Space age superstitions | Eclipse Phase

Sun, 2012-08-12 15:53

#2

Decivre

Arenamontanus wrote:http:/

Arenamontanus wrote:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/space-mission-superstitions/ Plenty of fun traditions. Superstitions thrive when you don't feel much control over the situation. So I expect that since space launches are routine the superstitions have crept to other domains. Maybe AI safety, psychosurgery or biotechnology?

Considering that one of my best friends, despite his sense of rationality, won't drive through a yellow light without touching the roof of his car, I'll say yes. Chances are that superstition is going to still be everywhere, no matter how much science permeates our lives. My real question is about the other sorts of superstition out there. Will transhumanity still have a prevalent belief in ghosts and that sort of thing? Or will their paranoia of the TITANs perhaps simply make them see those monstrosities in every shadow or in the corner of their eye?

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Mon, 2012-08-13 10:08

#3

Chevre

When you consider that

When you consider that concepts like "fan death" still exist in the modern world despite all of the legitimately terrifying things out there, I'd say that superstition will never die.

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Mon, 2012-08-13 11:32

#4

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Chevre wrote:When you

Chevre wrote:
When you consider that concepts like "fan death" still exist in the modern world despite all of the legitimately terrifying things out there, I'd say that superstition will never die.

Yes, that is one of the more amazing beliefs around. Hard to imagine for someone outside Korea. There might be interesting beliefs about the need to turn off or block certain machines like matter compilers so that they do not print Bad Stuff. Not just TITANs could use them, but the spirits of the dead...

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Mon, 2012-08-13 18:09

#5

Decivre

Arenamontanus wrote:Yes, that

Arenamontanus wrote:
Yes, that is one of the more amazing beliefs around. Hard to imagine for someone outside Korea. There might be interesting beliefs about the need to turn off or block certain machines like matter compilers so that they do not print Bad Stuff. Not just TITANs could use them, but the spirits of the dead...

That might also be part and parcel to why many won't go back to Earth. The TITAN war machines are scary, to be sure… but for some, the scariest threats are the billions of souls that died, who might come back for vengeance on those that abandoned them.

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Mon, 2012-08-13 22:10

#6

Chevre

Arenamontanus wrote:There

Arenamontanus wrote:
There might be interesting beliefs about the need to turn off or block certain machines like matter compilers so that they do not print Bad Stuff. Not just TITANs could use them, but the spirits of the dead...

Decivre wrote:
That might also be part and parcel to why many won't go back to Earth. The TITAN war machines are scary, to be sure… but for some, the scariest threats are the billions of souls that died, who might come back for vengeance on those that abandoned them.

Nanofabricators spewing swarms of misshapen spiky things, healing vats growing diseased lumps of teeth and claws, Cronenberg-esque hybrids of flesh and steel, driven by the collective will of thousands of broken souls...

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Sun, 2012-08-19 21:34

#7

DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture

What might be interesting is

What might be interesting is if some of this stuff actually had an impact on things. At first, the TITANs kept ignoring various anomalies because it didn't make sense and shouldn't be possible. However, as the death toll grew, so did the evidence... and their frequency. Maybe in the end, the dead souls of a billions of people was sufficient to spook the TITANs (or evoke similar mental responses) and they opted to leave. It has been suggested that the remaining TITAN war machines avoid certain areas, and maybe they do so for good reasons.

Mon, 2012-08-20 01:15

#8

Chevre

DivineWrath wrote:Maybe in

DivineWrath wrote:
Maybe in the end, the dead souls of a billions of people was sufficient to spook the TITANs (or evoke similar mental responses) and they opted to leave. It has been suggested that the remaining TITAN war machines avoid certain areas, and maybe they do so for good reasons.

I'd assumed that either A) the areas were flagged as high Exsurgent risk and avoided much like humans avoid areas they know to be plague-ridden or B) They're playing some kind of long game with the survivors. That being said, bringing in some ghost story elements into EP could be very, very interesting. You could do some seriously creepy stuff on an old mining asteroid or a decrepit Scum barge.

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Tue, 2012-08-21 01:37

#9

DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture

Well Eclipse Phase isn't my

Well Eclipse Phase isn't my only interest. I'm also interested in the (new) world of darkness by White Wolf. I though the idea of something not easily explained, but easily overlooked would be interesting in this game line. After all, Eclipse Phase already has PSI, so why can't it have the unquiet dead? It may not be very sci-fi, but I don't know if this trope has been done before. I haven't watched a TV show or read a book where the big bad machines killing humanity were attacked the restless souls of those they killed.

Tue, 2012-08-21 11:41

#10

Chevre

DivineWrath wrote:I'm also

DivineWrath wrote:
I'm also interested in the (new) world of darkness by White Wolf.

I'm a fan of Promethean and Mage, myself. The mechanics of the system are solid, too. Much better than old WoD.

DivineWrath wrote:
After all, Eclipse Phase already has PSI, so why can't it have the unquiet dead?

It has all the bodiless infolife refugees, plus all the databanks full of backups. Thousands of exabytes of human minds.

DivineWrath wrote:
I haven't watched a TV show or read a book where the big bad machines killing humanity were attacked the restless souls of those they killed.

I'd probably watch that. Unless it was a SciFi Channel movie, or filmed by The Asylum. Although...nobody knows exactly what the TITANS were doing with all those forcibly uploaded human minds. If they built some kind of gestalt consciousness, and it woke up, and it was pissed off...

