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:eek
Yes, that was my initial reaction to. I even went to the website and asked if this was what they meant to do. Yes, it was. So, if you download a fileshared copy of EP, you aren't doing anything illegal, but you should pay for it if you keep it, even if you don't have to. Let's have a little gamer's honor, guls.
A lot of RPGs are free, but few of them are as slickly and professionally done as EP. The creators claim it's a new marketing slant based on the new economic model created by the net, home computers, PDFs, POD, etc.
I have to hand it to these people to put this much work into something and then take a chance like this. I admire their audacity, and their faith in gamers to pay at least the 15$ they'd like to get for the pdf if they like it.
Now that I've admitted my bias and explained it, let's get this review rolling.
Eclipse Phase is an attempt to create a hard SF, transhumanist, post apocalypse setting. There's a heavy anime influence on it as well. The storyline goes something like this: About 200 years from now life has spread from earth through the solar system, and humanity has evolved into transhumanity, with genetically engineered humans, cybernetically enhanced humans and artificial intelligences taking the lead in settling and developing the solar system.
Then, a group of military AI systems called the TITANs, attacked humanity and wiped out most of it, devastating earth in the process and rendering in uninhabitable due to their left over killing machines, hostile nanotech systems, etc. (The TITANs are very much the boogeymen of the EP universe, but there's a lot about them that is actually uncertain.)
Soon afterward, the TITANs vanished, leaving behind mysterious "Pandora gates" that are gateways to alien worlds, A'la the stargate. (BTW, before anyone makes a condom joke, TITAN stands for “Total Information Tactical Awareness Network.)
In the decade following the loss of earth, people in their various forms have gone on. Much of society is dominated by hypercorps, which are smarter, tougher, leaner, meaner versions of the "old" megacorps and even more willing to treat people like renewable resources. Many of the last minute escapees from earth arrived as penniless (Sometimes bodiless) refugees and were promptly exploited into virtual slavery by the hypercorps.
The hypercorps have a lot of competition, however. Various groups and factions use high tech and the resources it provides to keep them from suzerainty. "Firewall" is one such group, and a good starting place for most characters. (Most of the game assumes you are playing firewall operatives, but you don't have to...)
There are factions aplenty in the EP universe, and the mainbook gives you a good sampling to start. No skimping or "see supplement product XXXX" for starting character groups. The main book has so many options for a starting character that other products may not be necessary for a time.
When it comes to making characters, EP does a solid job. You have essentially 2 separate sets of stats, one for your ego, and one for your morph. Your ego is your mind, and your morph is your body. Thus you determine your mental stats and knowledge (skills) first, then pick a morph to start in. (Some characters exist solely in "cyberspace" and thus don't need a morph in essence.)
If you like high tech, you'll love EP as almost every character starts with a very high tech gadget called a "Cortical stack" that records your mind into a hypertech "flash drive" every second or so, and thus you can easily swap or copy your ego into a new morph. Note that just having a cortical stack doesn't do you a lot of good if you can't afford a new morph, or if no one gets your stack to a place where it can be "resleeved" into a new body.
Cortical stacks are ubiquitous in the world of EP, and not having one is both a rarity and a disadvantage.
The ease and speed at which a character can put his ego into a new morph mandates a character system that clearly separates the mind from the body ad heavily influences EPs system in all ways.
A desirable side effect of the “respawn” option in Ep is that a character can die and still succeed in the mission, and the player can keep running the character, so this encourages more dramatic role playing, while the penalties associated with respawning a character discourage utter foolishness.
Chargen is a points buy system with ads and disads, and you do get a lot of points, but don't worry, you'll have no trouble spending them all.
As to the rest of the system, it's a fairly straightforward roll under percentile system, and you can get by with just a couple d10's. A double counts as a special success or failure, and I like this mechanic as the higher your chance of success the higher your chance of getting a special good result,likewise for the reverse. I don't like "clockwork" critical systems where criticals come up on fixed results regardless of skill. (Note that EP has a trace of this in that 00 and 99 are always special results, but it's acceptable.) I'm glad to see more systems moving away from clockwork criticals and towards a system where your chances of a critical success or failure change as your overall chances of success/failure change.
