It’s alternate RPG month here at Geek Of All Trades, so today we have a shiny gem of a Mini-Review for you for an RPG known as Eclipse Phase!
INITIAL THOUGHTS
The first thing that caught my eye had nothing to do with the game itself, but rather it’s license: Great Googly Moogly! They are using a Creative Commons License! This is extremely rare in the industry and immediately they’ve increased the odds of me buying the book just to encourage this. This is the license that everyone knows RPGs should have. Not only is the entire collection of books free for you to try out and download on the creators blog, it’s totally legal to post your characters and your game aids to the internet. There is no legal grey area or anything, non-profit game additions are explicitly allowed, allowing the community to thrive, share and grow. The print versions can be purchased at your local game store (If they have them in… if not ask!) Otherwise you can get them through Amazon. If you prefer PDFs and want to give the folks over at Posthuman studios a bit of a tip for their fine work, they may be purchased via DriveThru RPG as well.
Overall, the system primarily uses a D100 system, with the simple approach of performing a test by rolling D100 and scoring equal too or under your value in the relevant skill. This seems to diverge quite a bit when it comes to combat, more on that later.
CHARACTER CREATION
The Eclipse Phase books in general have all been well organised and jammed full of awesome content. At its core, it’s a game about Transhumanism. What does this mean you ask? Well, if you’re unfamiliar with the phrase (and obviously too lazy to follow my carefully placed link) It’s essentially the desire to augment and advance mankind through the use of advanced technologies. This can range from improving our bodies through genetics, transferring our minds into different vessels altogether with advanced science, or even uplifting other lesser species to “share” in our intellect.
In retrospect, uplifting the octopus may have been a bad plan
So, as far as Eclipse phase goes, your options are remarkably broad. You could be an uplifted octopus neuroscientist or a purely digital intelligence. You could have your mind distributed between a swarm of stealthy micro-drones or wear the body of a genetically “Pure” superhuman from one of Titans moons. Overall, this forward looking futurism is actually quite exciting and the possibilities are there for some amazing stories!
When you generate your character, you work through backgrounds that give you access to various skill bonuses and origin stories. These small bonuses may also have penalties attached and some of them even give you restrictions on what you are allowed to play.
You then decide on your “aptitudes”. These are rated on a scale of 1-30 and what they actually do is set the starting value of your skills in a particular area (Which you can then buy up from there with experience.) I’ve created a few characters now and in the few game’s I’ve played in, it’s often made sense to look ahead and decide your skills beforehand and then set those aptitudes higher.
Points are all fungible, so if you take one that gives you 10 points worth of Zero-G operations and 20 points worth of Networking: Criminal, this is completely identical with one that gives you 30 points of Zero-G or 30 points of Networking: Criminal if you intended to ultimately buy 30 points of both anyway. The exception here is playing an Infolife character. Being an A.I. makes you spend half points on four skills (All the computer related ones) and double price on eight different skills. (Human interaction/ Social understanding ones) If you are a character who was going to spend more than twice as many points on the first pile than on the second, you can save a lot of points by being a computer program. Otherwise, you’re fighting an uphill battle!
You also choose your starting “Morph” (Body) at the beginning of the game (based off what’s available to your background and the points you have spare) This essentially gets treated like equipment, because you can change morphs like a DND character changes magic hats when he needs a different buff. If you can afford the giant genetically engineered space breathing crab morph, sure! But don’t expect to be able to get around stations easily unless you have a spacer morph stashed away somewhere.
I’m pretty sure the Player Character is the one on the left actually
All in all, character Gen involves a great deal of MATH and isn’t the quickest of processes, but is incredibly diverse and fine tune-able, allowing you to build exactly what you want to play.
THE STORYLINE
Earth has been lost! In their hubris mankind created a set of AI’s known as the TITANS and one day, for some unknown reason (Probably Aliens), they turned on us. Even more enigmatically, after years of fighting, they all just vanished, leaving earth a shattered, war torn, wasteland of a planet. Most of humanity has escaped to the various habitats and local colonisations efforts, but for the most part, they are mostly stuck within the sol system. The setting is divided into both Sunward and Rimward locations write-up wise, with the more corporate/politic storylines happening sunward closer to earth and the larger populations and the more creepy horror element of the game occurring rimward in the depths of space. Keeping in mind that Mankind still has pretty limited space tech so it takes extremely long to get from one side to the other and do so is very dangerous unless you opt to digitally transmit your personality into a “rental body” instead.
