Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition Review

[Update:  This review was written based on the PDF version.  I just received the hard cover version, and it is visually spectacular--the most beautiful ttrpg book I have seen, in a way that doesn't really come across in the PDF.  So, that's worth saying.]

Back in 2009, I was living in San Francisco, and from time to time I would pop into the Borders bookstore across from Union Square and just browse.  At the time, I had been out of the tabletop RPG scene since the mid-90s, but every once in a while I would wander over to the RPG section of book stores and see what was new.  In '09, the new thing that I saw at Borders was a glossy, black-spined book called Eclipse Phase.  For whatever reason it caught my eye, so I picked it up and read it for a while.  An hour later, I was at check out buying the book, and pretty soon I was back into the hobby.  There were other games that I picked up and played more--4th Edition D&D, then 13th Age, then Numenera and 5th Edition and basically everything.  But my return to tabletop RPGs really got kicked off by Eclipse Phase, and I have followed their line all the way through.

In 2017, the designers at Posthuman Studios Kickstarted a 2nd Edition, and they sent out the PDF version of the Corebook (the hardcover is due soon), and that is the version I am reviewing.  It is worth noting that Posthuman releases its products under a Creative Commons License for the PDFs, and so if you want to check out the 1st Edition materials, you can get them legally here. 

The selling point for Eclipse Phase, or EP, is the setting.  EP is a transhumanist sci-fi role-playing game, with strong elements of conspiracy and horror thrown into the mix.  The best short summary of what it going on in EP comes from the evocative tagline:

Your mind is software. Program it. 
Your body is a shell. Change it. 
Death is a disease. Cure it. 
Extinction is approaching. Fight it. 

Prior to EP, I had very little exposure to transhumanism and transhumanist ideas.  At least in its EP presentation, the technology exists to make copies of the consciousness of a human being, store it as data in a computer system, and then download it into a new body (known in the game as "re-sleeving").  This makes your body a possession that you have (and can change, if you have the means or access), as opposed to a reality you must accept.  These bodies are modified through genetic engineering into a wide variety of optimized forms, or replaced with mechanical forms, or dispensed with altogether in favor of existing in a purely digital form.  There are also uplifted animal forms, allowing you to play, among other things, a giant octopus.  Thus, while there are no playable aliens in EP, there is an enormous variety of character types, and the ability to move from embodiment to embodiment that creates additional options.

Anytime you engage with transhumanism, you are on some level engaging with questions of identity, and EP puts those questions very clearly on the table.  To take one example, in the last few years questions of gender identity, and associated questions relating to changing or conforming one's physical presentation to those identities, have entered the mainstream discourse.  In the world of EP, most people have easy access to tools that allow them to explore a vast array of physical presentations in a non-permanent context.  And this, in turn, raises questions--if I, someone with a male gender identity, could spend a week in the body of a woman "just to see what it is like," would I do that?  Probably.  After all, in the world of EP, that kind of experimentation would likely be considered vanilla, as your options literally include inhabiting a giant octopus.

The "extinction" bit has to do with the threat of the TITANs, a set of ascended AIs that attempted to wipe out the "transhumanity" ten years before the starting point of the game.  At the cusp of achieving its goal, the TITANs disappeared, for completely unknown reasons.  As a result, EP is a post-apocalyptic game, with the Earth mostly uninhabitable and policed by an orbital satellite defense system that no one is willing to take responsibility for setting up.  The inhuman threat of the TITANs also adds a strong horror component.  The default game concept in the 1st edition of the game had players serving as members of "Firewall," a conspiratorial organization dedicated to preventing another extinction-level-event.  Second Edition retains the Firewall campaign option, but broadens the focus--more on that in a bit.

The third major tent-pole of the EP setting is politics/economics.  Roughly speaking, the Inner Solar System (i.e. from Mars inward to the Sun) is controlled by a consortium (called...the Planetary Consortium) of business interests that push a capitalist line.  The Outer System, by contrast, is dominated by anarchist and other non-capitalist economic and political systems (most notably the Nordic Socialism 2.0 of Saturn's moon Titan).  These two sides, as you might expect, don't like each other very much, and are engaged in a system-wide "Cold War."  At the heart of this divide is the fact that nanotechnology allows for something approaching a Post-Scarcity economic situation, where a household nanofabricator can "3-D print" anything you might need with some power and a store of bulk matter.  The Outer System is all-in on these ideas, while the Inner System powers strongly regulate the use of nanotechnology, ostensibly for security reasons by also to protect their economic position.

