Assassins Wanted.

One of the issues I have raised before regarding the Eclipse Phase game is one of mortality, or lack thereof. It's one of the many underpinning aspects of the universe that requires a serious shift in a player's mentality. It's a tricky one though as I am unclear as yet what the difference is exactly between transferring a consciousness and copying one. I would have though that a being would cling onto life under any circumstances even if backups are available, as backups, and forks for that matter, are just copies and separate personalities. Other than vanity from a human perspective, why would I even bother to create a copy or backup of myself at all ? Death comes to me in all its form unless it is actually my consciousness itself that is transferred at the moment of death. This cannot be the case of course if my brain is slowly altered through drugs, medical procedures or torture ie I can go through a radical personality alteration before expiring.

The point about this is that we were mustering a plan to assassinate someone in the last game but the conversation slowed dramatically as we began to realise that the individual will have copies. In that case we don't actually care about his personal view on immortality, we just have to take him out. But are we satisfied with just removing his current persona ? Well, we located his business address and have plans to destroy his server racks where at least one backup resides but we have no idea at this stage if he has further backups and if indeed they lie within a major,  maximum security corporation that provides such services on the basis that they can never be compromised. Mission Impossible comes to mind, so we have been discussing methods of possibly infecting his backups in order to destroy them aside from physical intervention. As always, I am sure that the meticulous planning phase of our mission will bear no resemblance at all to reality.

 

As much as I raise an eyebrow over what could be a flaw in this game, I am reminded of course that it is also an issue in many other more classic scenarios. I recall having to hunt down the individual embalmed organs of Liches in order to ensure that they can be killed, and Vampires, particularly the high level ones, do have a tendency to repeat offend, this is perhaps nothing new in the problem we are facing .

 

We need the cyber equivalent of a wooden stake.

A Jovial mission

 

Managed a brief chat with GM Jon last week regarding his COC. Apparently the intrepid and only slightly insane party have managed to successfully derail the Nazi transmission tower in the Valley of the Blue Monks. There was some attempt a sneaking around in the middle of the night which is always fun and as I understand it they shot a Monk that was about to raise the alarm on the monastery horn. Despite the fact that gunfire is significantly louder than an old gasping Monk pouting on an even older bronze tube, the party actually managed to explosively demolish the offending aerial and get away. As it happens, the only 'explosives' around to purchase in the mysterious mythos mountains were fireworks used for weddings and the like, thus the resulting military operation ended in a sort of special forces barmitzpha. Well done so far but still waiting to hear about zombies and tentacles...next time perhaps.

 

 

On the other side of the universe the Eclipse Phase team have now begun a mission for their new employers, Firewall. There was the option for a memory wipe/roll back should anyone not really feel in a trustworthy frame of mind but curiosity seems to be just ahead of paranoia in the cognitive stakes at present. So without rebooting  we now find ourselves at the Jovian system investigating the disappearance of a Firewall agent - we are sort of in the investigation phase at the moment but are already becoming aware of the various criminal gangs and bosses that run the place. The Jove habitat is founded on inter entity tolerance but with freedom comes criminality and cross cultural rivalries.

 

I only hope that the local mafia haven't infiltrated the municipal services like they usually do as the stink from rotting refuse in a sealed city would start to give the place a post post post modern medieval feel it. We'll see...

Musings

  

So when do you become you ? Stupid question ? You bet, but I ran into this little dilemma last week.

 

I picked up a character to play last week that is basically sort of a familiar, always fun, but in this case I was dumped into it unceremoniously. Last episode the muse as it is called had come to the conclusion, or rather calculation that it was not logical to stay on board a compromised station and transmitted itself out of the game. Not as helpful perhaps as the eclipse phase wiki would imply:

 

 

"Getting To Know Your Muse

 

While a muse isn’t as smart as you are, it’s also smarter than you’d think. A muse will always act in your best interests, but that can mean different things at different times. They learn from what you say and what you do. At first, the muse may seem to be a nosy intruder who bugs you about every tiny thing. It will ask how hot you like your soup or why you tease one of your friends more than the others. Many children get frustrated with all of these questions, but try to be patient with your muse. Every question you answer honestly helps the muse understand you. Muses work better when you learn to trust and respect them. After all, they can’t help you if you don’t let them."

