The main podcast (commentary and comedy rather than Actual Plays) is switching from GM/PC advice over to analysis, review, and discussion over specific game systems. And our first episode is about Eclipse Phase. We gear the conversation towards those that have yet to try out the game, but it might still be of interest to the forums. Give it a listen and tell us what you think! http://slangdesign.com/rppr/2011/12/podcast-episode/rppr-episode-68-phas...

Episode 7 of the Know Evil campaign is up on RPPR. This episode is the climax of the Venus tier of the campaign. The Firewall team has found the secret base of the sky pirates but now comes the most dangerous part of their mission – infiltration. They must pose as the real sky pirates they killed and find the captured hacker they need to rescue. Of course, between them and their target lie dozens of armed and paranoid pirates. To make matters worse, the hacker turns out to be more than they initially thought… http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2012/01/genre/horror/eclips... BTW, this episode is where the idea I shamelessly ripped off from Anders Sandburg is finally revealed. Everyone come listen to my lack of originality! Yay! Quote of the game: "The sky pirates had a bad...altitude." (cue "YEAHHHHHHHHH" from CSI theme song).

Thanks for the kind words, Pyrite! At this point, I think you can expect far more than thirteen games coming down the pipe. We finished a Luna tier that was slightly longer than Venus, and now we've detoured to the scum swarm described in The Stars Our Destination for at least 2-3 sessions before starting up the Earth orbit plot. As I currently envision it, there will be at least one more setting change after Earth before we hit the endgame. So...at the rate we post games, we'll probably finish the campaign around the time my cat gets uplifted and I sleeve into a flexbot centipede.

@Quincy Episode #8--which is the start of Luna, I believe--should be up in a week or two. The AP site alternates weekly between our Wild Talents Campaign, a one-shot random system, and Know Evil. A Cthulhu Invictus game and a WT session have gone up since #7 got posted, so I'm guessing the next one will come out soon. Things will probably keep up that schedule for quite some time, with the exception of the month of April; Clockworkjoe is going out of the country for a month, and he's the one that makes the podcast magic happen. For running a transhuman game, I'm a pretty remarkable luddite and have no idea how to do that stuff. I would love to novelize Know Evil, or turn it into a campaign book, or really do anything EP related! Posthuman Studios, you have my number (fingers crossed).

Episode 9 of Know Evil is up on RPPR. Things get real when the gang gets their first taste of Exsurgents. http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2012/03/genre/horror/eclips... The Firewall team has taken one step closer to the machinations of the organization behind Know Evil. On the Argonaut station Mitre, the team uncovers a plot to ruin the reputation of an important media personality and put to a stop to it. They also find a link to research into TITANs, including a mission to retrieve new specimens from an active TITAN site. The team tracks down the researcher but isn’t prepared for what they find…

Awww! Thanks so much, Lilith! I hope you find a group soon.

