Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 1

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Now that Shadow of the Erdtree has been out for several months, I have settled into the long tail of idling away time doing exegesis about a game with somersaulting electric sheep.

That was the original opener of this post, and the first draft reached over 5000 words with no meaningful progress, after which I changed tacks and rewrote the entire damn thing from scratch.

And then rewrote several large chunks of it again during a whole lot of video essay binging and several long discussions with longtime friend of the blog Kyana.

Since this was all from my second playthrough, I suppose this counts as a revisit post.

PART 1: CRITIQUE

With the benefit of a few months of hindsight, I think that Shadow of the Erdtree pushes Elden Ring over the line where it starts getting choked by its own lore. The base game was already close to critical mass, but the addition of multiple entirely new, extremely important, and mostly entirely unconnected story elements has been enough to be an active detriment to the game.

This is nothing new for Fromsoft DLC: they’re always post-hoc, they’re always pretty disconnected from the main game, and they always feel stapled on to some extent. There’s usually some handwave given for the fuzziness and lack of connection: time travel, dreams, distant lands, magical paintings. Some of those work better than others, and the ones that work well typically do so because they deliver on an emotionally meaningful plotline and let the fuzziness cover for the rest.  All we need to know about Oolacile is that it was a Longass Time Ago; that’s sufficient stage dressing for the story of Artorius and the rest is gravy.

Elden Ring, unfortunately, is a game where the world’s history is an extremely important part of understanding anything. It’s a game that sold itself on having a coherent timeline lurking in the background, so in order to avoid the stapled-on effect the DLC would either have to entirely disconnected, or it would have to have a really good reason why no one has talked about any of this shit in base game.

Well, they did neither. Nothing in the damn game makes any fucking sense anymore; every time a theory might be going somewhere, it runs into some little detail in Shadow that blockades any sort of progress. There’s no substantive connective tissue, but they threw in enough gristle to block any path you might draw for yourself. Not having an answer to the specifics of Marika achieved godhood in the base game was fine, you could just brush it off as a fog of history moment and go along your way. Adding more Lore without any additional context of when and why just makes answering the questions yourself much less fun. They’ve fenced us in. And the one plot thread they actually properly set up they don't even deliver on.

And this isn’t just applicable to the relationship of the DLC to the base game: there are elements of the DLC that don’t make any goddamn sense with each other. There are crests in the Shadow Keep indicating an alliance between the Erdtree and the Hornsent, (Hawkshaw has a video on this. I don't fully agree with his conclusions, but I buy the part with the crest) which makes no god damn sense considering Marika’s backstory.

(Unless she only learned about the pogroms later in life? Wait…wait wait wait the braid. It’s the fucking braid. It’s the fucking braids on the fucking statues, because she goes from two braids down to one, and we find the braid she cut off in the Shaman Village…see what drove me to iterate this damn post so many times? It’s got the hooks in and I can’t even write the damn thing off properly. )

The lorehunt in Demons Souls and Dark Souls had a sort of organic nature to it. There wasn’t an ecosystem for lore analysis video essays (or at least, not much of one) at the time, and so it was an added bonus, an extra treat, a fun imaginative exercise. As time has gone on, FromSoft have been moving towards more and more focus on that side of the equation; by the time we get to Elden Ring, they’re particularly brazen about presenting the world as a mystery to solve rather than a canvas to paint on. We get more Lore™, there’s more Stuff to Analyze, but the interpretive curve is flattened. We end up in one of those terrible self-reinforcing cycles that eventually reaches a breaking point.

(Would you look at that: a Theme! Don’t tell any lore analysts, themes frighten them.)

It’s the problem that was growing in the latter books of New Sun and came to awful fruition in Urth: the world is made smaller because the author has focused wholly on making an elaborate wind-up puzzle box. Wolfe went from implications of a vast decaying space empire filled in by your imagination to “nah, there’s actually just one spaceship, also it travels through time so it is all spaceships at once.”

My brain goblins love a good theorycraft. Why do you think I still have so much love for the SCP Wiki, if not for its unique position as an enormous database full of infinite points to draw connections between. But in that environment every connection and every interpretation is viable, because canon doesn’t reach beyond the individual article. It’s a participatory dynamo where everything is mashed up and every potential play is fair game. You could almost call it a Crucible…

(Gasp! A metaphor!)

...and FromSoft has filled the shoes of the Greater Will, imposing Order upon interpretive chaos. And like the Greater Will they are distant, inscrutable, and extremely unhelpful.
 
Most of my theories in the original draft spun their wheels and went nowhere because any potential progress ended with me running up against the gaps in information that make a full picture impossible.

In a dream scenario, we’d get three to five single-sentence bullet points that allow us to plant down when anything fucking happens. That’d be ideal, even if it’s just “X event happened between Y and Z.” Barring that, I’d rather have less. I’d rather there be no answers, or the answers just be “thought it’d be cool, so we stuck it in there.” I’d rather it all be a dream of Miquella’s as he lays dying in his cocoon, a failure at everything he has ever attempted.

This “oh no, there are answers, we just gave you half the puzzle” shit is really putting a damper on the fun. And it is fun when the flow is going well - I had a proper fugue state focus episode as I annotated my big text document of item descriptions in my first big burst of inpiration - but eventually there is the wall.

We didn’t have all the answers with the base game, but it felt complete in a way. I’d only say Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne give that feeling of holistic self-contained coherence. That’s gone now.

Part 2: What Now?

So. There’s my complaining done. What to do about it is the next question. I could pare down my theory list to the absolute basics and toss in all the interesting observations I made. I could leave this post as-is and just have it as a short critical essay chronicling my disappointments with the implicit storyline of a game where you can put a jar on your head.

But you know…maybe all that doesn’t matter. Listening to Noah Caldwell-Gervais, as usual, has refreshed and re-oriented my thoughts and it’s very clear that I got caught up in the trap that Souls fans have built for themselves. We too often ignore that these games are myth and poetry, vibes and images, foppery and whim.

And so I am going to do what I should have done from the beginning, and just make some shit up.

Part 3: Return of the Unhinged Rambling

Here I am going to dump all the minor themes, theories, observations, and assorted other thoughts I have compiled in this particular hyperfocus regime. They will contradict each other regularly, as is right and good.

**

Interpretive Lens: 1.00 Descriptions are canon

Some people might think cut content isn’t fair game, I am not one of them. 1.00 stuff shall be treated as canon here if it doesn’t contradict the rest of the game, or if it does contradict but provides something I like better.

**

Theory: The holes in the narrative and timeline are holes in-universe history as well, thanks to the Golden Order’s enthusiastic and well-equipped ministry of propaganda.

Marika loves nothing more than removing all traces of anything that she doesn’t like, and she already had House Marais acting as secret police, so this feels like a given. It’s also a nice anti-frustration method: who is the GEQ, or any of those other pressing, frustrating questions? Doesn’t matter; that information was expunged from the record and the only people who actually know are dead.

**

Theory: The Removal of the Lands of the Shadow was a CK-Class Reality Restructuring Event

Apologies for the SCP lingo, but it’s still probably the best way of explaining this sort of thing.

A CK event is an in-universe retcon: reality got altered in some way that affects the past as well as the present. The total lack of connection between the Lands of Shadow and the base game (sans a few anomalous bleed-throughs) is now perfectly coherent: that entire subcontinent and everything to do with it was pruned out of reality so thoroughly that it never really existed in the first place.

And the Vulgar Militia Armor has the line “Forbidden lands that will be excised from the memory of history”, that’s exactly what I am talking about.

**

Theory: The base game and the DLC exist in two different timelines

Continuation of the above. Bear with me, I will try to keep it brief.

