Take Dead Space, Lovecraft, Accelerando, and The X-Files. Mix to taste.
Eclipse Phase is a post-apocalyptic transhuman conspiracy horror roleplaying game. If you manage to unpack that one and still want to keep reading, we’ll get along juuuuuuuust fine.
The Big Idea for Eclipse Phase is that humans reached the post-scarcity world of nanofabrication and neural mapping goodness, but an AI apocalypse called “The Fall” threw everything off track. Lots of people died, humanity was scattered, and we discovered that terrible things Out There wanted to stomp us. The AIs left via Stargate-style bridges to other galaxies, but humans (and hyperintelligent corvids, and uplifted bonobos, and whales in mecha suits…) are trying to pick up the pieces in a complicated, broken world.
Beyond the game itself, PostHuman Studios is a pretty cool place. They’ve released the Eclipse Phase books under a Creative Commons license, so there’s a pretty active community of people building cool tools for it.
General Eclipse Phase Links
Rob Boyle, one of the creators of Eclipse Phase, has a complete list of download links for all of the current source books and adventures. I’ve purchased hardcover copies since I started running campaigns, but the free PDFs are a great reference for players or for GMs trying to decide whether they want to dive in.
Chuck’s Eclipse Phase Wiki: A nice browser-friendly (or at least browser-friendlier) version of the core EP rulebook. It also explains a handful of useful house rules to simplify EP’s normally clunky speed/initiative system.
The EP character sheet generator project is a bit out of date: it only features morphs and character backgrounds from the core book, not from the recent Transhuman supplement. However, i’s super-clean, super-fast, and you can check it out and run it in your local browser without an internet connection. Slick.
Random Stuff
I’m a new GM, so keeping track of a lot of the details can bog me down. Which robot took that last wound? How many rounds of ammo does that drone have? Was that NPC’s Fray skill at 45 or 50? You get the idea. I whipped up some maps, and a small pile of mini cheat sheets and scratchpads sized for printing on 4x6 index cards.
All maps and printables use the free PT Mono font.. It’s pretty, and has an attractive set of accompanying serif and sans serif faces. Yum.
Scratchpads
I give new players a combat scratchpad to help them focus on the numbers they’ll need in “vanilla” fights that don’t involve hacking or PSI. Print ‘em out, cut ‘em in half, hand out some pencils.
Generic NPC Cards
NPC cheat cards are no-frills printouts that contain combat-relevant skills and equipment for NPCs. The original Numbers version can calculate derived stats like trauma thresholds from other aptitudes once they’re entered.
Continuity maps
The excellent Continuity starter adventure has one key weakness: its maps are colorful orange-on-dark-blue things that look great on screen but murder a black and white printer. I recreated the Continuity maps as black-and-white line art in OmniGraffle, and produced an alternate GM-only version that marks the locations of key equipment, NPCS, and threats. I also took some liberties with the map of Kepler station, allowing it to fit a bit nicer on an 8.5x11 or 11x17 sheet.
- Player maps: PDF, OmniGraffle
- GM Equipment maps: PDF, OmniGraffle
Continuity and Bump In The Night Cards
I’ve whipped up those NPC cards for all of the NPCs and mobs in the Continuity adventure (including Exsurgent-infected versions of the suggested pregen PCs), as well as Bump In The Night adventure.
Continuity GM Cheat Sheet
A general GM cheat sheet for Continuity saved my bacon. It includes a quick lookup table for the suggested pregen characters’ relevant skills, pre-calculated targets for the common WILx3 and COG+INT+SAV tests triggered by the scenario’s Basilisk hack, and weapon damage tables with the equipment they’re likely to find on the ship highlighted. It’s definitely geared towards Continuity and the particular PCs my group was running, but I’m probably going to whip out similar ones for upcoming sessions.