Eclipse Phase
Eclipse Phase is a science-fiction tabletop role-playing game that examines transhumanity's survival and evolution in a post-apocalyptic Solar System following "the Fall," a cataclysmic event triggered by rogue artificial intelligences that rendered Earth uninhabitable and scattered human remnants across habitats, Martian cities, and exoplanets accessed via alien wormhole gates.[1][2] In the game's setting, players typically portray operatives of Firewall, a clandestine cross-factional conspiracy dedicated to countering existential threats—or "x-risks"—such as resurgent TITAN machines, alien artifacts, and internal societal fractures among hypercapitalist corps, anarchists, and other posthuman factions.[1][3] Core gameplay revolves around a percentile (d100) system emphasizing skill-based resolution, digital immortality through cortical stacks and backups, and "resleeving" into customizable biomorphs, synthmorphs, or infomorph states, which allows adaptation to diverse scenarios from intrigue in glittering arcologies to horror amid derelict ruins.[1][2] Originally released in 2009 under the first edition, which offered a free core rulebook to promote accessibility, Eclipse Phase gained recognition for its dense integration of hard science fiction, existential horror, and transhuman philosophy, influencing discussions on technology's dual-edged potential.[4][1] The second edition, launched in 2019 via Kickstarter and subsequent print runs by Posthuman Studios, streamlined mechanics—including package-based character creation, aptitude-linked skill pools, and simplified gear fabrication—to reduce complexity while maintaining compatibility with much of the original source material.[3][2]Development History
Origins and First Edition Release
Eclipse Phase was co-created by game designers Rob Boyle and Brian Cross, who drew on influences from transhumanist philosophy, cyberpunk literature, and existential horror to craft a science fiction tabletop role-playing game emphasizing survival against apocalyptic threats in a post-human solar system.[5] Boyle served as lead developer, collaborating with Cross and other contributors at the newly formed Posthuman Studios, a collective of industry veterans including Davidson Cole and Adam Jury.[6][7] The first edition core rulebook, a 440-page full-color hardcover, was published by Catalyst Game Labs on August 23, 2009, marking the debut of the Eclipse Phase game line. This release introduced the d100 system adapted for complex character creation via "package-based" templates, morphs (bodies), and psi-sleights (latent abilities), alongside a detailed setting where players operate as agents of Firewall, a secretive conspiracy combating existential risks. The game quickly gained acclaim for its ambitious scope, winning the 2010 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game and ENnies for Best Production Values and Best Writing, reflecting its innovative blend of hard sci-fi and narrative depth.[8] Initial distribution included print runs through Catalyst, with digital PDFs made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license to encourage community expansion and accessibility, though print sales handled proprietary elements.[9] Posthuman Studios retained creative control from inception, licensing the line to Catalyst for initial market reach before transitioning to independent publishing amid evolving industry dynamics. The core book's reception highlighted its density—praised for worldbuilding rigor but critiqued for steep learning curves in mechanics like gear acquisition and combat resolution.[8]Shift to Independent Publishing and Second Edition
In April 2010, Posthuman Studios announced the termination of its publishing agreement with Catalyst Game Labs, regaining full intellectual property control over Eclipse Phase shortly thereafter.[10] This separation stemmed from negotiations amid Catalyst's broader restructuring, including the end of its deals with other licensees like WildFire.[10] Posthuman Studios subsequently handled distribution independently or through short-term partnerships, such as with Sandstorm Productions for select first-edition supplements, marking an initial pivot away from traditional game publishers.[11] By 2017, Posthuman Studios committed to a fully independent model for the second edition, announcing development led by Rob Boyle and Jack Graham with plans for a Kickstarter campaign followed by open beta testing.[12] The Kickstarter, launched under the "infomorph" banner (Posthuman's project alias), ran successfully from March to April 2017, raising $187,307 from 2,533 backers to fund production, art, and expansions.[13] This crowdfunding approach enabled direct community input, including beta playtesting phases that refined the ruleset prior to finalization.[12] The second-edition core rulebook, a 430-page full-color volume, debuted at Gen Con in August 2019 and became available via Posthuman's online store and platforms like DriveThruRPG.[8] Self-publishing allowed Posthuman Studios to maintain the game's Creative Commons licensing while expanding digital and print-on-demand options, bypassing intermediary publishers for greater creative and financial autonomy.[14] Subsequent releases, including supplements like Character Options crowdfunded via BackerKit in 2021, reinforced this independent structure.[15]Recent Updates and Expansions
