Thursday, October 31, 2013

304: Lightminute Prisoner

ENTRY 304: Lightminute Prisoner

For his crimes, Roger Murderkill was given a sentence of one million lightminutes. His ego is recast between receiver stations roughly 18 million kilometers apart on a continuous circuit that will take almost two years to complete. He experiences approximately one second of time for every sixty seconds of real time that passes; confused glimpses in his brief respites between farcasts. When his sentence is up, the lightminute prisoner will have experienced a little over 11.5 days of subjective time - and re-enter transhuman society after almost two years of real time.

The brief media buzz that surrounded the lightminute prisoner has already died away, except for the hardcore conspiracy theorists. The specifics of his crimes, trial, and even the authority that gave out the sentence are maddeningly vague, with many of the citations in the news feeds lacking or contradictory, and the punishment itself unusual in that there are considerably easier and economic ways to achieve the perceptual time dilation. Most of the conspiracy theorists (except for the Tortured Artist adherents) suggest that the punishment is symbolic, and done to send a message across to someone - although whom that may be is not clear. The only one that might be able to shed any light on the subject is Roger Murderkill.

COG
COO
INT
REF
SAV
SOM
WIL
MOX
13
14
18
8
13
9
18
-

Morph: Infomorph
Skills: Academics: History 30, Art: Calligraphy 35, Hardware: Electronics 20, Hardware: Robotics 25, Infosec 30, Interests: Experimental Perception 50, Interests: Library Science 40, Interfacing 40, Language: Native English 90, Language: Russian 85, Medicine: Nanosurgery 45, Networking: Criminal 25, Networking: Media 25, Perception 50, Profession: Librarian 60, Programming 35, Research 66
Disadvantages: Social Stigma (AGI, Prisoner)

Using Lightminute Prisoner



Someone wants Roger Murderkill out of the way. They have gone to considerable trouble and expense to see that he is incarcerated in a very specific way, working around the moral, ethical, and legal objections of various habitats and governing bodies who have turned a blind eye to why a transhuman ego is being treated in this fashion. That alone raises red flags for conspiracy theorists and watchdog groups - this could have been done quietly and more efficiently using long speech (see entry 019) or other time perception-altering protocols. To do this and advertise it in the media, even with misleading and planted stories, suggests that someone is monitoring the lightminute prisoner, waiting for someone to make their move to free, kill, capture, or communicate with him...and there are no shortage of groups that want to do all of the above.

The stats given above assume that Roger, whatever his supposed crimes, is predominantly a patsy designed to draw out the real players that his captors wish to identify and intercept. Gamemasters might also make him a political prisoner of a Jovian Republic schism, a dangerous exsurgent criminal that Firewall cannot house for any length of time because of his psi powers, a criminal mastermind faking his own death, the victim of an elaborate revenge that sees his life destroyed slowly, a researcher testing cumulative light-decay and translation errors on transhuman egos, or the newest inductee into an eingerost (see entry 058) cell trying to free him from his mortal trappings.

Catching up with the lightminute prisoner requires calculating his routing, something any PC's muse could do given a few minutes with the software tools available to them and enough information on his schedule so that they can arrive at one of the receiver/rebroadcast farcasters ahead of him. Once there the PCs can hack the software or hardware to redirect Roger's route or isolate him, or use a time dilation protocol to try and communicate with him in the one second he is cognizant. There are no safeguards preventing Roger from communicating with anyone, though he is typically too disoriented to do so.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

303: Hyperia Light Mining Co.

ENTRY 303: Hyperia Light Mining Co.

There are estimated to be over one million asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer in the Main Belt alone, with a total mass only four percent of Luna - and yet that represents a greater exposed mineral wealth than has been mined in all of transhuman history. Miners tend to focus on the metal-rich M-type asteroids, looking for the easy pickings in the form of close-to-the-surface nodes and exposed veins. Yet even though there is wealth enough out there for generations of bouncers to ply their trade, stories roll in of "played out" mines and being "beaten to the punch" as an indie miner rolls up to a promising specimen and finds that the richest outer takings have already been worked over by a previous miner. Outside of any habitat's legal jurisdiction, claim fights can quickly get vicious.

Hyperia Light Mining Co. aims to solve that problem. Originally a microcorp asteroid miner based out of Ceres, Hyperia specialized in surveying, and quickly found that they did not have the resources to exploit their finds, and that it was more lucrative to sell their findings to other miners than try to capitalize on all of them. So Hyperia has begun the transition to a data services corporation, buying and bartering for astronomical, fiscal, and survey data, building up the biggest archive of the Main Belt currently in existence. Complicating the matter somewhat is that their main "competition" is also their customer base.

FreeMiner is a Mesh-based app where surveyors and miners in the Main Belt (and beyond) can upload their data to a volunteer community database, showcasing asteroids, claims, mineralogical surveys, core samples, distinguishing features, amusing rock formations, graffiti tags, individual profiles, etc. As with other community projects the quality of the data varies, made more difficult because follow-ups and confirmations are expensive undertakings and many miners prefer to keep data to themselves, or even seed FreeMiner with false or misleading data. At least one mining corporation tried to close FreeMiner over use of its proprietary data, but couldn't find a suitable jurisdiction to pursue the case - and when their hackers tried to hit the site, they found themselves facing every miner with an access jack and quickly backed off.

Hyperia deals with FreeMiner by working with the app instead of against it. They pay credits for verified, high-quality survey data; post "bounty lists" of asteroids that they particularly want miners and surveyors to check out; issue surveyor qualification tests and digital certificates; and issue updates to FreeMiner via a 'ransom' model, averaging once a week. The microcorp makes no bones that this is a business as well as a community service, and sometimes attempts new products like "elite memberships" for FreeMiner with access to advanced algorithmic tools that suggest asteroids which are unclaimed and mathematically likely to have good deposits, but such efforts have had little 'stick' so far, as the data is often pirated and posted onto the normally accessible FreeMiner in short order. Still, individual miners and hypercorps sometimes hire Hyperia for private computations or even early access to their regular updates.

Seeds

  • The player characters are hired as security by a Hyperia surveyor out to catalog an unusually small, compact asteroid family which is being picked over by rival miners - one of which is one bad job away from turning into full-blown space pirates. If they can keep the surveyor alive and get the data out safe, they'll find that not only do they get paid, but they've developed a small rep in the Belt community and have several job offers waiting when they get back.
  • A malicious hacker is going to obscure corners of FreeMiner and changing key data, costing the community considerable time and effort to clean up their work - enough that a group of sysadmins gets together and offers a bounty if the PCs break their limbs and tell them to knock that shit off. Of course, when they get to the hacker's domicile, it turned out to be a 12-year old menton who was just having a bit of fun...
  • Hyperia wants to expand beyond the Main Belt, consolidating data from other Mesh apps into a single pan-Solar Mining Registry. The project is still in its early stages, and dealing with all the different local apps and miners is proving a headache, especially for a microcorp that doesn't have much presence outside the Belt. The PCs are hired to act as Hyperia's representatives on their habitat to negotiate with the local miners, surveyors, app-programmers, etc. However, the locals are suspicious, and to earn their trust the PCs will have to join the local Mining Guild and be certified as surveyors. Hyperia will pay for the classes, but can't prepare them for the initiations, which may venture from the ridiculous ("the hair vacsuit") to the dangerous ("dead man's spacewalk" - a short trip through vacuum without an vacsuit - don't hold your breath!)

