/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

How drastically would the setting be affected if one made it a bit more like Altered Carbon, at least in how cortical stacks and death works? In other words, many people only have a single backup and real death is still a distinct possibility if you die AND your cortical stack is destroyed. Unless you have a lot of money or rep, of course.

I kinda feel like there's no real sense of tension or drama to a EP game if immortality is guaranteed for literally everyone except for a handful of people. And I know the main source of tension in the game is cosmic horror or existential dread and yes, loss of continuity means that death is hardly a mental cakewalk, more so if you remember how you died, but there's only so much you can get done with using those.

>>51149699

I mean, you can always decide to increase risk by causing situations which endanger the stack. They aren't invincible though most personnel weapons won't cause them serious harm.

Also, for players, never let them get away with a "free" backup. Unless they say they're going out to spend a couple hours backing up, if they die and their stack can't be recovered (a very real possibility), they go back to how they started the campaign.

You can keep stakes high while still keeping the original tone an intent of the game.

>>51149699
>I kinda feel like there's no real sense of tension or drama to a EP game if immortality is guaranteed for literally everyone except for a handful of people.
You forget that one of the fundamental elements of the setting is things worse than death. Permanent death sounds downright swell in comparison to having your stack stolen by Nine Lives, or being infected by the exsurgent virus.

Death is an outdated concept in EP. Lamenting the lack of it is a lot like complaining that you can't have an alchemist (not chemist) in your sci-fi campaign.

>>51149878

Why'd you take back the lampblack analogy?

>>51149699
Getting shoved back into cold storage is death for most purposes.

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>>51149878
an exurgent horror is coming to turn you into meat fractals, roll to see how you fare

>>51149699
>immortality is guaranteed for literally everyone except for a handful of people

But it's not. Immortality requires that someone be willing to retrieve your stack or back you up if you die, both of which are services like any other which cost credits or rep. Then to be re-instantiated you need either a body or server runtime, neither of which are free either. Bodies are the most expensive and desirable commodity in the setting. Immortality is a pipe dream for anyone without the thousands and thousands of credits or the massive popularity necessary to continually resleeve. If you're 'lucky' you might experience immortality stuck in a synth, without skin, organs, genitals or a face. You don't need to make the setting more like Altered Carbon, it already is.

Rolled 1 (1d20)

>>51150713
>roll to see how you fare
Sure, why not?

>>51152626
the habitat is hit by RKVs days after you're painfully transformed into toilet paper-butter golem

>>51149699
There's still much to be lost

Wealth, status, friendships, the wellbeing of others, knowledge, sanity, culture, rights and freedoms, millions of single-copy infugees in cold storage, political relations, home, the balance of power, opportunity

The list goes on.

>>51152948
Okay. Let's do another one then. Which you rather be
>An Infugee slotted into cold-storage, not knowing whether they will ever awaken
or
>Be egocast into a Spare on some backwater hab

>>51153060
Who else is on the hab?

>>51149878
I don't know if I'd call it "outdated", because it still fucking sucks to die, both to remember it if you were the one dying AND to witness it if it wasn't a peaceful death.

>>51153277
Mainly Pods. Some Synths. No organics. No mercurials. It's some sort of Hypercorp colony, through you don't know the specifics.
It seems that you are expected to do work when you get there. Though you don't know what work a Spare could do, and they aren't able to tell you.

>>51149878
But mechanically speaking the player shouldn't care if their cortical stack gets stolen by Nine Lives or they become an exsurgent, they can merely be restored from backup and then boom, blank slate. Any mental stress taken can just be psychology'd away via muse.

>>51153370
I'll do that as long as I don't have to deal with the communists.

Realistically speaking, can a civilization that consists of people that live forever really sustain itself? What's to stop them from becoming stagnant or extremely conservative and then just dying out because they no longer see a point in reproducing (when u can just fork urself lmao!)? We've never had humans live past a certain age, I can't imagine we'd be anything other than jaded, mentally exhausted folks AT BEST at the age of a thousand.

