L
Leodiensian
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Original poster
Eclipse Phase is a game of transhuman scifi, Lovecraftian horror and spy intrigue. The game is set ten years after Earth was destroyed by renegade AIs known as the TITANs. This event, known as the Fall, pushed humanity to the brink of extinction. Then, for reasons known only to then, the TITANS just.. vanished. However, the remaining human population has a kind of immortality thanks to technology that allows us to convert minds to computer data and upload into new bodies. As long as your mind is kept on a server, and you're keeping up with your life insurance premiums, death isn't that big a deal.
Eclipse Phase has a whole bunch of different factions butting heads in the solar system. The inner system is dominated by the Planetary Consortium, a conglomeration of hypercorporations centered on Mars, while out past the main Belt things get weirder, with the Jovian Republic, the Titanian Commonwealth and all kinds of anarchists, isolates and Scum (think mad scientist-gypsies) floating around. But above all those other factions is Firewall, a secret conspiracy assembled after the Fall.
The goal of Firewall is simple - to keep another Fall from happening and stop humanity from toppling over the brink into oblivion. Agents of Firewall, called Sentinels, are recruited from all known factions and can be all kinds of people. They can be criminals or soldiers, hackers or politicians, engineers or pilots. This broad draw is as much a weakness as a strength, as Firewall has no official power to protect itself, being simply a group of like-minded individuals who all agree that humanity's continued existence is a better priority than petty factional squabbles.
So, that's the general setting out of the way. Now for the more specific plot I have in mind: Firewall has recently determined it has a leak. An operation on Luna went horribly wrong, killing and exposing a large number of Firewall agents. Suddenly weakened in the inner system, Firewall has assembled a new cell to the Scum ship With Sharp Flames to make up for the loss of manpower... and to ferret out the mole.
EP's a big setting, though, so there are lots of other potential concepts for a game.
BIG IMPORTANT IDEAS IN EP:
Ego Vs Morph is a really important distinction to make in Eclipse Phase. Your ego is your mind, which is basically a computer program running "human-mind.exe". Your morph is your body - and your morph is NOT you. You might not even have one. Your ego is stored in a part of your morph called a cortical stack; think a hard drive made of diamond, about the size of a grape, in the base of your skull. So long as that can be salvaged from your corpse and put in a new body, you're not dead! Morphs can be robotic or organic - organic ones are favored and synthmorphs tend to have social stigmas attached to them - and the organic ones might not even be human. Morphs can be modified and upgraded, traded and sold, and they're a hugely in-demand commodity following the Fall. And since humanity hasn't invented faster-than-light travel yet, traveling long distances basically means leaving your morph behind and emailing your ego to another planet, with another body waiting.
Forking is the process of simply making a copy of your ego and putting it in another body, so that there are two "yous" running around. Alpha forks are exact copies, while beta, delta and gamma forks are inferior copies, with fewer of your skills, memories and personality traits intact. People often make forks to be in two places at once and then reintegrate to get their memories; this can be a slightly disturbing experience so most people don't fork for longer than a day or so. Also, since many people actually don't HAVE bodies it's considered poor taste to hog up a body you don't really need.
Nanofabrication basically means using nanotechnology to turn a lump of boring base elements into delicious food or awesome guns, using dedicated machines called fabbers. Such technology is a huge point of contention in EP's politics. The inner system economy runs on traditional capitalism, which means stuff needs to have scarcity and value for money to make sense. As a result, the corps TIGHTLY control nanofab tech with DRM, one-use blueprints and watertight IP laws. In the outer system, however, the tech is open source and there are a number of factions that advocate using non-capitalist economies with free access to nanofab tech.
Rep is the cornerstone of those outer system economies and it does see some use in the inner system, though not as much. Rep is short for reputation and it works as a kind of social currency. Your social networks each have a different rep attached to it - for instance, anarchists use @-rep while media types use f-rep - and shows your esteem and standing in a group. The higher your rep, the better those people like you. You can use that rep to buy favors from that group and earn rep by doing favors. On the other hand, doing something to anger that network will lose you rep.
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