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

302: Vanth

ENTRY 302: Vanth

"The grey dust grew into a tree, tiny glowing advertisements running down its limbs and trunk and the roots that ate into the metal floor. Steam and smoke poured off of it as it vented heat from the transformation, and in moments the tree flowered, blossomed...and gave forth fruit. They were cherries, perfect spheres of glassy red... Maria ate the first one. I remember how she screamed as it ate her from within, saw the pale grey fuzz spread from her lips...and that's when I had the idea."
- Dr. Schloss, explaining the origin of the Vanth Forbidden Zone

Out in the Kuiper Belt are plutinos - small, icy dwarf planets like Eris, Pluto, and the "anti-Pluto" Orcus. Tidally locked with Orcus is a moon, it's only natural satellite: Vanth. While Orcus is the focus of water ice and hydrocarbon mining, Vanth is sealed off by treaty of the major powers in the Solar system, with everyone forbidden access unless approved by the Vanth Commission, a politically independent body that oversees the Vanth Nanotechnological Proving Grounds, informally known as the Forbidden Zone.

Vanth is a live test site for nanotechnological disaster scenarios - the legendary "grey goo" incidents of rogue or poorly-programmed nanotech devices and weapons which could pose a large-scale threat. The media currently estimates as many as 300 nanotech weapons have been unleashed on the surface of Vanth or its subsurface caverns. The exposure to multiple grey goo scenarios has reshaped the surface of Vanth, though regular assaults with EMP bombs, orbital HERF guns, and interplanetary weapons stationed on the side of Orcus facing its moon disrupt and and occasionally clear portions of Vanth from infection - although the Commission only does so in order to introduce new nanotech weapons to their ongoing test scenario.

Ammonia-miners on Orcus have taken telescopic images of Vanth, and describe it as a shifting, promethean surface reshaped by warring rogue nanotech, though cold and lack of sunlight appear to diminish the spread of individual swarms. Some portions of Vanth consist of a single metallic hypermembrane covering a hidden ocean rolling with a sargasso of mercury-like puddle-balls; the north polar regions show spindly towers or antenna and face frequent bombardment from Orcus whenever a radio pulse or signal is detected from that region, and the southern "continent" is an ongoing fractal structure, like a mountain carved by a jeweler into the perfect cut.

Using Vanth

A laboratory on a planetary (well, planetoid) scale, Vanth is ground zero for research into the deployment and counteraction of "grey goo" scenarios and nanotech weapons - critical research for most of the major political and economic powers of the Solar system, but too dangerous to have multiple test sites sitting around. As a setting, Vanth is exotic (and deadly) even by Eclipse Phase standards, with player characters facing near constant risk of infection from multiple hostile nanotech strains the longer they remain on the planet. That said, if the PCs are willing to make a run past the entrenched (and mostly automated) defenses on Orcus and in orbit around Vanth, they could conceivably make landfall and survive long enough to get a few primo samples, which could be worth millions of creds on the open market. Alternately, the Commission might hire them to test their security, to deliver a new weapon and observe/record the results, or even rescue another group - or, if the goo has gotten hold, eliminate them.

Seed

  • Rumor has it that the Planetary Consortium has secretly been using Vanth as a prison colony, keeping dangerous and insane mentons locked up in an underground habitat where they only survive by constantly reprogramming incoming nanoswarms. The PCs are hired to find evidence of this prison, and if possible to free the inmates. Unfortunately, a prison break scenario triggers an "Apocalypse Cless" nanowar event followed by a "clean sweap" series of EMP pulses from orbiting satellite weapons. Neither of which are likely to do the player characters any good.

Monday, October 28, 2013

301: Bonus Point Bank

ENTRY 301: Bonus Point Bank

It used to be hard to bank a favor. Reputation networks trade on ephemeral currency, and it's up to the individual transhumans who they owe and how much a given favor is worth. Most transhumans in a network base requests against the individual's rep score, giving up some of their personal judgment in exchange for a like consideration. Still, a rep will only get you so far - especially out toward the brink, where the rep networks haven't all situated themselves yet, and membership is thin. You might have a solid rep back Sol-ward, but out past Jupiter where the network is maybe a half-dozen transhumans with limited resources, even a "small" favor can tax your rep fairly heavily. Given those kind of circumstances, sometimes people need a way to 'cash in' on their rep more directly.

The Bonus Point Bank began as a money laundering tool designed to abuse rep networks, and evolved into a service allowing network users to directly transfer their reputation into assets and vice versa. The 'bank' works as a collection of false identities plugged into the rep networks; users who wish to use their services transfer property or currency to the 'bank' and the group of identities upvotes the user's profile in the network in direct proportion, and later on that user can request a 'favor' from one of the cover identities in the form of the assets or property that they 'deposited.' The original incarnation of the Bonus Point Bank involved fees, but the contemporary version has been re-engineered as a fee-free service designed to extend network access in areas with a low density of network resources and assets.

Still, there remains some ethical qualms about the Bonus Point Bank and related services, as they actively subvert the trust-based nature of the reputation networks with the promulgation and use of false network identities, which are routinely flagged and eliminated - and just as routinely new ones are created and carefully fostered with Mesh blogs, subscription channels, etc. Still, the anti-bankstas have succeeded in making rep-banking a moderately disreputable activity, and apt to cause a spate of downvotes to anyone caught using such services.

Using Bonus Point Bank

Rep is a great concept and one of the more terrific ideas in the Eclipse Phase setting. That said, it does depend and require that there be transhumans around in the same network willing to exchange favors with each other, and in some of the extreme locales that player characters find themselves in that's not always a guaranteed situation. That can make for a great additional wrinkle to a scenario as the PC is forced to rely on their own resources (or what they can beg/steal/join another network to get), but sometimes it can be a game killer. The Bonus Point Bank is there to prevent a session from grinding to a sudden halt because the PCs don't have the local currency to keep going - whether it's to buy a vacsuit, rent a vehicle, pay bail, grease the wheels of bureacracy, or any of the million and one other problems that money can solve.

Mechanics

The Bonus Point Bank allows a player character to convert rep directly into credits (or other currency) and vice versa. To 'deposit' monies at the Bonus Point Bank, the PC simply exchanges credits (or other currencies and property); for every 1,000 credits or equivalent their appropriate rep score increases by 1. Any amount of credits can be deposited in this fashion, but the maximum rep that can ever be gained this way is 6 points. To 'withdraw' monies from the Bonus Point Bank, the PC burns rep points equal to the equivalent favor (see Favors table, Eclipse Phase 289) plus 1 (so, a trivial favor would be 0 + 1 = 1, a low favor would be 1 + 1 = 2, etc.) and receive the appropriate amount of credits (or the equivalent in local currency/property) according to the Acquire Services Table (Eclispe Phase 290). Unlike normal favors, there is no refresh rate on these transactions - a PC can continue to burn favors until they have the currency they need or run out of rep.

