362: Ghost Planet

ENTRY 362: Ghost Planet

"It's eating my fucking suit."
- Fon Zongying, gatecrasher

The Iktomi are the only extraterrestrial civilization known to have used the Pandora Gates - remnants of their civilization or explorations have been found on several worlds. Of the Iktomi themselves there is little record or remains; no indication of what had happened to them. Yet just recently, in an arid semi-desert planet under two suns, a group of gatecrashers have reported finding what might be the actual physical remains of the Iktomi.

The planet is called Zongying, and the gate stands in the center of an open pavilion of heavily abraded aluminum girders, arranged into the outline of a pentagonal prism with a floor of aluminum plates. Along the edges are an interlocking pattern of pentagons, formerly painted bright blue and yellow, which are recognized as Iktomi warning/danger/forbidden symbology now mostly faded and covered by dirt. If there were ever walls or ceiling, there is no sign of them now, though certain markers on the aluminum frame suggest they might have been meant to be climbed. Beyond this barrier is the dry valley.

The Iktomi - if that is what they are - stand like a grove of gnarled, dead trees in every direction. Dark grey twisted carapaces, pale white strands like branches of antlers growing out from within, breaking out at joints and intersection points between the semi-petrified chitinous plates. Many reach for the sky as still white limbs, while the others tangle on the ground like roots, sometimes intersecting or burying themselves in the soil.

Research on the site is in its infancy, and after the loss of researcher Fon Zongying (after whom the planet is named), biohazard status on travel to Zongying has been upgraded to Synthmorphs-Only. It is believed that the creatures around the site succumbed to a fungal parasitoid that replaced their inner tissues before bursting through their shells - which, in the extremely arid environment, managed to survive longer than on other worlds, though some evidence suggests that they and the gate might have been buried for a period and recently uncovered. Whatever the case, it is clear that the fungal parasitoid is still active, and that is spores (or possibly a symbiotic bacteria) are capable of metabolizing plastic - which is how they got to Zongying, whose remains now form a permanent part of the xenoarchaeological site.

Using Ghost Planet

Ghost Planet does not necessarily contain the final truth to the end of the Iktomi - but it might hold clues to one possible end. As a civilization that survived for some thousands of years and made use of the Pandora Gates, the Iktomi were in their own way explorers not like transhumanity - and like transhumans, they found strange dangers, and sometimes brought them with them. For the Iktomi, the fungal plague may have been their version of the exsurgent virus, and the destruction it wrought on the population so terrible that they quarantined the entire world. Beyond the strangely grim and silent forest, beyond the bounds of the valley lies what was once a thriving planet - and now is only a ghost world.

359: Frontier

ENTRY 359: Frontier

"The truth has always been out there. We just have to go find it."
- William Scully

There is a rumor in the Firewall network, passed from ego to ego, the stories sometimes growing in the telling. The ultimate failsafe, if all else goes wrong - a colony on an exoplanet, a final refuge where transhumanity can retreat, should the inconceivable happen again. Not to make a final stand, but to walk through and bury the gates behind them, to close the door on the solar system for good - because transhumanity is bigger than Earth, more important than sentimental attachment to the sun that birthed it. Survival, at any cost.

There is a truth to the rumor, though it is stranger than any of the stories make it out to be. When gatecrashing began in earnest, Firewall stumbled upon a single set of coordinates that all of the known gates had in common. They found there a near-Earth compatible world with over two dozen active gate devices, a hub in the gate network. The first gatecrashers dubbed the exoplanet Frontier. If not for what else they found there, perhaps Firewall would have let it become the new home for transhumanity.

Frontier is an uninhabited world - but it was not always so. The gate complex stands in the midst of a vast prairie-type landscape, a broad sea of grass on a continent the size of Australia. Massive, far-separated pylons dominate the landscape surrounding the gate complex, geothermal-powered terraforming stations that spew out nanites to shape the land, water, and air to something else. Estimates suggest they have been running at least two hundred Earth years. Yet there are no signs of habitation, no structures at all besides the gates and the pylons - except overhead.

Hanging above the planet are the remains of a stellar empire built by an extraterrestrial race. Broken rings, cracked cylinders, and dying satellites circle the world in a belt of space trash, and every night is marked by the burning debris as decaying orbits bring the detritus falling back to the surface. Samples recovered are, relative to Earth technology, primitive - spacecraft and habitats built by a society with four arms and four-fingered hands that counted in hexidecimal and had barely mastered the transistor, but in such profusion that they represent hundreds of years of sustained exploration and colonization of space...using technology equivalent to the first Earth astronauts.

Cleary, these alien astronauts did not build the gates. Equally obvious, whatever race did build the gate complex and terraformers on Frontier, they never moved in. Some Firewall xenoarchaeologists suggest that there was a glitch in the terraform software, and that the nanoswarms removed or cannibalized any structures for raw materials. Others suggest that the terraforming was abandoned when it became clear that the planet was inhabitated...or they simply hadn't moved in yet. Until the mystery is resolved, Firewall has kept a low-impact presence on Frontier. There are still protocols in place for transhumanity to retreat here in the event of an extinction event, and storehouses of raw materials, information, and technology have been established in preparation of such an event, but until such time as the mystery of what happened is resolved, Frontier is not acceptable as a colony site...not yet.

Using Frontier

A mystery, wrapped in an engima, through an artificial wormhole. Frontier may represent the great hope of transhumanity - or the most direct threat to its existence. Even if answers to what happened to the two races whose technological remains have been found on the planet can be found, there is no guarantee that transhumanity will like the them. There's a strong possibility, though few even at Firewall will admit this, that the sudden intrusion of the gate complex led more or less directly to the downfall or disappearance of a race that had obviously been space-capable for longer than transhumanity. If this is the case, Firewall needs to know. The only question is - are the player characters game to explore this Frontier?

Seed

• Firewall has manufactured an emergency shutdown test at Extropia, which will leave the Pandora Gate "sealed" for several hours - long enough for them to run an evacuation drill and see if their current protocols are sufficient for moving a substantial population of transhumans and associated equipment through the gate to Frontier. The PCs are assigned roles to assist, and move through the gate with the others as part of the mock-evacuation. However, something goes wrong - the sudden appearance of so many transhumans on Frontier appears to have activated several of the pylons on the other side, and caused the gates to temporarily lock. Cut off from home and with no obvious chain of command and potential immenient threat, what will the PCs do?

351: Comet For Sale

ENTRY 351: Comet For Sale

For sale: Encke's Comet. Gently used. Inquire within.
- Mesh Ad

Comet habitats have never really taken hold of the transhuman imagination. While the nucleus of comets are equivalent to sizable asteroids several kilometers in diameter, and comets often contain hydrocarbon compounds and water ice which are relatively easy to mine, the often erratic and sizable orbits are a turn-off, and the delta v necessary to lock trajectory and close with a comet through its thin atmosphere (coma) can make embarking or disembarking more complicated than an orbital habitat in some respects.

One of the few serious efforts at comet habitation was Encke's Comet - with a nucleus of 4.8 kilometers and an orbital period around the sun of 3.3 years, it seemed an ideal candidate as a sort of roving trading or scientific post. A development corporation was established, landed on the comet, and drilled down beneath the crust to carve out a series of chambers, roughly half of which were furnished and functional by the time the credits ran out. Worse, the construction period took so long that the comet was headed away from the sun by that time, and the majority of the crew abandoned Encke's Comet save for an AGI caretaker called Yngvi as it headed out to its aphelion of 4.11 AU and back.

