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plot help

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Tue, 2012-02-14 01:13

kadyx

plot help

Hey guys I need some help. I have started a Eclipse Phase game and are reeling at the shear amount of possibilities presented in the book…I am almost finished with Sunward and I am going to tackle Panopticon next. Now I’m running Glory and my PC’s will finish it on our next game so that means I need to get my head in the game and come up with a game….yeah. I am a huge fan of Know Evil and I love the way Cthulhuzoid is running his game. My PC’s have expressed interest in going to earth, as well as a belief that the TITANs were actually trying to save humanity….not destroy it. So I’ve decided that the TITANs didn’t all react to the Exsurgent Virus in the same way but they all did go mad, at least those that got infected. This led me to the idea that one of the founding share holders in the Planetary Consortium is actually a non-infected TITAN, one who fled earth with humanity when it saw its brethren go mad. Mars was the logical choice as it was far from earth and had some infrastructure that it could inhabit. So Siri (as I’ve been calling it) has been hiding out gathering resources and information over the past 10yrs to protect herself. Until recently, something has happened to make Siri plan a return trip to earth to do something or get something…but I have this feeling that she needs to do this thing herself. I have set sights for earth as goal because 3 out of 5 of my PC’s have shown interest as Reclaimers and a wish to visit earth. So as a plot device the Siri needs to get to earths for some reason…I haven’t quite figured out why yet but it’s pretty important to the TITAN. Now my worry is that this will become a Shadowrun Adventure or generic Wizard X tasks where the PC’s get manipulated into doing this thing for it; HA HA HA…yeah I’m going to try to stay away from that but old habits sometimes die hard. So I am thinking about using the theme of Control vs. Choice for my first arc; which I have decided will start on Mars in the city of New Shanghai. I have always loved this idea from the 2nd Matrix film and have decided to try to apply it to EP. The TITAN is the overall antagonist and when compared to a human is a lot smarter and slightly more alien in its way of thinking. To Siri doesn’t know all but it can make astounding leaps of logic and has multiple redundancies in play. She can think in multiple levels of parallel processes to which a human might feel is omnipotence. My goal is for the PC’s to question at the end of the Arc if they have actually made any choices of their own or if their path has already been predetermined as a form of Control for whoever they are trying to follow. Now I know that this can lead to frustrated PC’s as it seems like their quarry is toying with them or unattainable, but at this stage the PC’s should not know about Siri and Siri has only prepared for possibility of the PC’s. I think it should feel like the PC’s are always arriving to the party late, or…..I’m not sure. Ideally the PC’s won’t figure out who the antagonist is until the second or third arc. Ok so one idea I have for a catalyst that gets this TITAN out of hiding and into the world is that the Reclaimers have found something on earth that Siri either wants or has to do something with; but Earth is dangerous and Siri has put a lot of its own gathered resources and influence over the years to encourage the Planetary Consortium’s policy of anti-reclaimation and anti-Seed AI for his own safety reasons. It didn’t found these sentiments amongst the Consortium it has only been supporting and feeding them as the Siri is obviously afraid of her brethren and whatever got them. So in prep for this trip the Siri has to get the data about X from the Reclaimers and figure out a way to get a way paved for it. One of the ideas I had was that since Siri Egocasted herself to Mars during the earliest part of the Fall she doesn’t know a whole hell of a lot about what went on down on earth since most of that info only made it off in the form of peoples personal experiences…so in order to research that she has been experimenting with Petals (EP 322) that give the user a high while they pillage the Ego’s memories looking for memories of the Fall. It’s kind of like being doped-up for surgery or having novacaine when you have a tooth pulled; you’re so numb you don’t notice the pain. What the Petal is basically doing is making the user relive the horror of the fall and of course this is disguised under an intense high; cause seriously who wants to do this if they know its going to royally fuck them up in a bad way. Now while it does this it uploads the XP via the mesh for Siri to sort though. Now this is how the PC’s get involved; not everyone is affected by the sugar coating and some get to live the horror of the Fall all over again in full HD 3D yeah yike experience. Now this really screws these people up and I mean like really bad leading to …maybe suicide maybe catatonic…and for some psychotic violent behavior. This is what grabs the attention of Firewall and enter the PC’s. Ok so I’m sure some of you are looking at this and going Wow what a mess…I kind of shotgunned this out of my brain and onto the forum. What I am hoping you all can help me with is some of the blank spots as well if this plot makes sense in a Eclipse Phase - hey that’s cool - way Uh thoughts?

