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Invisible Sun, a Study in the Tension Between Accessibility in Price and Design

invisible-sun-kickstarter-graphic
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an Invisible Sun within us. – Sir Thomas Browne

The quote above is credited by Monte Cook games as an inspirational source for their new game Invisible Sun. Invisible Sun is a highly experimental RPG that includes elements of board gaming, formalized rules for downtime sessions, and rules for engaging players with different playstyles in a variety of ways. The board game elements bring a tactile experience that has been less prevalent in RPGs since the industry moved away from the miniature figure and occasional terrain inclusion of yesteryear. The board game elements also allow more complex role playing systems like multiple percentage roles for determining randomized effects to be handled though simple dynamics like drawing cards from a deck. The game includes a beautiful resin statue meant to display cards that impact game play so everyone can see them, and the first stretch goal was a spell and artifact grimoire that includes spell cards for every spell in the book.

When I first saw the kickstarter for Invisible Sun I was at first excited, then disappointed, then excited all over again. It took me a while to figure out exactly how I felt about this whole RP experiment. The problem is the lowest pledge reward is $197. Yes, you read that right. One hundred and ninety seven dollars, and that pledge level doesn’t include the majority of the stretch goal material. For the past several years I have been increasingly concerned about the trends in game development that make it difficult to bring new players into the hobby. Some of these issues are related to how difficult it can be to dive into modern role playing games with any kind of mental processing challenges. I started thinking about these issues in earnest largely because of the first post on this blog, which focuses on the challenges of role playing with memory issues. Other barriers to role playing are purely financial, which is an increasing problem in the 20teens. The books just seem to be getting larger and larger, with each edition being more expensive than the last. With a few exceptions we have not really seen any tools to break these games down into more systematically manageable, and affordable pieces.

Comparison of the most recent Vampire the Masquerade LARP and Tabletop books to the most most recent editions released from the original White Wolf era. The modern books here are the thinner basic print quality.

The one fairly high profile aid designed to streamline the process of juggling rules mid session are the spell cards Wizards of the Coast published as part of the D&D 5th Edition line. In the last year I’ve seen a few companies follow WotC’s lead on spell card inspired products, and at this year’s GenCon I saw a few companies experimenting with tools and game design that break away from the tables, charts, and expansive RP tomes that currently dominate the gaming market. Those experiments were not the norm though. The majority of what I saw at GenCon still leaned towards heavy, ornate, leatherette bound special editions with little in the way of gaming aids. Even a few small indie publishers were still defaulting to this format, despite not having an established brand to back up their price point. When gaming aids were available they were generally being produced by third party companies for extravagant prices.

So when I saw Invisible Sun announced I was phenomenally excited, and when I saw the price the day the kickstarter went live my heart fell. Several people expressed concerns about the price in the kickstarter comments. The game devs responded, saying that this was a premium product, and that part of why they are aiming for such a luxury experience is that their last few game products were specifically targeted at affordability, so they felt like this was a good time to aim for a different segment of the role playing market.

I decided to check and see what “affordable” really meant. I was incredibly surprised to find the Numenera Player’s Guide pdf was only $7.99 and a hard copy was only $19.99. This book is advertised as including all the rules necessary for a player to make a character, and generally get up to speed on the setting and core rules. I haven’t seen a price point like that on a major game line since the 90’s, and being primarily a World of Darkness player I’m used to the go whole game or go home design philosphy. It was very refreshing to see a product priced and designed for players who know they will never need GM materials. After seeing this I decided to go back to the Invisible Sun kickstarter and take a second look at what was being sold for that $197. As it turns out that price tag covers a lot of game material, and it left me wondering how that actually stacked up to what it takes to get started with a traditional role playing game.

As a baseline I decided to compare the Invisible Sun box to the price point for running a decent Dungeons and Dragons 5th Ed. campaign. I’m not counting the D&D startup boxes, because they really only give you enough to decide if you want to purchase the rest of the game. Assuming you need at least 1 Player’s Guide, 1 Dungeon Master’s Guide, and either 1 campaign book, or the Monster Manual if you’re going to create your own campaign, your initial book investment would be $150 MSRP (I know Amazon is less, but let’s assume you want to support your local game store). A basic Chessex Dice set is $4. So we’re right around $154 with no game aids. If we add in a wet erase mat, a few miniatures, the Arcane spell cards and 1 set of healer class spell cards we overshoot that $197 initial purchase cost handily. Given what is included in the Invisible Sun Black Box this seems like a reasonable comparison.