Example
Daisy Six is in jail in Nova York and needs some fast cash to make bail, which has been set at 1,000 noyos. Making the most of her one Mesh transaction, Daisy contacts the Bonus Point Bank and sets up a 'withdrawal.' Marking off 6 @-rep, the funds deposit into Daisy's account...and Daisy Six is a free transhuman once again.  

Despite the comparison to a bank, the PC does not have an "account" as such and does not need to have deposited monies to withdraw them. At the gamemaster's discretion, player characters that abuse the Bonus Point Bank system may be Blacklisted from the network.

Seed

  • Santa-bot has come early this year...an unknown benefactor has deposited funds in the PC's names in the Bonus Point Bank, giving them a healthy 5-point boost in one of their reps. Unfortunately, that turns out to be a bank error in their favor, as a very dangerous-looking gentleperson from the Nine Lives drops in to explain. Of course, this is all a simple misunderstanding and if they can't pay back the money then the PCs are welcome to the rep bonus - but now the Nine Lives want a little favor in return: there's a shipment of plasma rifles heading off the habitat tomorrow and they want one of the crates to quietly end up on a different shipping platform.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

300: Su Bede

ENTRY 300: Su Bede

"Su's face today is designed by Alafonzo, and carved from the bones of orphans that died during the Fall. Order yours now and one tenth of every credit will be donated to..."
- Partial marketing spiel

It takes more than the gaunt figure of a heroin addict to be a successful model in today's fashion industry. The proliferation of morphs has changed the standards of beauty from the classical starvation victim to a plethora of transhuman standards, and fashion has adapted to this new environment by trying to capture the elegance, grace, and dead sexiness inherent in every morph. So bouncer models have breasts that are only realistic in microgravity, mentons shave their heads to show off the access jacks, and neotenics aim for an androgynous look that minimizes secondary sexual characteristics. Su Bede has it harder than her biomorph peers - she's a synth.

When an hourglass chassis is something that can be banged out in a shop in an hour, synth models like Su have to work less on their physical appearance than their physical movements; absent the mammalian fascination for cleavage she commands the audience at fashion shows with poise, grace, movement, and stance. One of the first synth models, Su has invented some of the theatrical language of contemporary synth modeling, making use of the extended range of motion of synth morphs and alternating between deceptively simple "natural" movements into complicated rotation routines that would be impossible for biomorphs to imitate. Su Bede has parlayed her modeling success into her own clothing and jewelry lines, but now she has started something more ambitious: cosmetic inlays.

Metal, plastic, even gemstones, anything artificial is ridiculously cheap to manufacture - so Su has begun to model interchangeable cosmetic augmentations for synthmorphs based off of expensive organic materials. Wigs of real hair, fur, feathers, kelp, etc.; faceplates of bone, wood, porcelain; strips of leather that dangle from the shoulders like a cape or gird about the loins like a cannibal's miniskirt; and those are just the initial offerings in her catalog. If these biosource cosmetic inlays take off like Su thinks they will, they might just be her shot into the big time.

COG
COO
INT
REF
SAV
SOM
WIL
MOX
18
15
15
25
15
20
20
-
INIT
SPD
LUC
TT
IR
DUR
WT
DR
6
1
40
8
80
40
8
60

Morph: Synth
Skills: Academics: History (Fashion) 40, Academics: Psychology (Fashion) 37, Academics: Sociology (Fashion) 37, Deception (Cosmetics) 40, Disguise (Cosmetic) 44, Free Fall 26, Interests: Fashion 50, Interests: Gossip 40, Interfacing 26, Language: Native French 92, Language: English 80, Language: Italian 78, Networking: Criminals 25, Networking: Fashion 80, Networking: Media 44, Profession: Fashion Designer 55, Profession: Model 45, Protocol 55
Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cosmetic Modifications (wood, stone, and mother-of-pearl inlays)
Mobility System: Walker (4/20)
Traits: Armor (6/6), Social Stigma (Clanking Masses), Uncanny Valley

Using Su Bede

Fashion is one of those weird industries that is all appearance; the skill and efforts and logistics that goes into the design and production of the models' glamour is often lost on the casual audience, who see only the peacock-strut of starved men and women parading in gaudy and sometimes silly outfits on the Mesh. Yet make no mistake, this is a multi-billion credit industry, and behind the artsy pretension and surface vanity of high fashion lie ruthless, resourceful business people and highly-trained, dedicated models who twist and contort their bodies into specific roles over long periods of time. While it is easier than ever to achieve the physical appearance that you desire in Eclipse Phase, just having chiseled abs and butt-cleavage so mathematically perfect that a geometry teacher would weep in joy isn't enough to succeed - especially when you're a synth.
Su Bede is an "in" that the gamemaster can use to introduce the player characters to the fashion industry in Eclipse Phase. She knows practically everybody that is anybody, from the has-beens to the players to the hot young things from the meat markets. As a contact, she is their ticket to meeting the people who do not accept random friend requests or questions from strangers, and has enough pull and dirt to get the PCs what they need, from an invitation to rustling up a good costumer in the middle of the local sleep-cycle. Her modeling activities and new cosmetic inlay line are also solid points to hang an adventure on, from rivalries and business trouble to inconvenient bodies in the dressing room that need to be done away with before the curtain goes up. As an antagonist, the PCs are only ever likely to earn Su's wrath if they thwart or threaten her ambitions - something that they could easily do accidentally in the course of other work, like intercepting a load of illicit seasoned cinnamon-wood that was supposed to go into her latest project. However, her influence doesn't generally extend to ordering hits or making the PC's lives hell - but she will see them blackballed from the fashion industry, making everyone refuse to even talk to them, unless they can find out what they did wrong and make amends.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

299: Corporate Totem

ENTRY 299: Corporate Totem

"I am never disarmed."
- Direct Action Totem, before unleashing her attack womb

Hypercorps are more than just hierarchical businesses organized to maximize profit/production and with joint ownership. They have grown beyond the easy definitions of a single legal or ethical system, becoming sprawling interlinked matricies of social connections, softare, legal and economic obligations, and most importantly people. Transhumans make a hypercorp; without employees and shareholders and customers they are empty concepts. Yet it is difficult after the Fall, when so many transhumans are displaced from their homes and old lives, to hold them together in a single corporate culture. To expand across worlds, to hold its employees against the poaching and honeytraps of rivals, to care for their dependents and wellbeing in sickness and in health, hypercorps must have goals beyond the domination of an industry or the maximization of profit. They must have ideals that transhumans can comprehend and follow, a corporate ethos that employees and officers can make their own, a discrete purpose that lifts them about grubbing for credits and exploiting the gullible masses. It is not enough to have texts that define these hypercorp attitudes, or songs and XP media that can serve to propogate their message. Hypercorps needs individuals that exist as examples of their philosophies in action, living embodiments of the hypercorp to steer and inspire outside the set hierarchies of the hypercorp. These are known as the corporate totems.

