58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Triumph of Science Fiction Roleplaying, October 16, 2009
This review is from: Eclipse Phase (Hardcover)
[A quick forward: Though I do own the game, the version I'm reviewing happens to be the PDF version, rather than the dead-tree edition. I'm working on the supposition that if anything changes between the two, it'll only be for the better, as the lag time will give the publishers a chance to correct errata, polish details, etc.]
It's usually acknowledged that, in the world of roleplaying, science fiction tends to get the short end of the stick. The gaming hobby is fairly dominated by the Fantasy genre (with Horror also well-represented), but with the exception of a few stand-out games over the years -- Traveller, Star Frontiers, Alternity -- the SF corner of the hobby is a bit anemic, and most of what's offered tends to be of the "blended" variety, with games like Rifts and Shadowrun offering two great tastes that sometimes taste great together, but can just as often get in each others' way.
Well, to that august line of SF games, we can now proudly add Eclipse Phase, and I wouldn't be surprised if this one stands the test of time as have the big names before it.
Physically, it's a good-looking book, a full-color hardback weighing in at 400 pages (again, I'm working from the PDF, but that means that the only part of that that I haven't sampled personally is the "hardback" part). Table of Contents and Index are both actually useful, something of a rarity in the RPG world, and while it suffers from its fair share of typos and errata, they seem to be no more severe than what one usually gets in an RPG first printing.
The premise, while not unique to SF, is one that hasn't made the rounds as often in gaming circles, and thus remains fairly fresh. At some undetermined point in the future, after achieving the Singularity, the human race is hoisted by its own petard as a group of rebellious AIs, dubbed the TITANs, make short work of us and drive us off-planet. With Earth now an irradiated wasteland occupied by killbots and murderous nanite swarms, we're forced to push into the rest of the solar system, but we're aided by a level of technology practically undreamed of -- FTL communications, cornucopia machines and even consciousness transferal have made Humanity into Transhumanity, and opened the doors to as many new adventures, and new dangers, and they've closed on old ones.
Players take on the roles of agents of Firewall, a shadowy organization composed of members from numerous different factions, each drawn to the chance to protect this fragile new Transhumanity from itself, as well as outside sources. The incredible technology that is at their disposal allows for truly mind-bending play: body-swapping, "forking" (copying one's mind into another form, essentially cloning), and consciousness backups create a game where physical death is often only a temporary setback, and where a character's mental attributes mean much more than their physical ones.
The game engine itself is a straightforward percentile system, with a few interesting twists, such as Moxie points, which can be used to swap the digits on a die roll (reversing the 1's die and the 10's die), often turning a really bad roll into a really good one. It's clean, it works well, and it's always easy to teach new roleplayers how to play a percentile-based game, as it's easier to simply say "you have a 50% chance of doing this" rather than explaining all of the statistical math inherent in most other systems.
And one of the most innovative bits: All of this is being released under a Creative Commons "copyleft." That's right: Provided that you're not doing it to turn a buck, anything and everything in the books can be copied, pasted, mixed, matched, hosted, etc. to your heart's content, legally and with the blessings of the publishers. Essentially, if you know where to look, the game is free, and fans will undoubtedly contribute a vast store of material. As with all fan-made creations, some of it will be great, some of it will be terrible, and most of it will fall somewhere in between, but one thing that those fans won't have to put up with are cease-and-desist letters from an angry publisher. The whole thing falls very much in line with the designers' views, lending a sort of pleasant surreality to the idea of a free game that sports themes of freedom of information (among others).
With a slew of unique ideas supported by a solid system and some clever distribution concepts, Eclipse Phase is definitely worth your time, and it belongs in the collection of any gamer serious about expanding his collection of SF RPGs.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best Sci-fi RPG I've Seen, December 25, 2009
This review is from: Eclipse Phase (Hardcover)
I like most of the others here am Actually reviewing based off the PDF, but i plan on purchasing the hardcopy. I have played most of the big name RPGs on the block, D&D, HERO, GURPS, WoD. and have ran a few Sci-fi games using Hero, GURPS, and starwars d20. I also played in a few rifts games.
I enjoy science fiction literature but have always found that when it came to sci-fi i could develop decent stories but the rules systems were never very good. Rifts offers ridiculous imbalances, running terran empire with Hero is alright but i find for the most part Hero has a few balance and scaling issues at the low power scale. Starwars d20 was d20 which has it's place but 1) you are forced to do starwars pretty much and 2)d20 is not the most character based and flexable system.
So GURPS was alright and filled the need.
Now that i've seen Eclipse phase, for the style of sci-fi it presents, i don't think there is a better system out there. I find the universal systems will always do their job until a specifically tailored one is released which will do the job easier and hopefully better. Eclipse phase does the job better, while still leaving plenty of options.
If you want a crew of Aliens flying around the universe getting into space ship battles around far off moons, this might not be exactly the system you are looking for. There are some space opera elements but for the most part there didn't seem to be alot of focus on having a space ship flying around and blasting. Eclipse phase is sort of more of a Neo-Sci-fi. While still fantastical in some eliments (there are psionics). the vast majority of the setting seems to be a modern extrapolation of what technology could be, with some interesting elements add in to make the game interesting.
I like the default setting and the rules system alot and even though it isn't space opera focused I think a GM would be able to add in rules to make it more space battley pretty easy. They also leave you alot of leeway for playing around within their universe but not using their campaign per-say. There are things somewhat similar to 'stargates' so you could wormhole off somewhere crawling with aliens and play that way.
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