Synopsis

Farcast

is a yearblog for the

 Eclipse Phase

roleplaying game by Posthuman Studios. The goal of this blog is to post a single entry every day for 2013—new locations, groups,  NPCs, artifacts, morphs, tech, and ideas for players and gamemasters to use or take inspiration from in their games. Each entry will be at least 500 words in length, and will rely primarily on the material in the

 Eclipse Phase

main book. This is all completely unofficial fan material; I have no affiliation with Posthuman Studios.

Farcast 151

is a PDF collection of the first 151 entries from the Farcast blog, compiled together for your convenience and released for Free RPG Day 2013.

Legal

 Eclipse Phase

 products (including printed rulebooks/sourcebooks and PDFs) by Posthuman Studios are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. All written materials on the Farcast blog and this document fall under the same license. The cover and background images for

Farcast 151

 are from Ernst Haeckel's

Kunstformen der Natur

(1899-1904), in the public domain.

Language

Characters who are genderless, intersex, or of indeterminate gender are referred to using singular they, as opposed to the gender neutral it (because of unfortunate connotations) or artificial gender neutral pronouns (which readers found strange and irritating). Hopefully this won't cause too much confusion.

Thanks

Editing and proofing these entries has been helped in large part by readers of the blog who posted comments or otherwise gave feedback, and I’d like to thank Aldero, Chase S, CodeBreaker, Colin, Duncan, Francis Tiffany, Frank Trollman, Ian, Ire, Jaberwo, Jan, Joe, Marcin, OneTrikPony, Shannon, Smokeskin, Soyweiser, TITAN, William, and wint-r-mute for their help and support!

Who To Blame

Writing:

Bobby Derie

Special Guest Editor:

Joseph Baum http://farcastblog.com

 

ENTRY 000: Test Item

Transhumanity lives in a universe where alien intelligences and civilizations have already lived and died, leaving behind remnants for them to paw through, analyze, and reverse engineer. To prepare and train new generations for the task of cracking these problems, the scientists and philosophers of the Morningstar Constellation have opened a crowdsource digital artifact: the Test Item. Based in part on real alien artifacts discovered on exoplanets, the Test Item is a complex software construct which thousands of users can probe, test, and interact with during each test-cycle. The Test Item programmers are volunteers that include some of the most creative, knowledgeable minds in the solar system, and each new incarnation of the Test Item typically incorporates bizarre physics, chemical composition, cultural influence, and xenobiological traces. As both a puzzle and an exercise in analysis, testers are encouraged both to cooperate and compete; posting significant breakthroughs on the latest Test Item (or even some of the archived old Test Items) generally causes enough interest for a small s-rep boost, and sometimes job offers from hypercorps. Tangible benefits of the Test Item beyond education are few, but have produced some working theories on the physics behind the gate mechanisms and refinement in a few technologies like allotropic alloys. The conspiracy-minded point to statistical correlation of certain physical and cultural traits among past Test Items as evidence suggseting that the entire Test Item project is little more than a cover for actual testing of an alien artifact—or perhaps a cache of such artifacts!—in the control of the Morningstar Constellation. For most testers however, the Test Item remains little more than an ongoing intellectual exercise, and a challenge that prepares gatecrashers for what they might discover on the other side.

Using Test Item

The Test Item is a public MacGuffin; it does nothing by itself, little more than a complex three-dimensional software model of a hypothetical artifact that bends or breaks certain laws of physics, or combines unusual chemical and xenocultural elements. However, the Test Item functions as a focus for characters to interact—teams of testers will compete over specific theories and test methodologies, sabotage each other and steal data, try to hack the Test Item sourcecode or influence the programmers, lay wagers and try to collect them—and as such is a useful concept for the gamemaster that wants something with outrageous properties that cannot be easily stolen or abused because it is completely conceptual, with no physical existence. Of course, the conspiracy theorists could be correct for once, and some or all of the Test Items

are

real artifacts…in which case finding the originals the Test Items are based on would be a mission in itself.

Seed



 

A highly-regarded merchant has purchased an artifact, but it afraid of damaging it through testing. The merchant hires the player characters to arrange for a digital simulation of the artifact in place of the Test Item, crowdsourcing his way to the  best test strategy. The merchant doesn’t care how they do it—negotiating with the Test Item programming team, blackmailing them, bribing them, hacking the software, etc. are all viable methods.