Once again, I had very little familiarity with anarchist political ideas or Post-Scarcity economic theorizing prior to EP, and while the designers are pretty clearly on "Team Outer System" by and large, there is enough there to show off the pros and cons of each system in order to provide a balanced perspective and interesting story material.  For example, anarchist systems run entirely on the "reputation economy" to distribute skilled labor, unique materials, etc., mediated in part through online scoring systems.  In '09 when EP first came out, this seemed (and was presented as) mostly unproblematic; after ten years of social media ubiquity, it's not hard to see how that can be subject to manipulation and grief.

The final tent-pole of EP are the Pandora Gates--basically star gates that appeared mysteriously after the TITANs left at five places in the Solar System and which allow for instantaneous travel to other systems.  Different entities are exploring and settling these extra-solar worlds, discovering the ruins of other civilizations (though, no living aliens, apart from the slime-mold like Factors who showed up in the Solar System and are basically just "keeping an eye on things").  So, in addition to or as a substitute for Firewall-oriented play, you can play a group of explorers seeking out new worlds in a Very Weird version of Star Trek.  Second Edition also gives more resources for running a Han Solo-style "scum and villainy" criminal focused campaign, which is an interesting choice as it was not front-and-center in any of the 1st Edition materials.

As you might be gathering, the setting of EP is very dense and very rich.  It is a lot to absorb for the newbie, especially as it draws on material from less common ends of the sci-fi pool.  And, perhaps except for a pure Gatecrashing campaign, it would be difficult to run a campaign that doesn't engage with the political and economic ideas of the setting.  EP as written is clearly anti-capitalist, pro-anarchist, and pro-transhumanist, and while they are not going to come to your house and seize your gaming materials if you depart from that, the work needed to re-craft the setting away from those concepts is likely not worth the effort.

Having said that, I love the setting, despite not necessarily sharing all of those ideas personally.  And I think the setting material matured, in the sense of becoming richer and more nuanced, as the line developed.  For example, the original corebook presented the Jovian Republic in a pretty standard left-wing, unflattering characterization of US-style political and religious conservatives.  The Outer System sourcebook, Rimward, didn't so much depart from that as present things from their point of view, allowing you to see why folks would be on-board with a basically fascist state and presenting interesting (if not very nice) factions within that structure to work with for story purposes.

Second Edition keeps all of that good stuff, with the changes limited exclusively to the rules engine.  First Edition was a very crunchy game, especially by 2019 standards, showing off the influences of the designers' previous work on Shadowrun.  The new edition is still comfortably above the median on the crunch scale, but they made some targeted changes to bring it down a bit.

The biggest change has to do with how bodies work.  Remember, your character's body (known as a "morph") is basically a piece of gear in EP, and can be changed and swapped during play.  In 1st Edition, your morph provided bonuses or penalties to your attributes, which in turn affected your skills.  Thus, when you switched morphs, you had to in a sense rebuild your character and recalculate all of your skills.  Second edition morphs, instead of affecting attributes, instead provide points to physical, mental, and social pools that allow you to alter dice rolls or perform other effects.  So, instead of the Olympian morph giving a bonus to your Somatics attribute that effects every test, you get a pool of points to spend on certain tests.

While this does make morphs less relevant to the outcome of the game overall, it greatly simplifies the character management process.  The pools also push the game in a bit of a narrative-game direction, a departure from 1st Edition.  Spending a point from the Insight Pool allows you to automatically find a clue a la the GUMSHOE games, and there is a fourth, "Flex," pool that allows for things like causing a helpful NPC to appear or introduce an element into the environment.  I like these sorts of mechanics, but they are a little bit jarring for a game that is otherwise very simulationist.