The return of Encke's Comet in AF 7 sparked a renewal of interest, but legal troubles where encountered when the AGI caretaker claimed squatters rights; few of the original parties chose to contest it, and after a brief bout of fund-raising development on the comet renewed. This time, Yngvi focused on the installation of antimatter drive engines, intended to function as directional thrusters to help steer the comet to make flyby passes of certain habitats and thus increase its commercial utility, but found itself unable to procure antimatter due to the interference of the Jovian Republic (which already viewed the comet as a potential interloper and threat). Yngvi and Encke's Comet moved away from the sun once again.

Having now just returned in AF 10, Yngvi is tired of playing caretaker and is looking to sell the comet and settle down, possibly getting a little apartment on Titan. Beginning asking price is 250k credits, though Yngvi is willing to act as the banker in the transaction as long as it gets a down payment of 20% in cash.

Using Comet for Sale

Encke's Comet makes a good setting for a one-shot adventure, a fitting lair for a brinker or setting villain, or a quirky fixer-upper for enterprising player characters that don't mind being stuck on a fast-moving ball of dirty ice for a three-year tour of the Outer Rim. Being relatively large, isolated, and moving, comet habitats combine aspects of long deep space voyages and being stranded on an alien planet - although in this case, at least for a third of the trip the comet should be reachable by various transhuman habitats with fast ships, so in that respect it can allow player characters to visit many settlements they might not ordinarily get to in the course of their adventures.

Seeds

• Lionel Beauchamp believes that the Tunguska Event was caused by a fragment of Encke's Comet breaking off and exploding above Earth - and wants to prove this to show that comets are weaponizable. Lionel and his fellow space pirates have boarded and taken control of Encke's Comet, and Firewall believes they plan to make a test strike on Luna. The PCs are the only ones in a position to stop them, since they are near to where Encke's Comet will pass.
• Sauvegarder Comète Encke (SCE) is a grassroots mesh-based organization that wants to cease further development on Encke's Comet. They've raised 20,000 credits, but Yngvi is unwilling to sell the comet to them or place it under trust. The PCs are asked to negotiate a settlement, possibly with an eye towards turning Encke's Comet into a Universal Park - but they will have to work against a third party, a Jovian miner named Maria Manuel Escopetarra that wants to buy the comet just to strip it of its hydrocarbons.

344: Third Run

ENTRY 344: Third Run

"Can it be synthesized?"
- Mo Kohen, Chief Technology Officer of the Tharsis League

There are still monopolies. Chemistry is the science of processes, and while most transhumans think of chemistry in terms of the end products, chemists and chemical engineers know that the real difficulty in any synthesis are determining the processes involved, and the more complicated or obscure the molecules involved, the more difficult it can be to reverse-engineer how to make a given substance. When it comes to biological substances like flavinoids or aromatic compounds, which are typically synthesized using genetically-engineered organisms, reverse-synthesis can be difficult or almost impossible. So it is that a few hypercorps, habitats, and even individuals can have a virtual monopoly on certain substances, simply by keeping their processes and raw material trade secret. While eventually competitors will be able to create comparable products, by refusing to patent their processes or copyright the genetic codes involved, the monopolists require chemists and genehackers to work from scratch, trusting entirely in secrecy rather than legality for protection of their intellectual property.

On Mars, the most important monopolist is the small incorporated habitat of Third Run, a predominantly ethnic Indonesian enclave independent of the Tharsis League. Third Run is the only producer of nutmeg, mace, and related essential oils in the solar system, and the export of these materials is the basis of their wealth. While it is assumed that the Third Run community has access to the original genetic material of Myristica fragrans, and possibly other species, the habitat is too small to contain whole nutmeg trees, suggesting that they use some other method to produce and harvest the spices. Many hypercorps maintain a sizable bounty for any industrial spy that can crack the secret of Third Run's production processes and/or return with a sample of nutmeg genetic material, but so far the paranoid, security-conscious community of Third Run has prevented any leaks, spending a considerable portion of their nutmeg export earnings to keep their security state-of-the-art.

Generally isolationist, Third Run has accepted a few hypercorp visitors over the years. All of them report that beyond the airlocks the atmosphere is kept near-tropical, and the scent of spices and human occupation are omnipresent and nearly overpowering at first. Reportedly, the culture of the habitat places severe emphasis on personal responsibility and celebration of individual effort, but also a closeness to community, lack of personal space and property, and near-xenophobia towards outsiders, along with a graded security/taboo concept where access to certain areas/substances/individuals was restricted based on practical and social necessity. Outsiders were warned that they were not permitted into any region marked with yellow indicator lines - which corresponded with sealed portions of the habitat believed to lead to medical and lab areas - and were not allowed to enter until they signed a contract agreeing to abide by these restrictions. The few individuals who have violated the yellow line never returned from the habitat.

Using Third Run

A tough nut to crack, Third Run is primarily presented as a challenge for player characters looking to practice their breaking & entering skills, and in many respects represents a classical dungeon scenario for Eclipse Phase. However, this is a carefully-set-up ruse - an elaborate headfake or honey trap designed to discourage and mislead thieves. Security increases the farther the PCs get into Third Run, but the secret of the habitat doesn't lie in it's mythical, heavily-guarded "production" facilities, but in its inhabitants. The genetic material for nutmeg was coded into a pair of diseases (nutmeg is viral, mace is bacterial) that forms a chronic infection in the population of Third Run, and the nutmeg, mace, and related substances are carefully harvested by individuals and processed discretely under the guise of waste management. The Third Run inhabitants carefully monitor and track the expression, spread, and treatment of their disease, as prolonged episodes can lead to hallucination, illness, and death.

Seed

• A disaster in Third Run: the mace bacteria has mutated to become resistant to typical antibacterial treatments, the an outbreak of "mace pox" threatens to get out of control. Third Run microbiologist Peya is sent out to obtain the technology necessary to contain the disease, and the player characters are hired as her bodyguards and helpers, as Peya has never been outside Third Run before. While her yellow tattoos mark her as taboo to the inhabitants of Third Run, in the crowded habitats which do not recognize her society's customs the prospect of personal contact is disturbing and horrific to her. Unfortunately for Peya and the PCs, some bounty-hunting chemists think this is an ideal chance to grill Peya for some answers to the secrets of Third Run.

337: EarthCon

ENTRY 337: EarthCon

"We gather here to remember Earth-that-was, and Earth-that-shall-be-again. Transhumans, charge your glasses and raise them high. In toast to the fallen, in memory still bright."
- J-Bird, EarthCon Opening Convocation

Every Earth year, transhumans from across the solar system converge on the Muir habitat on Luna for EarthCon. The population often increases in size by an order of magnitude during the 240 hour event, requiring temporary domes and tin cans to be established to house both the visitors and the exhibits. Parents and guardians bring their children to the greenhouses and micro-farms to smell the scents of Earth-life, take physical tours through reconstructions of Earth city streets, wade in the synthetic oceans of painfully rebuilt beaches, hear recitations of poetry in nearly-dead languages, old recipes followed with strict authenticity to produce foods unknown to most transhumans, experience Earth-gravity in spin chambers, see the artifacts and remnants brought up from Earth, all physical reminders of what transhumanity has left behind. There are rememberances and lessons on who and what was lost, the struggle that culminated in the abandonment of Earth. Visitors wear native costumes long discarded as impractical living in space, some going so far as to resleeve into simulacra of historical characters. Memorials are raised for the dead, oaths renewed, reclaimationist plans discussed, scholarship shared. It is EarthCon, one of the greatest events of the year.

