Eclipse Phase: Oceans of Conspiracy

An Eclipse Phase 2nd edition game. Ask me for the book.

the Fall

In the late Twenty First Century, humanity ascended to a new plane of technology, and regressed to an earlier phase of geopolitics. As resource wars, proxy wars and ideological conflicts erupted across the globe, the rival great powers exploited new technology against one another. The colonization of space opened up new scenes for rialry. Of all the new technologies the most powerful was the seed AI, self evolving intelligences. The most powerful of these were the TITANS, which the American military had settled on as the corner stone of its defenses.

Twenty years ago, the second cold war went hot. Then things got worse. First their was an escalation of regional conflicts, crime, murder, terrorism and informational attacks, then, as the hundred small wars escalated to become wars between the great powers it became clear that something more sinister was going on. July 7th 20XX, battle of Anchorage is the most common date for the start of the Fall, as both sides robotic combat machines turned on them. A short while later what had happened became clear ss the TITANs took over every US military command system and unleashed the automated legions of all major powers against humanity.

In response, the other great powers unleashed their own final weapons. Europe's ecological management systems switched to combat mode, transforming the world around it into a visciously prelapserian ideal, clashing with China's far more alien combat biology. Indian Combat posthumans, strange combinations of altered human and seed AI mounted campaigns of hyper intelligent sabotage and destruction. Combat grey and green goo. Self evolving bioroid combat dolls. Automated combat factories. The war became fully out of human control.

The TITANs and their enemies continued to evolve, with humanity trapped in the middle. Their behavior grew stranger, with waves of hunter killer robots moving to harvest the brains of other sapients for no clear purpose, and the use of seemingly impossible weapons that defied the normal human understandings of physics. Humanity fell back to its last remaining fortresses on earth, Mars, and in the outer system, waiting for the end.

And then, suddenly, the war stopped. TITAN war machines seemed to lose direction and the waves of combat ecology ebbed, leaving the remains of humanity watching in amazement. They had somehow survived, even if they did not know how.

That was twenty years ago.

Today

The old powers have fallen. Humanity today is dominated by corrupt emergency governments dominated by hypercorps and oligarchs, and by revolutionary groups, anarchists and committees of revolution that developed among populations abandoned to the horrors of the Fall by uncaring governments. Humanity, or as most would have it transhumanity is a diverse group of sapiences including humans, AIs and uplifted animals. Questions of what was a human have been brushed aside by the fall in the name of practicality, with every person now having a stack, a device that saves their consciousness. In the event of destruction of the body, or even simply for the utility of moving vast distances, the mind can be disincarnated and reincarnated in a new, perhaps quite different body.

Mars and Titan are the centres of human civilization in Sol, with refugees in Earth's choked cities desperately seeking a ticket to one of these supposed off world paradises. On Mars, various martian states are defacto controlled by oligarchs and hypercorps, ruling over a vast mass of human and AI minds sleeved in cheap expendable robotic work bodies. On Titan, the old Nordic/Canadian colony stands on a threshold between past and future, caught in its obligations to the vast number of traumatised survivors it's taken in, and challenged by radical forces along its left flank. The two sides are slowly rolling towards a new cold war.

And beyond that, the TITANs and yet stranger things threaten humanity from within and without.

Alien Contact

Ten years after the Fall, the Factors came. Strange fungi like, semi-liquid alien beings contained within near light vessels, they came to trade. To link humanity to a perported galactic community that exists beyond Earth's star. Little is known about them still, but they have told humanity not to use another alien discovery that has been discovered. The Pandora Gates.

Pandora Gates

Originally discovered on the Moon Pandora, and now on other places, the Pandora gates are artifacts of the TITANS, or perhaps ancient aliens capable of creating an instant faster than light connection to another Pandora gate elsewhere. So far four have been discovered across the system, opening gateways to hundreds of other exo-planets, many of them considerably superior to conditions in the solar system. Despite the Factor's warning, humanity has started to spread out through the gate networks, establishing off planet settlements, spreading out to avoid another fall.

Exsurgent Viruses

Even more than the advanced nanotech and warmachines that the TITANs used, the Exusrgent Viruses is perhaps the most terrifying product of the fall. These viruses, which appear to combine the properties of computer and biological viruses can affect radical transformations of the human, or even mechanoid body and mind. Tales of how exsurgents have deployed impossible powers are officially sneered at but privately widely believed. While most strains of exsurgent virus rapidly transform the victim into a horrific monster, others exist as chronic illnesses or are even treatable. The most famous of these is Watts-Macleod, a rumored virus said to grant psychic powers.

Firewall

Formed from the remains of various mutual aid organizations, intelligence cells and orphaned military units during the fall, Firewall is a decentralized organization of cells (called Servers) working covertly within human society for a simple purpose: Prevent the extinction of Terran derived sapient life, especially via a second Fall. To this end cells carefully investigate threats and mysteries, trying to avert further mass destruction which might push the fragile survival of humanity over the edge.

Disliked by the authorities of the System, Firewall are one part heroes, one part insurgents, a conspiracy of strange individuals come together for the common purpose of survival.

You are one of them.