kiznit
Explorer
Continued from this thread, but you don't necessarily need to read it, I'll recap.
It's the transhumanist future, set in a hard-science setting set still within the solar system but after the earth has been rendered uninhabitable. My four players are playing the following: A male criminal con-artist "face", A female political extremist "sneak/saboteur", A female "space gypsy" hacker, and an older male "already survived-a-few-deaths" soldier.
They work for a mysterious extinction-threat fighting conspiracy called Firewall. Firewall activated them to investigate and deal with a WMD that was being brought aboard a floating black-market colony ship. After a skirmish with a local egonapping "consciousness-slavery" cartel, they tracked down the details of the WMD and ended up boarding a derelict light freighter that was being brought in by a profit-hungry scavenger not quite aware of the viral danger of her cargo.
They boarded the ship, and while everyone else ran distraction on the scavenger and her uplifted cybergorrilla bodyguards, the Sneak managed to track down the WMD in the technical/medical bay, a dangerous-looking canister covered with "memetic hazard" stickers. ("What's a memetic hazard?" someone asked. "An infectiously bad idea," I told them, "you wanna open it?" "Uh... No. No, not really.") Unfortunately at this point a mysterious third-party Op Team stormed aboard the ship, a firefight broke out, and the Face and the Hacker managed to escape aboard the scavenger's tub with the canister while the Soldier and Sneak stuck around to fight them off. The invading Op Team unleashed a malevolent and indestructible nanoswarm to consume the ship (and assumedly the WMD) and everyone but the escapees perished.
Death is transitory in Eclipse Phase, so we're on to part two, the next session which I've lovingly dubbed "AIs well that ends well" (get it?).
If you happen to be one of my players, stop reading at this point!
....
I haven't really even worked out what the WMD is, relying on the simple premise that it's just really, really bad for everyone involved if it gets released. Seeing as how the players managed to get ahold of it I'm going to assume that they'll have destroyed it, but they may not, we'll see.
What I do know is that an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, the standard Eclipse Phase Mysterious and Dangerous Antagonist) is after it (and other weaponized TITAN infotech) for unknown and presumably malevolent reasons. I'm operating under the assumption that the AGI has been limited in some way (probably being used as an illegal genie-in-the-bottle by some foolish doesn't-know-what-they're-messing-with hypercorp). The AGI managed to get out a fragmented operational fork of itself which went on to Basilisk Hack a group of Ultimate Mercs into creating a nanoassembler and going after the WMD.
The WMD was recovered originally from a TITAN cache of Intelligent Weaponry on Mars. With the cannister destroyed, that's going to be the next stop for both the PCs and the AGI, and where I expect the next session to go.
I'm opening the next session with a simulspace virtual debriefing with their Firewall Proxy. The Hacker and the Face are back aboard the colony ship, infotracking the sequence of events so far and doing a search on the Mercs that caused the destruction of the derelict cargo ship. The Sneak and the Soldier are "rebooted" from their last backups and their infomorphs are undergoing Experiential Playback of the soldier's "last stand" aboard the ship in order to get back up to speed.
The firewall proxy (an old, squirrelly "mischievous old man" type that's some professor somewhere - certainly not aboard the scum barge) has managed to run some damage control on the situation and has also managed (presumably with the Hacker's help) to isolate the intelligent fragment of the AGI that corrupted the mercs and was after the weapon. So the first scene is the players (in their infomorph forms) interrogating an AI to figure out its motives.
How do you interrogate something you can't really torture? It's purely an informational consciousness, and it's certainly not human. I don't really know where to go with this or quite how to play it, I plan to just roll with it and see what happens. The AGI is primarily motivated by the freeing of itself - not this fragment, but the source consciousness - and is aware that it's informationally isolated so the PCs don't really have anything to "trade" with it or anything it could want and may have to figure out something clever like spoofing a network connection or engaging in some sort of social engineering, I don't know.
