Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Technically there is no FTL... Apart from Factor ships, but we don't know how those work. All there is in the setting is ways of moving from place to place by shortening the distance travelled. Semantics, I know, but they're important semantics.

Einstein is not so easily cheated. Remember the old mantra: "Relativity, causality, FTL: pick any two". Remember, in a relativistic universe, outside of one's past-and-future lightcones, there's no particular reason to prefer any reference frame to any other; thus, if wormholes /can/ be created, then either it's possible to arrange them in such a way to create a path that lets you loop back into your own past, violating causality; or there /is/ some sort of preferred reference frame which we currently have no evidence for, violating relativity.

Decivre wrote:

So basically the gates just disassemble someone and transmit their data to other gates at light speed, which reassemble them? Or disassemble them and put them in virtual worlds? I'm kinda confused on your explanation. If the former, then getting through the gates and back would take centuries. If the latter... it's just a super-complex TITAN-built simulspace system. Either way is kinda funny, though.

My apologies for my lack of clarity. To try again: No wormholes, no FTL of any kind. If you want to get to Alpha Centauri, it takes at least 4.3 years travel time, and probably longer. My suggestion was the latter one you describe: dissasemble, virtual worlds, super-complex TITAN-built simulspace.

Demonseed Elite wrote:

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

[b]The Golden Dawn Era[/b] 31 B.F. - The start of the final years of the Golden Dawn Era. For the past few decades, transhumanity has advanced rapidly. All the advances that will later be taken for granted had their founding in those years. By this point, they are common enough that more than one in two people are genefixed. However, with prosperity comes trouble, and it is also a time of great trouble and suffering. The class disparities have never been higher. The world has fallen to oligarchs. That doesn't mean that billions don't still live on the planet, enjoying what their new toys bear out for them. Subsisting on bread and circuses, humanity continues. In this setting, the TITANs have not yet ravaged Earth, and so there is no Firewall. Instead, the focus of the game is on the troubles that new technologies bring about. In this setting, mental uploading is a very, very, very recent technology to go on the public market. AGIs are still unheard of, but the technology is fast-approaching fruition. Your average person doesn't even have a cortical stack just yet. It's recommended that, in this setting, the players are investigators for some organization or another who has the credits to resleeve them. All augmentations cost one grade higher than usual, and many are simply not available to the public. Chief inspiration: Ghost in the Shell

I have some half-written notes on a setting similar to this that I was just calling "Before the Fall." It takes place about a decade before the Fall, when technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, but along with it are massive social imbalances, asymmetric warfare, unchecked megacorporations, and environmental disaster. It's a more cyberpunk take on [i]Eclipse Phase[/i], though still with transhumanism elements.

Man, that's uncanny. I had pretty much the exact same idea a while back: About 10 to 15 years before The Fall, much more emphasis on cyberpunk with some transhumanism seeping in, and having it give a more in-depth look to pre-Fall Earth. I had a slightly fancier name in mind though, "Early Dawn". Due to the lack of Firewall in that timeline, I had it in my head that players oughta be able to choose two different default styles for their group; one being a pseudo-law enforcement angle that centers around investigative efforts similar to Ghost In The Shell(and Firewall in regular EP, if you look at it a certain way), and the other being an outlaw-for-hire type of style reminiscient of Shadowrun.

Alternative Setting? Transhuman Eclipse Space. Take away the less then diamond hard sf elements (Pandora Gates, Aliens, FTL communication) but leave the main memes (The Fall, TITANs, Prometheans, Firewall) intact. Than add the more realistic depictions of solar system colonisation and social development of Transhuman Space and there you go.

Battle Star Glactica No mesh or post scarcity all the cylons have farcasters. It may also be interesting playing a beta fork of yourself for long periods of time. Of course all of is dependent on the characters playing cylons.

