On a funny note: EP and Furry Pirates More seriously though, i think an EP and Warhammer 40k Crossover would be awesome. You really could do some serious damage/awesome. Just have to rewrite minor details in the EP book, transferring them to starsystem the Imperium recently found. And the TITANs? They are now knowns as C'tan and The Great Devourer :)

I will post my EP + Aberrant/generic superhero game crossover soonish. It makes more sense than you think...

root@improbable crossovers [hr]

GreyBrother wrote:

i think an EP and Warhammer 40k Crossover would be awesome.

Yes, this would be neat. I'd lean toward Necromunda, but coming up with Creative Commons 3D files for figurines and vector graphic tile sets could be pretty fun. There is Blender3D (open source) for modeling, and if you can learn to use it there is a MakeHuman (also open source) for making humanoids that could be worked on. Then people could customize and print their characters from any convenient fab shop.

Jay Dugger wrote:

And we will find the TITANS in Ex Tempore?

Of course! Where else would they go? http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Game/Fukuyama Hmm... looking back at past campaigns, my big fantasy/steampunk terraformed Mars setting might be tweaked to include Eclipse Phase in the past. Produces a completely different reason the old Martian Terraforming Network collapsed (the Fall) and makes the rest of the solar system much more sinister... http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Game/Mars/

I'd planned to drop "Land of the Ten Suns" as stage dressing in my as-yet unnamed EP campaign. It'll count as a very popular entertainment licensed from those no-good, gun-toting, free-market economists on drugs in Extropia. I imagine it as a cross between Masterpiece Theater and an MMORPG. It fits nicely with a PC simulspace expert.

Post-Scarcity: Magic can summon material goods into existence. Dungeons & Dragons has had "Create Water" and "Create Food" since the early days. For energy: Fireball and Lightning Bolt. For climate control: Ice Storm. Information Proliferation: That will just have to be one of the things that stays exclusive to the present & future, unless you want to purposely force it in through crystals that record memories, people keeping in communication through magical artifacts, etc.

Ah most interesting. I think a shamanic-psychedelic Dreamtime-style parallel dimension could be made to work very much the mesh, albeit in a fairly crazy impressionistic manner: people would have dream-selves and dream-helpers (muses), their beliefs and memories are experientially accessible (XP), karmic feedback between minds exalts or taints individuals based on their actions (rep; an intuitive phenomenon enabling the gauging a person's honour/virtue), and telepathic bonding would serve for individual pinging and mass communication. There's some interesting and wild fields of thought out there about the convergence of intelligence we call the internet, and of it's effects being not necessarily contingent upon computers - interconnectedness of all levels of nature is an eternally evident fact acknowledged by many ancient and indigenous cultures. Surfing Gaia's internet via the vegetable interface (or other, non-psychedelic means if you believe [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade]Eliade[/url]) is, purportedly, the essence of shamanic magic. Check out Alfred North Whitehead, Tielhard de Chardin, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terence McKenna in particular presented the concept very beautifully. If EP were to be translated to fantasy, it'd be my preference to have non-scarcity be society's default, Edenic state from which the new order of scarcity (and paternalism, rationality, materialism, etc.) has emerged. This would set up a nice dichotomy between the ancient magical la-de-daa ways of the forest (aka the outer system), which are being lost to the rapacious ideologies of the technologists, engineers and architects of the cities (aka inner system).

Tuesday, 22 February 2011 I wrote out a document describing "Land of the Ten Suns" for players of the Eclipse Phase campaign "Martian Autumn." In that campaign it serves as intellectual property for various vidgames, ARGs, and XPs, and also as pan-Martian propaganda.

As you might have noticed in my sig, I have a story set in Eclipse Phase that is a somewhat modified retelling of [i]Death Note[/i]. Like the magic notebook, the Sentient Erasure Terminal allows for completely anonymous murder from anywhere in the solar system, or as far as can be determined, anywhere in the galaxy. Unlike the magic murder notebook, it doesn't just kill the person, it completely erases them - backups, forks, everything.

