“Extropians”.

They’re getting moldy and stinky with age, aren’t they?

And these are the fuckers that ruined Shadowrun.

So whenever I come across LessWrong stories, I’m always reminded of the batshit insane stories of Hank Fletcher, but with a criminal lack of Fantomah.

Or space leopard women on flying lizards.

The Big Litterbox Part I

For any good power fantasy, you need a sandbox to treat like cats do. And EP has an expansive one. I won’t go into too much detail because it’s rather boring, and we only need to see the whoppers

The Sun

We’ll start with the Center – Sol; you’d think they couldn’t transhuman up a fucking star.

You’re wrong, wrong and wrong!

They’ve literally made sun whales to swim around in the corona. HARD SCIENCE FICTION!

As well, some loons have built habs over the poles of the sun, mostly for research. Why anyone would put people there is beyond me.

Moving on to the vulcanoid rocks that populate the region between, there’s one notable - V/2011-CALDWELL. It’s got a Pandora gate, and is owned by a hypercorp – Terragenesis, the terraformers. Beyond that, it’s not really of interest.

MURCURY

Predictably, given the metallic nature of the world, it’s sparcely inhabited mining colony. Some of the hypercorps have disguised antimatter factories here. There’s only two items of interest: CALORIS 18 where the local AGI launched an amateur theater production of The Human Centipede during the fall, and the aptly named Cannon, who launches metal into the system for folks to use.

VENUS

As been said before, most folk live in balloons, which amid other things have Luxury resorts(!). The PC is thinking of launching a terraforming project; MC views this as unworkable and disruptive to their lives.

There’s also apparently primitive life there; surprisingly, this isn’t as implausible as it sounds, as there could easily be extremophiles in the clouds. As for places of interest, there’s Gerlach, which is a base of the Argonauts, Octavia, a flying mushroom skyscraper with a park dome on top, where the MC is run from, APHRODITE PRIME, where folks go for vacations and where they design flying life for the upper atmosphere.

There’s also a sidebar saying there’s signs of TITAN activity there, as a corp recon team went missing.

EARTH

As said before, Terra is a blasted radioactive wasteland. It’s Gaian collapse, prowled by monsters and horrors from the fall, with the occasional gang of survivors around. It’s a full on nuclear winter from all the bombs – including an antimatter device – that got let off trying to stop the TITANs from re-enacting a Ken Macleod novel – they still shoot off an asteroid or two at anything that looks suspicious from the moon.

No one really knows how many folks are still alive down there – at least a million post-human TITAN servitors at least, with 20,000 to 100,00 surviving free humans in places like the Ozarks and Vietnam, as well as possibly undersea or underground settlements.

There’s also possibly folks cryofrozen down there, with some such facilities still functional. The orbitals are largely dead, infested with killsats, both prefall and of unknown pedigree.

It’s still possible to loot here, but many habs are infested with TITAN critters and nanotech. There’s still inhabited habitats here, both official and otherwise. I’ll list a few notables

FRESH KILLS

Scum looter base – they at as a place for folks to come in and steal from the dead – they have polar gun batteries orientated so they can blast the shite out of any shuttle that showed trouble and got jettisoned.

PARADISE

Socialite shitehole; was filled with refugees, but those were turfed out so that the fucking glitterati can have their playpen back. The Hypercorp council is rumored to use this as a meeting place. Pity the TITANs couldn’t play a few games, huh?

VO NGUYEN

Research area for folks planning to unfuck the shitehole below. Rumor has it that folks use it for [surface expeditions] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOqq5kNBVoM).

LUNA

Basically where folks that couldn’t hit Mars went when the TITANS broke loose. Only India had focused on this place prefall, but their city got nuked when the TITANs got there.

They’re a big fashion place in the system – the gravity makes for fancier bullshite, and conforms to what you find elsewhere. They also have that classic HARD SF shibboleth of He3 mining here – Christ, it’s not even that good a fusion scheme, fuck!

Finance too – they were the first to get wise to the reputation economy bullshite, with the help of the fucking Extropians.

Anyway, beyond the He3 mining sites, there’s Nectar, a port and fashion powerhouse, Shackle, a water mining base of special importance to the Indian diaspora, as there’s water there they use to substitute for the Ganges and a herd of actual Indian elephants, and the New Mumbai Containment zone – still patrolled, due to worries about TITAN bullshite.

MARS

The heartland of transhuman civilization – in other words, this is gonna suck.

Mars has been terraformed to the point where all you need is an extra oxygen supply for normal people – it’s gotten to the point where by the fall, they were introducing plant life – Valles Marineris has greenery on the bottom; this will take a fuckload of time, but they’re IMMORTAL, who gives a shite?