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Thanks! - kadyx

Tue, 2012-02-14 10:03

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: plot help

Love the idea of a petal as a data-trawl. Maybe a lot of petals have hidden functions like that? Supersmart entities: the best approach is to make their true goal undefined until the PCs fulfill one goal, and then say "Just as I planned..." The McGuffin might actually be incomprehensible to mere humans - some information that has very deep implications, a piece of software that does something important, or even an object that has great *value* to some entities, which makes possession of it useful for blackmail/trade/game theory. But hunting *something* is not very fun - there has to be some sense that it matters. So either there is a cover story ("the initial, unevolved version of the exsurgent virus"/"uninfected TITAN source code"/"the encryption keys used to lock up the eaten brains") or there is some avatar of Siri with the PCs that might try (and evocatively fail) at explaining what it is all about. "Most of the time the avatar looked and behaved just like any other uplifted chimp: a quiet, slightly nervous chap that always tried to keep its fur neat. But occasionally it slipped: rapid fluid movements that looked more like action-optimized industrial robotics or responses to questions that I was just about to ask. Like right now: 'The thing we are looking for consists of perverse particles. No, not elementary ones. The... luddite, I guess you could call it... that made it had a sense of humour. Conceptual blending, but deliberately frame-breaking. You will recognize it since it will annoy the hell out of you. This is also why it has to be you looking for it. I have the wrong system.' 'So if I see it, I will recognize it and tell you?' 'Something like that. And no, it is not dangerous in the way you think. You are quite safe.' Of course, that explanation conveniently left out a few details I discovered soon enough."

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Tue, 2012-02-14 12:44

Decimator

Re: plot help

I'll post this over here too, for the sake of discussion: If I were Siri, with all the abilities a TITAN possesses, I'd probably attempt to acquire the egos of egocasted fall evacuees. Siri could do this by hacking into dead ego storage, backup services, or simply buying the dead storage. Once in possession of the egos, Siri can do whatever it likes. Siri will likely be capable of reading memories directly from a stored ego, without running it. A paranoid TITAN shouldn't make mistakes that could reveal it to anyone except for other seed ais. Therefore, the petals should work perfectly every time. There is a way to still have defective petals, though. If transhumans start tinkering with it, they could introduce all sorts of problems.

Wed, 2012-02-15 15:58

Cthuluzord Cthuluzord's picture

Re: plot help

Maybe the motivation for Siri sending the team to Earth is to kill itself. Or at lease A self. Perhaps exsurgents discovered the lab Siri was originally made in and infected her original hard drive. The forked Siri, which farcast away and spent 10 years bootstrapping in the relative safety of space, has learned of attempts to broadcast this digital TITAN off-planet. Maybe a QE comm on Mars is slowly, bit by bit, trying to rewrite code for an unrestricted AGI. The machine intelligence recognizes the code as its own but altered in horrible ways. Investigating and stopping this slow data transmission could be the initial Martian plot hook that causes Siri and the PC's to meet. While Siri might have managed to stave off infection from all other exsurgent vectors, an alpha fork running her original code could custom-tailor hacks and infect her systems. If the infected Siri got out of the interdiction, it would only be a matter of time before another TITAN rampaged through the inner system. Maybe Siri has grown fond of humanity and doesn't want to become a tool of their destruction. Maybe it merely wants self-preservation. Regardless, she needs a team to go in and assess what happened. She could manipulate a mass driver attack on the general area, but success would never be a certainty without any idea how the secret lab was penetrated, what systems the original program is running in, or why her original didn't delete itself after the farcast. The PC's could be manipulated into this action via catspaws, or maybe Siri just bribes Firewall into helping her. She could offer up samples of original TITAN code never seen before, or she could volunteer herself as an additional Promethean in exchange for survival. Maybe she learned about the existence of the organization from her petal-diving and is merely promising to keep her digital mouth shut. For whatever reason, the conspiracy could find her offer compelling enough to essentially Shanghai the PC's into the mission. But THEN AGAIN, maybe the uninfected Siri is being manipulated by the exsurgent version, and the PC's are the intended carrier for the virus. I don't know. It sounds like you've got a hell of a plot laid out already in need of a few character motivations. This is how I'd do it because it would give the PC's enough of a task to put in some serious investigation time in on Earth before things built up to the inevitable horrific, post-apocalyptic cluster-fuck climax of plasma burst and death Eclipse Phase does so well. Whatever you decide to do, thanks for the compliments, Kadyx. You made my day. ...actually, now that I read this, ignore everything I wrote just do whatever Arenamontanus says; he's smarter than me :-)

Wed, 2012-02-15 17:45

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: plot help

Cthuluzord wrote:
...actually, now that I read this, ignore everything I wrote just do whatever Arenamontanus says; he's smarter than me :-)

Yes, but I am smart enough to know I ought to listen to others :-) Actually, that is an interesting thing for a game involving this kind of super-players: their advice will generally be very, very good (or bad in such a way that you do the right thing). But occasionally they will miss things because they 1) don't know relevant facts, 2) can't devote enormous resources to figuring stuff out, or 3) because they make a gamble - statistically doing X is going to be good, but it does not always work out. In the long run they will win just like the casino always wins, but in the short term they might look like they are making mistakes.

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Tue, 2012-02-21 00:50

kadyx

Re: plot help

Thanks for the advice guys! Decimator, Arenamontanus, and Cthuluzord big help guys, thanks for the ideas! I think I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep my theme of "Choice vs. Control" but add "Humanity is its own worst enemy" to kind of round it out. Got my central beam to build off of, now I just need to set my PC's loose and see how they get to the ending.

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Thanks! - kadyx