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Night10194 posted:Also does the drugs an hour before doing an 'emergency militia call'.
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Aug 4, 2019 04:05
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Another thing I realized, we got our ancoms, ancaps, and right-authoritarians. Where are the Space Trots and the rest of the upper left section of that political ideology square?
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Aug 4, 2019 10:09
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Ronwayne posted:Another thing I realized, we got our ancoms, ancaps, and right-authoritarians. I'd guess the authors just decided that "Communism is a failed ideology!", ignoring the huge reams of soviet and post-soviet bloc science fiction and aesthetics that would be perfect for cyberpunking it up and the existance of China and the Great Firewall (Which is cyber-dystopia now). Oh, and they also ignored the whole contribution of Yuri Gagarin to space flight, and all the crazy soviet space program stuff that should, by rights, show up, because they're still using Soyuz tech for orbital deliveries to this very day. Seatox fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Aug 4, 2019 |
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Aug 4, 2019 10:34
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Ronwayne posted:Another thing I realized, we got our ancoms, ancaps, and right-authoritarians. Tired narrative reason: Their ideology was discredited long ago. Wired narrative reason: John Ademurewa has deployed his enslaved infominds to run whatabout.bat at all people left of Rand at unthinkable intensities. When the tankies get past the signal lag you're going to see some poo poo. Inspired reason: Socialism requires capitalism to reach its full flower before the contradictions can be taken apart. True hypersocialism will thus require hypercapitalism to do so in its turn. The Space Brothers have kindly taken those with proper knowledge of the dialectic into the future so they may enjoy the hard work of all of the hypercapitalists while also experiencing a dolphin hang-out experience, and for those who are interested, water-birth.
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Aug 4, 2019 10:36
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Ronwayne posted:Another thing I realized, we got our ancoms, ancaps, and right-authoritarians. They probably weren't all that relevant when the setting was conceived in 2009. The overarching theme is a conflict between the forces of hierachal capitalism and liberal anarchism, (with anarcho-capitalism as a weird outlier), and authoritarian state socialism doesn't really fit into that conflict.
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Aug 4, 2019 10:51
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Ronwayne posted:Another thing I realized, we got our ancoms, ancaps, and right-authoritarians. its because eclipse phase sucks rear end
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Aug 4, 2019 11:09
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juggalo baby coffin posted:its because eclipse phase sucks rear end Can't we just leave authoritarian state socialism in the 20th Century, where it belongs?
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Aug 4, 2019 12:24
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Intra-left shooting matches (ideological and literal) have excellent drama potential, its the modern day political equivalent of the sin of kin-slaying. The Jovians and inner-system can't touch us, but goodness, the "comrades" pulped our space-POUM in a heartbeat.
Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Aug 4, 2019 |
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Aug 4, 2019 12:44
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Ratoslov posted:And at 1255, he nearly gets creamed by an 'impromtu drone demolition derby'. Come to the outer systems! The cops are all volunteers on ketamine and someone might drop a drone on your head for no reason! Yeah, is there a particular reason we've gone with the "one of these is presented as good and the other as bad" when its pretty clear they're both bad, but in different ways in a book that we know has fluff sections written in-character (to varying degrees of success). I don't think "had to call a bunch of people so no one gets hurt by rampaging drones, all the cops are volunteers on ketamine and also someone might decide to test their prototype guns on you and forgetting one item on a meeting's itinerary costs you a % of your income" takes super geniuses like us to figure out is bad so maybe that's intended. And like LatwPIAT said the details of the inner system one is so over the top that the whole thing has to be a puff piece. It's not very good fluff either way and highlights even more their problems with not having strong enough character voices and not making it clear to people that don't know they do that sort of thing that it's in character.
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Aug 4, 2019 17:01
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One of the things that weirds me out about stuff like HSD and EP is the need to kill off Earth and most of humankind to get their weird transhumanist future. It feels weirdly unnecessary. But then all the 'cosmic horror' stuff in EP feels unnecessary to the actual potentially interesting part of the premise anyway.