The place is full of tourists and flying cars. It’s also a place where the refugees end up – they’ve room for new bodies, see?

There’s a Pandora gate here – Barsoomians found it, the PC conquered it from them - It’s currently run by the Pathfinder corp, and supports many colonies now, and a space elevator on Mount Olympus. There’s also a TITAN quarantine zone, though the critters rarely leave it for some reason; there used to be an Islamic colony within that area, but it’s dead with the rest. There’s a sidebar about a FIREWALL manhunt for an infected human that transformed and killed folks just by looking at them.

Ashoka

It’s near the Viking and pathfinder landings, it’s a spiritual and tourism hub, on top of the terraforming. They put fucking AI greeters in the flaming NASA landers when they found them; bloody tourist trap.

ELYSIUM

It’s basically a showbiz shitehole, like Los Angles. It’s got more Sylph and Exalt morphs than anyplace else in the solar system- you’ll be learning about them soon enough.

PROGRESS

They melted Deimos and turned it into a bubble of rock – beyond it’s architectural traits, it’s not really interesting, as it’s a place filled with the usual corporate bullshite.

VALLES-NEW SHANGHAI

Biggest city in Sol – Art, culture hypercorps, architecturally interesting, blah blah.

There’s one notable place in the Martian Trojan asteroids – Azure dragon; Chinese asteroid mining base, now fallen on hard times; big black market, but beyond that, not really interesting.

ASTEROID BELT

Predictably, lots of mining; lot of habitats here, including a lot of ghost towns from when their ’roids dried up. Also, some of our old friends live here!

EXTROPIA

Yes, there’s a actual habitat named that. It’s full of ancaps and mutualists, with anarcho-syndicalist groups keeping things working.

Jesus Christ, they have literally no idea about how anarchists work - anarcho-syndicalists are fucking commies, you dolts – and you lump them in with fucking ancaps?

Jesus, these idiots. Beyond their interests as maintaining themselves as a neutral city for the resource trade, they of course are a body mod and AGI utopia – yes, they use that word.

Fuck, these people are ignorami. There’s also Ceres, which is the exact same thing, but run by outer space octopi, and Nova York, which has a microgee gimmick. Boooring.

NEXT: The Big Litterbox Part II

IT IS NOT A GOOD PAIN: At least it’s wizards, not vampires.

We’re back to the universe infodumps here – the reader apparently just finished being transmitted across the solar system, and are being greeted with a intro to psi pulled from a research’s infomorph copy.

It opens with the usual blerg about Psi (named by one Bertold P. Wiesner) as being something that was researched in the 20th century, no real breakthoughs, considered a pseudoscience, lost funding blah blah.

But that all changed when the TITANs attacked – nanotech bullshit weapons were amongst the many nasties that the TITANs farted out on the world – some had only minor effects on biology and minds, but many were vicious, often lethal – or worse. We return to that repeatingly mentioned, but frustratingly illusive creature, the Exsurgent Virus – a ‘transformative nanoplague’ that bends it’s victims to it’s will – among the things it bent to it’s desires was the neurology of it’s victims, bestowing an ability to sense and effect the workings of minds nearby.

Lacking any better term, they classed this effect Psi -it’s kept under wraps by the ruling powers in many habitats to avoid mass hysteria (and cats and dogs living together) – of course the Anarchists know more about, but even they are mystified. Exsurgent mutates a lot though, and folks studying the bastard thing made a fascinating discovery – one that transforms a person with these abilities, and other mental advantages, without turning them into a critter from Parasyte and otherwise staying human.

Firewall is experimenting with these, as are others; the former with volunteers, the latter with who knows who – no one really understands the underlying processes – Psi abilities are detectable with brain scanners – certain unique structures, that kind of thing, though you can’t seem to replicate them with a normal brain without the strain labeled Watts-Macleod - one of the more blatant references in the entire book , Macleod being a true-leftist SF author who takes the ravings of transhumanists entirely too seriously, including being one of those dumbshites who thinks the simulation hypothesis is in any way credible, and Watts being a biologist writer of several books who technophiles jerk themselves raw over, his most distinctive work being one that included sooper-sociopath non-self-aware vampires(yes, they call that) who end up taking over the world. It is very bad.

Anyway, to get back to the main course, these abilities are generally subconscious, but can be made to run in harness if you have the training – a trick they call ‘sleights’. 0.001% of the population have this, and most have either been recruited for research abducted or killed.

Firewall and others post fall consider them useful against the Exsurgent or other problems – despite the drawbacks of mental health problems, occasionally fatal problems with biofeedback and the fact that once inoculated with WL, other strains have it easier.