EarthCon Corp. is a non-profit organization that stages EarthCon every year, in cooperation with the Muir Habitat Authority and Lunar-Lagrange Alliance. Admission is explicitly free to all attendees, and necessary materials are often volunteered by participating hypercorps in exchange for the rights to limited advertising, with many hypercorps competing for the most sensational, realistic, or poignant display. During the period of EarthCon, the ECC assumes special legislative control of the Muir habitat and temporary extensions, dedicated to allowing access to any transhuman, and permitting the full participation of all transhumans - no matter their morph, orientation, or affiliation. Troublemakers quickly find themselves shadowed by ushers - cockroach-headed security synthmorphs designed to evoke disgust in most transhumans; and if their crimes are heinous enough (rape, murder, or fire-production not arranged ahead of time with the ECC as a part of the festivities) they are escorted - forcibly if necessary - to the nearest airlock.

Other habitats throughout the system have their own, smaller EarthCons; most of these are licensed from the ECC for a nominal fee and agreement to follow the spirit of EarthCon ("Open access for all transhumans."), and some of the largest and best-organized are staged at Olympus on Mars and at Liberty Station on Ganymede in the Jovian Republic.

Using EarthCon

The future is a study in contrasts, and while many Eclipse Phase campaigns will focus on what transhumanity has gained - resleevings, personal augmentations, space habitats, gatecrashing, etc. - it is also important to remember what has been lost. Not just the planet Earth, it's breathable air and natural wildlife, but the vast cultures that disappeared almost overnight, and the few remaining quickly dying out or becoming isolated. There are transhumans in AF 10 who only known Earth through second-hand memories, if at all, and their trips to EarthCon hold the same emotional resonance for them as a child visiting an elaborate movie set or theme park or museum. Emotions run high and deep, and as the setting for a scenario EarthCon can range from comedy over the reaction of morphs who have never been to the beach before to pathos as still-scarred veterans and survivors of the Fall weep at the memorial to their fallen comrades or leave floating candles to remember the family members that died on Earth. In addition to the bug-headed ushers, the ECC always contracts private shadow security forces to identify and shut down any disruptions to the planned events - and the ECC is willing to defy anyone, even the Planetary Consortium or Jovian Republic or a major hypercorp, who tries to keep anyone out or in other ways disrupt the freedom that characterizes the event. Even if the PCs don't care to participate directly, a minor Earthcon is one of their best chances to show up somewhere they're normally persona non grata.

330: Mundihof

ENTRY 330: Mundihof

"We are not a confederation, or a corporation. We are a community. Now git off my rock."
- Mama Yulia, Holder of the Nuke

An extensive beehive habitat with a population somewhere north of 10,000 transhumans, the Mundihof Collective are burrowed in to 48 Doris, one of the largest asteroids in the Main Belt. Most visitors mistake Mundihof for an anarchist enclave, but the truth is something stranger: 1,013 politically autonomous entities, each with a distinct geographical territory defined by their artificial cavern or caverns, mined out of the native rock and connected by a spiderweb of interlocking tunnels and politically neutral community areas subject to collaborative upkeep. Each "hof" currently consists of no more than 13 members, and engages each of its neighbors in complex political and economic agreements concerning trade, rights of way, tariffs and tolls, mutual cooperation, etc. Most of the Mundihof residents are stringent Autonomists, with a few being isolationists that are virtually brinkers, and the point of the habitat is to foster cooperation between small groups, while retaining their particular customs, art, and language, thus avoiding the dilution of cultures.

Of course, given the stringent self-centeredness that characterizes each hof, mutual cooperation with regards to the outside world and keeping the peace is a difficult balance. The former is handled by the Stadtholder, a perpetually interim political body/secret police that deals with outside threats on a case-by-case basis; the latter is handled by the Covenant of Mutually Assured Destruction - each of the hofs is possessed of a nuclear weapon of some kind, and violence between hofs is forbidden under penalty of their use - which in turn would lead to further reprisals, further uses of weapons, etc. Current estimates suggest that in the event of a nuclear exchange, the entire Mundihof habitat would be destroyed within thirty seconds. Even so, the various citizens of the hofs like to bicker and bargain and try to gain advantage over each other; it's pretty much the local pasttime.

Mundihof is mostly self-sufficient, with no individual hof having the resources or population to dominate any of the others to a considerable extant, and community resources like waste management, power generation, and air quality are generally handled by committees of the nearest hofs. Large-scale industry and agriculture is out, but among the thousand-plus hofs are hundreds of small specialist workshops that specialize in various individual crafts and crops. Tourism is quite popular on Mundihof, with several Mesh-based travelogues remarking on the ability to travel through three or four culturually and politically distinct mini-habitats in an hour (depending on local border travel agreements), and likening the experience to parts of Europe on old Earth. A transhuman could dine on reconstituted kelp wraps in Nizima, get a hand-carved cicatrix in Algeb, and finish off the night in a swing-hostel on Bryn Mawr, listening to the chorister-miners chink away at the rock. A few of the hofs are experimenting with their own currencies, but at the moment they accept credit as the universal currency, and when that isn't available simply resort to @-rep.

Using Mundihof

It remains to be seen if the great experiment of Mundihof will work out, end in a blaze of nuclear fire, or eventually consolidate into a single habitat or confederation. Only time will tell. In the meantime, player characters can have the run of the vast network of caverns and all of the strange, idiosyncratic mini-countries that inhabit them. Given the laughably small size of each hof, the player characters will probably present a considerable influence block in their own right just by showing up, and their actions can have a serious impact on local politics and economics. Some PCs might even get it in their head to start their own hof, which if the gamemaster is willing is perfectly fine with the Mundihof - all they need is to carve out a cavern, obtain a nuke, and start dealing with their neighbors. Empire-building isn't for every game though, and whether they set up shop on Mundihof or not the Stadtholder might have a use for the player characters to see to external threats - aggressive hypercorps, Planetary Consortium and Jovian Republic reps, and scumbarge pirates are just some of the problems that need to be dealt with, and trying to herd the hofs into acting together is more difficult than herding cats in zero gravity without a mass driver.

Seed

• A terrible event: the hof of Niven has discovered that someone has stolen the radioactive material from their nuclear weapon! Now defenseless before their neighbor/enemies, the Nivenites quietly feel out the PCs to steal the material from another hof's weapon. The PCs can set out their plans, and if they succeed they find out that the target hof's nuke also lacks nuclear material! At this point, one of the Stadtholder shows up to explain that both weapons were disarmed to prevent their use - since only the threat of nuclear weapons is necessary to keep the peace. If the PCs agree to continue the illusion, the Stadtholder will pay for their silence and give them fake nuclear materials with which to satisfy the Nivenites.

323: Uno

ENTRY 323: Uno

"Oh fuck, I think I stepped on something."
- Fuckup; 34:256:11:29 remaining on on their sentence

A step through the Pandora Gate brought the 'crashers to an alien paradise garden. The air smelled like cinammon, with patches of bitter almond that turned out to be clouds of cyanide gas. The whole place moved; the carpet-critter scoured the ground for feces left by the undulating gasbag plant, leaving bioluminescent slime trails eagerly slopped up by the five-tongued starfish-snail. Nothing attacked the transhuman tresspassers; nothing seemed carnivorous. It was a weird ecosystem, and deserved a lifetime of study.