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Aug 4, 2019 17:10
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I think the idea in EP is to avoid Altered Carbon (the book) - old money and institutional power is basically untouchable on Earth without pulling a Kovacs and the whole thing is wildly depressing, and it's not even on a spaceship. Works well in the book, likely not so well in an RPG. This is probably also where the 'nation-states are obsolete' thing comes from as well. Quantum Thief by Rajaniemi and Macleod's Newton's Wake are also both posthuman future settings based on 'Earth got eaten by the singularity crash, all the weirdos who went to space/weren't on the main Internet are the main factions and power players now.'
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Aug 4, 2019 17:21
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Some of y'all are confusing leftism on the ground with Left Twitter. There's no pressing necessity for EP to feature Tapatio authoritarian socialism because such movements are thin on the ground. Also, I don't get all the fearmongering over anarchist communes. Communes exist, they have social problems, but there's no reason to rush to the conclusion that the cyber-kibbutz will be a hellworld of ostracism and witch burning. If you want real examples of places where the workers are left to organize production communally, but society is still horribly unfair, the first place to look is agriculture under feudalism.
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Aug 4, 2019 17:28
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Everyone just relax and enjoy the
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Aug 4, 2019 18:45
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I think one of the later EP1 books had a suggestion that there's this horrible gribbly extra terrestrial intelligence and the TITANs were actually helping us by inflicting catastrophe onto humanity and forcing us to adept rapidly. Which would mean, A) God exists, B) He is a Posadist.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:20
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Seatox posted:I'd guess the authors just decided that "Communism is a failed ideology!", ignoring the huge reams of soviet and post-soviet bloc science fiction and aesthetics that would be perfect for cyberpunking it up and the existance of China and the Great Firewall (Which is cyber-dystopia now). 2 years ago I noticed a distinct lack of commies in Eclipse Phase, so I did a homebrew project making Titan more explicitly socialist.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:28
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juggalo baby coffin posted:depends on the scale of the country. england had big cities and still shipped food by horse and cart or canalboat for a long time, its just that a lot of the food was lovely, long life stuff, and the range of vegetables and fruits was very limited. a lot of the breeds of fruit we eat today are ones that were created so they could survive long periods of travel without spoiling. It's worth remembering that ancient Rome was fed by grain from all across the Mediterranean, and even without an imperial bureaucracy in the early modern period western Europe would regularly import food from Poland and eastern Europe, especially to make up for shortfalls and famine, so even before refrigeration and steam power food could be moved across the continent relatively quickly in emergencies.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:47
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Specifically, the late Republic (let alone the Empire) was a complete no go without Egyptian grain. The Social Wars, and the professionaization/proletarianisation of the military meant that Roman plantations focused on cash crops like olives and grapes instead of staple crops.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:53
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Ronwayne posted:I think one of the later EP1 books had a suggestion that there's this horrible gribbly extra terrestrial intelligence and the TITANs were actually helping us by inflicting catastrophe onto humanity and forcing us to adept rapidly. Anyway you could totally do a cyberpunk space posthumanism future without having to make Earth a pillar of unfuckable rage-tear superoverhypermensch. You do this by... not writing it that way. I remember the GURPS Transhuman Space did this, and while I did not ever do more than skim those books, the fluff text for Earth sounded boring but pretty comfy in terms of random person's lived experience. The design reason is probably to force the game to focus on the stuff that they think is cool, which is living on space habitats and interplanetary colonies. By blowing up Earth you also don't have to write anything about Earth culture or national spaces, which would probably be a heck of a lot of work and open you up to being pecked at the internet for getting details wrong. If I wanted to make Earth politically weak and non-decisive I would have had a space colony nation drop some cylinders on key sites. A few of those would probably settle the Earthnoids down nice and good. If I wanted a fuckton of refugees I would also have that space colony nation command mass emigration in some form. If I just wanted to make it so Earth lost a lot of its first mover advantage, "losing a war" seems more than enough. e: I also get the feeling that HSD is the Explicitly Furry version of Eclipse Phase, anyway... spiritually, of course, not literally.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:56
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Halloween Jack posted:Some of y'all are confusing leftism on the ground with Left Twitter. There's no pressing necessity for EP to feature Tapatio authoritarian socialism because such movements are thin on the ground.
