Hi everyone! New to the forum, thanks for the help.
I first saw EP based on its reviews on amazon and read a little into it. I put it on my wish list and my dad bought me a hard copy for christmas. My group just picked / rolled characters yesterday and I'm trying to decide how to break everyone into the game. I want to run the Glory and Think Before Asking adventures, but also have a few concepts I wanted to run by everyone here and flesh them into actual adventures. They came to me immediately on reading the core rules, but they're too immature to actually throw the players at them yet.
1)The idea of forced torture XP on a broad population seems like an interesting threat to me. At first, I thought the general mesh would be way too secure to just hack people's inserts and start forcing the XP playback. That made me realize it would have to be done to the victims from inside their security perimeter. How would someone get inside their security perimeter? It would seem you'd need to mess with their actual morph. That got me to thinking about a rogue body bank / resleeving tech that is putting backdoors into every morph an ego farcasted into the habitat gets. I'm thinking the technician is actually a submissive in a sado-masochistic relationship with the real villain, a psycho-surgeon that's exposed zim to alternating torture and tasping treatments to the point of addiction. Now the surgeon has compelled zim to upload a fork of the surgeon into a backdoored ghostrider module of every morph the bodybank processes. The surgeon is on a complete power trip of dominating large groups of egos and no one can identify yet how the XP is penetrating so many victims. As a complication for the players, this habitat they're being sent to investigate isn't their native one, so they very well may ego-cast into a compromised morph. What's the forum's ideas on how to build this out into a playable scenario and any pitfalls to the feasibility that I need to hammer out?
2)The second threat I thought about was uncontrolled mass fork farcasting. What if every habitat began getting unplanned, massive influxes of egos being forked to them from every other habitat? How would they process the immigration? How do they sift the genuine, intended immigrants from the hacked transmissions? For the outer system, what if indentured infugees trapped on the inner worlds got transmitted outworld to autonomist habitats? Would they turn them away? What if anarchist forked egos got sent to the hypercorps-controlled inner worlds? Would they trap their political rivals? Force more into indenture? Cherry-pick the most talented for exploitation and delete the rest? Again, subjecting the PCs themselves to the experience (adventuring on Locus suddenly to have the narrative switch to "Meanwhile... Hello and welcome to Olympus. We have no record of your planned immigration, can you please specify your point of origin.") In general the idea seems to take the potential of an x-threat without needing the spooky elements of the exurgent virus to create it. I would prefer again to use some kind of rogue transhuman actor than a TITAN or seed-AI. Again, what's the forum's feedback on the feasibility and pitfalls for building out such an adventure?
Thanks everyone and I look forward to participating more in the future.
-DamionW
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New GM adventure ideas
Mon, 2013-01-14 20:55
#1
DamionW
New GM adventure ideas
Tue, 2013-01-15 06:53
#2
towo
For scenario 1, I'm guessing
For scenario 1, I'm guessing someone interested in cracking the case would coopt a muse or AI to correlate data between all victims and notice they all have morphs from the same facility. To add difficulty to this, make the tech be more of a technician and hack /all/ the resleeving facilities in a particular habitat. You could eliminate this by having only one resleever on the orbital, but that would make the location pretty small, reducing general anonymity.
To the 2nd bit: You usually arrange morphs at your target location in advance. If you didn't, you'd just be run as an infomorph in simulspace, and processing capability for that is a dime a dozen. In the end, this is just a spam attack with valuable cargo.
If those actually _were_ alpha forks (which would take some serious effort to universally gather from so many people), you could elaborate on the rather ethical dilemma on handling _people_ who are sent as _spam_. I wouldn't want to butt in and tell you how you should do it, since this would be an interesting thing for you to explore.
Tue, 2013-01-15 10:49
#3
Undocking
1. Well, if someone actually
1. Well, if someone actually wants to watch the XP playback then there are no problems. Person X sells Person Y an XP he wants, but it has an encrypted self-executing script that activates the torture XP. I mean, many XP boutiques might not even know that the stuff they're selling is compromised. Another thing: have a trojan in a large habitat wide notice that opens a hole in the mesh insert's firewall that can be later used for hab wide XP torture.
You have a lot of options for what want the torture to be: forcing someone to experience a brutal beating? subliminal torture? forcing someone into the mind of a captured xeno? Deciding who is behind it and what they want to accomplish is more important than the actual way they go about it. This could definitely be an X-risk.
2. You could have a rogue human actor freeing SIMs in cold storage from the Planetary Consortium and farcasting them to Morningstar, Titan, Jove, Extropia, and prominent habs. Have the rogue use a random generator for choosing the cold storage facility she hits, but again you need to know why she is doing this. I think it is feasible, but not really an X-risk (more of a strange humanitarian terrorism) unless something else is going on. It could always be cover for an exhuman faction sneaking their suicide soldiers throughout the system, making it an X-risk. Perhaps a radical Consortium faction, unknown to Oversight or Ozma, is trying to bring down other large factions by constructing WMDs. Your first idea could very well take place on Venus leading to this idea.
