Eclipse Phase: Long Night Sign-Up

[Arhra]

Man is a creature that fears the dark.

He craves his fear, even though he averts his eyes from it. But you cannot see darkness. It is absence and emptiness. What Man fears, what the eye craves, is that which inhabits the dark.

Less than two decades ago, the world ended. A cataclysm of killing machines and broken physics. Humanity became a thin smear spread across the heavens, leaving the Earth below grey with dust and death.

Much of humanity has been resurrected from frozen memories, but ultimately Man has turned away from the past. There is too much darkness there. It is colonised by ghosts and mysteries. Better not to remember, better not to dwell on the past, Man says.

Is it wrong to seek out the things we fear?

Wake up!

Is it a crime to seek the truth? Is it a sin to think?!

The day humanity abandons its curiousity is the day we die! If we give up the past and curl up in our little solar system, hiding away from what frightens us, then the march to our extinction has begun. The TITANs are vanished, not dead. The cause of their murderous uprising is unknown. Their science is beyond us.

You might have tried to blind yourself with light. But no matter how bright a bonfire, how matter how starry a sky, you found yourself looking out into the darkness beyond.

Tear down your little house of rationalisations and disassemble your careful arguments and denials. Bid farewell to peace and rest - it was all a lie anyway.

Go out into the dark.

Fear is vital.

* * *

You are not unique.
You have been here before.
And you already died.

This is Eclipse Phase. It is a cyberpunk RPG setting where over ninety percent of humanity was killed during the Fall, not even twenty years ago. The Fall was caused by the TITANs, artificial self modifying intelligences who rose up against their creators. Some of the monstrous horrors of the Fall suggest it was triggered by a third party, an Exsurgent.

Humankind is now spread across the solar system, in the middle of the arduous process of rebuilding civilisation. Many of those slain during the Fall had copies of their consciousness beamed into space. Most of them are still stored in memory caches. Bodies are precious, for the demand far outstrips the supply.

And, of course, not all of the existential threats left when the TITANs did.

This will be a one shot game. It'll largely be in the style of a freeform RP, but I will be applying skill checks to inject some capricious whims of fate into the process. The core book is available for free on the interwebs, but I would only recommend it for flavour as the rules will be vastly simplified.

For this scenario, you are workers on Cerberus Base, a hypercorp operated research facility located in the outer system. They're researching some, well, three separate very dangerous things involving psychic powers, exotic matter and portals. Your characters have just woken up in the medical bay together because you have been murdered and the base is currently in full security lockdown. Its your job to figure out what exactly is going on. Preferably before the security countermeasures kick in and everything explodes.

The characters will be largely pregenerated by me, however I would like people to present some ideas for what they'd like to play, so I can use that as a starting point.