Hmm, Kult makes a fun crossover. Maybe the Fall was really the awakening of most of mankind? The "dead" on Earth have become original humans, living in an incomprehensible higher reality that the unawakened transhumans merely see as a horrific wasteland. Meanwhile the rest of the solar system is a battleground for the surviving Archons and other entities, desperately trying to distract transhumanity from the enticing possibilities of techgnosis...

Kult would work well as a crossover for some Eclipse Phase campaign types because Kult oscillates between the themes of Discovering the Secret (reality-as-prison) and Escape (Ascension). You don't really need to apply the Gnostic occultism setting to make Kult work in Eclipse Phase. You can just apply the sequences of themes from Kult to Eclipse Phase. You can also do this with the Call of Cthulhu variant Delta Green, or the time travel RPG Continuum. This post goes on for another sixteen hundred words. It discusses how the particular RPGs go from one theme to another, and not how to fuse settings. You might want to stop reading now. Games of Kult can go from Discovering the Secret to Escaping the Jail. This makes them prison movies, if you like. Think of "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "Jacob's Ladder," "Hellraiser," "The Thirteenth Floor," "The Machinist," or "End of Evangelion." Each of these involve the two steps I mentioned. The protagonist encounters the secret--subjective reality imprisons--and attempts to escape, often without knowing what they do, to some transcendent state--usually death. For extra credit, consider out-and-out prison movies such as "Escape From Alcatraz" or "The Shawshank Redemption" in this model. Eclipse Phase provides various entrapments: morphs with DRM preventing resleeving, petals, XP, simulspace, uploading, and even literal imprisonment. As an example of that last, consider Orwell's "1984" played in Kult. All Oceania's citizens live in a prison; Winston Smith knows it (Discovering the Secret). He tries to escape through an illegal diary, an act which symbolically undoes his work at Minitrue, and through sexcrime, an act which gives him selfish pleasure the Party forbids (Escaping the Jail). In Kult's mechanics, this raises his Mental Balance. His capture, torture, and betrayal lower his Mental Balance until he not only fails to escape, but even forgets the secret. (Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.) The parallels with the Jovian Republic don't need much detail, do they? ;) You could also do Delta Green in Kult very easily, either literally, as the precursor of Firewall, or as above, with the sequence of themes. Delta Green shares mechanics and setting with Call of Cthulhu. Delta Green usually gets described as conspiracy theory meets Lovecraft, and that misses an important point. DG maps a second layer of secrecy onto CoC. Between the secret of a toxic universe and subjective existence lies the vast fog of conspiracy theories. The adventures of Delta Green usually involve moving between these four themes. Discover the Secret...Discover A Front...You Must Handle the Truth...You Can't Handle the Truth. Call of Cthulhu has just two of these themes, "Discover the Secret" and "You Can't Handle the Truth." Delta Green inserts a theme "Discovering A Front" before the theme "Discover the Secret." Players usually start in that fog as members of Delta Green. That obliges them to handle the truth. It also warns them of and shields them from "You Can't Handle the Truth." Delta Green inserts a fourth theme, "You Must Handle the Truth," between CoC's two themes of "Discover the Secret" and "You Can't Handle the Truth." Characters move back and forth between "You Must Handle the Truth" and the themes of CoC. The interior two themes conceal the horrors of a toxic universe. This lets humans matter more through preserving their suspension of disbelief. The potential of DG characters to guard, but not save, other people allows DG stories a heroic aspect not permitted in CoC. It also opens up the moral can of worms present in many DG stories. In a Firewall-based Eclipse Phase game, just as in Delta Green, player characters operate in a cell-based conspiracy. Firewall PCs start off at "Discover a Front," where they investigate the possibility of an existential threat. This might get handed to them as background briefing, or the investigation might form the meat of the adventure. Existential threats map to the theme of "Discover the Secret." The black seas of infinity in Eclipse Phase aren't "not meant that man should voyage far," but humans can't go far without becoming Other. In Eclipse Phase, this is something everybody knows, but with only ten years since the Fall, and quarantine zones on Luna and Mars, it is also something no one likes to consider. (Much like the risk of going to bed during the Cold War and getting killed in a nuclear exchange before morning. No one liked to consider that either, and if you don't remember it, good.) Firewall handles existential threats (You Must Handle the Truth) and they have two problems in doing so. First, they only have to fail once (by definition). Second, they ultimately can't keep winning (You Can't Handle the Truth). The Fall ended only because the Titans stopped; transhumanity's survival wasn't a victory. Firewall has only a finite capacity to predict future existential threats, and the variety of potential threats grows almost as fast as the number of people