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Author Topic: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?  (Read 37814 times)

jeff37923

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #450 on: May 26, 2021, 07:12:21 PM »
Before it was retconned, the borg collected their dead (to be recycled) and rescued lost drones.
They also didn't give two craps about the people aboard the Enterprise in their first encounter. The only thing they cared about was if there was any interesting technology for them to absorb... hence what they used tractor beams and were cutting chunks out of the ship... they were dissecting it the way a student would a frog in biology class.

If you further read between the lines on their initial motivations, they'd already hit the Alpha Quadrant powers by the end of season one with those big holes in the ground where they scooped up colonies so there was nothing technological for them to learn... EXCEPT the Enterprise-D was where it absolutely shouldn't be relative to their observed technology... so they were looking for what they missed. Then the Enterprise-D zipped away at speeds beyond even the Borg (because Q), and now the Borg HAD to go to Earth in order to figure out what the heck gave them that ability and Locutus was just a one-off to try and better figure out the puzzle of this supertech space travel system they had observed.

So going by their original appearance up through the entire TNG, the Borg would have been relatively harmless to human life if Q hadn't piqued their interest by giving the Federation the appearance of far more advanced technology than they actually had.

Which is to say, they were originally (probably due to Roddenberry still being involved in season two) transhumanly alien, but not malicious to lower forms of life. Their next appearance was all about PICARD's unreasoning hatred of the Borg and wanting to turn Hue into a weapon to destroy them. Their last appearance during the TNG-era was after leaving Hue's individuality intact the Borg collective self-destructed until Lore took advantage of the situation to use them as a weapon (so basically the Enterprise-D inadvertently genocided the original recipe Borg).

All the "Borg are the ultimate evil" can be pretty much be laid at the feet of the motion picture department who wanted to cash in on the most popular antagonist of the TNG-era and dumbed everything down to have a clear bad guy for "Tank Top Picard" to defeat because God forbid we get nuanced conflicts where neither side is objectively evil in our summer blockbusters.

So basically, yes, the original recipe Borg were an infinitely better vision of transhumanism than whatever the heck EP claims to be.

OK, the above nuanced version of the Borg sound more like the Conjoiners of Alastair Reynold's "Revelation Space" stories.
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BoxCrayonTales

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #451 on: May 26, 2021, 07:49:36 PM »
To them, making everything and everybody borg is an ethical action. These short-lived primitive species are not to be trusted with their own freedoms and minds. Not out of a fear of them being a threat, but because it is their imperative to 'uplift' everybody into being borg. Those that are unwilling are like a child refusing their shots. Just immature.
A fascinating way to put it. Thank you.

This is why I am always frustrated when schlock scifi strips away that interesting inhuman aspect from groupminds and turns them into generic bad guys or sympathetic figures with a literal human face. That ruined the Borg, the Zerg, the Replicators, and more I can't remember right now.

Ratman_tf

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #452 on: May 26, 2021, 10:57:31 PM »
* Though I found it interesting that the very first episode with the Borg, they didn't assmiliate people, only technology. After the abducted Picard it seem the idea of assimilating people became a thing.

It's hard to view that as a turning point given the Borg drones were all human(oid) from the beginning.

They showed a baby borg in that episode. In a galaxy full of humanoids, the Borg could have been just another race like the Klingons or Vulcans, before they Borged out.
And some species has to have been first. I've often thought a story about species 0001 could be interesting.
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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #453 on: May 26, 2021, 11:10:59 PM »
They showed a baby borg in that episode. In a galaxy full of humanoids, the Borg could have been just another race like the Klingons or Vulcans, before they Borged out.
And some species has to have been first. I've often thought a story about species 0001 could be interesting.

I feel their assimilation made them more interesting (as I said ties into an interesting inhuman set of ethics). While I agree they likely did end up retconning it, it doesn't contradict future materials. Id say assimilation actually makes more sense then them having babies just to borgify them later instead of just cloning them or whatever.

They will assimilate babies as well as adults. They truly value life in a very...different and clinical sense.

Edit: Also they where tearing away outposts in the neutral zone, even before the enterprise was catapulted towards them. They would have figured out the Federation by then.
« Last Edit: May 26, 2021, 11:15:04 PM by Shrieking Banshee »

HappyDaze

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #454 on: June 02, 2021, 01:55:32 PM »
I have a buddy that's mentioned the Infinity 2d20 game and I recalled that it had been mentioned in this thread too. How does it compare to EP? I know that many of the worst tech abuses in EP don't really work in Infinity (new bodies, while possible, are very hard to get and there are not limitless AI abuses that PCs can monkey with), that there are polities that derive from the real world (one superpower is based on a China that eats up much of Asia and another that is formed from India, Australia, most of the Pacific Islands, and some of South America), and that religions have more-or-less continued on. Anyone familiar enough with the setting to give a better comparison.