick.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/990685/Eclipse%20Phase.zip

Didnt know it was free to download, cheers for the link im gonna give it a read over the weekend(between bouts of champion online early acess and planning out my next paranoia missions) not sure i'll ever get to play it ith my group(they tend to glaze over at anything too rules heavy), but im sure i'll get enough ideas out of the background info in the book to spur my imagination for awhile.

I'm extremely interested in this game.
Thanks for the download link! I passed it along.

I haven't had a chance to look at it in-depth, but I'll say this much -- the artwork and layout is orders of magnitude better than some games I've paid good money for. Seriously, wow.

Well let's see, I've pretty much dismissed this game out of hand for it's chosen genre, but let's break down that description a bit more, for where I start to get a little leery:

QuoteThe Eclipse Phase game just came out, if any of you like PnP RPGs. It's wonderful. As a short plot synopsis, the world starts going cyberpunk, with the rich getting richer (and smarter, and stronger, and longer-lived, and better-looking) and the poor getting angrier, things start going badly for people, the US builds [strike]SkyNET[/strike] the TITANs to deal with the uppity poor people instead of wasting transhuman lives. As you can guess this doesn't turn out very well, and in a few years 95% of the human race is dead, Earth is not only suffering from nuclear winter, several 200 kilometer-wide blast craters, and a dearth of life, but has also been quarantined and abandoned, and an organization called Firewall has evolved to meet the challenge of any threats which endanger all of transhumanity.

OK, this all doesn't sound too bat, robot post-apocalypse in space and all, except for that last word there, but they could manage to not fuck it up this time.  

Quote1. Creative Commons License (legal to share and/or download!)

Well that can be good and bad.  I'm big on open design and all, but because I'm big enough I'm well aware that it is as often a calling card of a bunch of pretentious hippies or a marketing ploy as it is anything genuinely to do with open design.

Quote2. Transhuman post-apocalyptic roleplaying!

OK, I'm not sure those words mean what you think they mean.  

Quote3. Enjoy horror... in SPACE

Umm, OK, not seeing what's so special about that but I can bite.  

Quote4. Heavily hard-SF inspired

I think the author is playing some word games here, using "inspired" as a code word for "not really hard SF at all", because then he goes on to say this:

Quote5. You can play an uplifted octopus
6. You can play an uplifted cyborg octopus who wields 3 assault rifles firing explosive bullets that have underbarrel smart missile launchers that fire fuel air explosives.

See where I was going with that now?  And this is the part where I struggle not to tune the whole thing out as THS all over again.  It's a bunch of lame, OTT power fantasy all over again, masquerading as high concept.  

Quote7. Fight horrible AI gods!
8. Lots of cool toys to use, bodies to swap into, and places to go.
9. Rules support for swapping bodies, post-scarcity economies, and other neat stuff.

And here's more of it.  Pretty predictable spiel at this point, but take special note of the bolded section, and cross reference that with the claim in #2.  Kinda screws all to hell one of the fundamental conflicts of a PA game to make it a "post-scarcity economy", no?

So at this point, basically we've got a THS heartbreaker, with some crudely applied and ill-considered attempts at adding GRIMDARK to a conceptual framework that makes GRIMDARK irrelevant.  

And then he goes and does this:  

Quote10. It's like someone took Call of Cthulhu, Transhuman Space, the Terminator movies, and Hunter: The Vigil and threw it into an awesome BLENDER.

. . . and I have to restrain my gag reflex.  May as well throw in how EXTREME! it is while you're at it.

I've liked bits of transhuman fiction over the years, Sterling's Schismatrix is one of my all time favorite SF pieces, and it can be a fun thought experiment to ponder, but I've yet to see any proof it's the slightest damn bit of good as an RPG, and crudely tacking on bits of other genres doesn't seem like the way to prove otherwise to me, nor does reducing an otherwise cerebral philosophy experiment to "OMG COOL POWERS!".  

I'm sure RPGnet's drooling over it already though.  I know 4chan is, and they both share the same fondness for games that will never actually see real play.

QuoteI haven't had a chance to look at it in-depth, but I'll say this much -- the artwork and layout is orders of magnitude better than some games I've paid good money for. Seriously, wow.

