Tisiphone Cyrin's page

I am about 3/4 through with putting together my Berserker, Signy.

I had initially envisioned her as having this spiritual tie to these big monstrous polar-bear types, which was a 'stock' thing for berserkers far enough north to deal with said bears (and their spirits). Now what I'm curious about is this, the CC "Skinwalker" which is where I see her heading, has this requirement:

When you wear the skin of an animal as an intimidation tactic

during a battle, you may take his move when you level up:

Now...Is it valid for her to have that skin up front, starting out, or is that something you feel should be acquired in-game?

Here's the backgrounding I'd been fiddling with:

Back before the Doom was clear, when there was still a hint of spring to divide the winters and there were stars rather than storms in the night sky, Signy was a young lass of the northern tribes, and perhaps she was lovely then. There is, at least, truth that one man loved her. The two were to be wed, but the day of their marriage one of the great ice bears broke into the village, stormed straight towards the wedding party as they were arming themselves, and took her husband-to-be's head with one great paw. Something inside Signy snapped, and as great as her love was, so great was the sudden fury which took her. She actually wrenched a great-axe from the hands of her lover's father, and went at the bear with it, and that's where the stories really begin, you see, because the bear wouldn't hurt her. It dealt terrible blows to the others who came near it, but it wouldn't lift its claws at Signy, nor even roar at her...The noises it made when Signy struck at it were more like a mother bear lamenting her cub. Eventually, most of the holt's better warriors were struck down, though few had been slain, and the bear continued backing slowly away from Signy, who screamed and struck, screamed and struck, until finally she found one of its knees and it went down. She killed the great bear, and wouldn't stop hacking at it until she was exhausted. The shamans who witnessed this mulled things over and came to three conclusions: the bear spirit (clearly, by its actions!) had disapproved of the marriage, and given the clearest sign possible; women were not berserkers, therefore Signy's spirit was clearly that of a man (or possibly a bear), which is why she shouldn't have married; and they wanted her out of the holt before more bears showed up. Likely, they should've taken the axe away from her before telling her this, but as it happened there were no fewer injuries. Signy bundled her few belongings, skinned most of the bear's tattered and hacked hide, including its head, and strode off into the afternoon gloom, still holding the axe none had dared demand of her. She wears a man's clothing now, hacks her hair short, and whatever beauty her face once held has been furrowed under with lines of anger and loss, but she still answers to a woman's name, when any dare call to her.

I apologize for not being around, folks. I had expected that I'd be able to get on a bit over the holidays despite a family reunion.

I had not counted on another death in the family. I am probably going to be indisposed for several more days, if you have to drop me and move on with someone else I understand.

Just an FYI I will be indisposed and likely AFK for most of this weekend.

I haven't had time to look into the bear sark or skinwalker further, yet, but that is still what my go-to class concept was, albeit I was seeing it as something the character would 'grow into' rather than 'start out as'.

Am I thinking too far ahead in those terms?

I'm not terribly familiar with DW, as said, so any advice on classes would be welcomed and I'll look up what's been given so far.

I also haven't played Skyrim, but I've got a bunch of the old, oldschool S&S writers in my formative years...And among them are Anderson's take on Hrolf Kraki, and "The Tale of Hauk."

Nohwear raised the idea of the ship as "we would have a base of operations and an easy tie."

I kicked back with the idea that "Ships were wealth and power, and the sea was life." and I wanted to see more of that being under threat, or all but devastated.

Nohwear replied with the idea of the ship as "something designed to make the travels safe, or at least sane." and added "Thus part of our adventures could simply be acting as one of the few things keeping civilization together."

And now we've got our setting bits, and one of those setting bits is the destruction of community. One of the reason ships were wealth and power is that it took a community to make a vessel large enough to trade or raid...And it took a community to maintain such a vessel...I assume you mean a ship and not a fishing boat. o let's see, hmmm. I'd like to toss a few ideas in about the ship and its relationship to "absence of community".

