324: Nuit Academy

ENTRY 324: Nuit Academy

Personal augmentation started with a relatively low acceptance rate, but once the commercial products hit reasonable levels of safety, conformity, and cost then development of new augmentations quickly outpaced the abilities of society to accommodate individual technologies. So, outside of some specialized habitats, few habitats are built, designed, or adapted with any specific personal augmentation in mind - catering to the special needs of those transhumans that preferred echolocation to visual sight, for example, took a back seat around the time of the Fall, when survival of the majority of transhumans took precedence over the wants and needs of the few. Some of the victims in this rush of technology and societal changes were the burgeoning secondary markets that tried to grow up around augmentation technology, only to fail when they couldn't keep up - or else adapt into something else.

The Nuit Academy is a survivor of those harsh market forces. Originally a school for the blind on Earth, Nuit specialized in fitting its students with echolocation prostheses and teaching them how to navigate by sound. The advent of reliable, cost-efficient cybereyes severely reduced their body of potential students, and the Nuit Academy reinvented itself and transitioned its curricula to train transhumans in the use of new sonar implants. However, "sensory acclimation schools" fell out of favor relatively quickly, as most transhumans could easily access equivalent courses on the Mesh and proper calibration of sonar augumentations during implantation rendered them more user-friendly. Faced once again with a shift in its core audience, the Nuit Academy abandoned its failing business and reoganized as a microskillware studio.

Subskills are extremely specific abilities which are too minor and incidental too merit full skillware; they are typically little more than collections of instinctive reactions and physical familiarization that few transhumans think twice about - and because of their seeming unimportance, subskills represent an untapped market that the majority of skillware producers have failed to develop, and the Nuit Academy has moved into the gap. Using a pay-as-you-go model with occasional ransomware projects, the neuroprogrammers of the Nuit Academy are the masterminds behind several popular subskill products such as Navigating by Sound, Chopsticks, Zero-Gravity Toilet Training, Whistling, and Tying Neckties. The genius of subskills is that while most of these activities have online tutorials and training that users can easily follow, downloading and installing microskills grants immediate mastery with none of the time, hesitation, or potential for embarrassment that comes from trial-and-error or missing a step in the directions.

Mechanics

Subskills are an option for characters with skillware implants. As noted, they cover a range of perfectly mundane minor skills that your character may never have needed and which are normally not the subject of a test (unless your gamemaster is particularly cruel). For example, a PC that has never been off the surface of Mars probably would not know how to use a zero-gravity toilet, and instead of trying to figure out the instructions while their guts are boiling simply downloads the subskill and gets to work. Anything that can be covered by an actual skill test, like playing a musical instrument or firing a pistol, is beyond the range of a subskill. Assume that all subskills are available for download and are free, and each takes up only 1 skill point in the skillware implant.

The only down side of subskills is that the character cannot familiarize themselves effectively with the actual task while the subskill is installed. So if a character installed a subskill to handle using chopsticks, they would cease to be able to handle chopsticks once it is uninstalled and would have to learn how to handle them the old-fashioned way. For this reason, many transhumans become somewhat dependent on certain subskills, although Mesh legends of parents that installed toilet training subskills in their pets or children and then never bothered to uninstall them are (probably) false...

Using Nuit Academy

The Nuit Academy are business people and programmers that try to understand the transhuman condition and make little programs that make life easier. To do this requires a fundamental understanding of the transhuman condition which is a difficult thing at a time when the bulk of society devotes its resources to the statistically average transhuman abilities. Originally developed to assisting those with disabilities and then those with personal augmentations, the Nuit Academy has transitioned to more generic fare to pay the bills, but as a group they still devote considerable resources to subskills aimed at help disenfranchized characters who because of their combinations of morph/augmentations and/or disabilities require some help at basic tasks, or those whose upbringing has left them deficient in some basic areas of transhuman knowledge, such as the brinker synthmorph that doesn't know how to apply a band aid to a biomorph or the over-nannied flat who never learned to brush their own teeth because they had a nanomouthwash for that. Most PCs probably won't be direct recipients of their skills except possibly from a flavortext angle, but NPCs might be very reliant on them.

Seed

• Many uplifts have basic difficulty adapting to transhuman body language, especially smiling - which many see as a form of threat display. The Nuit Academy markets a Smile Adaptor subskill specifically to address this, but there's been a bit of difficulty with it - three neo-hominids using the subskillware have died recently, and the Nuit Academy asks the PCs to investigate. The answer turns out to be rather straightforward, in that the software worked too well - the neo-hominids using it became so inured to smiling that they ignored threat displays from other hominids while smiling too much themselves, which ended up with them getting into fights they couldn't win.