Just to make sure D&D wasn’t a one off example, I looked at some of Onyx Path/White Wolf’s products. The World of Darkness 20th Anniversary core books cost between $50 for a relatively moderate quality print on demand text to $115 for a premium print on demand copy of Mage the Ascension 20th Anniversary, and are not available with free shipping or any kind of Amazon discount. Chronicles of Darkness has a similar price point since you need the core rule book as well as one of the specific game texts such as Vampire the Requiem or Beast the Primordial to really run a full chronicle. While that may seem to provide a slightly more affordable point of entry than D&D to run a reasonable World of Darkness game, you generally need more than one copy of the book as during combat players often spend a lot of time hunting down exact rules for their actions so they are prepared on their turn. There are spell cards available for some of the games in the Chronicles of Darkness lines, but not all of them. A comment on a recent Onyx Path blog indicates they are going to begin to release similar products for the World of Darkness 20th Anniversary line, but these cards are not yet available. So at many tables multiple 500+ page tomes are a necessity, as are far more dice than are ever needed for Dungeons and Dragons. Again, we have very rapidly overshot the $197 price point of Invisible Sun, and we have far fewer game aids available to help make the play experience more accessible.

The primary problem with the Invisible Sun model is that with other properties players will likely pick up the extra dice, copies of the player’s guides, spell cards etc. for themselves. With Invisible Sun everything is wrapped up in a single product, and while Monte Cook Games has encouraged players to split the price, generally people are going to be less likely to do that if they don’t own the fruits of their expenditure, and no collector is going to be comfortable breaking up an Invisible Sun Black Box. There is now a player kit priced at $36 thanks as an Invisible Sun stretch goal, but that is an additional expense. It doesn’t help mitigate the initial $197 hit. Ultimately the game is incredibly well priced for what is included, and breaks much needed ground on accessible game design, but is less financially accessible than most games on the market because all of the expense is front loaded in a single purchase.

When all was said and done I did end up funding Invisible Sun. I am still frustrated that the 15 year old me that bought his first copy of Vampire the Dark Ages after much scrimping and saving would have a difficult time investing in my favorite properties today, and would certainly not be able to make the dive into Invisible Sun. However, I am also aware that by the time I was done with high school I had spent well over $197 on my World of Darkness collection, and it was in many ways a less comprehensive assortment of role playing resources than what is included in the Invisible Sun Black Box. I also remember far too many games with players who ended up leaving the hobby behind because navigating arcane texts, and tables filled with endless numbers kept them from truly enjoying the process of role playing.

Invisible Sun may not open role playing to a new generation of 15 year old geeks waiting in the wings of their local gaming stores, but it unquestionably breaks ground on making role playing games a more accessible experience. As long as Monte Cook is focusing on creating products at all price points, the innovations that work in Invisible Sun have a very real chance of making their way into more affordable game lines. Hopefully over time these innovations will spread well beyond the scope of Monte Cook’s games and find their way into a variety of role playing products across the industry. We can do more to make games that everyone can easily enjoy, and despite the sticker shock I honestly believe Invisible Sun is only the beginning of a trend in thinking about game design in radically new and elegantly accessible ways.

EMBRACING MINORITIES IN GAMING

Like many of us, gamers, I have been playing role-playing games since I was twelve years old. Unlike many of us, I am Latino and my first GM was black. From early on, race and ethnicity have played a large role in my gaming, either consciously or unconsciously. A few years ago this topic came to the forefront for me when my GM at the time started a game about the Irish mob. Race and ethnicity had been coming up frequently in my life, but when I heard about this game, I frankly got very bored and somewhat dejected. As I saw it, this was yet another story about Europeans and their problems without representation of other minorities. This topic came to a head recently, when friends were running a 7th Seas one shot, and that same sense of boredom at the setting washed over me, yet another eurocentric game. As I look back, I can think of the overwhelming number of white players and characters in my groups. As a geek and ex-goth I have met and played with countless white people as these subcultures are centered around European cultures. It’s not that I wasn’t welcome, these people were and are my close friends, it’s that I wasn’t counted.