Somehow I have to let it leak that the AGI figured out the infotech source on Mars and is presumably mobilizing resources to move on it. They may not end up getting this clue from the interrogation, we'll see. But time is of the essence so egocasting to Mars is the most direct way to stop it (I'm loosely working off of the quickstart adventure's framework here). That means new morphs!
I asked the two "dead" players what new bodies they were interested in playing in. The soldier didn't seem to care, but has been playing the whole "it's been too long since I've felt human" angle I figure I'll put him in a Fury morph (the most combat-oriented human body in the game). That way he gets too roleplay the whole "oh wow human touch/feel/experience" thing but it gets a twist on it since Fury morphs tend to be female "oh god I have boobs!".
The Sneak said he wanted to go all Voltron and wanted to play a cybernetic wolf so I'll have to juryrig a canid morph (some cool martian version of one) with combat enhancements, should be interesting. I actually have trouble thinking of the practical benefits of having a wolf body but he's clearly in it for the cool factor and that's fine.
The Face is probably going to get a Ruster Morph (red-thick-skinned human body that have been bio-engineered to survive in Mars' semi-terraformed environment), under the presumption that he should "fit in" the most on Mars.
The Hacker, I don't know, she did a great job playing an infomorph in the first session I'm going to put her in a synth and see how she does (a desk-sized spider tank, essentially) but let her infomorph around if she wants to. Also she's my wife so she should totally get the awesomest stuff, right?
Mars is "the wild west" frontier part of Eclipse Phase, where you get to make all the Total Recall jokes you want. The players egocast into their bodies at the major domed city but will eventually wander out into the badlands to try and find the TITAN cache. I'm only working in a 2.5 hour sessions so we're really probably only going to get one scene on Mars.
Help me out, guys, what happens on Mars? A cool scene on top of a bullet-train out to the outlier colonies? Intrigue in one of the major canyon cities? I'm not sure where to go.
It's the transhumanist future, set in a hard-science setting set still within the solar system but after the earth has been rendered uninhabitable. My four players are playing the following: A male criminal con-artist "face", A female political extremist "sneak/saboteur", A female "space gypsy" hacker, and an older male "already survived-a-few-deaths" soldier.
They work for a mysterious extinction-threat fighting conspiracy called Firewall. Firewall activated them to investigate and deal with a WMD that was being brought aboard a floating black-market colony ship. After a skirmish with a local egonapping "consciousness-slavery" cartel, they tracked down the details of the WMD and ended up boarding a derelict light freighter that was being brought in by a profit-hungry scavenger not quite aware of the viral danger of her cargo.
They boarded the ship, and while everyone else ran distraction on the scavenger and her uplifted cybergorrilla bodyguards, the Sneak managed to track down the WMD in the technical/medical bay, a dangerous-looking canister covered with "memetic hazard" stickers. ("What's a memetic hazard?" someone asked. "An infectiously bad idea," I told them, "you wanna open it?" "Uh... No. No, not really.") Unfortunately at this point a mysterious third-party Op Team stormed aboard the ship, a firefight broke out, and the Face and the Hacker managed to escape aboard the scavenger's tub with the canister while the Soldier and Sneak stuck around to fight them off. The invading Op Team unleashed a malevolent and indestructible nanoswarm to consume the ship (and assumedly the WMD) and everyone but the escapees perished.
Death is transitory in Eclipse Phase, so we're on to part two, the next session which I've lovingly dubbed "AIs well that ends well" (get it?).
If you happen to be one of my players, stop reading at this point!
....
I haven't really even worked out what the WMD is, relying on the simple premise that it's just really, really bad for everyone involved if it gets released. Seeing as how the players managed to get ahold of it I'm going to assume that they'll have destroyed it, but they may not, we'll see.
What I do know is that an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, the standard Eclipse Phase Mysterious and Dangerous Antagonist) is after it (and other weaponized TITAN infotech) for unknown and presumably malevolent reasons. I'm operating under the assumption that the AGI has been limited in some way (probably being used as an illegal genie-in-the-bottle by some foolish doesn't-know-what-they're-messing-with hypercorp). The AGI managed to get out a fragmented operational fork of itself which went on to Basilisk Hack a group of Ultimate Mercs into creating a nanoassembler and going after the WMD.
