Here is my writeup of the gatecrashing campaign I ran for the past few months:
http://www.aleph.se/EclipsePhase/The%20Gate%20War.pdf
Comments welcome. There is always room for improvement.
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The Gate War
Fri, 2012-04-13 19:09
#1
Arenamontanus
The Gate War
Fri, 2012-04-13 20:24
#2
Marek Krysiak
Re: The Gate War
Oh yeah. Thank you, Arenamontanus. I can't wait to read it.
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Sat, 2012-04-14 19:11
#3
NewAgeOfPower
Re: The Gate War
Just finished reading it.
Amazing! You have a very different style from my GM.
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As mind to body, so soul to spirit.
As death to the mortal man, so failure to the immortal.
Such is the price of all ambition.
Mon, 2012-04-16 08:53
#4
Xagroth
Re: The Gate War
I like it, and it reminds me of a BOLO story I once read (regarding the morphs and specialized egos), and I like all the attention to detail and background provided. I also took the liberty of browsing through your page, quite impressive too!
Mon, 2012-04-16 11:59
#5
Marek Krysiak
Re: The Gate War
I’ve read through the campaign and I must say I enjoyed it very much. It does require a lot of work from the GM but it’s a great material – I’d love to play it myself and listen to guys from RPPR Actual Play giving it a try.
I have some questions, though. Those are not really nit-picks – just things I’m curious about. I’d like to know what do you thing about those. Here’s the first one:
Rortians are at a major disadvantage when attacking Sol System because of their lack of spacecraft. While this is not as big a problem when exoplanets are considered, because majority of colonies are only moderately fortified and only reinforcements transhumans can count on is ground troops and light vehicles - whatever you can fit into the gate or disassemble and reassemble at your destination quickly. This category obviously doesn’t include spacecraft or even kill-sats along with means of ejecting them into orbit (but I guess some of exoplanets do have spaceports or even mass drivers).
So as long as Rortians are attacking colonies they have upper hand – their troops are better at combat and scorch and/or hack everything that moves ‘till it stops doing so.
But at the moment exhumans enter Sol System their up against fortified artillery, kill-sats shooting lasers at them and orbital bombardment. If it came to Sol being the last system controlled by transhumanity even the danger of bombing a Gate-site would be preferable to total annihilation – and those don’t even have to be nuclear bombings: dropping metal rods or space junk would just as effective.
The best they could count on is probably invading Eris and destroying any opposition as quickly as possible – hoping that tranhumans had no time to use QE communication – and then take their time and assemble spaceships from prepared modules. Or they could try the same trick with Vulcanoid Gate – depending on planetary positions they could choose moment when Vulcanoids are hidden behind Sol, thus preventing radio communication with closest planets or habitats (unless QE com…).
Tranhumans might of course foresee it and start to amass spacecraft above the gates. Assuming of course that they have any available – my guess is the biggest space fleets belong to Jovians and Titanians and those are both entangled into this whole sticky situation at Locus: no side will withdraw their troops fearing that the opposition will advance in their absence.
I’d say Mars, Venus, Luna also have battleships – for this reason Eris might be preferable for attack – but before ships actually get from Eris to the rest of Sol System…
Unless the Factors decide to ally with the Rortians and give them a helping hand consisting of fleet of lighthuggers, that is.
What do you think? How could Rortians end this war without Factors’ help?
(And yes, I’m assuming they came this far in their conquest – it is a possibility. If players have any say on the outcome of the events then failure has to be an option.)
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Mon, 2012-04-16 16:14
#6
nerdnumber1
Re: The Gate War
I think the Rotians would need to send in some agents in normal-ish morphs, secretly through the gate. Only after they have a power base of sleeper agents in sol should they even think of attacking. They could even jump gatecrashing teams and sleeve in surviving morphs (or psychosurgically modify some of the survivors) so they have some "survivors" of the tragedy to return to Sol and start forking into new morphs. Exohumans aren't stupid, they know when they are out-matched.
edit: How do they prevent being locked out? Trickery, hacking, hoping the gate is unlocked (which it is by default, but after a few Rotian attacks, security will likely increase).
What are the Attributes/skills of an average Rotian gestalt mind? I assume they are better than the average transhuman but by how much? Maybe it is the highest in each skill/attribute among each of the components? I'd assume at least 20 accross the board. Also, an increased speed makes sense if you have ~6 minds to man the guns.
