Eclipse Phase and Pandemic, Studies

Eclipse Phase is a post-cyberpunk transhumanist roleplaying game which includes political factionalism, alien contact, the devastation of Earth by rogue AIs, and travel to exoplanets by wormhole Gates. It has something for everyone in a mostly hard SF simulationist approach, and understandably it won the Origins Award for best RPG in 2010. The books are invariably beautiful, and the setting rich, and the author was not afraid of where transhumanist logic took him (I interviewed him in RPG Review Issue 33). For the past three-and-a-half years I've been running an Eclipse Phase story, and it's now coming to an end. The PCs been to every planet on the solar system, several moons, and a few exoplanets, and now they're staring down the singularity event on the edge of the sun, and Sunday's session ("A Holiday in the Sun") has all the hallmarks of an end-of-campaign chapter. It's been a hell of a trip, and despite some odd crunchy bits to the game, it's been very much worth it. I am, to be honest, a little inspired to pitch a similar game for Chaosium.

It was the second day of gaming in the weekend, as Saturday was our irregular CheeseQuest with ser_pounce and hathhalla. Game of the day was Pandemic: Fall of Rome, which is similar to those in the co-operative Pandemic series, but with a few additional changes to suit the particular example. Our downfall was quite brutal with a succession of unfortunate event cards and an inability to stop an overwhelming takeover of the Iberian peninsula by the Vandals. Overall, not a bad game and certainly one that I would play again - this time with a better sense of the dynamics and the strategy that entails. And speaking of matters of the strategy, the rest of the weekend was spent working on a 3000-word essay on strategy for my MSc in Information Systems. One essay and one short dissertation to go and I'll be finished my fifth degree and second Masters.