BOMherren wrote:

Have some metaplot, where some particular event occurs, detailed suggestions for how it affects various places and factions (...), and adventure writeups for different things the PCs might be doing as part of the event, depending on their inclinations.

This. I want this too !

Adding a metaplot campaign means splitting the player community into two. One that runs it and accepts it as background canon for all subsequent material, and one that doesn't. This is typically the road to ruin by internal incompatibility for a game setting. "Are you still using the Jovians? But they split in the Zeus War?"

A good book on building Morphs. I played and built up a character to research and build new, as well as old, Morphs, and I had my own Vat and Cornucopia machine. The GM still had me paying out lots of cred to build old Morph designs, let alone create new ones. So one that realistically reflects cost in a setting where you can essentially build nearly anything for free, and already have, or created, the blue prints, would be really nice. So would a system that reflects the time it takes to research new break throughs. According to some things I have read in the setting material new discoveries/break throughs seem to take only about a year now, with all the AI/Fork assist you can have, as well as AI feedback and evaluations you can get so easily, which would include computer simulation testing of the new designs, I can see why things move so fast in EP rather than the snail pace we see in our real world.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Adding a metaplot campaign means splitting the player community into two. One that runs it and accepts it as background canon for all subsequent material, and one that doesn't. This is typically the road to ruin by internal incompatibility for a game setting. "Are you still using the Jovians? But they split in the Zeus War?"

On the other hand, the current situation also traps the game to a large degree. Those of us who love asyncs, or alien technology will never see any real development in async abilities beyond what has been discovered within the confines of 10 years. Not to mention that it creates a material cap for the devs of the setting. There's only so many supplements and so much material you can reasonably write about a single year's worth of a fictional world. You can always dip backwards, I suppose, but inevitably you or the fans are probably probably going to want more. This is moreso important when it comes to sci-fi settings; half the appeal is the advanced technology, which makes the increasing advance of that technology equally appealing. Plus, I disagree with the sentiment that a progressing storyline is a road to ruin. It is terrible when handled terribly (as it is almost always when we talk about D&D settings), but works great in the right context. Shadowrun and Battletech handle a progressive storyline quite beautifully, and the fact that the former did it so well is one of the reasons I would love to see Rob and Adam do that with this game. The setting retains the vibe and feel, while still having a game world that moves and is vibrant. No matter how far in the future it goes, you still have 10 country-scale corporations ruling the world, the key locales of the setting remain intact, and factions tend to shift more than simply disappear. Plus, the setting becomes more diverse… whether it be the coming of the Otaku, the Year of the Comet, the infestation of insect spirits in Chicago, the second Great Crash… all of it tends to add to the setting, and rarely remove. Or they can handle it like Battletech does, which enjoys a rich community that enjoys the game within a plethora of selectable eras. I myself tend to play in 2750 (Star League era) and 3025 (Succession Wars era). From my understanding, the most popular era is 3050 (Clan Invasion era). And yet I know plenty of people who play in 3070 (Jihad era), or 3130 (Age of Destruction era). The added benefit is that because the setting is spread amongst many eras, they may continue to jump back and forth for new supplements, occasionally releasing a new book set in the Star League era or Clan Invasion, despite the fact that the actual setting canon (and most future novel releases) has already pushed ahead to both 3070 and 3130 (which are handled simultaneously, for now). It takes one franchise and makes it potentially into many sub-franchises, which cater to many tastes. Personally, I hope they handle it like Shadowrun. I would love to see the setting come 20 AF; perhaps the first psi-capable cyberbrains release, or reverse-engineered alien tech finally gets released for public consumption, or we meet another living extraterrestrial species (fingers crossed that they're hostile as hell). Maybe that split within the Junta makes a civil theocracy and an ultra-aggressive empire, both claiming the right to the name "Jovian Republic". Maybe the Consortium is devastated as an Indenture Civil War occurs within its borders. Maybe a group of survivors have successfully re-colonized a fragment of the Earth's landmass and made contact with the rest of the system. That's what's really awesome about sci-fi. We get a chance to explore the possibilities.