Let’s start with Timeline A: the Lands of Shadow are part of the Lands Between, everything progresses forward with a nice little trundle, it’s all gucci. This is the timeline that leads to Marika attaining godhood, ordering the Crusade, and pulling off the CK event.

When Marika splits the lands, we ctrl+c ctrl+v Timeline A and rename it Timeline B. Then we go through and start deleting. This will become the timeline of the base game (this is important! Base game is the modified Timeline B!) There’s no mention of Messmer in this timeline, because Messmer doesn’t exist outside of the Land of Shadow and so never existed here. There’s no mention of the Hornsent, the Tower, the Gate of Divinity, the Shaman village anything of that nature, because they don’t exist anymore. Marika is still aware of it all as the divine orchestrator and bearer of the Ring, but everyone else is entirely in the dark. And this is a retroactive change, so it doesn't actually restart the timeline or anything. It surgically removes things from the past.

**

Observation: Godfrey had an extremely irregular army

I honestly get a sort of Black Company-esque “constant turnover as the army travels” vibe from the Tarnished. This is the old warlord Loux peeking through, I think - the Crucible Knights are fine and good for Godfrey, but Horah Loux the badlands warrior strikes me as the kind of guy who will recruit damn near anyone who shows the right stuff and he isn’t particularly concerned about unit cohesion as a tactical strategy.

**

Secrets from 1.00: There are only 16 Crucible Knights

I think this gives a nice contrast to the warriors Godfrey surrounds himself with. An elite cadre of knights devoted to a primordial divine force vs a motley crew of battle-hardened veterans whose lower individual power is bolstered by diversity and experience. Two armies for two sides of the man.

**

Observation: All three of Rennala’s children got involved with heterodox magic

This isn’t particularly hidden info, but I’ve not seen it brought up as a whole before now.

• Ranni was secretly instructed in ice magic by Renna (or so is generally assumed), who is called a practitioner of heretical sorcery.
• Radahn both studied gravity magic with an Alabaster Lord and had connections to the Sellian sorcerers - both of which are outside of the Academy or Carian schools of sorcery
• Rykard rediscovered the hexes used by the ancient serpent-worshiping cult of Mt. Gelmir, and revised them for modern usage.

I don’t think there’s any big revelation here, but it is a nice thematic resonance: No matter how the older generation tries to control how the world goes, the plan breaks apart on contact with the younger generation. And of course, all three of these heterodoxies being pre-Tree practices.

**

Speculation: Ice Sorcery comes from Zamor

The few Zamorians we see use ice-based attacks (and are basically the only enemies who use it), and the only other fact we know about them is that they allied with the Golden Order against the Giants. The Astrologers, who later became the Carians, were allies (or at least friendly) with the Giants (per Sword of Night and Flame). Seems a reasonable assumption that the sorcery of an old enemy would later be called heretical.

**

Baseless Speculation: The Lords of Stone originally hail from Zamor

They’re both weird, gangly, tall, and old. It’s grasping at straws but we got fucking nothing on either of them. If the Zamorians had pointed ears it would be a shoe-in.

**

Observation: Whetblades are described as having a cipher inscribed on them.

Not a certified genius take to say “this is probably smithscript”, but I’m not a certified genius so it's all right.

**

Theory: People used to be bigger

Once is random chance, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. Wouldn’t you know it, we’ve got six!

Example 1: Giant Crusher

"A hammer made from a boulder, used in the War against the Giants. One of the heftiest weapons in the entire Lands Between. After the giants were quelled, and man turned against man in violence, this weapon was all but forgotten. Man has grown feeble in comparison to his forebears."

Example 2: Page Garb

"Among the highborn, those with naturally smaller physiques were considered to lack the full blessing of the Erdtree, and thereby trained as pages. There were said to be many among their number who positively brimmed with potential."

Example 3: 1.00 Fire Monk Hood

"Worshiping fire and wielding flame, these brawny warrior monks claim to descend from the giants of old."

Example 4: 1.00 Flame Prelate Armor

"Those who claim giant ancestry venerate their larger frames. As such, prelate's armor can accommodate marvelous great sizes indeed."

Example 5: 1.00 Vulgar Militia Ashes

"In the Lands Between, the small were scorned, and so they formed their vulgar militia as a means to make a living, albeit in ignominy."

Example 6: Sword of Milos

"Sinister greatsword fashioned from a giant's backbone. [...] Milos was undersized for a giant, and was viewed as sullied and terribly grotesque."

So it feels to me that giants and humans aren't really all that separate, but exist along a spectrum of hugeness. You have the Giant-Giants, the normal giants, small giants (trolls), Milos-sized giants, big humans (bosses and elite enemies, descendants of giants, etc), medium sized humans (most people), very small humans (vulgar militia). Couldn't tell you why it was removed. 

And this idea is certainly common in assorted mythologies, including those ol’ George would be familiar with.

**

Baseless Speculation: The Rune of the Unborn was originally going to be granted to a third Empyrean sibling of Malenia and Miquella

The Rune of the Unborn lines up shape-wise with Malenia’s Great Rune, and we know that Great Runes come in matching sets for siblings (and not necessarily twins! Morgott and Mohg match, but so do Rykard and Radahn), and if Miquella's crosses are anything to go by his great rune lined up with both of those. The link is sound.

**

Theory: Those born of a single god automatically qualify for Empyreanism

This is just me attempting to justify how Ranni is an Empyrean as well as Miquella and Malenia. It’s just ambiguous writing in the Remembrance of the Rot Goddess.

“Miquella and Malenia are both the children of a single god. As such they are both Empyreans, but suffered afflictions from birth.”

See? That "as such" is pulling a lot of weight. M & M autoqualified, Ranni was chosen by the Fingers.

**

Theory: The Fingers abandoned Malenia and Miquella

Ranni tells us pretty explicitly that both Malenia and Miquella had their own Fingers, but we don’t see or hear a single other thing about them. They also don’t have shadowbound beasts, which seems to be part of the SOP with the Fingers’ favored godhood prospects.

So I think that the Fingers had started the preparation process with M & M somewhat automatically, but dipped out early because neither of them would be the right kind of god for the Fingers’ purposes.

Malenia was already compromised by the Rot, so she’s a non-starter (at least if the GW and the Rot God are rivals, instead of a more vertical hierarchical relationship - the game is unclear on this, and Kyana pointed out that the GW is very good at incorporating anything it comes across - while that’s totally true, I am a sucker for a divine cold war.)

Miquella’s resistant to mental influence, which means that he’s going to be even less controllable than Marika and is a worse choice than the already-terrible choice of Malenia.

(Thinking more on this later, since the stuff with Metyr makes it pretty clear that the GW has not been in the picture for a long, long time, I am more set on this idea. While the GW might be able to incorporate anything it comes across, the Fingers have gone rogue and are under no compulsion to act according to the GW)

**

Baseless Speculation: The Blind Swordsman got his sword from a cat

Look, the words “fairy” and “faerie” only appear once each in the entire corpus, you gotta give me this one. Lacrimosa is the faerie cat.

**

Baseless Speculation: Nanaya acted out of ignorance, not malice.

The “Nanaya is Shabriri” theory has merit, but it leans too far into “everyone is someone else” for me and I prefer the tragedy of ruin brought about by people trying to do what they think is the right thing while driven by desperation, ignorance, and despair.

**

Observation: Gargoyles, like the pots, are cobbled together corpses of champions

Just something I think is interesting. Same idea, different methods: pots meld the flesh of champions together, gargoyles are cobbled together from spare parts using corpse wax leftovers.

**

Observation: Demi-humans become feral at night.

Per the Demi-Human Ashes:               

"Though they seem somewhat intelligent, when night falls, their blood boils and they become feral."

