To second what ShadowDragon just said, I think that a big part of the fear is actually generated by the hypercorps to keep people in line. They insinuate that the Jovians are scary fascists to obfuscate their own authoritarianism on the one hand, and insinuate (or outright say) that the autonomists are going to do hab terrorism or allow the slippery slope of AGI rights into [i]scaaary[/i] TITAN IIs (which would be a frightening thing to people who just barely survived complete xenocide of transhumanity, AIs, uplifts and all, just a scant decade before). The fact that a lot of PC citizens eat that shit up goes hand in hand, though, with the fact that they also eat up the propaganda about how the hypercorps, having the best tech, will know first and best if the TITANs return, and I'm sure talking heads keep the calm all the time by vid-casting all over the Mesh their Very Expert Opinions™ that the TITANs are Gone For Good® and that the [i]only[/i] fears they need to have are the hells that are (DUN DUN DUN) [i]other people[/i]...but don't worry, the Consortium is here to hegemonically protect ya'll! PROGRESS! And that's just the thing: there are truths woven through those propaganda memesplosions. They [b]do[/b] have the best tech (even if it might be developed in some ethically/morally questionable ways). They [b]are[/b] currently the best line of defense against a TITAN return (i.e. their populations may have a 0.0001% better chance to escape their habs while transhumanity's best shit takes that one extra hit it can take than the jury-rigged autonomist cough-and-wheeze junkers). And on and on. There are actually probably quite a few optimists out there, and likely it is to the advantage of every polity (and apolity) out there to fire memebuckshot into everyone's braindata that contains messages of hope...it's just that the hope takes forms that are to greater or lesser degrees deceptive depending on where you landed post-Fall.

I think the goal of any good Eclipse Phase GM is to thrust party and character optimism into darkness and insanity sufficient to break it [b]and[/b] bring the fear and cynicism that generates out of the darkness with pinpricks of light to which the PCs can feel they are able to contribute. I think that's why Firewall is the setting default, not "a thing the PCs might belong to", because they are at the front lines of how bad shit can get [b]and[/b] where beauty and meaning can still be reached for.

Consumerdestroyer: I'm pretty sure it's nothing but 1150% (not a typo) propaganda that the PC has the best stuff Transhumanity has to field. They sent their best war fleet to Locus and got beat like a drum by pretty much just the locals. When they sent Fleet #2, the entirety of the Autonomist Alliance showed up, including Titan, and they got hammered like an anvil. The PC is probably [i]still[/i] spinning damage control from those clusterfucks. But they definitely don't have the best stuff. On par, perhaps, but that's only because for all that they decry open-source as evil and dangerous, they damn well are pulling apart everything the Argonauts publish to patent it within their own borders and employ it. So, at best, their stuff is "on par." The Jovians, of course, are unquestionably falling behind, and the rate that they fall behind is growing year after year. Unfortunately, they have sufficient resources and industry that they can just zerg rush kekeke.

In AF01 the Jovians had the best military. It's now AF10. Their institutional, systemic paranoia of New Technologies and especially the augmentations that allow Argonauts and others to make breakthroughs at breakneck pace is unquestionably hobbling them. The Jovians have top-of-the-line MilTech circa AF00. It is now AF10. Even if we assume, generously, that they're willing to pick apart open-sourced stuff to determine what is safe, they're going to be going at it with the same methodical fear as a caveman confronted with a device which has electrocuted Oog to death. So, yes. They're behind. Also, because of said paranoia of New Tech, any ships they field will be massively crippled by the need to depart and return to Jovian orbit, which means they'll need massive amounts of radiation shielding to keep the poor dumb flats and splicers manning the things alive, and comparatively more mass devoted to fuel than anyone else. (Still less than launching from Earth, mind you, but it is a strike against them in terms of projecting power.) As a side note, so are the Titanians, largely due to their insistence on TITAN preparedness. Copper-wire analog telephones where the bridge calls down to the engine room for full power has no place in AF 10. It won't slow the TITANs down much, but it does add mass and complexity to their ships that doesn't need to be there. On the other hand, they have a larger military-industrial complex than the rest of the Alliance put together, and quality has a quantity all of its own, even if that quality is encumbered by unnessessary backup redundancies. The very best stuff is going to be fielded by brinkers only a few steps removed from exhumans, the kind of folk who write out all forms of life support and limitations of flesh from their designs by simply becoming the ship. After them, I'd look to the Ultimates for the best quality gear, because they have the resources to put the very best open-sourced and home-grown tech to use, as well as the Nietzschean desire to do so. The Alliance and PC come next, probably on parity, and the Jovians come in last. The other powers (LLA and Morningstar,) have access to the same open-source tech everybody else does, but they largely seem content to let the PC handle their military needs.