Tossing this in for discussion:

In its time the ship was the heart of a community, figuratively and literally. In its time, it was a dragon-ship, figuratively and literally. Now the dragon's spirit bound into the great, carven head at the prow speaks rarely, even when she is summoned to, and she has become lost more than once, too, whether it is the lack of stars to guide her or her own vision fading with age. She is old, and the ship is old, and where once she was the core of a community, now not all of those who sail in her are crew. She can break ice where the seas are frozen, and in this fell age that is sometimes one of the only ways to know when one has reached land...And there is a price to begin each new voyage, a price which steepens over time, but community makes all things easier, and dissent makes all things hard.

Yeah, the Skinwalker is a...Uh. Something class. Meaning, you don't start that way, you have to achieve it, and it can shapeshift or (if I remember right) do extra damage. So something for the character to move towards.

I may be misremembering. I've read DW perhaps 3 times in two years and that linked "how to" exactly one time, which mentions it.

Ships were wealth and power, and the sea was life. One of my first thoughts for 'Norse end times' last night was a scrap of some old S&S talking about Ragnarok as a final winter, some little hoary phrasing about "a wolf winter, a black winter" so I was actually going to propose that the seas were frozen farther than a man could walk from the shore...

I'm not wedded to that, but I do like the idea of a descending darkness, where the sun rises less and less, until the closest there is to "day" is the faintest lightening of the eastern skies...Clouds cover the sky, and those who count time by the stars wander around as if lost, for even a clear enough gap in the clouds to see starlight is a precious event. No crops last year, this year most men ate their crop-seed, and already those with less honor and strength eat other men. There've been children born who are a year and more old who have never seen spring's thaw...

I may be letting a bit much apocalypse from my AW experience intrude. ;) How gritty and dark are people thinking?

I've played AW but not DW, color me very, very intrigued.

Hmmmmmm. Norse and Goblins both sound interesting. I admit that the goblin comedy exerts a strong pull, but I don't have a character in mind...

On the other hand, if we go Norse, I could definitely see a shieldmaiden-type who'd stepped into a man's role when the man in question went down, and is now discovering and having to deal with all of the social side-effects of that. Maybe eventually becoming a bear-sark or (in DW terms) a skinwalker.

If that's too heavy for people, I understand, but I have a real fondness for exploring characters who are stuck in the wrong societal niche.

I am kind of getting the impression that you aren't very familiar with a lot of significant elements of the setting...Or you are discarding them as having little interest or significance.

Serious 'real' AI the way most SF fans/writers think about it has only existed a few decades...The AI Singularity nearly destroyed humanity less than 12 years before game-time. There are no hundreds-of-years-old AIs unless they're alien-made.

The Singularity, referred to in EP as the Fall, was so traumatic that almost every posthuman has a Muse installed in their skull not just to help them balance their checkbook, but to keep them from having nervous breakdowns every time they trip over some TITAN remnant.

You said something about 'in the universe' before. In the original EP setting, posthumanity is confined to the solar system, there are no starships. There are some extra-system colonies via the gates (similar to those in Stargate) but these are high-risk ventures and opening a gate at any time is a non-trivial thing: the gates are surrounded by the highest firepower posthumanity has on offer, including small-scale nuclear weapons, because sometimes THINGS come out of them, and there's just not enough of posthumanity left to allow horrors to come crawling into the only system we know is 'ours' for sure.

Most people with money, interesting jobs, or hard luck have had more than one morph in their lives. At the same time, plenty of infugees can't afford to get into a real, physical morph at all and end up corporate wage-slaves with no end in sight but the promise of a morph...but they keep running up bills at the company store so it's always just out of reach...Meanwhile the Inner-System glitterati put on a different morph for every party.

Many of these elements (the Fall, the Inner System economy with its semi-artificial morph scarcity and extreme wealth and class disjunctures, the incapability for starflight (or even fast in-system flight...There's a reason people beam their egos instead of taking the taxi, and why the system is full of Fall-wrecked habs that no-one has had time/energy to recover yet...If everyone can go Kuiper to Mercury in a week all those places are too easy to get to) are kind of core pressures on the setting...Elements that make it what it is.

So honestly, from where I'm sitting there comes a point where it kinda begins to feel like:

"...Yeah, so I skimmed the Hobbit and I wanted to run a game set in Middle Earth for you guys, except there are no halflings, no elves or orcs, no Sauron, no Mordor, no Dragons, no rings, but I came up with these really cool jellyfish races which are psionic and can fly so if you want to play a game in Middle Earth go ahead and make a character."