[h3]Books[/h3] I also think the mesh and infomorphs need some more love. The latter seem to be an important element of the setting, but many things about them are currently really unclear. Are the indentured infugees allowed to sleep or relax? Do they even need it? Can they perceive the mesh in some way? Do they require a simulation to be ran for them, to take care of things like sensory deprivation? What about AGIs? Exhumans are another thing that I would gladly read about. They constantly make cameo appearances in the source material, but I don't remember anything really specific about them. [h3]Metaplot[/h3] Then there's that thing. I usually hate all kinds of metaplot with a passion, because I can't remember an RPG where it has been done right. The word itself makes me think of the old WoD kudzu plot, full of uber-powerful NPCs scheming in the background and world-shattering (sometimes literally) events which were bound to disrupt someone's campaign. Many publishers also frequently use it to burn and salt the whole gameworld before pulling out a new edition, so they could describe the same places again. I rarely see the world "metaplot" used positively. There is a good reason to be careful with doing something like that in EP. Currently, the situation in the Solar System is wonderfully unstable. The Jovians can continue to isolate themselves, risking they won't keep up with transhumanity and become some kind of a sinister zoo... or pull off some gambit to prevent that, probably by attacking the rest while they are still divided and weak. Indentures may rebel, or be placated by some symbolic peace accord by the Consortium. In one campaign, autonomists launch a full-scale war for the inner system, in the other - divide into squabbling factions. There are full of possibilities right now. An ideal metaplot should preserve that situation, either avoiding disruptive events, or opening new paths in the place of those closed off. It also should avoid explaining things that currently are left vague: ETIs, exsurgent virus, Ozma, etc. It would be probably best if the players had chance to participate in the events, rather than just observing them. The problem is that it's extremely tricky to pull off and I haven't seen it done right yet.

I have serious trouble coming up with balanced encounters... I'd love to get a sort of Monster Manual with a bunch of generic pre-made mercs, morphs, mooks, monsters, and machines. I can just choose a vague "Challenge Rating" and drop stat blocks into play, confident that I may wipe the party or be a total cake walk, but at least it was because of rolls/tactics and not my lack of game balance... Even a super short 15 page "Cheat Sheet" pile-o-NPC-stat-blocks would be great.

Hilarious variable commentary as well. If your players choose to blow up station, Cock rants about how awesome all those deaths were. If not, Momo comments on the odd activities of the Exsurgents

Nah, the cock would sound like Patton Oswald with an abscess on his tongue.

a book on gear, morphs and vehicles would be cool as would something more on the mesh infomorphs and AGIs

On the subject of metaplot I would like to see flexability. Similar in what is done in GURPS and other generic setting books, I would like to see suggestions and guidelines on metaplot, up to and including metaplot books that help a GM run through a full campaign. When it comes right down to it a full campaign will almost certainly require some major changes in the setting, perhaps even fundamental changes. I for one would like to see guides and suggestions on how a GM could plot and work with the system in those directions. Novels are similar to campaigns in that to create a saticfying novel with a dynamic setting something has to change. Yes you can do slice of life novels or novels where only small scale changes occur but that hobbles the writer in where they can go. For both, the Eclipse Phase setting is a transitional setting. It is a setting sitting on the cusp of great changes with many questions that when answered could fundamentally change the setting. The mechanics and writing for it must allow for that change and be flexible.

Good God... i have a Deja Vu... is this the matrix?

Demonseed Elite wrote:

Like most things, there is good and bad to Shadowrun's metaplot and that's coming from someone who helped write it and also did a good bit of struggling with it. You wouldn't be seeing things like the recently released "Shadowrun 2050" book if everyone was entirely thrilled with metaplot development. Quite a bit of Shadowrun flavor has changed due to the metaplot and there certainly have been critics of it. I know I've been criticized many times for metaplot decisions I made as a writer and I've seen other writers get hammered much worse.