A totem is an AGI, often crafted from the corporate founder or a CEO that best embodied the attributes and attitudes of the hypercorp; the AGI is then pruned and psychosurgically altered into an exemplar of the hypercorp, its individual memories washed out and replaced with the skills and experiences appropriate to their new position. Most corporate totems exist outside the organizational chart, mobile officers with broad authority and special rights that allow them to interact with individuals at every level of the hypercorp and address the issues they are dealing with. For each hypercorp, the totem is different - the Direct Action Totem is a fury that leads from the front, always on the front lines, and her troops come first; while the Experia Totem is a rotating position, a mediagenic overmind that puppets key officers and personalities to literally experience what they go through and make changes by speaking through them.

Using Corporate Totem

Iconic characters stand for more than just themselves: they are the meter by which entire groups, nations, religions, and concepts are judged in ways that go far beyond any formal position or authority. This is useful for gamemasters because it can allow them to distil the essence of a hypercorp into a single personality, to allow one character to front for an entire philosophy and way of life - for good or for ill. This need not make the totem a shill for the company, any more than Captain America is always a mouthpiece for the United States government in comics; the totem is the spirit of the hypercorp, not its brains or balls or conscience, and will work to see that the hypercorp continues to follow the philosophy that the totem lives by. In this way, the totem is almost guaranteed to live a life of conflict, facing internal hypercorp threats almost as much as external ones, and provides a decent "in" for the gamemaster to bring the PCs into the innermost workings of any given hypercorp.

Seeds

  • The Gatekeeper Totem believes that the corporation is seeking too much to monetize and exploit the Pandora Gate, and focusing too little on exploration and scientific research. To counteract this balance, it is planning a demonstration - a surprise documentary that will cover ten new exoplanets which Gatekeeper has suppressed knowledge of. The totem has the access to get the crew in, but needs gatecrashers with an adventurous spirit to keep them safe and help explore on the whirlwind gatecrashing tour. Are the PCs game?
  • The Go-Nin Totem has been murdered - and the first task of her back-up fork is to figure out who killed her previous incarnation. The PCs are brought in as private investigators, backed up by the authority of the totem - an authority that not everyone in the tradition-bound Go-Nin Group is happy to accept. Rebellion is brewing in the corporate ranks, and the PCs meet with someone who claims to be the emerging totem of a new Go-Nin Group - one which wishes to break from the keiretsu model and experiment with more flexible corporate hierarchies. The totem that hired the PCs believe this "new totem" is a flawed gamma fork - and if the PCs are not very careful, they will quickly end up in a hypercorp civil war.

Friday, October 25, 2013

298: Gold Ballast

ENTRY 298: Gold Ballast

"Gold is no longer a store of value."
- Opening invocation to the AF 3, 3rd Annual Mass Economist Suicide Convention

The migration of transhumanity from Earth to space has necessitated a reconsideration of the values of many things. Metals that were scarce or difficult to mine from the surface of the Earth are astoundingly plentiful and easily available from asteroid mining - even a relatively small asteroid a few kilometers long with an average metal content of 3% by volume can contain more gold and platinum than has ever been harvested from the surface of the Earth. Of course, few miners are quite so thorough in their pursuit of mineral resources as to process an entire asteroid, aiming instead to pick out the most profitable metal nodes and agglomerations then moving on, but the simple fact remains: gold is fairly cheap, while hydrocarbon compounds and botanicals that cannot be easily mined or manufactured in abundance are precious. Wood is far more costly and rare than gold, though the latter retains sentimental and aesthetic value for jewelry, dental work, some electrical and electronic applications, and so on - but for most of the solar system, gold is most known as the preferred ballast material.

One of the technical requirements for any good spacecraft, satellite, or habitat is ballast - preferrably something dense and inert. While still a commercial good, the relative low cost of gold with relation to its volume makes it an ideal ballast material, and many minecraft contain simple forge equipment to separate gold from the ore slag and cast standardized weights to adjust the center of gravity on their loads. When they reach their destination, the gold masses that cannot be sold are often left behind to save mass on the return trip, and piles of gold spheres, discs, and slugs (often more than slightly radioactive) form common sights in scrapyards.

Of course, the most famous use of gold ballast is in the Starwell gravity tractor, which uses the gravitational field of a massive series of gold weights to adjust the orbit and approach of nearby asteroids without actually touching them. The gravity tractor - which currently consists of up to eighteen 1 kiloton gold slugs stacked together by carbon fiber rods and pushed by an antimatter drive - maneuvers near the target asteroid, and the gravitational forces between the two masses adjust the course of the asteroid. While a delicate operation, the gravity tractor is considered by many inhabitants of Starwell as a key component of asteroid defense and the continued long life of the habitat, and there has been some interest in licensing the design (particularly the targeting and gravimetric software and sensor package) from habitats on Mars, Titan, and Luna.

Using Gold Ballast

The future is not defined by our expectations. Prices in Eclipse Phase are not denoted in any of our national currencies, and there is little reasonable expectation that commercial brands of the current day will make it into space in a recognized form - so why should the rather primitive notion of gold as a shiny, imperishable metal being a cornerstone of economic thought survive into the future? Hell, most economists will tell you straight up that gold isn't that important today. So if you strip away the currency folklore and look at the basics of it, what is gold good for? Well, it's dense, malleable, and relatively abundant - all good qualifications for ballast, and a nice flavor piece to challenge the preconceptions of players that equate gold with money or wealth. This isn't to say that every story with gold has to be an economic fable, but the potential is there if you want to play with it.

Seeds

  • The PCs arrive at a small brinker habitat on Mars known as Randtopia, which uses gold coinage for all internal exchanges, reserving credits and other currencies for trade with outsiders. Of course, the PC's are using a fifty-kilogram gold slug as ballast - which as far as the Randtopians are concerned, is a single coin with a greater mass than all the gold they have in circulation. When they learn of it, the government moves to impound the gold ballast before it destabilizes the local economy, but the Randtopians have already learned of it and the resulting speculation has a devastating effect on local prices and markets, not to mention the groups that wish to steal it. How the PCs deal with the situation is up to them, but even extracting themselves from Randtopia might be harder than it looks.
  • The Starwell gravity tractor has been stolen by space pirates. Worse, the pirates have made it into a weapon - accelerating up to speed and then releasing one of gold bricks creates a 1 kiloton missile with a lot of inertia. Starwell has been issued an ultimatum: one billion credits and ten kilotons of water-ice or their habitat vanishes in a cloud of gold dust. The PCs, who are not currently on Starwell, are asked to try and infiltrate the ship and activate the antimatter drive's self-destruct sequence.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

297: Jane Starware

ENTRY 297: Jane Starware

"You see an orphan. I see an undeveloped personnel resource."
- Nicky Blackstone

Hypercorporate life can be tough on families. Along with the hustle and bustle of work, meetings, training camps, seminars, conferences, and all the other events that fill the business portion of the calendar, hypercorps are also societies with their own holidays, teambuilding events, birthdays, and parties, and have to incorporate transhuman events like weddings, funerals, births, resleeving, augmentation and sick leave, and office sex. Employment in a hypercorp, as opposed to freelancing, is a serious commitment for both the hypercorp and the employee and their families. There are health, financial, and educational benefits to be sorted out, and each employee represents a massive investment in time and resources. So on occasion when an employee dies or chooses to give up their children for whatever reason - or, in some cases, when unauthorized fraternization leads to an unexpected and undesired pregnancy - the hypercorp will adopt and raise the child as its own. (Some hypercorps tried the whole clone-worker approach, but after the debacle with Moletronics Amalgamated Genetics, it's a hard sell.)