If you want to simply make your own setting, there are easier game systems to use, IMHO, but it feels as if you're playing with elements of the setting that are kind of definitive to why the setting is what it is.

I don't mean to offend, I just think there's a point where you go "I'm using some parts of the Eclipse Phase setting but I've yanked out enough big elements that it isn't really the Eclipse Phase setting." And at that point you need to sit down and lay out what the setting you're playing in actually is, and stop coyly keeping your cards against your chest and calling it something that it isn't.

As mentioned, I'd like to play an infiltrator, but I was waiting to hear what other folks were interested in as well.

So far there's been a kind of a resounding silence, coupled with queries of 'it'd be nice to know where we are and how you're changing the setting.'

Hopefully now that that has been...more-or-less...established we will start seeing some character concepts?

Hey, can I put my muse in a servitor bot? I assume I can, but I can't find whether it says either way. I just want to check :)

Muses are AIs, bots are run by AIs...Every campaign I've ever been in would have no problem with it. However I'd recommend putting a copy of your Muse in the bot. Most characters in EP really need their Muse inside their head, providing them with active information, monitoring their PAN for security breaches, running on-the-fly translations and language lookups, etc. Not to mention helping you keep a calm head when the walls are bleeding and that fabber just grew legs and tentacles.

I'll try to have a character concept up later, but it'd help if I had some info on the campaign itself. If you're still getting things together, that's fine. So, what kinds of character roles does an EP typically have? Psionicist, scientist, fighter, doctor, stealth, hacker, pilot, ect.

EP isn't that easy. Like I said earlier, specialization is for insects. Anyone with anything over a 50 is the equivalent of a doctorate in their field, 60+ is 'known' in their field, and by the time you hit 80 EVERYONE in your field has heard of you. At 90, everyone in the system has heard of you whether they are interested in what you do or not. Skill returns start costing hard at 60+, the thing to remember is that you don't NEED skills much over 60 to be superhuman. Here's an example:

Skill A (60) with a specialization (+10 when it applies), plus a complement skill (some other skill that's relevant to what you're doing: say using Academics: Physics to assist your Pilot: Spacecraft) which can be anywhere from +10 to +30 (if the complement skill is also 60+)...Oh hey we just hit 100%, didn't we? But it doesn't stop there. Your muse may be able to assist you if it has relevant skills...Add another +10. If you've got the right tools, add +10 if it's just a toolbelt, +20 for a serious toolbox, +30 if you're in your lab or your garage or whatever and have 'BIG' tools. Oh, and +10 for each of your team-mates helping you. Oh, and BY THE WAY if you want to take extra time you can trade extra time for more skill bonuses.

Wait, we're WAAAAAY over 100%! How did that happen with a skill of 60%? How come every character in the game isn't superman? Because there will be minuses thrown against you sometimes, too. For example, the same way you can 'take your time and do it right' you can also 'rush the job'...Say you want to hack the local security systems before that plasma turret lights you up? NOT the time to take your time, amIrite? The big thing to remember is that AFTER all of the bonuses from all the stuff I just listed, and AFTER all of the penalties (voluntary or otherwise) you cannot be more than + or - 60% to your own base skill value.

But because of the way complement skills work it's MUCH better to have a bunch of situationally relatable skills at 60%-ish than to have two-three skills at 70% or one skill at 80%.

What this means is that almost EVERYONE will have some solid weapon skills, some solid science skills, etc. You'll be 'better at' doing certain things than other team members, but by no means are you likely to be 'the only guy who can do _______.' If you are, it means your team-mates' characters are overspecialized and the team is pretty weak. There are a LOT of times the hacker will want someone with 'some' hacking skills to lend them a hand, or the tactical bad-boys will want somebody who isn't a bona-fide SNOIPAH to lay down covering fire while they make their moves. Eclipse Phase really rewards characters that have some flexibility and teams that can help cover each other's bases. My personal rule of thumb is 3-4 (not SUPER-related) skills in the mid-60s, probably twice that many in the 40s-50s, and a scattering of 20s-30s.