I disagree that the Shadowrun 2050 book was a sign of disdain for the setting's metaplot. Rather, it's a sign that they have decided to give players a chance to see where the game has come from, from the perspective of a 4th Edition ruleset. In fact, the opposite has been in effect at our tables; Shadowrun 2050 has given our group a chance to break out all our old 2nd and 3rd Edition books, and play games from 2055 onward as a 4th Edition campaign. We totally plan to use the metaplot, and have a progressing story that fits the setting as it has been established … yet this campaign wouldn't have been possible without a book like 2050 (and my copy of Universal Brotherhood would continue to go on unused).

Demonseed Elite wrote:

Additionally, you mentioned that not having a metaplot creates a cap on game material. That may be true, but there is an opposite side of that in that metaplot creates "material weight" that must be carried forward by writers and developers. Every future metaplot development must factor in all the cumulative effects of previous metaplot, which at times was difficult and frustrating to write. Especially those times where I didn't like previous metaplot elements. Additionally, it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with creative metaplot ideas that don't repeat elements done before. That's not an immediate problem, but over Shadowrun's decades of metaplot, it was a topic that came up among the writers on every single metaplot discussion I was involved in.

Yes and no. As a story shifts forward the amount that something has to be addressed becomes less and less relevant. Dunkelzhan is not as relevant to the modern setting of Shadowrun, even if the portal left behind by his death is. Deus, Magaera and Mirage are all rather irrelevant to the setting, even though AI are still present. You'll find very little modern material referencing these things, despite them being part of pivotal moments of the game's established history. And while I agree that new material needs to take into account all previously released material, I think this is true regardless of whether you have an advancing metaplot or not. If they want to release a Jovian supplement, that book will have to take into account every bit of previously established material regarding the Jovians, just as a new metaplot book would have to take into account previous metaplot material. New material always references old, but that's not a good reason to refuse the creation of new material.

Demonseed Elite wrote:

As much as I have loved some of Shadowrun's metaplot development (the insect spirits, the Dunkelzahn assassination and the Deus plotline, for example), I am leery of repeating it in Eclipse Phase. I am left wondering if it will be possible to do metaplot-like campaign books that are optional to the setting, an idea Posthuman has mentioned before but remains difficult for me to wrap my head around. I suppose you could do metaplot event books that are self-contained and explain to GMs how you can continue to run Eclipse Phase with the storyline alterations caused by the event, but future core books simply ignore it. Then players who didn't buy that campaign book or didn't like that metaplot idea aren't forced to accept it.

Admittedly, I would like to see a bit more elasticity regarding metaplot elements. One of the things that bothered me about the Renraku Arcology Shutdown was that there was no way to avoid the escape of Deus, no matter what the runners did. Hell, we had a game where the runners ended up killing every single person in the arcology (not on purpose; critical failures are a terrible thing to roll when using demolition tools), yet the setting assumes that someone inevitably escapes. I would like metaplot for Eclipse Phase to be written such that players can actually have an influence on it. That's why I love the new campaign books that Battletech has been putting out, and the way that Shadowrun Missions has been written so far. That might carry over into this game as well, perhaps even in an improved manner.

The best way to handle metaplot is the way Heavy Gear did it in its first edition: Don't advance the core rulebook and place virtually all of your supplements in the same time. Then have a separate line of metaplot supplements that advance the timeline. Those who want the metaplot can reference those books. Those who don't want the metaplot can simply ignore the metaplot advancers and lose nothing. You may occasionally want a supplement that arises from the metaplot. Clearly label it with the relevant year and you're golden. Another good technique was found in the Trinity game line: The metaplot advancers were mega-campaigns, allowing the players to be the movers and shakers that change the status quo. Combine the two techniques and you'd have something pretty awesome that nobody could complain about.