Until one of the gatecrashers accidentally stepped on a finger-crawler. Damage done, the team scraped it into a sample bag and took it back home, initial survey complete. Analysis of the finger-crawler showed signs of an engineered organism - immortal cell-lines, no recognizable reproductive capabilities, ridiculously specific digestive system, something that looked like a serial number encoded in base 13 under one gill-flap. Reviewing the recordings of the survey further reinforced this hypothesis; none of the analysts could see two of anything. Each creature appeared to be unique, with its own niche.

The subsequent team came back to a devastated ecosystem. Things were starving, dropped dead in their tracks. A whole section of the garden's food chain had broken down, critters starved or suffering from micronutrient deprivation, others overburdened and poisoned by waste products that they couldn't rid themselves of naturally. Emergency rescue measures met up against an ecological prime directive, but a last-ditch 24-hour Mesh campaign raised enough funds to overcome the eco-conservatives and at least make an effort to save as much of Uno's ecosystem as could be done.

As for the gatecrasher who killed the finger-crawler, their punishment was set for bid during the fund-raising campaign, and the winning vote was that their name be officially changed to "Fuckup" for a period of 35 years, with all traces of their former name being erased retroactively. Fuckup wasn't exactly contrite or cooperative with the sentence, but eventually submitted to psychosurgery under duress, and henceforth until time is up will be known as Fuckup.

Using Uno

Transhumanity has a nasty habit of unbalancing ecosystems; it's just rarely as blatant as what happened with Uno. That said, even with its dying ecosystem, Uno needs to be explored - there is every indication that this group of alien lifeforms was built, not naturally evolved, and there may still be evidence of the extraterrestrial sentients that created them around there somewhere. Likewise, gatecrashers are needed to help in the recovery efforts, bringing sick and starving critters back for treatment and study, then re-introducing healthy specimens along with feeders that approximate the functions of some of the lost critters. It's a weird world, and the xenoecologists want to keep it that way.

Seed

• Fuckup approaches the PCs, trying to hire them to recover their original name. The PCs will have to do some serious digging if they accept the job, and face a number of reasonable-sounding transhumans that will non-violently hinder them, as they believe in the justice of Fuckup's sentence.

316: Venuvius

ENTRY 316: Venuvius

Miners in the Main Belt rarely have the facilities to process the ore they harvest, which remains an energy and oxygen-intensive process which is most efficiently and economically handled in large lots. Consequently, while the Belt mining is dominated by small and independent miners and microcorps, extraction is gated through a handful of specialist hypercorps and even a few middlemen who buy small lots direct from miners and combine them into large lots to be sold directly to processing stations (or hypercorps that then send them to processing stations). Balanced against this trend to centralized processing are small individual processing stations, which are independent of hypercorps and often work on a cash-free basis. The largest and most established of these situations is the Venuvius habitat, located in the Vesta asteroid family.

Venuvius contracts with individual miners or groups, even microcorps, and specializes in the extraction of hydrocarbons and metals. The entire exchange is explicitly creditless; the workers of Venuvius receive a share of the processed material as payment for their labor, typically on the order of 10%, although particularly poor ores or difficult extractions and/or more involved processing can make their share up to 25%. For this service, the Venuvians handle the entire extraction process, including waste disposal and statistical quality sampling, though the other parties they deal with are welcome to participate in (or at least observe) any part of the process. The Venuvians then use or trade their share for needed materials and foodstuffs; given that they have the expertise and technical capabilities, most of their materials see further processing before they are shipped out, which further increases their value.

Inhabitants of Venuvius are predominantly German-speaking, with a heavy Vietnamese linguistic minority that makes for an interesting ethnic blend. The population does not have a distinct identity, but as a group shares certain values such as efficiency, independence, industriousness, and a dislike of waste which form the core cultural concepts of the habitat, and put most of the transhumans that live there firmly into the Autonomist camp. For example, the oxygen required for several of the furnace operations is generated via electrolysis from the asteroid's native water ice; the hydrogen gas would normally be considered a waste product, but the Venuvians use it as a coolant and in some other light industrial applications. Recycling, when economic to do so, is very big on the habitat, and any non-hazardous product without an industrial use is typically made available for art installations.

Seeds

• The great secret of Venuvius, if there is one, is that the current group of residents did not build the station, they only inherited it - and even now are discovering aspects of its design and construction. Case in point, the current group of administrators have accidentally triggered the transformation sequence, and the whole station is in the process of reconfiguring itself into some kind of giant spider-robot. The PCs receive a distress call to help reverse the station transformation, which requires them to infiltrate its "head" and overcome the security measures there.
• The Venuvian holographic process-mark is one of the standards by which raw metals are measured by in the Belt, and marked ore ingots are typically used in place of currency on many smaller habitats. So when the Venuvians catch wind of a counterfeiting operation, they ask the PCs to find the counterfeiters, destroy their apparatus, and seize as much of the fraudulent material as they can, so that it can be re-graded properly before Venuvius' rep takes a dive.
• A contractual quibble has grown into a full-blown legal row on Vesuvius, as a bouncer named O'Qeefe claims the station has taken more than its fair percentage. The parties involved have settled on a resolution method to everyone's satisfaction: nonlethal trial by combat. O'Qeefe and a few of his biggest miners will represent his side, and the Vesuvians offer to hire the PCs to act for them. If the PCs win, they'll get 0.5% of the total processed material - which works out to about 500kg of palladium. 

309: Macroforge

ENTRY 309: Macroforge

"We built the pyramids with bronze tools and rope. We assembled the Eifel Tower with less than two hundred people. We chiseled Mount Rushmore out of the mountain with dynamite. Now look at us, living in tin cans, cramped where ever we can fit when all the solar system is ours. Why did we ever stop? When did we start thinking so small? Microtech, nanotech. Fuck that noise. Let's build something they'll see from another planet. Dream big."
- Jaq Prime, First Among Engineers

Vast city-habitats float above a half dozen worlds. Spacecraft with a volume measured in cubic kilometers drift silently through the vacuum. Space elevators stretch into orbit, millions of meters of nanotubes linked together. Three-dimensional printing is nearly ubiquitous in the solar system, nanotech makers pumping out all manner of goods, but they are limited in scale and capabilities, and while their products are adequate for most purposes few are suitable to large-scale construction. With their little printers, most designers and techies dream small, playing at lower scales. But there are some transhumans who are not afraid to dream big.

Orbiting Mercury, where solar power is cheap and material from the Belt is plentiful, is the Macroforge, a clunky grey donut with six great spokes, between which hangs a spiderweb of solar cells hanging on nanocarbon cables. The bulk of the industrial cluster habitat is one massive three-dimensional printer, which can assemble entire spacecraft and habitats within its depths. The bulk of this work is automated; each megaconstruction is embodied in a single Grand Design, which is broken down into component parts, which are in turn broken down into generic 3D printer designs - right down to the tiniest screws and linkages. Boundary printers churn out the materials, which are transported to treatment and manufacturing bays to be processed and fitted together, and so on and so forth with larger and larger component sections finally being brought together to form the finished product.