Tue, 2012-04-17 08:55
#7
Xagroth
Re: The Gate War
I've been having a look at Gatecrashing. Frankly, the only way in using the gates would be using the contested one (I think it was controlled by Go-Nin? The one that blew up and then rebuilt itself), because the ones controlled by the Planetary Consortium, Titan and Morningstar are really ready to be blown up the second something big and scary tries to show its nose. And the one controlled by the autonomists? God knows what might happen there. After all, somebody might want to test his exotic matter bomb... or his gravity projector... or her time dilation generator... things that might work or blow up incredibly XD.
Another option, of course, is them discovering how to make new gates or make old ones to move (what do you mean a gate cannot move? Have you ever wondered why they stop showing up in the databases? Or how the TITANs placed some of them so far away?), placing a sixth, uncharted gate in the middle of the space, around which they build some starbase to act as a staging point!
Tue, 2012-04-17 10:24
#8
Arenamontanus
Re: The Gate War
Of course, there might also be an *unknown* gate in the solar system. Maybe under the ice of Europa, on a main belt asteroid or even on Earth. The Rortians have been exploring the network and might have found a secret ace in the hole...
I like the point about spacecraft. They are a natural limitation for big invasions. The more I think about it, the more it looks like the objective of the exhumans is not so much a direct invasion as grabbing the gate network for themselves.
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Tue, 2012-04-17 15:51
#9
Marek Krysiak
Re: The Gate War
That's the gate on Dysnomia (Eris' moon). Around 5 to 13 light hours from Sol.
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I know it’s not really important as far as actual campaign is concerned but this is the reason I like EP – it gives you an opportunity to think about things like this:
What's it like to be a ba… Rortian.
How does it feel like?
Imagine you are a mash-up of minds, devoid of most “expendable” components; set of crippled identities stacked one on another for maximum efficiency at given task. You are a symbiotic mind with a single purpose, and you know that if you fail you will be erased. Are you even sentient? You are certainly autistic, seeing world as a puzzle to solve – with your pre-set paradigm filtering all that is not necessary.
How about self-preservation? Do you feel the need to be alive? Or are you just taking care that no valuable equipment is damaged? Because you are a piece of equipment – a heuristic engine enclosed in a metal shell. Do you even remember what does it feel like to have a human body? Or were those memories deemed unnecessary? Do you long for something? Do you dream?
Or is it just machinery of mind?
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Tue, 2012-04-17 18:01
#10
Xagroth
Re: The Gate War
I think that would be a very excessive generalization. Some exhumans might want exclusive use of the gate system, but others will just wat unrestricted use (and some gates are being closed for security reasons by transhuman colonists using the system designed by the autonomists, which might isolate entire chains of connections!). Others might feel threatened by the transhuman expansion. And others are just predators that enjoy a good hunt, so they want the gate system to keep working and unrestricted so they can get new prey...
As for the spacecraft, I think some small ones can be made that would fit through the gate (the same way in Stargate we can see a Yaffa fighter designed to do that, or the Puddlejumpers of SG Atlantis), but big ships would need a modular design or to be assembled on the other side. Considering the nanotech EP has, it is just a matter of time to do such things.
Tue, 2012-04-17 18:29
#11
nerdnumber1
Re: The Gate War
Based on the entry in Gatecrashing for Rorty, despite claiming to have been stripped of "such distracting and detrimental human emotions" the dreadnought gestalt mind apparently felt pleasure at the thought of finding a new colony to raid. One can infer from this, that either the process of modifying egos to be emotionless is imperfect and/or certain emotions are not considered distracting and detrimental enough to be pruned. I would take a bit of a mix of both. I would say that self-preservation is still valued, based on the focus on self-improvement and personal perfection. The Rorty leaders are actually not opposed to individuality as such, but will not allow any personality quirks which might diminish the survival chances of the group (which is seen as directly proportional to combat efficiency.
Wed, 2012-04-18 03:55
#12
Xagroth
Re: The Gate War
number1, I remember an old Global Frequency comic where a cyborg had his pleasure center tied to killing. I'd say that getting pleasure from something is an incentive to do that something, after all. Like the proberbial carrot on a stick.
Thu, 2012-04-19 05:03
#13
Marek Krysiak
Re: The Gate War
The actual quote being:
“In any case, the leaders of the community had no actual objection to individuality; they simply could not permit any personality quirks which might diminish the survival chances of the group, which were in turn assumed to be directly proportional to fighting efficiency.” (GC p.125)
I agree with self-preservation being valued – what I question is the motif. Does Rortian mind care if they are dead or is their self-preservation forced by the need to be useful?
Considering what Xagroth wrote:
Having your pleasure centre stimulated after completing some action and thus receiving positive reinforcement is not a sign of self-consciousness or having identity or having emotions. It’s just conditioned response.
