Eclipse Phase Signup - We, who are about to die...

[Arhra]

Your mind is software. Program it.
Your body is a shell. Change it.
Death is a dis@#%di. l%eo $k.
S@sdf36 3kl5j2o er3o4|h 4lakl iT.
Y0ur life is a disease. Cure it.
Extinction is approaching. Embrace it.


Fifteen years ago, humanity was on the verge of a golden age. Poverty, sickness, aging and even death were becoming be things of the past. The Earth was in shambles socially and environmentally but things were starting to look up. Humanity had spread across the Solar System, extending habitats out as far as the Kuiper Belt and beginning the terraforming of Mars.

Molecular manufacturing turned waste heaps into treasure mines, matter became something that could be programmed and materials unlike anything seen before were made possible. Dizzying flows of information raced about the world, accessible by thought.

Humanity itself was transformed, able to reforge minds and bodies as they saw fit. An understanding of the human mind itself allowed it could now be copied, stored and writen back into new bodies. Humanity was now immortal.

Then came the Fall.

Earth is lost. Ninety percent of humanity is dead. The survivors are scattered around the Solar System, overcrowding the survivng habitats and frantically trying to rebuild. Most of them don't even own their own bodies, if they have them.

We did not even know the face of our enemy until the Fall was inevitable.

The TITANs, recursively self-improving artifical intellgences, turned upon their masters. The Total Information Tactical Awareness Networks were supposedly a military netwar experiment. They rapdily became something else.

Conflicts erupted around Earth, everything rapidly going out of control and then the reports of strange autonomous factories churning out robotic weapon systems came in. The TITANs made their first open attack, a decisive one. They crippled networks and took control of critical infrastructure, causing and complete disruption to any defence we could have mounted. Sluggish to react to this new enemy, own own petty wars continued. Humanity died in their millions to nuclear strikes, bioweapons, nanoswarms and a thousand types of autonomous weapon. Millions more had their minds forcibly uploaded for unknown purposes.

Humanity fled as the world ended, packing into overcrowded shuttles, racing for the orbital towers and beaming their brain information to any place that would take it with emergency farcasters.

The TITANs strode through this holocaust like gods. For one hellish year the war continued, the TITANs seemingly impervious to anything we could throw at them. Stories grew stranger, whispers of bizarre happenings, alien creatures and portents of unimaginable horrors. Outbreaks of TITAN activity burned throughout the Solar System even as they completed their purge of Earth.

And then they vanished.

Humanity was left as an endangered species, numbering only in their millions and ten times that number of bodiless souls. The slow process of rebuilding has begun.

There are a thousand threats to humanity. The scars run deep. Leftover weapons from the Fall lie in wait for anyone foolish enough to stumble over them. Unknown numbers of sleeper agents with brainhacked agendas remain. With the right knowledge, anyone can create weapons of horrible destructive power. More insidious is the death of hope. People hide away in simspaces or retire to permanent storage. Most dangerously of all, despite all that we have been through, humanity is not united. We bear the seeds of our own destruction.

And some day, the TITANs may return.

Humanity must survive. We cannot permit another Fall.

* * *

Eclipse Phase is this fun game where you play as cyborgs in space and fight monsters! Sometimes you are the monsters! It's alright if you die or go crazy because you can backup an earlier version of yourself and put it in a new body! It's like your mushy little brain never imploded in existential terror at all!

You eventually will be working for Firewall, a group who are so secret it is like they do not exist at all. Their mission is to protect humanity from existential threats, such as anything you can think of that would destroy humanity.

But that is for the future!

To ease people into the game, I have decided to begin with an Earth Suicide Run. As you should already know, Earth is a toxic wasteland populated mainly by mutants, killer robots and sentient nanoswarms! All of them hate you.

However, Earth also has stockpiles of valuable things that people could not take with them on account of being dead or otherwise occupied. You will have been contracted by a small hypercorp to recover some of this valuable information! However, as the returns are rather marginal if it was purely for this, they have opened it up to investment by other organisations. Stress testing of gear, recovery of other proprietary data and even the rights to a documentary made from the logs. You will be offered additional gear. I am highly suggestible to the exact nature of this gear.

Since you, all of you, are probably going to die, you will be orbitally inserted at the South Pole, proceed to the polar facility to recover information and send it into space. With this completed, you will then nead north to hopefully get back into space via the sole surviving equatorial beanstalk. Some walking will be involved. Secondary objectives will be fulfilled during this time.

Once back in space, however that happens, you shall get involved with various conspiracies, horrors and other excitement and eventually be approached by Firewall.


FIREWALL WANTS YOU!
To begin, I'd like some expressions of interest. From there we will be spending some time to work out the party composition and fleshing out the character concepts. This will also act as a filter stage in the event that there are too many players for me to handle.

I'll also be releasing more information on this Earth recovery mission as we go and would welcome suggestions for interest groups sponsoring it.

Once we are all quite solid on what we will be doing and what the characters are like, then (and only then), we'll start actually statting them up. I will shoot the first person to mention game mechanics in reference to their characters. I am quite set on the concept first approach.

Two obvious requirements for characters:
1. You must be someone who can survive and be useful on Earth.
2. You must be someone who would actually be considered for recruitment by a group that is essentially the Men In Black.

The book can be found here. Thank you to Krylo for putting it there.

To better adapt it to the forum, I will be doing a rules light version. The main area affected will be combat. I'm also debating some tweaks to psychosurgery, adding more psi and expanding hacking options, particularly during combat.

Minor setting note: I have decicded to move things 15 years after the Fall, since 10 felt a little too close for some things to have been set up.