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Aug 4, 2019 22:21
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There is power in the factory, power in the land. I'm not sure if space habitats have either of those
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Aug 4, 2019 22:36
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PurpleXVI posted:
What about delta/gamma forks? Thinking about it, the whole fear of indentured servitude seems pretty silly and bioconservative considering the commodification of skills and talents implied by forking technology. Why bother enslaving an actual sapient when you can just license/pirate an infinite number of copies of the Best Cold Call Seller in the System, guaranteed to be literally incapable of anything other than cold call selling 24/7. You would have an entire industry of people training themselves just to serve as feedstock for sufficiently competent forks, and recruitment agencies trawling the infugee databanks for unclaimed talents to copy-paste.
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Aug 4, 2019 22:52
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Halloween Jack posted:There is power in the factory, power in the land. I'm not sure if space habitats have either of those Space habitats can provide access to mineable resources and hold the solar panels/nuclear reactors for the factories.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:12
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It's a pretty interesting space to explore, actually. You could have fork rating agencies similar to our credit rating agencies (with all the shenanigans that implies); full people claiming to be forks to make themselves more employable; the release of a new sufficiently skilled fork could put entire industries and thousands of people out of work, making assassination a key form of industrial sabotage.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:13
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Halloween Jack posted:There is power in the factory, power in the land. I'm not sure if space habitats have either of those Assuming the latter, sure, why not.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:37
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:What about delta/gamma forks? Thinking about it, the whole fear of indentured servitude seems pretty silly and bioconservative considering the commodification of skills and talents implied by forking technology. I mean I think the answer is that that's probably still slavery, it's just more efficient. Specialized forks are effectively carefully lobotomized people-parts, and outside of the context of a person spinning off a fork to do something then reabsorbing that fork, you're wading into some strange and uncomfortable waters. The Quantum Thief has a fascinating faction, the Sobornost, who get really into using elaborate arrays of fractional minds as their infrastructure. E: the point being that enslaving infugees is just cheaper on psychosurgery bills and produces a more flexible asset than going to the trouble of dividing out the part of them you want and copying it over and over.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:39
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Libertad! posted:2 years ago I noticed a distinct lack of commies in Eclipse Phase, so I did a homebrew project making Titan more explicitly socialist. I like it.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:41
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean I think the answer is that that's probably still slavery, it's just more efficient. Specialized forks are effectively carefully lobotomized people-parts, and outside of the context of a person spinning off a fork to do something then reabsorbing that fork, you're wading into some strange and uncomfortable waters. The psychosurgery would be free once you copy and enslave a psychosurgeon. Just a little electricity to keep your 20,000 psychosurgeon savants working endlessly in virtual space. Eclipse phase gets more horrifying the more you think about it, but you get the impression that the authors didn't think about it that hard.
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Aug 5, 2019 00:12
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Joe Slowboat posted:E: the point being that enslaving infugees is just cheaper on psychosurgery bills and produces a more flexible asset than going to the trouble of dividing out the part of them you want and copying it over and over. Well, the point of commodification is that it produces systems larger than the individual actor. A corp wouldn't have to manage forking itself, there would be an entire highly liquid market to supply them. You just hit up the fork emporium and find whatever solution fits your budget. One of the universal truths of capitalists is that they are highly risk adverse, and the risks and uncertainties involved in personnel recruitment and HR is one of the largest risk factors in business. If corporations could use lobotomised skill-bots with certified and measurable abilities they would happily trade away soft factors like "flexibility", I think.