Looking back at the initial post and the weird crossover thread I just got an equally odd idea: Eclipse Phase the Ascension: a hermetic science fiction setting The world is largely as in Eclipse Phase, except that there are a few enlightened people around who understand what is really going on: mankind is undergoing an alchemical transformation. The Fall was the Nigredo process, the decomposition and descent into the netherworld necessary to refine it towards the albedo, citrinitas and rubedo stages before the full ascension to the "philosophers stone" - the next stage of evolution. Or maybe the next stage of evolution for a select few: someone might be quite willing to extract and sublime transhumanity in such a way that only a tiny fraction remain. Who is behind this? Naive observers may think this is a natural or fated process, but the enlightened ones realize what is actually happening: there is a someone behind it, a demiurge. The demiurge could be a conspiracy of oligarchs and secret agencies, but it could also be something alien - maybe this is how the ETI refines civilizations for its own uses. Worse, the goal might not be ascension of mankind but ascension of the TITANs or AGIs. There is a race on towards the Stone. The Illuminati are the oligarchs and powers of the inner solar system. Rich and with the best alchemical and hermetic knowledge money can buy (or maybe it is the reverse: once you possess the true hermetic secrets you can use them to become rich, whether by astrological stock market prediction or building medichines incorporating the elixir vitae formula). Their goals are somewhat fractured: some oligarchs are just aiming for personal godhood, others sincerely do want to help as much of humanity as possible. Firewall largely remains what it is: a counter-conspiracy trying to stop the Illuminati and the dangerous transformations of mankind. Unfortunately that means they are trying to stop the conspiracy to evolve: they just see death and destruction, not what truly goes on. But within Firewall there is a group of people who know more. They are the Calcinati, those purified by fire. They know the real game, make use of hermetic knowledge and can see the big picture. The Calcinati are however split between those who want to wipe out the Illuminati and the ones who support them in principle but want to keep them from abandoning the masses. Of course, some members may be far more selfish. Then there are the qlippoth. Dark forces of chaos, unbeing and corruption, they are trying to undo everything. They are the real force behind the exsurgent threat. They also manifest in many other forms trying to corrupt mankind and sabotage the alchemical refinement. They have destroyed countless other civilizations, now transhumanity is the target. There are many other groups in the game. The Argonauts, the true inheritors of the Invisible College, are fighting for their own version of transmutation. So do the Ultimates. The Autonomist Alliance might be largely political (not everything is about magic!) but there are plenty of low-level enlightened there who have escaped the secret purges instigated by the Illuminati. Some are now brinker mystics, while others run the occult bazaars of Phelan's Recourse and Extropia. There are also nasty rumours that the reason the Jovian Junta is so closed and anti-enhancement is that they are attempting to recreate Adam Kadmon, the perfect human - a single embodiment of all souls of transhumanity (or maybe just all sufficiently pure souls). Much of EP technology has secret magical roots. It is not so much that it runs on magic as it is magic reaching the Clarke's law limit: it is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable - in fact identical - to technology. The AIs started out as golems. Uploading is the soul transfer ritual. Biomorphs are homunculi. One reason for the uplift of animals was to refine the methods of alchemical evolution - as well as get the necessary symbolic players into the ritual. Thanks to bodysculpting sacred hermaphrodites are now commonplace. Space colonization also allowed the Illuminati and others to gain access to the pure elements of the planets. In this setting the characters are involved in the secret war over ascension using hermetic magic, high technology and any other tool. AGIs run spell libraries and people inscribe protective names in their DNA. Blessed guardian nanites vs. TITAN nanoswarms forming the terrible names of God only known to TITANs. Ageless oligarchs performing secret rituals to channel the power of the sacred geometry of their space habitats. Deals between Carnival of the Goat petal alchemists and extropian quantum-mages to smuggle lacta philosophica to exhuman groups trying to simulate the final transmutation. Firewall agents sent to stop somebody from brewing alkahest. Basilisk hacks might be literal here. Gatecrashers learning alien alchemical and magical formulas at great risk, not knowing the power of the symbols they carelessly photograph. Characters, in addition to the wizardry of their high tech, also have access to hermetic magic. Much of it is ritual and subtle: not as quick and flexible as the wild magic of psi, but even more subtle. Most effects involve arranging synchronicities and apparent randomness to one's advantage: a Calcinatio member who performs a ritual of protection will serendipitously duck when a sniper shoots at her, the extropian financier who put a mercury amulet into his morph's heart will make the right trading decisions above chance level. While some local and dramatic effects are possible the true power is the shifting of destiny for entire habitats or sections of humanity. Using the secret ritual chamber under the Mons Olympus caldera the illuminati can to some extent determine military luck for any conflict in the solar system. The real reason Go Nin wanted Eris was its power to disrupt things: they can use it as a strategic magical defence or weapon. The Argonauts meanwhile use Venusian energies from Gerlach and the solar might from Ukko Jylinä to nurture transhumanity. Hence much of the struggle is about who controls the powers of which celestial bodies and can get enough people to unknowingly arrange themselves in the right sacred patterns. The conspiracies try to sabotage or support these schemes - while also trying to prevent those pesky WMDs and qlippothic infiltrators from ruining the day. Inspirations: Mage the Ascension obviously. This is a world where the Technocracy kind of won, but were then transformed from inside by the Order of Hermes. Unknown Armies is full of yummy ideas, especially for anarchic outer system magic. GURPS Cabal has some good hermetica. Stross Laundry books fit in, giving a technomagical explanation of what is going on and plenty of neat descriptions of the overlap between InfoSec and True Magick. Neon Genesis Evangelion is also excellent source material. Maybe attacking alien/exsurgent/divine angels could be fitted in, and the various groups need to scramble people with sanctified exoskeletons to fight them? After the eclipse, a golden dawn is on its way. But who will be there to greet it?

