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My Opinions on Transhuman (the book)

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Chase-san Chase-san's picture
My Opinions on Transhuman (the book)
I went out and bought this. I was surprised to see that there had been a kickstarter, had I known about it I would have likely donated quite a bit. However nothing I can do about that now. There is so much content that I cannot hope to comment on it all. That said I read through the book (as best I could) and have a few thoughts on it. I skipped over a number of sections because I was tired. WARNING, THE FOLLOWING IS INCREDIBLY BIASED. THESE ARE MY OPINIONS. Typo's and errors: I found a number of typos and errors. For example p. 60, Table 6 says D100 ROLL in the header, where it actually requires a D10 roll. Or on p. 57 in table 3.8 it says "Roll randomly on the Choosing a Morph Table (p. 38)" when the table in question is actually on p. 44. Or Page 150, near the image at the bottom, "not cured of their contact with th exsurgent", where th should be "the". For a print book I find these kinds of errors somewhat troubling. Story - Interference: I got bored reading it about the time Chi got attacked. It really didn't hook me in the way that Lack or Melt did. Character Creation: First, I love the alternate character creation systems. Especially the second one. It makes it much easier to make a character in my opinion. Character Options: Many of these options I found helpful. I especially like Simplified Networking. Since I find the Rep system already very obtuse. However Speed just complicates things more. It is nice to finally see rules on Sizes. The Moxie as luck makes more sense to me then just plain Moxie ever did. Playing Characters: A lot of useful information here. I especially liked the section on Muses. A number of questions I previously posited on this forum were answered. Such as "What if you were downloaded into a biomorph that still had a mind." Most said it would just overwrite, but Transhuman provided the infinitely more interesting remnant personality. The AGI information was very in depth, and give me a better idea how to play an AGI. Roleplaying Resleeving was also nice. In my opinion Uplifts have already been fairly well covered in Panopticon. so the extra section here isn't that important. Though it is fairly short, so I have no major problem with it. Morphs: It also answered a number of question I never had, such as "Tell me more about flexbots." I personally have no idea why they got such a large section. I mean really? Are they that popular? The section on swarmanoids answers a lot of questions, so that section is well deserved, if a bit lengthy. In conclusion: It also failed to answer a number of questions I was hoping to get answers to. Examples of how certain social stigma's manifest themselves. Sure they delve into AI/AGI/Uplift stuff pretty well. But those stigma's in my opinion were already pretty obvious. More specifically unanswered questions are, examples of social stigma's against alien/exotic morphs, neotenics (in more detail at least), opinions and views on extreme biosculpting/mods, and how widespread their usage is. I was also hoping for suggestions of play for every already listed morph type, a bit more flavor information, if you will. I like the passing mention of the instincts of the Scurrier and so forth, I was hoping for more of that. I was also hoping for more variant rules to simplify play. The book was rather long winded in many places, particularly places of little interest to me, and very brief on topics I found truly interesting. But to be fair, it was also somewhat long on a number of topics I found interesting.