Synopsis Farcast is a yearblog for the Eclipse Phase roleplaying game by Posthuman Studios. The goal of this blog is to post a single entry every day for 2013—new locations, groups, NPCs, artifacts, morphs, tech, and ideas for players and gamemasters to use or take inspiration from in their games. Each entry will be at least 500 words in length, and will rely primarily on the material in the Eclipse Phase main book. This is all completely unofficial fan material; I have no affiliation with Posthuman Studios. Farcast 151 is a PDF collection of the first 151 entries from the Farcast blog, compiled together for your convenience and released for Free RPG Day 2013. Legal Eclipse Phase products (including printed rulebooks/sourcebooks and PDFs) by Posthuman Studios are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- Share Alike 3.0 License. All written materials on the Farcast blog and this document fall under the same license. The cover and background images for Farcast 151 are from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904), in the public domain. Language Characters who are genderless, intersex, or of indeterminate gender are referred to using singular they, as opposed to the gender neutral it (because of unfortunate connotations) or artificial gender neutral pronouns (which readers found strange and irritating). Hopefully this won't cause too much confusion. Thanks Editing and proofing these entries has been helped in large part by readers of the blog who posted comments or otherwise gave feedback, and I’d like to thank Aldero, Chase S, CodeBreaker, Colin, Duncan, Francis Tiffany, Frank Trollman, Ian, Ire, Jaberwo, Jan, Joe, Marcin, OneTrikPony, Shannon, Smokeskin, Soyweiser, TITAN, William, and wint- r-mute for their help and support! Who To Blame Writing: Bobby Derie Special Guest Editor: Joseph Baum http://farcastblog.com ENTRY 000: Test Item Transhumanity lives in a universe where alien intelligences and civilizations have already lived and died, leaving behind remnants for them to paw through, analyze, and reverse engineer. To prepare and train new generations for the task of cracking these problems, the scientists and philosophers of the Morningstar Constellation have opened a crowdsource digital artifact: the Test Item. Based in part on real alien artifacts discovered on exoplanets, the Test Item is a complex software construct which thousands of users can probe, test, and interact with during each test-cycle. The Test Item programmers are volunteers that include some of the most creative, knowledgeable minds in the solar system, and each new incarnation of the Test Item typically incorporates bizarre physics, chemical composition, cultural influence, and xenobiological traces. As both a puzzle and an exercise in analysis, testers are encouraged both to cooperate and compete; posting significant breakthroughs on the latest Test Item (or even some of the archived old Test Items) generally causes enough interest for a small s-rep boost, and sometimes job offers from hypercorps. Tangible benefits of the Test Item beyond education are few, but have produced some working theories on the physics behind the gate mechanisms and refinement in a few technologies like allotropic alloys. The conspiracy-minded point to statistical correlation of certain physical and cultural traits among past Test Items as evidence suggseting that the entire Test Item project is little more than a cover for actual testing of an alien artifact—or perhaps a cache of such artifacts!—in the control of the Morningstar Constellation. For most testers however, the Test Item remains little more than an ongoing intellectual exercise, and a challenge that prepares gatecrashers for what they might discover on the other side. Using Test Item The Test Item is a public MacGuffin; it does nothing by itself, little more than a complex three-dimensional software model of a hypothetical artifact that bends or breaks certain laws of physics, or combines unusual chemical and xenocultural elements. However, the Test Item functions as a focus for characters to interact—teams of testers will compete over specific theories and test methodologies, sabotage each other and steal data, try to hack the Test Item sourcecode or influence the programmers, lay wagers and try to collect them—and as such is a useful concept for the gamemaster that wants something with outrageous properties that cannot be easily stolen or abused because it is completely conceptual, with no physical existence. Of course, the conspiracy theorists could be correct for once, and some or all of the Test Items are real artifacts…in which case finding the originals the Test Items are based on would be a mission in itself. Seed A highly-regarded merchant has purchased an artifact, but it afraid of damaging it through testing. The merchant hires the player characters to arrange