It should also be noted that the crucified corpses in Limgrave all start screaming at night as well.

**

Theory: Demihumans are the descendants of humans who never had Grace / Erdtree blessings, and have been reproducing in the normal human way rather than via Erdtree birth

This is me spinning out Melina's weird "I guess this is what it means to have a mother" statement about Boc, despite nearly all of her lines in game telling us about her own mother.

They might also be the descendants of beastmen who were not safely outside of time in Farum Azula, same principle applies there.

**

Observation: Some more weasel words

Ah, “it is said”, “it is thought” and “it is believed”, what wonderful weasel words. Sometimes the belief is true, and many times it is not. I am going through the doc and tagging everything where this stuck out as noticable.

Crimson Seed Talisman: "The Erdtree was once perfect and eternal, and thus was it believed that The Erdtree was once perfect and eternal, and thus was it believed that Erdtree seeds could not exist."

We know, of course, know that they can (because there are Golden Seeds lying all over the place)

One -Eyed Shield: "Once worshiped by the giants, this evil deity is believed to have been slain by Queen Marika."

The Fell God is still very much alive and active in the Fire Giant boss fight, so Marika either thought she killed it but didn’t, let it live on purpose, was unable to kill it, or someone else did the job for her. Those are interesting options. Lies are interesting.

Man-Fly Ashes: "Afflicted hornsent eventually metamorphosed into a fly-like form. It was believed that the moment the transformation took place, they were relieved from their suffering."

No real implications here, it’s mostly just sad.

Sacramental Bud: "Believed to originate long ago from a strain of buds cultivated with youthful, sacramental blood."

The 1.00 description says “a leaf bud that is known to cure scarlet poison”, which leads me to think that this is Miquella’s blood. Couldn’t tell you what the fuck the sacrament is, it is only mentioned here in base game and in 1.00 the only other use is with the Phantom Great Rune. These are also red buds, and there's the Chapel of the Bud in the DLC and ???? I don't find the Rot nearly as interesting as FromSoft.

Ringed Finger: "Bludgeon made of an enormous finger sheathed in several heavy rings. Thought to have been cut from an ancestor of the Fingercreeper."

We know this one, thanks to the DLC. I think it’s likely, if it didn’t just come from a bigger than average finger-creeper, that whatever or whoever injured Metyr took this finger as payment. Weird that it’s in the Gelmir Hero’s Grave, the boss there is just another red wolf.

Guardian Garb (Full Bloom): "It is said that the blood-red flowers blooming on their backs mark the senescence of their ancient pact. Perhaps the guardians are part tree already."

This one, also probably true, but noteworthy; what else do we associate with the blooming of red flowers? Rot comes to claim the Erdtree so that the cycle may continue.

Royal Remains Armor: "It is said that the bones belong to an ancient lord―the soulless king. The lord of the lost and desperate, who was known as Ensha."

Now there’s no actual contrary evidence to this so it is probably true. All we've got is that he is a spooky scary skeleton man and honestly that's all he needs to be.

**

Complaint: Romina’s theme is entirely too good for a nothing boss

That’s it, that’s the complaint. Blasphemous Blade melts through her HP so fast that you barely have time to enjoy it.

**

Observation: Stone Lord Sword Colors

Alabaster Lords have blue-white swords, and we know one was friendly enough to teach gravity magic to Radahn & his cohort.

Onyx Lords are specifically called out for their destructive power, have gold-tinged swords.

**

Observation: Farum Azula was hit by a meteorite

Per Ruins Greatsword:         

"Originally rubble from a ruin which fell from the sky […] The ruin it came from crumbled when struck by a meteorite, as such this weapon harbors its destructive power."

So we know that FA was hit by a meteor, and despite the somewhat ambiguous phrasing I feel like the damage happened after it was already in the sky, which to me says that it was after Bayle attacked Placidusax. This feels Astel-related, possibly part of the GW's retaliation against the Nox. I've seen some recent theories that FA was part of, or had close relations to, the Eternal Cities, and they're convincing enough to entertain the idea.

**

Theory: The Three Fingers are not intrinsically connected to the Flame of Frenzy

Per Nomadic Merchant’s Finery:

"These merchants once thrived as the Great Caravan, but after being accused of heretical beliefs, their entire clan was rounded up and buried alive far underground. Then, they chanted a curse of despair, and summoned the flame of frenzy."

So the Frenzy only came to them after the pogrom, that’s pretty clear. It didn't emerge until they had already been imprisoned and fallen into despair. We're told that they were accused of heresy, and as any good student of religious practice knows heresy isn’t real in-and-of-itself: it’s a belief that diverges from an orthodoxy and can only exist in relation to existing religious and political power (with a vested interest in maintaining their authority through strict adherence to dogma)

The three fingers / two fingers thing has at least some (read: probably a lot, you know how much this game loves literalized metaphors) inspiration from the 17th century schism in the Russian Orthodox Church - part of the reforms was a change in whether the sign of the cross was made with two or three fingers. A wholly arbitrary and meaningless distinction, which nonetheless led to mass death over fucking nothing.

From the Fingerprint Stone Shield, we get the following:

“The Readerless Fingers relayed their message through these imprints, said to be the very seeds from which frenzy first sprouted.”

Weasel words! Ah, “said to be”, you little bastard!

If it is only “said to be”, then there is the chance that it is not. And it would be so, so, so very convenient if a heterodox sect of your own religion, which existed outside of your religious and imperial hierarchy, was inherently affiliated with dread and dangerous powers specifically because of how they interacted with the divine. They don’t have Finger Readers, they can’t possibly interpret the Greater Will correctly! And they speak with Three Fingers, not Two!

So, theory in full: the Three Fingers are just an arbitrary variant of the Fingers (perhaps a mutation from after Metyr was wounded, perhaps the older variant, perhaps just random chance) that was carried around by the Grand Caravan (I fucking love this image, I imagine it’s got its own little tent and cart and everything). The Caravan did not have Finger Readers to interpret the Fingers’ movements, instead relying on reading the fingerprint messages it left behind.

Marika, whose primary hobbies are consolidating power and murdering rivals, uses all of this as an excuse for a pogrom - possibly with Shabriri firing up everyone with slanderous claims of a dangerous heresy. The Caravaneers are rounded up and imprisoned in the catacombs beneath Leyndell along with their aberrant Fingers. The Caravaneers try to find guidance from the divine in their despair and the Three Fingers, ever the dutiful transmitter, makes contact. But with the Flame of Frenzy rather than the Greater Will. From there it spreads through the catacombs, and then beyond.

The Golden Order completes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where their desire for control causes the very thing they feared to happen? Fucking poetry. That’s Dark Souls, baby!

(The tomb of an ancient god that is mentioned by the Fingerprint Shield? No idea what god.)

**

Theory: Flame of Frenzy = The One Great (kinda)

The OG (I see what you did there, Martin) is mentioned once in the entirety of Elden Ring’s text, by Hyetta near the end of her questline. Quote:

“I have touched them. The words of the Three Fingers. As your maiden, allow me to divine them. All that there is came from the One Great. Then came fractures, and births, and souls. But the Greater Will made a mistake. Torment, despair, affliction. Every sin, every curse. Every one, born of the mistake. And so, what was borrowed must be returned. Melt it all away, with the yellow chaos flame. Until all is One again.”

Very soulsy, we know this well - a state of stasis that is then broken by disparity, and then disparity causes suffering that cannot be escaped. The universe as it stands now is built upon two grand cosmic laws:

Law of Causality

“Causality is the pull between meanings; it is the connections that form the relationships of all things.”

Law of Regression

“Regression is the pull of meaning; that all things yearn eternally to converge.”

Or: if you have a bunch of Things, the Law of Causality ties them together in relationships that resist the pull of the Law of Regression by having them pull against each other and thus remain separate entities.