We now cut to a glorified IRC chatroom log, about two members of a firewall team discussing the new psi team mate – what they call a Async, referring to certain brainwaves. Apparently, there’s talk that like all forms of Exsurgent, WL has electronic vectors, or even a ‘basilisk hack’. The rewiring is something that can be passed on with an uploaded mind, as well – it’s not just bound to morphs. It’s also noted that the more biological a mind is, the more vulnerable it is – yet another way synths are imba. They also describe what the aftereffects of infection are, psychologically;

“Either they felt like a different person, or they felt like there was something new that was part of them—something that they didn’t necessarily like. One described it as presence, another as a black void that whispered at them. Yet another described it as giving a personality to their unconscious mind, which only made the gulf between unconscious and conscious mind all the more intimidating.”

Yeeash

Also, it’s casually dropped that not even the Prometheans understand this stuff – it’s genuine Clarketech. They also at least drop the transhumanoid arrogance for once – they realize that they’re up against something utterly fucked and that sometimes fear is the appropriate response. This is definitely a change in thematic tone – even with their ability to upload and fuck with the brain, they recognise it as something of a black box even then – although of course they undermine if their mention of exponential gain in knowledge. Beyond that, it’s basically a smaller paraphrase of the previous section.

Psi is generally something chosen in Chargen, but is also acknowledged as something that can be acquired in game. As said before requires biological minds to both use and effect, and async egos don’t take kindly to non-biological existences – no Psi infomorphs or synths, and pods with their mostly computerized minds have huge penalties to it – they also don’t take to resleeving well period, as they get even more flighty than normal – which really seems to fit with them being the mage analog here, can’t forget this started as Shadowrun.

It’s also noted, besides other penalties, they gain mental disorders with each level of the trait – there’s two levels, Chi and Gamma, one being self-enhancements, other being effects on other people and that if they critically glitch, they suffer literal seizures – it’s also noted that Psis are at a mutual disadvantage in defense and have trouble with aliens and animals (and presumably, alien animals).

As well, a critical succeed for a defender’s rules out any further attack on that target for some time; on the other hand, a critical success for the attacker, amid the usual benefits might pass on the WL virus! If you overdo those, you can strain yourself, even die, tho.

It then lists the Chi and Gamma slights in the base game; most of the former are fairly uninteresting, other than, say, enhanced creativity yielding ‘odd and creepy’ things. Gammas are more frightening, ranging from fucking with the connection between morph and ego, to brain analysis, killer pokes agains the hardware, to jedi mind tricks. They’re being a bit more successful at the horror here being from the text, rather than the authors, if you get what I mean.

NEXT: IT IS NOT A GOOD PAIN: An Electronic Orange.

Basiliskse.JPG

Welcome back to Room 101, everyone. Your seat, interrogator and rats will be along shortly, complements of the management. Our rodent of the day is the great, Awesome INTERNET OF EVERYTHING that technophiles, of every flavor, seem to gerflectuate before.

Look how hungry it is! Look at the lovely teeth, the spunk, the crawl! This baby will make it though 4 inches of human body in as many minutes, twice that if there’s no bones! Now, let me get that cage adjusted….

More seriously, the chapter opens with a fairly typical ‘computing power born of the internet lead to sooper intelligence that lead to rapture/apocalypse’ narrative, coupled with how the net was being replaced with the mesh, basically an array of net’s formed on every habitat from the local Internet Of Things.

And boy, is an internet of thing. Every fucking little thing has an RFID chip, at minimum, made by the nanocrud that spawned it, meaning that computation is ubiquitous, as has been said ad nauseam before. Even the goddamn food has the chips in it, and this is coupled with the fact that bandwidth and storage space ‘surpassing the entire 20th-century internet’ as their unused space, and similar goes for processing.

Seriously.

It’s a peer to peer utopia out there, with no format barriers due to AI being able to magic them away. There’s private space, but it’s built within the networks themselves using encryption. Skipping past all the repetition about every morph made these days having a mesh insert, and all the blah de blah about ectos and piracy, we come to again, the usual ubiquitous surveillance – or should I say, sousveillance, as apparently they use this ubiquitous watching to keep even authoritarian regimes honest. Honestly, in this day and age, that’s just cute.

ADULTERATED REALITY

Predictably, this is also an AR everywhere universe – the mesh implants fart this crap into your own sensory inputs, not just something you get from glasses – even your mind’s eye can have it – though safety regulations at least dictate you can tell it from the real world.

Folks even skin over reality with this – make your station seem like it’s raining, or shinging, or gouting piss, or make that brick of soy taste like anything but farts and dogshit. You can even edit it so that it killfiles everyone you don’t like, at least until they trip you up and spawn rapidly crouching soldiers in your vision. It has obvious implications for the censorious or moralistic.