who can realize them. (In Call of Cthulhu terms: Rlyeh rose about the time Google Books scanned Miskatonic's restricted collection. Good luck, agents!) Call of Cthulhu has a weak win state: A PC that escapes the scenario, or a PC who dies in ignorance of the Mythos. Thus the jokes about "burn the books before reading" and "save the last bullet for yourself." Delta Green has no such win state. Delta Green characters start with some Mythos exposure and will always get called back to service. (Thus the DG joke about the "retirement plan, self-administered, 9 mm.") Eclipse Phase has slightly stronger win states courtesy of population distribution, cortical stacks, forks, and psychosurgery. A Firewall agent can finish the scenario as a bawling, crippled wreck (e.g., Danforth in "At the Mountains of Madness") or as a custom built cyborg with a brain rewired to obsessively solve arcane puzzles (e.g., Richard Swift in "Diamond Dogs"), and in the next scenario get restored from back-up, or get repaired in body and edited in mind, or just get that poor fork written off as a martyr for the cause. If you're smart, you'll head for Kuiper Belt or an extrasolar colony. If you do any of those in play, you draw on the theme sequence from the time travel RPG Continuum (see Wikipedia), where PCs belong to the history-spanning group "Continuum," whose members can teleport through time at will and whose actions preserve history. Where they work to keep history fixed, Firewall works to keep its members fixed. Enforce the Jail<--Discover the Secret-->Escape the Jail-->>Rebuild the Jail-->Enforce the Jail Keeping history fixed requires preserving its blood-soaked story (Enforce the Jail). In Continuum, history's bloody story results from the manipulations of time travelers in the Continuum. Humanity lies in prison and you are a jailer. History is a factory with human raw material processed through suffering and bloodshed into an utterly inhuman end product. (Discover the Secret) Notice that time travel itself is NOT the secret, any more than existential threats in Eclipse Phase are secret. With Firewall, you have people doing much the same on a smaller scale. Agents prevent existential threats (Enforce the Jail), and so long as they keep succeeding, they keep suffering, right up to point where they fail with results ranging from euthanasia to extinction. Agents will suffer, over and over, until they fail or until they realize the trap. (Discover the Secret) In Continuum, some time travelers turn renegade at this point, and try to change history. (Escape the Jail) They can do this in two ways. One, they can fork the time line into a parallel branch and the main branch. In the former, they have their own time line to play with. Unless they make a very significant or a very subtle change, the new time line probably also has their opposition. (Rebuilding the Jail) In the main branch, of course, they fail and the Continuum wins by preventing any change to history. The Continuum wins by tautology. The other way to do it is to go back in time before the foundation of the Continuum. That takes great effort. Even if you escape the Continuum's range, you just end up in the range of another organized group of time travelers, who aren't very human either, and won't necessarily be happy about a refugee. (still Escaping the Jail) With Firewall, you can Escape the Jail in only a few ways. You could fork an alpha unknown to Firewall, join an Isolate or extrasolar colony, or undergo severe psychosurgery. Each of these attempts to Escape the Jail has its own complications. In Continuum, an escape from enforced history leaves you the only time traveler about, and you've a private time line for your own ideas about history. From the trivial (making sure you ace the test) to the profound (insert your own horror here), you are now the jailer. Good job on becoming what you hate. (Rebuilding the Jail) See Gerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself" for example after example after example. (JFK announcing the Janus Program instead of the Apollo Program comes to mind as an unintended consequence of selfish time travel.) With Firewall, a fork unknown to Firewall must lie low or undergo substantial identity change to keep hidden. Either way, the fork remains subject to existential risks that affect the solar system. Ditto for joining an isolate colony. If you flee to an extrasolar colony and destroy the gate behind you, then you have certainly traded one jail for another. Eventually, you will have to either retard local technological progress towards known risks (welcome to the Jovian Republic), recreate Firewall to handle existential risks, or start shooting all incoming ETs on sight and relativistically bombing every body of every nearby system "just in case." (See Pelligrino's "Flying to Vahalla," Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime," and Steiger's "Earthweb.") Again: good job on becoming what you hate. (Rebuilding the Jail) You can see this sequence in the movie "Momento." Memory damage works like time travel; watch it in reverse order. The protagonist couldn't escape his jail because he kept recreating it. You can also see this in LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven." The main characters work very hard to fix the world, and then even harder to fix the consequences of their mistakes. This perfectly captures the tragic nature of members of Continuum or Firewall: you can only become what you hate.