 

Having no idea of what a muse was at the time I gradually became aware of how I should have been playing it by the end of the game, nevertheless in this case it is actually a fully blown ego posing as a muse as far as I can tell, so my confusion was accurate, if that makes sense - an ego being more of a personality/character than an intelligent learning tool.

 

So, to date, having transmitted off the station, intercepted by 'The Wall' (long story) and sent back, everyone now is very suspicious of me what with viruses flying around. The upshot of which is that just to be on the safe side I have been downloaded into a primitive head with an equally primitive voice box - tried hacking it already before you ask but it came off a shop manakin as far as I can tell.

 

I am just starting to get the hang of this universe now, so I will try not to die, reboot, rollforward or forkback.

 

 

 

Knowledge is Power

I would not expect a roleplaying game, nor session, to be an educational pursuit. Especially considering that when I received my first roleplaying game in the mail (Vampire: the Masquerade Revised), my dad informed me it's an acceptable alternative to being addicted to drugs. I've since assumed that's what most would think about this hobby we partake in.

However, during our recent session, as we were being described the scuttling noises made by some bots infiltrating our station, we learned that they were not, in fact, attempting to sink us. Moreover, as we progressed from Bill and Prince Marik showcasing their Thesaurus-like skills in finding synonyms for the word, we engaged in banter over what beings may scuttle, why elephants wouldn't and the effects of low gravity on a creature's ability to scuttle.

While a highly enjoyable conversation, we still had the problem of our corrupted former selves planning to murder us... or so we assumed. There was only one thing we could do, we split the party! Bill's tiny octopus changed colour, and thus camouflaged, counter-infiltrated the vessel docked to our station. While he was going about the ship, avoiding traps and our originals, and gathering intel, the rest of the group did a similar thing.

As GM Jon's Achtung Cthulhu! game did not have enough players, we were joined by Jack who took on the role of Bill's muse. She hacked into the system, a risky move considering we were warned the whole system was compromised, and found out we were dealing with a Basilisk Hack which could infect through audio (and possibly visual) contact. This put a major dent in our plans to jury rig a devive to send a warning. We had very little time to figure something else out because something was at the door to the chamber we were in. Whatever it was, it was cutting and slashing into it so a fight was inevitable. Armed and ready, we opened the door only to find my own mutated character!

It was described as a mutated person with horrific disfigurments all over its body. All this Corruption made us instantly think of Warhammer 40k so we had to roll against being confused by tropes! No? Just me? Well, I did fine on my roll... despite shamelessly looking through my character sheet on a Windows Phone.

Suffice to say, we killed it. Although in true horror-esque fashion, bits of it fell off, scuttled away and hardened on the walls and floor. Then, our octopus infiltrator came back, told us of how the other more dangerous versions of us were destroying the ship's AI and then everything went momentarily dark...

BOOM!!!

Said octopus's other body went limp.
It seems the muse inhabiting it had the excellent idea of beaming itself out of the station and harm's way...

Anti Virus

It seems little beyond doubt now that we are dealing with some form of virus in our Eclipse Phase game. In such an existential and biogenically augmented world it's interesting to see what an infection would look like.. When one thinks about it there is an argument to say that the ordinary, or common or gardenening homo sapien is a case in point.; millions of years of viral exposure have altered or enhanced our DNA where I suspect many mutations have been environmentally selected such that we take them for granted or specifically define the species. Have we always had two kidneys or was it the result of an ancestor catching a cold...?

 

Physically, the complete transcending of our DNA and the extinction of natural selection whilst opening up new transgenic branches to the tree of life, in many ways throws our instincts back further into the past. Gone are the days when a community or even a small group of people can band together under their common humainity. Humans have traditionally established their survival in terms of mutual support and sharing of knowledge, although for most of our past this has been, in part, a pack or mob mentality stemming from defending small communities. As our communities have grown much faster than our DNA has adapted we are left with a contention between empathy in small groups versus friction between larger societies. My point where Eclipse Phase comes in is who can you trust ? Where is your gut instinct (if indeed you have a gut) when it comes to your colleagues let alone your enemies. For now we are united by what is trying to kill us but I dont have a feeling yet as to what binds us together as a party. Still, no point in trying to look too far ahead.

 

At present we need some sort of anti virus capablity as its apparent that there are multpile comopnents to its infection methods. There is code piggy backing transmissions and even the lighting has been altered to carry subliminal information into the retina. Not sure of any biological infection systems as yet but that will become apparent I am sure. Definitely time to update our virus definitions.