The real question is whether Rortians are something more than a mash-up of non-sentient skill-softs. GC goes further:
“According to their star-mapping, that was the direction in which Earth and its solar system would lie. The ego stared in that direc¬tion with a deep sense of nothing.” (GC p.125)
Is this what they feel when faced with non-mission-specific data? Nothing? Or is the Rortian somehow… surprised that it feels nothing. ‘Oh, how well was I pruned’? Are they glad of it?
“ Some of the egos composing the gestalt might once have felt yearning or regret before they were integrated, but those had been assessed and appropriately modified. Even the most recent addition, a former ultimate mercenary, no longer held such distracting and detrimental human emotions. They were unified in their abandonment of the flesh, in their shrugging off the chains of morality and weakness.
(…)
It was only a matter of time before their experi¬ments with gate settings found one of these colonies. And then a reckoning would come. The ego consid¬ered that possibility with pleasure. Blood would soon be spilled—the blood of creatures who were foolish enough to regard the possession of blood as anything more than a disposable weakness.” (GC p.125)
They seem to possess at least one human emotion – hubris.
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Thu, 2012-04-19 11:35
#14
Arenamontanus
Re: The Gate War
You can be hubristic without emotions. Human hubris tends to be full of pride, ambition and other ego-stroking emotions that motivate the behavior, but shorn of that you can still have overly ambitious goals even if you do not feel strongly about them. The exhumans think they are right. They think they should act accordingly. Hence they will wipe out the fleshies with no pity. When they discover problems with their plan they will activate strategy-minds to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
As I viewed them during the game they were somewhere in between a machine out of control and a philosophical utopia - both dehumanized and dehumanizing, yet having some remarkable aspirations. One problem with the whole Gate War setting now when I look back at it is the lack of interaction with the Rortians. I would gladly hear suggestions for introducing that.
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Thu, 2012-04-19 13:41
#15
Smokeskin
Re: The Gate War
Captured Rortians
Diplomatic interactions
Infiltration missions
Getting captured and then rescued or emergency farcasting out (provided something is there to pick up the signal of course)
Thu, 2012-04-19 14:19
#16
Xagroth
Re: The Gate War
Hacking scenarios where some "social" engineering is needed might force to capture a Rortian ego, then "dissect" it ASAP.
Defectors/Defective egos that turn to the players for whatever reason are another option. Of course, some players won't take the bait, others will flatly refuse to do so, and others won't take the hint.
The first scenario implies the players need to be somehow tied to an organization that recognises the threat and wants to face it (be it the planetary consortium or a group of gathoppers), while the second only requires the players to not be all that trigger-happy, something probably better at the start of the campaign.
Thu, 2012-04-19 18:01
#17
nerdnumber1
Re: The Gate War
The core exhuman philosophy of self-improvement at the cost of humanity, of shedding weak flesh for a more powerful metal shell, to persue personal perfection and survival at all costs, speaks to some strong initial emotions. While their minds have obviously evolved since then, the ambitions that led them to exceed human limits is likely still valued enough to remain in some form. Furthermore, since the leaders did not object to individuality, but only to any potential liabilities in a mind, I think that a great many traits that weren't clearly liabilities or dangerous were kept in some form. Emotional responses and instincts were developed through evolution and natural selection (of course that was when humans were made of meat and didn't have lasers), so there could be advantages to some. A gestalt ego would prune away or alter anything that proved problematic as its mind state was tested in simulation and actual battle. Over time the emotions probably have twisted somewhat and eroded, some have been pruned away entirely.
An interesting twist might be to have separate factions that are split on the issue. One might think that all emotions are signs of weakness and prune them all out, while another could think that emotions can be useful tools and that the effects of each should be carefully weighed and adjusted before being discarded. Alternatively, the process could be less of a personal matter and more of a scientific one, where a select goup is tasked with testing and altering emotion types to find useful ones. These factions could be fairly loose and as long as each side calculates the detriment of the other's beliefs to be less than the loss of resources that a civil war would cause, they could continue to coexist.
Personally, I would keep the ambition and hubris that drives the exhumans to self-improve. Death is bad because it shows weakness and failure, that the gestalt is not strong. It also may prevent further improvement (if things are so bad an exhuman dies, its allies might be too busy to recover its stack, especially considering its armor, plus the weakling died, survival of the fittest).
Fri, 2012-04-20 15:23
#18
Marek Krysiak
Re: The Gate War
I like your analysis very much. It shows Rortians as inhuman and logical – and at the same time allows for them to be emotional, individual and to be considered moral agents. It’s not only believable but also allows the GM a great deal of freedom when portraying them.