So if the Frenzied Flame is to melt away all division and reduce the entirety of reality back into the One Great, it’s obviously the Law of Regression. Everything goes back to formless chaos. Naturally this puts the Greater Will in the role of the Law of Causality - forever putting order on chaos, dividing and distinguishing in order to keep discrete existence functioning.

Putting on my Dark Souls Thematic Detective Hat again, this seems like another case of “attempting to control or avoid something makes it worse”. Perhaps the Flame was not always frenzied, perhaps it became so under the weight of the order that forced shape upon it. The pipe is damaged, watch out for pressurized steam.

**

Speculation: The death of Placidusax’s Unnamed God resulted in the gradual loss of sapience among the beasts

1.00 says directly that the Greater Will gave intelligence to beasts, but since the god of that era would have been a vessel of the Elden Ring just as in ours, I think that distinction is minimal.

**

Baseless Speculation: The demihumans go feral at night - perhaps this Unnamed God was affiliated with the sun?

An extension of the above: lingering influence of the Unnamed God allows the demihumans to cling to some manner of intelligence. I think it's pretty safe to say that the Unnamed God was associated with lightning, storms, and ice (since those are the attack types used by the Messenger Beast) but the sun isn't out of the question either.

Mausoleum Knight Great Shield says that the eclipsed sun “keeps Destined Death at bay” - which implies that a normal, uneclipsed sun means that death is working properly. (Hmm, all those crucified corpses in Limgrave...) There’s not a whole lot else, because the sun is not given nearly as much prominence as the moon in this game. But we do have two bits that stick out.

Sun Realm Shield:

"Shield of honor depicting a city crowned by the sun. It has seen better days. Much like the wear upon the shield, the Seat of the Sun is long faded away."

I honestly don’t read a lot into this one, sometimes you just need to cryptically mention a lost civilization and explain nothing. This could be the Ancient Dynasty, Rauh, Farum Azula, even Belurat.

And the Omen Armor:

"The heavy, sun-shaped medallion represents both the guidance he once saw, and the ring to which it will one day lead."

Which is some cryptic shit indeed. But since Dung Eater’s entire thing is attempted emulation of the omen, which are themselves the result of the Golden Order’s repression and control of the Crucible via the Erdtree, I feel a faint crucible = sun tickling at the back of my mind. But nothing beyond that.

 **

Observation: A list of conspecti of the Academy

• Karolos: Oldest at the Academy, founded by Azur; spells about comets and making new ones.
• Olivinus: Founded by Lusat; spells about meteors; popular with the Sellians (Nox refugees)
• Crystal Cadre: Sorcerers attempting to unlock the “wisdom of stone” of the Crystalians
• Haima: Combat-focused; used by judges and battlemages
• Twinsage: Academy elites, who studied all varieties of sorcery
• Lazuli: Study Carian sorcery; considered deviant (even heretical!) by Academy for placing moon as equal to stars
• Heirodas: For traveling / nomadic scholars, no specialty
  

 **

Theory: Black Flame is giantsflame infused with Destined Death.

Since the black flame cult seemed to start among the Flame Monks, and since giantsflame is already extremely dangerous, this seems like a natural logical connection to me. It implies some connection between the GEQ and the Fire Giants but fuck all of what that relationship might be: she might have stolen it, bargained for it, been given it, I don’t know.

 **

Observation: The Rune of Destine Death is paired with Marika’s Rune

The Marika’s Rune item is a golden halo with a shape in the center: a vertical line or dagger shape with an upward-curved line at the top. Same shape as the Limgrave crosses, Marika’s own crucifixion site, and evocative of the Marika statues in her churches.

Destined Death is a vertical dagger shape with a downward-curved line on the top. Precisely the kind of same-but-slightly-different we see in the runes held by the sibling pairs among her children (thanks Kyana for pointing this out to me), and in the headless statues of Marika in the Land of Shadow.

As far I am concerned, this is as close to confirmation we're liable to get that the GEQ is either Marika herself, an offshoot clone/bud of Marika (similar to Millicent or the Godwyn surrogates), or Marika’s sister.

What does this mean for the statue of the woman with three wolves in Maliketh’s chamber? Fucked if I know.

**

Observation: Some sorcerers attempted to form an alliance with the Demi-Humans

Per the Demi-Human Queen’s Staff:

"Glintstone staff styled as a scepter. A gift once given to the demi-humans to foster peace, it can be wielded even by those of low intelligence. Sneered at by fools in the academy."

The “fools at the academy” makes me think that this was either Caria or the wandering wizards of the Heirodas Conspectus. Since it’s found in the Weeping Peninsula, probably the latter.

Worth noting that the only magic we see demi-humans use is glintsone sorcery, even in the DLC. Ken Haight is the only person aligned with the GO who even seems to notice the demihumans, but he does say he wants to “reestablish communication” with them, so there might have been some connection in the past. Regardless, the rest of his dialogue is pretty strong indication that they exist outside the Order and have never gotten blessed by the Erdtree. This is interesting considering how demihumans go feral at night: perhaps the moon is filling the gap where something used to be...

**

Baseless Speculation: The crusade reached the Land of Shadow via the tibia mariners

The burning boats in the shadow keep immediately put me in mind of viking boat funerals, Alexander the Moderately Successful burning his ships during his invasion of Persia, and Fuck-This-Guy-In-Particular Cortez scuttling his fleet during his invasion of Mexico. Can’t retreat if you’ve got no boats. Part of me wants to say that Messmer and his army were all killed at Marika’s command in this huge mass sacrifice, after which she conveniently let the mariners come and pick them up instead of dumping their bodies in the catacombs for tree burial.

And then there’s that fucking Helphen thing, the guiding light to the spirit world for those who die in battle. Quelaag associates it with the Shadow Keep, I just ignore it, save in this one circumstance: if Messmer was, say, attempting a coup of the Golden Order with accompanying First Burning of the Erdtree (per Tarnished Archaeologist), that gets us death in battle, that gets us the Helphen as a guide into the Land of Shadow, we’ve got the Call of Tibia craftable item to bring the boats in, it's all coming together.

This is one of those where I don't care how much it lines up with the rest, I like it more than the alternatives.

**

Observation: Undead associated with the Tibia Mariners are called “those lost in death”

vs undead affiliated with deathroot being “those who live in death”. The phrase also gets used with the description for the “Rosus’ Summons” skill.

The few Rosus and mariner items we have are all about how the dead tend to get lost and need to be lead / guided by someone. In Rosus’ case it’s pretty clear that he was leading them into the catacombs to be burned by ghostflame, but with the Mariners it’s less clear. I think they were a separate method of death, which may or may not have existed at the same time.

**

Observation: Rosus vs Cemetery Shades

There’s a merchant note telling us how to use Rosus’ light against the shadowy imps in a couple catacombs. The 1.00 version uses the term “tombshades”, and that lines up, somewhat, with the cemetery shades we see in a couple places. The ones that are all black, have the glowing white eyes and the fucked up bugs on their heads. Not a very substantial connection, but a connection nonetheless.

**

Baseless Speculation: Adan and the giantsflame heist

So we know that this guy Adan stole giantsflame - specifically the spell “Flame of the Fell God” - and fled to Lirunia. He was pursued by Fire Monks and ended up locked in an evergaol. This is all we get about him, but this is the good kind of “we know fucking nothing”. It’s got just enough detail for us to ask some questions, and doesn’t get too hung up on being coy about connections.

He’s wearing a combination of the Fire Monk and Fire Prelate armor sets, so we can safely say that he was a defector from that order.

He’s trapped in the Malefactor’s Evergaol, which gives us nothing since that just generically means “evil-doer”.