The Darkness Redeeming Keeping with the original timeline but giving transhumanity a much more difficult time in simply climbing out of our womb and taking to the stars. Keep with the idea similar to an earlier post "Transhuman Eclipse Space" but also add this. The total human population to escape thus far into space is no more than 700 million. Roughly 80+% are still infolife of which roughly 65+% of that is still in simul-cold-storage. Roughly 18+% are sleeved in synthmorphs of which roughly 80% are in cases or bots; nothing too fancy. The remaining less than 2% are in biomorphs with about 85+% being in flats. Combine this with tripling (or more) the cost of heightened technology such as beam (or any non-chem ballistic) weapons, egocasting, habitat construction, ship construction, and any and all form of nano-tech/bio-tech including morph engineering. Obviously this makes the game much more difficult but it leads to that truly elite feeling when you get a Reaper morph or an Exalt morph. I also like the idea of keeping the TITANs and other alien races having hypertech so Pandora Gates and the like are still ultra hard to truly destroy (if ever). Let me know what you think.

Bethlem Royal Hospital In an age where death itself has been defeated transhumanity finds a new enemy, more inexorable and more cruel than the old, madness. Bethlem is a huge space station 5au outside the orbit of pluto, no one travels physically there, supplies are delivered by mass driver and can take years to arrive, returning cargo containers are melted down, transmissions eliminating from the station are automatically blocked. To the solar system Bethlem does not exist, but to egos too damaged for psycosurgery it is the last stop. I have 3 campaign ideas for the setting. 1. neverland the inmates have escaped and broken themselves into camps. The staff sail around the station in skiffs trying to reclaim the station. the players would likely be "lost boys" who think that they are on some kind of adventure while there are criminally insane savages hunting for fresh victims and "rationalists" trying to build a ship or a farcaster to escape. 2. infected in their efforts to "cure" the inmates the staff have grown insane themselves. Torture and other various atrocities are visited upon the inmates until they rebel. Now madmen are locked in undieing battle as each tries to control key station facilities in order to wipe the other out. 3. death therapy Goes through some of the extreme therapies that the doctors try to cure the terminally insane. Possibilities include but are not limited to; exposer to the real possibility of final death; simalspace games where to continue they must overcome their madness or face pain; being sleved into "therapeutic" morphs