In the Eclipse Phase setting, Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) are the source of some deeply forged and bitterly raw prejudice: Their digital cousins the TITANs — seed AIs capable of recursive self-improvement — underwent a hard-takeoff singularity and shattered human civilization in a genocidal frenzy. The core rulebook states:

The vast majority of transhumanity blames the Fall on rogue seed AIs. As a result, any AIs that are not crippled or somehow limited from improving themselves — including the AGIs that were common and growing in number before the Fall — are completely illegal in many habitats or at least heavily regulated… Many transhumans consider AGIs and the TITANs that murdered their homeworld to be one and the same.

Since AGIs are also playable characters in Eclipse Phase, it can be vitally important to know where you can travel openly and where you need to fall back on smuggling and darkcasts if you’re going to go there at all. Unfortunately, this information is somewhat scattered and often unsatisfactory. (You have to reference various passages from the core rulebook, Sunward, and Rimward, and even then the information is frequently vague.) Reading between the lines and making a few inferences, however, we can draw up some general guidelines.

AGIs AND THE LAW

First, there’s a general spectrum that runs (from most severe limitations to least severe limitations): Jovian Republic, Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, Planetary Consortium, Morningstar Consortium, Titanian Commonwealth, and the Autonomist Alliance.

Within that spectrum, you can use these general guidelines:

Jovian Republic: AGIs are subject to summary erasure. Anyone creating, aiding, or abetting an AGI is subject to severe criminal penalties, including the possibility of execution for treason.

Lunar-Lagrange Alliance: AGIs are outlawed by most LLA communities; they will be banished or placed in cold storage depending on circumstance. Hypercorps or individuals creating AGIs are subject to heavy fines.

Planetary Consortium: Roughly 25% of Planetary Consortium polities ban AGIs completely (similar to the LLA). In other polities they are heavily regulated. AGIs are considered property by the Planetary Consortium and will never have citizenship rights. In addition to regulations by local polities, the Planetary Consortium as a whole has regulations governing the development and use of AGIs. Violations of these regulations are punished with heavy fines.

Morningstar Constellation: The Morningstar Constellation’s approach to AGIs is similar to the Planetary Consortium, but the regulatory oversight is significantly smaller and only 10% of Morningstar polities ban AGIs completely. (Very rare MC polities even grant AGIs citizenship, but citizenship in one Morningstar polity is no guarantee of your rights in another.)

Conservative Independents: This isn’t a specific political body, but a significant number of independent settlements (including some autonomist settlements) fall into this category. In these settlements, AGIs are considered full citizens but they sacrifice some of the normal rights of citizens. This most notably includes privacy: AGIs in these settlements will have their mesh access tightly monitored and their morphs/hardware specs routinely audited. They may even have to undergo mandatory and intensive monitoring of their minds in order to detect the hypothetical onset of a singularity event. It’s even possible that they could be legally forced to undergo psychosurgery in order to prevent it. AGIs visiting such settlements will also undergo such scans (and possibly surgery).

Titanian Commonwealth: AGIs are recognized as full citizens by the Commonwealth and even benefit under Titan’s “one body for every mind” policy. However, new AGIs can expect to undergo extensive monitoring and testing before achieving citizenship. (Optionally, a GM could easily decide that AGI citizens are still subject to heavy surveillance and sousveillance in Titan society.)

Autonomists: AGIs, infomorphs, synthmorphs, Factors, flats… Dude, we’re all sentients, right? Don’t bug them and they probably won’t bug you.

NOTES

Individual habitats, of course, can obviously vary from these generic baselines. (In the case of the PC and LLA, you could even use the listed percentiles to randomly determine a given habitat’s legal framework.) These should be considered tools, not straitjackets.

It should also be noted that the Morningstar Constellation’s attitude towards AGIs is, as far as I can tell, never explicitly spelled out in any of the Eclipse Phase sourcebooks. I’ve intuited the position described above based on specific adventure seeds and historical incidents in Morningstar habitats. Given this paucity of information, however, a GM could easily shift them even further from the Planetary Consortium. (Perhaps you could have them behave like the Conservative Independents I describe above?)

Tagline: Hogshead is quickly becoming one of those companies I continually look to because of their consistent high quality. Hogswash, their sorta annual “newsletter/fanzine/thing”, not only helps you to keep an eye on them, but also has some pretty solid material in it.

I got subscribed to Hogwash one day while I was perusing Hogshead’s website. It wasn’t particularly difficult – all I had to do was drop them an e-mail with my home address in it and, before I knew it, I had the current issue of Hogwash (#4) sitting in my mailbox. Hogwash, you see, is a “newsletter/fanzine/thing” for Hogshead – it’s self-promotional content is rather high, so its distributed freely.

So why am I reviewing a “newsletter/fanzine/thing”? Because, having read it, I want to encourage all of you to drop Hogshead a line and get subscribed to it. And why do I want you to do that? Basically two reasons.

First, Hogshead tosses interesting tidbits of free game-stuff into each issue (mini-modules, monster write-ups, etc.). This is the “substance” of the issue, and it’s quality makes it well worth the handful of minutes it will take you to read through it. Its more than worth the price (since there is no price).