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Aug 5, 2019 01:08
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That assumes infugees aren't wildly cheaper than forks, and moreover the setting is better for play and for its themes if the hypercorps exploit infugees and some subset of them/factions go full Sobornost with the forks.
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Aug 5, 2019 01:32
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Part of the problem here is how badly psychosurgery is handled, in terms of setting, in both EP1 and EP2. It's literally just taken as "okay we delete autism.ini and then he's a normal person" or "we find the .cfg file and swap 'disloyal=1' for 'disloyal=0'" and that's that. Like it's described as though we have perfect understanding of every part of the human mind and how to edit it. A better way to handle it would be to look at psychosurgery like the father's mind control abilities in Firestarter, where they can give general nudges, either through very focused forms of therapy, or they can lop out a general section of the mind, and that while they've gotten way more precise at doing these things than in our time... it can still go wrong, and even the most benign psychosurgery can have unintended consequences, often requiring days if not weeks or months of supervision to make sure that no one jams their own cortical stack in a garbage disposal. Or that making a fork takes time and effort, to make sure it has no traits or knowledge it shouldn't, and even then still slips up sometimes. I expect that the idea was to make it trivial so corporations can just go "har har, you are a slave now! because I edited you! in your brain!" but it would be more horrifying and internally consistent if it wasn't handled that way. Because it's no longer just removing the "disloyal" flag from an infugee's mind, instead it's a decade of crushing "therapy" in accelerated simulspace or slash-and-burn in their cortex, meaning that these lobotomized egos in charge of factory infrastructure or whatever might suddenly snap or get dragged into weird behavorial loops that either A) makes them easy ground for TITAN basilisk hacks to get its hooks in or B) just lead to general disasters for the embodied populace otherwise. It also means that there's still, you know, an actual space for non-lobotomized forks/people. So it kind of gives the entire economy a reason to still exist without yanking us into a complete and utter post-scarcity wanksville. If psychosurgery had a few, you know, risks and imprecisions, it would also lead us in a nice, comfortable loop around "what if autism, dyslexia and ADHD are actually just different rather than bad and we just need to tweak a couple of .ini parameters and then everyone suffering from them will A) be happy and B) magically have niches where their divergent neurologies make them superior contributors."-can of worms, by ensuring that it's not just a casual afternoon's work to have the "bad parts" removed from your brain. Lastly, if it was just a casual afternoon's work to remove selfishness, greed, hedonism, sociopathy, schizophrenia, etc. from everyone's brain, there's a whole new moral minefield that the setting seems to casually ignore. If this could be done risklessly, effortlessly, would it be a state's responsibility to cure these things at the earliest possible moment, for everyone's sake? A last-ditch thing? Or something that no one ethical should ever consider simply on principle? Where does someone's freedom to sanctity of mind get trumped by my freedom not to have to deal with sociopaths, narcicissts or pyromaniac arsonists? Like if they really want to get all in on the post-scarcity wank, they need to have these conversations, or at least show the class that these conversations were had and a conclusion was reached, by various in-game factions. Hell, just access to psychosurgery with any precision even approaching what the book's has, should have its own loving entry in the history of the setting. You can't tell me that the instant that emerged, it wouldn't be a trigger for all kinds of social upheaval and debate.
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Aug 5, 2019 07:46
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Reading all of this also makes you wonder, how do people in the setting know for sure that they're not in some simulated reality? Given all this stuff laying around it would be a very casual thing indeed to have the GM reveal, no, this was a training module - prepare for re-integration and deployment to the Freeside case to get more info about Wintermute.
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Aug 5, 2019 07:58
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The discussion of psychosurgery and worldbuilding is a huge can of worms given that a respectful handling of mental health is something few RPGs handle well. But Eclipse Phase goes into the "insanity wrought by horror" trope as well as the mental discomfort of not "having the right body." Psychosurgery serves a game mechanic effect of "restoring sanity points," but when you look at the broader implications that's a whole other line of writing few RPG authors are qualified to write about.