>>51153355
>I don't know if I'd call it "outdated", because it still fucking sucks to die, both to remember it if you were the one dying AND to witness it if it wasn't a peaceful death.
Sure, but it also sucks to be beaten to death by Krampus, and I'd still call that an outdated fear.

>>51153390
>But mechanically speaking the player shouldn't care if their cortical stack gets stolen by Nine Lives or they become an exsurgent, they can merely be restored from backup and then boom, blank slate.
Bullshit. If your ego is stolen, everything you know is potentially stolen as well. They can have anything you remember. Perhaps they'll use that ego to access your bank accounts, tank your rep, or convince your wife to take a trip to Legba.

A stolen ego is anything but minor.

>>51153468
To clarify, by dying out I mean basically going into virtual hibernation and never coming back out, or existing in a state where they're no longer recognizably human or even conscious.

>>51153468
Insufficient data

>>51153468
>>51153547
That would indeed be a very good question. How old is the oldest ego of transhumanity? 100 Years old? Maybe nearer to 200?

>>51153483
>Bullshit. If your ego is stolen, everything you know is potentially stolen as well. They can have anything you remember. Perhaps they'll use that ego to access your bank accounts, tank your rep, or convince your wife to take a trip to Legba.

So? You're still alive. And if your wife takes a trip to Legba and never returns, just restore her from backup. Who gives a fuck what happened to her other alpha ego? And rep and credits can always be replenished. And I'm pretty sure that banks and similar organizations would be aware of how easy it would be for criminals to use stolen IDs to do things and would have some kind of safety net for groups like Nine Lives.

>>51153624
An ego does not cease being an ego.

There now exists two you's. The you that has been restored from back-up. And the you has been stolen. What do you do when the you returns from the void?

Do you merge?

>>51153624
>So? You're still alive.
And your every memory is in the hands of a malicious group. Good fucking luck with that.

You think blackmail is bad now, just wait until someone can steal the shit you KNOW.

>Who gives a fuck what happened to her other alpha ego?
That's some ice-cold shit, yo.

>And rep and credits can always be replenished.
I have a hard time believing you know what it's like to be poor if you believe this.

>And I'm pretty sure that banks and similar organizations would be aware of how easy it would be for criminals to use stolen IDs to do things and would have some kind of safety net for groups like Nine Lives.
It'd be a hard thing to fight. Two people claiming to be the same person, one of whom is brainwashed by Nine Lives. How can you tell which is which?

What about criminals using that ego data to simply take you out, knowing every place you've ever stored an ego backup and where your usual haunts are? They have everything they need to fuck you over a thousand times.

Have you seriously thought this through, or are you just thinking from a gamer's mindset when you first come to "lol infinite lives!"?

>>51153611
Well over a century old, if I'm remembering Sunward correctly.

This is probably my greatest fear about our civilization getting into a similar situation as EP. Who really wants to live forever? How on Earth do we know that we won't just start mentally falling apart at a certain age, and no amount of psychosurgery or mental health sciences can prevent it?

Groups like Firewall and OZMA are thinking too short term. Nothing they do matters, because in a few thousand years, maybe less, transhumanity will either collectively go insane from living for too long, or will decay and rot into permanent stagnation of infinite loops inside virtualties that would make no sense to a more cognitive species. Who needs exsurgents or alien x-risks when the greatest x-risk is just by existing for too long?

I'm not a nihilist by any means but unless I'm edumucated on contrary information or arguments. this is what I honestly think would happen.

>>51153762
>Who really wants to live forever? How on Earth do we know that we won't just start mentally falling apart at a certain age, and no amount of psychosurgery or mental health sciences can prevent it?
Why are you so scared of humans losing their mortality?

>>51153755
I'm honestly trying to argue from the mindset of a player who isn't intimately familiar with the game's setting. Stuff like identity and identification in this kinda setting is one of the biggest things I struggle to wrap my head around as GM, even after scouring Panopticon.

