Anyone doing pre-Fall scenarios or campaigns?
Do you handle character generation any differently? Any rules mods/hacks that is used for chargen?
I looked at the lifepath system in Transhuman, not sure it would fit well without a lot of modding.
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CharGen for pre-Fall games?
Tue, 2013-11-19 22:03
#1
fellowhoodlum
CharGen for pre-Fall games?
Thu, 2013-11-21 20:53
#2
jackgraham
My first EP campaign started
My first EP campaign started during the Fall, and I really want to do a short book on this type of campaign at some point... but it's a long way off, I'm afraid. :)
In the mean time, here are a few thoughts (based on my campaign starting on Earth, mind):
1. I made just about everyone take the Fall Survivor Background, as no others were relative. The one exception was the PC who was raised mostly on a North Sea oil platform; he got to be a brinker isolate type. I pretty much ruled out off-world backgrounds, as my PCs were British spies.
2. Some rep networks didn't exist in their present forms on pre-Fall Earth. Hypercorp, Guanxi, Anarchist (sort of), and RNA are all valid choices, though.
3. I strongly discouraged players from putting a lot of points in morphs or gear, as their chances of getting off the planet in their morphs were pretty low. The ones who ignored my advice were later sad.
4. If you want to play out the Fall, and Firewall is an element, you have to come up with an origin story for Firewall. This is fun! But it's also challenging.
5. You also get to play with the proto-Factions fighting each other to set up the post-Fall world. My PCs' initial impulse was to try to link up with the UK government-in-exile in orbit, but then they found out their govt-in-exile had gone all Battlestar Pegasus and decided against it. They ended up allying with a Vietnamese faction aboard Vo Nguyen.
Some other thoughts about pre-Fall:
- Society is a lot more stratified. The oligarchs have everything locked down, and the Fall hasn't come along to disrupt their power yet.
- Weird morphs are actually more common. The Fall instilled a lot of pro-humanity memes in morph design.
- Earth is already pretty trashed from an environmental standpoint. Europe is COLD; coastal Asia faces much greater peril from massive storms. North America & sub-Sahran Africa have suffered badly from the water situation.
- Computing is different. Big servers capable of hosting seed AGIs are common. Centralized networks with top-down admin and access controls are common.
Hope that helps!
—
J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!
http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham
Thu, 2013-11-21 23:04
#3
thezombiekat
jackgraham wrote:
this is the one thing i would actually doubt, kind-of.
a higher tolerance for inhuman biomorph, and a more common desire for one would make sense. but the majority of the worlds population is too pore to use any morph other than the one they where born with.
The portion of the pre fall population able to afford re-sleaving is smaller than the portion of the post fall population in inhuman morphs. however of the pre fall population able to afford re-sleaving a greater portion use inhuman morphs.
did that make sense, this idea may need a diagram. i don't know how to include one.
Thu, 2013-11-21 23:23
#4
fellowhoodlum
Thanks for the input, Jack :D
Thanks for the input, Jack :D
I was toying with an idea of a short campaign several decades before the Fall. Some of my group seem keen on it but I stumbled on the issue of chargen. Not only we can't use existing PCs, half the characters didn't even EXIST prior to the fall.
Mostly inspired by stuff from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and 2312, the PCs will be part of a metanational faction called ReTerraforma (who will become the Reclaimers in EP). ReTerraforma are basically geohackers who try to reverse or adapt to the environmental damage that Earth has received in recent decades.
Missions probably include "persuading" reluctant governments to allow reterraforming, fighting off rival exploiters, salvage/looting damaged zones. Probably drama too.
Sun, 2013-11-24 02:41
#5
Holy
A pre-Fall story sounds
A pre-Fall story sounds really interessting! I have not thought about that yet.
A nice thing to throw in would be coast line changes due to sea level rise. To me changed shores produce a wonderfully exotic feeling.
I have not found a good page where altered coast lines for the whole planet or even large regions can be found.
The US Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change give nice worst case scenario of projected climate change (EPA, IPCC).
Sun, 2013-11-24 18:46
#6
fellowhoodlum
I found some interesting
I found some interesting projections:
http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/24/opinion/sunday/what-could-...
Wed, 2013-11-27 06:29
#7
Holy
fellowhoodlum wrote:I found
Very nice! Thanks for these links. :-)
Tue, 2013-12-10 18:08
#8
zombiak
I think that there should
I think that there should definitely be more *official* information about what happened before/during the Fall. I tend to run preludes for my players, which introduce their characters to the plot of the main campaign, but also serve as a 'life path' of sorts - they get to play their character during the turning points of their character's life, and they get to make all the important decisions. Most of those events happen before the Fall, since it happened only 10 years ago; therefore, it would definitely be more than helpful to have more information concerning those troubled times.
For example, one of my PCs is an AGI - he started out before the Fall as an uplifted, borderline-emerged AI which focused on analysing potential dangerous people in the corporate district - he analyzed their gestures, facial expressions, their criminal background and so on; it was long before the Fall when he found out that he can actually *experience* those feelings and emotions by running certain sub-routines in his system. The corporation who owned him used it in order to humanize their media profile - the AI was patched and modified and became Adam Moniteo (Moniteo was the name of the corporation), an AGI who served as a mascot and a media representative of the company. Nonetheless, the corp disappeared when a hostile takeover erased Moniteo from the market. Adam Moniteo was no longer needed, so he was sold to another company running a mining business somewhere in the Main Belt, and that's how he got to survive the Fall, but it also caused him to hate hypercorps for treating him like an object (despite the fact that they made him a *person* in the first place).
Running preludes like that before/during the Fall is very helpful in building character motivations - they get to know what they have lost during the Fall and what are the reasons why Firewall recruited them in the first place - for example, the AGI mentioned above ended up repelling a minor TITANs attack by sacrificing himself, but was recovered by Firewall and they considered him to be a valuable asset in the organization.
Overall, it is useful to use the chargen system as-is (personally, I prefer the Package system from Transhuman), but still let the players experience a short prelude happening before/during the Fall. I found that it lets the players focus on their character better, and the players new to Eclipse Phase/the ideas of transhumanism also adapt better during the actual play.
Tue, 2013-12-10 21:40
#9
Songtress
I really like zombiak's
I really like zombiak's vision.
It would be nice to have a 'pre-fall' setting book, even if it were just a 'small' book to give us some idea how the Pre-Fall Earth is different from out own 21st century world + how characters may have lived their lives, or how their parents may have lived their lives... (if they were born post fall though it seems not many children are born post fall).
Wed, 2013-12-11 03:45
#10
fellowhoodlum
Yeah, official "pre-Fall"
Yeah, official "pre-Fall" setting info would be helpful, yes. But what I'm doing in instead is reading up a lot of the books mentioned in the References section (p.394) of the core book and building up a pre-Fall world based on other sci-fi works.
At first I feared consistency and coherency would be an issue but then I realised I've read more of that list than all my players combined. If they can build a better setting, they are welcome to it; otherwise they'll have to suck it :P
So far two of my players came up with characters for the pre-Fall game. We used the package system pretty much unaltered (with the exception of some Faction names changed)