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Aug 5, 2019 09:09
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LatwPIAT posted:Can't we just leave authoritarian state socialism in the 20th Century, where it belongs? authoritarian state socialism makes more sense as a way to administer the ravaged remnants of the solar system than nightmarish hyper capitalism. capitalism relies on there already being a functional state in place to exploit, otherwise it collapses itself as fast as it can. it's not an efficient way to allocate limited resources at all.
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Aug 5, 2019 10:56
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juggalo baby coffin posted:authoritarian state socialism makes more sense as a way to administer the ravaged remnants of the solar system than nightmarish hyper capitalism. capitalism relies on there already being a functional state in place to exploit, otherwise it collapses itself as fast as it can. it's not an efficient way to allocate limited resources at all. Capitalism also relies on markets, stunned and impoverished survivors that have been stripped of all property even to the point of often not having bodies, are not solid markets. And ten years after losing 95% of the entire market, i.e. of humanity, is not exactly the point at which they will have recovered. Some of the hypercorps also rely on business models that didn't even exist before the Fall(infugee exploitation, basically any sort of society beyond Jupiter, Pandora gate exploration), so they couldn't really have been founded with solid corporate architecture pre-Fall, meaning they had all of ten years to get all of this poo poo stacked up and functional. EP would make a shitload more sense if it was thirty or even fifty years after the Fall. Even with SUPER NANOFACTURING, rebuilding functional states takes time. Hell, maybe even give the players different time periods to choose from. 10 AF: Everything is still on fire, it's anarchy and authoritarianism as political structures coalesce. 30 AF: We've learned to talk to Factors now, embryonic PC, Jovian, Titanian structures emerge and the political violence has mostly ceased. Early Pandora Gate exploration. 50 AF: Things as they are in the published books.
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Aug 5, 2019 11:22
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That doesn't sound like going FOOM! at all.
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Aug 5, 2019 11:27
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PurpleXVI posted:Capitalism also relies on markets, stunned and impoverished survivors that have been stripped of all property even to the point of often not having bodies, are not solid markets. And ten years after losing 95% of the entire market, i.e. of humanity, is not exactly the point at which they will have recovered. Some of the hypercorps also rely on business models that didn't even exist before the Fall(infugee exploitation, basically any sort of society beyond Jupiter, Pandora gate exploration), so they couldn't really have been founded with solid corporate architecture pre-Fall, meaning they had all of ten years to get all of this poo poo stacked up and functional. yeah like i know they're mentioned to have infugees doing accounting, whose accounting are they doing? and how in the hot name of gently caress is it more efficient to simulate a full personality instead of just an excel spreadsheet? human paralegals and accountants are ALREADY on the way out. we're at The Matrix levels of logic now. it's like a rich guy on a lifeboat trying to charge other people on the lifeboat for food, when he doesn't have any goons to back him up, or special rations to hand out. it makes no sense. the setting doesn't really make any sense. they want to have their cake and eat it, having a dystopian establishment for the players to rebel against, but also fresh wounds and unknown mysteries on earth. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Aug 5, 2019 |
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Aug 5, 2019 11:42
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On some level, to use a phrase from the political forums, "the cruelty is the point"; when systems of hierarchy and exploitation become primarily about the pleasure of being a petty tyrant oppressing and exploiting social inferiors with any economic benefit as just a nice bonus on top. But I don't know if the authors have identified this sadistic-authoritarian aspect of laissez fair, or if they take the fig leaf of "blind greed causing harm without malice" too much at face value.
PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Aug 5, 2019 |
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Aug 5, 2019 12:02
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PurpleXVI posted:Part of the problem here is how badly psychosurgery is handled, in terms of setting, in both EP1 and EP2. It's literally just taken as "okay we delete autism.ini and then he's a normal person" or "we find the .cfg file and swap 'disloyal=1' for 'disloyal=0'" and that's that. Like it's described as though we have perfect understanding of every part of the human mind and how to edit it. In 1e Psychosurgery tended to cause a whole lot of mental stress, so part of the horror of corporate-mandated psychosurgery of their slaves was that it was that it was stealing the mental health of the workers. There's also a passage in Sunward (I think, or maybe it was Rimward about the AnCaps) talking about how, oh, sure, (EP 1e psychosurgery rules also didn't really support the idea that you could just fix things easily. The most you could do was to give someone a ±30 bonus/penalty towards wanting to perform some action - which was pretty meaningless in game terms since there weren't really any rules for wanting/not wanting to do things - but clearly indicated that you couldn't just change 'disloyal=1' to 'disloyal=0'. You were limited to changing 'disobedienceFactor=0.45' to 'disobedienceFactor=0.15'.) PurpleXVI posted:Some of the hypercorps also rely on business models that didn't even exist before the Fall(infugee exploitation, basically any sort of society beyond Jupiter, Pandora gate exploration), so they couldn't really have been founded with solid corporate architecture pre-Fall, meaning they had all of ten years to get all of this poo poo stacked up and functional. Infugee exploitation, or at least the system of indentured servitude that exploits the infugees, existed pre-Fall. When the corporations set up shop in space they decided to and were allowed to re-institute indentured servitude as a practice. This is one of the early sources of the burgeoning anarchist movement in space: former slaves suddenly super into an ideology that is very anti-slavery.
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Aug 5, 2019 12:29
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By the way, what does EP feel about cyborgs and other ways of modifying a body that you were born with? It seems like resleeving takes the center stage, but why don't Jovians want to be shiny-and-chrome? Or, on the other hand, have human-looking bodies with some gnarly biomods? Is resleeving that much cheaper/common/etc? It reminds of a Russian sci-fi/cyberpunk book where two factions in a city were cyborg templars and dudes who did Tyranid-like bio self mods, that was cool.
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Aug 5, 2019 13:10
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 THE NINTH WORLD BESTIARY PART 5 - L&M - Limes to Monkeys Latos  These are gigantic robots who have a portal to a pocket dimension for a face. The pocket dimension contains a place the ancients wanted to preserve and protect, for whatever reason. Apparently the Latos live in the Beyond, or even beyond the Beyond (gently caress off Monty). The Latos are not aggressive by nature but it's difficulty 10 to convince them to let you in to the little realm they protect. If you do piss them off they are able to attack with punches and also gently caress You level mental blasts. They can do a lot of intellect damage to everyone within a mile, even more damage to people within long range (which is I guess closer than a mile), or pick one person and send their brain to an ethereal dimension where one round in the real world = one day there. if you spend a year of ethereal dimension time you permanently lose a point of intellect, AND have to make a difficulty 10 intellect roll or go 'quite mad'. Not very mad, just quite mad. There are no rules given for going 'quite mad'. You can only be rescued by a telepathic friend, who journeys into your mind to rescue you, 'perhaps combating dream phantoms on the way'. No rules are given for the dream phantoms, and I don't know how they venture into your mind when it was sent to the ethereal dimension. Laurik-Ca  internet trolls of the year one billion These are 7 foot tall goat mans who are always found in groups of three and have glowing symbols on their foreheads. They get matched up into groups as babies by their 'dam' (it does not say what a dam is) based on the symbols on their head, which in the correct combinations allow them to connect to global wifi using their horns as antennas. I am not joking. There's a very brief selection of example wingdings symbol combos and the power each gives the monsters:  The text assures us that there are potentially infinite combos, but lists four and has no rules for making up others. I'd have figured that what they would have done is make up a little system like in the