Decivre wrote:

On the other hand, the current situation also traps the game to a large degree. Those of us who love asyncs, or alien technology will never see any real development in async abilities beyond what has been discovered within the confines of 10 years. Not to mention that it creates a material cap for the devs of the setting. There's only so many supplements and so much material you can reasonably write about a single year's worth of a fictional world. You can always dip backwards, I suppose, but inevitably you or the fans are probably probably going to want more. This is moreso important when it comes to sci-fi settings; half the appeal is the advanced technology, which makes the increasing advance of that technology equally appealing. Plus, I disagree with the sentiment that a progressing storyline is a road to ruin. It is terrible when handled terribly (as it is almost always when we talk about D&D settings), but works great in the right context. Shadowrun and Battletech handle a progressive storyline quite beautifully, and the fact that the former did it so well is one of the reasons I would love to see Rob and Adam do that with this game. The setting retains the vibe and feel, while still having a game world that moves and is vibrant. No matter how far in the future it goes, you still have 10 country-scale corporations ruling the world, the key locales of the setting remain intact, and factions tend to shift more than simply disappear. Plus, the setting becomes more diverse… whether it be the coming of the Otaku, the Year of the Comet, the infestation of insect spirits in Chicago, the second Great Crash… all of it tends to add to the setting, and rarely remove.

Don't forget Traveller, which saw an entire new rules edition with every successive era of in-game history they depicted. They're now putting out Traveller 5, btw. I agree, the game should not remain static in the '10 AF' period. New things should happen - for example, eventually players are going to want to see an alien civilization other than the Factors. They're going to want to learn more about the TITANs, the exhumans. They're going to want to see what's really beyond the Gates, which represents enormous potential for the expansion of the game. That's where I'm writing my adventures right now, anyway. Perhaps some new threat will somehow evolve on the lost Earth, some sinister AIG that has been brooding down there in the ruins, creating some bizarre army with TITAN tech, perhaps with the minds of the infomorph survivors trapped in the computers left behind.

We need spaceships, space combat, piracy, Scum, space rescue and security forces. A host of travel information and customs/interdiction procedures for both physical objects & information would fit that kind of sourcebook too. On another note, religious info would be cool as well.

Just got NPC 1, so an NPC 2 would be great! I'll post why on a seperate thread "Who are the NPC's?"

Jérémie wrote:

Right now, the main thing missing from Eclipse Phase is a big campaign (as in, a set of linked adventures). Eclipse Phase needs its Enemy Within, Harlequin, Masks of Nyarlathotep, and such..

This exists. Just unpublished. The RPPR crew have a campaign coming to an end that I would love to see published. A decent size one to, 25+ sessions and 4 different areas of the solar system. It was made by Caleb Stokes of Hebanon Games. Based on interviews with him its all more or less written up. It just needs polishing and an OK from Posthuman Studios. I think the problem is that with the creative commons license he can't run a kickstarter to fund the publishing (art, layout, some salary for him) and last time I knew (a while ago) Posthuman Studios had not answered his effort to contact them. I really don't care if Hebanon Games publishes it with an OK from Posthuman Studios or if Caleb does it through Posthuman Studios. But it's seems a waste to let such good roleplaying material go to waste. I know I would happily pay good money for it so that I could inflict it on my gaming group. Link to RPPR: http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/category/systems/eclipse-ph... Link to Hebanon Games: http://hebanongames.com/

There needs to be a single but exhaustive book on gear and morphs. Lots and lots of new gear and ways for the GM to create custom gear that is exactly as powerful as he wants it to be. Most other books need to flesh out the setting. EP is so big that there's always room for more Habs for the GM to create, so why not take a few and get [i]really[/i] specific with them? Make these few examples as granular as possible so as to better show what the culture of a given place is like. Personally I think you could get a dozen books out of just Habs, but other people would probably get bored of it before I did. Personally, I hate the idea of metaplot, but having some notable NPCs wouldn't hurt. It especially hurts people with long term campaigns (this happened excessively in classic world of darkness). On the flip side, I can see the appeal to advance the game. Personally what I would prefer would be dozens and dozens of bite-sized metaplot legos. Essentially things that might happen and the potential fall-out. For instance, it's not necessary to advance an official storyline in order to learn about the Factors. A GM book with that information and different ways it could come into an existing EP story and the effects it would have would be much preferable than a single, imposed from above pronouncement.

