One of the problems any space-faring sci-fi game has to deal with is how to handle space travel and space combat. Both of these can be significant glitches in an RPG setting. Space travel can mean a long delay between action, as the players must board a ship to get from one setting locale to another. Planets and space stations are not stationary objects, however, and so travel time can very between the same two places by a matter of months or more, as their orbits take them nearer to or further from each other. Add in the many different types of potential spaceship drives, and you have another complication. Some games deal with this by including charts and complex mathematics, actually requiring you to do the math to figure out how long your journey from Mars to Saturn will take.

Assigning illustrations for purely digital entities is never easy. While things in virtual environments can pretty much look like anything, especially given the hyper-real capabilities of digital imaging in Eclipse Phase, you run the risk of having something that looks completely out of place if you don’t include some context. Unfortunately the way to provide context is usually to provide some sort of obviously digital environmental element, even though such things would be unlikely in actual virtual spaces. Dug Nation pulled this illustration off admirably, showcasing an infomorph, a digital emulation of someone’s mind. The split-off faces could be taken to represent the process of forking, or making (usually limited) copies of yourself.