Now as to the thing you're BEST at, sure...It's nice to be able to let people know "I'm an ___________." In EP, you get a lot of different possibilities. Hacker? Sure. Combat Hacker or Information Specialist or Digital Forgery Specialist? Nano-specialist? Programmer/Fabricator? Infiltrator? Security Specialist? Many kinds of Scientists? Social Network Face? In-Person Seduction Face? Various sorts of Engineer? Bot Jammer? Melee Specialist (but, but, this is sci-fi, where are my guns? They're somewhere else when you're dragging your naked body out of a vat that your infiltration specialist and hacker have uploaded you into from five parsecs away, and you haven't even got a rolled-up newspaper to help you secure the room so your buddies can get sleeved up! Nice to know how to use your knuckles sometimes...)? And of course any number of Shooty types.

Lots of choices, hm?

Your typical team will have a couple of guys who can do nasty wetwork, a couple who can hack, and a couple who can do other things of various sorts...And all of them will be able to do a little bit of at least some of the rest of the team's jobs in an emergency, or help them out to give them a solid bonus.

You're going to have a contact named "Chase." I'l create the alias and all later, but essentially they'll be your "handler" for lack of a better word. I'll be adding to some history, hopefully not changing it, I haven't read everything, but I'm working on it.

What kind of a contact? Criminal? Financial? Old drinking buddy? "Handler" suggests an espionage outfit of some type, and that's something that we should probably factor into who our characters are, right? :)

Just letting you know it won't be standard cookie cutter scenario from the book,

Unless you mean some of the modules, there really isn't a 'standard' scenario that I've seen. Well, maybe Dark-Hab work...

I may bypass and intro I was writing for my players as they'll be new, was going to have them run a small scenario in Real-Sim ( I think that's the name)

Simulspace?

Ok, so hope you enjoyed your weekend, mine is just beginning, (Off Mon-Tues) so I'm going tree shopping, in China.

Nifty! What kind of tree? Trying to find a nice solid holiday fir in Mao-land?

Firewall is the default faction which PCs belong to in the game. It's basically a cryptic underground cell-based organization dedicated to dealing with X-threats. They provide a free resleeve, some support in the sense of being 'sekrit agent doodz' but not much. They're not like the CIA or the KGB, they're more like a distributed activist network with heavy duty partitioning...Or more like a terrorist network of do-gooders. You might get a mission where you have to use what's in your pockets, sorry, we had to rely on you, nobody else is there to prep, we've got no recon, you're going in cold, the universe depends on you buddy, we'll get you support as soon as we can but no promises...Or you might be given a set of connections, passwords, and pre-established caches with gear. It all depends on how long Firewall has known about what's happening and what sort of agent support network they have in the area.

Firewall's 'grab whatever assets are convenient and get them moving' motif is also useful for roping together a group of characters who otherwise might not have reason to work with each other (though I really prefer putting characters together by discussion and agreement to create a party with a bit of history).

The key GM details on Firewall are on pages 356-361, but you will notice that the vast majority of most EP books contain sidebar information that is marked as 'Firewall sourced' information. Over 200 of the core book's pages contain the word 'Firewall.' It's pervasive for a reason...The original game intent was that most PC teams will be Firewall teams because, hey, it immediately gives them a reason to get in trouble. But some people dislike it for various reasons and don't like running or playing Firewall games, so you will discover that 'Firewall or not?' is a pretty normal question at the beginning of an EP game.

The reason why Nohwear advocates Firewall or Gatecrashing is that both give the GM more tools for moving the party around. Firewall has this vast undercover cell-based network where someone you don't know might bump-pass you something and you'd never see them again, just find yourself learning that there's a heavy plasma rifle built into the wall behind Schmo's Pho & Pizza and starting to worry how soon you're going to be told who you have to use it on. Firewall ops tend towards espionage and cthulhoid nightmare fuel.

A Gatecrashing expedition is basically alien-world away-team adventure. See the entire book Gatecrashing for more info. If you're worried about dealing with the myriad social environments, clades and factors (and Factors) in EP, Gatecrashing is MUCH easier.

