Editing Eclipse Phase (section)

==Setting==
In the not too distant future...

There was a massive war between first world nations and corporations. This was brought to sudden stop when the singularity happened and a bunch of seed AIs called the TITANs went crazy, took over most of Earth's infrastructure and military assets, and waged a very one-sided war on humanity. A few people went on ice in hidden underground facilities. Some people evacuated Earth by shuttle or orbital elevator, though most who had escaped left by being uploaded and broadcast off planet. Many, many survivors are refugees with nothing left to their name, not even a body to call their own.

After Earth was evacuated, just about everybody lives elsewhere - on the partially terraformed surface of Mars, on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, floating above the clouds of Venus, or in habitats dotted across the solar system made from retrofitted space stations, hollowed out asteroids, or purpose-built orbiting settlements. Nanotech is readily available, people can copy their minds to computers, and humans uplifted a couple of species (mostly different types of apes, birds, and cetaceans) into human-level sentience through genetic engineering.

There are several Wormholes called Pandora Gates (possibly left behind by the TITANs) that link to various other solar systems. They might be tranhumanity's ticket to survival as a species by allowing expansion to various locations throughout the galaxy, or they might be a trap or Trojan horse that will lead to death and horrible Cthulhu-style alien threats. Who knows?

Some aliens calling themselves 'The Factors' appeared shortly after the Fall, claiming to represent the rest of galactic civilization. Who they represent is all but unknown, since the are very mysterious, notoriously tight-lipped about any details, and possibly completely manipulative assholes who want to fuck humanity over. Or maybe they're helpful. Who knows?

There's an odd thing called the Exsurgent virus. It's mostly thought to have been created by the TITANs, but some think they only found it. It's basically everything horrible about nanoplagues and the [[Warp]] that you could ever imagine, rolled into a single ever-changing threat: it starts off as a computer virus, and infecting nanofabricators makes it able to propagate by nanomachine or bioweapon capable of doing strange and terrible things to a body, or even as a Basilisk hack, which is a stimulus (like a sound or a sight) that reprograms the human mind upon exposure. The virus itself seems to be sapient and capable of complex long-term strategy, or it may be guided by unknowable intelligences, as it better improves itself to screw with everybody else through intense body horror and mental reprogramming. On the other hand, it's so incredibly advanced that understanding it would be a huge leap forwards for science, and the Watts-McLeod strain might just be a relatively safe and easy path to functional [[Psionics|psychic powers]]. Or it might all be an even more insidious and horrible trap. Who knows?

The solar system alone contains more factions and sub-factions than your average [[Drow]] city, and they trust each other about as much as the Drow do. They almost all believe that they have the only safe and functional methods to avoid transhumanity's extinction (and make huge profits along the way, in several cases), and/or improve safety and quality of life for everyone. Or maybe they're all wrong, and everything will end in a huge war throughout the solar system. Who knows?

If you didn't get it by now, there's a reason why Eclipse Phase is generally considered a mystery/horror game. It's full of the stuff! If the ethical and practical implications of some of the stuff that can be done with transhumanity's technology doesn't scare you, the Exurgents and TITAN threats will. And the setting itself is absurdly full of plot hooks and conspiracies to <s>get repeatedly killed by</s> have fun with.

Also there are space-whales living in the sun, and all kinds of weird ass fucking to be had. Especially if you join a Scum swarm, or any of the other groups who use the incredible potential offered by transhumanity's technology to do weird shit going from absolutely crazy sex to pseudo-Darwinian "enhanced natural selection" through cannibalism and fighting to the death repeatedly.

This game's setting is incredibly well developed and thought out (aside from maybe one massive hangup; see below) and overall it's quite a nice read. The core rulebook itself isn't an awful way to expose people to transhumanist ideas and implications, either. The fact that the PDFs are free is nice too.

===The Catch===
In case you haven't noticed, there's a pretty big pulsating nodule in the setting's premise and logic, it's infamous for tying the Eclipse Phase forums in intellectual knots. You see, the centerpiece of the Eclipse Phase version of transhumanism is the ability to translate human consciousness into data and copy it between bodies and across interplanetary data links. The operative words here are ''translate'' and ''copy.'' It's the same philosophical issue that people have been raising with [[Star Trek]] transporters for decades; you're trusting a computer to use your brain to make something that kinda sorta acts like you, kill you, and then let the copy go on with its life thinking it's you, all while deluding yourself into thinking the copy that's left behind after you die is, in fact, ''you.'' Moreover, Eclipse Phase goes beyond simple transportation into duplicating and modifying people with egoware, resleeving and the forking mechanics, which makes it much harder to handwave away the implications as Star Trek does.