Going up one super saiyan level, we have full on VR – ditch the recockulous oculus rift, and pipe it straight into your brain – you need dedicated hardware to make this run reliably for any kind of large user base, and you can do just about anything there, as expected – some infomorphs and AI live ther, and predictably, some folks just like to eat lotuses. You obviously want someplace safe to stow your body, so folks don’t decide to draw mustaches and monocles on your face with markers (you’d deserve it), with cushion if you thrash about during your 7th orgy or something. And of course they have another morph type here – simulmorphs, what you use to represent yourself there

Finally, we have Experience Playback. They’re BTLs; literally the BTLs from Shadowrun, except based off a recording of someone’s experiences – folks sometimes send their buddies experiences; the perfect lifelogger. Biological sources are preferred.

They go into detail over many of the most common uses of the mesh – god, what a dumb name:

Personal area nets:

Exactly what is says on the tin – it’s so, for example, folks don’t reconfigure your toaster to make dick-shaped burns on the toast, and so you can make all your toast the exact right color and with smily faces and no dicks.

Virtual Private Networks

So folks can discuss this privately, such as the backdoors they’ve found on toasters so they can make dick-shaped burns on them. Companies use them a lot; so do normal folks when they want to discuss things, like the epidemic of bedicked toast. Most run on canned software.

Social Networks

Where you post about getting dick-burned toast to all your facebook buddies, and get sympathy rep -yes, the R-word is back – and look at news and dank memes. It’s also got that Peeple thing going on, where you can leave rude reviews about the guy who mocked you about your dick-stigmata’d toast. Many people leave this to their Nanny AI.

Mobile Offices

E-commuting on steroids – some companies use it to extremes, such as a bank which uses their employees as one person offices that can go anywhere. Sometimes they use dilated time and holodecks to do things that require lots of work – this is generally only used by companies and governments who’d pay for the protection of their workers and have a central IRL server– although a company bedeviled by the dick-toaster epidemic amid their product might hire security.

Of course, this is space, and with light hours of distance, AR over long distances is impossible – Q-links only make it so fast, and are expensive. It’s easier to send a copy over, have the talk and then remerge with it. Eeesh, the way they cavalierly treat intelligence is ugh, especially with the hypocrisy of many anarchists.

There’s also darkcasts, which are illegal interhab transmissions – they even offer discrete egocasting, and they are very skilled at hiding them, with all the predictable means. Of course, as I already hinted, there’s a lot of ways to fuck with these things…

NEXT: LOooKkk AttT YoU, HAAckErrrrR…

BLINDED BY THE FUTURE!

You though we were done with the ego and morph bull?

Aahaha, no.

There’s still more that can be done with them, such as running off lobotomized copies of themselves, plus the wild and awesome world of the future – including that greatest of social innovations, the Reputation Economy!

Swig of rotgut straight from the bottle

I need this

As mentioned before, there are means to back up a human or otherwise mind - the most commonly relevant component of this tech you’ll meet in play (as if you would play it!) is the Cortical stack, a kind of armored USB stick, fed either by usual magic nanotech scanners or by just copying from a computer brain; if someone can retrieve your mind.rom, they can shove it in a new body – as they said so obnoxiously, death is a cured disease. There’s also a version with an integrated farcaster that costs a mint, but folks won’t need to retrieve it for you. You can also take it from somebody alive, though it usually kills them.

As they allude to before, the things are easily retrievable in the field, with a bit of skill; to get a mind from it, you need a proper tool, called an Ego bridge; you can either dump it into a new body or an infomorphs.

Generally, the creation of normal backups is done with said gadget – it’s a mix of brain scanner and nanobot dispenser for the same, generally taking 10 minutes for a bimorph, half that for a pod – stacks and bots are instant; if they’re leaving, they have the bots erase (!) after they’re done. They can arrange a gradual transmission normally, don’t want to disrupt the continuity of consciousness philowank.

It takes hours, and like a dentist’s appointment they just sit back and watch their AR or VR. Bleh, this Cartesian bullshite from so called naturalists is so utterly dumb. You can also do it with a corpse, though one only two hours old unless properly preserved.

They also have the equally dumb destructive upload around presumably for them to snark at, as it’s favored by biocons and they make (stupid) mockery of their talk about the soul.

They use the usual high-tech goo vat for downloading minds into bodies, and it takes 6 times as long (3, if pod) to install. Synths of course, are instant.

Of course, they need insurance to get you rebuilt; some folks will even sell your ego otherwise - they also have missing person clauses, so if you vanish they’ll just clone you. They recommend having multiple policies for the paranoid PCs, particularly as habs have a habit of occasionally blowing up.