Dude, there's almost as much wasted space on these pages as there was in the Nobilis book.  All because some pretentious twat was trying to be "artistic" about it, instead of getting the damn words on the page in an efficient manner.

Quote from: J Arcane;324360Dude, there's almost as much wasted space on these pages as there was in the Nobilis book.

With Nobilis, however, it's worth remembering the square shape of the book's design. As the result, reserving the broad borders on both sides for snippets of fiction didn't actually reduce the word count in the central columns at all.

J Arcane, I wouldn't despair right away. Eclipse Phase was created by Rob Boyle (personal blog here) and Brian Cross. Other writers include Lars Blumenstein and Tobias Wolter. I worked with all of them, and they are very good in my book.

Here is a summary of the core book's content:

    * 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

The official blog is here.

From all the hype in /tg/ I've been seeing, my main hope seems to be that they've failed so utterly at the "transhuman" part, that the whole thing just winds up another CP game in space with freaky AI.

The ludicrous power fantasy like the aforementioned post however, just gives me bad memories of Exalted and THS.

Quote from: J Arcane;324360Well that can be good and bad.  I'm big on open design and all, but because I'm big enough I'm well aware that it is as often a calling card of a bunch of pretentious hippies or a marketing ploy as it is anything genuinely to do with open design.

They're up-front on the website about it being a marketing ploy: "the biggest danger to new authors is obscurity."  Honestly, I think it's a fairly good idea.

QuoteI think the author is playing some word games here, using "inspired" as a code word for "not really hard SF at all", because then he goes on to say this

You're right, it's not hard SF at all.  I guess you could say that there are some elements of it that would be hard SF.  (Using quantum entanglement for one-time communications is a somewhat outdated example, since it's something we know doesn't work.)  Basically it's not "all fantasy all the time," even though there are many elements that are essentially magic or are contrary to the way the world works.

QuoteAnd here's more of it.  Pretty predictable spiel at this point, but take special note of the bolded section, and cross reference that with the claim in #2.  Kinda screws all to hell one of the fundamental conflicts of a PA game to make it a "post-scarcity economy", no?

The economy is not anywhere near being post-scarcity.  In this I think it's mostly that the person who wrote the review on SpaceBattles didn't really pay attention to what the book was saying, or was possibly mislead by the book itself.  More than 95% of people have robotic bodies (page 50), in many cases not by choice but because they can't afford a top-of-the-line augmented biological body (page 66).

The setting doesn't have cyberpunk levels of inequality in most places, but nearly everwhere has a strong division between the more- and less-well-off (page 38-39).  Some places don't use money, but that just means that they have different ways of deciding who gets the toys and who doesn't.  Those places tend to work on a system where individuals receive a quota of energy and raw materials based on their social standing, and have to perform work in order to keep receiving their quota -- in other words it's almost exactly like just using money (page 62-63).

This said, none of this means your criticisms are incorrect.  I haven't even finished reading the book, let alone played the game.

I'm just reacting off what I've seen here and other places.  I should give the book a read, but I'm horrible with PDFs, especially PDFs that insist on print-style layout even for the digital version.  I can't stand trying to read them.

Lord, after looking at this thing (big "props," as the kids say nowadays, to their putting this thing out for free), I know I'm getting old; I'm positively overwhelmed at the sheer volume of technocentric trans-whatso-zoids that exist in this thing.  Jeez.

One thing that kind of gets me is the whole "super-bad-evil AI has humanity on the ropes and then just...disappears," crap.  Same thing applies to the New BSG story too, but that time, the humans were winning.  Unrealistic as hell.

h+ magazine interview with Rob Boyle.

Quote from: J Arcane;324360Dude, there's almost as much wasted space on these pages as there was in the Nobilis book.  All because some pretentious twat was trying to be "artistic" about it, instead of getting the damn words on the page in an efficient manner.

The per-page wordcount of EP is actually rather high; it's at least average for a modern game book.

Cramming as many words as possible onto a page may be "efficient" for reducing pagecount, but doesn't necessarily aid in readability.

If you haven't taken a look at the game yet, then I hope you do so at some point; I don't care if you end up liking or disliking it, but I'd much rather that you had an opinion based on it's own merits/flaws than an opinion based on someone else's opinion of it.