Apathy Blogs

Eclipse Phase by Posthuman Studios.

Eclipse Phase is a science fiction RPG that I want to love. I really do. It incorporates new sci-fi topics and really feels like an RPG for the modern reader. On the other hand, in some ways it tries to do too much. Which makes it harder for me to sell to the other players. Too much new terminology to pick up. Both in-character and out-of-character.

First let me tell you about the most amazing feature of this game. It’s free. Every book they release is Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike.) That means you are free to copy and remix the material as much as you like, as long as you don’t resell it and tell people where you got it from. More importantly, it means you can download all the books legally. The company itself releases good quality versions of the file. They of course would like you to go buy the beautiful printed books or purchase the PDFs to support them. On the other hand they embrace the “information should be free” hacker ethos.

The setting is the relatively near future. Mankind has colonized the solar system, but nothing beyond it. There is no galactic empire that spans thousands of star systems. We only have the planets of our solar system to work with. We have advanced to the point where we have stations every where from the sun’s corona to Pluto and beyond.

Meanwhile, Earth is dead. Or mostly dead. 10 years ago a collection of AIs sparked World War III and wiped out most of mankind. There is a quarantine around Earth because automated war machines still roam around destroying anything that moves. Luckily the AIs mysteriously left the solar system, so things have been relatively quiet since then.

We have also perfected the technology for copying brain patterns. So a few billion people “escaped” earth by uploading their brains into the colonies. We have the ability to implant these brain patterns into bio-enhanced bodies, artificially grown bodies, or purely robot bodies. However, living space isn’t unlimited. So many refugees from Earth have to live virtual lives in the computer network until they can earn a body. A large number have chosen to contract themselves to corporations as indentured workers, often mining or other tedious jobs, just for the chance to walk around again.

Another aspect of being able to copy brains is that you can now duplicate yourself. The legality of such “forks” (as they are called) varies from place to place. Most of the time it is illegal to have multiple true copies running around, but some places allow limited versions for a short period of time. You can also merge your forks back together, stitching the memories of both into a new whole. Of course, doing so after being separated for too long may lead to mental instability. For the most part, people don’t fly from colony to colony when they want to visit someplace. It just takes too long. Way easier to temporarily send your mind over there and rent a body for the trip.

I said we hadn’t reached other star systems earlier. That’s actually not quite true. After the AIs left we discovered a number of “Pandora Gates” (named after the moon they were found on, although the mythological implications of the name are intentional.) Nobody knows how they were created. They do allow travel to distant worlds. Of course, not very many expeditions return successfully. Those that do often come back with worthwhile information or tech. Whole campaigns can be centered around the exploration of the worlds beyond the gates.

Suffice it to say, the setting is rich and detailed. There are a ton of aspects I glossed over in my quick overview. I really like that the setting has so many types of games that can be played in it. The primary themes of the game are horror and conspiracy, but exploration and adventure are also possible. The Eclipse Phase world is an interesting place to explore.

So what are the problems with the game? It can be overwhelming. I tried to run a one-shot and failed utterly. Part of it is my fault. I had two scenarios to choose from, and I went with the one that had the most straight forward plot. However, it just uses pre-gens from the book. So it doesn’t have detailed backgrounds to hand out to each player. Nothing to ease them into playing the scenario. I realize I should have printed up the Quick Start Rules to hand out. It at least condenses the basics of the setting down to 6 pages. The other scenario I could have tried had better backgrounds, but I suspect it still would have floundered due too information overload at the start.

The rules are, once you start playing, relatively simple. A percentile based skill system similar to Call of Cthulhu or other games. Creating characters? Takes hours. You’ve got a thousand points to spend on skills and other aspects of your character. Which is why I opted for pre-gens. However, I didn’t realize quite how obscure the terminology really was. There’s a lot of info on the page, most of my players got confused too early. I planned on running things rules-light anyway, with the sheets as just a guide for what the characters were like. But since the statistics all use unusual terms (COO, COG, SOM?) my players didn’t really know what to make of things.

So I realize with a little more preparation I could have made things easier. On the other hand, next time around I’m tempted to just use some variation of FATE to run the game. Simplify skills so that people can easily find “Guns”, and “Dodge” instead of “Kinetic Weapons” and “Fray”. Give each character some aspects for their mind and personality, and some separate aspects for their current body. Example: Ruster morph: Aspect: Adapted to Mars. Aspect: Red skin. Making it so that a new player can understand who and what their character is about with a single read through of the character sheet will go a long way toward engaging them with the game world.

Overall, I really like Eclipse Phase. It has some hurdles, although the Quick Start Rules do help. Once you get past the jargon, there is a lot of great stuff in the setting. I just need to find a way to hook players in a single page of text, not 2 hours of studying the main book. Still, if you like sci-fi, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I mentioned it was free to try, right?

Apathy Rating: 4/5.

Tags: 4, eclipse phase, rpg, sci-fi

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.