As a player, I know of many games, but I will admit to not knowing the full gamut of games out there and all their varieties, so I focus in this essay on the games that I know, and the games I know are popular. Off the top of my head I can think of two games, Shadowrun and White-Wolf, that paid any attention to minorities. Everything else I can think of gave lip service to any ethnicity except chop-socky Asian stereotypes (giving particular looks at Ninjas and Superspies, 2nd Edition AD&D monks, and the Akashic Brotherhood books). And often, when the players did try to embrace these other cultures, the characters were white-washed caricatures. Medieval fantasy role playing games are particularly bad culprits of euro-centrism, as their definition of medieval is specifically exclusive of any other culture. The best (or possibly worst) attempt to create diversity were the Drow in D&D. My wife has a

andvari — A Runestone with Andvari (maybe a Svartelf)

particular issue with the Drow because she sees them as playing in blackface. I see it differently, because I know based on history the Drow aren’t trying to be black people, they are just a race that happens to be black based on Nordic myth. My issue with the Drow is that instead of trying to expand beyond European folklore, the authors invented a new race, notably the only one of color, that fits within their eurocentric world. To make matters worse they are all evil except the one heroic Drow who decides to embrace the mainstream morality and culture. It’s not to say that the authors imagined non-whites as evil, but as a minority player, this was a message I received.

My favorite system to play are the Old World of Darkness (OWOD) games, mostly because I like the pathos inherent in the games. OWOD, in the 90s, was one of the first games in my recollection to really take any consideration of non-European ethnicities, and they did it badly. But, they did it, and they gave a real attempt to go beyond pure stereotypes. The Werewolf books integrated a Native-American style animist philosophy into its core principles and it included African characters with the Silent Striders. The Mage books attempted to recognize Hindi religions with the Euthanatoi (aka Chakravanti). The Mage Book of Shadows introduced the Ali-Batin, Arabic mages based not on any sort of extremism, but on the Islamic Golden age of the 10th through 12th centuries. Even the Kindred of the east, as chop-socky as it was, delved deeper into Asian mysticism than just about anything that had come before it. I reiterate, these weren’t good, but they were a start. I felt at home, in a sense, because in this system I existed implicitly.

koe

I could have asked to exist explicitly in these worlds but that would not have been possible. I grew up in a very diverse area. I lived with people of all ethnicities in Washington, DC. I don’t know how to feel normal without a massive amount of diversity around me. From ethnic, to political, to sexual, I had all types of diversity around me. As a foreigner I spent my early years travelling back and forth from Venezuela, and though I want to say I identify more with that particular culture, I don’t. I do identify as Latino but I don’t carry that sense of patriotism, that love of the land, that I see in many other people have for the native country. So for me, representation, however bad, was enough. It was a start. It attempted to create a world in which I exist. I’ve heard from others that they’ve known people from somewhere in the world that were offended because these games didn’t get their ethnicity right. Grapevine hearsay aside, I’m okay with this. We are not going to get these games right, particularly not on the first go around. And it’s going to be particularly difficult to get any one culture completely in a short fictional summary of text. We are playing a game of course correction; we try to hit a target, miss, and try again. As the 20th anniversary edition of the old White Wolf games comes out, they work to get create better representations.

I focus on the White Wolf games as the best example I know, not to put them on a pedestal as the best example in the industry. Part of my particular emphasis is that I do not know of any other games with a global reach. I’ve seen Mage fan movies in Catalan. I’ve met a surprising number of native Portuguese speaking players, particularly Brazilian. I’ve run into Greeks, Bolivians, Mexicans, Chinese, Blacks, and Muslims that play these games. This is impressive to me. But enough fan-boyism.

I understand where this eurocentrism comes from: white privilege. I despise that term, not because it’s not accurate, but because it feels slimy to me. Yet, that’s exactly what it is. The majority of gamers I’ve played with are white, and have identified with the British Isles or Nordic countries. If I had a dollar for every Nordic rune or Celtic knot I’ve seen I’d have enough to buy me a couple of new next gen consoles. Even the minority players I play with have a hard time playing characters that aren’t white. We are inundated with white-washing in our media and have come to accept it as normal. Whites in the US are the cultural rulers, and as such in a position of power, whites as a group are not bothered by the lack of representation of other minorities. It’s not that the individuals don’t care, they do in their individual lives, they just haven’t had examples of players or characters from other ethnicities in their midst. We need examples of games that include other ethnicities as central points, not as villains or stereotypes, but as proper representation that the world is larger than what we have seen and experienced.

