My EP game has been going since it came out, so that's a fair while! and atm all my players are in heavily modified and customized Remades and given our play schedule people have pretty much max out their attrib's and skills of interest (40 max attributes etc). Which according to the attribute scale chart means they are Already Post-Human. Given whats occuring in my game, Im gearing up for not running a Trans-Human game but now a Post-Human game. I want to run essentially the groups dealing with posthuman intelligences and finally dealing with the "ETI".
Regardless of something's intelligence, there are motives which can be explored regardless of totally alien, posthuman, transhuman or merely human. For example the ETI created the exsurgent virus to deal with civilisations like transhumnaity (from the main rules) this could have been for Security, Aggression filtering, Assimilation, Enlightenment or its a War Remant (as listed in the main rules but just in case players read this Im not going to say what the motivations and goals of MY ETI are in EP). I am comitted (as are my players) to running the game for pretty much the next decade of real time (we often play via online services too) so we are going to explore essentially the "second" singularity in Eclipse Phase and it appears in my game at least that my players are going to be at the center of it.
As I develop this I wanted to know if anyone elses game had essentially reached the point where the players are Completely Post-Human (again by the scale of the game stats and skill levels) and how they handled the next Leap in their game.
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Running a Post-Human Game
Mon, 2011-08-29 12:23
#1
Abhoth
Running a Post-Human Game
Tue, 2011-08-30 05:20
#2
Arenamontanus
Re: Running a Post-Human Game
Well, the ETI are a bit above mere posthumans. *Way* above posthumans in capability.
But I think there are problems in how to play on a truly posthuman scale. It is hard to conceive of what things an EGO 40 character will understand or invent. What do you do when a character or enemy forks into 50,000 alphas and begin to solve problem as a society? (this actually happened in one of our games, way back) How do you depict an intelligence that thinks using a quantum computer, collapsing the wavefunction of its mind to only optimal results? What motivates people who can make themselves want anything? Let alone alien entities on this level, like sentient fifths of planets.
Try explaining to a lab rat what the motives you had in modifying its genes. "Well, I really want to figure out how memory works... of course, being largely non-tool using you don't understand figuring out. I also want tenure, which you might say is like having high social status... but it is not really for having a lot of sex partners, although that might be a deep evolutionary reason for it way back... And that spin-off company and potential Nobel prize are of course nice, but you would not understand what those are beyond a way of getting more food... just be glad that after I have run you through the maze enough you will become a data point in a good publication! (If I get past the reviewers.)"
The exsurgent virus could be just as impossible to understand to us. "You mean you destroyed our civilization to get *data*?!" "No, I said that gathering data is the drive *you have* that most corresponds to the drive in my past self-evolution that produced a complex hierarchy of motivations that led me to make the virus. But since you cannot even understand what learning is to an atemporal quantum system like me, the analogy limps a bit."
The problem with the ETI is that any simple answer about them will be rather flat. They work much better as something grand, mysterious and hidden. If you meet them it will invariably be disappointing.
Still, I think trying to run a posthuman game is a wonderful ambition, and I wish you the best of luck! It is just that you are setting out for a very, very hard goal.
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Wed, 2011-08-31 15:09
#3
Abhoth
Re: Running a Post-Human Game
This is the first part of what Im going to definitely have to tackle head on. In-fact its already started in my game as well it was the start imho of the "post-human" take off event. I need to work out strategies to make the game coherent and interesting while still achieving the dislocation of a Post-Human take off and making it seam Real and making the characters seem Strange and Alien to the Players while enabling the players to Role Play as the characters.
On the other side of the question I think that the ETI should be mysterious and strange and alien but the whole chunk of the game revolves around the ETI and my players want to explore the ETI part of the game. Its like the pay off for watching a show Lost or X-files except in both cases you did not get the pay off you wanted (well I do not know about Lost I have not watched it (statement based on friends who have) but X-Files was v.poor towards the end and gave no pay-off at the end). So eventually the players are going to want to tackle the ETI in Some Way and that does mean knowing its motivations. Even if you are describing the motivations through analogy and letting the players come up with what it means themselves (even if they are not aware of it).