Second, Hogshead is quickly setting itself up as one hell of a fine game company. It’s finally beginning to produce original material for their licensed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying line of products (having gotten almost all of the original line back in print), and the stuff that’s coming out looks like its going to be absolutely fantastic. On top of that they’ve released The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere). In the near future they’ll be releasing Violence (by anonymous author who we all know) and Puppetland (by John Tynes), among other projects. Hogshead is hot, and Hogwash is an excellent way to keep an eye on the company.

Let’s take Hogwash 4 as an example. It was released in August 1998 (but I didn’t get it until just a couple of months ago, when I signed up). If you had gotten it in August 1998 you would have been treated to a sneak preview of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Marienburg: Sold Down the River, and the Enemy Within campaign.

The main substance of the issue is a mini-module for WFRP, Bad Tidings, set in Marienburg and written by James Wallis. For eight half-pages, James packs in a lot of plot and background (involving a murder mystery, a Chaos cult, and even a handful of interesting adventure seeds). Very nicely done, and well worth the absolute nothing you paid for it (since, even if you don’t like the world of WFRP, it’s easily adaptable to any fantasy campaign).

In addition an “exclusive interview” discussing The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which is as cleverly done as the game itself), and a two page article explaining the changes which Hogshead will be making to the legendary Enemy Within campaign. Plus you get the “Not the WFRP FAQ” FAQ, and a rough pencil preview of the cover to Marienburg: Sold Down the River.

All in all, I strongly advise signing up for a free subscription.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: James Wallis
Company/Publisher: Hogshead Publishing, Ltd.
Cost: Free!
Page count: 16
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/07/26

I really miss Hogshead. They were daring and clever and James Wallis was always marvelously kind to me as both a reviewer and a freelancer. James’ is still around, of course. You can find his blog over here, and he continues to share marvelous games with us on an entirely-too-infrequent basis.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

First things first, you need to click through this link to Goblin Punch and read the blog post there:

A Spell Called Catherine

Okay? Done? Good. Because this next bit isn’t going to make any sense unless you know what I’m talking about.

Let’s start with a random rules check: Summoning spells physically bring the creature or object from some other place, they don’t create them out of whole cloth.

I’m not sure if that simplifies the ethical implications of this concept or makes it much, much worse: Are these actually versions of Catherine from alternate dimensions? If so, does the Catherine of this dimension actually deserve any recompense for their labors of her other-dimensional “siblings”? They’re effectively immortal while here and if they’re actually returned to the same place and time as the one that they left, are they actually being exploited? What if people start disappearing from this dimension and it’s determined that it’s a result of people summoning them?

Not all of these issues actually require “Catherine” to show up in your setting: The summon monster spells already allow spellcasters to summon intelligent beings to come and do their bidding. There’s a really tremendous ethical mire lurking there. “Catherine” just brings it into sharper focus and puts it center stage.

And even if you’re not interested in the ethical conundrums presented by this particular “what if”, consider all the immediate fantasy plots that fall out of it: You’ve got wizards fighting to gain (or protect) arcane secrets. You’ve got the wizard’s guild encroaching on the whore business. You’ve got mobsters trying to get their hands on the spell (and wizards possibly trying to stop them because they’re uncomfortable with that sort of thing). You’ve got people obsessed with the summoned/created Catherines trying to stalk or kidnap the “real deal”.

If you can’t find at least a half dozen potential scenarios in all of that, then you’re not really trying.

(In a modern setting with magic I’m imagining a similar scenario also resulting in organ donor scams. The PCs get called in when recent transplant recipients start dropping dead because their new organs have vanished inside them. Although I suppose it doesn’t take much imagination to imagine angry diabolists hunting down an arcanist because their human sacrifice retroactively vanished and their demonic patron is unhappy about it.)

Inaki Lind posted a review of the Legends & Labyrinths: Black Book Beta at RPGNet awhile back. Check it out.

Of course, you can also download a PDF copy of the Black Book Beta itself now. That’s over here.

Comments have been opened yet again. So obviously the WordPress bug that’s periodically turning off comments on all the posts on the site has still not been resolved. If ya see the comments closed at any point in the future, please feel free to drop me an e-mail and let me know.

On the back end, although Akismet has been doing a generally great job keeping spam off the actual site, the Alexandrian has been getting hammered by spammers. (500+ spam comments per day.) So it’s clear that the math problem anti-spam thing has been completely cracked. On the basis of nothing except my gut, I suspect that all this spam may be triggering the bug.

So I need a new solution for preventing the spam from getting posted in the first place. Therefore, the math problems are gone and we’re going to be trying out a Turing Test check box. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

What I’m hoping to avoid is a CAPTCHA system. I find them to be both annoying and a bit of an eyesore. But I’ve got to do something to shoo away all these Russian Viagra dealers. (I blame myself for the essays I wrote about my translation of The Seagull. Apparently if you put Cyrillic text on your website you’re basically laying out a welcome mat for Russian spammers.)