More reading. I've finished reading chapter 2 (bringing me to p. 78). It seems that the Coalition succeeded where the EP hypercorps failed. They can watch the average citizen at any time without having to worry about the average citizen watching them back. Their nanofabs (called compilers) are kept in controlled territories and are very difficult to hack. By hacking, I mean that the technology can very quickly undo changes to its programing. Nanofabs check the ID of the user, checks to see if they legally own the blueprints (called templates), checks to see they are in Coalition controlled territory, etc. Hacking these nanofabs, at best, makes the machines thinks that everything looks good. It seems that the Coalition controls most of the nanofabs humanity has. Apotheosis - The process of replacing every brain cell with an equivalent machine. It takes about a week, but once done it provides many of the benefits that EP mesh inserts, cortical stacks, and muses provides. About 35 % of the population has gone through this. I haven't read any rules about it yet. Ego bridges do not appear to exist, so if one wants to be backed up, they need to under go apotheosis. Their cortical stack (the Mnenomic core), is stored somewhere in the owner's brain, so I think some manner of surgery is involved if you want to access it. Synthesis - The process of injecting nanotechnology into the human body and causing it to transform into a flesh and machine hybrid. The bodies are better than normal humans bodies, but they tend to have a metalic sheen and glowing eyes. About 7 % of the population have gone through this. Its one of the things that currently make me wonder how hard sci-fi this game is. The Reputation Economy - This economy tries to determine how valuable a given person is to society. Anyone is allowed to anonymously bump (+) or hit (-) someone's rep. This system is managed by monitors, advanced AGIs. These monitors act to prevent people from gaming the system. There is some discrimination among different rep levels; in some cases low rep people are denied access to locations or are denied serves because of their low rep. Also the thoughts and opinions of high rep people are considered worth more. They have more voting power, their bumps and hits have more impact, etc. Flash Clones - Clones can be produced in about 2 weeks. Really puts EP biomorph industry to shame. The Mercury (for antimater production) and Mars is in heavy use. Earth is abandoned because the technophage (the gray goo and drones it built). Venus is of little interest to the Coalition because of the hellish environment, but people (who don't want to be part of the Coalition) have built hidden habitable structures on the surface (I think its built on the surface, but the book is not clear on that). Jupiter and beyond see limited use. Planets in other solar systems have been colonized as well; many of them seem to be doing fine. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality do exist. However, in some cases people have died outside VR due to in game deaths (due to some programers tweaking feed back settings up too high). (How hard sci-fi is death caused by a death in the matrix? I think its not realistic, but I'll look into that more later.) Since much of population have not gone through Apotheosis, much of the population lacks direct mind machine interfaces. Instead a multitude of techs exist to allow for more indirect methods of controlling machines. Money in the form of gold is something that the Coalition does not approve of, and considers illegal. They take measures to stop gold mining and refining operations to try to put a stop to it.

I did some more reading yesterday. I decided I would give myself some time to think about it before posting. I was trying to post my thoughts immediately after reading, but I don't think I was getting good results. Chapter 4 - Gameplay Well first, the game reinforces the idea that the game is about the shadow wars. Its a secret war that the Houses allow. In exchange for doing jobs for the Houses, the Houses tend to look the other way when the participants of this war do illegal things. It feels artificial though, as the Houses have the means to instead end all wars and conflict permanently. From what I understand, this game is supposed to use the FATE system. I'm not yet familiar with the system, so I'm not sure how it would compare. The next part of this chapter is the dice system, which I think works alright. They use FUDGE dice (essentially d6 dice that have 3 possible outcomes; +, -, and 0). They use 4 of these dice, so the possible rolls range from +4 to -4, with 0 being the average (and most common) outcome. Like many other systems, you add your skill ranks (or equivalent stats) and add other situational modifiers. Unlike many other systems, there doesn't appear to be a dice combination that is automatic success or failure. Your outcome on a test is determined by the total result of the dice roll. There is also degrees of success or failure, but I'm not going into that. The next part is aspects and fate points. Aspects seems to be factors for characters, situations, environmental, etc that is not normal and could create favorable or unfavorable situations. For instance, being shot in the leg, a broken arm, or having the floor be slippery would be aspects. You can create aspects by spending fate points, you could create aspects if you got a very good result on a dice roll, you could voluntarily suffer a negative aspect to get fate points, etc. It sort of gets the players more involved in the game by helping them to write a story. Some aspects can be acquired through gear, augmentations, or through character advancements. A player could invoke positive results of an aspect by spending fate points (such as wanting a bad guy chasing you to slip on the slippery floor) or the GM could invoke an aspect that would be unfavorable to a player by spending a fate point from its GM reserve. A character always has the option to negate a use of an aspect used against it, but that would cost a fate point. Minor enemies rarely get to use fate points, so they are often out of luck. The next part is stress and consequences. This game uses the word 'stress' instead of 'damage'. When a character suffers stress, it is applied to a stress track which keeps track of how much stress you could suffer. There are 3 kinds of stress: physical, mental, and system (you only have it if you are a Savant). You have stress tracks for those kinds of stress you can suffer. Any time a character suffers stress, it has an option of suffering a concession instead. A concession essentially allows you to negate X amount of damage from an attack, and instead get a negative aspect. In essence, even a wound that should kill you could be converted into crippling injury (something that the setting's medical technology can fix). It should be noted that while stress (like flesh wounds) can be recovered quickly (probably before the next fight), consequences take longer to recover. However, being 'taken out' is far less pleasant. A person who is taken out is unable to participate further in the situation. The person who takes out an opponent gets to decides what happens to the opponent (in whatever way that might make sense). In combat, this could easily mean being killed. However, a character does have the option to cash out all its remaining fate points (must have at least 1 to spend) to decide what happens instead. Regardless, the outcome should always be that the character is taken out of play and suffers some loss because of it (such as loss of life or being captured by an enemy). There are more rules, such as an abstract ammo tracking system (you only need to worry if you fire a lot of bullets in a fight) or tracking and using rep, but I'm not going to get into it here.