for a digital simulation of the artifact in place of the Test Item, crowdsourcing his way to the best test strategy. The merchant doesn’t care how they do it—negotiating with the Test Item programming team, blackmailing them, bribing them, hacking the software, etc. are all viable methods. ENTRY 001: Void Station Most habitats follow the layout of the solar system, transhumanity strung out like a string of lights along the plane of the ecliptic. From a distance they look huddled close to the rocks and gas giants, or shuttling back and forth between them. Yet approaching the north ecliptic pole, far from the sun, orbits the spindle of Void Station, rotating inside a ring of zero-gravity laboratories. An independent research outpost, eyes out to the deep black, beaming back what it sees to the rest of the solar system. With its transhuman population in the high double-digits, split into three research clades, Void Station is barely a blip on the radar for the hypercorps or larger habitats. Void Station crowdfunds its research, accepting resources from across the solar system to pursue goal-oriented projects, the clades competing and cooperating for access to equipment and materials. All labs are property of the Station itself, as administered by the infomorph Iubit; the clades rent labs, station facilities, and research drones from the Station out of their budgets. Other than that government is minimal; by unanimous acclaim the clades have eschewed pursuing political trappings, so that Void Station claims no official status, avoiding efforts by criminal and dissident groups to use it as an asylum or tax shelter. As a whole the station has a high reputation and is generally trusted with the credits and resources it receives from its crowdfunding. While amenities are spare on-station, transhumans travel to Void Station to partake of research facilities without eyes on them or just to get a radio telescope pointed out at the big black. The clades are open to any scholar willing to share their research and play well with others, and sometimes attract hypercorp scientists on sabbatical, particularly from Extropia. Deep space probes are sometimes launched from there, out to beyond the bounds of the solar system. Seeds A probe is coming back from deep space—but it isn’t one that Void Station ever sent out. Now hypercorps, mercenaries, and Firewall operatives are converging on the small habitat as they prepare to capture the probe and unlock its secrets. The surge of inhabitants would overwhelm the Station’s systems and deplete its resources—players may be hired by Iubit as extra security, or by one of the interested parties to ensure they get first crack at it. Firewall may fear the probe carries an Exsurgent threat, and want the players there just in case. A scum barge graveyard has built up near Void Station—a small community of trashpickers and datathieves that live off whatever space scrap they can salvage and data they can skim from the local mesh. Iubit finds them difficult to dispense with because they’ve begun to offer biomorph hookers and home-crafted narcotics, but recently they’ve begun to attract the wrong kind of elements— nation starters with fill-in-the-blank constitutions, rogue accountants and banks looking for non-reveal tax shelters, that kind of thing. The scum barges need to go—are the players up to the task? ENTRY 002: Rimwalkers There has always been a segment of transhumanity that is disenfranchised, lost, or refuses to be tied down. Some are criminals, others just outcasts, while still others are the detritus of civilization—relicts of old humanity, failed experiments, flawed forks in broken morphs, all gathering at the edges of transhuman society. They thrive in the fringes of habitats, beyond the ambiguous fringes of legal and political jurisdictions, moving on and adapting to each new culture, finding out what they need to do in order to breath, subsist, heal, fuck, and move on. Closer in to the warmth of Sol, they inhabit scumbarges and slip from asteroid to planetoid and back again, wearing many names. Sooner or later, though, the game grows too hot, debts are called in, and the enemies they make start to close the noose—then they flee outwards, trying to lose themselves in the vast emptiness as they walk the rim. Rimwalkers are hardy itinerants that move between the habitats of the outer solar system. Poor by most material standards, they sell what they carry with them always: their skills, knowledge, and experience. They are freelancers who often specialize in negotiating the legalities and commerce between habitats, or the make-do technical know-how that doesn’t come out of a text book. Most are criminals in one way or another, though that means nothing out on the Rim, where a transhuman might be a criminal just for wearing the wrong shell. All are opportunists, looking for the next score.