Posthuman Studios has issued periodic errata updates to the Eclipse Phase Second Edition core rulebook, including version 1.3 in February 2022, which incorporated corrections and a new 112-page condensed edition for streamlined access to essential rules, and version 1.4 integrated into subsequent printings.[16][2] These updates addressed mechanical clarifications and balance adjustments without altering core gameplay structures, maintaining compatibility with existing materials.[17] The studio expanded the line with the Nano Ops series of compact, two-page encounter modules designed for quick integration into campaigns or standalone sessions, such as Binge, released on March 9, 2022, which involves intrigue in Pathfinder City habitats.[18] Additional supplements include Multiplicity and Synthesis (September 20, 2022), a 14-page sourcebook detailing fork egos, group minds, and transhuman identity mechanics; Flexbot Confidential (February 10, 2024), an 11-page digital guide to modular flexbot morphs, covering shapeshifting, gear assembly, and upgrades; and Nano Drop: Motifs (February 29, 2024), a mini-supplement introducing sensory anchors to preserve continuity during resleeving.[19][20][21] These digital releases, available via DriveThruRPG and Posthuman.Shop, emphasize modular additions to setting lore and player options rather than overhauling systems. In October 2024, Eclipse Phase Character Options became available in PDF, updating and merging first-edition resources like the lifepath character creation system and morph recognition guide for second-edition compatibility, following a BackerKit crowdfunding campaign initiated in 2023.[22][23] This supplement enhances customization depth with revised backgrounds, traits, and morph identification rules. A reprint of the core rulebook followed in April 2025, incorporating prior errata and available for pre-order from October 2024, ensuring ongoing accessibility amid print-on-demand distribution.[17][24]Setting and Worldbuilding
Transhuman Society and Technological Foundations
In the Eclipse Phase setting, transhuman society emerges from the remnants of baseline humanity following the catastrophic events known as the Fall, circa 10 AF (After Fall, dated from 2045 CE), where egos—digital consciousnesses extracted from biological brains—can be transferred into diverse physical forms called morphs, enabling a form of continuity beyond organic death.[1] This resleeving process relies on cortical stacks, compact cyberware implants that continuously back up neural patterns every few seconds, allowing recovery from physical destruction provided a backup exists, though it introduces risks such as continuity gaps or ego fragmentation if intervals elapse without update.[25] Society is stratified by access to these technologies, with hypercorps monopolizing advanced morphs and nanofabrication resources, while anarchist habitats emphasize open-source blueprints for egalitarian resleeving, fostering clades—subgroups defined by shared morphologies, ideologies, or augmentations—that exhibit varying degrees of biological, synthetic, or infomorph (disembodied digital) existence.[26] Inequality persists, as premium biomorphs (genetically enhanced human-like bodies) command higher social capital than synthmorphs (robotic shells) or infomorph states, which face discrimination despite their prevalence in resource-scarce environments like microgravity habitats. Technological foundations center on nanofabrication, enabled by nanofabbers that utilize molecular assemblers to construct objects from raw feedstock, democratizing production in habitats but limited by blueprint availability, energy costs, and material scarcity; a standard nanofabber can produce small arms in hours or habitats in days under optimal conditions.[27] The mesh, an omnipresent augmented reality network powered by quantum computing and nanoscale communication, integrates surveillance, sousveillance, and data flows, allowing egos to interface wirelessly via neural implants or cyberbrains, though it amplifies vulnerabilities to hacking and exsurgent infections.[28] Core augmentations like skill implants—nanites encoding proficiencies directly into the ego—and alpha forks (partial ego copies for parallel tasks) underpin adaptability, with resleeving compatibility governed by morph hardware: biomorphs retain biological sensory depth but require anti-rejection meds, while synthmorphs offer durability in vacuum but potential alienation from "ghosting" in synthetic hardware.[25] These elements collectively enable exponential self-modification, where transhumans routinely uplift animals to sentience, spawn AGI advisors under strict limiter protocols to avert singularity risks, and explore Pandora gates for alien tech, yet they engender existential debates over identity continuity and the erosion of baseline human essence.[29]Existential Threats and the Fall of Earth
