Noble Pigeon wrote:

I know that's the endgoal, but I also understand that nothing says I can't modify or get rid of said themes. It's not that I absolutely "hate" it; that's too strong a word for it. It just doesn't appeal to me is all. The cosmic horror themes, luckily, aren't prevalent enough to where if you ignore them or don't play on them the game suffers for it.

Yeah. One of the campaign's I ran was heavily inspired by Ghost in the Shell, and didn't even involve Exsurgents. It's pretty easy to excise those components of the game. All you have to do is portray the setting as though your characters are never where the infection is.

Noble Pigeon wrote:

That [i]is[/i] a pretty sweet twist, even for players that knows about the secrets of the setting. How did they discover what they were?

One of the strains informed them. It turned out that not every strain was hostile to humanity, including the one they were conversing with. Just an overwhelming majority of them.

Arenamontanus wrote:

I have actually so far not used either ETI or TITANs directly in any of my campaigns. They are part of the big backdrop, and that is enough. One exception might have been a PC coming into contact with something alien when gatecrashing. He was programming the gate directly by hand using his fractal digits and a bluebox emulator running in his cyberbrain (it was pretty desperate) and began experiencing odd things - including an apparently impossible but day saving event ("did he just save us through a retrocausal action?!"). At the climax of the campaign it became pretty clear that there was some kind of alien intelligence in the gate system (and quite possibly now inside his brain). Whether this was ETI or something else was never clear. If ETI were on a scale a few plucky transhumans or trans-aliens could thwart, then they would have been thwarted eons ago (I actually have a poster analyzing this issue in detail at the SETI section of the UK National Astronomy Meeting - I promise to try to turn it into an adventure as I publish the full paper). They are by definition on top of the galactic food chain, something that is on par with the best the galaxy has produced across billions of years. But the relevant question is how an individual interaction might go: what is the power and understanding differential between them and us? The problem of making this gameable is that a transhuman setting implicitly assumes that individuals can become very enhanced and powerful, and that there is no near-human ultimate limit. Hence ETI and TITAN agents might be arbitrarily powerful, and the whole plotting problem resides in explaining why this particular entity at least in one respect is on par with the players. This is by no means impossible, but it requires a bit of thought.

I tend not to treat most ETI/TITAN encounters as direct or overt actions against humans. As you said, any ETI or TITAN that decides to try and wipe us out is virtually guaranteed to win. Instead, I tend to work under the presumption that humanity aren't either the ETI or TITANs targets, and deal with humanity's efforts to simply stay out of the way as they trample on through. In this case, Firewall's purposes when it comes to ETI and TITANs tend to be more about damage control, cleaning up the aftermath, and hiding the truth from the public. These entities are more like acts of god than counterable antagonists. As for exsurgent threats, I like to think that not everything the virus produces is a success. The exsurgent virus is a rapidly-evolving entity, one that probably produces a multitude of strains over a short period of time. And much like anything that evolves, not everything is better than its predecessors. You sometimes get virus strains that are full on intelligence abortions, completely flawed in execution and function. Or sometimes you simply have a strain that does not properly interact with a target that it infects. Either way, the end result is something that is mad rather than enlightened, flawed rather than perfected, and confused rather than focused. These are the things that Firewall usually fights. Not TITAN death machines, but the defects from the post-singularity tech factory. Other threats they might fight and win against are outdated TITAN weaponry (many of the things you find on Earth and within most TQZs fall under that umbrella in my games), TITAN experiments (most of which are probably the post-singularity equivalent of "feral"), and other such lesser entities. I work under the presumption that humanity is still way under the radar for the ETI to care. Like humans to ants, the ETI and TITANs might wreak most of ther havoc upon us without ever realizing that we are present. A nanotech plague is the equivalent of us stepping on an ant trail, a loose TITAN weapon the equivalent of a sneeze. Our survival pretty much relies on existing well below anything they might care to notice. And maybe that is the [i]true[/i] purpose behind Firewall.