If you want a popular Sci-Fi show that could be easily run with Eclipse Phase, Firefly fits much better than Star Wars/Star Trek. River is a Psi adept, the Reavers are Insurgent infected, the Alliance is the Consortium. Star Wars and Star Trek are both Pulp Space Opera. Eclipse Phase isn't really.

Star Wars/Star Trek? You're not in the right millenia in setting, or the right century IRL! Look at the past decade of sci-fi and you have a better chance of finding a match. Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, maybe Babylon 5, whatever that series is that I heard way too much about but died in its second season and so on.

EP is not like any other low brow pop sci-fi. Which is why it's good.

Funny, no one mentions Alien. The thing is, there's a whole bunch of movies, books, shows and other RPGs that you could emulate in an EP campaign without problems. One of the first things i did when i got my hands on the corebook was to stat out the cast from Futurama. Run a campaign with lots of extropian mercenaries, criminals, barsoomian insurgents and strong hypercorp influence in a domed city on Mars and you end up either with Shadowrun meets Mad Max IN SPACE or Ergo Proxy meets GitS to beat up Cowboy Bebop. It's a huge setting with tons of largely isolated societies, particularly when you include the Pandora gates. You could do the Star Trek thing and let the group play on a different planet of the hats every week. You can go for grit, horror, sense of wonder and exploration, post-apocalyptic survival, psychological drama, comedy, it's all there. You liked Avatar? Set a game on Bluewood. You want to go for Starship Troopers instead? Let things escalate a bit on Tanaka.

Double post

wwwjason wrote:

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, maybe Babylon 5, whatever that series is that I heard way too much about but died in its second season and so on.

Are you referring to Dollhouse? A present-day or near-future setting, with mind/body transference.

Awesome show, but no, that's not the one I was thinking of. Farscape maybe? That sound familiar? (Aliens is also a good reference - also the only 20th century sci-fi I'd consider to fall into that category.)

Arenamontanus wrote:

In some of the games I am aiming for 2001. My players do not thank me for this :-)

I didn't really like that film. Felt very slow in my mind. Then again, maybe I need to go and rewatch it; I last saw it when I was a good bit younger.

Arenamontanus wrote:

The problem with both Star Trek and Star Wars is that they deal with humans having human problems. Sure, some have rubber foreheads, but there are not really any transhuman options to change the human condition. A world where everybody's identity is potentially fluid, minds tradeable goods and the big threats either utterly alien or organisations does not really fit in with either. (Yes, the Borg did push the limits a bit, until they were defanged and made cute). Babylon 5 comes closer, but was still bound by the limitations of a sellable tv drama. Dollhouse came even closer, especially with the realization that certain technologies can change *everything*. "I broke the world..."

The worst part with Star Trek is, wherever transhuman options come up in those shows, they're usually portrayed negatively and as "ground where man was not meant to tread". I even remember a few episodes where they do things like upload people's minds, even alien minds, into computers, and it's NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN, as if such a discovery is nothing to blink at. When crewmen are dying left, right, and centre, no-one thinks to capture their neural patterns, just in case they didn't feel like being dead. The whole show stank of wasted opportunities and a desire to maintain a relatable status quo. As for the Borg, they always annoyed me by being "TV Smart", which is to say that they could spout technobabble and build plot devices, but were otherwise utterly incompetent. They were pathetically myopic, and, for a super-intelligence that can theorize a way to pierce into other dimensions and communicate across interstellar distances, they were remarkably easy to defeat. I remember once a group of Borg being defeated by being sucked out an airlock, despite it being long-established that they have magnetic feet, are able to survive in space, and have a mental link that ensures their constant contact, meaning they were fully aware of the threat before it occurred yet neglected to grab something sturdy. Star Wars has the excuse of being Westerns/Space Operas/Wuxia films mashed together for pure entertainment purposes, or, at least, the original three films do; they were just there for pure entertainment value, that was all. Star Trek was just plain badly written. Not that I didn't enjoy Trek's many series, but it's never the place you want to go if you want to enjoy well-developed plots about the potential future for humanity. Oh wow, I just nerd-ranted, didn't I? I'm gonna go put on my shame cone...

A fish is more like an apple than a car, because fish is food, and an apple is food, but a car is not food.

Star Wars isn't even sci-fi. It's a fantasy with sci-fi trappings. A farmer gets a special sword from a wizard-guy, learns magic, and fights an empire along time ago in a land far far away. Space ships and lasers do not a sci-fi make. That's not a criticism, by the way. I love Star Wars. Star Trek is an optimistic promise for the future of our species, where national and racial differences dissolve and humanity embraces a secular religion. The "science" half of the science-fiction is really just a vehicle to place the characters in difficult moral choices that in real life could only be hypothetical. Like, Tuvok and Neelix get merged into one, a totally new person... is it right to destroy this new person in order to retrieve the two that were lost? Also not a criticism, I love Trek. From reading it alone, EP seemed to me like Ghost in the Shell + 2001 Space Odyssey