I know I'm going to be the odd man out here, but I generally find "evil computers blow up the world" settings to be intolerably tedious. This game is going to need a pretty convincing twist to capture my interest, and I haven't seen it in what's been made available so far.
Anything more you can add on the horror aspect?, "Eclipse Phase" (in biology, the tme between a virus infecting a cell and it's effects becoming noticable) suggests that there is a lot more to the "Exsurgent Virus" than rumors... and not good things either.
And will players be able to reach these extrasolar colonies? I like the idea of a Transhuman game not confined to the Solar System alone.
I keep hearing Alastair Reynolds as a reference and I instantly think the "Revelation Space" universe... with all the oddness, cosmic indiference to man, and really ALIEN aliens it implies...
Sounds boring and clichéd to me. It sounds like it makes all the mistakes which THS avoided and will just be another generically implausible post-catastrophe setting with some transhumanist gloss.
To be fair, it's aiming in a very different direction to THS.
The comparison is inevitable since very little in SF gaming is based on SF novels from the last couple of decades - we've mostly still got Golden Age star empires, 80s gritty dystopias and various riffs on Star Wars. So when something even touching the borders of Hard SF appears, people are going to think of THS instantly. But recent SF covers a broader area than THS alone can fill.
Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds and Ken MacLeod (at least what I've read) doesn't fit anywhere into THS. Reynolds, for example, has a species of malevolent AIs, but their motives eventually turn out to be more complex than the Terminator. The post catastrophe epoch, seemingly malignant AIs and leftover wormholes seem bears the hallmarks of Newton's Wake and Singularity Sky. I'd guess the post-catastrophe factionalism also has roots in the collapse of the Belle Epoque from Reynolds' work.
So, when you start with work best described as 'hard-edged' Space Opera and adapt it to an RPG, you get something different to THS. Personally, I think THS is a triumph, but I also think you can't really use it to fault someone trying to cover fictional ground which shares nothing other than the word "transhuman" with THS.
The blurb alone doesn't guarantee it will be excellent - most attempts to condense a setting into three paragraphs will come out a little bland, unless the setting is very High Concept. Hell, I was on these boards when Exalted's early publicity was out, and it sounded like a powerfully generic and cliched game of Ye Ancient Heroes for a long time. Give Eclipse Phase a chance, is all I say.
-Proteus
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I'm interested in "Elipse Phase," certainly, and in part because it does go in different directions from THS, but there's no need to dump on THS because of it.
Man, my thoughts exactly.
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Rev. Keith Johnson
keithalanjohnson AT gmail.com http://keithalanjohnson.blogspot.com/
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"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit." -- Aristotle
Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds and Ken MacLeod (at least what I've read) doesn't fit anywhere into THS. Reynolds, for example, has a species of malevolent AIs, but their motives eventually turn out to be more complex than the Terminator. The post catastrophe epoch, seemingly malignant AIs and leftover wormholes seem bears the hallmarks of Newton's Wake and Singularity Sky. I'd guess the post-catastrophe factionalism also has roots in the collapse of the Belle Epoque from Reynolds' work.
So, when you start with work best described as 'hard-edged' Space Opera and adapt it to an RPG, you get something different to THS. Personally, I think THS is a triumph, but I also think you can't really use it to fault someone trying to cover fictional ground which shares nothing other than the word "transhuman" with THS.
This is an exceedingly good description of both the differences Eclipse Phase has from THS and the reasons for them. I'd have been overjoyed to work on (and play) something that was simply THS + intersteller travel, since (to me) that seems far more interesting than a game solely limited to the solar system. However, Eclipse Phase is considerably more than that, it's definitely in the mold of modern space opera, with ancient alien secrets, vast and strange AIs, exotic extrasolar worlds, a transformed humanity, and a setting that is considerably more unusual than that found in THS.
If you like Alastair Reynold's work, then I'm betting you will like Eclipse Phase. Charles Stross and various other authors were most definitely strong influences on EP, but to me at least (although I can easily see the other authors and the developers having very different views) this is a game that reminds me most of some of Reynold's work (with significant touches of Ken MacLeod's work, especially Newton's Wake.
This is an exceedingly good description of both the differences Eclipse Phase has from THS and the reasons for them.
I too like THS but, when it was released, I'm sure people were all over it with: "this doesn't sound like Traveller at all, it must be like teh UNkewl."
THS may have been the yardstick of hard SF games but it shouldn't be the be all and end all of this RPG genre.
C.
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I've moved the Actual Play links to my control panel.
Pros: Transhumanism! Uploadable consciousnesses, stacks and Accelerando. Stross+Morgan = win!
Cons: Human arrogance creates machines that will doom us all. I, too, am tired of this concept and find it tripe and unenthusing.
All in all, I´m still excited to see what can be done with Eclipse Phase, and I´ll make sure to check it out as soon as humanly possible. While I don´t really appreciat the "evil AI" thing for several different reasons, I can appreciate the fact that they´re going for a different vibe to THS. The whole wormhole thing can be interesting as well - to venture into the great unknown and see horrors to shake a digitized mind, all of that.
We´ll see, huh?
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