Gamemaster Tips

This advice addresses some of the practical aspects of gamemastering Eclipse Phase, especially those that differ from other games.

Tracking Backups

If a PC’s cortical stack is lost and they are restored from an older backup, their character is reverted to an older state, meaning they may lose memories and even Rez Points. For this reason it helps to keep a trail of old character sheets when players backup or resleeve. If your group has digital copies of everyone’s sheet, this is easy. Just save a copy each time a backup occurs, noting the date in the file name. For paper character sheets, take a picture with your phone. It also helps to keep a log of PC interactions and events, to note which memories may fall victim to lack.

Handling Muses and ALIs

Between a character’s muse and all of the gear that has device ALIs, a PC in Eclipse Phase could potentially be carrying around half a dozen minor NPCs (AIs & Muses). Some of these, like the muse, may have distinct personalities. Others will likely be more generic but still have skills they can use and, sometimes, limited autonomy. Handling all these virtual henchmen is potentially complicated, but keeping in mind a few principles about how different ALIs behave will greatly simplify things.

Gear ALIs Are Hyper-Focused

The ALIs in carried or wearable equipment, such as a radio booster or a vacsuit, are mostly reactive under normal circumstances. They can operate themselves and answer questions about their own capabilities (sometimes in excruciating, Brent Spiner-esque detail), but they rarely, if ever, take the initiative to interact on their own. Characters communicate with the ALIs in their gear all the time. It’d be tedious to roleplay with your nanodetector every time you scan for nanobots, but occasionally highlighting the interaction with a device ALI serves to remind the players that most of their gear has an intelligence of its own.

The ALIs in vehicles and bots communicate more, especially when operating autonomously. Although still hyper-focused on their own functions and not very proactive, just the ability to move around independently means that there’s a much wider variety of situations about which to communicate with their owners. Given a set of instructions or a basic task, most ALIs will work autonomously unless they encounter an obstacle or anomalous condition. An automech bot ordered to do repairs on a ship’s hull can do its job through all of the normal conditions that’d be encountered on the outside of a ship, but if they encounter a weird, fleshy alien clinging to the hull, they’ll call a PC for instructions.

Setting ALIs

Motes are ubiquitous in the setting, and with them, the ALIs controlling them. Everything from beverage dispensers to sex toys to public utility feeds has device ALIs. Most lack the individuality of a muse, but they’re part of the fabric of daily life. Occasional conversations with inanimate objects are a good way to immerse players in the setting.

They might not be objects of sustained attention, but ALIs in the setting have the same extensive recordings of their own experiences as other infolife. They can be sources for characters on an investigation — or they can give them away to the opposition, if a team’s foes hack into an ALI that they interacted with and get useful information.

Muses

Muses are more active than other ALIs, giving advice, reminding the characters of events, and covering for them when they’re busy. Muses are effective backup researchers for characters who are occupied or who have poor Research skills. Muses know a PC’s day-to-day routine cold and can handle complex instructions. They cannot default on skill tests, however, so getting a muse to perform a particularly complex set of actions outside of their normal skill set might require a Program or Interface Test. Finally, for new players, muses are a good way to introduce facts about the setting in-character.

Muses sometimes remain functional when a character is inacapacitated or killed. This means they can summon help or be questioned as witnesses. This provides an opportunity for players to stay in the action, at least as an infomorph. Muses are also recorded with your ego into the cortical stack, when backing up, and when egocasting, so they stay with your character.

Playing Each Other’s Muses and ALIs

One thing that can save the GM a bit of work is having the player’s roleplay each other’s muses. This can be a lot of fun but needs to be done with a light touch. Muses shouldn’t go rogue, become pests, or work against the agency of the PC they belong to. On the upside, it allows players who might otherwise be sidelined to participate as a muse, and it eliminates the chance of the player or GM forgetting when a muse might have an ability relevant to a given situation.

Bots and even nanoswarms can also be run by other players if their characters are sidelined. The autonomy of bots makes them a good choice to handle as supporting characters. If the player taking control of the bot is sufficiently familiar with it, the player who owns the bot can stay focused on controlling their main character.

When ALIs Go Egg-Shaped

ALIs can fail in all kinds of interesting ways. As software, ALIs can be directly corrupted by the exsurgent virus. But like other egos, they can also experience stress and trauma. What causes stress tends to relate to the ALI’s function. Muses, for example, take a stress hit when something bad happens to their user, especially if they’ve been made helpless to render aid.

Other ALIs have more obscure stress points. How do you traumatize a security ALI or the ALI in a bot? Device and vehicle ALIs tend to be oblivious to many of the stimuli that would stress an AGI or other transhuman. For example, they tend to be unfazed by physical violence unless it relates to their function (e.g., the ALI in a car wouldn’t be stressed by witnessing torture but might take a stress hit if its occupants were harmed in a collision). On the other hand, most ALIs have a strong, emotion-like drive to perform their designated functions well. An ALI forced to stay on a state of high alert against failing to perform one of its functions could, over time, develop the equivalent of anxiety. A vehicle ALI that repeatedly lost the lives of its passengers might behave over protectively or develop something like obsessive-compulsive disorder. An ALI repeatedly affected by basilisk hacks and function-related traumas over a short time could crack under stress.

