Eclipse Phase: Terminal Velocity

[munchkin]

Tiny's muse looks pretty much like this

his name's Frank

[Joose]

Nice choices all

As well as getting contact with your Muses back, your more immediate memory comes back. For those of you that have read the background information for EP, it might interest you to know that the Fall hasn't happened yet. I'm sure you can therefore guess where this story is going

A little more background for your individual characters, now it has come back to you:

deject: Barry Dylon is an IT spod for a small division of a hypercorp based in Washington DC. He is pretty junior in the company, but is showing promise, and is hoping to progress into a more security related role in the near future. He lives in a housing complex that would be cheap if it wasn't so close to the city centre, and was popping out from work for some lunch when everything went black.

TSD: Kurt Walker is a marketing executive for a hypercorp division (not the same one as Barry though). He is experienced, but a little old school in his buisness deals recently, and some of the fresh new blood is threatening to overtake him. He is not one to let that happen though. He is not based in Washington, but has farcasted in to town for a business deal, and so is in one of his company's car-pool style morphs. The deal went well, and he was just leaving when everything went black.

Dog Pants: Edgar Black works for non-corp business doing basic office work. There have been rumours recently that a hypercorp is looking to fold your company into theirs, and as one of the lower skilled workers you are worried that you will be made redundant as a lot of the things you do would be automated. Its almost the weekend though, and you are looking forward to your usual Saturday activities of kicking back with your friends at a local shooting club. There's an ongoing competition on at the moment, and you were in the lead last weekend. You were just stretching your legs, getting out of the office, and staring morosely at the shitty weather when everything went black.

munchkin: Tiny works as a bouncer at a night club in Washington, well known in the area for its retro-indy sensibilities. You have just moved down to the area from a small town in Pennsylvania, as there were not many jobs there for someone with your skills. You enjoy your work, and think that it is one of the few things that could never be totally replaced with AI or the like: Bouncing needs the human touch. You had been meeting some of your new work friends in town, being shown the highlights of the area, and were on your way back to your apartment when everything went black.

All of you only have glimpses of the time since then. You have many flashes of waking up in the house, over and over again, each time with things being ever so slightly different to the last. You are fuzzy on the details though. Anyone who wants to try and remember exactly what happened during those loops can make a COGx3 test at a -10.

Your muses are all, to one degree or another, making a fuss over you. For the sake of simplicity, im going to assume you are all letting each other see/hear your muses for the moment. They tell you that there is some sort of global disaster going on. Its chaos everywhere, with computer systems either crashing of seeming to have a mind of their own, outbreaks of violence with no obvious cause, explosions and all sorts of impossible sounding rumours. At first, they thought it was the political tensions that have been building up globally finally breaking, but it now seems like there is more to it than that. It has been going on for hours now, and almost as soon as it started, all of you fell in to what looked like some sort of coma. It took a while for the Muses (which were running the whole time) to realise you had been sucked in to a simulspace via your mesh inserts (the computery gubbins installed in all your brains that lets you interface with computers, the internet and your muses).

They managed to briefly interrupt your simulation once, but it quickly adapted to their attempt to get in externally. They then tried a number of more subtle ways of getting to you, in the hope you would be able to get out yourself. The video you were seeing on the telly of people rioting was live video feed. The video of a factory building strange shapes was from a factory Kurts business owns. Its supposed to be making cars.

[Dog Pants]

GOG at -10? That would be 0 for me then :\

Civil War! God damn, I need to get home. Daisy, what's going on, why can't I get down the street?

[Joose]

GOG at -10? That would be 0 for me then :\

No, you do the x3 first. Your COG is 10, so 10x3 is 30, then -10 to 20. Still not an easy test, but doable.

You're in a sim, darlin'. It aint real, and it don't go much further than the house. One a you needs to shut it down, or eject you from the sim or somethin'

[Dog Pants]

Of course, that makes so much more sense Ah well, nothing ventured...

7, 6: 76 Severe Failure!

Haha, I'm worse than clueless.

[deject]

COGx3=75, -10 for a 65: 4, 8: 48 Success!

[munchkin]

COGx3 =30 - 10 =20
Roll 96.............crapbiscuits

[munchkin]

Frank:

Tiny dear, one could say that all of those knocks to the head that you've had in the past have affected your memory just a touch

[The Shutting Downs]

I'm okay sweetheart, don't fuss, nothing a proper drink won't cure when we get out of this.

