your under the impression that death in EP is a failure state

I guess it boils down to whether your players want second chances or whether they like surviving against all odds with serious chances for failure. You can run Continuity as more or less "adventurey." A more adventurey Continuity will have:

• technology easier to disable
• fewer (or no) chances to get infected by the virus without some warning that this might happen
• better access to tools and weapons to solve problems
• easier computer interface without potential for infection

As I said in a previous post that I can't find, depending on when and who you think built the space station, it could be a lot easier or excruciatingly harder to navigate without seriously injuring yourself. For example, how do you talk to Hans? The most "adventurey" way would be to have a terminal interface so that the characters can type queries into the system without risk of basilisk hacks. The most difficult way is to have to jack or mesh directly into Hans and risk infection to your entire stack. (There are some options in between.) Similarly, many adventures end with a forced detonation of the station's reactor (a total party kill situation, but most players, including mine, feel pretty proud of themselves for not having infected forks running around). However, immediately pre-Fall reactors might be basically immune to such sabotage, and your characters could find themselves just precipitating an emergency plasma dump into empty space without improving their situation. You see where I'm going with this -- if your players are allowed to sense that something they do is kind of hazardous, and the technology available supports their cockamamie plans for survival, they'll survive. But as written, Continuity can be supremely fatal, and I warned my players beforehand that some forms of death can be considered a "win" condition, so they took the total party kill in good grace.

There's no way to purge the virus, but when I ran Continuity, the PCs did [i]way[/i] better than I thought they would, and all but one avoided infection. A character made the check the first time I called for a Perception check to notice the speck of a ship in the void (must be that deep sea predator genetics), but even [i]before that[/i], when they all realized the medbay was definitely not infected in any way the engineer's player asked me if he could set up the med bay on its own power supply if he cannibalized some other things from throughout the ship to do it and I thought that sounded fine and gave an estimate of how long he would think it would take and he started working on it. Work got interrupted by events in the adventure, but then resumed, and well before the time the ship arrived it was ready. So at the end, an unconscious mass of rubbery tentacles with a gaping wound and a nanobandage slapped on was shot out in one of the ship's escape pods by the others, the engineer rigged the missiles after they carried them to the respective engine rooms on the ship and station, one person got infected wiping out their doubles and stayed behind to set off the final detonation of the station and ship with a Trivial nanofab'd detonator (could've ratcheted that up for increased time and f'd them over, but honestly I can't imagine a detonator being any higher than that just on its own) and everyone else including the engineer piled into the jury-rigged medical unit and disconnected it from the spar. I can't remember how they kicked it off from the station so it would clear the explosions but they did do that, I think it was academics rolls for math or physics or something? But anyway there weren't any infected systems in the medbay to start, and they kept it that way! So there was an escape pod and a med bay hurtling through the void, and they completely wiped out the infection and destroyed Hans and the array. I'd call that a win! It almost wasn't a win, because the infected character secretly made a copy of Hans, but when he himself got infected he a) didn't want to let anyone know he had done this even if any of them could have been convinced to carry it off with them and b) he sort of realized it was a bad idea by that point, and his copy went with the original (and with him!) in the big space fireballs. On the other hand, when they did Mind the WMD with the template characters before the campaign began, everyone died when they detonated the antimatter ordinance in the midst of the TITAN tech. They all tacnet'd each other about it first, but they were like "yeah there's no way to do this that preserves our stacks, we're holed in with all this no-no stuff and surrounded by enemies who are now pouring into this room...two birds, one stone honestly! let's vaporize their stacks too while we're at it" so I don't think a TPK is anything but a solid win against an x-threat and "people who know too much" in some cases, and there are ways Continuity can go where that's true. Oh, the other thing sort of related to this thread and lost memories and so on is that these sentinels record their experiences either as XP or with that other recorder implant, and they share unedited, full (minus thoughts) experiences of different angles on what happened to people who don't make it, so the solidarity and mutual aid there cancel out some of the horror that would remain to haunt less trusting sentinels. The way they all figured it collectively, each of them individually would want to know what happens even if their stack isn't recoverable, and with tacnet they could actually see a picture in picture in someone else's XP that [i]is[/i] what they were seeing, which means in a sense part of their stack's experiences are recorded on everyone else's stacks. I know that might not be common in other groups of sentinels, given the paranoiac elements this game is supposed to engender, but there are definitely creative options players can find to mitigate some of the negatives. It's hard to make my players paranoid about each others' characters until one of them does something suspicious, not as a metagame thing, but as a "well we're all in this together and we are literally keeping the end of all things at bay over and over so maybe we should trust each other to have each other's backs in as many ways as possible given how serious that is and what trust Firewall itself has put in us to do this" so I think next campaign I run I'm going to open with the convention version of Million Year Echo, [i]then[/i] have them make their characters.

