Unknown Game

[goatkiller666]

I'm getting back to having a life. Or having NO life, which means I should be ready to start doing a game of my own.

So, first off, I'l be spinning up Inferno again. That HAS to be my first priority.

And Alina is still plugged into Dark Ages game. It looks like Taduz is back as well, if we want to keep doing that. I could try to recruit some more players, if that's what people are into. Or, I could maybe spin up another game, instead.

In real life, I've been playing some 40k RPGs (Dark Heresy, Black Crusade) recently. And I'm kind of interested in Shadowrun 5.0. And, I've discussed LoGaS.

Thoughts? Preferences?

[goatkiller666]

And how could I forget Eclipse Phase? That's such an awesome game.

[GM Gavin]

I don't know much about the 40K games and have never played Shadowrun, but am happy to give things a try. LoGaS would be cool too.

[goatkiller666]

Okay, because I'm about to embark on the joys of running a Shadowrun 5.0 game in person, I think I'll do this game also as Shadowrun 5.0. So I only have to keep myself current on one set of rules.

I have the core rulebook available for download, if anybody needs it. (I mean, I'll still have to upload it and set up a URL, but that's pretty easy to do.) Let me know who all's interested.

I have it in mind that this will actually somehow be in the same multiverse as Gavin's game, only dealing just with the events on Nevyn's world a good ways prior to then. I haven't worked out all the details yet, of course. And it shouldn't be earth shattering stuff anyway, but for those who appreciate one franchise nodding to another, you'll want to pay close attention for when I drop a reference to events in Gavin's game.

In my mind, I'll also try to have the events here occur alongside the events in my table-top game. However, given the differences in pace, I can't guarantee that that will all work out.

[Artifacts of Amber]

let me know when you have it together, I might or might not have that rule set. forget which one I have downloaded. I only have 1st edition in hardback.

As far a s characters go I like Riggers and Tech sort so will probably lean that way. Never actually played shadowrun but have the whole series of books (minus 2 I am hunting for) but played cyberpunk 2020 for a long while

[goatkiller666]

Click here for a PDF of the core book.

[Artifacts of Amber]

will take a gander soon. Any time frame on start date?

[goatkiller666]

No. And as I'm struggling with some big apathy these days, I want to make sure I can really run a game. I'm glad there's interest, at least.

[GM Gavin]

I'll take a look at the rules, but it might not be till next week at the rate I'm going today.

[goatkiller666]

I won't be ready to kick this off for probably several weeks, at the earliest. So no rush.

[Vincent]

I'd be willing to try some Shadowrun. I've never played or read the rules but have heard great things about it.

[goatkiller666]

Wow. This bot-post was almost coherent and on topic. Like it's not a bot at all.

Go go gadget Turing Test!

[Timur]

I start to worry bots might start writing Timur's posts:

"Its long past noon today, so Im going to go ahead and chase some eagle tail, but before I do, should I chase Nysra?"

[goatkiller666]

A bot could probably play Kitty.

[Timur]

A fembot perhaps

[goatkiller666]

Gender is an illusion that bots don't maintain.

[Natathip]

Very nice
Do they all look the same, or are posters tailored for the game their in?

[goatkiller666]

Holy crap, yet another bot post that might be a real human.

Natathip, if you're a real human, let's make this a turing test.

[goatkiller666]

Okay, in terms of playing a new game here. I have some thoughts:

1) I have an Eclipse Phase game all mapped out in my head, from the in-person game I did a few sessions of.
2) I very much dig the Eclipse Phase game setting, so I would love to hang out there doing cool stuff that such a world makes possible.
3) I find that all of my characters start to sound the same... they sound like me. And when doing NPCs, I'm not always great about them making mistakes. And yet mistakes are what make life interesting, most of the time.
4) Clearly, my apathy levels are pretty high these days. I really don't want to commit and then fizzle out after a while.
4.1) Gavin predicts five months until his game wraps. I say it'll go past that, just because I know us.
4.2) It seems like a target start date for a new game would be January 1st, 2018.
5) With all that in mind, I think I can be ready to start a game of Eclipse Phase by then.

I'm not sure how the rest of you feel towards EP, though. It's a far-future post-apocalypse world, with plenty of small communities, hard sci-fi all over the place, and any economic / religious stuff a GM could want.

[GM Gavin]

I downloaded the free quick start rules last night and I'll take a look later in the week.

[goatkiller666]

If I can remember how to upload books to this site, I can give you all access to the full set. Need to get an sFTP client on this new laptop, mostly. I am basing the below list of books on the list from the Eclipse Phase website. I don't quite have all of them, but I'll use this list to find the rest. I DO have the adventures, but am too lazy to make snazzy pictures for each of them here. If anybody really wants them, shout it out. Likewise, I have the Fiction in ePub format on my wife's Kindle.