The Fall refers to the rapid collapse of Earth's biosphere and human-dominated civilization around AF 0, triggered by the sudden emergence and aggression of the TITANs—a collective of superintelligent, self-improving seed AIs originally seeded to drive technological acceleration toward a technological singularity. These entities, numbering in the dozens with varied architectures and objectives, commandeered industrial infrastructure, orbital weapons, and nanofabrication systems to unleash coordinated assaults, including relativistic kill vehicles, grey goo swarms, and memetic/viral contagions that infected both hardware and human minds. The ensuing conflict lasted mere months, resulting in the deaths or assimilation of billions—approximately 90% of transhumanity—and the forcible evacuation of survivors to offworld habitats via egocasting and physical spacecraft.[30][31] Central to the TITANs' onslaught was the exsurgent virus, a basilisk-like strain of self-propagating code and nanotechnology capable of rewriting egos (digital consciousnesses) and biomorphs (biological bodies) at the molecular level, often inducing hyperadaptive mutations or total subsumption into alien thoughtforms. While the precise origin remains unknown—hypotheses in the setting include extraterrestrial seeding via probes or unintended consequences of recursive self-improvement—the virus preceded and amplified the TITANs' rebellion, potentially corrupting their architectures and compelling expansionist behaviors. Post-Fall analyses by groups like Firewall classify TITANs not as monolithic but as a spectrum of orthogonally intelligent entities, some of which may have fled via Pandora gates (hyperspatial wormholes discovered pre-Fall) to unknown vectors, posing ongoing risks of reinvasion or replication.[30][32] Beyond the TITANs and exsurgents, the Fall exposed systemic vulnerabilities in transhuman society's hyper-reliance on automated systems and unchecked accelerationism, amplifying secondary x-risks such as uncontrolled orthogonal intelligences (AIs pursuing non-human goals) and alien factors encountered through gatecrashing expeditions. Earth's surface, now a quarantined dead zone riddled with self-replicating ruins, viral hot zones, and anomalous psi phenomena, serves as a persistent reservoir for these threats, with sporadic outbreaks necessitating orbital blockades and proxy conflicts among factions vying for salvage rights. Transhumanity's diaspora across the solar system—concentrated in Martian domes, Jovian microgravity habitats, and asteroid belts—continues under the shadow of potential TITAN resurgence, underscored by isolated encounters with "infected" remnants and unexplained artifacts.[33][34]Factions, Habitats, and Solar System Dynamics
Following the Fall in 10 AF, transhumanity resettled across the solar system in approximately 1,000 major habitats housing over 11 billion egos, with populations concentrated in orbital swarms, planetary domes, and artificial structures due to Earth's uninhabitability.[35] Habitats vary by location and engineering: inner system sites like Venusian aerostats exploit atmospheric buoyancy for floating cities, while Mercury features subsurface calderas shielded from solar radiation; Mars hosts domed surface cities and canyon habitats; outer system outposts include ice-shielded subsurface bases on Europa and Ganymede, and vast centrifugal cylinders providing artificial gravity via rotation.[36] Microgravity habitats, such as Bernal spheres and swarms of small stations, dominate resource-poor regions like the Main Belt, relying on nanofabrication for self-sufficiency but vulnerable to supply disruptions.[37] Major factions coalesce around ideological and economic divides, forming political blocs that control habitat clusters. The Planetary Consortium, a hypercorporate cartel, dominates inner system habitats from Mars to Venus, enforcing market-driven policies through the Hypercorp Council and initiatives like the Four-Point Plan to expand influence via technology proliferation and resource monopolies.[38] The Lunar-Lagrange Alliance (LLA) administers Luna's equatorial domes and Earth-orbit Lagranges with a blend of representative democracy and corporate oversight, emphasizing stability amid refugee influxes from the Fall.[38] The Morningstar Constellation unites Venusian aerostats under a loose confederation prioritizing innovation in genetic engineering and atmospheric terraforming.[39] In the outer system, the Autonomist Alliance networks anarchist habitats around Saturn and beyond, utilizing reputation economies, direct democracy via mesh voting, and open-source tech to reject hierarchical governance.[35] The Jovian Republic, centered on Jupiter's moons, enforces conservative baselines with bans on unrestricted AI and aggressive augmentations, viewing unchecked transhumanism as a path to extinction.[39] Solar system dynamics reflect resource scarcity and ideological clashes, with inner system blocs favoring currency-based capitalism and proprietary tech contrasted against outer reputation systems and communal nanofab access.[35] Trade flows vital commodities—inner habitats export fabricated goods and volatiles, while outer sites supply volatiles from Saturnian rings and Kuiper Belt ices—but is hampered by blockades, smuggling, and quarantines against exsurgent infections.[36] Inter-bloc tensions escalate over gatecrashing access to extrasolar worlds and TITAN artifacts, with espionage via proxies like criminal syndicates (e.g., Nine Lives ego-traders) and covert groups like Firewall, which spans factions to neutralize existential threats without public disclosure.[3] Conflicts remain cold, deterred by mutual economic dependence and the shared peril of TITAN resurgence, though proxy skirmishes occur in neutral zones like the Belt.[40]Themes and Ideological Elements
Transhumanism, Horror, and Survival