Tue, 2013-01-15 20:27
#4
DamionW
towo wrote:For scenario 1, I
That was the complication I had in mind; that it wouldn't be hard to track the correlation. I was trying to figure out ways that a smart villain would cover their tracks. Staggering the XP onset from victim to victim, interfering with not just body banks but bodies parked in a VR gaming lounges, other avenues of screwing with morphs that people wouldn't expect.
Yes, I realize there wouldn't be morphs on hand, just infugee traffic. I was thinking the egos would be full-up alpha forks taken from cold storage / backup and directly cast out to any and all habitats. I imagine the Martian oligarchy ending up in some brinker tin can, Locus anarchists being dropped into the Jovian republic, and a slew of other combinations. I imagine that sufficient processing and bandwidth wouldn't run out, but smaller habitats not accustomed to the visitors would have a harder time dealing with the massive infomorph immigration. And as I said, it has political implications. Will Titan take action and sleeve all the indentured infomorphs that slip through from the inner system? Will the hypercorps exploit anarchist infomorphs for their ends? How will that affect their cultural stability?
As for the culprit, I'm thinking of a layered conspiracy pointing to multiple individuals. At the very bottom though, I imagine one of two possibilities: a)a savant/genius criminal darkcaster that ran afoul of someone and was targeted for final death. When his last backup was erased, his failsafe set off a cascade of unintended farcasts. With the author of the transmission virus deleted from transhumanity, finding a solution becomes difficult. Or b)a Jovian spy trying to crash the hubris of the rest of transhuman society, leaving the bioconservative Junta in an advantageous position.
The logistics are obviously complicated. It's hard to picture a breach of security at that level being pulled off. I could make it happen by sheer GM fiat, but I was hoping to have a rationale at my disposal as to how it might happen.
Tue, 2013-01-15 20:47
#5
DamionW
Undocking wrote:1. Well, if
Thanks for the ideas! I'll probably use some of them as alternate attack vectors to just the morph bank compromise. As for who and why, I'm thinking of an individual ego on a megalomaniacal power trip. Like I said, I picture someone living in the sado-masochistic subculture whose normal vices stopped doing the trick. They needed to expand their dominance and pain infliction beyond just willing partners and engage in torture of the populace at large, knowing they can start or stop it at will. Their normal submissive is the semi-willing accomplice.
That's funny, because I considered this more of an x-risk than scenario 1. Like I said in the other reply, I'm imagining system-wide breech. Considering the number of backups in cold storage, what would happen if near the full population of transhumanity suddenly was cast in as an infomorph into every single habitat, big or small? How would society deal with the "population" explosion? If just Fall evacuees are having as hard time getting morphs and adapting, causing social upheaval, what would this cause? It gets worse if the problem cascades multiple times, as individuals try and farcast back home only to find they never left.
I had considered the political "WMD"angle, with the Consortium striking anarchist meshes with ego bombardment", but it backfiring as the outer system turned the tactic back on them, but it seems neither side would be so immoral to do this. That left me with the two ideas of either the Jovian Junta exerting bioconservative supremacy, or a rogue individual doing it as a last-ditch failsafe should their final backup be targeted for deletion. The idea that it might be cover noise for some other operation isn't bad, though.
Wed, 2013-01-16 11:19
#6
Undocking
DamionW wrote:
No problem. I have a good time slipping into the shoes of x-threats.
It would be interesting if the culprit had some sort of fork organization like Pax Familia going on. Maybe being a sado-masochist to his own alpha-forks in cloned bodies, then re-integrating, wasn't enough and the other hims agreed. Why not have a bunch of the same sado-masochist running around pulling similar mass XP torture trips across a certain part of the system? The Jovian Greeks, Asteroid Belt, or Venus Aerostats could work well for this.
If it is a system wide breech, then it would have to be a bit more than a rogue individual. Even though this would cause chaos and moral dilemmas it doesn't threaten the existence of humanity. It is just a pain to deal with. Firewall would investigate who did it and what they were up to. Generally people don't stir up shit without a reason, and that is what Firewall would want to know.
On such a massive scale, it would have to be an organization of some sort but having the Junta do it would be a very aggressive move and something the Consortium would gawk at. Sticking to a rogue group may be your best bet.
With both of these ideas, have it happen in small populations at first so the PCs can start to understand the situation and its consequences. Give them the opportunity to stop it. Just dumping a fubar system and giving them clean up isn't very evocative. Build up the tension as the PCs are one-step behind the culprits. If you want to fubar the Sol system, just pull a Manhattan: "Firewall thought they could stop me? Fools, I started ego-casting(activating XPs) two hours ago!"