I LIKE this setting! As much as I love and am certainly thankful for Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer just seems to be a bit more up my alley. Not as much, "everyone hates each other and we're all screwed if the TITANs come back." And more, "we're all immortal now, not even the stars are the limit!" That's what I picture when I think of my belief in transhumanism, a bright and infinite future.

You could project nearly any kind of idealistic environment using simulspace, why limit it to a setting that's similar to the one the customers are trying to escape from?

Meh that's true, it just seems a waste of bandwidth to re-create a similar environment to your own with just slightly less nihilism. Go big, or go home, know what I mean?

Steel Accord wrote:

You could project nearly any kind of idealistic environment using simulspace, why limit it to a setting that's similar to the one the customers are trying to escape from?

the best lies carry a grain of truth

Funny, that's actually why I play many RPGs, in the hopes of emulating in my actual life what I do in them. Albeit in a scaled down, less over the top fashion. XD

that is the reason why i can not stand the next generation and a large part of the premise of star trek. I do not believe homosapiens can out grow their destructive and selfish natures and that given the resources we would all pursue hedonism to its unproductive conclusion. We'll see what happens when we mutate into what ever species succeeds us humans. different genes a different premise.

I find the glimmer of hope in a seemingly-hopeless universe to be far more inspiring than baseless idealism that assures us "everything will turn out fine in the end" for no real reason. But then again, I [i]like[/i] Call of Cthulhu.

It's always darkest before the dawn. It's just the general attitude of most Eclipse Phase players seems to be that there is no light beyond the dawn. A lot of time is spent on what's wrong with the universe as it stands, but the books give very little detail on heroes fighting back. Most of the in-universe stories play out like "Alien." Even Firewall has the Templar mentality of burning a village to kill one witch. Yeah, I understand your line of thought. That's part of the reason I like the newer Fallout games. The world has been blown to Hell, but YOU can save lives and leave the Wasteland just a little bit brighter and better than how you found it. Let it be known that Mindjammer doesn't assume a stance of it's universe's tone. It gives players the option of playing gritty, light hearted, philosophic, and everything in between.

of course we can steel. Now eclipse phase makes it hard but i am pretty sure you can do a campaign where you do not work for firewall. Project ozma comes to mind but may be that's to similar. how about a covert action group of the Junta or PC? Maybe go a bit more battle star galactica and you are implanted titan operatives that think they are transhumans but are actually something far worse. or along similar lines to that a transhuman faction that believes we had our shot and and blew it so lets put the bleeding husk out of its misery my point is its all about how creative you can get and what your players will get yo away with :P

Post-apocalyptic, conspiracy and horror themes in my sci-fi is all I want, so EP is perfect for me. I still find the idea of Mindjammer awesome and appealing, but EP is where it's at for my personal tastes. I kind of like the idea of injecting a truly apocalyptic campaign arc into Mindjammer, actually, one where the Commonality breaks down from within due to conspiracies and from without due to cosmically horrific new neighbours along the lines of the ETI. Kind of like what would've happened if everything went Consortium-side-up and no TITANs happened...but post-Singularity benevolences within the post-hypercorp Commonality still managed to trigger the ETI's very rapt and very [i]other[/i] intellect thousands of years later. I'm not a huge fan of the Fate mechanics, though that's not hard to figure a solution to.

I think that's why that apocalypse appeals to me...it has a real impact! Permadeaths! But maybe in the collapse, the glimmer of hope is the discovery of an EP-like way of complete personality continuity discovered by one of the PC Singularity planetary artificial intelligences that held the line to the last against the ETI's infinifleet...or some other suitably PC-oriented discovery of a transhuman hope in the ruins of the Commonality.

Glimmers of hope can seem like goddamn hope [i]conflagrations[/i] against utterdark. I take a very Taoist approach to campaign creation. Always a dot of yin in overwhelming yang, always a dot of yang in overwhelming yin.

Perhaps I'm the one who's demanding too much. That is a beautiful interpretation and the one that makes the most sense in my mind. The greatest of heroes act when no one is looking and all that.

Steel Accord wrote:

With my current understanding of Singularity studies, that whole movie suddenly makes a lot more sense.

The book's better. (sayeth the bibliophile! ^_^)

I know some of my players, one or two in particular, might read this, so I don't want to say anything specific even under a spoiler tag but...yeah, I've got some pretty contemplative, mind-bending, psychedelic and epic ideas for a path towards a broader (and deeper) transhumanity+/posthumanity+/whyallthelabelswithanthropocentrismifwehavemovedbeyondthehuman?+ that I plan to provide larger and larger windows onto as my campaign goes on. Lotta different ways it could conclude, too. All depends on them. *devious GM hand-wringing and creepy GM grin*

I have the book, and while it's an amazing implementation of fate with a rich universe, I'm puzzled by how the Commonality is described in the "theme, genre, and styles of play" as the "Golden Age of humanity" and "its greatest hope", with lots of optimism thrown in. It's not at all like the culture. The culture is interventionist because its humanism is universalist, although they aren't very militaristic by nature and try to use a light touch whenever possible. The key thing, though, is that they are (trans)humanists to begin with. Heterodoxy and essential freedoms are protected within the culture, as a rule of thumb. Want to pray to a bunch of god? Pray as much as you like if that floats your boat. But Mindjammer's Commonality is quite totalitarian. Not the worst there is, or the worst there could be, and still a far cry from, say, 40k's Imperium of Mankind, but still far from promoting humanist ideals. Democracy and quite a few freedoms and liberties we consider essential are illegal in the Commonality. Now, a dystopian setting is fine in itself, especially since a lot of the campaign world is on the border or outside of these totalitarian stuctures, allowing for a "living the free life and defending that freedom" theme. But why is Commonality supposed to be the best hope for mankind? I mean, it's not Commonality propaganda that says this, it's in a GM advice section on themes and styles.