And then there's the dark-hab run. Most of the deep space habitats (and even many surface habitats) from humanity's golden age are still abandoned. Damaged, or invaded, or trapped during the Fall. Some criminal types or unscrupulous hypercorps use such nightmare ruins as secret outposts. Others are breeding grounds for leftover TITAN war-machines or other horrors. Dark-habs are basically the EP equivalent of a dungeon-crawl: screw the social stuff, your ass is in an airlock, the lights are out, there's no air, you can feel the abandoned wreck groaning slowly through the sole's of your vacsuit as the misaligned centrifuge gradually turns, pirouetting unsteadily in the void.

...What do you do?

Hope that helps!

In system, though we will be traveling. Try to use Transhuman rules for PC creation, thats what I'll be using in future.

Firewall characters or no?

I tend towards jammers and hackers. I think this time I'm going to go for an infiltrator-type.

BayouSnowman, can you at least let us know if it's Gatecrashing or something in-system? That'd be nice. :)

Also, what character creation system. There are three. Two of which are easily compatible. As for chars, my Novacrab idea would probably work best as an enforcer and visible security.

All three systems are fully compatible. However, a minor CP adjustment must be made to the original purchase point system to 'equalize' it with the other two. See the red textbox at the bottom of p.13 of Transhuman. The Transhuman package system builds 1100 CP characters, so players wishing to use the original system need to expend an additional 100 CP to have an equivalent character.

Note also that the purely random system can generate characters well above or well below 1100 CP...The dice giveth and the dice taketh away. I find it to be an intriguing thing for generating fast NPC backgrounds but I don't use it for PC character generation, myself.

I also note that it's very difficult to organize a party if people are using the purely random generation system.

"Oh look, I rolled a hacker, too! That's what, five out of six hackers? Bob, what's your character?" (Bob begins rolling the dice, dreading the obvious dramatic outcome.)

BayouSnowman, did you have a particular region of the system you intended us to be in? Is this a gatecrashing campaign? Firewall? No-Firewall? Isolated habitat? Urban confabulation? :)

It's not just a matter of 'specialization' (one thing EP reinforces quite nicely is that specialization is for insects), it's also just for character-concept work.

First time I've ever heard someone say EP resembled 40k, I must admit. They're both distopic SF games, I suppose, but to me, at least, 40k is far more cartoony, not nearly so obsessed with trying to be mostly hard SF (EP claims to be this, but admittedly its interpretations of nano, strong AI, and an AI singularity don't support that argument...And the Psi is right off the charts, of course...I think it's more 'hard' in the sense of 'no warp drive, just raw thrust slow-boating all the way'). 40K has magic and demons, of course... And elves, and orcs and... And the systems to me seem as different as tic-tac-toe and chess.

How would you say they are similar? I am very curious! They both have horror, and they both have slave-states (although one is a corporate wage-slave-state while the other is more like a grossly distorted medieval empire with feudal characteristics).

EP really does benefit more than most games from having a coordinated party, so I agree with Tamilius that talking together is the way to go.

Also, this next week is going to be VERY busy for me, but I'll see what I can do.

Well, we can keep in touch here and maybe sort out some beginnings of what sorts of characters and who might be interested in GMing come January.

Keep the fires lit, as it were.

We'll probably see more activity Monday-ish as all the people who went home to visit family trickle in.

Hope everyone had a pleasant holiday, who had one?

I've seen the CP morph pool before, and I've usually been pretty opposed to it. Part of EP's cachet, in my experience, has been the peculiar tension between treating a body as equipment, and knowing that if you lose it you might end up with something far less specialized.

There are benefits and drawbacks to overspecialization of morphs. In the long run, the most flexible agents are those who are flexible even if you sleeve them in a tuna can. Additionally, a GM may sometimes choose to toss unusual or specific morphs at a party for reasons that the players may not understand.

Eventually, experienced agents end up with safe houses and morphs stashed all over the place against eventuality, rather like the Major in GitS. But those still represent choices...Where to keep what morph?

And all of that goes pretty much right out the window if you just assume everyone has a CP pool for buying morphs. At its most reprehensible extreme I actually heard someone discussing starting out as an infomorph while investing in a big CP pool so they could grab whatever morph the scenario needed...Not terribly realistic when part of the political tension in the majority of the game setting revolves around there being fewer morphs available than egos to sleeve into them, and there are explicit rules regarding how long it takes custom morphs to be grown.