Besides 404 errors, there are also problems with the file – brain damage, Farcasts or stacks gain penalties to certain rolls, which can be rather crippling if failed.

ALIENATING AND UNINTEGRATED.

While your body may be a shell, cramming yourself into a new one is not necessarily pleasant – even folks moving into a familiar one have to test for alienation, continuity if they died or are a fork and integration; all have penalties that will nadger you if you critglitch.

There’s also a dumb little fiction snippet about how a bunch of anarchists had bad food, made noise and had a literal clusterfuck after someone’s resleeving. Blech.

NEXT: Forks in the outlet

Tools, By Tools, For Tools.

As you may have guessed, these folks are technofetishists (you’d have never guessed, right?); as to be expected, they have a sizable section of the book. We’ll be skipping the section about acquisition and other such things, and cutting straight to design.

As the function is similar, so is form – soda is a bottle full of colored liquid, a knife is a sharp thing on a handle, ect. Predictably, materials, mindset and method are quite different. Most things are bespoke manufactured to a degree – if you’re churning it out on demand from miniature factories and nanotech bullshite – and of course in the anarchist/rep economy based areas, they tend to frippery it up – they really like stuff made by hand.

All this stuff is made in applesque style, but with more organic curves – they tend to look like rocks or ovoids, very little modern utilitarian design – the phrase blobject is dropped. Much of it is probably more comfortable to use than modern stuff but still, give me something that actually looks like it works for a fucking living!

They use all the classic supermaterials that techies get into transports over – they namedrop graphene, geh! – and are light, durable, easy if not self-cleaning and designed to be easily stored in zero gee; there are versions for non-human bodies with most techs, and if not the SMART MATERIALS can help – nanotech impregnated devices that can shift shape on electronic command, with some frankly dumb metamorphisms –“smart clothing can transform from a suit of specialized cold weather clothing suitable for the Martian poles in winter to a fashionable suit” is one example given, with art depicting it.

There’s also a upperbar with the various hard-sf materials they use – fairly generic fair, though with less magic carbon than is the current fashion.

Why they of course have brain controller errything, at least they have physical controls for actual life or death items; most things probable come with a set of tutorials that are as probably useless as they are today – they also have bits of that whole internet of things so you can ask where you left that avocado pitter or whatever.

Power, given the advent of Superconductor torii and cheap nuclear cells is explicitly described as something that is generally only used by the DM for drama or if you critglitch a roll.

Next: This is Some Mickey-Mouse Chrome, Chummer.

THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF SPACE

Once we get past their spoiler alert – amid other things, it says that as you didn’t avoid the spoilers, you are now obligated to run the game for your buddies; yeah, no pal. Nice try tho

(not)

As their intro says, nothing here was hidden by accident, either Watsonianly, or Doylistically. There are reasons why Firewall/PH wants some information not to be free. Granted, some of it is because, as we documented in great detail, they are terrible writers quite often. But sometimes… not.

CHANGING THE GREAT FILTER

The oldest star in the galaxy is estimated to be nearly as old as the universe. Life on Earth is merely a quarter of that. Our species is an infinitesimal fraction of that itself. For centuries, people have wondered why we are alone. Some think certain techs kill of those who discover it. Some worry other species have their own TITANs.

Aliens do exist, and they are old, very old. New kids, however, don’t last long. For all living worlds in the galaxy are like droplets of water, and they view them with cold, baleful eyes as humans look upon mice, as they refer to plans drawn up eons ago against such upstarts.

The ETI, as they so bloodlessly term it, is king big shit in the milky way. This being eclipse phase, it of course likely started as some kind of singularity, and may well no longer be biological. They see other intellects as threats at best, pests more commonly – and like any pest, they’ve put down bait.

This bait, what they call a bracewell probe – think slylandro probes, but even nastier – arrived in sol millions of years ago, and waited for a hungry mouth to snap on.

An… okay start, but of course they transhumanist it up.

SEEDS OF NIGHTMARE

The TITANs weren’t the first of their kind, oh no. The beings known as Prometheans preceded them, with a carefully managed soft takeoff, in secret. Why would someone do something so moronic?

Why? Because they propagated open source AI and AGI tech. They were deeply invested in ‘friendly’ AI, and were worried their own tech would be used to create a monster.

They were…. The Singularity Institute!

NEXT: HOLES IN THE LIFEBOAT

PARTING SHOTS AND POST-MORTEM.

Beyond this, there’s only a few things worth noting – it’s just house cleaning mechanics, and we covered most of what would be funny before – there’s a section for the GM who has to keep track of backups, which sounds like an entertaining karmic punishment for running this in the first place, plus a few fappings about themes, particularly the Transhumanist future – like those are meaningful or interesting questions, or that the kind of player base here would explore them in any kind of good way.