Erratic behavior from ALIs can be used as both a foreshadowing tool for the GM and a clue for players. Since it’s common practice to simply overwrite ALIs with a backup if they begin acting strangely, encountering an eccentric ALI signals that something weird is going on. Psychosurgeons or characters with appropriate Know skills should be able to speculate about what’s off with an erratic ALI if they spend sufficient time interacting with it.

Like AGIs, healthy ALIs have mnemonics ware, but a corrupted or failing ALI might develop memory faults, compromising their otherwise perfect recall. Attacking monitor ALIs to tamper with their memories is an effective but difficult-to-pull off intrusion tactic.

Skill Use

A few uses of skills deserve extra GM attention, particularly in regards to Infiltrate, Perceive, and social skills.

Ongoing Actions

For continuous actions such as sneaking or climbing, it is easy to fall into the trap of calling for a test each action turn to convey the ongoing action. Multiple tests, however, increase the likelihood that at least one roll will fail. Instead, treat these as task actions with specified distances and timeframes and a single roll.

Also, failure in these situations does not automatically spell doom; it can simply mean an inability to proceed further. Someone climbing may get stuck. Someone sneaking may be trapped between two camera views. Superior failures, however, spell a fall or discovery.

Group Tests

In the same vein, be careful in how you handle tests involving a group. Having every character in a group roll a test makes it likely that someone will make it (in the case of Perceive Tests, someone will spot the thing) and someone will fail it (with Infiltrate Tests, someone will fail and reveal the group). Instead, treat the group as a single unit and have one character (usually the one with the highest skill) make the roll. Only that character may apply pool to the test. For situations where a group is actively working together, such as investigating a room, treat this as a teamwork test, with a +10 modifier per extra person (up to +30).

Teamwork tests can even work for actions such as a group skipjacking to avoid surveillance. Remember that sneaking in Eclipse Phase relates as much to knowing where and how to move to evade sensors as it does to physical stealth. As such, a PC with high Infiltrate skill can trailblaze a path for characters with lower skill so that they stick to sensor blind spots and move quickly when they can’t avoid sensors — especially when aided by tacnet software. If a group is trying to creep quietly past a guard, however, then individual tests are more appropriate.

In some cases, however, it is better to have individual members of a group roll. This is particularly true of situations involving imminent danger, when the stakes are high, or when individual results matter, such as a Perceive Tests against surprise.

PCs with Better Social Skills than Their Players

Just as all players are not expert sharpshooters or scientists, we cannot all be as suave as our fictional characters. Inevitably, players will face situations where their smooth-talking character would be more persuasive, provocative, or deceptive than they can personally pull off. As a GM, adapt how you run these skills to the player and situation at hand. If a player isn’t being particularly eloquent in real life, just let them roll the test. The result indicates whether their character had the impact they wanted. For players with the gift of gab, let them talk before rolling, and then apply a positive or negative modifier to the roll based on how convincing they were with their roleplaying.

This also extends to tests with Know skills: a player may not know a specific fact, but it’s reasonable for them to ask the GM if their character knows.

Diverging from Canon

Published setting material and scenarios for Eclipse Phase expand on the world as described in this book. In some cases, they may even introduce changes to the setting or metaplots that alter factions or political boundaries. Though our goal is to minimize alterations and include advice for incorporating changes, there is the chance that the setting as we develop it may diverge from the one presented in your campaign. Don't sweat it; it’s your world, introduce the changes you like and ignore the rest.

GMs who want to develop this setting further and make it their own can and should diverge from what’s offered here. Add FTL, or at least fast sub-light ships. Take the ETI factor out of the Fall.

Advance the timeline 20 years. Introduce a new faction or alien species. These are all interesting options.

In-Play Worldbuilding

Recruit your players into helping bring the setting to life, too. Mine their character histories for ideas. When devising your game, leave some things blank. Ask questions about the setting at the game table, and incorporate the answers. Flex points also give players an easy mechanism to define small things about the world, including NPCs. Encourage them to use this, perhaps by occasionally awarding bonus Rez Points to players who add a cool or unique thing to the world while employing Flex.

Play Culture & Behavior

Eclipse Phase was influenced by several classic RPGs in the investigation, horror, and cyberpunk genres. Many of the assumptions about how the world reacts to PC actions are similar to these games. If someone starts a shootout downtown, cops or militia will show up. If a character won’t stop ranting about weird infectious aliens, they could get locked up, pending psychosurgical intervention. If the team kills NPCs all over the damn place, not only will they be hunted down by pissed-off locals or authorities, they’ll also miss information they need to finish the mission. Some PCs may even have day gigs they need to explain their absence from when on an mission.

This reactivity of the world, in most groups, contributes to a problem-solving play culture. PCs may spend a fair amount of time coming up with plans. At their best, these tactics sessions evoke the planning scenes in heist films like Heat and the Oceans franchise. Encourage them as long as they’re fun, but try to urge players along if they get into a state of analysis paralysis. Remind them that they can use Flex points to introduce details that compensate for anything they overlooked when planning.

Maps

Eclipse Phase is flexible enough to run action scenes as a tactical game using miniatures and maps or with a more abstract, mapless, theater-of-the-mind style, according to your group’s preferences. The latter option gives you more leeway for improvisation, and also works better for three-dimensional settings like beehive habs or space. Keep in mind, however, given the networked nature of the setting, that PCs will often have easy access to detailed maps of their locations, possibly even including minutiae such as conduit ducts and ventilation shafts. As a GM, it will help to have maps prepared in advance to anticipate player questions, or at least be ready to sketch out drawings and make up details on the fly.