Transhuman Themes

Eclipse Phase isn’t noteworthy for its light and fluffy subject matter. The game is meant to be a challenging look at a future that is in some respects distressingly plausible. With this heaping helping of dystopia come generous sides of horror, adult themes, politics, and philosophy. It’s a heavy mix, and it’s important to acknowledge this to keep the game fun.

Watching Boundaries

Eclipse Phase can be a splatterpunk horrorshow or a deeply disturbing inquiry into the sources of mental trauma in the hands of some GMs. This can be compelling for certain groups and awful for others. Talk with your players about what’s not fun for them before you spring the hentai monster made of sewn-together babies on them. The gross stuff is obvious, but keep in mind that some of the more subtle things that can happen in the game — creeping mental illness, character helplessness, and even resleeving — can also squick out some players. Scaring your players is cool if they’re into it, but you want to avoid inadvertently triggering someone. If you’ve got an arachnophobe in the group, know ahead of time, so that you don’t bust out surprise giant nightmare spiders. And maybe change the Iktomi into lobsters or something. Give players a chance to discuss privately or in writing what they’d like to limit from the game, in case you’ve got players who don’t want to talk about it with the whole group.

Philosophical Futureshock

Death, birth, citizenship, and privacy are all radically different in AF 10. Some players find the philosophical challenges of the setting a heady mix, while others want to go back to Kansas the first time their character has to egocast. Is that thing a suicide chamber? Isn’t my character just a copy when they come out on the other side? How can you casually just get rid of your body? Do forks have souls? Do AGIs? Is uplifting animals a moral imperative? Who is a person, and who is a machine? Is there a real difference anymore? Why be human at all, if machines exceed our capabilities in so many respects?

These and other philosophical quandaries are in the background for most PCs in the game. They’re living life as it is in AF 10, and the philosophical shifts shaping their outlook have already happened. But as a GM, you need to be sensitive to the fact that the players might not be so comfortable. Be patient if they need time to get their heads around some of the weirder concepts. Sometimes it’s worth stopping play to discuss the implications — sci-fi should make you think!

Safety Procedures

Your group might want to considering establishing a procedure for when the game heads in a direction that’s a problem for one of the players. Here’s a very brief description of two safety protocols widely used in the RPG community.

Using X-Cards

X-cards are a safety procedure invented by John Stavropoulos. They’re a great mechanism for redirecting play if it’s going in a direction that a player isn’t up for. At the beginning of the session, place an index card with an X drawn on it in the middle of the table. If anyone lifts or taps the card — no explanation necessary — then whatever caused the X-card to be invoked should be edited out of the game (if the specific content is unclear, pause the play and resolve the situation). This gives players a safe way to ask that the table back off on content that makes them uncomfortable for any reason.

John writes about how to use the X-card in full here: http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg

Safewords

For some groups, agreeing on safewords is a good X-card alternative. One widely used safeword scheme is brake and cut, a pair of terms from Nordic LARPs. When someone says “brake,” they are asking, “whatever’s directed toward me in the game, please step it back.” It is an indication that they are drawing near their limits, but play can continue as long as things are toned back, slowed down, or moved in a different direction. When someone says “cut,” they mean, “I have an issue, please stop the game.” This means the game should be paused until the problem is resolved. If your group adopts these measures, it is important that everyone adhere to them.

Campaign Themes

Choosing a few big themes to explore over the course of a campaign is a good way of centering the story. If at any point you’re unsure which way you want the plot of your campaign to go, themes can be a guide post. They can help you decide which story element, plot point, or character to focus on next. Good überplots can turn out more than one way, and the endings are often tied to opposing thematic elements.

Survival vs. Growth

In AF 10 just as now, one of transhumanity’s biggest conflicts is between what we need to do to survive over the long term and what we want to do to increase our personal enrichment and material prosperity. Particularly for PCs who lived comfortable (or at least mundane) lives prior to joining Firewall, the things the Eye wants may come into conflict with how they think society should work. Firewall knows what it’s doing (or thinks it does), but how sold are the sentinels on this? If you’re breaking into corporate labs at night to make sure they’re not up to any evil, are you really a secret agent and not just a criminal? Security forces who capture you sure think you’re the latter. And what if you run into someone who’s doing something dangerous with noble motives? If a scientist is working on a project that Firewall considers dangerous but could also benefit transhumanity, are the sentinels right to stop them?

Optimism vs. Dystopia

Transhumanity’s situation in AF 10 is one of abject squalor juxtaposed with glittering wonders. Politically and economically, it’s somewhat analogous to India or some southeast Asian countries today. The vast majority of people are poor, desperate for opportunities, and vulnerable to abuse of power. Life is either crowded and noisy, or isolated and spartan. The elites live in splendor barely eclipsed by the Fall, directing the lives of millions and bankrolling megaprojects — like the terraforming of Mars — that dwarf any past transhuman endeavors. But even the poorest have mesh connections and limited access to nanofab, giving them opportunities to learn and organize in ways the underclasses of the past never could.

Player characters exist slightly outside the bounds of normal social categories in the game world. If they’re sentinels, this is partly because of their double lives. But even non-sentinel PCs are more empowered and free to cross boundaries than average people in this world. As such, they should often be called on to take sides. Will they do the profitable thing or the idealistic thing?