270: Group Psi

ENTRY 270: Group Psi

Psi is a solitary activity in Eclipse Phase. There are no mechanics for group psi use. It doesn’t follow the cultural paradigms for magic, there are no rules for two asyncs cooperating to achieve an effect greater than the sum of their parts, no group minds, or distributed strain. There are a couple good reasons for this. The exsurgent virus affects people, and their perception of their situation and abilities, differently—one async’s understanding of their abilities may simply not be compatible with another’s. Too, there is no real async culture; each victim of the virus is unique, often alienated because of their ability. If there was a Mesh stream just for asyncs to sit down, talk sleights and maybe try to get laid, every other member would be a Firewall agent trying to reel in a new fish. Maybe the exsurgents can get it together enough to do something like that, but the exsurgent already have weird powers beyond the ken and normal ability of transhumanity.

That’s not to say that you cannot have two or more asyncs cooperatively use their powers toward some joint purpose in your Eclipse Phase game, but treat it as what it is: an unusual and maybe unique set of circumstances, deserving of a bit of attention. Two (or more) asyncs in the same place, trying to use their sleights to achieve a given effect, should be a cinematic scene—let the players sweat a little, see if it works. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but here are some guidelines to consider if you allow group psi in our game:

• Rule of One: Psi sleights with a range of self are too personal and centered on the individual async—though there may be a two-headed exsurgent morph or twins that can get away with it.
• Rule of Two: Complementary Sleights Can Assist the use of other sleights. It is up to the player to come up with a good justification for why, for example, one async using Cloud Memory on an ego will make the use of Implant Memory by another async at the same time easier, but if the players can provide a good justification, and it seems logical, maybe it should work. As a guideline, use the Complementary Skill Bonus Table (Eclipse Phase 137), with the assisting async’s skill acting as the complementary skill to the primary async’s skill.
• Rule of Pi: Two (or more) asyncs working together against a single target tends to present considerable strain on the target ego; the conflicting signals causes an amount of mental strain to the target equal to the number of asyncs + 1 every Action Turn for sleights with a duration of Temp (Action Turns) and every minute for sleights with a duration of Temp (Minutes) or Sustained.
• Rule of 2^2: The Mindlink (Eclipse Phase 227) sleight allows all asyncs in the link to target another member with their sleights, facilitating group psi activities—but keep in mind, if one the target of the mindlink is an unwilling participant and an async, they can also target any member of the group through the mindlink with their own sleights.

250: Statistical Tradecraft

ENTRY 250: Statistical Tradecraft

In the spy game, human intelligence is almost dead. HUMINT is slow, subjective, inefficient, and unreliable. All major intelligence communities, militaries, and hypercorps rely on technical intelligence-gathering, focusing on intercepting and decoding signals, analyzing massive Mesh-based databases of statistics and metadata to identify trends, key phrases, patterns, and other vital information, often branching out into obscure keyword-coded super-specialized subdisciplines looking at electronic signatures, time stamps, image analysis, and other minutiae. Yet spy organizations have also grown decentralized from the bloated bureaucracies of the past, now more closely resembling the cell-like networks of resistance movements and linked peer-to-peer networks; number-crunching nerds devoted to their own arts, processing Big Data, and passing it on to the next group for analysis and discussion.

Yet there is still work to be done, clandestine and public. Agents that represent the spy orgs, their eyes and ears and tongues and voices in the narrow hallways of the habitats and on the vast reaches of Mars and Luna, Titan and Europa. Yet if HUMINT is dead, it still has its analogues and parallels in new forms of tradecraft: transhuman intelligence (TRANSINT), posthuman intelligence (POSTINT), and extraterrestrial intelligence derived from the Factors (XINT), each of which deals with entities so far beyond the statistical models that interpreting their raw data is fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings. When the signal-to-noise ratio is too high, the results must be independently confirmed by agents in the field—through cultivating relationships, espionage, and even interrogation. These field operations are categorized as a form of statistical tradecraft, seeking to confirm or deny the findings of analysts because the data is too wonky for them to extract reliable information.

Counterintelligence also has its place in statistical tradecraft: manipulating the numbers to hide correlations in masses of data. These operations seek to throw off rival organizations’ analyses and predictions by manufacturing artificial extreme data points which distort their opponents’ projections and defeat their models, protecting their own secrets at the same time. Sometimes that requires a well-placed murder, but most of the time it involves subtle manipulation to increase the average height of a group of morphs, or the formation and promulgation of bizarre organizations that make use of known key words and search terms to help throw search analysis off. A tricky business where the ultimate results are hard to judge, but the effectiveness is always quantifiable.