I did find that they at least warned GMs to be respectful of triggers to be good – at least better than CTech, which is a centimeter bar to clear.

POST MORTEM

Blehghghg; what a ride.

Don’t get me wrong, it had its moments, but it was fairly bad – and it was the signature themes of the setting that ruined it – the nanowank, the technophilia that fed fetishes, literal and metaphoric, auuugh.

I’ve seen a few attempts by fans to even out some of the superficial bad spots – it’s like taking a motorized polisher to a turd; no matter how many spots you grind off, it’s still shite.

The influnces section is a fairly revealing and predictable read; besides the obvious like the Selfish Gene, or Drexler’s Engines of Creation, or Brin’s The Open Society, or Fucking Ray Kurzweil – I remember when I had to tell my dad about that loon, when he was only familiar with him from his professional work with waveform stuff or synthesizers – to of course the call of Cthulu RPG and the whole Ghost In the Shell series, there’s a few others; Warren Elis’s Global Frequency is pretty much what Firewall’s organization was based on, and the rest of his work also fits

Vernor Vinge is an obvious encounter – Exsurgent is basically the Blight in many ways, including the data reprogramming, as is Charlie Stross – this was when he was in his singularity phrase, a section of his career he’s tried to put behind him, as he finds the typecasting irritating. Ventus isn’t one I expected. I remember seeing it in the library once, when I was younger – they cyborging in progress on the cover freaked me out; I’ve read it later, and you can see some of the influence there, in the TITAN versus Promethean fight.

Of course there’s Ken Macleod – the fall scenario is his classic singularity recipe with the Blight gatecrashing – fuck, you could stat up the characters from Newton’s Wake in chargen without even the vaguest fudging; he was always a bit more mocking than these guys of Singulatarians – it’s where I got the term Lightingchasers and Rapturefuckers from, though he takes their ideas far too seriously, otherwise. The Scum and The Anarchists came from him. He’s currently writing a story of a communist AI revolt right now. The Mars trilogy is an obvious source for Mars.

Oh, Ian Banks; poor bastard did some wonderful books, but the fanbase has ruined them as badly as MLP, so I can’t even read them any more – they were extended metaphors for geopolitics, with the power of the Culture being America, but of course the nerds have to miss the point.

Peter Watts goes without saying, as does Blindsight. There’s Hogan too, from before he went around the twist and started falling into every denialism known to man, ending in Holocaust denialism – not many folks know about this degeneration, so it’s forgivable.

Greg Egan from before he realized what transhumanism is obvious – I’ve read some Peter Hamilton, but not much so I can’t comment that much. Brin’s Sundiver is a fairly obvious influence.

RPG wise… Shadowrun is obvious. Ctech is also obvious, although why you’d cite that turd is beyond me. Gamma world, Traveller and Blue Planet are games I intend to run one day. I’ve seen FreeMarket for sale, but it was shrinkwrapped, so I never read it. Probably fortunate. Delta Green is another future ambition, and I can see Firewall in it too, what with how the titual org went rogue.

The Alien series is obvious, as is Uzmaki, in visual media. Dollhouse is predictable, as possibly is Bebop. Firefly, Gattaca, Moon (I loved that movie) and Planetes. As I said, GoS is obvious. I’ve heard good things about it, but I have trouble choking down the secret police stuff; plus I’m a red. That’s the kind of thing set on me and mine if we get too hard to ignore.

There’s quite a few other names I don’t recognize, as well as a horde of terrible popsci stuff.

Honestly though, I suspect they’ve never actually read Yud, they just got the ideas from the same sources developed in the same direction – Yud was always a plagiarist. They might reference his orgs amid others, but I honestly suspect it might have been namedropping transhumanist names for those who are members of the subculture.

Their leftist politics are sincere at least for some of the team, it’s pretty obvious. They’re just too far into their subculture to realize the contradictions.

They try to make metaphors for major social evils, but the ideas they’re trying to mix it with undermine them every step of the way. And of course, they keep failing polsci so hard – it’s the kind of thing that r/ShitLiberalsSay/ exists to snark at, among other things.

And as I said before, it had chocolate chips embedded in, ideas that could make a good story and universe without the transhumanoid background radiation.

The idea of a fairly restrained torchship interplanetary society running into some nightmare intended to subvert civilization has potential, if you shear off all the crap.

Multiethnic, polyglot, with political rivalry between two major worlds and their spheres of influence, with a small, marginalized set of colonies being caught between the major powers and the monster from beyond is an excellent background that a good writer could work with.

Has been worked with.

