Super-Empowered Characters

Eclipse Phase player characters are borderline godlike compared to characters in other RPGs. They can acquire information from the mesh that’d take an old tech detective months to sniff out, print any gear they want, fork themselves into a chorus of co-operating alphas, and come back from the dead.

Be flexible when designing scenarios and story arcs. The tech in this setting will allow your players to scoop you at some point, blowing up your exsurgent villain’s masterful plan. Or they’ll finish a task that you thought would take half a session through some shortcut, leaving you unprepared for the next two hours. They’ll blow up the space station they were supposed to explore, nanofab a robot army to kill your exsurgent goons, and call in influence favors that let them dance around social obstacles. Relax, let them be awesome, and think up another obstacle.

That said, there are times when it’ll fall to the GM to be the arbiter of common sense and the guardian of good times. The rules can’t cover every situation, so it’s okay to say no to a player who wants to do something that’s not forbidden by the rules but breaks the fun of the game.

Logistics and Nanofabrication

The rules for nanofabrication assume that characters are making equipment for personal use. Most transactions take place in the setting equivalent of today’s consumer economy. If PCs try to acquire feedstock or gear in industrial quantities, they’re playing a different game, and things rapidly get more expensive and complicated. Most habitats don’t have feedstock massively in excess of their day-to-day needs, so printing more gear than is needed to equip a typical team may draw a rejection from the local feedstock utility. Certain rare elements are only available in limited quantities.

In autonomist space, hogging feedstock will have all of your neighbors knocking at your door wanting to know what’s up. In regulated areas, like Titanian space, requesting militarily useful quantities of the rare elements needed for certain sensor equipment or weapons will have a regulatory inspector politely requesting that you thoroughly document what you’re planning to do with all that thorium before feedstock will be supplied. In the inner system, rallying the assets to build a military-style arsenal will draw attention from Oversight (the Planetary Consortium’s intel service), Morningstar or Lunar intelligence, and/or the oligarchs, market watchers, and crime syndicates who monitor such moves for any potential benefit.

Fork Hordes

Creating forks is easy, and some players may be tempted to over-do it. PCs can and should make use of limited forking fairly often, but printing out a robot army and sleeving yourself into it is a Björk song, not a best practice. Law and custom in most of the Solar System take a dim view of anyone attempting unbridled self-replication. Forking is a form of reproduction, so people react to hogging resources and territory for a bunch of forks of yourself with the same gut level decisiveness they would to someone stealing from their kids. Server space is effectively free in a lot of autonomist habits, but as with nanofabrication, this assumes personal levels of use. In hypercorp space, it’s possible to find someone who’ll rent you a dedicated server farm for all your forks, but even these arrangements frequently come with oversight of how the server space is being used, either by the landlord or by regulators. Getting caught running a massive fork farm carries harsh penalties in some jurisdictions, and it goes without saying that the forks involved may lack legal status.

Customs and corporate policies against excessive forking tend to limit its use where legal oversight doesn’t. The most powerful tenants of Extropia need their libertarian haven tuned to certain parameters to make a profit, and by these measures, hordes of one person’s forks make shitty neighbors. Characters who try to set up a fork horde in a place like Extropia are likely to get a polite warning from their neighbors to desist, followed by a barrage of tort filings or mercenary action.

Finally, there’s the internal dynamics of a fork horde to keep in mind. Forks develop a sense of self-preservation once they’re away from each other long enough. A character willing to flout law and social convention to the extent of creating a fork army is likely to have some troublesome forks, even if they’re betas. Forks should be treated as NPCs when there are more of them than can run in a character’s mesh inserts and implants. One player shouldn’t be allowed to control what are effectively a bunch of different characters.

Time Distortion

It’s possible to massively accelerate subjective time inside a simulspace. To some degree, PCs can exploit this to circumvent time-limited challenges. So why shouldn't they do this all of the time — or better yet, use VR to gain Rez Points? Part of the answer is computing resources: most teams don’t own or have unlimited access to a dedicated server that can run time-accelerated simulspaces. And partly, it’s the limits of simulations. Unless you have a precise simulation of the enemy’s security system, you can’t crack it using time acceleration. Nor can you gain skill ranks by spending weeks of virtual time in a simulspace, because it’s not quite reality.

What proponents of time-accel sims overlook is the personal angle. Your fork could log months in relative time of hard work for you, but do you think they’ll be happy to do it while their alpha ego is out having fun and adventures? Sure, you could rotate multiple forks in and out to lessen the work load, or run them through some psychosurgery to make them happy to do it all, but when you're veering towards that ethical line of virtual slavery, it might be time to reconsider your goals, or your own forks might rebel against you.

Let’s Nuke It

Firewall is willing to nuke things from orbit, but it also likes to learn things that will help it fight future x-risks. As such, Firewall prefers to bring weapons of mass destruction into play after a team completes its investigation and other options have failed. That said, it may depend on which particular Firewall faction your proxy aligns with. Conservatives are more likely to call in the big guns; pragmatists would prefer to capture the threat and study it. Even trigger-happy proxies have to answer to the rest of Firewall, though, and covering the conspiracy’s tracks becomes a lot harder when weapons of mass destruction are deployed. For tension purposes, it’s often best to encourage the PCs to sort things out on their own and leave the nukes or antimatter for the campaign finale.

WMDs are hard to acquire and move without drawing attention, even with nanofabrication. In autonomist habs, public makers usually keep a public log of what they make and materials used. A record that someone’s fabricated nerve gas or made something incorporating a large amount of fissionables will trip alarms set up by watchful citizens. Most WMDs are reliably detectable by transhuman sensor technology, so it can be tricky to move them in and out of habitats. PCs who rely on them too often may find themselves hunted as suspected terrorists.

Puny Transhumans

Technology is only an edge until your opposition’s technology is better. For all that transhumans can pull off incredible feats of engineering, they’re up against a universe that always has something bigger, meaner, and more technologically advanced to throw at them. The TITANs outclassed transhumanity in most aspects of military technology during the Fall, and wherever they are, they’ve had ten years since to develop further. The Factors have a clear edge on us as well, but an unpredictable one. The amoeboids, oddly, have technology we can’t begin to understand in some areas, such as propulsion systems, but they seem not to be far ahead of us in other fields. And then there are the uncountable organisms — those we’ve met and those we have yet to encounter — on various exoplanets. Transhuman technology hasn’t always been equal to the threats it encounters from exoplanet life forms and climatic conditions.

Alien creatures can have abilities inexplicable to transhuman science. TITAN technology and exsurgent psi also don’t always play fair with transhuman tech. For example, a team might find the radar or t-ray sensors they’ve come to rely on fail to detect the dangerous predator native to the world they’re surveying. Or their abilities might work with familiar science but at a scale that dwarfs transhuman capabilities. Yes, you can print a drone army, but the exsurgent virus is coming after you with an entire exoplanet’s worth of infected alien parrot-monkeys. Don’t let this turn into a game of one-upmanship with players, but make it clear, if it comes up, that there are forces in the galaxy against which transhumanity’s best option is to be on the defensive.

Providing Outlets

Maybe once per campaign, your player who wants to build an army of themself is going to be the hero the Solar System needs (or the one it deserves, at any rate). When this happens, let them unleash their hitherto unreasonable impulses. It’s the campaign finale, and there’s a swarm of exhuman probes coming to Titan? Give them the backing from a faction or powerful NPC, let them go industrial with printing drones, and allow that fork horde its moment in the icy glint of Saturn’s rings. One of the themes of Eclipse Phase is learning how to live with the incredible capabilities given transhumans by their technologies. Sometimes, it should turn out to have its advantages.