Ego Hunter is a one-shot scenario for the Eclipse Phase roleplaying game.

Eclipse Phase is a roleplaying game set on just the other side of the singularity: Earth has fallen to apocalyptic AI and most of the “survivors” only escaped by uploading their minds into machines and beaming them to our extraplanetary colonies. Many of these uploaded egos remain stored in stasis: The few who are pulled from storage and sleeved into new bodies are selected because someone on the outside has a use for them… and when they wake up, they have a debt to pay.

The scenario concept for Ego Hunter is immediately captivating:  You’re all beta forks of a single individual. In other words, you’re partial mind-clones with incomplete memories that have been “forked” from your original alpha personality in order to carry out some specific task. You return home expecting to be reintegrated with your primary personality… but instead you wake up, surprised to find that you’ve been re-sleeved into a new body. Your alpha is nowhere to be found, nothing makes any sense… and then people start getting murdered.

(click for PDF)

The scenario is great, but I found its rambling presentation and lack of organization to be significantly debilitating. So I’ve put together a rather extensive set of prep notes that I think other people interested in running the scenario will find useful. It includes stuff like:

• An easy-to-reference timeline of past events so that the GM can easily grasp the mystery being solved.
• Pulling together all of the disparate information on the “big problem” so that it can be easily referenced on a single page.
• A comprehensive revelations list to make managing the mystery on-the-fly as easy as possible (as discussed in the Three Clue Rule).
• Pulling all the stat blocks referenced from the core rulebook so that they’ll be available at your fingertips.

There are also several chunks of new material: I’ve clarified the node-structure and beefed up the investigation in a few places where it seemed a little threadbare. I’ve also fleshed out other material.

SPOILER WARNING

These prep notes also feature two major revisions to the original scenario.

First, I’ve tweaked the player characters in order to tighten the scenario’s focus on the interesting premise of “you’re all playing the same character”. Most notably, this includes redesigning Nkeka’s role in the adventure so that he pretends to be one of the beta forks in order to infiltrate the operation. Study the character briefings at the end of the prep notes to make sure you understand the dynamics of the group.

These character briefings are also designed to be given to each player. The scenario requires Nkeka Adesoji (posing as B6) and Roque Vera. Park Soon-Ok is an optional character who can be played as an NPC. (I recommend using up all five of the Achjima beta forks before assigning Park Soon-Ok to a player.)

MAPS

The other major revision to the original scenario is Air Processing Unit 13. I found very little utility in the published version of the map, so I redesigned it:

(large version / no key)

And there are also versions isolating each level. You can click each image below to get a larger version:

WHAT YOU NEED

In order to fully understand the concept and background of the scenario, you will probably need a copy of the original adventure. The original adventure also includes the pregenerated character sheets for the PCs (which can be paired to the customized character briefings found in the prep notes PDF).

You may be asking yourself: “If you had to go to all this trouble, why should I pick up the original adventure? It’s clearly horrible!” If so, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood me. The original scenario is really great. I’ve just organized the material and added a couple of tweaks.

The Ego Hunter: Prep Notes PDF and associated maps are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

While I was at GenCon this year I played in one of the most memorable convention scenarios: Lord of the Hives by Threat Detected. It featured three gaming tables participating in a series of linked, timed tournament scenarios: The success or failure of a group during a particular round would directly impact the situations encountered by the other groups during the next round.

I was at the pilots’ table and played a young Admiral Ackbar in his pre-admiral days. There were, of course, copious outcries of, “It’s a trap!” We actually started the game playing a game of sabbac on the hangar deck, so my first line of dialogue in the game was:

Good times. Like most good gaming experiences, it featured a combination of clever scenario design and people who were fun to hang out with.

I bring this up, because Threat Detected has posted a Gallery from the event and a podcast featuring a Post-Play Round Table from the session. You can see me obliquely in the former and hear me briefly in the latter.

First off: Looper is a really great film and not at all what I was expecting when I walked into the movie theater. I was expecting a sci-fi action movie. Instead I got an indy sci-fi film featuring outstanding performances. (It might be Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s best performance on film to date.)

Second: I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the way time travel works in the movie, with many people online complaining that it “doesn’t make sense”.

SPOILERS AHEAD

If you watch the film carefully, however, you’ll note that it has a nearly consistent handling of causality: Any changes to causality due to time travel propagate instantly, but only forwards from the point in time at which the change is made. (This is consistent across the maiming, the death, and the memories.)