There is no space ship combat mechanics, instead there is dying in space and not dying in space
As a starting point, The book suggests Players take part in a cross-faction secret network dubbed Firewall that is dedicated to counteracting “Existential Risks” IE: threats to the existence of transhumanity, whether they be biowar plagues, self-replicating nanoswarms, nuclear proliferation, terrorists with WMDs, net-breaking computer attacks, rogue AIs, alien encounters, or anything else that could drive an already strained transhumanity to extinction.
“Extinction Looms: Overcome it” is a massive theme to this game and hopefully exactly the thing needed to make the PCs band together despite (and even because of) having wildly different ideologies. Combined with the ability to swop your body, you can easily have libertarian egoists fighting alongside communist party members without things being weird or contrived. The party interaction potential for this is also amazing, Huzaa!
Also, the have people in synth bodies riding genetically engineered dinosaurs hunted by stealth commandos… what doesn’t this game have?
If inter planetary politics, Space Piracy, Megacorp shenanigans and post apocalyptic earth scenarios don’t interest you, the writes of Eclipse phase has opened the door (quite literally) on experimental inter-dimensional travel as well. The problem is that unlike in other game systems there is no way to find “easy” and “safe” parallel universes, just a whole multiverse filled with things that will easily please any Lovecroft enthusiast.
Stargate: now comes in Soul crushingly terrifying flavor
COMBAT
In Eclipse Phase, you don’t have space battles, you have space deaths. Combat is fast and brutal people die very quickly, but at the end of the day you don’t really mind all that much because backups are available.
When you attack someone and they roll a defence roll, nice and simple. Plus if there is a large difference between attack rolls and failed defence rolls, you get bonus damage. This becomes a little counterintuitive when you realise that you compare the literal value of your attack roll and their defense roll and whoever got a worse roll and still succeeded wins, as opposed to a higher margin of success on your attack roll than the defender’s margin of success on their defence roll.
IE: Not only do you have to succeed at a skill test with a target, you also have to then beat your opponents defence roll (Provided he beats his skill test target) So a master swordsman, who hits easily all the time, could potentially miss a bumbling old granny who can barely dodge if they both succeed their tests.
I think I’m going to go the other way rather…
You also get critical fumbles, when the defender rolls doubles on their percentile dice and rolls under their defence score. This I like to call the “Storm Trooper effect” or something, in that people (regardless of skill) drop their weapons when fighting against skilled opposition. This effect, while frequent enough to be humorous and bizarre, is not actually enough to save you from a horrible death that Eclipse promises however, as your Defense score is halved when your opponents use ranged weapons, which they will be doing because… well… it’s the future.
As such it works out to: every time an opponent attacks you, they have a 1% chance of losing their weapon plus an additional 1% for every 22 points of “Fray” skill you have – the game right off the bat tells you that Fray is a “necessary” skill for almost all characters, which makes me wonder why it’s a skill in the first place if everyone should auto-buy it?
Lastly, actually inflicting damage is almost like a strange foray into another game system entirely, you’re now rolling d10s and adding them together and subtracting them from your opponent’s hit points. Also, you are dividing that damage by a number to see how many wound levels you hand out. You’ll probably hand out 2 or 3, (which translates to a fearsome -20 or -30 respectively to all skills.) So generally after the second hit you’re going to want to get out of whatever firefight you got yourself into. People start to die generally around the three hit mark times. Once again, involves quite a lot of MATH, but, much like playing a tabletop wargame after a few fights you can do it on the fly.
