The Eclipse Phase universe, like a lot of science fiction universes, features faster-than-light travel (in the form of the Pandora Gates) and FTL communication (in the form of quantum-entangled transmissions). If relativity is true (and, in the real world, we have copious evidence that says that it is), then this is impossible.

This tends to get hackles raised from those who are unhappy with a universal speed limit, but this Wikipedia article gives a pretty good explanation of why FTL causes time travel. There’s really no way around it: If FTL communication is possible, then Alice really will receive an FTL reply from Bob before she sent the original FTL message. And once you can do that, it’s trivial to create causality violations. (Particularly if we replace “FTL message” with “FTL travel” so that Alice can go some place, come back before she left, and shoot herself in the head.)

The realities of relativistic speeds are deeply unintuitive to us, but they are no less real because of that. Without getting elbow-deep in the math so that we can really grasp what’s happening, we’re not going to spontaneously discover something that the last five generations of very clever scientists have overlooked. There is no easy escape hatch.

But recently I was drawn into a discussion of how the FTL “realities” of the Eclipse Phase universe could be handled. Here a few approaches you could take:

OOPS…

I guess relativity was wrong after all. Oops.

There’s really no way to pull this off without ignoring a century of scientific data, but we’re just going to ignore that: FTL works and there’s no causality violation because, ta-da, we said so.

To be fair, general relativity and quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible with each other and something’s going to have to give if we’re ever going to reconcile those theories. It could be the light speed limit that’ll need to be jettisoned (although it’s entirely unclear why or what form the resulting scientific theory would take).

This is, basically, the approach Eclipse Phase takes: QE-based communication alone completely ruptures relativity at a local and immediate level. Ergo, relativity must not be true. Fly, Skylark, fly.

MUST… GO… FASTER…

But let’s wave our hands a little faster.

It turns out that hyper-luminal drives actually increase the local speed of light not just for the ship, but for all spacetime within the light cone of that ship. There are no causality violations because the ship never actually goes faster than light (just faster than light was going last week), but suddenly the radio waves from Earth are reaching Mars much faster than they were before. In fact, it turns out that most of the dark energy in the universe is just a by-product of extragalactic FTL civilizations and tachyons are basically a form of interstellar pollution.

For the purposes of Eclipse Phase, let’s just ignore QE-communication for the moment and focus our attention entirely on the Pandora Gates. It turns out that this “speeding up the speed of light” effect of hyper-luminal travel is heavily gradated due to the vast distances being traversed by the Gates. But people begin to suspect what’s happening when scientists begin detecting small “speed-ups” in interplanetary communication systems. (And it’s possible the scientists weren’t the first ones: There have some anomalous trades on the Planetary Stock Exchange that could only be possible if someone knew they could take advantage of discontinuities in communication speeds.)

OUT OF THIS WORLD

Or maybe causality violations resolve themselves through some variant of the many-worlds hypothesis: Alice leaves at FTL speeds, returns before she left, and then shoots herself in the head. But causality isn’t violated because Alice the Murderer can still trace her personal timeline into a different world where the shooting never took place.

The universe where this happens, however, is a complete disaster: Causality may not technically be violated as it leaps from one spacetime to another, but from a local perspective it’s shredded into pieces. The solar system becomes filled with nonsensical events that we can’t really comprehend: Revolutions are thwarted before they started, but then instantly won by time-traveling revolutionaries who blah blah blah, my brain hurts.

Interesting thought experiment, though: What does the universe where Alice the Murderer zoomed off at FTL speeds look like? Well, in that universe she simply disappears the minute she turns around and violates causality (having skipped into a different universe where her return isn’t an immediate paradox). In this scenario you might actually end up with a very large number of universes which this causality-violating Alice simply “skips through” creating ghostly, quantum-froth blips as she sequentially violates causality in one after another. (Once again, we could hand-wave violently and pretend these causality-busting events are happening around us all the time and are the source of dark energy or quantum manifestations or any number of things.)

But here’s the important bit: In the universe where we sent Alice away at FTL speeds, she simply vanishes and we will never see her again. If she turns around and tries to come back, she (and anyone else trying that stunt) will vanish into an alternate dimension never to be seen again.

In the Eclipse Phase universe, though, we’ve been doing this for awhile now: We send Alice out at FTL speeds through the Pandora Gates and we bring Alice back at FTL speeds through the Pandora Gates. Everything seems fine. But then we crack the science and discover that Alice can’t come back: When she comes back, she flips out of this dimension and is never seen again.