There is a very similar, parallel issue, which is women in gaming. I’ve run into many men that won’t play women, and vice versa, as well as players that will not stray outside of their own culture. These players claim this is somehow a defense of that other culture or gender, that they don’t want offend or misrepresent. I am calling this behaviour out as ethnocentrism, fear, and laziness. Ethnocentrism in only being willing to engage in something the player already knows. Fear as in retaliation or rejection for stepping outside the box. Laziness for an unwillingness to explore and research other cultures. The cure for this is courage and compassion. Courage to be willing to explore unknown cultures and courage to be wrong. The compassion is to open up your heart and mind to seeing other cultures and ethnicities as human. Investigate a new culture, seek people out from that culture, learn as much as you can about them. You’re never going to get the whole picture, but the effort of trying to approach something outside yourself makes you more compassionate in real life.

yoruba-ritual-face-painting-by-laolu-featuring-dapperafrika — Image by African History, Yoruba Practioner

I challenge anyone has never gone outside of their particular box to pick a culture for their next game and make a character from it. I have done this, my most notable example was a gay black practitioner of Yoruba, specifically Angolan Yoruba as opposed to the Vodou or Santeria offshoots. I had played multi-ethnic characters before but this endeavor helped open my eyes. This character was about as distant from me as I could think of, or so I thought. The experience was eye-opening, not only learning how Yoruba spread with slavery into my own country, but also how other-ing it was to be gay and black in a room full of white people representing European countries. I was fortunate to have a very good storyteller that was able to run with it. One of most poignant experiences I had was that other players continuously forgot that my character was black. The notion of someone who didn’t look like they did was so foreign they couldn’t keep it in their heads. One of the best surprises I received was realizing that another player in the Irish mob game decided to play a black Vodou practitioner, a player that very much would have otherwise expected to play a white Irish character. I don’t take credit for influencing him, but I would like to think that playing my Yoruba character touched someone somehow.

I don’t mean to malign anyone by this article. This is not a pointed finger at white people, but a pointed finger at ourselves, whatever ethnicity we are. As gamers we have the power to become someone else, anyone else, let’s flex this power. We have a powerful tool at our disposal, role play, that allows us to become someone else for a bit, to walk in someone else’s shoes. I want us to all realize that we are a broad diverse people, that we have so much richness in culture to draw from. It’s okay to explore and play any culture, European or otherwise. We should be acknowledging that the European myths from which our games come from are a tiny part of a broad vast world, and that we no longer live culturally isolated. Let us realize that we are again and again playing the same song, and excluding many of the people whom we love in our external lives. Let us realize that we are people living the same struggle, and that the struggle of others is interesting. Let us realize that by exploring we create compassion within ourselves. If you are a game writer ask yourself about who you are representing in your games. If you are a player, ask yourself whom in your life do you want to know more about. Allow yourself to grow.

Miguel Ludert is an artist and software developer, originally from Venezuela, then Washington DC, then Richmond, VA, and now Seattle, WA.

A CASE FOR QUEER CHILDHOOD HORROR IN THE WORLD OF DARKNESS

Tell me if you’ve heard these before. “I liked Changeling the Lost so much more than Changeling the Dreaming because they got rid of all the childhood garbage.” “When I read Changeling the Dreaming, I turned and ran and never looked back.” “Changeling’s a fine game I guess, but it doesn’t belong in the World of Darkness.”

I have seen or heard every statement above when WoD players talk about Changeling the Dreaming. I am a long time fan of Changeling, and specifically I am a long time fan of the horror themes inherent to the game. In truth it can be the darkest setting in the line, but the themes are difficult to approach for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons are tied to how the game was developed, but some of the problems have to do with the perspective players bring to the game.

Changeling the Dreaming fundamentally speaks to a distinctly queer experience. No, I do not think Changeling is exclusively queer, but I think the horror of the game is particularly resonant with the lived experience of queer gamers. I do not know if this was intentional on the part of the developers, but I want to take some time to really dive into the horrors of Changeling through my experiences as a gay man, and how I feel these experiences show up in Changeling.

There are a handful of moments in my life that I think about when I think about Changeling. When I was in 7th grade I was at the counter of a small kitch store with my mother in front of a cashier than I am now quite certain was a gay man. A box of rainbow rings sitting next to the register caught my eye so I picked one up and asked what it was. The cashier told me they were gay pride rings and I dropped them like my hands were on fire. I don’t know how the cashier responded (I can’t imagine well), but my mother awkwardly tried to tell me I shouldn’t react that way, while at the same time obviously not wanting to be angry because she wanted to cultivate empathy in me, not shame. As much as her reaction was the right one, she didn’t understand why I dropped them. She hadn’t spent years on the playground with me, and she didn’t understand the fear of the slurs being true that only really exists when they are. Until I finally started dating guys I never thought about that moment, but it lingered in high resolution in my mind. Now it defines how I understand gay men before they accept who they are.