Politics

We’re not going to make any bones about it: this is an overtly political game, and political conflicts shape much of the setting. Most readers will be familiar with how capitalist socioeconomic systems work, so we’ve given much more attention in the setting materials to describing new and alternative political systems. If the authors appear biased toward anarchism and socialism, it’s because we are — but we also need to describe how they actually work, since Americans don’t understand socialism much less anarchism. Truthfully, all sci-fi games are biased; most just happen to be biased towards the status quo.

Transhumanism is also in part a political movement. Issues that are just now becoming current in today’s society — cloning, replacing human workers with robots and AIs, genetic enhancement, interfacing bodies with computers — have arrived, had their effect, and been dealt with (sort of) by transhumanity. It’s the “sort of ” that makes the setting interesting; different cultures and polities still don’t agree on how to deal with many of the problems created by technological advancements.

Eclipse Phase is in part a vehicle to ask questions about future political systems and how they can benefit or harm transhumanity. Capitalism is the prevailing economic model of today, but how can it cope with its contradictions, its need or endless growth, or the flaws inherent to the nature of intellectual property? Can it ever deliver a just level of prosperity to everyone living under it? Anarchism empowers individuals, enshrining their liberty and providing a body of customs that promote harmonious living without the mechanical compulsions of law. But how can small collectives of anarchists maintain their way of life if faced with conquest by an overwhelming outside force? How can they prevent internal hierarchies from developing, particularly around social capital? Socialism places the prosperity and happiness of its citizens over the accumulation of profit, but how can a welfare state that promises bodies for all keep up with its population’s needs when it has more people than it can productively employ?

Personhood

Not every PC in this game is going to have equal legal rights. It’s up to your group to decide how often this comes up. As written, AGIs are deemed property rather than people in much of the Solar System, and uplifts face second-class citizen status. Bigotry against non-humans is realistic given the history of the setting, but if being second-class citizens makes the game less fun for uplift or AGI players, ignore it.

For some players, though, fighting back against anti-uplift or AGI prejudice can be a fun motivation for their character. Think about how the major NPCs in your campaign feel about non-human characters, and provide opportunities for this to show up in play. A bigoted villain gives non-human characters an extra motive to defeat them. Having an opportunity to change a prejudiced NPC’s mind through roleplay can be even more rewarding.

Singularity Creeps vs. Everything

Else The ETI behind the bracewell probe that introduced the exsurgent virus to the Solar System is a cosmic horror — crushingly far beyond the scope of the PCs. But the things they encounter on Firewall missions are mostly cosmic-horror-by-proxy, byproducts of transhumanity’s out-of-control advancement that would have been dangerous with or without the exsurgent virus. These things have an urge to multiply, consolidate, and metastasize, though, and it’s this creeping accumulation of risks that Firewall constantly fights.

This world of exhumans, exsurgents, rogue AGIs, and other dangerous entities spawns its own monsters. The Prometheans, though nominally on the side of transhumanity, can be ruthless with individual transhuman lives. Some of their proxy clients in Firewall aren’t much better, and that’s to say nothing of the half-tamed monsters employed by Ozma, Oversight, and other intel services. The stakes of cosmic horror — extinction or assimilation — are easy to understand. But the PCs’ first priority is the thing in front of them, the thing that crept out of the singularity to turn on transhumanity, and the choices in dealing with it should sometimes be more interesting and morally gray than “fight this ancient, cosmic evil before it consumes everything.”

Sometimes this comes down to risk management. You can’t nuke everything from orbit. Some threats encountered by a Firewall team are dangerous and problematic, but do not raise the specter of extinction. They might be genuine x-risks, but do not require the same level of containment as a possible TITAN re-awakening. Or the team might have to make a difficult call about who can be saved. Can they treat the population of a space habitat against a viral outbreak, or is it too risky to do anything but blowing the place up with everyone in it?

Betrayal

Having the client screw the team over is a classic trope in cyberpunk RPGs and their descendants. Firewall proxies aren’t always honest with their teams about what they’re getting in to. Sometimes this is for good reason, and other times it’s because the proxy is just an asshole. A proxy who’s somewhat of an antagonist themselves can do interesting things in a plot, but be careful that the proxy doesn’t screw the team over so often that the players stop trusting you, the GM. Players don’t like it when every mission feels like a setup, but depicting the fall of a dishonest proxy can also be a highly satisfying denouement.

Humor

There’s a scene in the first-edition Eclipse Phase scenario Glory where one of the villains feeds a Firewall agent into a meat grinder, extrudes them as noodles, cooks, and eat them. What a lot of people don’t realize is that this scene is meant to be funny. The scene is pure splatterpunk: a form of absurdist humor that works by going completely gonzo with horror elements. Eclipse Phase is full of spraying gore, absurd arguments with murderous AIs, space stations made of meat, and ads for horrifying but plausible products. Why do this? Because sometimes over the top evil isn’t that far from real life, and there’s a well of black humor to be found in pointing it out. Sometimes, the universe is so awful, what is there to do but laugh?