But if Alice can’t come back… who the hell is the “Alice” who came back through the Gate? What the hell is the Alice who came back through the Gate?

In my last review of a Field Report — Psi Laws — I pointed out that the great strength of the format was that it allowed Andrew Bates (Trinity’s creator and line developer) to explore themes and concepts which would otherwise be difficult to do in a standard roleplaying sourcebook. Psi Laws was an excellent example of this. So is the Media report.

Rick Jones takes a very good look at one possible course of evolution from the modern media of today to the future media of tomorrow – blending film, television, and the internet (along with a number of others) into a future of a fragmented OpNet and “the miracle of holovision”. The use of the Field Report motif of the product being a “real” Aeon Trinity field report to its field agents allows Jones to take a very subtle approach to what is far too often treated in a cavalier manner. As a result you end up truly believing that the pastiche of media forces he describes could actually exist.

If nothing else this product is a useful addition to your Trinity collection because it helps you make greater sense out of other Trinity products. That seems a little odd at first, but you need to realize that significant portions of most Trinity products consists of media excerpts of one variety or another (artifact storytelling is the technical term for this) – hence the Media field report serves as a guide to those excerpts.

The one major drawback of the Media field report, however, is that it pulls a Verhoeven. Paul Verhoeven is the director of Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers (among others). Anyone who has seen these films know that they hold a single trait in common: They all use fictional commercials and television programs as means of advancing a story or introducing a setting. The thing all of these fictional programs have in common is that they’re all cheesy – looking more like paraodies of television commercials rather than actual television commercials. Although some of the visual elements of programs covered in the Media field report are actually quite good (Retrospective with Warren Shaw — a news program whose dead host was replaced with a sim of himself — is a good example), others are quite pathetic (Tuna Sandwich and Jake Danger: Aberrant Hunter). This is a prime example of how poor visual presentation can spoil an otherwise decent product. Since the book deals with the media of the twenty-third century the fact that that media comes off looking hokey cheapens the whole thing.

In any case, although this Field Report doesn’t quite live up to the reputation of the others so far due to its poor visual performance, it is still worth $5 – particularly for Jones’ excellent work. It would take a lot more than this type of minor foul-up to make these products worth less than their dollar value.

(For those of you who are following the developing meta-story for Trinity check out the sidebar on pg. 15. It kinda ruins the mystique of this being an “actual” field report – but that’s a pretty juicy tidbit they’ve decided to give us.)

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Rick Jones
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $4.95
Page count: 25
ISBN: 1-56504-771-0

Originally Posted: 1999/04/26

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

Tagline: The Trinity Field Reports continue to be one of the best elements of the Trinity line.

Since Dungeons & Dragons first appeared on the market over twenty-five years ago the vast majority of roleplaying games have shared a standard motif in which the roles that the player’s assume are always (and I mean always) individuals who spend 99% of their time together in what is essentially a gang, wandering around, and engaging in thinly rationalized acts of violence. It has been interesting to watch over the past few years as the seemingly inevitable backlash against this ideology has slowly materialized. The backlash, in fact, has almost reached the point where it is fashionable to include it as a disclaimer – even when doing so is patently absurd. (For example Unknown Armies includes the disclaimer that people who “follow this type of logic” usually end up in insane asylums… just before describing a game in which the players take on the role of people who believe that they can perform magic. Violence, I guess, gets you locked up a in a nuthouse. Thinking that you get magical powers through self-mutilation is perfectly normal.)

That being said, it’s not that bad a trend. Even if you aren’t looking to get your games completely bogged down in real world causalities (what fun would a Feng Shui campaign be, for example, if your PCs were always worrying about civil suits?), such things can occasionally be used to add an original twist to an old story. Take the storyline in the Flash comic books a couple years back, for example, in which the Flash is put on trial for failing to save someone from a fire. That’s clever. Or take the brilliancy of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Normally you just quietly ignore the fact that Batman is an unlicensed vigilante; Miller explores the concept (along with others) and creates something fresh and creative. (Costumed superheroes make an excellent example of this because so many realities are quietly put on hold in the genre; bring one or all of those realities back into play and you have a whole new playing field to explore.)

All of which brings us around to Trinity Field Report: Psi Laws. This is a product which probably never would have existed fifteen years ago, because the only question it asks is: If your main characters use their psionic abilities, what are the legal ramifications?

