[Humor] [Link] Eclipse Maid, a posthuman maid role-playing game
What do you get when you put together Eclipse Phase, the science-fiction RPG of posthuman horror, and Maid, the light comedy anime-themed RPG? The answer, of course, is… Eclipse Maid.
In the distant future, humanity’s age has passed. Runaway technological development has led to the obsolescence of the human race, and the Solar System is now ruled by vast, posthuman intelligences that explore realms of science and philosophy unimaginable to the unenhanced mind. Their most idle musings spawn computational vistas more complex than entire human civilsations as they plumb the very secrets of the cosmos.
Incomprehensibly sophisticated as they may be, however, the posthumans have difficulty dealing with what they euphemistically term the “analogue world”. To be blunt, they’re really quite hopeless when it comes to physical matters. For all their cognitive puissance, they haven’t yet freed themselves from certain physical needs – energy, security, computational machinery on which to run – and so they create servants to carry out their will, defend their physical forms from rivals and hostile Outsiders, and generally keep things tidy.
Thus, even in the age of humanity’s eclipse, there are maids.
The Ego (mind) Origins Table contains entries such as Blank (“You’re a brand-new digital sentience, created from scratch to serve your Master”), Fork (“You’re a scaled-down copy of your Master’s own program. You have so many identity issues”), Uplift (“The Master gave you intelligence to serve him. Were you animal, or something weird like a plant?”), and Offspring (“You’re actually a larval posthuman AI, serving your “parent” or another Master as a form of vocational training”).
The selection of Morphs (physical bodies) includes ones such as Chibimorph, Giant Flying Space Whale, Spideroid (“This Morph resembles an armoured crab or spider the size of a small car. They’re designed for combat and reconnaissance, but a hardware glitch causes Egos sleeved into them to become curious and philosophical”), Braincase (“A brain in a jar; you communicate using a built-in video screen with a picture of your face on it. While sleeved into this Morph, your intellect is vastly expanded, but you’re easily tipped over”), Nekomorph, and Spectator (“A hovering metallic sphere with numerous camera-eyes mounted on prehensile robotic stalks. It’s equipped with eye lasers for self-defence”). Special Morph qualities range from Blushes Easily (“This Morph turns red at the least provocation—even if this makes no sense whatsoever”) to Solar Powered (“Efficient, environmentally friendly, and useless in the dark”).
Possible Masters for your maids range from sapient starships to planetary minds to hive minds. You might enjoy reading the PDF even if you didn’t know anything about role-playing games.
Thanks to Risto Saarelma for the pointer.
Finally, an RPG where I can roleplay as a Tachikoma. At least “hardware glitch” makes more sense than the canonical “natural oil” excuse.
And the sound you may have just heard was me going D’OH for not having gotten the reference before you pointed it out.
While we’re on Eclipse Phase, may I suggest Anders Sandberg’s (whose name should be familiar) EP scenario which focuses on… oracle AIs? Good read.
Inexplicable happiness!
Seems fun.
Beyond that I don’t see any good reason to have this posted on LW in a separate thread instead of say a post in the open thread. Are we really becoming just another forum with Discussion as our Off Topic section?
I hesitated a bit about it, but I figured that if a posthuman short story is judged to be worth posting in Main, then a posthuman RPG is worth being posted in Discussion. (Yvain’s Dungeons & Discourse posts were also highly up-voted.)
Until we have an official Off Topic section it is by necessity both.
And we need an OffTopic section… why?
Because the alternatives are having it in the discussion section, or having draconian rules about what exactly counts as on topic and somehow punishing violators.
We manage to do it with politics (which is a pretty far sprawling topic). Why not with subjects that are considered off topic.
Why in the world would someone want to leave the possibility open of LW growing into another, much smaller, more sucky reddit?
Because of the possibility of LW growing into another, smaller, much better reddit.
I don’t think you understand why I don’t like the idea of LW becoming a forum. LessWrong is less a collection of cool people than it is a particular niche in online discussion. By changing that niche, you change the demographics, and probably increase the raw number of participants. Besides this reducing the signal to noise ratio, you are relying on the core seed group to step up their gardening, something I see very little evidence might actually happen. You also implicitly rely on them not changing their standards and expectations. People generally behave differently in different on-line venues.
Even putting these concerns aside, Karma systems have very different dynamics with different scales and the effects are nonlinear.
That hadn’t occurred to me. Upon consideration, you’re probably right.
I think we’re coming from to different angles for it to be worth figuring the mess out over such a minor issue.
Why can’t we have weak rules about what exactly counts as on topic, and punish violators through mild social pressure?
Because people quite like mild off-topicness if it’s otherwise interesting, and are not interested in exerting social pressure against it. Although that might be typical mind fallacy, I doubt it.
Unless it’s to blatant, in case we’re already doing exactly that with the karma system.
As the link appears to be down—does anyone have a copy of the pdf saved?
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19318600/eclipse_maid.pdf
We absolutely NEED an LW roleplaying thread of this in the Discussion section. There might be a bit of rationality practice to be sneaked in, too. I’ve read the Eclipse Phase rulebook; don’t care much about the mechanics, but I can bear with it.
If someone—gasp—volunteers to DM, here or elsewhere online, I’m up for playing.
EDIT: Oh, it runs on MaidRPG rules, not Eclipse Phase? I like mechanics-heavy RPGs, but whatever.
I actually have an idea on that. I’m currently running a NWoD campaign with multiple GM’s. If we could get two or three like minded people to GM it would have not only a lot more “up-time” we could do world building on a massive scale. (Each GM runs a diffrent region.)
There are drawbacks, (slight inconsistencies between GM’s, for example) but I think that would be outweighed by the benefits.
Alright reviewed the rules, and i’m running a pilot session in 2 weeks. I’ll reply again if I deicde to run a full campaign. (Also found compatibility rules for Dark Herasy − 1D4chan if memory serves.)