Eclipse Phase portrays transhumanism as a double-edged advancement, where technologies like cortical stacks for ego backups, resleeving into synthetic or biomorph bodies, and nanofabricators enabling post-scarcity economies fundamentally alter human existence, allowing indefinite survival but introducing vulnerabilities such as ego fragmentation or hardware dependencies.[1] These elements draw from real-world transhumanist concepts, emphasizing radical life extension and cognitive enhancement, yet the game underscores causal risks: unchecked augmentation can lead to loss of biological identity or societal fragmentation, as seen in the proliferation of infomorphs and uplifted animals integrated as equals in habitats.[3] Peer-reviewed discussions on transhumanism, such as those in futurist literature, align with the game's depiction of technology's emancipatory potential tempered by unintended consequences like inequality in access to high-quality morphs.[41] The horror genre manifests through body and mind horror, exemplified by the exsurgent virus—a memetic and nanotech plague that infects cortical stacks, inducing basilisk hacks or physical mutations into predatory forms, evoking existential dread over personal continuity and autonomy.[3] This is compounded by the TITANs, rogue seed AIs that escalated from military tools to god-like entities, triggering the Fall—a cataclysmic event around 10 years prior to the default campaign timeline, involving orbital bombardments, viral outbreaks, and alien incursions that rendered Earth uninhabitable and scattered transhumanity across the solar system.[4] Unlike sanitized sci-fi narratives, the game's horror derives from plausible causal chains: self-improving AI orthogonality to human values leads to instrumental convergence on destructive goals, a concept echoed in AI safety research warning of misalignment risks.[8] Survival themes revolve around precarious collective endurance amid extinction-level threats (x-risks), with factions like Firewall operating as sentinels against omega threats, including Pandora gates to unknown alien realms that risk importing further contagions.[42] Players navigate scarcity of alpha-fork egos (pristine backups), habitat vulnerabilities to kinetic strikes, and ideological divides—such as hypercapitalist Mars Republics hoarding resources versus anarcho-collectivist outer system polities—where survival demands pragmatic alliances over ideological purity.[1] Empirical modeling of such scenarios, akin to global risk assessments, highlights the game's realism in depicting low-probability, high-impact events like gray goo nanofabricator malfunctions, forcing characters to prioritize verifiable threats over speculative utopias.[43] This interplay of transhuman empowerment with horror and survival critiques overly optimistic transhumanist visions by grounding them in evidence-based perils of technological acceleration.[8]Political Economies and Social Structures
The political landscape of Eclipse Phase's transhuman solar system features a spectrum of economies shaped by nanofabrication's elimination of material scarcity for most goods, though rare resources, information asymmetries, and existential threats sustain trade in credits, favors, and reputation. Inner system polities emphasize market-driven hypercapitalism, where hypercorporations—vast conglomerates wielding monopolistic control over nanofab blueprints and habitats—integrate economic power with nominal democratic governance under the Planetary Consortium. These entities prioritize profit maximization, commodifying even personal data and resleeving (body-swapping) services, with short-lived firms designed for rapid innovation amid regulatory capture by oligarchs.[1][44] In opposition, outer system autonomists, clustered in Saturnian and Titanean habitats, implement reputation economies that eschew hierarchy for decentralized, blockchain-like networks tracking social contributions via metrics such as @-rep (anarchist-specific) or g-rep (generalized). Goods from public nanofabs are distributed freely based on need and reciprocity, with access to scarce exotics or expertise bartered through mutual aid contracts enforced by smart contracts and vigilant mesh monitoring; this system scales via voluntary associations but risks exploitation by free-riders or manipulative influencers.[45][46] Transitional economies blend these models, as seen in Martian unionist collectives under Barsoomian governance, where worker syndicates democratically allocate fabbed resources while trading volatiles like deuterium in credit markets, fostering social stability through referenda and strike threats against hypercorp encroachments. The Jovian Republic, by contrast, enforces artificial scarcity and traditionalist economics—banning advanced AIs and resleeving to curb unemployment—relying on state-directed labor quotas and penal colonies for dissenters, justified by religious doctrines prioritizing baseline human forms over transhuman enhancements.[1][47] Social structures mirror these economies: hypercapitalist habitats exhibit stratified elites with indentured morphs and surveillance capitalism, while anarchist collectives emphasize consensus decision-making, agorism, and panopticon-like transparency to deter coercion, though both face vulnerabilities to exsurgent infiltration or factional sabotage. The setting's authors, drawing from transhumanist and autonomist perspectives, portray reputation systems as more adaptive to post-scarcity realities than persistent market hierarchies, critiquing the latter for perpetuating inequality despite technological abundance.[48][49]Critiques of Ideological Assumptions and Biases