You can also get extra special results on very good or bad rolls. Some actions are based on "margin of success" and some contested actions are determined by who had the greatest margin of success.
Normally you get one action per turn, but various factors like the speed of your morph can grant you extra actions.
All in all, the game system is clean, functional, effective and even has a nice twist in that you can spend "moxie points" (They really couldn't come up with a better name?) to change results or improve rolls. One use of a moxie point is to "flip" a result, so that, for example, a disastrous failure of 91 becomes a howling success of 19. I can't say I recall a system where one could flip a result like that, and I guess it would mostly work with a d100 based system anyway.
Back to the setting, it's pretty much a free for all with hypercorps, private organizations, consensus groups, hidden conspiracies and aliens all either vying for power or just trying to keep anyone from dominating them, or simply trying to survive. There are conspiracies afoot, evil machinations galore and even a few folks just trying to do some good, often by stopping something bad. You can be a socialist, an anarchist, a capitalist or almost any other kind of ist you can think of. You can want to advance transhumanity or to re establish old fashioned humans as the dominant life form. Or you can just be a piece of self described "scum", a simple hedonist looking for new highs and pleasures. (Yes, dearies, "Scum" is a character class.)
As if that wasn't enough, there are some aliens in the mix too, an apparently fairly benign group of highly evolved slime molds have arrived in the system, seemingly intent on offering the people of the solar system helpful advice. They are, however, highly enigmatic and rather tight lipped about exactly who/what they are and various important issues. They also won't talk to certain groups...
All in all, the game world is fairly well sketched out and thoughtfully done.
As far as system and setting goes, EP is a pretty good product. The biggest problems are in it's production.
It looks slick and professional, with a lot of pretty graphics and art, but there seem to be a boatload of typos, misspellings, grammatical errors and such in it. Nothing that a good dose of errata and someone patiently spending a day or so revising the pdf can't mostly fix. (NOTE: As of now the revised PDF is available and does a fair job of correcting a lot of typos. Kudos to the EP staff for paying attention to the fans.)
The art's mostly good, but a few pictures of weapons just didn't look as detailed as I'd expect. Production values are fairly high, asides from the above mentioned problems.
Another thing I was irked a tad by was the use of some high tech terms that seemed to be used incorrectly. Frequent refs are made to "Nuclear batteries" which I can't say I understand. Now there are radio thermal generators that seem to be what the authors meant, as they were described as keeping various things running for a long time, and RTG systems do produce power for many years, but they really aren't batteries, they're generators. Also the use of such to power high demand, rapid drain systems like personal laser weapons seems wrong. Lastly, a RTG, or I guess "Nuclear battery" would produce a fairly constant amount of power for years and years, yet the book says that nuclear batteries must be recharged, usually at about 20 points per hour. Now if it was a case where the RTG would recharge a storage system at that rate I could understand, but it would still seem to be inappropriate for personal laser weapons where in battle you'd need to pop in a new clip and have more shots NOW, not a an hour from now. Maybe a tech consultant/editor could have helped here.
For a game setting where gear is vital, EP lacks a custom gear design system. Likewise it lacks any sort of spacecraft design, movement or combat system. We can hope that such are forthcoming.
I'd say that Eclipse phase most directly competes with Cthulhutech for being a game of future horror and conspiracy, and Transhuman Space for being a game about transhumanism. I think it beats cthulhutech on originality and on mechanics as the CT game system has major problems, and beats THS on being playable and easy to come up with scenarios for and not needing a caseload of gurps books to fully enjoy it.
So, to render my judgment on Eclipse Phase, I hereby decree that on setting it gets a 10, the system gets a 9 and the overall production values get a 8, which could be raised by some revision and errata corrections. (Note that the second PDF print gets a 9 on production due to the typo corrections.)
Lastly, if you get the pdf, please send the creators some money. 15$ may mean more than it used to thanks to the economic catastrophe we're in now, but the creators really deserve the money, so please either send them the 15$ if/when you can or try to buy a supplement for EP when they come out. These people took a real chance and invested a lot of time and effort on this, let's not screw them over.