videogame Magicka where each symbol is a modifier you combine together to produce an attack, like 'verb adjective noun' or something, so the gm could mix and match stuff and have a little fun that way. like code:But anyway, these guys are motivated by 'destruction', and under interaction it says you are likely to encounter them if you connect to the datasphere (future wifi), which they will use to abuse you by sending threatening ideas and horrible pictures. So they are goat men who will send you pictures of the goatman. Hell yeah. Llaric Scorpion  It's a big vinegaroon who has holes in its limbs (not pictured) which it can blow air out of to play flute music that disrupts your brain. So it plays the theme music from Mind Maze. The text describes it as an amblypygid, which is a weird choice, because those are whip spiders and not whip scorpions, and the fact that its the year 1 billion and the thing is 5 feet long would put it in its own order all together. They're not intelligent, and they live 'Anywhere other than the desert'. So outer space, the ocean floor, a condo in miami, all fair places to find this guy. I'm just being bitchy, I don't hate this guy. It would be a bit more interesting if it was smaller, as the adventure hook they suggest for it is a village of people acting crazy because the flute music is making them insane, which the adventurers have to find the cause for. It would be more fun to have just a lil bunch of whip spiders be the source, instead of giant ones. Lorub  A big red lungfish who some people use as mounts. They are conflict-averse and prefer to flee, despite being big and strong. If you kill one the venom in its blood leaks out into the water and fucks you up, which is what you deserve for attacking these peaceful boys. Be nice. Magathan  I know we saw part of this pic before but this time it's the snake and not the roach man. These snakes are 14 feet long and have two heads; one real and one ethereal. They are SUPER PSYCHIC and build beautiful glittering cities that for some reason they hide using illusions so nobody else can see them apart from other psychics or guests they let in. They like to disguise themselves as human traders using their psychic powers, and can speak any language. They love to trade, but unfortunately also love the taste of human flesh, so gently caress you. Magmid  gently caress the magmids, i'm tryna hit the magloud These are mysterious robots of mystery who dig and maintain mysterious tunnels whose walls are engraved with a mysterious dead language. The tunnels meet in mysterious 100-sided nexus chambers where mysterious things happen, like there being no gravity, or some other physical laws are 'out of whack'. If you ask the mysterious robots questions they will ignore you, and if you keep asking they will attack you. They're here to maintain the mysterious tunnels after all, and you're trying to damage the mystery. Marteling Whale  we did not buy a bunch of keith thompson art and then think up a much less good backstory for it!!! stop saying that!!! Whales who live on the surface and only go underwater once every 10 years for mating season. For some reason this makes people think it's a good idea to build their cities on the back of them. Well, I guess 10 years IS enough time to build the entire Eclipse Phase status quo ooooooooooohhhhhhh. They feed by keeping a big poopy rock (the 'odor stone') in their mouth, then they open up their mouth and the poopy rock attracts a bunch of birds to it, then the whale closes its mouth. Genius in action. I don't know why this is a monster with stats for fighting it instead of just a minor setting in some splatbook. Whatever I guess. Memora  A standard 'eat and replace' shapechanging monster. You've seen em before, you know em, you love em. These ones are mostly notable for their loot being evil ketchup that lets you turn into anyone you eat. Seriously.  Merkadian Soldier  'merkadian' was something from magic the gathering when I was a little kid, I swear Cyborg death knights fighting a war long since over. If you don't behead them and loot all their items they will regenerate over the course of a day and look even more corpsey. They can talk in the language of their corpse body and claim to be soldiers of the Grand Orbital Territory of Merkadia, a place which no longer exists. If you trick em you might be able to form a brief alliance. They can turn invisible, have a sword, and can 'project a detonation'. There's a sidebar about a GM INTRUSION where one of the items the players loot is cursed and begins to infect the player who has it. Metallic veins form on their skin, and their dreams fill with scenes from a war outside the atmosphere. If the player doesn't throw away the item the GM takes control of their character permanently, BECAUSE gently caress YOU IF YOU THOUGHT AN INTERESTING PLOT COULD HAPPEN. I mean, who would want to roleplay that scenario out and uncover the mysteries of the Grand Orbital Territory