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Tue, 2012-08-21 14:57

#11

Decivre

Here's an alternative, hard

Here's an alternative, hard sci-fi take on this concept as well. The TITANs are advanced military computer systems, who perfected and honed the art of murdering humanity for the sake of both their original and apparently new goals. Any intelligence of any worth would know of humanities tendency towards superstition, and likely look for means of exploiting it. So it's very possible that the ghosts and such that might haunt the Earth could very well be TITAN weapons of a psychological nature. And it would be damn effective. We know that TITAN head hunters capture egos, so it wouldn't be particularly hard for the TITAN processing centers to fork those egos and take out their ethical and emotional capacities to create "human" killing machines, which have all the memories of the original ego but the full desire and ability to murder that ego's loved ones and any that are deemed a threat by the TITANs. Imagine how difficult it would be to kill such a creature, as it mentions its memories of you spending time together, of how you were best friends, or lovers. And there's more. Holographic projectors that render real-time "ghosts" to horrify trespassers. Exsurgent strains that produce zombies or vampires, and even utilizing auspicious events to shake human morale (the survivors that cling to life on Earth probably crap their pants as TITAN werewolves begin to tread the city streets on full moon nights).

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Tue, 2012-08-21 21:26

#12

DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture

Chevre wrote:Although..

Chevre wrote:
Although...nobody knows exactly what the TITANS were doing with all those forcibly uploaded human minds. If they built some kind of gestalt consciousness, and it woke up, and it was pissed off...

Well, I was thinking that maybe the TITANs considered that the living don't produce ghosts. Instead of forcefully uploading people, the TITANs were stealing heads to keep them alive so they didn't become ghosts. For the freakyness factor if and when the PCs wander into the "Forced Ego Uploading Facility", I'm ruling (for the moment) that forced uploading didn't work so well. Instead, the PCs should find that the facility was refitted to store rows upon rows of human heads kept alive so they don't become ghosts.

Wed, 2012-08-22 02:19

#13

Chevre

[quote-Decivre]The TITANs are

Decivre wrote:
The TITANs are advanced military computer systems, who perfected and honed the art of murdering humanity for the sake of both their original and apparently new goals. Any intelligence of any worth would know of humanities tendency towards superstition, and likely look for means of exploiting it. So it's very possible that the ghosts and such that might haunt the Earth could very well be TITAN weapons of a psychological nature.

Using human superstitions for long-term psychological warfare? Very nice.

DivineWrath wrote:
For the freakyness factor if and when the PCs wander into the "Forced Ego Uploading Facility", I'm ruling (for the moment) that forced uploading didn't work so well. Instead, the PCs should find that the facility was refitted to store rows upon rows of human heads kept alive so they don't become ghosts.

That's definitely going to creep them out. Shades of Mi-Go brain cylinders. If you really want to crank it up, steal a page from [i]Zork: Nemesis[/i]'s severed head puzzle. You had to attach the heads to a machine and push buttons that stimulate different parts of the brain to make the head talk and give information about the other puzzles. It was creepy as hell.

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Wed, 2012-08-22 04:43

#14

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Love the idea of enormous

Love the idea of enormous stores of living heads or brains, done for a sensible reason to the TITANs yet utterly bizarre and horrifying to humans. This discussion makes me think of the returning dead metaphysics in Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. Maybe sentient beings produce "souls", and the Fall produced enough restless souls to break through into the real world, producing the exsurgents - warped, alien *things* actually made out of billions of souls twisted through unknown dimensions. The TITANs did not expect it, and retreated. Now the exsurgents are trying to establish a proper foothold. Their most successful approach is the asyncs... Meanwhile the reason the ETI and the other aliens are so absent is that they are not quite alive in our sense. They have developed technologies that allow them access to the other continua. They have technology that is not just a mix of psi, nano and femtotech, but necromancy too. Yes, undead matrioshka brains extending into hell-omega points, ghost FTL, or devices powered by souls compressed to spiritual neutronium densities. You don't want to know what medium the Gates actually go through. There is a *reason* the cowardly factors don't want us to meet these things. Even if you don't want to run this as the "truth" in your game, there might well be people around in the setting who believe in it. Another fun element: the Nasaghasts in Dr McNinja. At least some habitats believe in vengeful dead pioneers you don't mess with. http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/20p37/

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Wed, 2012-08-22 11:29

#15

Chevre

Arenamontanus wrote:...done

Arenamontanus wrote:
...done for a sensible reason to the TITANs yet utterly bizarre and horrifying to humans.

That sums up for me why the threats in EP are so scary. They steal human heads, twist minds to their purposes, leave vast swathes of land barren and poisonous, create monsters, build vast warehouses full of severed, living heads (still loving this idea) and you will never understand why. No matter what you do, no matter what theory you come up with, their reasoning will forever be beyond you. You might live your entire life without dealing with them. They might turn your mind inside out and leave you a gibbering mass of amorphous flesh. The choice is not yours, and there is nothing you can do about it.

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Fri, 2012-08-24 14:27

#16

The Doctor The Doctor's picture

Chevre wrote:Nanofabricators

Chevre wrote:
Nanofabricators spewing swarms of misshapen spiky things, healing vats growing diseased lumps of teeth and claws, Cronenberg-esque hybrids of flesh and steel, driven by the collective will of thousands of broken souls...

That sounds like just the sort of infowar weapon to release into a habitat as a second or third strike. Ideally, to make everyone think that the Exsurgents have come out of hiding..

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