Eclipse Phase

Ah, I so do love gaming. Every once in a while there’s a game that grabs me not just because of the Game Master’s description, but because of the world and concept alone. Eclipse Phase is one of these.

A ghost morph with chameleon skin that shows up in the book.

The game boils down to a few things:

• The human consciousness and personality have been digitized. You are now software.
• Your bodies are interchangeable cases for your personality. You will now be put into a body that fits your job description perfectly.
• Transhumanity (for that is what we are now called) has created artificial intelligence that managed to wipe out most of the population. One in eight survived the culling down on Earth, which is now a blasted, infectious ruin.
• Your basic interaction with the world of information is filtered by an AI known as a Muse which essentially acts as a personal assistant.

In most senses, the people of Eclipse Phase are immortal. If you back up your ego, you can start from where you left off, even if your body is unrecoverable from whatever mission you’ve managed to die quite inconveniently during. Unfortunately, there’s no real way of telling whether you were unrecoverable or you’d happened upon some information in your mission that you really shouldn’t have.

My Opinion

The idea is rock-solid. The world is expandable via the Pandora Gates, the fabricators, and the limitless habitat combinations.

The habitat that our GM has created for us is Appleseed meets Ghost in the Shell. There’s nothing quite like an apparently utopian world where you can switch out your bodies but the Hypercorp rules all.

A few of my favorite things about the system are the successes, failures, excellent successes/failures, criticals, and moxie points.

The game uses a d100 system where you roll against the stat. If I have a 65 in the skill Free Running, I have to roll 65 or lower to succeed the check. Naturally, there are modifiers and certain things are much harder than others. If I roll doubles (11, 22, 33), I get a critical success or critical failure. Now, if I succeed or fail by 30 points, I have managed to be excellent at either doing what I meant to do or failing spectacularly. I don’t need to tell you that if you roll a 00 you’ve pulled off a feat. 99, needless to say, sucks.

Moxie points are essentially your “oh shit” button. They allow you to swap the positions on the dice (93 turns into a 39), ignore all modifiers to a roll, go first in combat, upgrade a regular success making it a critical, or downgrade a critical failure into a regular face-plant. My two points are precious, but they’re important to utilize in appropriate situations. They only refresh after your character gets sufficient rest.

I Hate…

The bloody character sheet needs so much work it’s not funny. There are so many little flaws in that two-sided piece of paper that I’ve managed to list out 20 things I need to change. These are not small changes, either. I’ll lay a few on you, though:

The offending skills.

1. The skills feel squished. The ones that require specificity (like Hardware: Armorer, Piloting: Ground Craft, or Exotic Melee Weapon: Morning Star) don’t give you enough room to write that modification to the skill. You get the name and less than a finger’s width to scribble in.
2. The psi skills (which are obtained via a virus you contract) are squished in with all of the regular skills. There’s nothing demarcating them from the regular skills.
3. The Muse area has a full stat block. The problem with this is that regular Muses only have a single stat. There isn’t even upgrade information for these standard Muses. You can have AI’s and infomorphs (people who don’t have corporeal bodies and live purely in the digital world) acting as your Muse, so the section makes sense, at least. The skills for the Muse are all crammed together in paragraph format. You get to write them.
4. Gear is crammed into a paragraph like section.
   

   Morphs, Muses, Gear, and Traits.

5. You only have two spots for weapons: a single ranged and melee. My character has three ranged weapons and two melee weapons. The other player is in a very similar position. Where do we put those stats? It’s not like we’re not going to use the weapons.
6. There’s no apparent spot on your sheet for your money.
7. Positive and Negative Traits are not only in paragraph form, they occupy the same little block!

In the next few weeks, I’ll be building a new character sheet, and I’ll likely submit it to Eclipse Phase themselves. The ones I can find on their site don’t quite hit my design requirements.

But, enough bitching for now. Game on!