I had that dream again. The one where I tower over all the bullies on the playground. I’m also blue, with horns and . . . it’s a weird dream. I didn’t have it while I was asleep though. I had it on the playground. Steve was getting it again for taking all the toys apart and trying to make them better. Chuck was leading the chant, and it was the same insults the kids always used. Geek, Dweeb, Tinkling Tinker, Queer. My vision went red, my skin went blue and I swung. I was huge. I towered over them. They couldn’t possibly win. . . Except they did.

Steve and I both ended up in the dirt, filthy and bruised. I got up first and tried to help him up but he smacked my hand and started screaming at me. Why did I stick my nose in his business? They would have been happy to just scare him if he’d played along, and then I butted in. His cheeks were red with tears and rage. For a moment I saw two red spirals twirl out of the flush on his face. I cringed back and closed my eyes, trying not to listen to him screaming. I don’t want to be this anymore. I don’t want to care about him. I hate myself.

Victor

When I was in high school I fell for my first boy. I mean, I’d crushed a few times before that, but I always found a way to convince myself it was something else. I can’t say we “dated” or that he was “my boyfriend”. His parents were Pentecostal. That was just never going to happen. Not in any way that normal people get to have boyfriends or girlfriends. We fooled around though. Did the sort of things 16 year old kids do with each other that their parents like to pretend “kids” that age don’t do. I loved him as much as a 16 year old is capable of coherent love. It was messy though. His relationship with his adolescent sexuality was complicated and capricious, and as hard as it was for me to accept liking boys because of the children I’d grown up around my entire life, I knew I could never understand what getting that from my family was like, so I was ok with it.

Then his parents found out. Not about us specifically, but that he liked boys. I wish I had learned about conversion therapy in a book or from the news in college like most people. I learned about it from our mutual friends when I found out why he wasn’t living at home any more. I am forever grateful his parents never knew we had messed around, because when he finally got home after months “at camp” I was able to see him. We joked about his stories. Made fun of the idea of all the boys at this camp being forced to bathe together. They wanted to stop him from being gay right? Clearly they were morons. We didn’t joke about the majority of what happened though, because he didn’t talk about it. He wasn’t quite the same as before. It wasn’t until years later that I really wrapped my mind around what that “not quite the same” really meant.

(http://www.lydiaburris.com/)

I sit in my dorm room thinking about Steve and Chuck. It’s been a long time since I traded blows with Chuck on the playground, but for whatever reason here I am thinking about it. I know now I wasn’t just dreaming that day. I can be tall now, huge beyond measure, and Steve isn’t just some kid who’s good at putting things together. I’m a Troll, Steve’s a Knocker, and laughably enough Chuck’s a Redcap. He doesn’t smell out other Changelings to torment anymore. Now he eats the fear of the assholes who made him afraid enough of his blood soaked dreams to turn on his own. I shouldn’t relish the nightmares he dredges up in those wastes of skin. I’m a seelie Troll. I’m honorable, respectable. Not every Autumn Fae gets a happy ending though and I can’t help but think he’s due a little payback.

Every other Troll in the court might shove their unseelie legacy down when it comes knocking, but I understand what that simmering hatred that locked me away from my chrysalis does to a person, and I understand what it drove Chuck to do. So when he feeds, he’s feeding for every Changeling he smacked around as a kid, and I savor his feasts almost as much as he does. It’s just one of those truths about being a fae in this world you don’t admit in polite seelie company.

My phone chimes. It’s Steve. He’s back from his break with his family. I can’t wait to tell him what happened in court while he was gone. It was an epic summer. He’s living off campus now, and I thought it was going to be awesome. I’m standing on his stoop waiting for him to answer the door and I can tell something’s wrong. When the door opens I see what it is. His face . . . the spirals on his cheeks that glow a deep candy cane crimson when he works are grey and dull. His seeming is there . . . kind of, but I wish it wasn’t. The mists are kinder than whatever I’m looking at. He’s happy to see me, but everything is wrong, and I don’t understand what’s happening. We go downstairs into his workshop and it’s immaculate. No knocker has an immaculate workshop. He’s building something and he sits down to start working on it again as if I’m not even there. I watch him counting holes and rows on a prototype circuit board over and over again. He’s counting exactly 3 times before putting his circuits in and I uncomfortably lean over him and joke, “whatever happened to the kid who always knows where to put the wire?”

He looks up at me and smiles, “Yeah, I was a pretty sloppy kid wasn’t I? But after the work I did for my dad this summer I know that if it isn’t perfect it isn’t worth making . . . right?”