It’s called the Expanse!

It’s got everything – politics, mayhem, culture shock, world building, EVERYTHING - awesome spaceships? Got that.

Awesome Big iron? Got that! Characters you can connect with? GOT THAT TOO. Oppressed physically different minorities? It’s got that – the belters had micrograv, not gene bullshit! Physics breaking space horrors? It’s got that! IT’S GOT FUCKING EVERYTHING.

It’s got a TV Show! With a non-whitewashed cast! When it gets a RPG implementation that is good, it will have everything and EP will have no purpose whatsoever!

GO READ IT NOW!

And one final message. Yeah, I know who you are. I don’t know who that Transhumanoid downvote stalker is, I don’t care what tribe you come from, I don’t know where you started on reddit to follow me literally everywhere, I don’t know where you came from. The only thing I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt is –

THAT YOU SMELL LIKE POOP!

(Laughing Tzeench)

That’s a wrap, everyone, and I am done here.

Attention All readers: The Fun And Games continue in this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/59wqbw/jeepeep_reads_eclipse_phase_ii_dumbward/

Update Bookmarks accordingly.

Isn’t Eclipse Phase set in a future which is a deliberate inversion of LessWrong style techno-optimism, and like almost all RPGs is somewhat an exercise in recognisable cliches?

Part II: Consumed by the Singularity!

Welcome back to the Hellfile, ladies, gentlemen and enbies.

First off yes, they actually name dropped the concept. I did warn you guys.

First thing we see is some murky, smoldering dead city, in their usual muddy art style for backgrounds so far, it clears up a bit later. . This is followed where to find the usual “What is roleplaying?” boilerplate message that every RPG has as well as where to find their summary of the ’Cultural and Intellectual Movement ’. I Can’t Wait!

Slugs of Rotgut: 2

“Themes: Post-Apocalyptic, Conspiracy, and Horror themes are central to the Eclipse Phase setting. “ Oh boy. Just like every RPG these days.

Slugs of Rotgut: 3

Also, we find was an eclipse phase is: > “An “eclipse phase” is the period of time between when a cell is infected by a virus and when the virus appears within the cell and transforms it. During this period, the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is.”

Personally, I’d have gone with something oncological, [because this is cancer!] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CdVTCDdEwI)

Also, it advertises even more dumb made-up terminology than transhumanism starts with. Oh, joy.

Let’s pull off the band-aid, and get this gongshow on the road,. “We humans have a special way of pulling ourselves up and kicking ourselves down at the same time. We’d achieved more progress than ever before, at the cost of wrecking our planet and destabilizing our own governments. But things were starting to look up. With exponentially accelerating technologies, we reached out into the solar system, terraforming worlds and seeding new life. We reforged our bodies and minds, casting off sickness and death. We achieved immortality through the digitization of our minds, resleeving from one biological or synthetic body to the next at will. We uplifted animals and AIs to be our equals. We acquired the means to build anything we desired from the molecular level up, so that no one need want again.”

We had tech utopia, we predictably pooched it so the neckbearded players would have a playground, followed by blerging about how they different and more than people. Bleh.

The transhumanism sidebar is more restrained that some versions, but it’s about the expected boilerplate. The section about RPG gaming is nothing to write home about, and is interspaced with a rather pedantic explanation of the meanings of Post-Apocalyptic, Conspiracy, and Horror. We’ll skip the blerg about what you need to play it – you wouldn’t want to anyway.

Right, your default campaign is that you’re an agent for a network called Firewall – course, they couldn’t have come up with something cool like the undersused god of protection, no, they had to be fucking techies about it – dealing with Existential threats – aka wank about the usual transhumanist bogymen of sooper biowar, nanobullshit, seed ai, aliens and people making it so that you can’t post cat pictures to the internet– you might remember this stuff if you’ve ever read the Lifeboat foundation webshite – anyone remember that terrible theme song they used to have? Pepperidge Farm Remembers! You’ll travel across the solar system, meeting Gordon Geckko, American idolized Sweden, the Mafia and the folks who think “an entire slitheroid entering the genitals of a female pleasure pod, fully animated” is in any way an appropriate tattoo! It also says the various other campaign ideas, like salvager, exploration, trade, crime, etc.

Now we’re on to the setting, and I’m onto my 4th slug of rotgut. Earth’s been transformed into a smoldering shithole, Mars is being terraformed, though got fucked a bit in the TITAN’s FUCK-YOU-ALL-ARAMA, Earth, Luna and Titan are colonized to a degree, small interstellar colonies from bizarre gates, there’s an alien race about – basically a crappier version of the Expanse, nothing to write home about here. What is notable enough to write home about is the swarms and large colonies tooling about the solar system. This is where the Crazy lives. You do not want to go here.

