Bringing It to Life

The key to making your setting feel real is to keep it in constant motion. Reputation networks fluctuate, the mesh never sleeps, ubiquitous surveillance always watches, NPCs have lives of their own, and life never really slows down in AF 10. The world should be dynamic — in-game events should change the world and PC actions should have an impact. These changes do not need to be massive and sweeping; smaller adjustments that affect the PCs on a personal level can really provide hefty flavor.

Social Media Dynamics

Reputation networks are integral to the lives of transhumans. Consider how often you consume social media today, how it keeps you up to speed on your friends' lives, world events, and the latest memes, and elevate that to gonzo levels. With augmented reality and ubiquitous surveillance, social media is everywhere. Try to incorporate this into the lives of the PCs. Muses will keep the PCs updated on the latest trends, news, and faction developments. News bulletins can be related to the plotlines of the campaign, but they can also simply provide flavor. Consider generating a few iconic advertisements, memes, or media personalities for recurring use.

More importantly, rep networks are personal. Big reputation shifts are major news, and the public pays attention to the rise and fall of major players as well as their peers and rivals. A PC who gets embarassed publicly may find themselves memed. PCs involved in a live-streamed fight or newsworthy event will be recognized by strangers. Did one PC have a falling out with a love interest? The other PCs will know soon enough when they see the status update. Use these situations to add excitement, humor, and spice to the characters' daily affairs.

Remember that rep networks are more than news feeds — they are made of people. Some of those peers will have crises, need support, or come asking for favors. You can reserve this to downtime actions, specifically where a PC spends time working favors for contacts, but it can also serve as an adventure hook. As a rule, the more interesting the life of a PC, the more interesting are the lives of their social network contacts.

One way to emphasize social media might be to give each PC a spotlight episode. For one game, highlight their online interactions and social media lives. This can be a great way to introduce sub-plots based on the PC’s history or their life outside Firewall. Doing this early in a campaign may give you material to work with for weeks to come.

The Street Finds Its Own Uses

Transhumans are creative — dangerously creative — which in part explains the existence of Firewall. Many of the perils of technology stem from second-order uses. You invent software designed to keep people in touch with friends, and someone uses the accumulated data to swing an election. You invent a drug to treat a disease, and suddenly there’s a thriving black market of people using it as a performance enhancer. You invent a robotic toy, and someone weaponizes it for an assasination. This process of technological repurposing is constant and can also be beneficial or simply fun. Use this as fuel for everything from news reports and cultural trends (“Synths Lining up for New Chemical Sniffer — Users Report Flavors of Rhubarb, Pizza”) to the foundation of a scenario. If the PCs come up with their own clever uses, make sure to inject those ideas into the world at large.

Fork Concerns

“Splitting the party” has different connotations in Eclipse Phase. At some point your players will attempt to multitask by sending out forks to accomplish multiple things at once. Though this presents a gamemastering challenge, forks can be a blast to play if handled well.

The main trick is to not get too fancy with parallel fork plotlines. Run a full scene or even story arc with one group of forks, then return to the other group, then continue alternating until it’s time for them to merge. Don’t try to switch back and forth between two groups of forks acting simultaneously unless you really have a handle on things.

Some players will use forks as a force multiplier if they are short on numbers. Though forks are often stuck as infomorphs, limited by the availability of morphs, players can find ways around this by using bots or hijacking the sleeves of NPCs. In these situations, treat the forks as you would bots, muses, and other secondary characters. Keep the spotlight on the alpha ego and run multiple forks as a group.

Forks that stay separate for long periods require careful tracking. You may even want to keep separate character sheets, especially if they earn and spend Rez points. It can be easy to lose track of which fork has what information, so take notes on the key scenes, NPC interactions, and locations each has visited. Over time, divergent forks may need to be graduated into NPC status.

NPC Timelines

NPCs don’t stand around waiting for the players to take action. Make timelines of the things your NPCs will be doing in the background. This can be at the micro level (“Basha plants the bioagent canisters in the PC’s cargo hold to frame them”) or the macro level (“The Ultimates initiate their plan to take control of the gates”). Use whatever time units make sense. For a fast-paced scenario, background events might be set to take place on the hour or even the minutes. For big events in the game world, days or months might make sense.

Recurring Villains

The functional immortality of transhumanity upends the traditional heroic narrative. Simply killing the big bad boss is rarely enough to end things. Just like the PCs, they’ll resleeve and start where they left off — or they may already have forks in place to continue their plans. It is often better to avoid having foiled bad guys return right away, however. They may rethink their plans given the exposure or revealed vulnerabilities, or they may have other priorities that require their attention. While recurring villains and revenge seekers can be fun, they can also get stale if overdone, so use sparingly.

Finishing off someone for good is difficult. Perhaps the PCs can devise a way to get at an opponent’s secure backups, but that should require major effort, perhaps a campaign unto itself. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is destroy their stack and have them go missing; depending on the clauses in their backup agreement, this could remove them from the picture for a few months until they are eventually restored. Another option is to get someone arrested for a serious crime in a polity with laws; this provides legal authorities with the power to seize backups, though it does nothing for backups held in private, with black-market providers, or in other jurisdictions.

Some of the threats in Eclipse Phase are impossible to eradicate, such as TITANs or self-replicating nanoswarms. These should be deployed in moderation and in situations that limit their involvement and scope. Some things are simply beyond even transhuman capabilities; simply surviving such could as success.