Changeling’s themes aren’t only queer, but the horrors come into deeper, more vibrant contrast when you are. The Nephandi of Changeling wear psychologists outfits and tell you you’re wrong, and the hardest part is the people telling you to listen to them aren’t motivated by some Wyrm tainted Bane curled up deep in their gut. The people telling you to listen to them are your parents, and girlfriends, and family. They are telling you to listen because they are afraid of you. They are afraid for you, and most painfully they love you. So they can’t just sit by and not do something. In the worst situations they are just like you. They are victims of the world around them and that’s the very thing that makes them so dangerous. Most people don’t understand that experience. It’s easy to see childhood silliness in Changeling if you don’t look too deeply, or if you’ve never taken a knife to your own ability to love because you’re more afraid of what the people in your life might think than the loneliness that haunts you.

I’m a gay man, and the words above are about my experience, but I will say I’ve seen these themes even more starkly and painfully when I hear my trans friends speak about their lives. This rabbit hole is so much deeper than I can ever pretend to illuminate and for that I am uncomfortably grateful.

If you’ve ever found yourself saying Changeling doesn’t belong in the World of Darkness, or that it’s full of silly childhood themes, take a second and think about it a little more carefully. I don’t ask that you dive in and drag the horror out of the game. It’s a game after all, and no one should tell you what should or shouldn’t speak to you. Instead of saying the game doesn’t belong in the World of Darkness though, I just ask that you take a second to be appreciate why you weren’t able to see that horror and be grateful it doesn’t belong at your table.

Victor Kinzer has been roleplaying since he first picked up Vampire Dark Ages in high school. He nabbed it as soon as it was released (he might have been lusting after other Vampire books for a while at that point) and hasn’t looked back since. He role plays his way through the vast and treacherous waters of north Chicago, and is hacking away at the next great cyberpunk saga at http://redcircuitry.blogspot.com/. He is an occasional guest on Tempus Tenebrarum (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvNp2le5EGWW5jY0lQ9G39Q/feed), and is working to get in on the con game master circuit. During the rest of his life he works in Research Compliance IT, which might inform more of his World of Darkness storylines than he readily admits.

ECLIPSE PHASE AND THE TRANSHUMAN PHILOSOPHY, OR, HOW I STOPPED FEARING DEATH AND LEARNED TO LOVE NANOTECHNOLOGY

Transhuman

The term is getting thrown around a lot these days and when I write the words a lot I mean a lot. Transhumanist groups all over the world have seen their numbers swell over the last five years, an example being the Singularity Group, a Transhumanist group that went from 400 members in 2011 to over ten thousand by 2014. The idea of “beyond human” has found itself coloring the cultural landscape in music, movies, television, novels, and especially in gaming. At first these change were small bits and pieces of what is an all-encompassing philosophical movement. Then Posthuman Studios in 2009 dropped Eclipse Phase on our collective gaming culture like a unknown hip-hop artist dropping the mic after proving themselves in an epic rap battle. The team at Posthuman integrated and deftly arranged Transhuman philosophy into and around every element of EP and created a game that is in the same vein as Shadowrun, forcing deeper thinking about the gaming experience from both a mechanical and setting perspective. Now in the uncertain future, which all gaming companies get to enjoy, in an industry that much like amateur theater is more a matter of passion than profit, the question becomes what is the direction of EP as the Transhumanist movement itself slowly saturates and bloats beyond the bounds of philosophy and into the realm of faith and cult-like attraction?

Let’s take it back to basics; what is philosophy? What is a philosophy? Why is Transhuman philosophy, at least initially, the truest descendant of those original Grecian deep thinkers? Start with the word: philosophy, the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline. The word itself is made of two; philo, “to love”, and sophos, “knowledge”. The first word, philo, has layers of meaning, being of the same literary family tree as phyle, “a race or tribe”, phyein,”to bring forth, produce, or grow”, and physis, “nature”. What is the Transhumanist movement but a collection of “tribes” all trying to “grow” more powerful so as to control “nature”? More so than any philosophy in history Transhumanism fulfills the faceted meanings of philo. Being a member of the movement doesn’t bring riches; followers love the promise of the movement. A golden apple of, if not immortality, then extended lifespan and health that no human being has ever enjoyed and expansion of the mind to match. Of course minus the necessary transition of death required by many other golden apple offering organizations who will remain nameless. I’m sure we can all think of a few off the top our collective heads, hm? Or wait, maybe there is a shuffling the mortal coil price of admission? We’ll get to that later.