Using Statistical Tradecraft

It’s hard to be James Bond in the panopticon. While great cinema, as files become declassified the ultimate effectiveness of a lot of Cold War-era tradecraft is debatable, and the shift to more reliable and quantifiable results in technical intelligence-gathering becomes understandable. That said, there is a place for Jason Bourne in Eclipse Phase, but you may be stuck with the question of how to seduce a posthuman and get them to pillow-talk, social engineer your way into a brinker outpost, or figure out how exactly to get a Factor inebriated. Statistical tradecraft means that the PCs, if they want to be useful parts of the intelligence-gathering apparatus, need to be prepared to go to the weirdest places and interact with the weirdest people, because that’s where the mathematical models break down.

243: Superkinesics

ENTRY 243: Superkinesics

The twitch of an eye, the number of blinks, the little calluses on the first two fingers of the right hand, the way she keeps her nails trimmed, the pulse visibly beating at her throat…people can be read, though not like a book. Every individual is different, but they are running the same wetware, and many fall into the same psychological traits. A good cold reader can walk into a crowded room and see who is nervous, and who wants to believe.

Augmented senses don’t make kinesics any easier—but they do open up the reader to a new level of information. Once they learn to interpret that data, a reader’s accuracy can be superhuman—the heat patterns from the flow of blood in their face, the smell as their pores open up and start to sweat under their clothing, the electromagnetic tingle as they access their implants. Even synthmorphs are not invulnerable; microscopic and nanoscopic vision in particular can tell a great deal about the ‘health’ of a case by the care taken in its repair, cleaning, and maintenance.

Of course, transhumans who live with augmented senses daily often pay as much attention to covering up some of their tell-tale giveaways as flats and splicers do with makeup. It’s a rare case or synth who does keep a couple small brush attachments for their fingers to clean those hard-to-reach slots, and learn to calibrate their speech synthesizers to disguise some of the unease in their voice when nervous. Many transhuman actors and public speakers make an effort to study superkinesics to help whoo their audience as well, to better emote their performance to an augmented audience.

Mechanics

Superkinesics is a specialization for the Kinesics skill that is applicable whenever the character’s augmented senses would give additional vital information that would help them judge another’s intent, or when they are dealing with a character with augmented senses, and functions identically to other skill specializations. The bonus from this specialization stacks with any bonus granted from the enhanced sense itself (i.e. a character with Enhanced Smell and the Superkinesics specialization would receive a total +30 bonus to Kinesics Tests).

Using Superkinesics

Superkinesics has a rather long run history in science fiction, though not under that name; a particularly good use was in Bruce Sterling’s “Twenty Evocations” set in his Shaper/Mechanist universe. As such, there are quite a lot of good examples out thereon how to use (and abuse) this trope, with both players and gamemasters coming up with arguments as to why a given augmented sense works or does not work in a particular situation. I would suggest not having those arguments; life is too short and at the end of the day +10 on a Kinesics roll really shouldn’t be a game over for your adventure. Now, this doesn’t mean a gamemaster can’t make life difficult on PCs that come to rely on their enhanced senses—enhanced smell doesn’t mean much if the characters are interacting through holograms, for example.

236: Sistemy

ENTRY 236: Sistemy

Modern professional military organizations recognize the importance of training in multiple related martial skills: close quarters combat using knives, hand-to-hand, and small arts, attacking at range, and overall strategic and tactical thinking are typically emphasized and increasingly integrated into a single block of training, with periodic refreshers and optional advanced courses in selected skills for promising or dedicated students. As a concept, these sistemy (singular: systema) allow the rapid development of a group of related skills in a relatively short period of time, and with a focus on utility and adaptability often absent from the more artistic contemporary martial arts intended solely for exhibition, exercise, and formal competition.

Mechanics

The sistemy concept is an option for gamemasters and players to help simplify combat in Eclipse Phase. Instead of having individual combat skills like Blades, Clubs, Fray, Kinetic Weapons, Unarmed Combat, etc. the character has a Systema skill which represents their basic block of training in multiple forms of combat. When attacking, the character would roll their Systema skill instead of the typical individual combat skill.