The only inconsistency to this is that the movie seems to suggest that the reason the Rainman is closing loops is because he saw Bruce Willis kill his mother. That doesn’t work with the rest of time travel as we see it. However, we don’t actually KNOW that this is true. Since his mother had previous connections to loopers, it’s possible that in the “original” timeline he saw some other looper kill her. Or possibly just some transient. Or maybe the Rainmaker killed his own mother before he gained control of his powers. (One of the interesting things about the ending is that we don’t actually have any way of knowing if things turn out OK for the kid. The film certainly feels hopeful at the end, but it resists delivering any certainty.)

The film could probably have also benefited from being clearer on what precipitated the change which allowed the main character to change the outcome of his loop. (I.E., break his bonds and control his arrival.) But that’s a minor quibble which usually plagues any time travel story that isn’t based around closed causal loops.

If I was going to change anything, I’d have probably had the transient that the main character “saved” the mother from be a legitimate threat (instead of just some kook with a placard). That would have strongly suggested that in the original timeline that guy killed the mother and precipitated the child’s abandonment.

A TEST CASE

To further demonstrate what I think Looper was actually doing, consider this simple test case:

• At Point C, Future Bob travels back in time to Point A.
• At Point A, Future Bob arrives.
• At Point B, Future Bob kills Current Bob.

If causality changes spread in both directions from Point B, this would obviously cause a paradox: Future Bob kills himself, so he doesn’t travel back, so he doesn’t kill himself, so he… yada yada yada. But if we assume that causality changes only propagate forwards through time, then the situation resolves itself simply:

• At Point A, Future Bob arrives.
• At Point B, Future Bob kills Current Bob. Future Bob instantly vanishes.

The change at Point B cannot affect Point A, so there’s still a Future Bob running around between Point A and Point B. But once the change happens at Point B, causality propagates forward, Future Bob never traveled backwards through time, and therefore he vanishes.

Similarly, during the maiming sequence in the movie: You start cutting off his legs, so he crashes his car as his legs disappear. If causality spread in both directions, there would obviously be no way that he was driving a car in the first place. But since causality changes only flow forwards, we get the result we see in the film. (You can see this in the memories, too: They don’t change until something in the present moment changes the causality. Because, again, the change isn’t propagating backwards.)

The interesting case would be something like this:

• Future Bob travels back to Point A.
• Current Bob gets maimed Point C.

From Point C forward, Future Bob would be maimed. If you jumped into another time machine and went back to Point B, though, you’d see a perfectly whole version of Future Bob. (Because the causality change at Point C didn’t propagate backwards.) But what if maimed Future Bob travels back to Point B? Hard to say. The movie doesn’t show us that scenario and it could be argued either way.

Regardless, the result is a universe that looks like a complete mess. But, of course, time travel universes always look like like a complete mess. And this would be one way for the universe to “handle” causality that would prevent a paradox from ever occurring.

As I’ve mentioned previously, there’s a bug in WordPress that periodically closes all comments on the site. Worse yet, I can’t see that comments have been closed when I’m logged in.

I just fixed the problem again, but this has been happening a lot lately. I’m not sure if it’s due to the lack of posting on my part, because the site is currently getting hammered with spam, or if it’s just WordPress being random.

But if you see it happen, drop me an e-mail and I’ll get it fixed ASAP.

I just got done running the most heavily railroaded session in probably my last 15 years of gaming, including heavily forced scene transitions and huge dollops of illusionism.

(Context: It was a dream sequence being experienced by a comatose PC. They were taken through a highlight reel of their memories — both the ones they’ve experienced and the ones their amnesiac character has forgotten — with the other players jumping in to play current and former versions of themselves in a kaleidoscopic dreamscape.)

I bring this up because I think it’s given me a fresh appreciation for why combat encounters — particularly those in “delve format” adventures — have become so overwrought in the past 10 years: It’s because, in a culture of “storytelling” GMs with railroaded plots, the combat encounters are the only place where players can actually experience freedom; where their choices actually matter.

So you get a large class of players who are primarily focused on the combat encounters because that’s where they’re actually allowed to experience the true joy of roleplaying games (and, therefore, that’s where they have fun). And to cater to those desires, adventure design (and then game design) focuses more and more on making those encounters really exciting.

But then, as that cycle degrades into itself, we end up with a situation where the tail is wagging the dog: Where the railroaded plot that strings together the combat encounters becomes thinner and thinner as more and more effort is put into propping up the combat encounter tent poles.

(Insert obligatory references to the Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design.)