Sophos, knowledge, in Ancient Greece men who so debated and argued over the meaning of life and everything were referred to as sophists; teachers who used rhetoric and philosophy to teach arete, excellence, to paying noble students. If the previous sentence sounds like a set-up for a winding downward path of corruption and misunderstanding than you’re paying attention. A modern day sophist is considered a charlatan, a hack, a cunning master of words who uses clever but ultimately fallacious and deceptive arguments. Yes, that’s right, a con man fleecing retirees in Florida has as much in common with a sophist of ancient Greece as the modern philosophy teacher. They are two sides to the same coin. Did I mention ancient Grecian sophists were also the first lawyers? Thanks, Greece.

It is in this respect that I feel Transhumanism cements a place as the truest spiritual successor to ancient Grecian philosophy. The Transhumanist movement offers a bright shining future filled with reason, logic, intellectual pursuits, and wonderful advanced technology. It also offers existential threats to both the continued prosperity of the our species and our very sense of self-preservation. Both of these futures are painted in golden words and clever arguments. One is classic sophist and the other modern and the movement has started to mix the two arguments freely.

“Wait,” you said while finishing that last sentence because you think I can hear you through the magic of the internets, “isn’t this a gaming website?”. You are correct! Eclipse Phase brings this murky complexity into the table-top arena and through the games we play and the campaigns we run forces us to face the questions of Transhumanist and Posthumanist thinking while laying the groundwork in the very bedrock of the mechanical dice system. Posthuman studios has created a game that from page one of character creation gently reaches under our chairs and elevates the conversations at our gaming tables.

PS21002_EclipsePhase_MorphRecognitionGuide_400px — Buy the Book

There are effectively two characters being created. The hardware; the body: whether bone and blood or steel and circuits; and the software: the mind, skills, and memories of the player character. The software is, in contrast to our experiences with computers, the permanent element of your character, while the hardware, in true Transhumanist fashion, is disposable and replaceable and upgradable like that cherry keurig in your kitchen. You can get a bedeviling assortment of enhancements both biological and mechanical for your body but never forget that you’re only stuck in it until you finish the payments… though, get the Gap insurance just to be safe. This is a pure idealist view of a bedrock technology for a Transhuman future that borders on posthuman. The idea of the mind and body as something that can be uncoupled is perhaps the easiest to understand concept at the center of Transhuman thought, and more importantly, is one of several fulcrums for playing Eclipse Phase. The body is a housing and with proper technologies for uploading, recording, and processing human personalities it may be abandoned.

As a player this will be one of the most difficult things to accept on a deep instinctual level as ironically the ideas of libertarian politics and individual liberties can be quirky and the popularity contest of a post-scarcity economy; which isn’t actually in Eclipse Phase; can be complicated, they are rooted in ideologies we can interact with in the real world. However, to abandon your body and not feel a deep loss when being uploaded away is an instinctually difficult idea to grok. FYI; “grok” is loaded into all spell checkers; that’s a big “W” for Heinlein. There isn’t anyone who can predict with any accuracy what would happen to a mind without all the support biology of a million years of evolution connected to it. Remember above about golden apples and transitions of death? When a computer moves a program it copies it first then deletes the original. Two whole and complete instances of self would exist and for those few moments be the absolute same person having the same experience. The entire experience would be so far outside our own reference points as to do unknown damage to the psyche. Thankfully Posthuman Studios agrees and included insanity and Stress points as an alternative type of damage and health in addition to the usual physical indicators of health.

The idea of sanity and more specifically the relation between perception and reality is another core tenet of EP and an important “big question” part of Transhuman thought. The world of EP has folded what a modern perspective would call virtual into the the physical world. The idea of technology so closely integrated as to be genetic means the street of virtual advertising that you can’t without the proper implants becomes reality. A city block, gray and tan buildings four to five stories tall, the thin skies of Mars overhead. There are crowds of people all moving along chatting but there’s no noise other than feet and mouths. However, with the proper implants, the street is lit with a dizzying array of animated signs for business. Holographic greeters stand outside door ways offering sense memories to sample products and digital menus with encrypted coupons to take home and order with later. The ears are alive with soundtracks being offered like radio a number of HD channels from private casters to a particular storefront offering a soundtrack with their commercials subliminally layered underneath. The clothes of the people are alive with neon art, short animations advertising a new popular band or movie.