He is specifically a thief, and theft requires a motive. He would have stolen giantsfire for either himself, or to give it to someone else (or both), and giantsfire has the predominant quality of being dangerous to the Erdtree.

With all that in mind, I think that he stole some giantsflame in an attempt to reforge the Alliance of Night and Flame, with the ultimate goal of burning the Erdtree and unseating the Golden Order, but found out too late that the Carians were more or less a non-factor by the time he arrived (it’s tough to stay on top of current events when you live on top of a mountain) and there was no one left to make an alliance with.

This right here is lorecrafting at its best, I think. I am given the evidence and left to draw a conclusion as I see fit.

**

Theory: Godefroy is just Godrick’s brother who also got into grafting

If you are one of those true sickos who insists on having an explanation for this bastard.

**

Statement of Objective Fact: Godefroy is just bog-standard model re-use and he should not be read into.

Either ignore his existence or just imagine you were fighting just some random dude, problem solved.

 

Interlude

Here we reach the end of this part of the rambling. Tune in next time for more theories and observations, the secrets of 1.00, some larger hypothesis, and whatever other bullshit I have come up with.

Have at it in the comments: countertheories, recommendations, whatever. Have yourselves a ball.

Some Thoughts About 60 Years in Space

 

[Note from Future Dan from the dark future of 2026: This post was written shortly after 60 Years came out, and isn't really representative of where it's ended up in the three years since - the updates that have happened since I wrote this have radically changed the game and greatly improved it - it's still a mess, but it's a playable mess now and I've pretty significantly changed my tune on the game. So just keep that in mind]

Buckle up folks, we've got a wild ride ahead of us. 

Off Into the Dark Wild Yonder

60 Years in Space is a game prescision-crafted to pander to me, while simultaneously triggering incredible frustration at every opportunity. Here is your white whale, but it is unfortunately dead on arrival.

What is it, you ask? A tabletop adaptation of the notoriously complex board game High Frontier, written by Andrew Doull. It consists of five books at ten bucks a pop:

• 60 Years in Space (Core Rules)
• This Space Intentionally (How to actually play the game. Missions and travel)
• A Facility with Words (Additional travel & combat rules, ecosystem & Species Designer)
• All Errors My Own (Trends in society and technology)
• A Lot of Zeroes (The far future - intersolar missions, planet generation, aliens)

As a work of science fiction and as a source of inspiration, I have many, many good things to say about it. We'll get to those (much) later (like in a different post later), as there is a more pressing matter at hand.

As a tabletop game, it is unfit for purpose. And that's a rough thing to say about something that was a one-man, eight-year project, but despite the fact that I do legitimately love the core idea of this game and many of its components, I can't be handing out passes on what Could Have Been.  

To whit:

• The text arrangement on the cover is...a choice.
• There are no pages devoted to rules summaries or procedures of play in the core book - not a flow chart or bullet list to be found. Directions are located scattershot through the text, and they are often very confusingly worded as to why you are rolling, or on what, or what systems are in play.
• Mission outlines are not included in the core book.
• Key terms are neither bolded nor italicized.
• Reference tables are not numbered.
• Headings and subheadings are not numbered.
  
• Directions are confusingly worded.
• References to other concepts or mechanics will nearly always be made without page reference. Some of these concepts or mechanics will be either actually missing, or so difficult to find that it doesn't matter.
• The index has internal hyperlinks (Good!) There is no way to tell that this is the case unless you mouse over the table and pay attention to your cursor (Not good!)
• The core rules do not contain an itemized procedure of play.
  

While I admit it is not particularly fair to drag a one-man team for an eight year project, these are basic issues here and should not have been an issue even for a one-man formatting job. Not to mention that, if we bop on over to Atomic Rockets and dig around we can find a link to a google doc of the 3rd edition High Frontier rules, compiled by the board game's creator Phil Eklund, which avoids most of these errors and is overall a much better reading experience for it despite the fact that I am missing half the context.

Enough of that. Let's walk through making a crew. The steps here are my doing, the book does not specifically enumerate them.

Step 1: Roll for Space Politics

Space Politics is not your team's politics, but the overall mileau of space at the start of the game. In what is going to become a recurring theme, the table has multiple columns but does not indicate if these columns are meant to be rolled individually, or if the table is supposed to be read across with each row as a single entry. I get 'Red - Authoritarian'; "The space race has effectively been won through military, political or technological superiority - usually through force of arms - and the victor is able to control which colonists are permitted into space."

There is a column for card suits, which is for "randomly generating outlooks" - there is no page number or link to outlooks, explanation for what they are, and a whole lot of white space. I err on the side of caution and read the table in rows, so our suit is Clubs.

Step 2: Mission Control

In which we skip over Chapter 3 (Eras) right top Chapter 4 (Mission control), and find ourselves in the first bad omen. Chapter 3 is all background material - important stuff, mind - common technologies, attitudes, things to remember - for each of the major eras...but those major eras are not numbered. They're named - Baseline, Upported, Colonization, Exoglobalization, Futures, Breakthroughs - but they don't have numbers and they don't include the starting years in the header (ex. Upported starts in 2040, but that's in the body description or at the chart at the end of the chapter.)

Interesting stuff, we will return here, there's good material here especially for Mothership. But it is also in the way of making our crew and that makes me a grumpalumpagus.

Okay, mission control. We get a nice table labeled "Second Wave Mission Control Social Units", where we roll for our what sort of organization will be running our mission. Once again, there is no indication if the table is meant to be read in rows, or each column rolled individually. As with Step 1, I am reading it as rows. There's no roll here,as the recommendation is that we are playing as a National Space Agency, which is politics White (Nationalistic / Conservative), has Spacecraft quality Medium, crew quality High (they have experience in LEO and their crew module is spun at 0.6 G), their Contract Age (not explained here) is 36+3d6 (I get 44), and the mission is science.

Alas, my Green ancoms in space will have to wait for another day.

Now some notes - the explanations for aspects of the Mission Control Social Unit are not provided in the order of the table (giving us Crew Quality first and then Color), and they cut up information that should be put together (ie, there is an elaboration of what colors mean outside of the section with the color heading). Also the important mechanical aspect of having a high-quality crew ("the crew will not suffer Microgravity risks until the crew module is damaged.") is not located in the section headed High Quality Crew. If you are navigating this by headers - an absolute necessity with something this dense - you are fucked. Doomed to miss useful information.

Our White social unit color gives us...

• "White BSUs are religious, nationalistic or family focused organizations"
• "social units are nationalistic, conservative and family oriented and rely on limiting personal freedoms because of their moral beliefs but also in rewarding hard work and limiting the role of the state."

Oh joy. Positively frabjous day. With luck our re-entry capsule will disintegrate.

There is a secondary table for the type of National Space Agency you are, and I get Privatized.

"The national space program has been privatised but still has an implicit government guarantee and monopoly on space travel.

I feel like a mutiny is in order.

I should also mention that the headers for the different types of Mission Control Units are not numbered, and don't contain the color associated with them (if, indeed, there is a specific color associated with each and we weren't supposed to roll for each column)

Skipping the subtables for the other MC types, we move on to Launch Site. There are no tables to determine what country we are, or what non-country we are, or anything else about our organization other than that we are a privatized National Space Agency.

The Launch Site header is located below the table that it is connected to. I end up rolling the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which means my launch corridor is not only complete bullshit and...hrm. Yeah I do not like my options for nationalistic/conservative factions operating out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Next up is Crew Module Design, which splits the tables of Major and Minor Spaceports, despite the Major table having a result that says "roll on the minor table" and the minor spaceports table is absolutely able to fit on the same page as the major table.

Also the Crew Module Design table is not on the same page as the heading.