>>51153762
You don't have to be the same person for a thousand years. You could wipe your memories and start over every century if you wanted.

>>51153835

It's like if you died in D&D, but had to wait for a rez in a cold non-existence and not an afterlife, and then bad guys could jack your body and make you a zombie (or already did).

Oh, and when you get rezed, you will always lose levels, or get stuck with nasty debuffs if they go to your original body.

That's how you explain analogies to players if they can't think for enough logical reasons why losing your body, control over your ego, etc is bad.

>>51153468

Step 1( People don't actually technically "live" forever. Theoretically morphs made now should not suffer damage from age to keep functioning by nobody has yet to stay in that morph that long - and even then you have like Elf-rules immortality. You take a knife in the chest, your morph still "dies" which can be all this other stuff with it. Then you as a person can't be stagnant because you need a new morph and all that other shit that goes with it.

Not everyone is ingrained with perfect memory and perfect bodily control - so, y'know, human factors which have persisted for thousands of years will persist a bit longer. Once we properly hit the posthuman stage, it's an up in the air thing, but that's like, a complex evolutionary problem which is way outside of my fucking context.

Transhumanity has projects, goals and aspirations as a whole which will last them hundreds or thousands of years to complete - and people have confidence they may exist still to see them complete. This gives people drive, motivation, basic evolutionary goals in addition to more complex intellectual ones. Transhuman is an ever broadening aspect of humanity, but still human. Why has our species developed all this bullshit which isn't related to eating, fucking and not getting rained on when you sleep?

>>51153390

Mechanically speaking, the player probably shouldn't care about anything.

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I NEED PICTURES, PICTURES OF SPACE STUFF.

>>51153835
>Stuff like identity and identification in this kinda setting is one of the biggest things I struggle to wrap my head around as GM, even after scouring Panopticon.
In short: identity is the only real marker of ownership left in the universe. Without it, you have nothing: no reputation, no legal recognition, and no resources or assets. Gaining your mind is essentially gaining your everything. Your deepest darkest secrets. Your greatest fears. Your every identifying piece of information, memory-kept.

It's more than losing a replaceable item. It's losing peace of mind that someone out there now doesn't have beyond-intimate knowledge of your every secret and fear. It's knowing that someone out there is probably testing out the limits of your capability to withstand torture, suffer rape, or far far worse. It's knowing that every cubby you keep, and every protected thing you've ever stashed is in danger of being taken.

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>>51157640
Tori are aesthetic as fuck.

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>>51158733

Yep

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>>51159583

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>>51160309

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>>51160915

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>>51161280

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Honestly, this game feels like an episode of Black Mirror to me, and not a happy one either. I just wouldn't be able to handle living among these people, I'd fly off to the Junta first chance I get.

>>51162959
>I'll just go live in dystopialand and let a religiously strongarmed government decide what's best for me (hint: it's not hab maintenance). Then I'll be happy.

>>51153060
Depends on too many factors to list, including odds of reinstantiation and the details of the hab.

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Toruses are okay if you're really short on volatiles.

>>51163740
>short on volatiles
Nope. You get much more livable surface area lit by windows in comparison to a traditional O'Neill Cylinder (i.e. one that has windows, not one that's artificially lit via an axial light source). It's more about efficiency of the structural materials.

>>51163971
No ypu don't. The torus is half floor and half ceiling. So is the O'Neill cylinder, but its floor is normal to spin gravity so you get more floorplan space per unit of floor.

Also, that's a picture of a Bernal sphere

Alright /epg/, time to get those creative neurons firing.

Give me your best ideas for space diseases. There's already a couple designer virus pathogens in the book, and we know space colds exists, so give me some weird disease ideas, from genehacker pranks to bioterror.

And don't just go Space AIDS or Space Ebola.

>>51169621
Progressivism

>>51169821

No space cancer either.