consumerdestroyer, just because something is a Win for Firewall doesn't meant it's not a huge loss for the group. A TPK for the group that wipes morphs and stacks is bad - worse if they paid for the morphs, worse still if they paid for them with chargen points instead of cold hard cash. You can evaporate a huge chunk of a player's chargen points that way, and if you don't let them pick up a new morph built with that many CP, depending on how new the character is, they would [b]literally[/b] be better off just retiring the character and bringing in a new one. I find that problematic, personally.

So long as the players are using Biomorphs it's fairly easy to avoid infection. The premades I used were all in biomorphs, so the digital infection was reasonably easy to avoid. It only claimed one, by seizing control of their medichines. They avoided the basilisk hack by getting vacsuits, failing to prevent the Kepler's loss of atmosphere, and being very paranoid about what signals they accepted. That also largely protected them from nanovirus infection. PCs who don't use vacsuits or keep atmosphere nearby are much more at risk, as are cyberbrain users, as the digital infection can get them directly, it's very possible they'll survive the length of the adventure though. It is very hard for players/characters who aren't familiar with the nature of the threat to make it though, as there are a lot of vectors to deal with. As for morph costs, the benefits from not buying an expensive morph make characters a lot more capable, especially if they invest in software and other disproportionately useful stuff for the cost. (The poor-man's RADAR software really comes to mind here) Blueprints especially. It does mean they need for time or allies, but Sentinels don't (at least they shouldn't) need Reapers and plasma weapons to win. High end synthmorph blueprints are exceptionally valuable, and not much more expensive than buying the morph directly.

consumerdestroyer wrote:

when they all realized the medbay was definitely not infected in any way

Is it, really? I'd assume that there's no way Hans could've protected every single piece of electronics in the medbay from infection or somehow purged the virus there. As to avoiding infection: If the PCs let the Dr.Bot continue its radio jamming, deactivate mesh accessibility for all their implants and equipment and only access devices 100% free of infection, they (or their muses and PAN in case of biomorphs) should be reasonably safe from the digital version of Chrynalus. The basilisk hack is an aural hack only, so avoiding it should be possible if the PCs protect themselves and their electronics from digital infection and physically keep it out of their auditory system. The nanoplague is tricky because it also infects "electronics and other machinery" and because the chrysacids that start growing after 3 hours seem to be mildly infectious themselves - which is unusual for a nanoplague.

Quote:

If a character receives a wound from contact with a chrysacid form, they become infected with the Chrynalus nanovirus.

Keep in mind that damage inflicted to an exsurgent nanoswarm by guardian nanobots is reduced by 2 (per action turn). So it should'nt take long for the nanoplague infection to take hold in whatever the guardian swarm is protecting.

In the game I ran, physical disassembly via diamond axe and plasma cutter.

At chargen, yes, but they don't have to worry about all the manifold issues which can arise between blueprint and fabricator. Mostly those shouldn't be such a problem in the outer system, but I generally have been running things in the inner system. I also use somewhat more in depth nano fabricating houserules to cover DRM in greater depth than the books provide. Getting a cracked blueprint through an inner system fabricator can be difficult, but is a decent material use for favors in transitional economies. The core talks about an average of a three to six week wait before someone cracks a new blueprint, but transhuman talks about how smart CMs are, so I figure it isn't a super long time (probably in the three-six week range, probably faster for certain high-risk items) before the crack gets patched out with firmware upgrades to CMs. Getting a hold of a CM running old and vulnerable firmware could be a task, as while they must exist they can't really be advertised. Typically I make heavily DRM'd blueprints cheaper, down to single use ones which are cheaper than physical goods. But yeah, in the outer system, that'd be much less of a worry. Only things which immediately come to mind is if the local CMs are weird/damaged/out of date, but that shouldn't happen often. Getting bad or "poisoned" blueprints could also happen if the players are in a big rush, and don't take the time to even read reviews, but I can't see that happening often. For a system hopping game though, full paid blueprints are nice for how usable they are in the inner system or other secured areas. Open source blueprints are annoying to use in a place where all the CMs need to be hacked to use them.