Thank you for the kind praise. I excerpted and reworked this from an even longer piece I wrote on the Delta Green Mailing List. It mentions more games, including Over the Edge, and it has a diagram. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jay_dugger/2265186269/ http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/dglist/message/19969 I offer these because I still work on the "Mormons in EP" piece I earlier offered. With luck, these will distract everyone. Firewall and Ozma remind me of Delta Green and Majestic-12. Both do very similar work in their respective settings, and both have similar problems. Firewall resembles a much stronger and less illegal Delta Green. Ozma is almost exactly like Majestic-12, but not necessarily corrupt and deceived. Ex-Firewall members might not have the same problem that ex-Delta Green agents do. You can retire from DG, unless they really need you, but the two handle the threat of whistle blowing very differently. Firewall can scrub your memories, or even restore you from an early and ignorant branch--effectively negating retirement. Delta Green would discredit and kill you if you threatened to tell what you knew. A renegade agent needn't pose a threat. One of my favorite DG adventures involves a cell cleaning up the home of a retired agent immediately after his death. The man had served well and lived out his life, leaving a death bed note apologizing for the mess. The PCs only had to purge his home of any traces of DG work... ...such as the improperly resurrected thing in the buried steel tank that had been the late man's wife. He'd just wanted to have her back, and it didn't seem so much to ask, that just one good thing could come out of all that he'd seen and done, and it had only made things worse, and he'd handled even that as best he could. It was still her, only she didn't know why he'd had to bury her alive, and couldn't understand why he wouldn't talk with her. That adventure gave a crossover between horror and tragedy, blending fear with pathos. In Eclipse Phase, easy accurate resurrections don't require completeness of remains for the finest effect. The parallel might have a gamma fork of a loved one presumed lost in the Fall infected with the Exsurgent virus, or butchered by psychosurgery such that it (accurately) blames the survivor for leaving it to die, or so on.

When aberrant first came out I ran a crossover Multi-genre game using the aberrant universe. The storyline revolved around the team mad scientist npc gadget man. He invented a machine that could program the mind like in the movie matrix. You would be given an avitar and go into the virtual environment be speed up to processor speed and learn the skill taking only a few minutes real time but months in the virtual environment. The mad scientist was not classically insane but was "mad" by way of the fact he was an ubernerd and clumsy, so something always went wrong with his inventions. In this case the team jacked in and the power station that was used had a short and went down. The players where stuck and had to hope from sector to sector in the computers memory to stay ahead of the systematic shutdown or they could die whille the professor in the real world powered up the backup generators. Remember only a few minutes to him but a lifetime for the players. The team hoped from sector to sector, going through different game setting and virtual environments, like sliders, until the game campaign eventually died. Not only did I have the original team but latter on a colonial space marine for the aliens universe and a vampire from vampire the masquerade had joined them on there adventures. Sorry for the long backstory, the point was that each time they went to a new virtual environment they had a new body similar to resleaving in EP. Just food for thought on an EP story idea where stolen egos are put through virtual games thus getting stuck in a similar situation. Probably by one of the crime syndicates for the amusement of there betting fans or reality TV watchers. ;) Red

Post Fall Earth = Thundarr the Barbarian : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3VxNX4lx98 DO IT.