Example

Sixjane needs to cut a Ruster bitch and pops her cyberclaws. Sixjane has Systema 44 and her player rolls 38—a success!—and is rewarded with a spray of arterial blood as her victim screams in pain…

Extras

Players and gamemasters interested in a slightly more complex approach to sistemy combat can include some of these optional extra rules.

Individual Advanced Training: The character’s Systema skill maxes out at 60, and cannot be improved beyond that. Characters wishing to improve their skills must take individual advanced training in specific skills to further develop them past this point. While the character retains their Systema skill at max, they can then develop individual skills (Blades, Clubs, Fray, Kinetic Weapons, Unarmed Combat, etc.) further, with each skill having a base rating equal to their Systema skill.

Example

After years of hard training, Sixjane has topped out at Systema 60. Now she qualifies for individual advanced training in Blades. By spending 2 Rez points, Sixjane now has Blades 61.

Specific Systema: There is no one Systema skill; rather there are multiple sistemy, each of which has its own skill, and each of which has its own culture and heritage depending on the military that developed it. Contemporary examples would include the systema of the Russian Spetznatz, krav maga of the Israeli military, and the MCMAP program of the United States Marine Corps, though in Eclipse Phase systems would probably include more training in recoilless and beam weapons, implant weapons, different morphs, etc. The specifics of each Systema skill should be worked out between the player and the gamemaster, but in general each should focus on certain areas—this is effectively represented by a free specialization in the chosen Systema skill which cannot be changed, though it does not apply to advanced skills obtained through Individual Advanced Training. Typically, certain exotic or unusual weapons or skills are not covered by these specific Systema—Kinetic weapons in particular are rare in space, and few systems cover Spray Weapons for example.

Example

Zapato: The systema of the Jovian Army, Zapato is a comprehensive fighting system developed for both close-quarters and ranged combat in microgravity environments and incorporates close-quarters combat training as well as ranged training with beam weapons, though training with firearms is neglected due to their general absence in the Jovian armory. [Free Specialization: Microgravity, Not Covered: Kinetic Weapons]

159: Language Synthesis

ENTRY 159: Language Synthesis

Historically, languages were critical components of a transhuman’s identity. The mother tongue helps determine how the brain develops, provides one of the standard identifiers for national and ethnic groups, and can influence the ability to frame certain thoughts and concepts. Even after the Fall and the flight from Earth, many groups stayed together based on their common language as much as any other shared belief or heritage.

Yet the social shakeup of the Fall and the rise in technology has seen the blossoming of new constructed languages, in a way never seen in history since the adoption of Morse code. Language synthesis is a hobby and pastime for some, a full-time profession for others. All manner of multimedia require “authentic” human and alien languages crafted by linguistic technicians, and the results are stunning: over half a million egos have a working knowledge of Sílá, the language of the O-síl in the popular Mesh-based fantasy game The World Tree. Powerful software modeling tools allow even amateurs to get in on the fun, using dialect engines to derive variant languages with unusual influences over a period of time—the cheap World Tree knock-off Yggys uses a variant of Latin based on a postulated five-thousand years of influence and borrowing from various Southeast Asian languages.

Many small groups have seized on custom-designed synthetic languages as a tool for more clearly communicating certain concepts, or to ensure no-one else can understand their speech. These code-talkers rely on the cutting edge of linguistics, combining difficult and complicated linguistic rules as a substitute for encryption—which is effective, until it isn’t. Many agencies don’t even bother keeping a staff of linguists to break synthetic languages: they can outsource the sample-languages to Mesh-based linguistic communities for free and have effective translations within minutes or hours, and certain military groups use specialized battle-languages to keep their communications secure.

Mechanics

Designing a new constructed language in Eclipse Phase is a Task Action with a timeframe determined by the gamemaster. The timeframe should be set according to the complexity of the language and could range from an hour (constructing a dialect) to days (assembling a new member of an existing language family) to even months (building an entirely new language from scratch). Typical appropriate skills for designing a new language are Academics: Linguistics or Art: Language Synthesis. The typical target number is 50, though the player may choose to aim for a higher target number if they wish the language to be more complex and difficult. At the gamemaster’s discretion, academic sources on linguistics and specialized dictionaries and software tools may provide a modifier of up to +30 on these tests.

When complete, the character has created a new language and the sourcecode for a rating 40 skillsoft in that language. Learning this language requires spending rez points as normal, though the creator can make as many copies of the skillsoft as they wish. Characters may design the language to be partially or mostly communicable with one or more existing languages (a specialized patois of English and Mandarin, for example), or specifically create it to be incommunicable with existing languages.