The second change is to character creation.  The system in the corebook for 1st Edition was full-on point buy, with all of the time-consuming min-maxing that goes along with that.  It was divided up into packages corresponding to a character's background, but most of it was freeform spends.  Second Edition puts the emphasis on bigger character creation "blocks," with a few bonus point to sprinkle around at the end.  You can still basically build your character however you want, but it moves faster and it is less overwhelming for new players.  In service of this, the number of skills in the game was significantly reduced to 21 plus knowledge skills, which helps.  They also smartly segregate the points used to buy morphs from the rest of the character creation points.  In 1st Edition, buying a tricked-out morph at character creation was a trap option, since many adventures would require you to ditch your morph to move around, causing you to lose those points.  [In EP, the most common way to travel from place to place is to download your consciousness, broadcast it to your destination, and "sleeve" you into a new morph].  Now, you basically build your "ego" (consciousness), and then select a morph separately.

With all of the simplifications, though, it's still a crunchy game.  The basic mechanic is a percentile dice system using "the Price Is Right" rules--you want to get as high a roll as possible without going over your target number, which is your skill/attribute value modified for difficulty.  In addition to the binary success/failure, a roll of 33 or above that succeeds is a superior success, while a 66 or above that succeeds is a double superior success; likewise, a roll of 66 or below that fails is a superior failure, and a roll of 33 or below that fails is a double superior failure.  On top of that, doubles (i.e. "00," "11," "22," etc.) are criticals, either a critical success if the roll is a success or a critical failure if it is a failure.  This system creates a lot of conceptual space for narrating outcomes from a single roll, and the clean breaks make it pretty easy and quick to interpret a particular roll.  My one concern is that the distinction between superior successes/fails and critical successes/fails is not immediately obvious (though, the rulebook does a good job of providing concrete examples of implementing both), and I suspect it will take a while for GMs to get used to narratively describing all of the different permutations.

Combat wise, everything is an opposed test--attacker rolls to hit, defender rolls to dodge or otherwise defend.  Damage is then applied against a HP-like pool, and attacks that do a certain amount of damage cause more significant wounds.  In keeping with the horror dimension, there is also a parallel mental damage track, as you lose sanity through confronting inhuman horrors (though, in EP, you can go under the psychosurgery "knife" and get that fixed up).  One smart change from 1st Edition was to get rid of Shadowrun-style multiple actions per turn for high initiative results, which slows combat to crawl in my experience.  I haven't done a comprehensive comparison between editions, but it also looks like they paired back the combat modifiers and noodly bits.

Hacking rules are a notorious pain-point in cyberpunk and cyberpunk-adjacent games, and I will confess that I made a point of avoiding the Hacking systems in my previous encounters with EP.  Smartly, 2nd Edition EP follows the trend I've seen in hacking systems generally of moving away from making hacking a separate mini-game and toward a menu of actions that you can take to make the computer do what you want it to do.  This integrates hacking better into the rest of the game.  The rules for cyber-combat (called here "Mesh combat") take up only one page, which suggests that they are not going to be overly burdensome in play.

There are also rules for psychic powers, for transferring your character's brain from body to body, for dealing with different sorts of habitats and a variety of locales throughout the solar system and beyond, for reputation and social networks, and a bunch of other stuff.  There are a lot of systems and material, but there is a lot of stuff in the setting, so I'm not sure what else they could have done to streamline it more than they have already done.  And that really speaks to my overall take on the rules changes--it is markedly simpler than 1st Edition, but it's not really simple.  The streamlining is meaningful as compared to 1st Edition, but it may not be enough for many folks.

So, here's my ultimate conclusion on Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition.  First off, everything that made EP an amazing setting is unchanged, and if you have any interest in these themes and ideas, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  Even if you never play the game, it's worth reading and thinking about as a piece of fiction--it's that good.  As far as the game goes, unless you are a dedicated high-crunch fan or completely allergic to narrativist mechanics, 2nd Edition is clearly the way to go.  As neither of those things, from my perspective 2nd Edition is an improvement on 1st Edition in basically every way.  But it's still crunchy, and it's unavoidably "a lot," as new players and GMs will not only have to take in a multi-faceted setting with concepts that might be unfamiliar, but also a demanding (though, not as demanding as before) set of game mechanics that cover the sprawling setting.

Would I be willing to play or run Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition?  Absolutely, gladly--as long as I had players willing to "dig in" a bit to the lore and the mechanics.  There are stories that EP can tell that I don't think can be told in other settings.  It's worth the effort, and its less effort than before, but it is still going to be effort.