Themes

In one session, the player characters (PCs) may explore the ruins of Earth, battling past TITAN machines to find a relic of the past. In another, they fight off exhuman hunters until the pandora gate opens for them to escape to safety. Around the table, during these moments, the players bathe in the details. But the details feel most poignant because they are an integral part of the setting and the broad themes it encompasses. Even when not the focus, the Eclipse Phase setting and adventures will explore several recurring themes. GMs should use these to define the character of their games.

Post-Apocalyptic

Transhumanity survives in the shadow of the Fall, when the TITANs razed Earth and exsurgent outbreaks metamorphosed civilians into writhing biological monsters. 95% of the population was exterminated in a few short years. For every person who escaped via shuttle, ten thousand lined up in mass-upload facilities, waiting for their minds to be digitized and beamed to orbiting servers. Billions more were consumed by war machines and plagues. Stations took on refugees until life support crashed. A few never made it off Earth but still survive among civilization’s bones, hunted by machines. No matter where people set their bed in the Solar System, they can look back on their charred homeworld and its rings of devastated stations and frozen corpses.

But as a wildfire clears space for new growth, transhumanity is set to rebuild society, seeking new ways of living that would not have been possible under the gaze of Earth’s central control. Mars and Luna are centers of commerce; Saturn hosts colonies of culture and science. In the outer reaches, independent habitats incubate new transhuman experiences. As some yearn for the old Earth to soothe traumas, others reach for the stars.

Survival

The Fall is over but transhumanity’s path forward is pitted with dangers. The TITANs left by their own accord, but their death machines still stalk the Solar System. The exsurgent pestilence lies dormant in shadowed craters, waiting to blossom in mutation and death. The Factors, transhumanity’s only ally, are ambush predators pleased to litter their chosen with gifts while setting hidden webs.

If the external threats don’t kill transhumanity, the internal ones may. The major factions are locked in a cold war, waiting for a moment of vulnerability to throw the system into war. Hypercorps release products to control or kill competitors, with no focus beyond the next quarter’s returns. Ambitious explorers dodge quarantine to sell ominous TITAN relics and alien artifacts on the black market. Even normal daily life is rife with danger. Just a loose bolt at orbital velocities can punch through a habitat, venting its precious atmosphere into space.

Extinction looms large over transhumanity; we are just one misstep away from blinking out. New technologies bring newer threats. On top of this, xenoarcheologists have visited thousands of alien worlds, all dead. The civilizations that once thrived there long ago reaped by their own cataclysms. The numbers show that soon too transhumanity will only be cold artifacts, waiting to be catalogued by the next iteration of space-faring intelligence.

Horror

Strange things thrive at the periphery of transhumanity’s light. In isolated habitats, exhumans experiment on themselves, accelerating their own evolution into perfect predators. In dark alleys, refugees inject themselves with black-market drugs, unaware of exsurgent spores now blooming inside of them. As explorers dredge old TITAN warrens, they discover survivors, surgically joined into wailing human insects. Even a malfunctioning airlock and a moment’s distraction, and a person is snapped in half, watching their legs flop freely in the vacuum of space. Death used to be a merciful escape. Now memories drill into the psyche like water torture. People shed their old, mangled bodies, returning them to the recycler to be resold in the next year’s model — but they carry their traumas forever. Adventurers especially accumulate terrors until finally there is nothing left to be done except find somewhere quiet to retire and struggle with their demons.

Infection

In biology, an “eclipse phase” is the period after a cell is infected but before the virus appears within the cell and begins hijacking it. At this stage the infection is invisible, but irreversible. The exsurgent virus survived a decade because of its adaptability, sometimes twisting the body, sometimes anchoring in the mind. No measure seems sufficient to stop it. It just waits, until it has an opportunity to mutate and rebuild the victim into something terrible and new. Some survive years with their infection, as an asymptomatic Typhoid Mary. An unfortunate few manifest psychic powers as a result of their exsurgent taint; a gift of terrible power with an unknown cost. It remains unclear if the virus was created by the TITANs or simply spread by them, if it was a mistake of alien evolution or if it is rebuilding transhumans for some greater cause. Anyone who comes into contact with the virus is considered infected and hunted for the remainder of their days.

Conspiracy

An assassin takes on the face of their target. A polity delivers humanitarian aid to a remote habitat, not knowing one of the crew is smuggling TITAN machines for the black market. A hypercorp contaminates the air supply with a psychoactive pathogen designed to subdue rebellious behaviors. The new world is one of misdirection and treachery. The Consortium, Jovian Republic, and Autonomist Alliance are locked in a cold war, marked with propaganda and espionage. Even Firewall is an organization composed of isolated cells that only communicate through anonymous channels under the guidance of unknown benefactors. The rate of change, from aliens to market spikes, is so fast that maps of the political landscape are obsolete before they’re published. Alliances are formed of necessity until a message from a distant habitat or a disappeared ship turns the parties into bitter enemies.

Because it is impossible to prove identities or motivations, trust is a rare commodity. The virtuous hide their goals behind masks and cut out knowledge from their own brains if it might reveal them later. Firewall sentinels might wonder if the person next to them is their comrade from a hundred missions or if that is their empty morph sleeved by an alien intelligence. In this world, friendly fire is a valid tactic. After all, a dead friend can be resleeved. But trust an enemy and you may cease to exist altogether.

Science

Science caused the Fall that nearly wiped out transhumanity. It was also the cure that permitted some to survive and provides the only path to the stars. PCs wield technology that makes them superhuman, capable of destroying habitats or possibly even planets. But the advanced technology of their enemies approaches omnipotence. PCs must use the tools they have and improvise to create what they’re missing.

Science always comes with a cost, be it the risk of misuse or the loss of what makes us who we are. In a world where most people are digitized and resleeved versions of their former selves, who have the option of modifying themselves beyond recognition and living in environments unimagined by our forebears, keeping a sense of identity and humanity may prove to be a challenge science alone cannot resolve.

Politics

Eclipse Phase explores a universe as it might be: transhumans across the galaxy, with different backgrounds and challenges. The result is a range of political systems, from representative democracies to bands of mind-joined cultists, from totalitarian regimes to colonies of forking-and-merging versions of a single seed personality. Many are familiar, some fantastical, a few obscene. Characters must learn the local customs, but may also pause to appreciate the diversity of the transhuman experience.

The technology available in Eclipse Phase has a direct impact on politics. The immense age and wealth of the oligarchs enables them to influence the lives of millions. Accessible nanofabrication undermines scarcity capitalism. Uplifts and AGIs demand equal personhood status. Forking challenges the legitimacy of voting in democracies. The ability to hack minds and surveil all paves the path to totalitarianism.

Change

The evolution of transhuman society is rapid. The confluence of emerging technologies creates inevitable social upheavals. Norms are erased as quickly as they form. Ideas once considered outrageous or utopian float tantalizingly near. Institutions once assumed to be eternal and inescapable, like the divine right of kings, now exhibit cracks in their foundations or mutate overnight into something wondrously unexpected.

Transhumanity itself is transforming. What it might be like in two years is uncertain, much less twenty. The political map of the Solar System could re-align, another x-risk could scatter transhumanity to the stars, or the species could advance to a post-biological stage, leaving only the bioconservatives behind. The only thing that is certain is the future’s uncertainty.