I almost forgot. We had a slew of In-Character writing take place on the RPPR forums after the last game that got posted. I'll copy them here for the sake of posterity. *SPOILERS* If you haven't listened to the latest episode. (This one describes what ClockworkJoe's character was doing after the escape) Bartleby sat down, hunkered against the wall of the craft. His back itched. The Yakuza tattoos of his new morph still irritated him. It was female, which he insisted on because he wanted to minimize his profile while they were on Luna. At least it was a futura. It was the only morph he felt truly stable in. He had tried a splicer once. He jumped at the littlest thing. Nothing seemed as real. Never again, if he could help it. He looked at the AGI's cortical stack, still in his left hand. The poor thing had sacrificed its morph to guarantee that the explosion would happen. Its plaintive cries still bounced around in his head. It felt responsible for Preston's death. When they had time to recover, he would ask what it wanted. He could try to treat it, to speak the soothing words he had learned, but he wondered if it would want to carry on. It might demand it be restored from a backup - a backup not scarred by the trauma of losing a comrade, of encountering the exsurgents, of death. Are the exsurgents worse for an AGI to see? To know that the same AI technology that created it could also create a new TITAN? The AGI could also ask to press on, despite its guilt or perhaps because of it. It might even ask for death - to be deleted or to retire so that Firewall could send them a new, less damaged agent. It deserved whatever it wanted - whatever he was in a position to grant, he would do so. It deserved that much at least. Preston had no decision to make. He was dead of course. One of the digging drones had bitten through his vac suit and infected him. After they had slain the exsurgents, he had turned on them. He had no choice but to empty a clip into his friend. His friend. How could he call him his friend after that. Bartleby looked at the pistol in his right hand. Loaded. It was easy to rationalize the murder. That Preston would have wanted to die rather than face life as an exsurgent. That there was no choice. That Preston was better off this way - his backup would be as jovial and entertaining as ever. If he had survived, his audience would surely notice the difference. They would see the horror in his eyes. But that's not what concerned Bartleby now. With his eidetic memory, he remembered every detail, including how he felt when he pulled the trigger. Nothing. No fear, no regret, no guilt. Bartleby only reduced to Preston to an abstraction - an obstacle to survival. Survival meant everything. He couldn't trust anyone. If he failed, then the Red Queen won. Alice depended on him and him alone. He had to survive to find her. He closed his eyes, putting his hands to his face. The cool metal of the gun and diamond armor of the stack pressed against his cheeks. He didn't even realize he was crying. After escaping Luna, he had fled into deep space. Became a brinker. Did whatever it took to survive. Trusted no one. He would have died as a paranoid recluse but Firewall saved him. Made him realize that trust was the real key to survival. Belief in a greater cause. That's why he didn't space Fayen. She had been exposed to the exsurgent virus as well. She didn't react like Preston though. After hauling her to the craft, he had given her a sedative to make her sleep. As they reached orbit, every instinct in him screamed to space her. But he couldn't. He didn't want to be a monster. He didn't want to be a soulless killer, the freak like everyone else in the LOST project. They were friends and comrades in the fight to save everyone. If Bartleby couldn't control himself, how could he save anyone? The opposing desires to trust and to survive raged within him. The emotional dampeners had already overloaded from the fight with the exsurgents. The war abated as he thought of a compromise. He watched her as she slept and realized there was only one way to know for sure if she was infected or not. He placed the cortical stack down and commanded the vac suit to remove itself around his hand. He felt her forehead and concentrated. His other hand aimed the pistol at her head. A few moments later the capillaries in his eyes hemorrhaged. A thin trail of blood ran down his nose. OOC: Bartleby will use deep scan on Thad's character in order to make sure she's not infected.

