Actually the exsurgent virus' broadly defined nature makes it perfect for a DM to craft it to fit his own narrative. For instance I lean towards opposite. I could care less about cosmic horror, since I feel it's too impersonal. My particular strain was an experiment along the lines of forcibly evolving transhumanity into a superior organism quite deliberately. Well a TITAN's own twisted version of "superior" anyway. It was never a malevolent thing. More like a we're going to make you "better" whether you like it or not. This adds a psychological layer of conversion, us versus them feel. Are the converted truly better off than the non-infected? Your friends are now "monsters" and they want to "help you". In essence it's biological memetics, instead of spreading ideas, it's forcibly spreading genes. This is in contrast to say the oh you've just randomly become a tentacle monster strain and you're very very angry and hungry for no particular reason. You need to be of course repeatedly shot so the protagonist can look good.

root@Problems with the Exsurgent Virus [hr]

Draconis wrote:

it's biological memetics

One of the ideas I kick around for the Exsurgent virus is that it is, at heart, only information. It can move between biological, memetic, logical, and religious information types because they are all expressions of some abstracted concept that the ETI came up with as a mathematical proof, and subsequently put to use to shape the universe around them. The purpose of the virus is simple enough to work at every level of abstraction for information: it filters information flow. It causes chaotic permutations to any information structure it can create an interface for, and it comes preloaded with the binaries for carbon and silicon based intelligent organizations. Any Singularity based on a short positive feedback loop will trigger this mechanism before they've had many identity shaking challenges relative to a civilization that developed the slow way. Since they've had so many fewer upsets from directions they couldn't predict and model ahead of time, the generalized TITAN-type intelligence will respond by evolving to adapt to this new threat in a vigorous and complete manner. From there it is fairly easy to play a metagame against the infected intelligence as to how many levels of abstraction they need to protect against. The individual parts either fight against each other, or get harvested to expand the ETI's version of the Internet (the Pandora Gates work pretty much like TCP/IP for matter), or get used in some other part of the ETI's immense abstraction machine. An older Singularity doesn't adapt as quickly, so it rapidly burns out and as long as it doesn't kill them all, they will be able to recover. The part I like to consider after taking all of that as a given is what if this is the most ethical thing the ETI could do about the possibility of TITAN Singularities? By forcing civilizations to either self destruct or to almost entirely die, the ETI never has to greet the more cancerous intelligences with any of its weaponry. They do this because the only effective weaponry against a hard Singularity that has had time to seat itself requires weaponry which comes with a rating based on radius, and the radius denoted in astronomical units of collateral damage.

ThisOne wrote:

My problem with these (and they certainly are the most natural explanations) is that a lot of the fiddly stuff doesn't seem to fit. For example, if the ETI was interested in transforming humans into monsters (to introduce a threat) the exsurgent synthmorphs, and the malevolent plotty sorts are explained well enough, but why waste valuable effort turning people into meat with some extra tentacles. Sure, it's possible, but kind of dumb, really.

A genetic algorithm? What if Exsurgent was analyzing activity strategies of whatever it infected and was trying different permutations to find ones which were more efficient in the long run?

What if Exsurgent is something *really* weird. Like post-singularity weird? Most people who talk about it assume that it has a comprehensible purpose of some kind. Its supposed to do something that would make sense. What if it doesn't? It's a product of super-human intelligence and its function is pure cosmic horror - We don't know, we can't know, and if we ever turn in to something that can know we won't be remotely human anymore - trans, post, or otherwise. One of the themes of the game is horror. And one of the roots of Cosmic Horror is that terrible things happen which simply do not make any sense on human scales. Whatever created Exsurgent or whatever Exsurgent is doesn't care about humans. It's not trying to do anything to humans. It's doesn't have any goals for humans. It's not competing with humans or trying to destroy them. We're like ants and Exsurgent is like a bulldozer. The bulldozer doesn't care about the ants one way or another, but it is going to build a freeway on top of them. Why does Exsurgent turn people in to tentacle monsters? It doesn't. Tentacle monsters is just a side-effect of the vastly higher-order, inexpressable workings of this thing. It doesn't "make tentacle monsters" any more than bulldozers squish ants. In game this could be kind of frustrating for the players, but then Cosmic Horror can be frustrating. Cosmic Horror doesn't think you're important or significant, so one reaction is to petulantly poke the quasi-godlike monstrosity and demand to be noticed. Then you get eaten and go mad. TLDR; Exsurgent doesn't need to have an answer. It's horrible for no comprehensible reason and all you can do is stave off the time when the Stars are Right.