Premade one shot version or standard? I've done the standard one, but not the one with betrayal and premades. If you do the standard one, make crossing the TQZ reasonably easy. I used the rules from Zone Stalkers and nearly got a TPK when the party got in a fight with TITAN war machines. Not the most fun part.

Evilnerf wrote:

I have no problem at all with the module being hard. Its just that Continuity is much less straight forward of an ending and I don't think the ending would be all that satisfying even if they did do everything right.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. As to MYE: Something I was unsure about when I ran it was if the Hegira is actually completely pressurized. It does seem like it because there's only one airlock. This came up when my players tried to destroy the helium envelopes.

Quote:

Gas envelopes aren’t under high pressure and will leak only slowly if shot or otherwise punctured. To cause the airship to lose altitude, one would have to intentionally shred a large number of gas envelopes with a machine gun or explosives, then kill the swarm of repair bots that would show up to patch the leaks.

Wouldn't you also have to puncture or destroy the hull for that if it was non-permeable (as it has to be for the Hegira to stay pressurized, right?).

*slow clap for consumer* Awesome group! I've run Continuity a lot (almost exclusively in four-hour blocks for new players at cons) and I talk with other GMs who run it as well. *Generally* two or three people survive and escape via escape pods, sometimes with more stacks in tow. I'd consider this a 'win' for a group of experienced gamers, who may not know EP specifically. I think I've seen one group steal back the Kepler shuttle. They quarantined off some rooms, cleaned out the rest, and just generally lived as space hobos for the months necessary to get home (when you get to 3:59 out of four hours, liberal summarizing occurs). But the point is, they had the time and smarts to reasonably survive. I've heard groups talk about tracking down the comms module, which I suppose could hypothetically work, depending on its condition. The point is, players are smart and full of surprised. Continuity is a challenging scenario, but not impossible. This is appropriate for some groups, but not for all. I've also seen a lot of groups just blow themselves up and high-five, which is pretty cool too. Regarding the loss of morphs... I would consider this a really low blow for a GM. The whole setup of the Kepler is that it's a million miles away from anywhere. The team almost certainly egocasted to get to the station, and there's no morph shop there to barter with. So if your GM assumes your super-expensive morph is there, it's because she doesn't expect it to return even if nothing happens at all.

Thanks. Some kind of venting system seems like a good idea. Should I run MYE again, I'll definitely use that. But still:

Chernoborg wrote:

Also, kudos to the author for describing the partial pressure envelopes, the gasbags are only filled partway to allow for expansion during altitude shifts without having to vent lifting gas.

Why would the gasbags expand in a fully pressurized environment?

NimbleJack3 wrote:

Blimps have to rise and fall through the atmosphere to land, navigate obstacles, reduce air drag thanks to thinner atmosphere... This means that, like a lost child's balloon, a gas cell will expand and try to fill the lower-pressure volume of the upper atmosphere. If it expands too much, it will burst. By only part-filling the gas cell, you leaves room for it to expand slightly as it rises into lower pressures and avoid bursting before the ascent stops. [s]I hope I've actually interpreted your question correctly, and haven't sounded like a condescending pillock...[/s]

Nah, don't worry. What I'm trying to understand is how the Hegira works on Mars where the overall atmospheric pressure is extremely low from the get-go. If the whole ~300m hull is pressurized, providing a breathable atmosphere with relatively stable air pressure (like an airplanes pressure cabin), would the blimp still rise and float and why would helium balloons inside of that pressurized volume still expand?