A NOTE ON POLITICS
Eclipse Phase delves into numerous political themes; in fact, we start
with the premise that everything is political. Like all authors, we
write from the perspective of our personal biases. Our specific lens is
radical, liberatory, inclusive, and antifascist. If you support bigotry
or authoritarianism in any form, Eclipse Phase is not the game for
you.
Sounds like a good attitude. Are the grognards not very happy or
something?
Can I hate both them and these twerps? BC Eclipse Phase takes the same techie crap seriously that this place exists to mock on the right, to the detriment of the left.
I don't see anything in this PDF to suggest that we should consider it anything other than a tabletop game, am I wrong?
Not every piece of singularitarian science fiction is Bad. Most are fine. It's only a problem when people break their brains and start worshipping the acausal robot god or pumping money and liquid nitrogen into their head collection or whatever
I like Alpha Centauri quite a bit, aside from anything else.... not least as the Big Goverment and Religious person, as well as much the writing pointed out and underscored how much of a completely insane hell on Chiron things descended into.
That seems to have been a result of Sid Meier's influence, I think,
Bit of a non-sequitur, but hey, one of my favourite games so, that works I guess? Most of the creative process for SMAC is attributed to Brian Reynolds, though.
The difference between SMAC and EP is one is written by folks who read singularitarian fiction, and folks who believe in that kind of discourse and are immersed in that subculture, as well as the X-risks one. Firaxis of the period also had better fiction to reference and their references were less... obtrusive.
Sid is famously something of a believer; Miram has at least some of his fingerprints there, I think.
Miriam is interesting, in that her entire schtick and faction bonuses primes you to dislike her, but she isn't wrong, and ultimately is arguably the most ethical person around.
SMAC is probably as good as singularitarian writing gets... not least as it doesn't chase any of the classic shibboleths and plays more with ecology then boopy computers, and it treats non-transhumanists, including religious ones with some respect, and the themes are well thought out and coherent; something which Eclipse Phase fails spectaularly at, as befits a game that tries to fit technoapocalypse under the same cover as technoutopia, as well as it's well noted inability to treat either non-transhumanists or religion with respect.
There's a powerpoint that basically says it's intended to push their bullshit, from IEET. It's literally walking through the classic technocataclysmic bestiary alongside the techie future in name -drop fashion. For context, X-risk discourse was the basilisk before the basilisk.
Plus, it's just crap.
My group has had a lot of fun with it. There are plenty of criticisms you can level at EP but if you want to be an anarchist superspy octopus who kills horror monsters with plasma rifles it's got you covered.
No one with any common sense would stat those things, for god's sake.
and the next book has a sexuality section.... Some Prime Sneer there.... if I can get past the urp factor.
https://ieet.org/archive/bpcs09-cross.pdf
It's basically of a kind with Yud's writing, except WAAAAYYYYY better written (damnation with faint praise) and by someone who has some grasp of RPG writing - it exists to propagate certain masturbatory debates, and certain discourses, especially X-threat bullshit, which, well, it's accurate to say that the Basilisk could be said to be closely related.
They also veiled namedrop a lot of groups in this subculture, including having the MIRI expy literally make a AI god that fought rogue CIA AI gods. There's some prime Sneer to be had in groups like the Lifeboat Foundation; I intend to exploit those veins soon enough.
Thank you for sharing that PDF! I would never have figured that the game had any sort of veiled or stealthy message, other than "Shadowrun wasn't complicated enough; what if we used percentile dice instead"?
I mean, there is point that conspiracy theories and just general weirdness can be fun gameable settings. But yeah, the Eclipse-phase people always gave the vibe of being just a bit too not-understanding-they-are-playing-make-believe about it.
They're up to their necks in the transhumanist scene, in the 'anarchist' variant, so this should not surprise - I have A Rant about how undermining nanocrapola and other magic tech are to leftist thought, on multiple levels.
Yeah, if you want to play magic space octopus with plasma guns thats all right, and magic can be a useful idea or concept to illustrate other stuff, but dont pretend magic is real.
And for all intents and purposes, nanotech is magic in these settings.
Overdone magic at that; for fuck's sake, I'm interested in fields that deal with nanoscale objects both professionally and personally (biology and computing) - I know how fiddly and fucking bizarre things get on that scale, which makes Drextech an insta-fail for Hard SF and hugely troublesome for SOD.
He's the guy who popularized that kind of nanotechnology as a concept, thinking that it could actually be a thing, and suspension of disbelief respectively.
It's worth noting that the guy who discovered buckminsterfullerene, one Richard Smalley debated Drexler and basically squashed him flat about this concept, and that nanotech has advanced as Smalley's postion predicted. Also, that Drexler is an engineer, not a damn chemist.
Heh, one of my friends recently took his Ph. D. in material physics, he wrote his thesis on... Something about nanoscale crystalline structures in titanium-carbide I think? And while most of that makes about as much sense to me as when I talk to him about historical methodology, it certainly isnt magic.
We're literally using nanoscale devices to do this right here... my time on /r/hardware has certainly hurt my ability to take fictional nanotech seriously.
Eclipse Phase is an awesome setting, and has been around for
ages.
I actually think it would be the ideal setting for a third game in
the Torment series (Planescape, Numenara), with the inherent focus on
immortality and consciousness.
I'm too familiar with the folks they name drop to agree, as well as the shibboleths; Yud's style of grift predates him by years - as I said upthread, X-risk discourse was the Basilisk Before The Basilisk. Yud just took it to beyond parody levels.
Eclipse Phase is better than GURPS Transhuman Space, because it’s not
using fucking Imperial and it has space whales who live on the sun, but
on the other hand G:TS has the erotopus as a character option and a
sourcebook about shitposting.
Indeed.... EP instead has the pleasure pod and the neotenic and a whole section on that bastardized version of rhetoric, 'memetics'.
EP has a whole lot of Sneer worthy entertainment; GURPs.... well, as befits the acronym has a whole lotta boring.
The 2nd ed contents. I think either Panopticon or Transhuman (urp) had something.... maybe the core book... but as I'm not writing a mockthread right now, I reallly don't have the patience to muck through the drek that passes as their prose, chummer.
Eclipse Phase is actually one of my favorite games – the guys who
wrote it are anarcho-socialists, and fairly close friends of mine.
They’ve put a blanket ban on the fash on their forums, and their
transhumanism is wildly queer-affirming.
Check out the FATAL and Friends on EP 2.0, it's savage. Basically no major lessons learned from 1.0 and it's mechanically inferior in many ways; I suspect Graham punching out lost them their best writer; I hate EP, but the bits I tended to grudgingly like tended to be by him.
I gotta be honest with you, after comparing my copy of the game with the F+F review, the review wigs me out harder than the game in terms of addressing shit like trauma and disability. But that might be a personal preference.
Sounds like a good attitude. Are the grognards not very happy or something?
Ha ha, my little joke. They are never happy.
Is this like that thing where you submitted a series of reviews of some fanfic that nobody read or asked for all over again
Eclipse Phase is an awesome setting, and has been around for ages.
I actually think it would be the ideal setting for a third game in the Torment series (Planescape, Numenara), with the inherent focus on immortality and consciousness.
Eclipse Phase is better than GURPS Transhuman Space, because it’s not using fucking Imperial and it has space whales who live on the sun, but on the other hand G:TS has the erotopus as a character option and a sourcebook about shitposting.
Actually, better stick with Eclipse Phase.
Eclipse Phase is actually one of my favorite games – the guys who wrote it are anarcho-socialists, and fairly close friends of mine. They’ve put a blanket ban on the fash on their forums, and their transhumanism is wildly queer-affirming.