The WMD was recovered originally from a TITAN cache of Intelligent Weaponry on Mars. With the cannister destroyed, that's going to be the next stop for both the PCs and the AGI, and where I expect the next session to go.
SIDENOTE: I tend to prepare for my sessions by coming up with a fey key pre-planned "scenes" both to start and end the session. This particular mini-campaign has been pretty heavily railroady both due to player unfamiliarity with the rules and the setting, and a certain degree of narrative roleplaying "experimentation" on my part. No-one seems to mind, everyone's having fun, but I am trying to keep this tendency in mind in order to maintain ways to keep the progress of the game at least somewhat open and freeform - especially now that two sessions in the players have a little more of a grasp of what they're capable of and hopefully will continue to play more and more assertively.
I'm opening the next session with a simulspace virtual debriefing with their Firewall Proxy. The Hacker and the Face are back aboard the colony ship, infotracking the sequence of events so far and doing a search on the Mercs that caused the destruction of the derelict cargo ship. The Sneak and the Soldier are "rebooted" from their last backups and their infomorphs are undergoing Experiential Playback of the soldier's "last stand" aboard the ship in order to get back up to speed.
The firewall proxy (an old, squirrelly "mischievous old man" type that's some professor somewhere - certainly not aboard the scum barge) has managed to run some damage control on the situation and has also managed (presumably with the Hacker's help) to isolate the intelligent fragment of the AGI that corrupted the mercs and was after the weapon. So the first scene is the players (in their infomorph forms) interrogating an AI to figure out its motives.
How do you interrogate something you can't really torture? It's purely an informational consciousness, and it's certainly not human. I don't really know where to go with this or quite how to play it, I plan to just roll with it and see what happens. The AGI is primarily motivated by the freeing of itself - not this fragment, but the source consciousness - and is aware that it's informationally isolated so the PCs don't really have anything to "trade" with it or anything it could want and may have to figure out something clever like spoofing a network connection or engaging in some sort of social engineering, I don't know.
Somehow I have to let it leak that the AGI figured out the infotech source on Mars and is presumably mobilizing resources to move on it. They may not end up getting this clue from the interrogation, we'll see. But time is of the essence so egocasting to Mars is the most direct way to stop it (I'm loosely working off of the quickstart adventure's framework here). That means new morphs!
I asked the two "dead" players what new bodies they were interested in playing in. The soldier didn't seem to care, but has been playing the whole "it's been too long since I've felt human" angle I figure I'll put him in a Fury morph (the most combat-oriented human body in the game). That way he gets too roleplay the whole "oh wow human touch/feel/experience" thing but it gets a twist on it since Fury morphs tend to be female "oh god I have boobs!".
The Sneak said he wanted to go all Voltron and wanted to play a cybernetic wolf so I'll have to juryrig a canid morph (some cool martian version of one) with combat enhancements, should be interesting. I actually have trouble thinking of the practical benefits of having a wolf body but he's clearly in it for the cool factor and that's fine.
The Face is probably going to get a Ruster Morph (red-thick-skinned human body that have been bio-engineered to survive in Mars' semi-terraformed environment), under the presumption that he should "fit in" the most on Mars.
The Hacker, I don't know, she did a great job playing an infomorph in the first session I'm going to put her in a synth and see how she does (a desk-sized spider tank, essentially) but let her infomorph around if she wants to. Also she's my wife so she should totally get the awesomest stuff, right?
Mars is "the wild west" frontier part of Eclipse Phase, where you get to make all the Total Recall jokes you want. The players egocast into their bodies at the major domed city but will eventually wander out into the badlands to try and find the TITAN cache. I'm only working in a 2.5 hour sessions so we're really probably only going to get one scene on Mars.
Help me out, guys, what happens on Mars? A cool scene on top of a bullet-train out to the outlier colonies? Intrigue in one of the major canyon cities? I'm not sure where to go.