The sample Jovian character is an Infiltrator. [i]Who wears a flat with a heart condition and doesn't have a cortical stack.[/i] Not only is he the worst infiltrator [i]ever[/i] (wearing a flat anywhere but the Junta gets you noticed big time and pegged as a Jovian spy, even if you aren't,) if their covert ops spies are like that, the rest of them are like that.

Steel Accord wrote:

I remember that very section on the Junta and it just got me pissed. "Oh! So it's okay for your soldiers to be transhumans but not your citizenry! F**king hypocrites!" Pardon my language, that was a direct transcription.

There is a side bar where a lobbist expresses a similar opinion, but about cancer and nanosurgery. The narrator of the Jupiter chapter is quite liberal in Jovian terms and would agree with you. I found the Jovians to be the most interesting faction because of their internal politics and inconsistencies. Their chapter made me sympathetic, though because I am a transhumanist, I can understand their plight to want control over the technologies they develop. Yes their are the Expansionists and the Hawks who wish to expand militarily, but there are also Reclaimers, Determinists and Reformists who wish for a different path.

Steel Accord wrote:

This just again brings to mind the tone of the setting. Personally, I would like to cast the Jovians as sort of the solar system uniting evil. Their commitment to suppressing their people's liberty and ability to choose their fate as something that Consortium, or Autonomist will no longer be tolerated.

Then you aren't playing them too far off from what the setting portrays them as, which is rather simple minded. Like how Call of Duty casts Russia or China as some all consuming zerg rush that wants to destroy freedom. Why destroy everyone in the Junta when it is a handful of executives for two of the five factions who push dangerous military memes? Propoganda is wrong, but nuking an entire society is as well. My favourite character I played was a Jovian in quite an optomistic game. A splicer with no cortical stack, no nanomachines, and no cyber augmentations. Just drug implants, enhanced senses and the basic suite of mesh inserts. He was considered a reformist by Jovian standards, but also a reclaimer. He was the humanity within the team that held a nova crab AGI, octomorph mercurial, swarmoid barsoomian and a hypergibbon neanderthal together long enough to finish a mission. Yes, the swarmoid had to be EMP'd to stop him from unleashing a TITAN on the PC. Yes, the neanderthal was put down to stop him from infecting a tailored basilisk hack on the corperate compound that previously owned him. Yes, the octomorph was vented into vaccuum to stop her from bombing Extropia with an antimatter warhead. Yes, the AGI was deleted before it could join with an ETI matrioshka brain. But I didn't stop them from taking out a Jovian reclaimer, who was my character's role model, when we discovered he was behind the plot to drop a TITAN on Titan. I was the one who pulled the trigger. That game was portrayed with an optimistic tone, because though there were losses and tragedies, we won. From unveiling a conspiracy to launching a gate on an asteroid orbiting a mashtrioshka brain into that brain's binary star, there was hope. Humanity was hanging on by a thread and we climbed up that thread and punched existential risk in the teeth, just to discover more threads. It was never about saving transhumanity, it was about preservering it.

Steel Accord wrote:

The Princess Bride conveys the truest of messages. True Love is worth dying for. Love is a force within the movie's universe, and I would argue real life.

That's a universal theme, though. You can put that in any setting, and if the love is unrequited, that just makes it all the more bittersweet. Think of Sava and Rati from [i]Lack[/i].

thebluespectre wrote:

Republicans? I thought they were Space North Korea. They are no threat to anybody, but we sure as hell don't want to intrude on their property.

The religion, the oppressive capitalist-politician combo, the neo-Luddite wisdom of repugnancy, the soul argument of pro-life applied to uploading, the big military. Not to mention that they name their stuff after Republican politicians. They're totally Space Republicans. How do you see them being North Korea?