The engineers, technicians, and programmers of the habitat work predominantly to refine the processes and designs, testing and evaluating new materials and methods, and troubleshooting any errors that crop up in the Grand Design. Most of the inhabitants are autonomists, though the habitat eschews politics in favor of a mutual purpose: to dream build, and to build big. The organization is a representative meritocracy, with each engineering discipline headed by the most knowledgeable and effective of their members, who takes the lead in internal design philosophy, doling out work assignments, and communicating with the other engineering disciplines. First Among Engineers is Jaq Prime, a multi-disciplinary engineer who has been authorized by the other engineering heads to negotiate contracts and represent the Macroforge when dealing with the Planetary Consortium and other reps, though she has no local powers or authority - and likes it that way. Most of the accessory duties (technical writing, technicians, logistics, etc.) is handled by the engineers' family and hired staff, including some services purchased from hypercorps.

Using the Macroforge

Scale is a tricky concept in roleplaying games. Climbing a mountain means nothing when it consists of a single skill check; distances measured in light minutes are transversed by player characters during a potty break. Sometimes players need to feel the size and scope of what they're up against - to stand in awe and soak up the flavor text, when the shadow of a passing habitat being towed into position temporarily blocks out the sun and stars; or they walk and walk for hours on the side of Mons Olympus, only to pause at the edge of space and look back to see the fragile web of lights om the plains and hills laid out below as night comes on. It is so easy in Eclipse Phase to forget how vast the scale is of planets, how terribly far away transhuman habitats are from one another, how tremendously huge that transhuman science and engineering can now build when they choose to dream big. The Macroforge is a setting where PCs can see the guts of titanic ships and the monumental skeletons of habitats as they are being built; to stand in awe for a few moments in the cathedral-spaces and wonder at what transhumans can create.

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.

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.

288: Liangamish

ENTRY 288: Liangamish

The Liangamish Tholus near the Amenthes Fossae on Mars is an artificial hillock carved from local stone and built into the shape of a large phallic dome, ornamented with penis-headed columns, and fantastic, intricately detailed phallic sculptures, carvings, and the accouterments. The architectural style is claimed by experts to be loosely derivative of Asian and Indian fertility temples of old Earth, but experts who have examined the building claim that while the outside architecture is smooth and symbolic or representative of human genitalia, inside the temple the artwork gets progressively more strange, detailed, elaborate, and dark, incorporating fanastical creatures and aliens, skulls and bones, perverse couplings, genital mutilation, and architectural considerations that suggest blood grooves and ritual chambers for self-castration.

Despite, or perhaps because, of the elaborate and strange sexual symbolism and artwork of the site, it retains a steady tourist trade, with the the Liangamish Tours microcorp controlling access to the site, giving guided physical and virtual tours, ensuring visitors don't damage the site, and selling souvenirs. Honeymooners in particular are known to visit the site and kiss or rub the Central Phallus, a freestanding iron pillar in the geometric center of the Tholus, which is often given to be good luck and promote fertility. An objective outside investigative agency performed a series of surveys and biomedical scans and found that there is a sleight positive correlation between fertility and kissing the Phallus, but argued that this may well be the result of other factors. This has not stopped the microcorp from disseminating the study's finding widely to attract more tourists.

Liangamish Tours has been searching for the original artisan or artisans as part of plan to expand the site, with detailed designs already in place for new tholuses centered around breasts, vaginas, and anuses, but have so far failed to discover much on the origins of the Liangamish site or its creator(s). Initial construction steps toward new or expanded tholus sites have also met unusual delays and faults, which has given birth in the media to the rumor of a curse - ironically, Liangamish employees and officers appear confused as to whether this is an idea they came up with or not, and interviews and Mesh-based digital archaeology gives conflicting evidence as to whether is it is a plant and to what degree the Liangamish Tours employees actually believe in the supposed curse.

Using Liangamish

A mystery, wrapped in an enigma, which could be the site of an H. R. Giger-themed pornographic film - and hey, feel free to use it in your game if that appeals to you. Liangamish is an adult-themed location which is taboo enough for the inner twelve-year old in every gamer, and with just enough is-it-or-isn't-it rumors and unresolved origins about it that the gamemaster can do pretty much whatever they want with it. As a scene, it's creepy and yet sort of silly, with carve stone penis-monsters that PCs can momentarily stumble on in the dark and then feel foolish about. Who built it and why are entirely up to the PCs, but as it stands it is a good slightly-out-of-the-way tourist spot (like Stonehenge), a decent scene for a wedding or post-wedding hijinks, the not-so-secret meeting place of an exsurgent cult, the remnant of an old Earth religion, etc. Gamemasters that don't like or aren't comfortable using "phallus" and various related terms every other sentence are entirely welcome to replace the distinctive theme with teddy bears or hippopotami or whatever else they find interesting, though that does mean they'll miss out on the opportunity to use images of Asian fertility temples and H. R. Giger art as props in game.

Seed

• The Liangamish Curse doesn't just prevent further destruction - individuals that have damage the site, such as removing materials from it, often face bad fortune or death. So when the superstitious flat Juice Boxer finds a stone penis among his things, he is scared bad. He asks the PCs for their help in returning the object to its rightful place as quickly as possible - made all the more difficult because Liangamish Tours has temporarily closed the site after recent marsquakes may have damaged the stability of the building.

281: Europan Quarry #1

ENTRY 281: Europan Quarry #1

Things swim in the cold, dark seas of Europa, beneath the crust of planetary ice. They live, they love, and they die, their remains drifting down to lower depths as a gentle organic snow, the prime source of nutrients and energy for the stranger things adapted to the high-pressure deeps. They in turn die, and their remains lay on the sea floor, accumulating into piles and mounds, eventually crushed beneath their own weight, forming the rough sedimentary rock that makes up the bulk of the Europan sea floor. Over geological time, this raw material undergoes further chemical and physical changes - slight volcanic activity, asteroid impact, etc. - resulting in upheaval and metamorphosis. The result is a rarity in the solar system: a soft, lustrous white marble, sometimes containing the dark grey fossilized remains of ancient Europan sea life.

Sites of Europan marble are few, and currently under a monopoly of the Europan Mining microcorp, which has established three deep water quarry sites. Taking an artisanal approach to mining, vast chunks of marble are blown out using explosives, and then transhuman biomorphs cut and shape the chunk into sheets and blocks using environmentally-friendly watersaws. Most of the material is reserved for construction, being a luxury export, but the smaller material is shaped into goods and artwork by a local feminist artisan community, the Parliament of Mermaids; the detritus from mining and art is powdered and sent to other habitats, where is it mixed with resins to form a cheaper false stone material.

Using Europan Quarry #1

Rock isn't something that most players are given to think about. However, it bears reminding that most everything we know and hold familiar about geology applies to the planet Earth. Other worlds, where there are no plate tectonics, no liquid water, no little carbon-based lifeforms to die and leave behind layer upon layer, have very different forms of stone, not to mention rock formations. This doesn't necessarily mean you throw out the book when it comes to rock and gemstones, but it does mean that a lot that players and gamemasters often take for granted can actually be presented as novel, rare, valuable, and fascinating. The Europan Quarry is one such site on which to hang related plot hooks, but Europan marble by itself is a neat little detail to work into a campaign from time to time. In addition to statuary, cups, and the like, polished Europan marble may also be considered a kind of gemstone suitable for jewelry, and can show up in other habitats far away by way of trade, and buildings made or decorated with Europan marble are a display of wealth which can be worked into the campaign.