I’ve commented before on the greatness of the Field Report concept. It allows Andrew Bates to deal with concepts, fill holes, and correct sizable mistakes which just couldn’t be handled any other way. These are things which could not be expanded effectively to fill a full-sized sourcebook, but of such a nature that they cannot be incorporated into another product in a convenient matter (or, in one case, something which should have been included in a product but was not – letting them correct the mistake in as clean a manner as possible). Their unique, cheap nature means that the Trinity universe can be fleshed out in ways other universes cannot.

Psi Laws is an excellent example of this. Giving both the GM and the player (due to their format as field reports to Aeon Trinity agents) a general overview of the way psions are treated by laws in all the major areas of the Trinity setting – and, through inference, the way law functions in general two centuries in the future — Psi Laws gives Trinity something no other science fiction setting has: Laws. Most games simply assume (or rather, let you assume) that the laws of their future realities will be, for all intents and purposes, identical to those of 20th century America. It’s an interesting oversight considering that the laws of today are substantially different from the laws of twenty years ago… let alone a hundred or two hundred years ago. Often these future settings have new technologies and new societies, but no conceptual base for how the law has changed over the years. This is a particular oversight in settings where the PCs end up being law enforcers of one variety or another.

Taking all of that into consideration I can give Psi Laws the same high recommendation I’ve given the other Field Guides — this is $5 well spent.

(Psi Laws does contain one serious mistake where a block of text was apparently pasted into the wrong place (it appears in its correct place as well father down the page). I also have reservations about the cover – a blow up of an interior image which is severely pixellated. These are minor concerns, however.)

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Bryant Durrell
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $4.95
Page count: 25
ISBN: 1-56504-769-9

Originally Posted: 1999/04/26

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

As I mentioned previously, I wasn’t planning on initiating this sequence of posts until I had the last of the final art in my hands. But my post about running a forum-based adventure over on theRPGSite a couple days ago has inexplicably resulted in two people sending me scathing e-mails demanding how I can possibly justify running online adventures or developing prep notes for Eclipse Phase scenarios when Legends & Labyrinths still hasn’t been published.

Well, it’s largely because there’s nothing for me to do. As I’ve expressed previously, we’re waiting for art. And the reason we’re waiting for art is because paying for that art was the entire point of the funding initiative. It’s frustrating that we’ve had artists flake, but we’ve got some really great artists working on it now and it’s just a matter of time before we’ll be able to realize Legends & Labyrinths as it was intended to be.

So if you’re wondering why I have time to write updates here on the Alexandrian or run games for my friends, it’s because the choice isn’t between “working on L&L” and “doing this other thing”. It’s between “doing this other thing” and “doing nothing”. Because you really don’t want to see what the art for L&L would look like if I was trying to fill the gap in my spare time:

(aww yeah… pay me $40 for a full-glossy hardcover of that, baby)

Notably, none of the excoriating e-mails I have received have been from the people who have actually given me money for Legends & Labyrinth. I appreciate the patience all of them have shown in waiting for the book to come to fruition. And I hope that the art they’ve helped me pay for — and the beautiful book that art will make possible — will be worth the wait for them.

Meanwhile, here’s a concept sketch (not a finished piece!) to give you an idea of why we’re waiting for the professionals to do their thing:

If you’d be interested in playing in a forum-based D&D adventure run by me, you should pop over to Basketweavers vs. The Sunless Citadel on theRPGSite and sign up. It’s first come, first serve. I’m hoping for a frequent updates schedule, so please be prepared to commit at least daily attention to the thread.

Fair warning, though: This is a bit of an odd bird. The run-thru is being motivated by a poster on theRPGSite named Mr. GC who is arguing vociferously that “basketweavers” — i.e., non-optimized characters — cannot play D&D. The opposing contention is that it’s absolutely trivial for non-optimized characters to play D&D, particularly if they’re adventuring in an open sandbox that allows them to select the challenges they want to face at any given moment.

In order to simulate that scenario, we’ll be using a very strange set of character creation guidelines set by Mr. GC for creating a party of “basketweavers” and then assuming that this particular party of “basketweavers” has selected The Sunless Citadel for their next adventure.

The particular version of The Sunless Citadel I’ll be using will be slightly modified from the original. But if you are familiar with the scenario, you may want to sit this one out.