It's pretty clear the Junta is an amalgamation of several historical polities of various right-wing and facist bents. Just labeling them as any one thing really undermines the complexity of the faction, and what makes them so interesting besides. I might never want to be one, but I love talking about them.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

Scum, Anarcho-Collectivists, and Titanians are probably all amongst the happiest folk in the setting.

*snort* Of course they are.

Smokeskin wrote:

thebluespectre wrote:

Republicans? I thought they were Space North Korea. They are no threat to anybody, but we sure as hell don't want to intrude on their property.

The religion, the oppressive capitalist-politician combo, the neo-Luddite wisdom of repugnancy, the soul argument of pro-life applied to uploading, the big military. Not to mention that they name their stuff after Republican politicians. They're totally Space Republicans. How do you see them being North Korea?

I seem to recall that General Monica, the Commander-in-Chief of the Jovian Security Council (and therefore the de facto leader of the Republic) was a declared atheist. General Gavin Brown is also non-religious, and not too many of the other Security Council have their religious views stated. So IMO, having them be simplified as "Space Republicans" or "Space North Korea" is not doing them justice at all. And I happen to make it a point in any games I run to re-name almost every single one of their habitats. This is in the [i]future[/i], at least a hundred years or so, so naming all of their stations after relatively recent neo-conservative figures is ridiculous.

ORCACommander wrote:

I think the jovian government is more concerned about keeping their power and pursuing their agendas than they are about the well being of their citizenry. They where their ideology as a cloak and use it to hide what they really desire underneath. The jovians were made of the remnants of the US military and several south american countries. So there melds the american reupublican party with the dictatorship drive of the south americas. Resulting in a police state with an ideological mandate that that is hypocritical at its higher levels. when it comes to jovians you only have 2 things to fear. a full mobilized military response, or the fanatic.

That portrayal lessens the interesting factor of the Jovians for me tbh. What the Republic reminds me so much of is Battlestar Galactica. A government that pays only lip service to democracy, and where its leaders are borderline paranoid and sometimes insular, and need to make hard decisions that can't be clouded with anything other than cold logic. On the other hand, the humans (among some Cylons, yes I know) were supposed to be the good guys. The human race is on the verge of extinction, and only they can protect them. So does that really make them the good guys against the "evil" cylons, or do the ends justify the means? In my eyes, the Jovian Security Council is not power-hungry (well, some of them probably are) and they do not want power for the sake of having power. If I wanted two-dimensional cutout villains in Eclipse Phase I'd rather go after some exsurgents or TITANs, thanks very much. They are in power because they genuinely believe they are the only ones ready for when the machines who wiped out [i]ninety percent[/i] of the human race will come back to finish us off. As a result they [i]do[/i] care for the people below them. Does that make them good guys? Maybe not. Plenty of dictators in history claimed to be have the people's best interests at heart, usually with negative results. But I like to think that far more interesting personalities other than bioconservative fanatics or grim-faced "ends justify the means" people can exist from the Jovian Republic. Despite my misgivings with alleged political slant in some of the books, I believe that the writers behind Eclipse Phase wants to have a setting where many people have muddled moralities, even the supposed good guys (Firewall). And so for me, the Jovians being much more complex of a faction, without being too sympathetic or too "Space Nazi"-ish, fits that vision perfectly.

Smokeskin wrote:

thebluespectre wrote:

Republicans? I thought they were Space North Korea. They are no threat to anybody, but we sure as hell don't want to intrude on their property.

The religion, the oppressive capitalist-politician combo, the neo-Luddite wisdom of repugnancy, the soul argument of pro-life applied to uploading, the big military. Not to mention that they name their stuff after Republican politicians. They're totally Space Republicans. How do you see them being North Korea?

I would say they are a parody of the republican 'Tea Party' faction.

I definitely plan on making Jovians a mixed bag, as far as who gets encountered outside of Jovian space...I mean, there's got to be a reason they're out there! And as for within Jovian space...well, I kinda doubt the party is going to want to go there, what with all the uplifts and AGIs in the party. I mean, yeah, I'm gonna [b]make 'em go[/b] at some point on a Firewall mission, but as far as exploring the solar system goes I am going to try and show them a diverse range of Jovian citizenry (probably slightly more diverse than what they'll encounter on their mission, don't want to make it [i]too[/i] easy to find a friendly face to hide behind when Junta security forces come knocking because one of their infosec specialists noticed something...off about the hacked scan results for the AGI and uplift characters).