The adventure continued on and around Venus… even as the atmosphere outside where we played appeared to resemble Venus in texture and colour. But we’re not talking about the Great Smothering Haze of 2013; we’re talking about last Sunday’s Eclipse Phase session. As Kage’s people began investigating the unregistered airlock from which the Spulturatorah Arcology ego bank thieves of had escaped from Gerlach station, Gamera Security returned to their office, leaving Wandering Kid in his battered arachnoid morph to help guard the airlock. Aggregators via Mesh links alerted them to a relevant news story that developed in the in Jupiter space: Diz, the infomorph inhabiting their old spacecraft the Fastball Special had hacked into Jovian traffic control to allow itself a clear path upwards from the ecliptic plane… toward interstellar space. The ship was unoccupied at the time, other than a hundred kilos of paper cranes. Cable informed this to […]
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Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems
The GOKL Eclipse Phase RPG campaign “Fastball Express” has started up again, and the uplift neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut is back in action, except he no longer has eight tentacles. Three game sessions were held so far and I managed to participate in two. So the story goes: some of the intrepid posthumans of the Fastball Express hypercorp was darkcasted to Parvati, an aerostat high above the surface of Venus. Hokusai had died some time earlier his octomorph blown up by a bomb, and the team retrieved his cortical stack and resleeved his ego in a worker pod morph. However, Hokusai remembered nothing else before waking up in an arachnoid sleeve at Parvati with Billy Cable Junior the neotenic, Danai and Dexter, their memories edited “for security reasons”. (That doesn’t sound suspicious at all, right? RIGHT?) Their Morningstar Corporation contact gave them a mission to discreetly investigate diseased biomorphs which had […]
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Seven Random…
…Roleplaying games: …Comics: Just a couple of participation photos from various activities on Google+ (Dead link).
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Eclipse Phase: Boom Goes The Octopus
And that is the story of how Hokusai Tarnungshaut, my Eclipse Phase neo-octopus character, got himself resleeved in a used worker pod morph. At least he didn’t go insane during the resleeving process.
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Eclipse Phase: Sheldon-class Drone
Here’s a type of drone which we use in Eclipse Phase: the Sheldon-class drone, named after the chick Sheldon of Garfield and Friends. It’s small, it’s egg-sized and it has a puppetsock. It can get through enclosed spaces and scout secure rooms. However, it has problems opening doors thanks to its lack of any sort of manipulator waldos: It has no arms. If you have an entire fleet of Sheldons, you could use them to carry a load like a crate or an unconscious sleeve back to safety. It uses the Gnat robot stats from page 346 of the Eclipse Phase core rule book, “except we use legs and cyberbrain with puppetsock,” says Ivan Tam the GM.
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The Fastball Express Gang
The Eclipse Phase RPG campaign I’ve been gaming in, gamemastered by Ivan, has been real fun. The posthuman campaign involves the players as “pre-emptive retrieval specialists” who have been plying their trade between Luna, Mars and the asteroid belt. And although I’ve drawn Hokusai before, as well as Billy Cable Jr. and Bishop-6 in vac suits, here is the first ever visual representation of the entire crew of the cargo ship Fastball Special. Here are the elements that made up the composite image above, according to alphabetical order:
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Drawing from After the Fall
Eclipse Phase was on today. I played Hokusai Tarnungshaut the uplifted octopus once again. As we played, I sketched the final scenario as we played it. Here we were, Bishop Six, Billy Cable Jr. and I had to rescue Maria, the advisor to the von Trapp family in spaaaace (a bunch of neotenics, really) from the Nine Lives crime syndicate. We all wore vac suits because we infiltrated the bad guys’ base from outside the space habitat, where I lost my Groucho Marx glasses. I wielded a pair of heavy railgun pistols, the neurachem-stimulated Bishop Six had a sniper rifle slung on his back and Billy wore a pickelhaube helmet for some reason and tried to bluff some guards with a dazzler in his hand. Ultimately, we figured out how one does solve a problem like Maria.
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In My Garden, In The Shade
My player character in Eclipse Phase is named Hokusai Tarnungshaut. He is an octopus. Specifically, he is a North Pacific Giant Octopus with an uplifted human-like intelligence. He comes with the regular eight arm, a beak and a camouflage skin. He was uplifted by a scientist in a hypercorp during the fall. The hypercorp was destroyed but Doctor Kyle Hoo the scientist took Hokusai away and taught him about the world. The scientist also used his resources to fit a whole bunch of cyberware – including a basic mesh insert, deadly cyberclaws and a cortical stack – in Hokusai. Because the body of the octopus lives only as long as two years, the scientist have been cloning his body and resleeving him in a fresh cloned body every couple of years. Over the years, he’s come to appreciate the arts, specifically drawing and painting. One day, he was invited to […]
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Whatever Happened to Ahmir Sektioui?
So, in part two of the Eclipse Phase quickstart demo scenario, Ahmir discovers that his knowledge on Mars – or anywhere other than the Outer Planers, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud – is worth zero. Ahmir’s player – me – discovers that his Gamescience dice is trying to kill him. Early on, I took these photos of the Tachikoma figure we used to represent Ahmir after he was resleeved following the previous episode’s nuke encounter. I forgot to snap more because the encounters were exciting. Action movie exciting. Also, they were somewhat hilarious thanks to some hilariously bad dice rolls. Kinetic weapons jamming. Beam weapons overheating. Parkour attempts that were… less than stellar. But there were some spectacular heroic acts as well, such as Zora shooting a bad guy through the neck to destroy his cortical stack embedded at his cervical vertebrae*. We finished the adventure with a […]
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I Rolled an 99 and Lived
Sunday was gaming day with GOKL and this time Ivan ran Eclipse Phase, the science fiction role-playing game with intriguing and extensive post-singularity and transhumanist ideas. Even running through the demo scenario in the free quick-start pdf, a lot of these high concepts shone through to us newbie players of the game, making the game even a more unique experience. (To be fair, I haven’t played GURPS Transhuman Space before to make a proper comparison, and the technology application in Eclipse Phase is much more high-concept than Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020.) An “eclipse phase” is the period of time between when a cell is infected by a virus and when a virus appears in a cell and transforms it. During this period the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is. The Eclipse Phase world is set in a future where advanced technologies exist that would awe you […]
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