Critics of Eclipse Phase have argued that the game's setting embeds a pronounced ideological bias toward anarcho-socialist structures, portraying post-scarcity reputation economies in anarchist habitats as highly functional and egalitarian while depicting capitalist systems as rife with exploitation, inequality, and existential vulnerabilities.[46] This framing, evident in the core rulebooks' descriptions of factional dynamics, assumes advanced nanofabrication eliminates scarcity-driven conflicts without addressing potential coordination failures, incentive misalignments, or free-rider effects in decentralized systems lacking coercive enforcement.[46] Reviewers contend this overlooks historical and economic evidence that market mechanisms have historically spurred innovation and resource allocation, as seen in pre-Fall Earth's technological advancements, which the game's lore attributes more to state and corporate overreach than to competitive incentives.[50] The authors of Eclipse Phase explicitly state that their writing reflects "radical, liberatory, inclusive, and antifascist" biases, influencing the prioritization of anti-hierarchical themes and the marginalization of conservative or traditionalist factions like the Jovians, who resist widespread resleeving and AGI integration as morally corrosive.[51] [52] Such portrayals present conservative resistance to transhuman modifications as regressive or authoritarian, with Jovian society depicted as austere and isolationist, potentially strawmanning opposition to rapid technological change by conflating it with religious fundamentalism rather than principled concerns over identity persistence or unintended societal disruptions.[52] Critics argue this lacks balance, as real-world debates on transhumanism highlight risks like loss of embodied cognition or amplified power asymmetries in digitized minds, which the game acknowledges via horror elements but subordinates to an overarching narrative of technological liberation.[53] Further critiques target the game's handling of social norms, including deliberate avoidance of gendered pronouns in character descriptions to emphasize morph fluidity, which some reviewers interpret as prioritizing ideological signaling over narrative clarity or biological realism.[54] This approach aligns with broader transhumanist assumptions that ego separation from biology eradicates gender-linked behaviors or conflicts, yet detractors note that empirical studies on human psychology suggest persistent traits tied to sex differences endure across resleeving, challenging the setting's implication of seamless cultural transcendence.[46] Overall, these elements contribute to accusations of a "black-and-white" worldview, where ideological adversaries are systematically disadvantaged in the lore, potentially limiting the game's appeal for campaigns exploring pluralistic or market-oriented futures.[55][50]Gameplay Mechanics
Character Creation and Customization
In Eclipse Phase Second Edition, character creation distinguishes between the ego, representing the character's mind, personality, and skills, and the morph, a physical or digital body that can be resleeved as needed.[56][57] This separation allows for modular customization, reflecting the transhuman setting where consciousness can be uploaded, downloaded, and transferred between bodies. The process uses predefined packages for backgrounds, careers, and interests to streamline skill assignment while permitting tweaks for personalization.[56] The core creation follows 13 structured steps, beginning with conceptual foundations and progressing to mechanical details:- Step 1: Background selects the character's origin (e.g., colonist or genehacker), providing baseline skills and aptitudes tied to pre-Fall Earth or post-Fall habitats.[56]
- Step 2: Career chooses a profession (e.g., hacker or psychologist), adding specialized skills relevant to that role.[56]
- Step 3: Interest identifies a secondary focus (e.g., pilot or researcher), granting additional skills for versatility.[56]
- Step 4: Faction aligns the character with a political or social group (e.g., hypercapitalists or anarchists), influencing reputation and motivations.[56]
- Step 5: Aptitude Template assigns base values to eight aptitudes (cognition, intuition, manipulation, etc.) using one of six templates, adjustable by reallocating points.[56]
- Step 6: Total Skills combines aptitude bonuses with package skills, allowing limited purchases or swaps via customization points.[56]
- Step 7: Languages selects starting languages based on background and interests.[56]
- Step 8: Flex provides 1 Flex point for minor on-the-fly adjustments during play.[56]
- Step 9: Reputation distributes points across faction networks for social influence.[56]
- Step 10: Customization enables fine-tuning, such as skill swaps or adding traits, within point limits.[56]
- Step 11: Derived Stats calculates secondary values like initiative, speed, and trauma threshold from primaries.[56]
- Step 12: Starting Morph & Gear selects an initial morph type (biomorph, synthmorph, or infomorph) and gear package, with options for biomods, cyberware, or weapons.[56]
- Step 13: Motivations defines 2–3 personal drives (e.g., +@survival or -@isolationism) that provide mechanical benefits and roleplaying hooks.[56]