Jane Starware is one of the adopted children of Starware hypercorp, born and raised by the Starware community, educated through their Pre-Professional Trainee Program, and slotted to advance into their Advanced Internship (Remunerated) program next semester if she can keep her grades up. Individual orphans' relationship to their parent corporations is determined by corporate law and their respective contracts with the hypercorp in question; Jane is currently operating under a "pre-majority contract" which can expire when she reaches legal majority, unless she chooses to transition into a full employment contract.

COG
COO
INT
REF
SAV
SOM
WIL
MOX
11
14
12
9
9
7
10
-
INIT
SPD
LUC
TT
IR
DUR
WT
DR
4
1
20
4
40
35
7
50

Morph: Menton
Skills: Academics: History 16, Academics: Physics 16, Art: Singing 14, Deception 13, Free Fall 13, Hardware: Robotics 14, Interests: Hypercorps 15, Interests: Kid Fashion 14, Interests: Starware Lore 16, Interfacing 17, Investigation 16, Kinesics 15, Language: Native German 78, Language: English 70, Language: French 63, Networking: Hypercorps 15, Networking: Scientists 15, Perception 15, Profession: Student 15, Profession: Intern 15, Programming 16, Protocol (Corporate) 15, Research 15, Unarmed Combat 16
Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Hyper-Linguist, Math Boost

Using Jane Starware

Being an orphan doesn't always mean being an unloved, unwanted brat. Jane Starware hasn't received a traditional upbringing, but just because she can't identify a specific prime parental figure (she's never met the donors of her genetic material, but for her birthday she was allowed to view their personnel records and noted they both scored very highly on the standard evaluations before their untimely deaths, though those records are still sealed). She's young, and rather optimistic about her future, but curious about the outside world. Her place in the corporate hierarchy isn't confirmed yet, but she already has a rather large indenture hanging over her head (sunk costs from raising her), and Starware aims to recoup those resources one way or another.

Seeds

  • Jane has a teenage rebellion stage scheduled, and the hidden sensors in her living facility have picked up evidence of outside communication and a likely runaway attempt. Starware is already aware of this, and plans to let her go for a few weeks or months to experience the outside world. However, Jane's Personal Manager is worried about her safety, and approaches the player characters to keep an eye on her and keep her away from any real threats to her future. If the PCs are up for a little ninja chaperoning, they'll earn a sizable favor from a Starware exec.
  • Jane Starware approaches the PCs. She wants them to uncover the sealed files on the death of her parents/genetic donors from the Starware corporate archives, and can provide a limited amount of assistance. All she has to pay is her "piggy bank" - a secret cache of Starware coupons that can get the PCs up to 20% off on any single purchase.
  • A group named the Comprachicos approaches the PCs, asking them to help extract Jane from her indentured status so she can be placed with a more traditional transhuman family. After the extraction goes off, the PCs are approached by Starware, and find out that the Comprachicos are a gang of corporate headhunters aiming to sell Jane to a microcorp with less stringent ethical standards toward their juvenile employees and corporate wards.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

296: Sweeps Squad

ENTRY 296: Sweeps Squad

Catharsis is the heart of attracting and keeping a prime audience, and in their quest for higher market shares media producers big and small will plumb the depths of love, heartache, pornography, violence, transgression, blasphemy, awe, devotion, and spectacle, leaving the transhumans that plug into their feed satiated, fucked out, brain numb, emotionally and physically exhausted from the experience, with creds and upvotes trickling into the accounts and profiles of the producers that worked hard to bring them the visceral entertainment they so crave. Yet in the vastness of the transhuman media sphere, with more content produced each second than any single audience member could experience in a lifetime, viewers aren't just spoilt for choice, their feeds are overflowing with content with no way to sort the million-volt-main line entertainment from the grainy, raw space hamster meshcam put out by a six year old with a My First Meshfeed sitekit.

Of course, the Mesh is rarely the perfect anarchist environment it appears, and different groups gather to consolidate shares of the market. In the Jovian Republic access controls subtly channel and limit content, trying to filter out illicit access to state-disapproved media through ever-evolving tag filters, self-contained genetic algorithms that sample metadata and pre-emptively ban incoming content based on what they think the next big fetish or philosophy will be; in the Main Belt anarachists data pirates have made it their mission to liberate the sum totality of adult entertainment on their peer-to-peer networks, undermining any effort by any second party to corner the market in pornography by making it available to all with a pay-what-you-want scheme that ensures creds and favors trickle down to the performers and crews; and in the Planetary Consortium media hypercorps dominate with vividly interlinked, self-referential fictional universes. Facing such dedicated competition, new players in the media need extreme measures to break into the business.

They're called Sweeps Squads. Often violent, always mediagenic, the Sweep Squads are pirate programmers, violating personal and media space to bring the gift of new media to the masses, often against their will. Flash operas erupt in Olympus, surprise audience members get co-opted into team bloodsports in the corridors of Extropia, prospective porn stars converge anonymously on New Varanasi for the Olympic Bang, and on a scumbarge out Mercury-way ten thousand subscribers have their feed hacked to experience an XP documentary about transhuman body dismorphic disorders. Freelancers are always welcome, and Sweep Squads are always hiring: in a market where viral advertising gets lost in the background noise, sometimes the only way to get noticed is to get in people's face.

Using Sweeps Squad

Smile for the camera and check that your sensory feeds are clean, it's time to get mediagenic. Sweeps Squad is an easy way to embrace all the excesses of media from every era, and the player characters can be hired to be as insane, dedicated, or ultraviolet as you're comfortable with bringing to your game. Sweeps Squads typically go over the edge of legality, and PCs will have to deal with an often confused and/or irate "audience," authorities, and competition as they try to get the people involved with their program. Given Sweeps Squad stunts might be as impromptu or elaborately choreographed as players and gamemasters care to make them. In any event, PCs at least have a clear idea of success: if the media ratings for their particular production go up, they've succeeded.

Seed

  • The PCs are on another job when they find another team shadowing their every move, recording everything, breaking into their quarters while they're out, interviewing contacts, witnesses, po-po, relatives, sex partners...they've been targeted by a Sweeps Squad that's making a reality/documentary on the PCs, and the brains behind the show try to roll with the PC's style, working in social commentary, psychological analysis, violence if the PCs get confrontational. A smart player might try to crash the ratings by being boring, but that just means the producers will try to spice things up by adding complication's to the PC's lives. The good news is, there's a built-in time limit because no new media fad lasts forever...but can the PCs survive that long?

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

295: Candee Apple Island

ENTRY 295: Candee Apple Island

"They look like...apes?"
- Yeshiva Candee, gatecrasher

Three months ago, a group of gatecrashers stepped through the Pandora Gate, and walked on sweet-smelling green grass under blue skies whose white fluffy clouds promised rain. All initials tests had suggested the statistically improbable - a near-Earth-like planet, with an active biosphere and characteristics tantalizingly close to old Earth. Gravity, sunlight, oxygen content, temperature - it was almost perfect. Of course, it was also already inhabited.