Should you want more information about that popular band or movie the image itself acts as a hyperlink to the movie’s launch site or the band’s fan page illuminating the integrated instant access to information. We in the modern day have some understanding of what it’s like to always be plugged in, connected to a vast resource of information. However, the tenets of Transhumanist thought call for a deeper integration of this access. An almost subconscious access, your implants; a solid state hard drive, networked cellular sized processors operating inside a shell made of your cloned neural cells, a multi-band high speed wireless connection made of micro-line that grows along your cardiovascular system. Imagine your virtual half offering up information and data without prompting as you take in the sights. Even downloading small sense memories, another person’s actual memory of doing something or experiencing something that they’ve digitized into a small file to be added to your own sense memory. As you integrate other memories then the questions arises of identity. What is identity in the face of the moldable nature of mind and awareness?

What is the value of self in the face of neural uploading? The first time the mind is uploaded, assuming from a healthy human, there are then two of that person existing, staring at each other through their perception of the world and both wholly formed people. The two would be identical people for only the briefest of moments and then they will be ever so slightly different. The in-setting laws and sections in EP about that moment is one of the most complicated sections of the entire line of books and is one of the most complicated ideas of Transhumanist thought. The process of “forking” involves rolls to prune the neural structure of your characters duplicate and allows a purpose built version of self minus any distractions like sense of self or memories in the case of beta forks. The much more complicated; re: fully realized duplicate; alpha fork is the more legally, philosophically, ethically, and spiritually dangerous concept.

fork_PNG3062 — Probably the Wrong Kind of Fork

This is where Transhumans falter in the philosophy and EP expresses it beautifully as few if any can agree on the moral and ethical nature of the above situation. Is it suicide to transfer your consciousness, to upload a copy of self away from your birth body? Is it a murder/suicide pact between your self when a fork is sent to collect information returns and is reintegrated into the “original” or does the fork demand the “original” integrate into the fork? Which is the legal entity known as that person? Who has legal precedent and who is the true person? EP handles this by providing every major answer in the characters of every major power in the solar system setting of the game. The Jovian Republic says there is a soul and if you’ve left your original body you are not human anymore. The Scum Fleets encourage experimentation of self that sound more like a John Carpenter movie than the well reasoned choices of an advanced species. The Martians focus on survival and let others tackle the big questions. The Titanians actively explore the concept in academic settings while Extropians enjoy the full width and breadth of the technological advances but don’t clamour for the extreme experience the Scum pursue. There are more and more and more factions, clades, tribes, clans, hypercorps, small city-states (village-states?), and ever more exotics forms of community. Like flipping through the pages of a book they are each different in their approach and reaction to the neural freedom of technology.

What does this do to the psyche? The far reaches of Transhuman technology create monstrous abominations that chant “long live the new flesh” while charging to break the body while their very appearance breaks the mind. A mind already ablaze and saturated with this constant input of sights and sounds that must be actively managed. A mind that isn’t tethered to a body and may also roam fully into the digital world of restaurant menus and subliminal advertising. How does this affect an originally “normal” human mind? The Stress point and insanities system of Eclipse Phase reflect the downside of this morphic freedom and by reflecting the darker side of the malleability of mind they embrace all of Transhuman thought. The rolls for resleeving, the adjustment periods, and all the bonuses and flaws of switching bodies is a fundamental element of Eclipse Phase and this neural freedom is key element of Transhuman thought.

The idea of a “mind” as software creates interactions with the environment not possible in other games and dangers that simply can’t be found outside of EP. The mind can be transferred to newer and/or better bodies but is also a target for psychological invasive memes, malware consisting a bad case of schizophrenia where the voices give you specific instructions to leave the back door unlocked at the bank, even whole other personalities with separate skills ready to take over when needed most. In this element of EP the Transhuman thinking at it’s core shines very brightly indeed. You must have faith in the process upon which you embark because after it’s done your mind will be humanely wiped from the meat like quietly putting down a old dog.

Transhuman thought asks massive questions about the mind and Eclipse Phase brings all those questions and the underlying technologies to you as a player in a variety of combinations. Just like the neural and morphic freedom that Transhumanity strives for the world of EP offers a way to play and approach these massive questions from any angle. Is the mind the soul? Do we have a separate element of ourselves which make us that can’t be transferred? Is there really a difference between real and virtual? Can a human be duplicated and if so are both the original? Can a mind be programmed, firewalled, infected with a virus, and upgraded like a desktop computer? Is there a point where the you that exists isn’t the same that existed?

Those are big table breaking questions and they won’t be answered in this article or in the Eclipse Phase setting so…good luck with that? The next time we meet we’ll dive into morphological freedom, the technologies and philosophical concepts behind re-sleeving, morphs, biotech, nano-tech, and the point where artificial and natural becomes very blurred indeed. We’re going to be with Eclipse Phase for a while really exploring the ins and outs of the Transhuman heart that beats at the center.