Seeds

• Exobiologists are attempting to call a halt to mining operations at Europan Quarry #1 so that they can examine and classify the fossils within the lustrous white stone (indeed, the artisans carving the stone often carve around the fossils to better show them off for clients). The PCs are hired to physically deliver the work stoppage order and represent the exobiologists' interests as negotiations continue. Work grinds to a halt and tensions aboard the small habitat get tense, with the PCs caught in the middle. Can they help negotiate a way out, or will they accept a bribe from the Europan Mining Corp. to let work continue and hope their rep doesn't take a hit? Or maybe they'll just investigate who is illegally labeling and selling off-grade white rock as marble...
• One of the "mermaids" in the artisan community has achieved notoriety for her small statuettes and cameos of exotic interspecies erotica, often featuring transhumans and one (or more) creatures based on native Europan lifeforms - including a few science hasn't identified yet. A group of collectors, scientists, and moralists have pooled their credits and hire the PCs to descend into the depths of Europa and find the reclusive artist - so that they can deliver her fanmail, cease-and-desist orders, special requests and offers, scientific inquiries, etc.
• A mystery is occurring on the player character's habitat: a mysterious disease is causing transhumans to calcify and slowly transform into statues of Europan marble! Local medtechs haven't been able to determine what exactly is going on, but that hasn't stopped the media from blaming the spread of the "Medusa virus" with an "infected" load of Europan marble jewelry that recently arrived. A little legwork and maybe a few long-distance calls to Europan Quarry #1 might put the PCs on a different tack: looking at the main competitor to the local marble importer, a specialist nanofabricator of artificial stone who has been losing business and might have the skill to program a nanoinfection.

274: Crashlandia

ENTRY 274: Crashlandia

“Everyone gets to where they’re going. Most don’t know where that might be, and find themselves a might surprised at where they end up. ‘s no use crying over crashed spaceships though. It’s your dharma.”
- Raj Fork42

The Glorious Infernal Majesty set off from Luna to Dione, one of the moons of Saturn, with fifteen hundred colonists to create an adjunct mining station aligned with the Thoroughgood habitat. Things did not go quite as planned, and when the ship failed to brake properly, Thoroughgood knew there was trouble. Still, there was little they could do as the silver pencil of a spacecraft skewed straight past the settlement to impact spectacularly on tiny neighboring Helene. Based on the energies involved, it was widely assumed there were no survivors.

This was not quite the case. The majority of the colonists did indeed perish on impact, including all of the biomorphs. However, three synthmorphs and four informorphs survived and were operable. Where other egos might have signaled for help from relatively-nearby Thoroughgood, the colonists all apparently underwent a philosophical epiphany and decided to make the most of life where they landed. Salvaging what they could from the supplies and the wreckage of the ship, the synthmorphs began industriously building their own little utopia. A year or so later Thoroughgood noticed the small habitat going up on their neighboring moon and sent a rescue party, which was quietly but firmly rebuffed. However, the rescuers took the time to get to explore the habitat and survey the local culture.

Government and civil structure is, even by anarchist standards, nonexistent. Instead, the inhabitants of Crashlandia - as they call it - appear to enjoy an almost fatalistic shared vision of a neat, orderly colony. The centerpiece of the colony is a fifty-meter pyramid, the sides lined with solar panels, and which houses the servers and computers that supports the infomorph population, which is comprised entirely of forks and currently numbers about forty members. There are now five synthmorphs, three having been fashioned from whatever material is at hand, each of which has designed and built their own small (3m tall) pyramid with internal and underground chambers for their private use. Despite the lack of biomorphs present on the small moon, the Crashlandia locals have spent considerable energy and resources created a small biomorph habitat, complete with a tiny hydroponics garden and atmosphere. They claim that this is the foundation for the eventual tourist trade, and have plans for install a bar and possibly a spa once they can afford the water-ice.

Using Crashlandia

There are some places that are just weird, where the people are just off. This is a well-beloved trope of science fiction, and Eclipse Phase doesn’t have enough of them. PCs visiting Crashlandia will fine the locals alternately invitingly and secretive, open-minded and close-mouthed. New concepts may run through the habitat like wildfire, upsetting the delicate shared delusion - or just as well may be ignored. There are occasional trade missions to Crashlandia, mainly to drop off supplies for their tourist base, paid for through certain media work and a convoluted banking scheme that everyone purports to not quite understand; accountants who access the books generally suffer as though they’d been exposed to a basilisk hack. The gamemaster is free to make Crashlandia as dire or harmless as they want to: it could be a fun and wacky one-off, a common backdrop or reference akin to Elbonia, or the great pyramid could be a TITAN weapon that they’re merrily building, ready to blast a basilisk hack out to the entire solar system by hacking the Long Array.

267: The White Room

ENTRY 267: The White Room

Many egos, particularly infomorphs, find themselves with a virtual eternity on their hands and not much to do. Some educate themselves from the publicly available archives of transhumanity’s collected art and literature, socialize, and indulge in the near-infinite amount of free entertainment available on the Mesh; other get involved with different projects and causes, finding meaning, purpose, and rep boosts in original research, original content creation, or the endless cataloguing, shuffling, and presentation of data for the benefit of their fellow transhumans. A conscientious ego can live a comfortable life doing nothing more than giving thoughtful, carefully-constructed feedback on the right forums and product pages; some even become successful enough to go pro.

Most, however, find escape in the various virtual environments and settings run in the Mesh; ventures that range from religious depictions of the afterlife and extensive life-simulation games to commercial interstellar fantasy roleplaying games with memberships in the millions and dozens of spinoffs. Most infomorphs lack the credits or reputation to swing a full membership in these virtual environments, but by the same token the gamemasters running the simulations often lack sufficient egos to run the hundreds of thousands of complex NPCs demanded for many games—or at least, don’t feel like making their own forks do all the work. This mutual demand has led to the creation of an extensive work-for-play culture in the Mesh, where egos enter into agreements to play certain non-player character roles within one Mesh game in exchange for access time as a player character on a game or games they do wish to play. The key to these contracts is the work-for-play ratio—at 1:1, every minute of time spent as an NPC credits the ego with one minute of time to spend as a PC, though most egos start out at 2:1 or 1.5:1 until their skills develop; truly gifted digital actors are given challenging NPC roles and may earn ratios of 1:1.5 or 1:2, though this is rare and often exclusive to the most expensive and extensive virtual environments.

One of the most popular environments is the White Room, a virtual limbo that serves as a gateway to several clusters of afterlife-based virtual games, where a PC can interact with NPCs based on historical characters, observe (or participate in) the pleasures and punishments of various real and fictional heavens, hells, purgatories, and spirit realms—and even more exotic locales, such as the Celestial Planet of Kolob™ and the Thetan Astral Plane. The wfp ratio is strictly 1:1, though players are allowed to vote up NPCs that are particularly entertaining, educational, or in-character, and gamemasters regularly award bonus hours to NPCs with a high rep. Officially, players cannot purchase additional hours for credits or rep, but have to earn them through playing NPCs, but PCs are allowed to transfer hours to each other and there is a thriving grey market in buying hours in the shadier parts of the out-of-character game forums.

Using the White Room

Games-within-games are nothing new to science fiction or roleplaying; think of the holodeck adventures on Star Trek: the Next Generation…and all the things they did well and did wrong. Virtual environments allow a change of pace from the space opera reality of Eclipse Phase, especially during long trips between planets or habitats, and are handy settings for one-off adventures, since they are infinitely customizable and most of the hard bits are easy to dispense with. If keeping track of play-hours as another form of currency seems too much bookkeeping for example, just give a straight credit cost or let the PCs burn a favor—the explanation being that they simply bought some hours on a grey-market forum. Some characters can make a profession of being an NPC, which is represented by the Profession: Game Actor skill or Art: Game Acting.