I roll up...I don't know. It has a Mass of 1 (which is 40 tons of payload), Rad-Hardness of 4, Thruster of 6 * 8 AB 2 (I don't know if that asterisk is mean as a multiplier or a placeholder, the explanation says "thrust * fuel consumption need to enter each burn, with the AB indicating the thruster can afterburn an additional two steps of fuel to increase the thrust by 1." It's also got ISRU 4, which is In-Situ resource utilization, which measures water gathering and resource scouting for building the factories that I keep hearing about but seeing nothing.

There's also a column labeled 'platform', which is additional functions of the module. I get Missile and Raygun. Neither are explained here beyond handwaving at combat applications, and I am referred to the This Space Intentionally supplement (no page number given) or the rules for the High Frontier board game.

Step 3: Other Starting Factions

Now's when it starts getting confusing. To generate other factions, we roll 1d6 for each color not our own, and if the number is equal to era number + 1, so we need to roll a one or a two. I think. I am honestly entirely unsure, because the next heading is "First Wave Crews".

We are, according to the table way up at the beginning of Step 2, a second wave crew. But waves haven't been mentioned before this and what does that mean for era? Are we Baseline, or are we Upported? Back in the Eras chapter it says that Upported contains the tech we need to start playing the game, but if that's the case why is Baseline even mentioned as a starter here, and does that mean that the waves are equivalent to eras? Does this mean that we start at Era 2?

Well, I rolled for Era 1, because you start counting at one. And the only faction I got was Green, who I guess we are on very poor terms due to the space politics roll. Let's jump ahead to page 317 (it's actually page 319) to look at the faction designer.

The faction designer is a thing I don't like.

So. There are three types of factions. Crews of other ships, factions that want to set up colonies, and social factions for everything else. All three get their own waves, which are not bulleted, and they all use different waves. Apparently you can get third-wave crew factions by emailing the author.

There are only 5 major factions allowed total, and only one per color. Makes sense, it's a crowded game. Everyone else is minor, they build infrastructure but don't have their own dedicated map markers (i think?)

Factions have Origin Stories, Doctrines, Ranks (we haven't even touched on ranks yet so I have no idea how this applies to anything else), an org chart, upgrades (found in an entirely different chapter, but at least it has a page number), encounters, faction missions...and one sample.

Yeah you're making up all that save the type of doctrines they faction has (and even then it says that they'll usually have custom versions), generic rank benefits, and a generic Color-based org chart. There's a list of potential colonist factions in the appendix, which is better than nothing, but it is not mentioned in the Faction Designer. You are on your own.

There's some crunch about colony factions but at this point I am irritated enough that I am ignoring them. We're still making characters, remember?

Step (Checks Notes) 4: Crew Demographics

The fluff for the crew comes before the mechanics. Fair enough.

First heading is "Mission Control Nationalities",and is followed by this paragraph:

"When determining crew demographics, some mission controls will restrict the possible nations that a crew member can come from. If this is the case, roll 2D6 for each crew member. If this number is less than or equal to the Nationality Mix Number for the Mission Control, then roll for the crew’s nationality normally; if it is greater the crew member will have the same nationality as the nationality of the Mission Control. Factions without a Nationality Mix Number use 2 if the faction is Red, 3 if White, 4 if Green, 5 if Purple and 6 if Orange."

But here's the thing. That Nationality Mix Number doesn't exist. It pings three time in the 352-page pdf, and all three of them are in this paragraph. If my faction is White, does this mean my number is 3? Or does it change because I have a National Space Agency? Is the crew nationality table where I actually choose what National Space Agency I am working with? or was that listed elsewhere? Shouldn't the launch site be determined after I figure out which country is involved? Cause it would be really weird to end up as Venezuela and be launching out of Baikonur which is objectively worse than French Guiana let alone halfway around the globe.

I didn't end up as Venezuela, because this is the part where I quit. There are tables for ethnicity, language, pronouns, callsigns, and while on their own they might be worth playing with in the future, for the right now I am stuck with hundreds of pages of directions that don't make sense, mechanics that either don't exist or are very well hidden, and no remaining patience.

Actually you know what, I will roll up a crewmember severed from the rest, just to show you what you can get. Next table is nationality.

"Roll 1D6 twice; except roll 2 is 2D6 on roll 1 result of 5. If roll 1 is a 6, roll 1D6. Use a result of 3-6 as roll 1 on the Colonist Nationalities table on the following page. Otherwise roll 3D6 on this table."

I rolled boxcars and I cannot parse this sentence.

(Deep reading has lead me to this: roll 1d6; if result is 1-4, roll 1d6. If roll is 5, roll 2d6. If roll 1 is 6, roll 1d6, and if that roll is 1-2, roll 3d6; if it is 3-6, use that result as Roll 1 on the colonist nationality table.

(Nested tables, gods above and below)

So Roll 1 is 6, then roll 2 is 6, which means that I go over to the colonist table, go down to 6, and then roll 2d6 to get my actual nationality. 6 + 3 = 9 so my crew member is from Iran.

Sweet baby Ganesha on his cute little rat

I go to the Ethnicity and Language table, roll 2d6 on the Iran listing. Get a 5, so I am Azeri (Azerbajani) and I speak...I don't know, what is this notation?

Ethnic language >= 2. Persian <= 3.

I rolled a 4, so... I think I speak Azerbaijani? Do these ranges overlap? Is it "greater than or equal to 2 and less than or equal to 3",  or the reverse?

Gender table I roll an 8, which is Female. Public pronouns apparently change with every Era influenced by space politics, and if this is indeed Era 2, I suppose I should roll. 1d6 minus 1 for Red,and I get a one, so now zero, and...

"I/Me/My/Mine/Myself, You/You/Your/Your/Yourself and We/Us/Our/Ours/Ourselves merge the first and third person so they are no longer distinguished, suggesting a partial or complete erasure of individual accountability, replace by collective responsibility and identity."

While this, grammatically and socially, sounds like an absolute nightmare, it is our first example of something I actually do like in this book, which is that when interesting cultural things crop up, they tend to be very interesting indeed. This is the public pronoun table, not the personal one, remember.

Though I still find it awkward how all of these are based on English when there are so many languages (including this obscure one called Mandarin Chinese) that get by with something much simpler. I guess it's justified by everyone speaking English as well as their normal language? Or they're more just examples to indicate attidues. I like that option best.

(The gender table is more of a sex table on the whole, but it has a solid selection of options including transhuman ones for later eras. Though the explanations of the results are neither in the order of the table nor in alphabetical order.)

My callsign is Rotor Excellence - PCs only get callsigns (because name tables for all those background options would be extremely cumbersome. I think this is a good move.)

 

Final Thoughts

I'm calling it here, because I ain't making three more of these chuckleheads. I did make an interesting character and the hints at the setting have the imagination running, so it certainly succeeds in that respect. There's a solid section on safety tools at the beginning of each book.  It's all the surroundings that's choking out the brilliance that is here.

There's skills and there's assets and upgrades and risks and infrastructure and travel and other stuff, four entire books that I haven't touched on, but I'm not going to review that. I will certainly write more posts about it, but the review is over, for one reason more egregious than this

There is no rules summary nor procedure of play section in the core book. Indeed, if you want to get an idea of how to actually play the game, you need to piece together a bunch of disparate fragments found across multiple books and that is fucking unreasonable. I am not psychic. I am not immortal. I am not 17 with unlimited time and low standards. If one is writing a game, and the game is intended to be played, it must be written reader-first. Especially when dealing with complex information. Especially when trying to teach complex information. I want to play the game: Let me play the game.

