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.
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.
This is awesome.
THANK YOU! XIE XIE! MERCI! KEELAH SE’LAI!
and SPOILERS, PEOPLE!!
I’m going to GM this adventure in a couple of weeks and was struggling in making prep notes likes yours.
Do you happen to have a map (and or location of the city in the Hellas Bassin)?
I have a couple ideas for the look of the city, pretty much different from one another
one is a dome built upon and around two hills north west of the bassin, not far from the edge of the crater, with the atmospheric plant inside one of the hills
The other idea is a layered city akin to what Hengsha was Deus Ex Human Revolution, or the city in Tiger & Bunny, with an atmosphere like the Colony in Total Recall 2012.
What was your approach?
for Achjima’s illustration I’m picking Ada Wong of Resident Evil fame. Made that decision while watching Damnation and ironed it while playing her campaign in RE6
BTW, was the footage of her murderous act just for FW’s footage or was it broadcast on the vid news? not sure which one it is
My basic vision for Anyang is of a modest domed city basically standing by itself out on the Martian plains. It’s one of several small-to-mid-sized domes of almost identical construction that were erected either immediately before or immediately after the Fall to accommodate incoming colonists. (The Chinese approached their colonization efforts on Mars a lot like they had their rapid expansion of their urban centers on Earth from 1990-2020. “Build it and they will come.”)
The atmospheric plant in the adventure is one of a couple dozen which can be found studded around the exterior of the dome. None of them have to take the full load of cycling the Martian atmosphere (which is great for cycling units offline for maintenance, but doesn’t help you if someone sprays xenofungus all over one of them). There’s a ring of industrial stuff around the outer perimeter of the city; a patchwork of different districts around a “middle ring”; and then a central ring is high-priced residential and the like. (It ends up being the inverse of a modern city: Everyone lives in the middle and radiates out to their jobs.)
I didn’t give it much more thought than that because the adventure is really designed to stay confined to the city.
I like the idea of using Ada Wong as an illustration.
Firewall has early access to the footage (and forwards it to Nkeka during Nkeka’s briefing in my version of the adventure), but the same footage (or essentially identical spime data) is broadcast throughout the city’s mesh later in the adventure.
I ran Ego Hunter yesterday with my group, which was the first Eclipse Phase game we’ve played. It went absolutely brilliantly and I’m sure I would have floundered without your notes, so thanks for that! The tweak to Nkeka’s character was also brilliant. The player playing him managed to keep it secret all the way to the end, while still getting them to investigate the hotel. She only revealed her character at the end when the forks were trying to decide whether or not to turn themselves in and possibly be deleted or try and get off Mars somehow. That made for a fantastic twist which none of the other players were expecting at all and which I wasn’t even sure she was going to do.
Thanks!
I am in a group with 3 others and I am considering running Ego Hunter to introduce them to the setting. This would mean 1 player taking the Nkeka role and 2 as Beta’s. Do I need to run the other beta’s as npc’s? What is your advise on managing the roles with a 3 player group? I could possibly recruit one new player but not sure.
With three players I would go with either:
(1) B1, B2, B4
(2) B1, B2, and Nkeka
Depending on whether you find the “many voices of Achjima” or the “secret traitor” to be the more interesting angle.
You can use whichever beta character sheets you like. (People usually seem to like the neo-hominid.) The key part is the information in the character briefings.
You don’t need to run the other betas as NPCs. None of the information they bring back is necessary, although you might want to swap in B3’s private message for B2’s. (Putting Nonny on their radar early seems useful.)
(The reason for skipping B3 in a smaller group is that B3 requires Roque Vera.)
The smallest group I’ve run it for is four players and I used B1, B2, B4, and Nkeka. But I think it would still be a very enjoyable scenario with only three players.
[…] and information nodes to get the players to where they need to go. I could not suggest utilising The Alexandrian’s prep notes for Ego Hunter. The prep notes give a very concise illustration of all the clues and […]
Hi,
the Ego Hunter prep notes pdf links to the Keep on the Shadowfell one, I asume this is a mistake?
@Lena: Took me a few minutes to figure out that you meant the link on the RPG Scenario page. 😉
Fixed! Thanks!
Hello! I know it has been ages since this post, but I am planning to run this scenario soon as a first time Eclipse Phase GM and I found this! It is being super useful, but I have a couple of questions!
– I understand that the beta forks do not have a muse, since they will go looking for Nonny. Whenever they activate Nonny at the Alpha’s lab, does Nonny immediately recognize them? Or should they convince her that they are the forks?
– Can Nonny actually realize that Nkeka is posing as a fake beta fork? Why/why not? (I am not 100% sure about muse capabilities)
– Related to that, should I still allow Nkeka as a fake beta fork to make the test to guess the password in Achjima’s lab? It would be weird to exclude one of the “forks” out of the test for “no reason”… I guess I can handwave this in case she succeeds by chance because Nkeka has studied Achjima’s background so much that she was able to guess correctly?
Thanks a lot in advance!
(1) Nonny was still active when the PC beta forks were made, so she would recall them existing and should be able to verify their identity.
(2) A muse is just an AI; it can’t read minds or anything. Nonny won’t immediately realize that Nkeka isn’t yet another fork.
(3) Check out Metagame Special Effects. I would call for the test and just announce it’s a failure no matter what. Remember that Nkeka’s player will know what’s going on, so they might be enough on the ball to realize what you’re doing and just announce a fail result.
Alternatively, roll these checks secretly.
Wow, that was quick, thanks a lot! Especially for getting back to this adventure after so long. It really helped!