260: Amberwald

ENTRY 260: Amberwald

“Step through the Gate and enter the world-forest…five-mile high pylons, supporting an artificial canopy that holds in the air for a massive greenhouse effect…mega-architecture on a scale never even attempted in our Solar sytem…and riches yours for the taking! Volunteer your team to go gatecrashing today. Some restrictions may apply.”
- Amberwald Incorporated Commune advert

The first gatecrashers on Amberwald returned with a half-dozen unknown xenospecies covered in purple-blue chunks of amber, some the size of their heads. They spun a tale of a world grown under an artificial sky, where weird hydrocarbon-heavy saps leaked down from the pylons like slow-moving, inexorable rivers, capturing and asphyxiating all life in their path. With the proceeds of selling the material from their first mission, the gatecrashers incorporated as the Amberwald Incorporated Commune and began selling the right to gatecrash Amberwald to anyone that would sign up. Most gatecrashers who take them up on the idea aren’t heard from again. Smart gatecrashers might ask why AIC, which keeps the Amberwald coordinates as a carefully-kept secret, hasn’t been back itself.

The truth is, the founding members barely made it back last time, and far from the lush and exotic paradise that they make it out to be, Amberwald is a hellworld. The pylons exist, but the upper canopy is damaged and incomplete, so that the air quality can drop from Terra-optimal to “surface of Venus” in a matter of minutes when the wind changes. The hydrocarbon-heavy polymer saps that dribble down the pylons to form the multicolored “amber” are distillations from the toxic upper atmosphere, and most contain unusually high impurities of radioactive salts and grit. Most of the native wildlife—if it is native, and not introduced—has been completely trapped and covered in subsequent waves of this tarry glue, and it is believed that only the native sixteen-limbed insect species and a form of exploding tree still thrive. Even most of the liquid water remains trapped beneath the amber, hidden lakes where the life has long suffocated except perhaps for bacteria.

Still, every now and again a crew actually manages to straggle back—and having paid their 50,000 credit fee to AIC, they are free to sell whatever they can haul for top whatever they can get for it.

Mechanics

Most of the time, Amberwald is fairly hospitable, with near-Earth level mix of oxygen and nitrogen and temperate temperatures a little warmer than the surface of Mars. However, according to irregular tides a stream of toxic outside air will dip in from a rent in the canopy, temporarily rendering the atmosphere corrosive (10 points of damage per action turn) for up to 10 minutes. The liquid amber is another natural disaster, somewhere between an avalanche and a flood—the streams of heavy hydrocarbons are sticky, dense, can move amazingly quickly, and can seal a morph in seconds if they don’t move quickly enough. The local insects have an inherent radiation sense that they use to help predict and avoid the amberflows.

253: Recess

ENTRY 253: Recess

“Youth, on your schedule, on your terms.”

- Recess viral advertising campaign

Many transhumans throughout history have tried to figuratively recapture or relive their youths; only now in the time of pods and resleeving can this actually be accomplished. Rejuvenation, resleeving into a younger cloned body, even a neotenic morph are available for those transhumans with the pull or the credits to feel young again—the supple body, the boundless energy, the smooth skin and fresh eyes. For those that cannot afford to be a child full-time of course, there is always Recess.

Situated on Gerlach, Recess is a collaborative role-playing environment where customers take command of neotenic morphs adapted as pods, puppet socking their charges and living vicariously through various scenarios, from a night with parents to a day at school. The most popular scenario is a literal infinite recess on a multi-microgravity level playground-city, where there are no “adult” morphs around, and only employees (either real neotenics or other puppeteers) to keep the peace and help make friends, leading activities like rival playtime gangs.

Specialist scenarios catering to more rarified tastes are also available, reproducing elements of childhood punishment and embarrassment, sexual encounters, and even an annual and quite brutal “child soldier” re-enactment which has appalled many and yet been lauded for accurately representing the physical and psychological trauma, thus discoursing its proliferation. Many habitats aware of these less-savory elements of Recess’ business have seen fit to limit their inhabitant’s access, but the permissive administration of Gerlach allows the business to continue so long as all egos enter into the process with full consent.

Using Recess

Recess is basically a good locale for letting PCs interact with neotenics and as neotenics, either by resleeving or puppeteering one of the available neotenic pods…and there is considerable reason to do so. Recess’ clients include hypermedia executives to burnt-out petal abusers, politicians with unpopular kinks and bored house-husbands, all eager to shed their old skins and experience life as children again. The distinction of neotenics is that while they may look like children, they are not—and nowhere is that quite so obvious as when a group of mature egos is piloting a group of childlike bodies in a three-story microgravity playground with no obvious supervision. Even outside of the “special scenarios,” violence (even sexual violence) is a possibility, and we’re not talking about Jhassa stealing Corban’s crayons… As always, the gamemaster should decide how visceral and gritty they want to play this at their own table; adults in the bodies of children can get as dark as an episode of CSI: Special Victims Unit, or be a relatively light frolic where people really do just act like kids, complete with tantrums and poor bladder control.

Seed

• A special “group enrollment” into the child soldier annual event has the management staff of Recess worried. The PCs are quietly approached and offered free enrollment passes (valued at up to 10,000 credits each) if they can track back the client. Doing so leads to a brinker community on the dark side of the Moon—who is using the virtual child soldier simulation to help train real child soldiers. If the PCs can obtain hard evidence (or sufficient testimony), then Recess will cancel the event and alert the lunar authorities.

246: The Crypt

ENTRY 246: The Crypt

Any Firewall agent that’s around long enough hears rumors about the Crypt. The secret, secure storage unit where archivists keep the most dangerous and important fragments of Firewall’s ongoing struggle against exsurgent threats. Samples of exsurgent viruses, alien artifacts, a library of confiscated basilisk hacks…some scuttlebutts like to throw in rumors of “lost” technologies, a hidden Pandara Gate, a live TITAN, major religious artifacts from Earth, a zoo of psi-capable transhumans and animals (and one really pissed-off toaster), the only known dracomorph, proof that ghosts exist, the cryogenic chamber hold Adam and Lucy the back-hacked common genetic ancestors of all transhumanity… Legends grow in the telling; some of the archivist queue even spreads them deliberately.

The truth is a little more colloquial: yes, Firewall does contain a secret secure storage facility, codenamed Crypt, which is managed by a queue of archivists. However, most of the material is rather mundane: secure backups of critical files, and a scattering of artifacts, cell samples, exsurgent virus cultures, etc. Nor is there any one single hidden facility hiding beneath a lavafall in the depths of Mars or only accessible if you put in the “Zero Code” on a Pandora Gate (what does happen if you do that is still classified for the next hundred and fifty years, but the last time it almost wiped out Extropia). Instead, the Crypt is maintained pretty much wherever the archivists can find the space, often with secure storage facilities being fitted into the unused spaces between walls and exterior bulkheads in habitats. The archivists prefer a modular honeycomb setup of self-secured cells with a hexagonal cross-section that can be easily stacked and magnetically bond together.

The main security device for such systems is to remain hidden, but each cell also typically contains a shaped charge sufficient to destroy the contents if anyone tries to tamper with them or open one without giving the right answers (selected by a philosophical expert system with several “trap questions”). Archivists also tend to come up with their own security systems, preferring small modular systems like overlapping sensor nets tied to particle beam bolters, spiders that “spin” webs of nanowire in dead spaces, and “radiation leak” false alarms coupled with low-level microwave agonizers to discourage unauthorized personnel.