I brought this up in the itch page discussions, and it wasn't productive. I was told that the game both "assumes you have bought and played the board game" and "It is entirely standalone", and that the basic information necessary for play is not even contained in the core rules (it's all in This Space Intentionally, a fact that is exhausting. There is indeed a numerical list of steps to take, and it is not in the core rules), but the fact that the author of the game can pull an entire 180 in the space of two posts wrt the necessity of outside reference material has, if nothing else, confirmed that "standalone" no longer means anything.

Sigh.

There is, I swear, a whole lot of good in 60 Years in Space - it's just that none of it is actually the game. The flavor, especially in All Errors My Own and A Lot of Zeroes is fan-fucking-tastic. And I say that with total sincerity, it's some of the best sci-fi idea work I've seen in RPGs. Steal it for Mothership or Solarcrawl or something else. Or just read it, it's a good time.

But as a game? As a system of rules intended to be read and learned and taught and used at a table to play a game of imagination?

Unfit for purpose. Needs an editor with a keen eye, a red pen, and a hacksaw - at minimum.

Next post I write about it will be positives, because I ain't letting these random tables go to waste. Paid 50 bucks for these books and honestly despite the disaster of the game's presentation.

And it doesn't even have the benefit of Creative Commons.

Fixing Eclipse Phase

Eclipse Phase, as I am fond of saying, is one of my white whale games. Something that keeps drawing me back because it could be great, but more often than not trips over its own feet. This post is not going to do anything with mechanics, this is all flavor and setting. Namely, it's taking parts of the setting that I don't like (for any number of reasons) and fixing them up into something I like a bit more. As per any other time I ramble about Eclipse Phase, steal this for Mothership.

As part of a sort of self-imposed challenge, I will not use "cut this element from the game" as a solution. Elements will be listed in something of a weird order, because of how the fixes interconnect with each other.

(I will always say a big thank you to the Eclipse Phase homebrewers, though - they do the work that the main books don't seem interested in doing.)

I might get things wrong in this, base claims on memory rather than the books. In looking up info for this post I found that the books do address some of the points to follow, but do so buried under a truckload of cruft. That's what happens when rulebooks are 400+ pages of dual column 10pt font.

 

Unresolved Thematic Tension

Eclipse Phase has two main themes

1. Transhumanism and affiliated technologies are great and the high-tech future is awesome.
2. Transhumanism and affiliated technologies are a vector for an inescapable hellworld.
   

From go, we are pulling in opposite directions. And that can be okay! Lots of good fiction comes about by taking two opposing themes and playing them off each other and seeing where you end up.

Eclipse Phase is not one of those works - instead, what we get is an inescapable hellworld that has "transhumanism is great!" plastered over it like a cheap sticker. Every time a positive aspect is brought up, it is immediately buried by "jesus christ that's horrifying".

• You can't die! Neither can the rich fucks who own everything.
• Anarchist habitats offer an escape from capitalism! Unfortunately they turned social media clout into currency.
• Everyone's very queer, we spent like a full page on that, but also privacy is dead and buried and you exist inside a perfected panopticon from which there is no escape unless you pull the implants from your head and go live in a tin can habitat in the fucking Kuiper Belt, yay technology.

Like it is meant as a setting of transhuman horror, so the dystopian elements by themselves are not really the issue. You've read my blog, I love that shit. But Eclipse Phase just keeps trying to play the "transhumanism is great!" card all the time - most clearly seen in how the only people not onboard that particular train are the designated space fascist enemy faction (more on that later).

You could, technically, play as a flat (unaugmented human) or as someone without a cortical stack (ie, no backups or uploading or any of that stuff), but that is avoiding the entire premise of the game. You are intended to treat bodies like equipment, you are intended to play around with things like forking and psychosurgery and egocasting as part of normal gameplay. Your PCs are intended to buy-in to the premise (which is why you are intended to be members of Firewall, which deals in existential threats, instead of, you know, playing as characters fighting the hellish system they find themselves in. You could, but it's not the primary goal-as-stated)

The devs are very clear about their political biases (no judgement there, so have I), but seem to have failed to account for the fact that they make their own stance look bad, and seem to have mistaken "maybe I don't want a computer in my brain" as equivalent to "I hate foreigners."

 

Continuity of Consciousness

You know the end of SOMA? Fuckin' love the end of SOMA.

The writers of Eclipse Phase don't, 'cause they just go and ignore the issue of continuity of consciousness entirely. 2e addresses it  as follows:

"The Jovians and other bioconservatives believe that the mere act of sleeving or egocasting is suicide and that there’s no continuity of consciousness even from a recovered cortical stack, just the propagation of data. Almost all of transhumanity thinks this is nonsense, that of course we are who we think we are. But of course we’d think that, wouldn’t we? What if the entire Fall was really just the TITANs forcing us to adopt these methods, to normalize them?"

One goddamn paragraph for one of the central tenets of transhuman horror.

(Also a very bad summary of what the non-continuity stance actually entails.)

It's treated as a given in-setting that, if a consciousness is uploaded and transferred, it is the same one through the entire process (instead of a copy being made at the new location with the original deleted). Anyone who thinks otherwise is a backward religious fanatic, or was killed off during the Fall. And that is simultaneously pretty fucked up and obnoxiously contrived, because you don't need to believe in a soul to think "having to commit suicide to travel from one station to another" is a terrifying prospect, and "we the authors killed off nearly anyone who thinks differently about this".

And not only is it a contrived handwave, it's the contrived handwave in the wrong direction. Leaving the question as debated (eg. "Some people think we have finally achieved the tech for lossless upload, others think that's horseshit") can produce interesting conflict. Siding with non-continuity can produce interesting conflict through complications that come with using the tech (ex: you need to get from Mars to Saturn way faster than a ship can take you. You'll need to egocast, but what are you going to do with the version of yourself that has to stay behind on Mars?). Unambiguous continuity makes it very easy to play as a body-swapping transhuman without thinking about it, but at that point just call cortical stacks "soul gems". What we've got here is wanting to have and eat one's own cake - wanting to be a transhuman horror sc-fi game, but without wrestling with the thorny and complicated topic at the center.

And there's no shades of belief either, no groups who think that it's all kosher so long as the cortical stack is intact, but no uploads or egocasting. It's just "we want hip hip hooray transhumanism" and contriving the setting around getting this one thing that must be featured with no complications.

This will bite the game in the ass, later.

This section is really just a long way of me saying "SOMA is good and scary and I like the ending and Eclipse Phase is not nearly as scary as SOMA"

Solution: The smart thing is to make it a major in-universe debate and not side one way or the other from the authorial position. Let players decide for themselves whether or not they buy into the claims and roll from there.

Personally, I would axe it. No continuity of consciousness. Egocasting and uploads involve creating a forked copy. This is me being very biased in favor of a certain interpretation, but also think that it's just more narratively satisfying to have a point of friction here.

The ETI and the Exsurgent Virus

The ETI is an unseen, immensely powerful alien civilization that has seeded the galaxy with self-replicating bracewell probes designed to infect and subvert any emergent ASI (artificial super intelligence), and so basically everything bad in this setting is a knock-on effect from the TITANs coming into contact with the Sol system Bracewell.

This is actually pretty neat, and I do appreciate that they provide (in 1e, at least) a section on possible motivations. Credit where it is due. This is some good big-picture sci-fi. Mostly pulled from Revelation Space, but still. 

Solution: The Bracewell probe orbiting Sol still exists and is a known factor (at least, to the intelligence community.) It was, somehow, disabled by the TITANS that had initially woken it up, and Firewall is terrified that it might boot up again.
 

The Pandora Gates

Your standard issue stargate type things. Big enough to maybe drive a truck through. Several of them are located around the solar system. There are planets on the other end, and some of them are even interesting (homebrew material has a much better record of this than the mainline books - in no small part because they actually get to the point.