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[strong]I came up with[/strong] a short list “interaction opportunities”: the first one is combat oriented; the second one is actual social interaction.
[strong] I. Structural weaknesses of Rortian morphs: [/strong]
Those can be used as both flavour and a simple way of showing that Rortians are capable of quick adaptation (once the weakness is uncovered by the enemy, the Rortians are going to remove it):
[list]
[*]Dreadnaught’s cortical stack is easily accessible to other dreadnought by means of a long flexible probe (2cm wide, 75cm long). The insertion point is located at the dreadnought’s “throat”. Its purpose is quick extraction/destruction of a cortical stack. Insertion point can be shot at – potentially causing stack destruction (Death Star! Eh, no, not really…)
[*]A small hatch at the front of a dreadnought’s hull, holding a set of set of high-sensitivity sensors and a pair of extendable arms – for close examination and precise manipulation. This is an obvious anthropomorphism, but at the same time it’s an opportunity to show how easily Rortians shed their humanity if it’s necessary. When few Rortians are caught with their hatches open, they decide it’s too vulnerable and decide to remove it.
[*]In environment with very strong EM field (like Rorschach or Indigo Latitude) a team of (literary) brainless dreadnoughts is connected via cables to a central controlling unit with heavy shielding. Quite a find – a team of hyper advanced machines controlled through wire. It’s such an obvious weakness that it’s only possible to encounter if Rortians don’t expect any transhuman interference at the site.
There’s also another option – biological dreadnoughts constructed by Rortians to survive it this environment. Those things could look really creepy – even if they were much less effective than the regular kind.
[/list]
[strong] II. Potential social interactions:[/strong]
[list]
[*] A common enemy - The players and the Rortians are on an uncharted world and they discover a hostile entity or they learn of impending deadly phenomenon. They can defeat (or run away from) the enemy or avoid the phenomenon only by combining their resources (example: the players have a device of some sort but have no power source);
[*] Crazy Rortian – the players encounter a single Rortian who cracked under the pressure; their mind become desynchronised and they developed multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. If players don’t reveal themselves to the Rortian, they get a chance of listening to its musings and inner monologue transmitted through morph’s external speaker – potentially learning some important intelligence;
[*]Diplomatic mission – there’s an actual cease-fire with the Rortians (or some group among them) and the players are sent with a diplomatic mission – as either diplomats or their security. The whole cease fire can be a trick or a legit attempt for peace;
[*] Rortian in the box – the players are stranded and/or can’t receive any support in the near future. They capture and immobilise a single Rortian, who tries to persuade their way from this situation. It’s an opportunity for conducting a simple version of AI Box experiment ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox ) and can either end very quickly or take few hours to complete;
[*] Secret Contractor – the players are on a job and they discover that they work for the Rortians. Eventually they may even receive an invitation to the Rortian community and be promised preferential treatment (perfumed natural oil?);
[*] Former ally – the players encounter a Rortian, who is a former ally, friend, lover or family member of one or more players. The Rortian may either ask for help or try to recruit them (or possibly both);
[*] Valuable asset - the players are sent to recapture a valuable asset: an exsurgent virus sample, a TITAN seed or a piece of hardware with a part of Promethean mind. As they make contact with the Rortians they discover the enemy was subverted and is either on their side or turned into monsters. One of the Rortians is still not completely subverted and asks for mercy;
[*] Bored to death – the players encounter a team of Rortians sent to an assignment. The exhumans have no mission objectives at the moment and they’re bored to death. Some or all of them may pursue some kind of individual or group entertainment – although, I don’t know what their idea of entertainment might be. Egan soccer? Noh theather? One-manipulator stunts? Bird watching? Bird shooting?
[/list]
[strong]The Threat of Tachikomas[/strong]
As there are no pictures of dreadnoughts available, all we know about them is that they are: six-legged, insectoid, low-slung and a couple of meters long. The problem is – the GM probably doesn’t want their players to say ‘Tachikoma! So kawai!’ after seeing one of the deadly Rortian combat morphs. It would be nice to have some artwork to deceive them: ‘No, no! Those are dreadnoughts – not like Tachikomas at all! (except they are six-legged, insectoid…)’.
I’ve spent some time browsing through pictures of robots and mecha and that’s what I found:
http://progv.deviantart.com/art/Flak-Mech-212552465
It seems reasonably realistic and consistent with the rest of EP art. This is obviously an anti-aircraft rig, but those weapons seem to be modular. It’s not low-slung, though.
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