The downside of this distributed approach is that sometimes a given Crypt is discovered and needs to be relocated quickly and quietly, or one or more items might need to be recovered either because it was stolen or escaped. In these circumstances, archivists are generally given the authority and resources to impress any local Firewall personnel or regular stringers to help them recover the missing material or help see to its safe transfer.

The Crypt system does include a few “megacells” which are essentially prisons for certain transhumans who are too important to destroy but cannot be trusted with their freedom. Such sites are usually located at brinker outposts or within existing prison habitats as special administrative solitary blocks. The most hazardous individuals are restrained (and sedated) at secure private medical facilities, but the cost of such incarceration generally prevents Firewall from overindulging in that option.

232: Mercy Wing

ENTRY 232: Mercy Wing

Not every trip through a gate goes well. No one quite knows why—maybe the receiver gate is damaged, or a collapsing star disrupts the wormhole, or the coordinates fed in were off by a bit. Most of the time when this happens, passage simply fails: the portal does not open, the connection is not made, please try again later. Much more rarely, the connection is disrupted when someone is going through. The survivors of such disasters are brought to the Mercy Wing, an emergency medical research facility which specializes in injuries caused by a sudden change in the local laws of physics.

Gatekeeper Corporation opened up the first Mercy Wing near the Pandora Gate shortly after the first “incident,” and most other groups and corporations (with the general exception of the Fissure Gate—negotiations with the anarchists have broken down again) set up their own emergency medical research facilities, combining the equipment of an experimental physics lab with state-of-the-art medical care. For the majority of Mercy Wings, the first goal is to keep the patient alive (biomorph) or functioning (synthmorph); this was a point of serious contention against their second goal, which was to study the injuries involved to determine what exactly happened. Transferring the patient’s ego to another morph is generally not a high priority, and generally only addressed when the staff finds it convenient.

Of the hundreds or thousands of gatecrashers that have gone through since the first gate was discovered, there have been only eleven recorded “incidents” affecting a total of sixteen gatecrashers. Nine of those have died, two have been rehabilitated, and the other five remain in care—three of them long-term residents of the Mercy Wing at the Pandora Gate. The immediate effects of the physics fluctuation are highly localized to the portions of the individual at the gate threshold during the time of the incident, but secondary effects either from the implications of the initial exposure or from re-exposure to ‘normal’ physics environments are extremely common, and typically include severe radiation exposure and the infamous “exploding hand” syndrome where a part of the individual’s anatomy experiences a sudden state change, typically accompanied by a sizable release of energy.

Using the Mercy Wing

Mercy Wings are secret hospitals that hide the deepest, darkest underbelly of gatecrashing—injuries so rare and random that there’s no point in rolling the dice for them because the normal chances of an “incident” while going through a gate is infinitesimal. The only reason transhumanity has suffered so many “incidents” is because they’re still playing fast and loose with the gate network. So having said that, any time a character suffers an “incident” passing through a gate is not a matter of the roll of the dice, but gamemaster fiat.

While physics majors might enjoy the hypothetical scenario about what happens when you stick your hand into a universe where the Plank constant suddenly decides it wants to be lower, for most gamemaster it is enough to say that very likely whatever part of the character that was at the gate threshold at the time will explode (or fuse, transmute, start to undergo rapid radioactive decay, etc.) and the character will suffer a relatively severe shock (as well as the effects of the explosion/radiation exposure, etc.) Immediate medical care is their only hope for survival, and so the crews are ready to take them down to the nearby Mercy Wing. Other injuries are possible if the GM is feeling creative, but the afflicted character is likely to be out of play for a considerable time, so it isn’t recommended to subject PCs to gate malfunctions. Rather, these gate errors, resulting injuries, and the Mercy Wing emergency medical research facilities are great setting material for games set around a gate, especially if the PC gatecrashers are getting cocky and think they know everything. The few survivors of gate malfunctions may even summon the PCs to a Mercy Wing and ask them to carry out a final task for them.

Seeds

• In as many weeks there have been two “incidents” at the local gate—and the PCs are scheduled to go through on a gatecrashing mission soon! Is this just a statistical fluke, or has somebody figured out how to deliberately cause gate malfunctions to weed out the competition? The only answers may like in the Mercy Wing.

225: Bruixera

ENTRY 225: Bruixera

“Rumor and legend.”

- Otoxa, Firewall Agent

There is a whisper, in the dark corners of the Mesh where secrets are the only wealth and gossip is the common currency of spies, criminals, and patriots. A hidden habitat for exsurgents, populated by innocent morphs infected by the TITANs’ viruses and fleeing capture and liquidation. A haven for transhumans on their way to becoming monsters, a combination of terrorist training camp and exhuman enclave.

Unfortunately for Firewall and the rest of the powers that be in the system, Bruixera remains no more than a ghost, an exsurgent Agartha or Shangri-La, a name screamed by once-human throats and smeared in infectious feces on the walls of their hide-outs. Most who are aware of the stories of Bruixera consider it just an idea—a new Sodom, a dark Avalon that desperate, scared people undergoing terrible, painful transformations latch onto. The Kingfishers, a group of anti-exsurgent counterintelligence agents at Firewall have even used rumors of Bruixera to entrap suspected exsurgents and collaborators. Very, very few consider that Bruixera is anything but a fairy tale.

Those few know that Bruixera is real. The information is compartmentalized and kept from the majority of Firewall, kept within the Witchhunters clique that studies long-term trends and patterns of infection. Disparate data suggests that Bruixera is a comment memetic element embedded in multiple forms of the digital exsurgent virus, which manifests as a migratory compulsion whenever an individual in an exsurgent network achieves a certain number of connections. The affected exsurgents drop out of their networks, and through circuitous routes start traveling…to where exactly Witchhunters have not yet been able to determine, though the three most likely possibilities include the Zone on Mars, a hidden habitat on Uranus, and—most dangerous or unlikely of all—a secret bunker located on the ruined Earth near the south pole.

Using Bruixera

Bruixera is a myth, and as such it is free for gamemasters to have fun with. It might be a literal hive where transhumans live like insects or mole rats, bare caricatures of their old forms, breeding and swarming; or a chaotic souk where mad, mutated capitalists trade the knowledge of the TITANs for weapons, sex, and further initiations; or simply a run-down habitat barely fit for human habitation where transhumans fleeing Firewall because of their illness have come to live or die in whatever peace they can manage. Almost certainly it has an exsurgent population of anywhere from a couple hundred to ten thousand, most of which is likely infected with multiple strains of the exsurgent virus, and almost certainly a character cannot find the habitat unless they are infected. It is unlikely for PCs to ever visit Bruixera, but as a mythical location it makes a nice background element to seed along in a campaign, or finding Bruixera might be the goal of an especially difficult one—even if it turns out Bruixera doesn’t exist, getting to the point where they make that discovery would be quite a journey in itself.

And, for the ambitious gamemaster, it might be the centerpiece of a particularly difficult and rewarding campaign: having the PCs (infected deliberately or accidentally with a strain of the exsurgent virus) infiltrate an exsurgent cell, rise through the ranks through successful acts of terrorism, and then find the way to Bruixera...a great prize for anyone that captures it, though most Firewall cliques would be happy to nuke it until it glows then break out the antimatter to do a proper job of it. Of course, that means days or weeks of degeneration likely ending in the PC’s death, but if they’re going to die anyway…what a way to go.