If you think about it enough, the idea that people are habitually "committing suicide" just to get around the solar system or do a specific job better could be seen as completely fucking absurd. In fact there's a whole faction in the setting, the Jovians, who see it as completely fucking absurd, and they're portrayed as the bad guys. The Jovians are a racist totalitarian dictatorship that commits atrocities, but in-setting they get shat on by the equally dystopian hypercorp-dominated cities because of their "ridiculous" attitude towards 'resleeving' (ie, physical suicide). To make things worse, the process of resleeving and egocasting can be compromised. Getting forked after cast, or even having altered version of yourself take your morph, is a real possibility. And it's not that hard either, many criminal organizations in the setting are known to do this. In the second edition of the setting, it is officially noted that storing a fork after transmission is ''routine practice'' for visitors to many habitats. These issues have been written about in science fiction forever, but the developers haven't really tried. Unfortunately, trying to excise the whole mess also forces you to excise a lot of the coolest parts of the setting (like the crime family that's all forks of the same chick). So if this comes up in your group, you're going to have to find a compromise that you can live with. Some possible approaches are:

# Ignore it. The Eclipse Phase forum does not wholly agree with the philosophical concept that a copy of something is not the same thing as the original, so you'll be in good company. Some people may not have even considered any of this and/or prefer not to think about the implications; perhaps all of the stuff mentioned in the Setting section above is enough to distract from the deep-seated implications. And, it's not entirely impossible that a society might shift its attitude towards the acceptance, that sleeving is merely a change in body for the non-changing mind. After all, normal human beings have replaced every single cell in their body with the resources of nourishment by the age of 7-40 (depending on who you ask) and they are not considered different people or "food clones" of the person they were when they were born. So, accelerating this process from 40 years to an instant is not necessarily a horrifying concept to a futuristic society that has lived with this technology for quite a while, now. In addition, the majority of refugees from Earth survived as cortical stacks or egos in a database. Somewhat contributing to acceptance of the technology.
# Embrace it. The various Eclipse Phase books do actually note that the huddled masses of transhumanity think the more esoteric stuff like forking and egocasting are weird and only resleeve when their existing bodies are about to die, so it's not that big of a stretch to just say that the upper crust of transhuman society that the PCs are assumed to belong to by default is so jaded and decadent that occupational suicide is small potatoes. (This is also more or less the approach to mind uploading taken by [[GURPS]] [[Transhuman Space]].) This lets you put focus on the existential horror inherent to what the PCs do to themselves and juxtapose it with the more cosmic threat of the TITANs. There's also the handful of ways you can resleeve while preserving continuity of consciousness, which may or may not be the escape clause your group needs to get on board.
# Flip the script. This is the Jovian option that gets bandied about so often; ordinary humans just trying to save their souls in a solar system full of Cthuloid horrors that are still ''just'' human enough to enact a twisted parody of civilization while they wait for their TITAN masters to return. The downside of this option, of course, is that you're consigning a lot of player options to GM use only and that the very nature of the setting and system make unaltered humans pretty much suck. On the other hand, most alterations don't require resleeving per se, with the obvious exception of most morphs.
# Treat your digital consciousness as a pseudo "soul." You are a digital entity that is constantly aware of its existence. When you transfer yourself you are moving your ego, not copying yourself. When you die you are "uploaded" via a constant stream that serves as an immaterial synaptic cord to another medium you inhabit. If you're having trouble grasping this, imagine how the traditional "soul" is suppose to work. When you die your mind persists as detached creature separate from the body. Essentially this means your PC will never feel fully attached to your body, but it's a simple solution to what is obviously an idiotic existential issue caused by bad writing and science's rather poor grasp of what self awareness even is. For other works of fiction that do this, look at Ghost in the Shell where copying digital minds is virtually impossible and the Matrix, which uses a whole host of spiritual analogies for the digital self.
# Have the option of your PCs travel via shuttles from planet to planet, propulsion systems like antimatter can go up to 70 million mph and can accelerate to fractions of light-speed pretty quickly. That being said, one may still run into issues such as your uploaded party members being beamed From Mars to Jupiter in ~20 minutes while the embodied ones need 20 days to reach it (unless TITANs developed the Alcubierre Drive or something similar).
# All or none of the above. Maybe it'll be a little bit of each at your table. Or maybe it won't come up at all, because not everyone thinks so deeply about this stuff. After all, Star Trek hasn't been brought down by it. It's just a game and one can entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it.

Philosophy on that aside, there are still a bunch of other hot-button political issues wrapped up in this game that could cause arguments at the table. Some of it is based purely on the nature of transhumanism, and some of it is intentionally injected by the writers. There are a lot of utopias to ruin in the Transhuman Future<sup>TM</sup>, and you had better believe someone is going to get their toes stepped on when you try to ruin theirs.