How long have I been out?

(Cogx3)-10 = 35

Roll(2d10)+0:
10,3,+0

So with 10 = 0 that would give me a 3 yes?

[deject]

I'm okay sweetheart, don't fuss, nothing a proper drink won't cure when we get out of this.

How long have I been out?

(Cogx3)-10 = 35

Roll(2d10)+0:
10,3,+0

So with 10 = 0 that would give me a 3 yes?

I think for this game, yeah since the values go from 1-10 on a normal d10.

[Joose]

yep, a 10 is a zero in this, so 10,3 is indeed 03.

Tiny and Edgar, you both don't really remember anything other than waking up in that house a bunch of times. Ignorance is bliss.

Kurt and Barry, you both remember more detail. A lot more detail. The whole thing was reminiscent of that scene in Groundhog Day, where he tries to kill himself. You would wake up in the same house, over and over, and be killed in slightly different ways. One time the house was on fire, and you burnt to death. Another time, the ceiling fell in and you were crushed. A cloud of nanites came flooding through the windows and slowly stripped your flesh to the bone. Most of the times, though, the robo-butler killed you: He stabbed, shot, poisoned, throttled, bludgeoned, electrocuted and suffocated you, in a number of horrific ways. Through all of this, you felt no pain, but the visions of you and your companions being murdered over and over were traumatising.

Which is my prompt to introduce Stress Points and Lucidity. Lucidity is basically mental hit points. Stress is mental damage. Just like when the damage you take exceeds your durability (physical hit points) you keel over dead or dying, when your Stress gets over your Lucidity, you fall over a gibbering mess, or go catatonic. Until you hit that limit, the individual Stress Points don't have any other affect. The other thing to note is Trauma Threshold. If you receive a number of stress points at once that exceeds your Trauma Threshold, you get a Trauma. These are more serious: you get a -10 per Trauma to everything you do, a -1 to initiative, and a temporary Derangement, which are about as fun as they sound. Most of this stuff can be found on page 209-210, and your lucidity (LUC) and Trauma Threshold (TT) can be found in the Stats block on your character sheet.

Kurt, Barry: Because you managed to recall the horror of the last few hours, you both get 1d10 Stress points. Congratulations!

Oh, and:

How long have I been out?

You have been in the Sim for approximately 6 hours, 32 mins and 12 seconds so far. There is a time dilation effect on the Sim, making exact timing difficult. This may also have made it seem much longer to you, im not sure.

[munchkin]

To Kurt and Barry

You guys ok? you look a bit freaked out?

[deject]

No, goddamnit. We keep getting killed in here, over and over. That goddamn robot in there is a murderous son of a bitch. Thank god it's just a sim, but something tells me we need to get out as soon as possible. I wonder if we can destroy that robot...

[The Shutting Downs]

Roll(1d10)+0:
2,+0
Total:2

2 stress points.

Right, lets huddle people and get some brainstorming going on.

We know none of this is real, we are in a loop of some kind and that our Associate here is able to have some influence over what is going on.

I'm guessing we don't have a lot of time before this reboots, so what are our options?

[Dog Pants]

I wonder if we can destroy that robot...

Edgar looks from the champaign bottle in his hand to the smashed remains of the robot on the kitchen floor, then gives it a token kick for good measure.

We can kick some fuckin' ass, that's our options!

[deject]

What else can I do with the hacking?

[Joose]

What else can I do with the hacking?

There's examples to give you an idea on page 259 of the main rules.

Specific examples as far as Simulspace goes:

View current status of simulspace, simulmorphs, and accessing egos: Just a straight Infosec roll. I've given you all this already though.
Change domain rules (the in game rules of physics), add cheats (turn on noclip or god mode, for example), alter parameters of story, alter simulmorphs, change time dilation: Infosec -10
Eject Simulmorph (people in the Sim), alter/erase character AIs (like the robot): Infosec -20
Abort Sim (close the program, ejecting the people in it): Infosec -30

That's not an exhaustive list. If you think of something you want to try, say so and I'll tell you the modifier.

[deject]

I think I want to try the godmode thing on me, and the others if possible.

[Joose]

Make an infosec -10 roll then. I won't make you do it for everyone individually, you can just make the one roll for everyone.

[deject]

InfoSec (70) - 10: 60

2, 2: 22 Critical! Excellent Success! awwww hell yeah