For me it's just messing with a core element of the setting, but I know that not everyone sees it that way.

Unless I've miscounted how many people 'might' GM, it's possible that there are enough players here for two games, with GMs playing in each others' game.

Six (presuming six is acceptable). Haven't quite the time to devote to GMing right now, but I'm very familiar with the system, having played in a few campaigns and have all of the books (most in hardcover, even!). I can help anyone having issues or questions with chargen if needed.

For those who don't have Transhuman (and yes, it does make chargen easier, although I like to use it as a stepping stone to the old-school full-control of every CP method), all of the EP books are legally downloadable and shareable...It's a Creative Commons licensed RPG. Do a search for Rob Boyle's blog (creator) and it'll have all of the download links.

It looks as though we have 2, possibly 3 potential GMs (if I am reading Cirle right).

Did people have a particular desired venue in-system (or out-system for that matter!)?

So far I see guardsman, guardsman, techpriestess, psyker, assassin.

Phil, Thrace, give a yell if you need any assistance anywhere along the line and I'll happily help as best I can.

Thrace, I'm pretty sure you just choose them.

On a sidenote, how familiar is everyone with.40k lore?

Quite a lot. Played the game for several years, read quite a few of the novels.

Imperial Psyker from an Imperial World (Paradise Planet).

(Not totally sure how to RP the paradise planet thing, but the dice landed where they did. I'll figure it out).

The only paradise planet I've found is (surprisingly enough) in the Dark Heresy core rulebook, Reth.

The details are in the 40k Wiki here.

I also ran across Reth being discussed on a forum debating whether it was possible to have a planet that was 'normally idyllic' by 20th c. standards. This post had some hilariously dark commentary.

This is Rosza/Shunka, et al.

Here's where I'm at so far:
Darkholder Techpriest (Darkholder is a homeworld from RHB p.30 which modifies the Voidborn homeworld)

Characteristics are Voidborn + (Darkholder if applicable) + Rolls from earlier post
WS.: 20+9= 25
BS.: 20+16= 36
Str: 15+7= 22
Tuf: 20+5+14= 39
Agi: 20+11= 31
Int: 20-5+17= 32
Per: 20+11= 31
Wil: 25+5+11= 41
Fel: 20-5+5= 20

Ill-Omened: -5 penalty on all Fellowship Tests w/non-Voidborn
Void Accustomed: Immune to Space Travel Sickness, Zero- and low-G environments are not difficult terrain.
Cold-Souled and Hungry: The character receives -5 to starting Fellowship and Intelligence Characteristics and begins the game with 1d5+1 Corruption Points. Darkholders also suffer a further -5 penalty (so -10 total!) on ALL peaceful social interaction tests (Voidborn included).

Homeworld Skills:
Voidborn Speak Lang (Ship Cant)
Darkholder Speak Lang (Ship Dialect)

Homeworld Skills as Basic:
Darkholder Navigation (Stellar)
Darkholder Pilot (Spacecraft)
Darkholder Forbidden Lore (Warp)

Homeworld Talents:
Darkholder Jaded
Darkholder Paranoia

Starting Skills (Tech Priest):
Speak Lang (Low Gothic) (Int)
Tech-Use (Int)
Literacy (Int)
Secret Tongue (Tech) (Int)
Trade (Copyist) (Int)

Starting Talents (Tech Priest)
Melee Weapon Training (Primitive)
Basic Weapon Training (Las)
Pistol Training (Las)
Electro Graft Use

Wounds: 1d5 + 6 ⇒ (5) + 6 = 11
Fate Points: 1d10 ⇒ 2
Divination: 1d100 ⇒ 52
Corruption: 1d5 + 1 ⇒ (3) + 1 = 4
Start Wealth: 1d10 + 150 ⇒ (6) + 150 = 156

Shadoven, with your permission I'd like to take the 100pt background Disciples of Thule: (p.37, Inquisitor’s HB) as a way of stocking up on Lores :)

I should have character finished either late tonight or sometime tomorrow. I'm in the process of moving this weekend, and wasn't expecting things to go so FAST.

The first game I tried to join here took a couple of weeks to character-up. :)

I do apologize for the delay. If you absolutely can't wait and would prefer to take someone else, I understand.