For example the motivation could be simple-Eradicate and assimilate threat's to the ETI, that's why the exsurgent virus didnt activate until a super-intelligent Seed AI found it. Of course if I go with this idea then the focus of the mystery and strange, alien otherworld nature can't be the motivations but rather the culture of the ETI and the way of defeating the ETI or avoiding it.
Of course you could try and make the encounter more surreal...perhaps the ETI are trying to create a galactic spanning async biological seed machine (the exsurgent virus's primary target/goal is making async minds) the async minds have a psi talent/locked into a grid/higher dimensional matrix that enables communion instantaneously and this is all in aid of a discreet hack on reality aimed in changing the nature of things....Reasons? Perhaps the ETI has discovered that reality is fundamentally hostile and it wish's to elevate everything out the prison it has discovered reality to be. The Exsurgent Virus is the lockpick to get out and find out who/why/what is behind the reality prison. Essentially the ETI/exsurgent virus is the "good guy" on a universal scale but to get there it must do horrible things as its in a competition with the jailors (outside intelligences that feed on universes? natural forces that are mindless and aware at the same time enforcing the "rules" of reality) and the time scale the ETI is working on could be in the billions of years so the destruciton of transhumanity would not even register unless the ETI saw "something" in transhumanity something the "fall" showed and so the ETI withdrew the titans to discover what the something is, this important something that will allow the ETI to finally get at our jailers so to speak.
Thoughts? its just a basic idea nothing too elaborate yet.
Mon, 2011-09-05 11:55
#4
Arenamontanus
Re: Running a Post-Human Game
A lot depends just how far up the ETI are compared to the posthumans. Are they like humans to apes? Humans to mice? Or humans to ants?
If the ETI are like humans to monkeys, then they are just about as far above the posthumans as they are to humanity - somebody who can nearly always outsmart you or use incomprehensible technology to get what they want, but they do bleed if you smash them hard enough. And you can almost figure out their goals, it is just that they have been refined to a level that makes little sense. To a chimp in the Kongolese jungle, the fact that guerilla fighters are killing them for bush meat is simply a matter of aggression/hunger. Why the guerilla fighters are there, and the links to postcolonial politics, the need for coltan in portable electronics and how humans organise themselves into supermeta-tribes called nations is irrelevant.
If the ETI are like humans to ants, then the motivations are so far away that analogy probably isn't even possible. The anthill gets bulldozed not because the humans cared about it but because a new road will be build. This road is in a way the same thing as an ant-trail for the human superhive, except that this particular road gets built because the local council got stimulus money from the federal government in order to fix the financial crisis... the real motivation simply doesn't map onto anything in an ant (or ant hive) nervous system. Especially since humans, not being eusocial organisms, have individual motivations that are utterly bizarre to an ant ("Gain social status so that you will have plenty of offspring?! Why don't you just have a queen as a sister for everybody?!")
Here is an idea: there is a limited resource in the universe, and the ETI want most of it. A transhuman would perhaps call it consciousness. Small outbreaks of intelligent conscious life is not a problem, but if they start to become large or build super-conscious AGI they deplete the resource. The ETI might even be making an optimal use of it, turning it into maximum utility - any alternative is actually morally bad, according to the true morality of the universe (which sadly, is far beyond transhuman comprehension).
The exsurgent virus is a way of wiping out conscious infections, primarily by making seed AGIs break down. The remaining infection more slowly destroys the civilization from inside, until it is no problem any more.
There is of course a nice way to compromise: just upgrade your civilization to a non-conscious state. Then there is no problem if you Dyson stars or perform galactic engineering (so cute and primitive by ETI standards - have those primitives never heard of Planck-scale computing and smart vacuum?) However, not all transhumans and posthumans might want to give up consciousness in order to co-exist...
(see Peter Watt's "Blindsight" for a lot more cool ideas about non-conscious intelligences)
Cool. KULT in space. With universe-scale jailors. Hmm, check out Fine Structure, http://qntm.org/structure
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