of Merkadia, in a setting where it's just chill to be a cyborg from character creation onward? Monty Cook claims CONSTANTLY in the Numenera books that this is a game about exploration, discovery, and roleplaying, not just combat, but all this poo poo is written like it's just monsters to fight in a bog-standard dungeon crawler game. It's so annoying. There's a creature in Bestiary 2 who pulls the same trick on people, metamorphosing them into a member of a race who was genocided millions of years ago but keep coming back for revenge. You lose your character on that one too. Minnern  Do you remember the cute hermit crab from the last post? This is the same guy, except it can also touch you to give you the Numenera equivalent of ability drain. They're blobby boys who make their home/armour out of numenera bits, and they love to scavenge and eat numenera bits also. It's notable that the description paragraph at the top of the entry describes them as 'Intelligent beings with a fairly good understanding of numenera', but the Interaction entry describes them as only 'relatively intelligent'. They have a fairly good understanding of ancient super-science, but are only relatively intelligent. Ok. They're peaceful but they get upset if you take their numenera, understandably. It's kind of almost a monster who only makes sense as a combatant in some kind of... standard loot-based dungeon crawler. Mlox  There was a gag in an pretty bad episode of Dr Who where this dickhead guy tagged along to the future and got the future version of the internet installed in his head, and snapping his fingers made a little hole open up in his forehead so his brain could connect or whatever. They made that into a creature in this. They are pretty neat though. They're a player race option in a later book, and they're actually robot brains inside biological bodies. On command they can open up their forehead to reveal a third eye that shoots laser beams and gets level 10 perception and faster reflexes. Apparently they keep their existence a secret, which I don't really understand, cause you'd figure in this setting a person with a robot third eye would just be assumed to be a cyborg like how everyone else seems to be. It's like a guy trying to pretend not to be an alien while he's in the star wars cantina. Buddy, nobody cares. Get over it. They don't even have a sinister secret person, they're just Some Guys. Morl  It's an ooze whose unique thing is if a few of them are together, anyone caught between them gets hit by bioelectricity that can stun them. It's not very inspiring. ----- Because this batch is not very inspiring, I'm going to reach ahead in the book to bring out one of my absolute favourites that hopefully will show everyone why I bothered to do this book in the first place. I've vetted the rest that would be in the same group as this guy and there are other good ones in there, so I'm not just robbing Future Peter to pay Past Paul. Odlark  look at his friendly face! Odlarks are big (larger than human) caterpillar guys with 'serene' faces who live together in communities that can be on the surface, underground, or out in space. They're very friendly, and make up for their lack of hands with telekinetic powers. Their technology is all based around organic nanomachines called 'grup' that they culture in big vats. They can make anything out of grup, although whatever it is will end up looking slightly translucent, slightly melted, and will smell of ale. So basically the grup is a kind of nanotech yeast that they culture like a brewery, but the beer it makes is 3D printed goods. They are curious and intelligent creatures who are happy to talk about any topic, and like to trade their custom made grup items to people. They can use their telekinesis to fly like a wish dragon, and even levitate up to 5 friends with them. They believe they were originally from outer space, but settled on earth some time in the past. I like the Odlarks a lot, friendly grub people who have their own unique, weird technology, are just interesting and mysterious enough, without having to throw the word 'mysterious' or 'unknown' in there a hundred times. They also fit with the game's overall theme of exploration, and the fact that the world is meant to be this vast and ancient place full of different types of people and technology and ruins. Too many of the creatures in the book feel to me just like straight future palette swaps of stock fantasy monsters. One mysterious ancient robot obeying forgotten orders is the same as another. But the Odlarks are cute and unique, and I wish they were a player option. You might think they're too bizarre, but on the next batch there is something that IS a player option, that you really wouldn't expect to be one. NEXT TIME: EVIL BABIES, EVIL PETS, AND EVIL ROCKS! ALSO MORE KEITH THOMPSON ART!
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Aug 5, 2019 13:18
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