Self destruct equipment returns policy.

 

Its a rare occasion to have to stop an adventure prematurely albeit with respect for the artistic integrity of the game, though it will of course happen from time to time. There  have been occasions where a party has turned on one another, usually through some mind alteration or perhaps due to an evil or criminally oriented group of characters. Its also been the case that some things can just get out of control and accidents will happen.

 

The Eclipse Phase universe has many existential aspects to it and presents an additional slant on this. When you have backup bodies exactly how far do you go to preserve your current predicament ? It would be easy to take an extreme example to demonstrate a point, say, constantly destroying oneself violently when in combat either to take out opponents or simply to push ones own body past its designed parameters to achieve tasks. Alternatively a casual engineers job to regularly test equipment, ships or habitats to destruction as part of a design process. Whether a GM would consider it an abuse of a system, it would still be possible - with replication systems on hand fabricating new bodies just becomes a time issue.

 

What is more important in my mind is where a culture's attitude settles in general on this. There is shifting the goalposts for sure in comparison with the world we know but this is a different game completely - would it be fair to say that life is genuinely cheap and if so does it matter ? Where does a sense of responsibility lie either from an individuals perspective or society's in general ? Does there a become a psychological and counselling issue at any point or does mental health become completely subjective in this world ?

 

It's an interesting  exploration and we will see where it goes. Our current predicament, as Krzys's last post implies, is that there is a good chance that we are now overrun and the last option is to scuttle our base along with whatever it is that is crawling into it and simply go back to our backup bodies and review the situation.

 

 

Perhaps this is actually a good time to split the party...

The Enemy Within

I may have failed to mention that you can legally download a pdf copy of Eclipse Phase, so there's no reason for you not to peruse the game.

With that out of the way, let's return to our attempts at survival in space!

Remember those strange noises we heard as last session came to an end?

It turns out it wasn't anything serious. We only found out after taking a quick trip to the fusion reactor chamber, fixing another opened airlock and going back through the greenhouse (centre of the station) and trying to get into our AI's, Hans, server room. The scurrying sound was caused by some of the worker bots watching us. Eventually, they attacked but not being specifically built to fight, they were quickly destroyed.

Just before the fight broke out, we noticed the very same ship we remembered planning on exploring coming ever so closer to our station. We were unable to reach Hans but we did get his logs and as we looked through them, an ominous message was being received. We decided to risk it, put together a crude two-way receiving device and turn on communication.

On the other side of the transmission... were us!

Finally some existential angst occurred. Were they really us after the backup? Which of our groups is compromised? How can we live with ourselves now? What's the optimal temperature of tea?! With all these questions in mind, one thing was clear!

As much as our original copies tried to sound shocked and sincere, we could sense something sinister in the background... and as they called us (or themselves) on our (their?) empty threats of blowing their (our?!) ship up, they docked.

Moments later, they cut through the barricades we had set up. We felt the air pressure of two atmospheres equalise, as a putrid stench filled the station. Many bots came out crawling to scout out the surroundings... and then, something came out...

In space, no one can hear you scream

As you may have had already heard; new games started being run last week at our wonderful club.

My use of a semicolon was not unintentional as prior to Eclipse Phase starting, we had a very interesting discussion on the pluralisation of an octopus. Lines were drawn, alliances formed and backstabbing commenced between the camps of octopi, octopuses and octopodes. As no clear victor emerged from the rubble, we went on to roleplaying!

I must say, even though I picked a ready-made character, it still took me quite a while to copy everything onto a blank sheet. Fortunately, GM Rob was kind enough to explain some of the character aspects I wasn't sure about which is always helpful. I'm told that making a character from scratch for Eclipse Phase is highly time consuming.

The current session started off with us waking up in our spare bodies. If you're unfamiliar with Eclipse Phase, suffice to say it's a sci-fi setting where conciousness is downloadable so changing bodies is everyday business. Last thing we remembered was getting ourselves backed up before venturing out of our space station to check out some ghost space ship that happened to drift by. That was too weeks ago (how ominous!).

The rest of the session was spent on getting around and trying to stop our oxygen from leaking out as something was attempting to open up the station's external hatches. Some of the doors were also welded shut with junk. Ferocious cutting and chopping was had!

We managed to stabilise our situation and started to breathe without fear of running out of air when.. suddenly... a cliffhanger happened!

Something's coming for us...

and it's not existential angst...

that was sorely lacking...