There are a couple of facets I'd like some more detail on. How does psychosurgery work? What we have now is clear in terms of what has to be rolled etc but I don't know how to describe what the characters actually do. I see that Transhuman will include something on psychosurgery so hopefully that'll cover this. How much chemical/drug/nanoswarm can fit into the capsule/spash version of various sizes of bullet/seeker/grenade. It'd be good to know eg how long it takes a hive to generate enough to fill a heavy pistol magazine worth of splash bullets or a wasp knife, and how much volume the swarm in an individual bullet could cover.

...I find myself jonesing for even more. I really would like to have an anthology of short fiction, 'Man-Kzin Wars'-style. That would be a really nice holdover.

jhfurnish wrote:

...I find myself jonesing for even more. I really would like to have an anthology of short fiction, 'Man-Kzin Wars'-style. That would be a really nice holdover.

In a perfect world, I would like the Mass Effect people to make doing a computer game based on the Eclipse Phase. In the world we got, I would be happy to have some EP short or long fiction. I think this would help me both better visualize and be able to describe the setting to other much better than another setting or rule book.

The biggest optional content pack ever -- a sourcebook on what pre-Fall Earth was like, and what (edit) eight or so billion people look like with Eclipse Phase technology and no species-ending apocalypse. Call it "Timeline Two". Put in some easter eggs that have your players going '... is this a timeline where the Fall was just delayed a little, or one where it won't happen? Because some of these hints look familiar.' Don't answer them for sure. IOW, go nuts. Eclipse Phase already has ten zillion ways to go nuts, but the one thing about the setting that you can't do is roleplay some insanely up-teched version of Deus Ex among hive cities containing tens of millions of people. I mean, in the setting Mars has... everything that Mars has... with a total population of 200 million people. On pre-Fall Earth, '200 million people' was probably the population figure of the northern third of the US east coast. It would be a way to have metaplot for those who want it, while (since its clearly an alt-timeline spinoff setting) not weighing down those who don't.

cglasgow wrote:

The biggest optional content pack ever -- a sourcebook on what pre-Fall Earth was like, and what (edit) eight or so billion people look like with Eclipse Phase technology and no species-ending apocalypse. Call it "Timeline Two". Put in some easter eggs that have your players going '... is this a timeline where the Fall was just delayed a little, or one where it won't happen? Because some of these hints look familiar.' Don't answer them for sure. IOW, go nuts. Eclipse Phase already has ten zillion ways to go nuts, but the one thing about the setting that you can't do is roleplay some insanely up-teched version of Deus Ex among hive cities containing tens of millions of people. I mean, in the setting Mars has... everything that Mars has... with a total population of 200 million people. On pre-Fall Earth, '200 million people' was probably the population figure of the northern third of the US east coast. It would be a way to have metaplot for those who want it, while (since its clearly an alt-timeline spinoff setting) not weighing down those who don't.

Good idea. I would totally buy that book!

...that the game shouldn't 'shoehorn', as another user here has expressed it, the incoming player into playing a FireWall character. (I do however like FireWall and its concept despite its flaws, which are likely inescapable all things considered. I rather wish we had something like it now, I'd join in a heartbeat.) I've come to realize that a book about the hypercorps of the Inner System and the Jovians would be a nice balance to that existing theme, although I side vastly more with the Anarchists of the Rim, whom I think have received more voice already in the game. They should get their own book later however. Also, a book that discusses in more detail how exactly all the economics, particularly reputation, works.