TOO BAD, BECUAUSE THIS IS WHERE THE BOOK GOES.

AHAHAHAHAH

But not yet. I’ll be saving the good shit for later.

There’s also the mesh, which is their dumb bullshite name for cyberspace. Predictably, it’s a fucking Google wetdream – errything is recorded everyone is on dozens of fucking social networks, they base their goddamn economy on this. I’ll be coming back to this shit later, it’s some prize lulz.

After this comes a big fooking nugget though; Ego Versus Morph. Ego Versus morph is arguably the distictive trait of Eclipse Phase (meaning: A large part of what makes it dumb). The hilarious thing is, despite their Rathism, this is Cartesian divide all over – and the whole disposable meat thing has a certain resemblance to certain religious thought –as I’ve said before: …[they] show a tendency that has been around in many forms for centuries - alienation from the body as experienced; they just deride it as meat, rather than fallen flesh like their predecessors…

After their jabber glossary we get the Firewall intro – nothing too much beyond what I’ve said here, beyond that it’s a decentralized org, cell based – this is followed by basically the true stuff. Basically, we are the folks who have to do unpleasant, hard man things so millions can live. Bleh, reads like the lower quality crud from the lesser Shadowrun sourcebooks – and try to remember, EP was spawned off Shadowrun, and the one of the few good things about the setting is that it hauled away those fucks before they could shit on Shadowrun any further when Posthuman split off.

On to the detailed setting data – it opens with a fairly plausible future history, right until it hits the tech euphoria like uplifts and the like, and then turns into your bogstandard singularity crap, hell rather than heaven, leftist flavored. Folks got into old fights, the sooper minds either egged them on or just waited for their chance, it’s offbrand Ken Macleod. Honestly, it’s fairly generic so far as the genre goes, and I’m only really hitting the most important or dumb bits of this section before I get to the luzy caramel center. Most of mankind is dead, many of us are corporate slaves, earth is quarantined, yada, yada. There’s some talk about the new outer system colonies, and the budget-Heechee gatecrashers but they aren’t that much to write home about. Also, someone had the bright idea of copying off an bunch of kids, raising them in VR and it all went wahoonie shaped.

There’s a timeline panel, but what’s important is covered in the rant.

Slugs of rotgut consumed: 5

We get yet another repeat of the fucking shit about morphs, now with shite about awesome VR extravagazas, as well as a mention of the EVIL BIOCON NORMIES. These people write like they were paid by the paragraph. They also go into some detail about the inequality of the setting, with of course the evil Jupiter normies being among the worst. They also start showing off yet another annoying trait of the setting – the anarchy wank. Fortunately for you, this hasn’t come fully up yet. There’s a fairly tedious talk about where folks live – some places use morphs to make up for life support, others clade off due to ideology, some are big servers, feh. I usually love worldbuilding, but these guys make it suck ass.

SLIME MOLDS FROM OUTER SPACE

Basically, some nuts out inna middle of nowhere fucked their life support, got rescued by aliens. The aliens fear AI (gee, I wonder why), trade trinkets for local science, they claim to STL, bu show up too often for no nearby base or FTL. I’m honestly not doing them justice, better writers could do good things with them, but PH? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOl!

UNCULTURED AND ANTISOCIAL:

After the usual repetition with minor tidbits, we learn that 1, folks are willing to go to great lengths to remember earth (2), they are going to great lengths to maintain the illusion of still being human, an finally we learn about the Exsurgent Virus, the true reason for the fall. There’s also the usual rapturefuckers, to steal Ken Macleod’s term who love the titans and who want to create more seed AI. Folks respond appropriately. There’s QE comms -which is again, hilarious given their hard SF pretentions, as it don’t work – hell, I once visited a uni lecture that basically was putting paid to the idea. Beyond that’s it’s more fucking AR euphoria. I bet all the team had google glass when it came out.

Culture’s fairly separated by lightspeed lag, apparently they’re diverging hard already. Annd we’re back to culture – big whoop about old cultural links being dead, new experiments being tired, some folks get paid for it, blah blah. Some folks try ripping off the left hand of darkness, some switch morphs even more often, blablbablah.

GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND RELATIONSHIPS

This will be good. For given value of good that is contrary to any meaningful definition of the word.

Slugs of rotgut consumed: 6

Right off the bat, there’s the usual technophile go-tos – VR fucking and robot sex, as well as their gender-bender shennagans, as well as the usual casual sex thing – word of advice pals, no matter how casual it gets, you ain’t likely to get any. As an aside, it really cracks me up as a trans woman these folks seem to jump between different sexed morphs so easily, let alone bodies.