Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Roleplaying Game Musings a couple of influences

I guess i am going out on a limb with this one as I have yet to do any related fiction for this topic.  But let me go into some of the influences of my game world E'his.  Much of the game goes back to my mistaken vision of the Digest publishing group's aborted A.I. project.  That was an early nineties attempt at trans humanism in an almost feudal setting.  Really there is pretty limited resources on the game but in years past I got in touch with Joe Fugate who was sort of the head of DGP before Roger Sanger.  With chatted back and forth for a bit on what the game was intended to be.  While the setting was very different the nearest modern equivalent is Eclipse Phase.

Eclipse phase is a funny game in that it reveals the funny and dark secrets of role playing.  Those being everyone tends to play the same damn character again and again; and secondly character death often means you create a new character who assumes the same goals as the first.  This is because people often want to play some idealized version of self and the campaign sets goals rather than characters in most cases. It does this by presenting the self as an OS you can install into a body called a morph.

I wanted to steal, ugh borrow, this concept and see what I could do with it in a fantasy setting.  The cheap version of this would be hey I'm an elf now I am a dwarf or whatever.  I wanted to use something of a biological blank perhaps like the sholanti out of Jorune.  This seemed a little juicier from a rpg perspective and could allow for more morphology later.

One of the elements of Eclipse phase that is challenging for me is injecting fear when you can reload your character.  I just wanted to avoid this problem as you would almost need to force a soul into some inanimate object to be real punishment in that game.  I wanted to avoid this by using more of a rigger analog out of shadowrun.  The character physically inactive while the morph active and going.  Perhaps in the case of old age or great physical injury. 

The mechanism that jumped out at me was sleep as I was always intending a matrix like dream lands inspire by the french RPG Reve dream of dragons.  Again I am stealing, err borrowing.  As I have not read that book I am left with my impressions from reviews and what limited material i have seen.

The "animus" the player would be loaded into would be biological in nature and would amplify the dreamers control over the physical world, but only with regard to the linked sholanti like morph.

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