Initial, covert surveys identified that the gate opens on a grassy bald near the top of a mountain on a sizable island in the middle of a salt water sea, with no other landmasses in sight. Rough early estimates give a population of perhaps four thousand six-limbed hominoids on Candee Apple Island, as well as associated flora and fauna suggestive of considerable evolutionary development. The hominoids themselves are lumbering figures somewhere between hairy reptiles and monotreme mammals, with a partial bipedal gait and evidence of some tool use and spoken language, though usage of fire and stored energy (spring traps, bows, etc.) is only incidental. They are omnivorous, with a few natural predators in the form of viscious six-limbed toothless carnivores with a caustic slobber and long, rough tongue, and are divided into three rough tribes based primarily on fur color (pink, blue, and green, though many stippling patterns are evident).

Faced with a thriving population of possible sapients, the gatecrashers quietly finished their survey and withdrew without attempting to make contact, and taking care to conceal signs of their intrusion. This has sparked an ongoing debate about the further development and exploitation of Candee Apple Island - whether it is appropriate to interfere with their cultural and technological evolution, the benefits of exploiting the planet for transhuman colonization and resource development, etc. Currently, the factions that argue for study and observation have won out with the hypercorp that sponsored the expedition to discover the world, a research-oriented venture out of Titan known as Kessler-Tycho AG. Emphasis has been placed on further exploration of the biology and geography of this new world, taking considerable pains to avoid direct contact with the native "apes," even to the extant of disguising drones as native creatures.

Using Candee Apple Island

CAI is classic Prime Directive bait, but with a couple twists. First, the gatekeeper for this "untouched" country is a profit-minded hypercorp, and while right now they'll listen to the ethists and scientists that want the Island to remain untouched, eventually the data needs to lead to something to justify the expense of discovering and exploring the world. Further, the "apes" of Candee Apple Island may or may not be all that they appear - while there are several indications of sentience, it is difficult at a remove to distinguish these behaviors from the actions of pre-uplift animals like Earth-based gorrillas and elephants - and nothing about the level of technology they possess suggests how the "apes" got here from wherever their parent land mass is, and there is no immediate indication that they evolved on the relatively small island. There are mysteries here as well as morality plays, and some of the long-time researchers wonder if they haven't stumbled upon an artificial habitat, not a natural one, and wonder quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Seed

  • The Prosperity Group is making a bid to buy out Kessler-Tycho AG, and that has xenobiologists and xenosapient watchdog groups going nuts. Different factions approach the player characters to intervene, hoping to dig up the PG's real plans for Candee Apple Island, or at least see if K-T AG is hiding any dark secrets. Surprisingly enough, the PCs do turn up a reference to an early report that was buried, the various gatecrashers involved mysteriously died or disappeared not long afterwards, all pointing toward a possible ruined settlement on the barren north coast of the island. If the PCs follow through, they'll have to pass through the gate to Candee Apple Island, possibly with Prosperity Group counteragents on their tail, and come across a perfect circle of fused, slightly radioactive glass and ruined buildings and monuments that the "apes" are the degenerate, inbred remnants of what was once an advanced culture...possibly the last survivors of their own extermination event.

Monday, October 21, 2013

294: AF Slurs

ENTRY 294: AF Slurs

"Why do I need a Chinese word for 'cunt'? Or a Venusian word, whatever. Why do I have to use a made-up word to say what I really mean? What's wrong with the word 'cunt' that I can't use the one we have in English?"
- John Tecumseh Jones, What A Cunt I Am

Hate, fear, and prejudice always find expression in the syntax of the time. That said, few swearwords, insults, and slurs have real staying power beyond general cultural inertia: the word 'fuck' has been in the English language in some form or another for a thousand years, and will probably continue to exist for as long; the Lunar trend of 'cuntoid' for female-identifying synthmorphs is already dying fast. Still, where there is anger and discrimination there will be words to describe it, and the changing social norms after the Fall provide plenty of raw material for new and injurious expressions. So in addition to all the hundreds or thousands of slurs still in use with regards to an individual's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, intelligence, appearance, odious personal habits, ancestry, etc. there have arisen thousands or tens of thousands of terms discussing new ethnicities, religions, morph types, political and social beliefs and preferences, just to name a few. Few of these really catch the metacultural awareness, and remain tied to specific networks, habitats, and social circles, but a few have spread fairly wide throughout the system.

"Nutes" as a disparitive descriptive for genderless biomorphs is one of the most common, though nowhere near as insulting as some of the more inventive names for them in Vo Nguyen, where bioconservatives have painted neuter biomorphs as sexual deviants and "unnatural."  Gender identity still remains a point of contention for nominally sexless synthmorphs (and, less often, informoprhs), which spans the spectrum from synthmorphs-that-identify-as-a-given-gender ("Cuntoids," "Princkbots," etc.) to mixed-biomorph-synthmorph-sexual-relationships ("Toyboy," "toyboi," "toygirl," "toygurl," "toyfag," "toyqueer," etc.) Xenoreligions and new religions see rather widespread distain, with any number of insults based on their beliefs, the least contentious of which is the Mesh media labeling them all as cults. Even some specific morphs and factions get their share of nicknames, such as the Ultimates and Remade ("ussholes," on Olympia, "Ulticunts" in Nova York, etc.) This is but a small sampling of the vast number of new slurs being generated, used, and abandoned every day.

Using AF Slurs

In moderation, where and when you must. The issue with fantasy slurs in a science fiction setting is less an issue of being politically correct as it is sounding like an asshole by spouting a bunch of silly, obviously made-up words designed to be quasi-offensive. I mean, c'mon, "cuntoid" sounds like something a thirteen year old boy would come up with to shock his friends. A number of sci-fi insults often come across the same way, feeling artificial and silly on the tongue - feth, feck, frak, frag, frell, shazbot, bleep, tanj, gorram, smeg, shock, smurf, bastich, Belgium, blotching, slitch, etc. Sci fi slurs are little better, often based on some basic physical characteristic or disparaging resemblance to Earth organisms/objects, like crab, bug, spoonhead, clicker, clanker, suckhead, spacehead, flatlander, socialator, smeghead, etc. These terms aren't offensive to contemporary ears because they aren't culturally ingrained as offensive, and so miss the desired impact (unless you just want to sound slightly silly, which is perfectly acceptable), whereas real-world ethnic slurs are likely to offend people you're playing the game with, which is generally undesired.

