So to continue in this line of discussion, which books do you refer to the most in game play? After reading the core rules/transhuman what would you recommend new players read to get a good grasp of the setting?

If you are running a game, Firewall is super useful, if you are running a Firewall/Players-Are-Sentinels game, than Firewall is all-but-required!

4th printing reads as pretty definitive. In terms of the other books I found Transhuman really useful for starting my current game, does a lot to streamline character gen so that's a really nice one to have. After that I think it depends on what your campaign is focused on, my game is non-Firewall and quite Gate focused so I've found Gatecrashing quite nice. Oh and the Morph Recognition guide, while not at all essential, is really convenient and just looks nice.

It would take some careful selecting to find the player-safe parts of Firewall, but the entire book for GM's is nigh essential. Before Transhuman (the de facto player's guide), I wish I had read Firewall first. Then Panopticon, then Rimward (for the rep economy bits, which is useful systemwide, since we all know how capitalism basically works Inner System).

I'd say Panopticon. Your players might read it, and it describes a major plot point of the setting, the Panopticon.

If you are recording everything, then there would be a lot of data to shift through. It is very possible that not everyone will ever get around to watch everything. Further more, Human minds tend to lose competence when doing mind numbing work. AIs maybe not so much, but there is a cap on how good they can be. On the other hand, Firewall has teams of people who specialize in data scrubbing. They can delete data, replace data, throw around some red herring, blame other people, etc. They can do a lot of things to push the blame and risks away from themselves. They're not the only ones who do that data scrubbing, so expect groups like OZMA, Jovians, Titanians, etc to help clean things up. Do keep in mind that they have different agendas. Left to their own devices, they might hide facts about TITAN monsters, but they might shift the blame to competing group such as you. Sometimes sentinels might have to throw away a fake ID... or even their real one as they can't easily get rid of the blame.

I agree at least.

MrWigggles wrote:

I'm still not sure how to handle the Panopticon in EP without it being GM fait. Like in theory, the PC may be being watch at any moment, everywhere. And sometimes you the GM force them into situations where they can't do their illegal works in the blindspots of the ever seeing eye. So what do you do there? I mean, it feels easier or more justified to zing the players if they dont cover their tracks after a thing happens. But that doesn't stop them from being watch in real time, from some yahoo. They were just flipping through "channels" and spotted this firefight or drug deal or ego extracting. Most folks would call the cops. So like how do you handle that? How do I as a GM have that simulation happen, without just shitting on the players?

Personally, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the rules for handling exactly this sort of thing found on pgs. 162-164 of Panopticon. Give them a read, they go a long way toward dealing with exactly the problem outline.

consumerdestroyer wrote:

Skipjacking is the best, it'd be so awesome to be fleeing through stalls on the outskirts of Olympus and just vanish from surveillance as you run. I like the idea of an entire party of sentinels (or Jovian/Titanian spec ops or Ozma or w/e) with high Infiltration just skipjacking from one end of a hab to the other in shapers, rotating disguises as they go just in case. Everyone ends up at the place they need to be, and when the dirty business goes down on cams they didn't manage to spot on their initial sweep, they reverse the process back to the airlock and walk off calmly as different people. No one can connect their entry and exit disguises with a) each other, b) any of the faces along the way where they missed a skipjack test or c) the disguises at the scene of the (x-risk prevention-related, hopefully) crime. But there's only ever the one sentinel with good enough Infiltration, everyone else is always stumblejacking.

Actually, my players do exactly that: all but one of them (the async) are skilled in Infiltration, so skipjacking to avoid attention is something they do regularly.

One thing that I'd like to bring up, that I've learned after a few years of making RPGs: sometimes the order that books are released is not a good indicator of how "important" a book is within the entire line. There are some books -- and I'd say that both Transhuman and Firewall fit into this category -- that are better when left later, because they benefit from knowing what people are actually doing with the game, what problems they've found, what gaps need filling.