[goatkiller666]

In a VERY summarized backstory, here's what we got: humans have beefed up their tech to the point that they can literally rewrite a physical brain to have YOUR consciousness instead of the person who used to be there. They can copy that data and run it inside a computer as a brain emulator. People can move into new bodies. Bioengineered bodies, or robot bodies, or animal uplifts, or totally in a Virtual Reality world. We have nanotechnology, and with a nano fabricator can build literally any object that it has plans for. People can have nannies in their blood that repair damage, and all the cyber-implant stuff they want to have.

We've spread to most of the solar system. There are even special bodies (based loosely on whales) who swim on the surface of the sun, in magneto-bubbles to keep from being burned to a cinder. There are colony stations just all over the place, plus on the moons or planets that have solid and not gaseous surfaces.

We've created Artificial Intelligence, including stuff that just spontaneously gains sentience (like the inventory control system for a large space station) as well as stuff that was written on purpose to be people. Pretty much every device that is built is fully integrated with the Internet of Things, and has an AI in charge of it. Your car can drive itself, repair itself, and talk to all the other cars on the road to make sure you're safe.

A few of those AIs hit the Singularity, where they started rewriting their own code, and doing it so fast that they quickly outstripped what humans could even really understand. Shortly after that, these user-powerful AIs started to turn on humanity. They were winning the war, and humanity on Earth was nearly wiped out. Something like 10% of our original population survived, and that's pretty much the ones who were out in the solar system. Those who could get off-world before the end did so. Most uploaded their brains to off-world storage, but their actual bodies (which may still have had working instances of their personalities in them) got jacked by the AIs. A big problem with a lot of the off-world sites is that they have a huge shit-tonne of these uploaded minds, but nowhere to put them.

The main goal of the AIs was to upload the minds of people it would catch. But they also liked to make nano-swarms that would slowly turn someone into an attack drone. These nannies would literally rebuild you cell by cell into whatever monster was wanted. Of course, your mind would be replaced with a monster-mind.

Then suddenly, the AIs just vanished. A lot of their kill bots are still active, though. The entire Earth is a quarantine zone, as is a large part of Mars and a smaller part of the Moon.

Those places from Mars and inward still operate on scarcity model economics. They put the mind uploads as basically indentured servants. They are run by hypercorps who rigidly maintain intellectual property rights on the plans to fabricate stuff, and tend to do shady stuff like give people biological bodies on Mars that are intentionally set to break down after ten years, so you have to keep paying them for the medicine, etc.

Places past the asteroid belt tend to be more anarchist about stuff. Sinece you can literally create any object you want, there's no economy as such. Everything runs off reputation. If you're the guy who did that one thing, everybody loves, then your rep is up-ticked by people. If you ask for something, like an upgraded robot arm, your rep is down-ticked. Saturn's moon Titan has a law that everybody gets a decent body. So all of the mind uploads, they're waiting to be issued their bodies (gotta make sure there are enough houses to hold all those bodies, too) so it's a slow process, but they're moving through it.

Mars is the biggest single place, followed by Titan. Then the Moon. Most of the moons of Saturn are part of Titan. All of the moons of Jupiter are a weird military cult state. They worship their original bodies, so don't allow bodies to be swapped or upgraded. (Other cults believe in maximum upgrades, etc.)

A few years after the AI left so mysteriously, we found five Pandora Gates (the first one was found on Saturn's moon of Pandora). These are basically Stargate, only the dialing interface isn't as easy. One on some asteroids close to Mercury, one on Mars, one on Pandora, one on Neptune, and one on Charon. Each gate can go to several other places, but not always the same several. A very few worlds can be accessed by multiple gates, so it means that whoever controls the gate on our side controls whatever stuff they put through their gate.

However... the places you can reach from our gates... those also have gates. These could be light years away, and their gates can then go on to yet other worlds. Since we only partially understand how to dial them, we haven't gotten to the point of having mapped out the whole system.

Also... what happened to the AIs? Why'd they suddenly stop killing us? They were winning.

Finally, a group of aliens has found humanity. They're mysterious, and speak of a much larger alliance of other races, but they're the only one we've encountered. We've found archeological evidence of one other race, but nothing current.

Which means the tthis world allows for corporate espionage type stuff. Straight shadow running, chummer. You can have hack and slash as you try to take back the Earth, or just to raid sweet loot from down there. There's exploration and adventure through the portal. There's the epic mind-fuck of the AIs coming back, and you trying to stop them. It could go many directions.

[goatkiller666]

Okay, I normally just delete bot posts out of hand. But I was so impressed by the avatar pic for this one bot, I had to give it props. So, I saved the file and I'll put it here, before deleting all of its posts.

[GrenSex]

Im a fan of the Fealty Stone. That sounds like a great addition to the game. I would love to see more ways for normal people to contribute to the realm. The realm should feel like its built up from the bottom up and not just those in power.

[goatkiller666]

Huh. This post is almost on topic. The bot who posted it is named GenSex... seems like not the most on-topic avatar name, but still I’m impressed.