Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

EP Pranks--Ideas

5 posts / 0 new

Last post

Tue, 2013-11-05 09:39

bibliophile20 bibliophile20's picture

EP Pranks--Ideas

In need of some brainstorming and out of the box ideas for pranks in Eclipse Phase. A little background for what I need: I'm running a game set on Portal, and I'm characterizing the place as a combination of a port city and a university campus; people coming, people going, lots of high intensity people running around studying and working and needing to blow off steam. So, of course, one way by which there's a social release valve is there's various bits of one-upmanship going on and a few ongoing prank wars between the various gatecrashing and argonaut teams. The socially enforced rules for the prank war are roughly akin to fine tradition of military pranks--nothing lethal or destructive, nothing that utterly impairs someone's ability to function or defend themselves, the more creative the better, the more skillfully executed the better, and, preferably, something that highlights a gap in their own security and defenses in a relatively harmless but flamboyant manner. Of course, every so often, someone miscalculates or fails to take something into account, and someone gets seriously hurt, or equipment gets destroyed, but that's the exception, not the rule. So, I need ideas for pranks to pull on my PCs with that unique EP flavor; wrapping up someone's GEV in grip tape or putting an inflated vacsuit with a knife taped to the glove in someone's locker just feels so... unsophisticated.

Spoiler: Highlight to view

I'm planning on having things up the ante slowly until I culminate in Arenamontanus' The Breakfast Says: Hi!

—

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -Benjamin Franklin

Wed, 2013-11-06 12:59

jcoltkelly jcoltkelly's picture

Augmented Virtual Reality is your friend

I suggest reading the section in Transhumanism about combat hacking, as anything applied for offensive attacks can be modified for pranking. Let's say you cut a two meter hole the floor of a hallway and then use a modified AR to make it look like the floor is still there until someone falls through and into a vat of nano-pudding in the floor below. Check your security settings next time! Also consider what can be done via social networks. The classic "Yard Sale" prank is to put out an ad in the local paper advertising a yard sale at your neighbors house starting at 6am on a Sunday. Well let's say you can grift someone's mesh ID long enough to post an add on the local hook-up site looking for "uplift experiences" now you're getting hit on by neo-bonobos left and right, awkward! And of course nano-technology can be a boon. Let's say you can sneak a swarm into someone's bunk at night that converts all their stuff into a goop that barely holds together until touched. Reach for your ecto and your whole desk falls over into a pile of sludge! Ewww! And because it can be re-assembled with only minimum hassle it's not a permanent prank like it would be today.

—

- I've only been with the company for a few weeks now, but I've seen shit that would turn you white! - Winston Zeddemore

Mon, 2013-11-11 13:02

Leodiensian Leodiensian's picture

This is relevant to my

This is relevant to my interests as a major NPC in my current campaign is a bored, immortal hyperelite who amuses himself throughout the ages in a variety of ways, currently taking the form of somewhere between a clown and a mad scientist. The players have only visited him once, but in that time he's played up the hackneyed circus clown japes with high technology twists. This has included things like engineering an inflatable chair which is indistinguishable from the other chairs in his house and essentially the whole chair is a whoopie cushion. He also has pies and water-spray flowers containing a variety of wacky nanodrugs to be absorbed through the skin, a 'can-o'-worms' that instead contains several swarmanoids kept under high pressure so as to spray out appropriately; they are loaded up with dog-like personalities so that they will 'chase' and attach to whoever opens the can in an affectionate, but offputting way. Basically he's very bored and very rich and just does what he can to make eternity a bit more fun, at least for him. And every few sessions he's going to have a change of heart and try something else, to keep him from becoming a one-note NPC. The best part of all this is that he's their primary backup morph source so long as they're on Mars. They can get bodies from him for free (or at least with i-rep since he's a Firewall asset) instead of tons of credits, but they're all going to have some hilarious version of Lemon, Uncontrollable Urge, Addiction or other trait hidden in there...

Mon, 2013-11-11 19:31

nerdnumber1 nerdnumber1's picture

Leodiensian wrote:This is

Leodiensian wrote:
This is relevant to my interests as a major NPC in my current campaign is a bored, immortal hyperelite who amuses himself throughout the ages in a variety of ways, currently taking the form of somewhere between a clown and a mad scientist. The players have only visited him once, but in that time he's played up the hackneyed circus clown japes with high technology twists. This has included things like engineering an inflatable chair which is indistinguishable from the other chairs in his house and essentially the whole chair is a whoopie cushion. He also has pies and water-spray flowers containing a variety of wacky nanodrugs to be absorbed through the skin, a 'can-o'-worms' that instead contains several swarmanoids kept under high pressure so as to spray out appropriately; they are loaded up with dog-like personalities so that they will 'chase' and attach to whoever opens the can in an affectionate, but offputting way. Basically he's very bored and very rich and just does what he can to make eternity a bit more fun, at least for him. And every few sessions he's going to have a change of heart and try something else, to keep him from becoming a one-note NPC. The best part of all this is that he's their primary backup morph source so long as they're on Mars. They can get bodies from him for free (or at least with i-rep since he's a Firewall asset) instead of tons of credits, but they're all going to have some hilarious version of Lemon, Uncontrollable Urge, Addiction or other trait hidden in there...

If he/you can't think of an appropriate morph at some point, you could have him determine the choice randomly using the tables in Transhuman, though he'd probbably do use something more impressive like a giant wheel or base the results on the winner of a hamster race. He get a lot of enjoyment out of short term indentures (pretty much give a small set of tasks comprising a single prank in exchange for a new body, beats two years as a prostitute). I'm totally going to make a more sinister trickster that makes a reality show about the lengths people will go for a new body, the exact nature of which is not necessarily revealed. Just how abusive he makes things would be limited only by the desperation of potential contestants.

Thu, 2013-12-19 20:39

uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture

jcoltkelly wrote:And of

jcoltkelly wrote:
And of course nano-technology can be a boon. Let's say you can sneak a swarm into someone's bunk at night that converts all their stuff into a goop that barely holds together until touched. Reach for your ecto and your whole desk falls over into a pile of sludge! Ewww! And because it can be re-assembled with only minimum hassle it's not a permanent prank like it would be today.

I am reminded of the Skittles' commercials where some hapless Candy-Midas turns everything they touch into a pile of Skittles.

—

Exhuman, and Humanitarian.