>>51163347
>bu-but it's relatable and has a designated place for me in society so I never have to learn new social paradigms

>>51169621
Space rabies

>>51167912
I know that's a Bernal Sphere, but those are terrible because artificial gravity varies with distance from the equator. Spheres are fucking terrible for a habitat, unless it's a bolo, in which case it's merely mediocre.

>the torus is half floor and half ceiling
First, the area of the "floor" is 8π r^2 greater than the area of the "ceiling". Second, an even half of an O'Neill cylinder is window. Second, cylinder habs need more structural support, since they don't have spokes.

>>51169621
Space SAIDS

>>51172333
>the area of the "floor" is 8π r^2 greater than the area of the "ceiling

Negligible at reasonable size, and not enough to compensate for the aformentioned curvature inefficiency.

>>51172333
Why can't a cylinder have spokes?

>an even half of an O'Neill cylinder is window

Just like the torus

>>51169621
Space Evola
Psychosurgically alters the infected individual into an approximation of the Italian philosopher Julius Evola.

>>51172801

See, this actually is a scary disease.

>>51169621

A genetically engineered bacteria that breaks down certain polymers. It was originally created to be released in garbage dumps and decompose the plastics, but a strain managed to get out of earth's gravity well and fester somewhere.

>>51173008

Does it do anything to people internally, or just make them naked?

>>51169621
>A virus which triggers automedichine disorders (super MRSA) in certain firmware versions

>a bacterial strain which can cause basic biomods to go rogue through horizontal gene transfer. Symptoms vary but are generally unpleasant and nonfatal.

>Prion diseases caused by faulty settings in poorly maintained healing vats. Neurological degeneration is even worse when your cranial computer thinks it's supposed to be happening.

>Black Lung caused by prolonged exposure to open nanotech such as swarms or open air nanoforges. Also effects poorly sealed synths by abrading moving parts.

>Metal or polymer eating bacteria damaging implants and some nanoware. Larger infestations can damage habs.

>A genetically engineered virus which injects commands into the medical computers in older poorly secured models, allowing for remote control of networked computers.

>"Rogue" medichines which survive by hijacking the implanted hives to make more rogue medichines. Cause all kinds of horrible things while passing through.

>>51172801
>This Disease Makes Faschists

>>51173100
>>51173008

>polymer eating bacteria
>not just making larval stage space moths which consume fibers to metamorphose into the verminous plasma moth, sailing the Outer System

>>51162959
>>51163347
>>51172031

I know you're trying to samefag to get some good ol'fashioned Jovian arguments manifest, but isn't it kinda beating a finely grained dead horse skeleton at this point?

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>>51173284

>>51173321

http://ephrep.blogspot.com/2016/11/plasma-moth.html

>>51173062

Cyberwear, tools, guns, etc.

>>51173008
That's not going to work fast enough to be scary

>>51173739

Doesn't have to be scary, just has to be a thing.

>>51173292
I'm the second poster. I suppose first and third could be the same, but I assumed 3 was just making fun of 1 with me.

>>51172718
>negligable at a reasonable size
Wrong.

As designed, the Stanford Torus has an outer surface area of 10.4 square miles. The inner surface area is 2.8 square miles.

>>51174198
Compared to an o'neill cylinder, where the inner surface area is a much higher proportion of the outer surface area.

>>51174275
Now you're just being retarded. The outer part of a torus is the livable part and the inner part is the window part. For an O'Neill cylinder, 50% of the cylinder's surface area is window. As I just calculated, 21% of the Stanford torus' surface area is window.

>>51174376
"Inner surface area" means window now?

Most of the surface area of a torus ranges from heavily inclined to upside down, leaving a small region of relatively flat ground. You can make more with terraces, but that's still way less than the interior surface area

>>51173802
You're right, I was

>>51174376
Why are you counting upside-down wall as livable space?