So what's the point? Well, sometimes you do want a non-offensive but patently supposed-to-be-a-slur-or-swearword in your campaign. Fair enough, more than one science fiction writer has written pseudo-swears just to get past the censors or for verisimilitude. However, this kind of language is also a strong indication of what characters in your game hate and fear - these are the focal points for social, sexual, gender, and ethnic commentary in the setting, and the new slurs you introduce can be a springboard for highlighting or examining those issues. Given the propensity of new insults to borrow from old insults, it is up to you to determine whether your group is comfortable or mature enough to handle such topics in a game - I would encourage you to talk with your players about it before Marvin d'Mars describes Rusters as "Martian Niggers," for example. That's going to send a shock through the table - and so it should. The 'n-word' is the ethnic slur to end all ethnic slurs in the United States, and busting it out at the table could cause an argument or at least several minutes standing around looking uncomfortable.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

293: Voice of One

ENTRY 293: Voice of One

"My beat is Aspis to Starwell, Nova York to Pallas...I find the news that doesn't make your Mesh feed, the stories below the fold, behind the paywall, and just plain off the grid. Hello, I am the Voice of One. I want your story."
- VoO, column 3866: "The Names and Addresses of that Shitheel Rapist Gang on Legba"

The Main Belt has its share of newsmedia. Bored editors and hyper little wordsmiths spin facts and events into a constant stream of infomush to keep the great crowd Audience fed and sedated. On the flipside are the so-called outlaw reporters - operating without major financial backing, insurance, and much in the way of credentials beyond their willingness to ask questions. Some of them wave guns around, others go "undercover" a little too convincingly for the local authority's tastes; most sell out and get out at some point. Somewhere near the front of the current crop is the vivacious, scar-faced bouncer known as Voice of One.

Specializing in "transhuman interest" stories, Voice of One has a reputation for picking up the small stories that the big media drops quickly, pursuing them relentlessly, and seeing that everything gets uncovered and the people in them get everything that's coming to them. Of course, she gets a piece of everything - from the advertising to the XP-of-the-week dramadocumentaries - that comes after, but she has to make a living somehow. She blows through habitats quickly, leaving bleeding bodies, broken lives, and bruised egos in her wake, often seeming unconcerned about the damage she does - like the time she did the expose on the Blue Ring in Legba, a sex trafficking ring that took turns resleeving into a series of underage morphs each week, while the child ego was out in a digital playground oblivious to what their meat bod was getting up to. That led to the expulsion (often by airlock) of all the adults and most of the kids bodies retained as evidence, leaving their egos as orphaned AGIs stuck in the Mesh.

COG
COO
INT
REF
SAV
SOM
WIL
MOX
15
17
15
13
15
16
15
-
INIT
SPD
LUC
TT
IR
DUR
WT
DR
5
1
30
6
60
40
8
60

Morph: Bouncer
Skills: Academics: Physics 30, Academics: Statistics 32, Art: Writing 50, Climbing 34, Free Fall 46, Interests: Rival Networks 45, Interests: Zero-G Sports 60, Interfacing 54, Intimidation (Blackmail) 45, Kinesics (Lying) 40, Language: Native English 90, Language: French 80, Language: Wu 80, Networking: Autonomists 44, Networking: Criminals 29, Networking: Media 66, Perception (Visual) 48, Profession: Reporter 53, Programming 54, Research 45, Unarmed Combat 30
Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Grip Pads, Oxygen Reserve, Prehensile Feet
Traits: Addiction (stimulants, moderate)

Using Voice of One

One of the nice thing about reporters is that they are some of the few individuals whose job is a justification for poking around in other people's business, especially when they're not wanted, and they have little to no requirement to report to or act under any authority. The Voice of One is such an enthusiastic (and occasionally violent) individual, and will happily pursue any lead if there's a credit or a noyo attached to it, and is more than willing to badger, harry, harass, heckle, bindle, blackmail, and extort the player characters for their help, assistance, or just for the fun of it. VoO's investigations are a good place to drop the seed for a new adventure, or she might hire the PCs (i.e. promise a cut of the eventual monies she might one day receive) to help her during an investigation, or she might turn up dead (again) on the PC's doorstep with a scrap of evidence on her and they'll have to figure out what she's gotten them into this time. Alternately, if the gamemaster prefers a more adversarial relationship, local authorities, private citizens, and hypercorps could hire the PCs to derail or halt her investigations - either by beating her to the punch, dropping false clues, causing small personal crises (she will never again discuss her second marriage, the resulting sex recording, or why she has a hallway on Legba named after her), etc.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

292: Oxo Light

ENTRY 292: Oxo Light

Transhumans evolved on the surface of the Earth, and their anatomies developed in with regard to that requirement - gravity, atmospheric pressure, air consistency, and sunlight. The transition to space and other planets and moons sees morphs derived from Earth plains-apes struggling to adjust to a much wider spectrum of environments, and while transhumanity has managed to adapt rather well to some of the difficulties of microgravity, recycled air, etc., the considerable radiation shielding designed to protect biomorphs from the damaging effects of cosmic radiation has had the unintended effect of depriving much of transhumanity of necessary levels of ultraviolet radiation. While UVR is very popularly known to cause burns with long or intense exposure, transhumans evolved in an environment that expected regular low-level UVR exposure, which is important for several physiological processes, most notably the photosynthesis of vitamin D. Some estimates suggest that as many as 76% of transhuman biomorphs currently suffer from vitamin D deficiency, as many as half of those individuals do not receive adequate nutritional supplements of vitamin D to make up the difference.

As recognition of this descrepancy filters through transhuman consciousness, the demand for a solution has led to a new invention: oxo light. Typically taking the form of a cylindrical column, oxo light is a calibrated low-intensity UVR emitter whose output is modulated based on the requirements of the individual user, determined by syncing with the user's medical profile via the Mesh. Several habitats have established rooms specifically for group exposure sessions, using colored rings zones around the oxo light column to help transhumans position themselves at the correct distance to avoid over exposure, which can lead to sunburn and even skin cancer with prolonged use. Individuals using these spaces shed most of their clothes (depending on the norms of the habitat and the individual) and spend up to a couple hours exposing themselves to the light. Most users spend the time in meditation or surfing the Mesh, although many habitats organize social activities such as martial arts lessons, physical exercises, speed dating, etc. Where space is a concern, oxo lights also come in smaller portable egg-shaped devices of various sizes.

Seed

  • One of the surprises of oxo light is its popularity with the Factors, who find the near-Earth-normal light beneficial and stimulating to their upper layers. Unfortunately, the PCs go in to their oxo light time one morning and find a blackened, immobile Factor - the apparent victim of extreme UVR exposure. The Factor is still alive, and contacts the PCs, asking for them to hide it as it believes it has been deliberately attacked, and that the perpetrators will seek to finish the job.
  • A genehacker named Black Ned has arranged to meet the PCs at an oxo light room during the time scheduled for nudists - all the better to make sure the characters are unarmed when they meet him, or so he'll say if they ask why. If the PCs do show up, it turns out Ned has something else in mind - an assassination against a rival genehacker here to take the light as well. If the PCs except, Ned will provide them with special sunglasses and then initiate a program that causes the oxo light to fluctuate, equivalent to a basilisk hack and affecting everyone in the room not wearing the special sunglasses (or equivalent flare protection). Making the hit then is dead easy - but what have the PCs gotten themselves into and what will the repercussions be?