Finally, I wrote a piece of short fiction shortly after the subshuttle game and sent it to all the players. It didn't contain any actionable information, but it does detail what "the opposition" is up to. A violation of narrative perspective? Yeah. But I wanted to freak them out :-) ******START SPOILERS******** ERRAND Kyler glided past the dank conduits of the maintenance tunnel, swimming through zero-G with the practiced ease of a born brinker. He was full-burn down the pipe, in serious danger of a bang up if he missed one of the handholds his muse was highlighting in his entropics. Mom had programmed Tilda for maximum physical safety, but the personality matrix was developing a narrow reading of the command and often allowed Kyler off-mesh for jaunts such as this. He was excited to get back to his hideout. He’d been forbidden from going to the disused storage capsule in the old cluster ever since Vera was forced off-station. But Mom was doing her tenth-day duties on EVA maintenance, a 16-hour shift if you added in the decompression time, and Kyler had plenty of time to get back to the sleeper pod before she got wise. Kyler booted up Parabola Coaster before he even reached the hatch. He’d gotten sick good at mapping vertexes since Vera had tutored him, and he loved to ride down the curves he’d made on his entropics, feeling the nanos simulate wind on his face and coming so close to yakking as the inner-ear mod Pavlov-ed him with that crazy, gut-dropping sensation he imagined kids with gravity got all the time. Mom would totally red alert if she found out he was logging extra credit hours on Parabola instead of Word Sensation, but that game vac-ed without the dedicated drug gland and Hackops hadn’t cracked DRM on the bluies yet. Kyler cycled the hatch and nestled into his favorite corner, the one near the hot water pipes. Entrhalled as he was mapping a mad-queasy ride of high-frequency waves, he almost didn’t see the man. He appeared as little more than an outline lit by the glow of LED’s. Kyler was kicking for the door when the man spoke. “No need to run. I’m not maintenance.” Kyler snagged some cable and looked back at the shadow. “Who you blowing up my spot then, morph?” “My?” said the man, floating closer but never leaving the shadow. “Possessive pronouns? Such profiteering language for so young a ladka.” Kyler blushed for having cussed in front of an adult. He was in for it now. “Besides,” the man smiled, his teeth glowing dull blue in the haze, “it isn’t as if your name is on it.” “Is too, morph!” Kyler said, unwilling to go down without a fight. “Spec it, low-rez, gots a tag right there.” Kyler pointed to the place where he and Vera had burnt their names in some ceramic with a hacked laser communicator. “Are you Kyler?” asked the man. “True” “And who is Vera?” Kyler looked down, uncomfortable with the man’s questions and slow drift towards him. “Vera was m…a friend. We came here to play school. It was quieter and she knew how to get admin on the levels. More fun.” The dark shape nodded as he slowly adjusted course, thankfully veering towards the hatch rather than the boy. He looked damn tall up close, those long limbs of his not so much drawn shadow as they first appeared. “And why isn’t Vera here today?” Kyler went back to his game’s entropics, trying to drool the guy out. “Mom said we could co-op no more. Said Vera weren’t no kid, but like an adult sleeving a kid, spec it? She was a Neolithic or something.” “Neotecnic?” asked the man. “Yeah. That one.” “Shame,” he whispered, drifting past within inches. “It is the dharma of the old to train the new.” Kyler squirmed, “Whatever. You gonna post or should I find another spot? I’m going for high scores, here.” “Oh, by all means,” the man was halfway out the hatch already, “stay here. I wouldn’t want to interrupt your studies.” “Like. Tetyell.” Kyler hit play on the game. He was part way down the first parabola when his vids flicked off. He wanted to say something, but for some reason the words wouldn’t come. The weightless feeling, that one that came before you hit the bottom of the conic and that fabled gravity took hold again, that feeling he’d felt his entire life, took on a new intensity. He looked down, down, down until he could see his feet, until he could see the fronts of his knees. He could see himself, upside down, with the dark shape behind him and shrouded in a red sheet, and then the world went dark. * * * The monowire cut clean before snapping. The boy’s stack glistened at the base of the exposed spinal column. He wrenched it free with a gloved hand and kicked the body across the room, leaving a comet trail of blood frozen in the half-light. "Sir," Shiva entreated, her do-not-disturb parameters no longer active, "message waiting from the inner system." He commanded it play while fishing for the case slung behind his back. "Cypher: Octopus and the rest made me. No idea how. He and the courier just fucking rezzed into the room as I was assuming Hoffman. One of them was coordinating security as I bailed with the beta-forks, I assume. Had to Ctrl-Alt the shapers and most of the tour group. Opsec maintained but the objective was not achieved. Luna is blown." “Interesting.” He removed the scour ring from its containment field, careful to only touch the outer rim. “Of all the variables…hmmm….” He placed Kyler’s stack atop the ring’s center cavity and watched it slowly sink, somehow not coming out the other side. "Shiva," he commanded, "dictation. Maximum encrypt." "Go." He placed the ring back in its container, unable to resist a hand wave through the space where the non-stack was violating the Conservation of Matter. @ cypher: Will be casting into the theater by the time you receive this. Prep a clone and call a conference simulspace for immediate debrief. Signature. "@ operations.oversight.pc.mars: Operation complete. Confirm body bank operative’s orders to space my morph after casting. Set operative’s memory lock countdown to thirty minutes at receiving of this message. Engage countdown. Signature." "@ intel.oversight.pc.mars: Keep me briefed on any further farcasts scheduled by Vera Dax. She may enjoy slumming with the Brinkers, but demographic testing of unapproved software mods is clear a breach of Intellectual Property Act 745CA9 of the PC charter and I’d rather not be distracted with any more of these errands. Signature." "@ e-feeder.mesh: Purchase a season pass of “Release the Kraken.” Identity L confirmation code. Identity L Signature." "End dictation. Send." The hive at his belt hummed as it fed nanos across his body. The tiny machines licked blood from their master’s hands like a loyal hunting dogs. The man held on to the hatch’s handle and looked back at the tiny, gore-strewn capsule. “Soana, Kyler. I release you from Samsara.” Manjappa closed the door.