>>51175045
I was talking about surface area, as in the whole structure. It's not like the difference between the spokes+hub and the cylinder's endcaps are going to make up for that 29% difference in livable surface area efficiency.

>>51175240
The canonical Stanford Torus has a major radius of 895 meters and a minor radius of 65 meters. The difference between the surface area less than vertical and the surface area beyond vertical is so small that it's not worth mentioning.

The area of the torus is 2.3 million square meters. The maximum floor area is a hair over 731,000 square meters. That's 32% of the surface area.

The canonical O'Neill Cylinder has a cylindrical section with a 4 km radius and a 32 km length, plus spherical end caps. I'll pretend that the end caps have no usable space and say that the floor space is half the cylinder area.

The total area is 871 million square meters. The underestimated floor space is 402 million square meters. That's 46% of the total area.

I guess I'm just being retarded though.

>>51175829
>minor radius of 65 meters
No. That's the radius of the circle that is rotated about the axis, dingus.

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>>51175862
Maybe if you dig that hole a little deeper you'll China

>>51175931
Well fuck. My way is better. It's not paradoxical at times. I acknowledge my mistake, though.

Where are you getting your "maximum floor area" numbers from? I was just using the downward surface area for one and half the surface area of the side of the cylinder for the other.

>>51176400
Floor area for torus is 2*pi*major radius*minor radius. This is a slight underestimate. You could do 2*pi*(major radius+minor radius)*minor radius to get an overestimate.

Floor area for cylinder is pi*radius*length. This assumes that no floor area exists in the end cap areas, which is an assumption I made to make the math easier and counteract the error in the previous calculation.

>>51176473
It's 2Rπ^2*r + 4π*r^2, end of story. You lost a *π in there somewhere. Remember that the total SA is 4π^2*R*r.

How do you even light the caps?

>>51176796
No. Floor area is perpendicular to the axis of rotation because people can't stand sideways or diagonally.

>>51176846
And btw if we drop that assumption it turns into a surface area vs volume problem and the cylinder still wins.

>>51176846
If we're being technical, there's no area that is perpendicular to the axis of rotation. There's only a circle. Right now I'm wishing that I had taken some engineering courses so I could do calculations for the structural requirements.

>>51176933
>surface area vs volume
It was never about that. Most of the volume is atmosphere, after all. It's all about livable area lit by reflected sunlight per kiloton. I was using total surface area as a stand-in for mass, but that was probably a mistake. Unfortunately, most of the studies undertaken use assumptions like using lunar soil for shielding and shit like that.

>>51177252
>If we're being technical, there's no area that is perpendicular to the axis of rotation.
That's why every single piece of art you'll find depicting a Stanford Torus shows it terraced

>It was never about that.
I didn't say it was.

>>51177412
While it would be terraced, it's not like I'm going to pull numbers out of my ass. I have no clue how to go about terracing it, so there's no way for me to come up with a horizontal surface area figure. You know what? Fuck windows. Cylinders with axial artificial light sources for EVERYONE.

>>51177489
Each terrace section is equivalent in floor area to a very thinly sliced cylinder. The maximum area would be achieved by having infinitely thin terraces that stay as close to the surface of the torus as possible. The least would be by simply spanning across the torus at the major axis. The last produces the underestimate of area that I provided. The former is still less area than the overestimate I provided.

I forget how technical some of the people EP attracts are some times. One minute you're talking philosophy or political science like it's the classical era again - the next some nerds are fighting about the surface area inside future spaceman ring-homes.

>>51177665
50% engineers, 50% political scientists

0% people who play the game

>>51177665
/EPG/: You don't need other threads.

>>51179213
Hey now. At least 3% play the game.

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Someone post some OC. Fill out a questionnaire or write some smut or something.

>>51179445

no u

>>51179445
>Content Producers Gone Wild

>>51179213

>I will never have an EP GM who doesn't have a hard on for Atomic Rockets and will let me go to a regular bar anywhere in the setting without going "sorry physical bars manned by non-AI entities don't exist anymore, too inefficient and waste of space."