Decoding a constructed language from captured samples of speech requires a Task Action with a timeframe and target number identical to those required to create the synthetic language. Academic sources on linguistics and specialized dictionaries and software tools may provide a modifier of up to +30 to decode a language, and substantial samples of the speech (a lengthy conversation of several minutes or hours) should reduce the timeframe for the decoding substantially (minutes instead of hours, hours instead of days, days instead of months). Again, the character still needs to pay rez to learn the language, but received a rating 40 skillsoft of the language which can be used to easily decode it, and can make as many copies as they want.

Using Synthetic Languages

From a thematic standpoint, synthetic languages are one more flavorful option that can be mixed in to the background without any need for mechanics—the Klingon Opera Company that tours Mars, books and fanchats conducted entirely in some spaceborne variant of Tolkien’s Tengwar script, wrappers for the latest hot snackfood written in some Sino-Greek hybrid, etc.—all good stuff that doesn’t need to make gameplay harder but can make it more interesting and fun.

On the other hand, speaking in a language no one else around you knows and understands still carries certain tactical advantages, particularly during negotiations or combat situations. Secure communications makes this less of a big deal in Eclipse Phase, but for players and gamemasters that want equivalents to the battlelanguages in the Dune series, these bare mechanics should be sufficient.

117: Knapping

ENTRY 117: Knapping

One of the great successes of the relicteurs is the revival of traditional knapping techniques, which in recent months have seen a tremendous revival thanks to the livecast survivalist adventures of Regina Rex, Gatecrasher and her trademark blue obsidian-tipped weaponry. Material scientists eager to capitalize on the sudden interest have designed maker-fabricapable synthetic materials whose fracture and stress lines are particularly suited to knapping, and these “blank bricks” are the foundation material for all manner of hand-crafted knapped blades in habitats throughout the solar system. Of course, many knapped blades are of limited utility—it takes considerable skill and the right materials to achieve a sharp, precise edge, and knapped blades are notoriously fragile and low-tech compared to blades made from metal, plastic, ceramics, or composite materials. Social trend-spotters are of the opinion that knapping is probably nothing more than a fad which will burn itself out in the next few months, though the products and technology will persist for years.

While the activity lasts, however, there are money, favors, and rep to be had. Many social networks are besieged with requests for choice knapping materials, from the high-density briny sheet-ice that forms in the Yukata Trench on Europa to the exotic “rainbow glass” found in the Al-Bakri crater, formed from multiple successive pre-Fall nuclear launches. The so-called “micro-knapped” blades from the Belt are considered the most desirable by collectors that prefer workable weapons, having been crafted using traditional techniques as applied by the latest high technology: artificial high-density glass refined to a near-monomolecular edge using micro-manipulators and nanovision magnification, with reinforced hand-carved artificial diamond stabbing points; each blade can take up to 100 transhuman work-hours depending on size and additional artistry.

Mechanics

The applicable skill to create an object is Hardware: Knapping, which applies to all materials (glass, stone, composites, etc.) and technologies, and follows the rules for Hardware skills in Eclipse Phase, p.179. A benefit of knapping techniques is that they are largely designed for minimal tools in sparse situations, and there are currently a surplus of help manuals and skillware available on the Mesh through relicteur networks: effectively, as long as a character has a Mesh connection they can have download Hardware: Knapping 40 skillware and receive a +20 modifier for the extensive online assistance, sufficient to manufacture a weapon from a “blank brick” or sufficiently large piece of glass in 1-2 hours.

Knapped blades are sharp (-2 armor penetration), but the edges are fragile, often dulling and chipping easily in combat, and are generally considered disposable weaponry. When a knapped blade breaks is left up to the gamemaster, and should probably depend on how the PC uses it—trying to cut through hard substances is likely to render a glass knife useless, but a glass-tipped surgical scalpel used only against soft tissues can retain its edge for years. Knapped blades use the Blades skill.

Blade	Armor Penetration (AP)	Damage Value (DV)	Average DV	Cost
Knapped Blade	-2	2d10 + (SOM ÷ 10)	7 + (SOM ÷ 10)	Trivial
Microknapped Blade	-4	2d10 + 1 + (SOM ÷ 10)	8 + (SOM ÷ 10)	Moderate

More exotic knapped weapons might exist—needlers that shoot micro-knapped crystal spires hand-carved by diligent, worshipful AGIs and suchlike—but such technologies are generally little more than expensive (if occasionally deadly) toys considering monomolecular wire and other more practicable alternatives exist.