Friday, October 18, 2013

291: Blind Tigers

ENTRY 291: Blind Tigers

"They say it is all in our heads. Of course it is. The universe is in our heads, the shadows on the wall of the cave..."
- Dzen Stephanopolous, Sight Beyond Sight

One of the peculiarities that became apparent once resleeving took hold in transhumanity is that for a significant part of the population physical injuries and disabilities coincide with or led to related psychological damage which was carried with the ego to the new morph. These conditions appear to be distinct from forms of neural damage (such as cortical blindness) that become inherent to the ego, but the effects are largely similar - an individual who had some physical limitation in an old morph such as blindness, deafness, limited mobility in a limb, partial paralysis, etc. carries some of their physical handicap or disability forward into the new morph as a mental handicap. Unlike neural damage, psychosurgery and therapy has often proven effective in treating individuals facing these mental disabilities.

Some individuals facing these conditions do not respond well to therapy, or choose not to undergo it. Instead, they embrace their disability in their lifestyle. Popularly called "blind tigers" (or deaf tigers, crippled tigers, etc. as appropriate), these transhumans are the leading edge of the population working to accomodate habitats and services for transhumans with disabilities, by coding alternative sensory input into Mesh sites and channels, working braille translations next to written instructions, designing systems designed for mobility-challenged morphs, giving alternate-sense skill training classes, etc. A large part of their efforts are simply providing a community of like-disabled individuals to provide continued encouragement and opportunity for both the community of disable transhumans and individuals.

Using the Blind Tigers

If a character in Eclipse Phase suddenly goes blind, one of their first instincts is probably to hack the nearest camera (or even ghost another character's visuals) and so regain their sight that way. If the blindness is a purely physical phenomenon ("Aargh, the laser got my eyes!") this is fine; kudos to the player. For other characters who have blindness as a result of mental derangement or neural damage however, this will not work. This isn't meant to be a way of screwing over the player character and gamemasters shouldn't inflict psychological disabilities willy-nilly, but the basic concept of being an inherent trait of the ego instead of the morph is that the disadvantage is completely removed from physical capability - it is a psychological block on the ego's ability to perceive certain information or utilize certain abilities, not a a matter of having defective parts. A character with Mental Disorder (Blindness) just can't process visual information, a character with Mental Disorder (No Left Arm) cannot use their left arm (or equivalent limb), etc.

Again, the point of this is not to screw over PCs ("Ha ha, sucks to be you."), it's an optional limitation for players and gamemasters to consider to promote roleplaying - how would you get around if you were blind and simply swapping out cybereyes wasn't an option? How would you make the universe a better place for other blind characters? In most cases, these disadvantages are not completely unsurmountable by any means - muses can act as go-between translating speach or visual stimulus into a form that the blind tiger character can interpret; sonar, radar, lidar, and other augmented senses can easily make up for vision in many (though not all) instances; the Mesh alone generally has options available to accomodate any number of disabilities, and so on and so forth. Blind tiger characters who work to integrate the solutions of their disabilities into their lifestyles are not working to deny their disadvantages as much as embracing them as key aspects of their character.

A particularly appropriate occasion to pick up a Mental Disorder of this form is when mental stress from resleeving, where a physical limitation or bit of damage from the old morph is carried over as a Mental Disorder of the ego. Again, this isn't intended to be a death sentence for the character, and the disorder can be dealt with via psychosurgery or therapy as normal.

Seeds

  • The player characters arrive on Pallwyn, a "dark habitat" where the primary sense is sonar, not normal transhuman vision. As a consequence, the PCs will have to find their way through a habitat full of "blind" morphs, where all the signs are in a sonar-reflection language and concepts like color are not in general use compared to terms for texture, jitter, delay, echo spread, etc. The habitat is currently suffering a series of murders, but some of the key clues are being left in visual media that the investigators are missing...one of the local blind tigers approach the PCs and ask them to find the killer, whom they are afraid is another one of the blind tigers. Of course, as strangers with full visual faculties, the authorities might grow suspicious of the PCs if they get involved.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

290: Rocket Rhosa

ENTRY 290: Rocket Rhosa

Every war has its heroes. In the fight against the TITANs, Rocket Rhosa was an armorer and pilot, known for her love of big guns and her innovative and flashy improvised weapons. She was known for having eighteen combat craft damaged or destroyed over the course of the conflict, and never wasted much time in getting another one and equipping it with bigger and ever more dangerous weapons. For the course of the conflict, she was one of the darlings of the Solar system.

After the war, her star fell. Rhosa never found a habitat where she fell at home, and her temper and taste for alcohol and explosives got her intro troubles legal and economic. For years she was reduced to the nominal position of pilot on an automated ore-trawler, because the owner was old-fashioned and preferred to have at least one transhuman on board to keep the AGIs honest. That was her low point, where she fell into dissipation from which she might never have recovered.

Then the space pirates attacked, and she found herself again. Now she's sober (mostly) and back to her chipper old self, piloting one rusty tub after another, each equipped with outlandish weapons of her own design - pirate hunters, smuggler outrunners, escort ships, whatever meets the needs of the job. She has friends in every port again, and most of them know to keep her off the sauce when playing with the plutonium.

COG
COO
INT
REF
SAV
SOM
WIL
MOX
21
15
20
15
15
10
20
-
INIT
SPD
LUC
TT
IR
DUR
WT
DR
7
1
40
8
80
35
7
50

Morph: Menton
Skills: Academics: History (Explosives) 55, Academics: Sociology (Propaganda) 55, Beam Weapons 50, Demolitions (Munitions) 48, Free Fall 36, Gunnery 72, Hardware: Electronics 34, Hardware: Spacecraft 48, Hardware: Munitions 56, Interests: Big Guns 33, Interests: Exotic Weapons 30, Interests: Propoganda 35, Interfacing 23, Intimidation 25, Language: Native Greek 95, Language: Russian 90, Language: English 90, Language: French 75, Navigation 23, Networking: Firewall 25, Networking: Scientists 25, Pilot: Spacecraft 49, Profession: Arms Dealer 50, Profession: Demolitions Expert 60
Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Hyper-Linguist, Math Boost, Multi-tasking, Oracles
Traits: Addiction (Alcohol, moderate)

Using Rocket Rhosa

Armorers are wonderful people that make things that hurt other people, and often will modify them to meet your specific needs at a reasonable price. They are often enthusiastic (if not always outgoing) professions with deep interests in their particular areas of expertise. Most players don't give much thought to their weapons past the raw statistics, and for most games this is sufficient - the idea of the rules and presentation being to induce a sense of verisimilitude of combat, since realistic depictions of science fiction battles is both difficult and open to wide interpretation. However, this does not mean that any idea or tweak involving weaponry can't be included in your home games - maybe the PCs see that the opposition has started "hotboxing" their beam weapons by modifying the settings to obtain higher damage at the cost of reduced range, lifetime, and the not-insignificant chance of exploding, and now the PCs want to hotbox their own weapons. Easy enough for somebody with the right skills - enter the armorer.

Rocket Rhosa for her part is a classic example of the out-of-work warrior archetype: enthusiastic when she has a project, and rather drunken and morose when deprived of purpose. Her specific purpose is blowing things up, which can come in handy for the PCs in many ways, but also makes her a deadly foe if she starts gunning for them (say, if the PCs decide to try their hand at space piracy). She's a loyal friend, but sometimes careless, and anyone that knows her for any length of time knows not to trust her when she starts disarming grenades while on her third bottle of whatever the locals distill.