Can I just walk down one street in the setting without constantly trying to figure out whether something even remotely familiar to people from the 21st century exists? Like goddamn bars?

And yes I'm projecting hardcore, this was an actual argument I had with one of the seven GMs on the entire planet that has ever run EP.

>>51181814
What? There's pictures of regular bars in the books, aren't there? Do these GMs just not notice anything that contradicts their psuedorealistic worldview?

>>51181814
The only place that might not have a bar is a transport spacecraft. Any hab would have one. You should have rebutted with "Sorry, biological organisms don't exist anymore. Too inefficient and a waste of resources."

>>51162959
>living among mexican subhumans

I'd rather be eternally tortured by TITANS.

>>51169621
I already posted this in a previous threat...

The DOOM virus. It's a TITAN-created brain virus that reconfigures your brain into hallucinating...

...basically it tries to run DOOM on your brain.

Every humanoid in your field of vision turns into a demon and YOU - MUST - RIP - AND - TEAR.

>>51181814
It's more efficient in terms of resources, space, and time to buy beer by the case from the liquor store and drink it yourself at your kitchen table.

Therefore bars will not exist in the 21st century.

>this is your GM

Can you make a space wizard like in the Mass Effect series in this game?

>>51183986
Asyncs

>>51169621
Tweaked versions of cosmetic biomods in virus form to be annoying or viruses that target biomods.

Things like making pheromones smell like farts or to emit mustard gas.

>>51183986
Go to 1d4chan and read the mass effect/eclipse phase crossover threads

>>51186478
If there's a fetish, someone has made a virus to force it on others.

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>>51190394

>>51169621

>SUPERFLU
>Subject of many fiction stories, the "superflu" describes a broad category of viral infections caused by enhanced versions of the influenza virus. Superflu strains were developed and employed as a bioweapon in the "Hot" phase of the Fall, leading to several public epidemics which added to global panic and loss of life. After the Fall, there have been no serious outbreaks though samples of the disease are contained in many research facilities and hospital to develop vaccination. Superflu is aggressive and infectious enough to fight most versions of Basic Biomods, and is particularly damaging to the body - having a significant mortality rate, especially among the young, elderly or those who are previously unhealthy. Exposure through an infection vector requires a DURx2 test (medichines are immune) - those who pass suffer only minor effects which can easily be passed off as the "space cold" (see above) for 7 days, -1 day for each full 10 MoS. Only those who Critically Succeed are properly immune. Failure means the virus takes hold in the next 48 hours, causing high fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pains, headache, coughing, and tiredness. Depending on severity of the strain, this should inflict -10 to -30 penalties to all actions as if from Wound(s). This lasts for 7 days, + 1 day for each full 10 MoF. Severe or Critical failures indicate a particularly bad infection, which may also affect the young, old or those with preexisting medical conditions or weak immune systems. In this case; secondary effects, high fever and physical damage from symptoms cause the body to degrade and risk death - Reduce DUR by 5 each day until the subject reaches 0 and dies or the infection passes. A healing vat can prevent further DUR damage, but does not remove the damage until the infection passes. Infection can be prevented by vaccination or Medichines, and counteracted with antiviral medication. [Expensive]

>>51158726
>It's knowing that someone out there is probably testing out the limits of your capability to withstand torture, suffer rape, or far far worse. It's knowing that every cubby you keep, and every protected thing you've ever stashed is in danger of being taken.

Worse than that, it's knowing that they could be running a sim using their copy of you to see where you'd move anything you own if you knew there was a copy of you in someone else's hands.

It's _NOT_ knowing if you're that sim, and any action you take to counter them may actually be leading them to where the real you moved things.

Someone stole your mind. Are you real or not?

>>51191662

I now have many more of these, if people want to see them

>>51197431
>me back when I saw operating hard with a data-driven dating approach on okcupid