You’d think this would be an uncommon fight scene… It’s not… but hey, at least the Octopus is leaving the humans alone
HACKING
The “Mesh” Section (which is their version of the internet really) reminds me a lot of Shadowrun’s “Matrix”, along with matching levels of complexity. Hacking isn’t just about breaking into stationary complex computers however, in this transhuman age, your very body’s processor is fair game. If you’re in a cheap enough model Synth-morph, your cyber brains may be vulnerable to a greedy AI with malicious intent in mind. I haven’t gone too deeply into the mechanics of these rules, as I have yet to play a hacker character, but fluff wise they seem a little conflicted from an engineering point of view (In my humble engineering opinion) After all, the people in the solar system went from a system of limited, definable bandwidth to a system of limitless untraceable bandwidth in order to keep artificial intelligences from growing too large and powerful. (silly Humankind)
Sticks and stones may break my bones but code actually overrides my basic motor functions
PSIONICS
Right off the bat, I’m going to be honest and let you know that I am always cautious around Psionics. (Ever since they broke Dnd 3.0 and muscled in on my wizard turf!) That being said, the Psionics in Eclipse phase certainly takes a different, refreshing but potentially game imbalancingly dangerous approach. What do I mean by this? Well, many of the powers you can gain access to don’t have hard and fast rules (eg: “Filter” allows you to “ignore distractions” but only “up to the gamemaster’s discretion”) They haven’t even bothered to specify whether wound penalties count as a distraction, or what level of distraction you can ignore. The strange thing, is that as a result none of these do anything actually quantifiably meaningful at the Chi-level weak powers. The Gamma powers seem to take the exact opposite extreme approach and are instead represented as bland skill buffs. IE: you get a bonus to your networking because you subtly influence the minds of others.
Social Interaction!
I can’t help but feel just taking a social skill instead would have been easier.
Lastly, you can read biological minds, or erase memories of biological minds, and stuff like that at the tier end of powers. But in this universe, those are all digital information stored, copied, and altered on a biological media. So, the question I pose to you is, what exactly is the difference between that and hacking?
Regardless, at least they’ve taken a rather interesting approach to explaining the powers fluff wise, in that all those who gain access to them have been infected by some unknown alien retrovirus. The same Alien retrovirus that may have corrupted the original TITAN’s. This opens a whole arena for potential alien motives and objectives to be explored, not to mention party suspicion over their obviously “altered by alien DNA” party mate. (Above picture related). Psi can also have potentially nasty aftereffects (Similar to those experienced by a long-term Lovecraftian investigator “sure I got these tendrils and I wake up screaming… but check out my Shoggoth summoning bonus!”).
COMMERCE
The game actually abstracts your ability to acquire goods and items quite heavily, very similar to how it’s done in Rogue Trader or Dark Heresy. It focuses around the various factional groups within the Sol system and how much influence you have with them, with certain factions having better access to certain things and a check needed to see if you can pull enough strings to organise the gear/equipment.
The same system is also used if you want to call in favours. So, for example, you can ask your anarchist buddies for help with an insertion into a megacorps factory, or maybe your connection with the communist cells on Mars to get you that aforementioned giant crab morph
At the end of the day, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know and who knows who you know.
FINAL THOUGHTS
All in all, this game has massive potential!
Chargen is like three or four steps too long, but the amount of customisation is broad enough to explain why you have to go through all the trouble. Optimally, the game could potentially be improved by revamping/removing the attributes system and just focusing more on the skillsets. (After all, that’s mostly what you focus on anyways.) The game is very rule heavy, with each of the sections containing their own microcosm of a ruleset. This will work well for the character optimiser and number cruncher type roleplayers, but the more “freeform” inclined players will quickly find themselves bogged down in MATH unless they opt to gloss over and streamline some of the details. (Which can be done easily enough if the GM realises things are slowing down)
The fluff overall is VERY detailed and well thought out. Now and then there are one or two things I would tweak for the sake of sensibility (The fact that there is Titan (the utopian of Swedish space communists) and TITANs (the super intelligent AI network quasi-gods partially from space) is maybe a little bit confusing sometimes when being discussed in the lore.) but overall its good quality sci-fi
If you want to jump right in, the Quick-Start Rules, which include starter characters, an introductory scenario, and enough background info to get you rolling in the Eclipse Phase universe. There’s plenty there and even more in the Resources section of the official Eclipse Phase site, as well as the unofficial Google+ community.
Enjoy, and try not to die too many times!
And there he goes again… can no-one stop this 8 legged scourge?
Original artwork belongs to Eclipse phase content is copyright© Posthuman Studios, LLC