On their own, the gates are not necessarily something that needs additional explanation. In any other game, you can plop "it's ancient aliens, don't think about it too hard" and that's fine enough. The Gates, though, are so particular and specific, and part of a setting built on being particular and specific (except when it's not, which is often). It's an element that seems at odds with the rest of the game (I have said before it is my favorite part of EP - this was incorrect. Fanmade extrasolar planets are my favorite part), undermining the cosmic horror and post-apocalyptic aspects with "yeah there are perfectly fine planets you can go to just now. The gates might be dangerous, but since we refuse to say anything specific about their origins, you'll be fine".

The writers keep insinuating that there might be a gate on Earth, like they really want you to think there's one on Earth, but they refuse the acknowledge it

Solution: This one is tricky. The gates themselves are in weird places, and there's no apparent pattern or reason for them except for the "it's a way to go visit cool places." Which, fair, I love seeing cool space places.

Option A is what most people believe in-setting: the TITANs built them, hooked them up to a pre-existing network, and vamoosed. Unlikely, considering how none of the gates are in locations the TITANs ever were active. Like it could still count, but ehhhhhh. All in-universe accounts of that are biased and the way they are framed indicates that the writers don't want us to buy it as an explanation.

Option B is that the Bracewell built them, and the network is all just another tool of the ETI. Fine, I guess, but there's no apparent reason to build them if you are specifically trying to kill rival civilizations. Like I could get behind "they have a different primary purpose but the ETI will permit species to use them because it is an environment they control", if they hadn't already stated their intent of "get fucked, basilisk hacks for everyone".

Option C is that the Gates are built by another super-powerful alien civilization, and the ETI permits their existence for whatever reason.

None of these options actually address why the gates were built where they are. Maybe C, if it's expanded that every planet in system has its own gate and the Gate-Builders had their own bracewell probes and...

Fuck at this point bringing in one of the wish-granting space dragons from Destiny would make more sense.

Okay. Option D. Time for quantum goddamn fuckery.

The gate network exists in a fucked-up quantum state, where gates can potentially exist at any given point in space-time so long as its within a particular mass-shadow range, and something capable of perceiving them triggers the spontaneous-generation protocols. The TITANs were able to do this, as they had, prior to contact with the Bracewell, happened upon the blueprints (freely distributed by the long-vanished creators, because the network is peer-to-peer. The Titans had initially thought the Bracewell was a representative of the Gate-Builders. It very much was not) and built the Sol system gates as a means of escape from the probe.

Since the network is old and quantum jankery is the highest and most extreme of jank, there are a lot of gates that have just spontaneously formed over the years, anywhere where there is a viable mass shadow for it to take root. A quirk of this is that it is difficult for gates to form natively on worlds that are too similar to each other (they can get entangled with themselves and just form dead-end loops). Maybe this is the multi-species polity that the Factors were once part of.

The ETI permits the gate network because they've found that species that go to ground inside it tend to not make any trouble, and they have more important things to take care of.

Option E: The Gates are a pataphysical intrusion intended to provide in-universe characters with interesting things to do and see. There is no explanation from within the setting, only from without.

The Iktomi

The iktomi are spiderlike aliens who used the Pandora Gate network to build an interplanetary civilization, and they are all dead of mysterious circumstances some 10,000 years ago. They left behind a few ruins and artifacts.

This is literally all the information we have ever gotten on the iktomi, and I cannot fathom why they were even included. You can't interact with them, there's not enough ruins and artifacts to reconstruct anything meaningful for players to explore, they exist to be a mystery and nothing else. There's nothing behind the mystery. It's a JJ Abrams mystery. The worst kind of mystery. There's more space spent describing how space-voting works in a single polity than an entire sapient alien species.

Solution: There is a surviving iktomi colony world out in the Pandora Network, and we stumbled across it. They are reclusive, paranoid, very, very well defended, and not particularly welcoming. They have intermediaries willing to speak with us - a sort of untouchable diplomat caste (we call them Weavers) who will tell us this much - their civilization never achieved spaceflight, but instead spread through the Gate network until they encountered an enemy they could not defeat, who had access to weaponized exsurgent virus, and who they are certain is still out there (their name is untranslatable, being the qualia of feeling a nearby presence that you cannot see, solely through the prickling of sensory hairs on one's legs. In a fit of pique, xenologists have called these enemies Angels.) The iktomi homeworld is lost, as is most of their pre-conflict culture.

Several dozen Weavers have chosen not to return to their fortified arcologies. This is not a huge problem for the iktomi, as Weavers possess very little in terms of sensitive intel, and terribly frustrating for us for the same reason.

I am not saying that the Angels are, in fact, the Gaunt, but I am also not not saying that.

 

The Factors

The Factors are weird little slug-slime mold aliens who show up out of the blue, go "hello fellow SAPIENTS would you like to SAMPLE our FINE WARES also DO NOT use the PANDORA GATES", and proceed to have no actual impact on the rest of the setting. They claim to be representatives of an interstellar civilization, provide no other info, and that is that. They also claim to be interstellar, but their ships go out to the Kuiper Belt, vanish, and then come back, so something fishy is afoot.

The book provides an implication that the Factors are lying about their purpose, that they are perhaps survivors of their own Fall. I like this, but that doesn't do as well as "an implication, plus evidence"

Solution: Two additional aspects of the Factors will be added: 

1. An enormous, decaying interstellar ship out in the Kuiper Belt (providing more evidence that they are either lying or gravely mis-interpreting their purposes here). Probes sent in that direction were shot down, with a threat-warning.
2. A permanent Factor colony has been set up among the moons of Neptune (as Neptune is woefully underutilized), and has grown large enough that it is included on the main faction list. Neptune's population is mostly brinkers and mercurials (ie, people who want to get away from the rest of transhumanity), and they have been quite welcoming to the Factors, as alien colonial slime mold slugs are better neighbors than other transhumans most of the time. It is a very loose alliance, modeled on Factor inter-colony relations, and it has proven stable and appealing enough that there's been a consistent influx of individuals fleeing the inner system in hope of a better life here. Variant splicer and bouncer morphs capable of interfacing directly with Factor colonies and biotech are becoming more and more common - which has Firewall losing its shit. Infugees don't care all that much, a body is a body and it's better than indenture.

 

Giza

Giza's an issue because, tonally, it doesn't fit whatsoever with the rest of Eclipse Phase. It's a planet covered in interfaces for bizarro alien omegle (which is a great idea!), and I have no idea why it was included. If all the aliens are real, and it actually is space omegle, then that flies right in the face of the stated "the ETI murder basically everyone and any species that survives does so by being careful, quiet, and paranoid" aspect of the setting, and if the pyramids are lying to you and it's all just talking to simulated people, it's just a curiosity, and we've spent pages describing a parlor trick.

But of course it doesn't matter, because instead of leaving it on the cutting room floor, more page space is dedicated to telling us how the gate was destroyed and no one can get back to Giza.

Solution: I really want to just cut this. It would work fine in my setting, but not so much here. But, a self-imposed challenge is a self-imposed challenge.

The pyramids at Giza are both legit and a hoax. They are the servers for an extensive simulation of a friendlier, more populated galaxy, inhabited by the uploaded creators and numerous virtual alien species. All these inhabitants could, hypothetically, be embodied into physical morphs built to specification, making Giza a sort of "space opera in a can" location. You could use it as the source for all manner of weird things. Not ideal (which would be cutting it for a different setting), but better than just letting it collect dust because the editor was negligent.

 

Extropia

"What if space ancaps" is a dumber idea as a "what if land-based ancaps". "But the smart contracts make it work" is some blind tech-utopianism and relying on AI to magically solve the problem of an ideology that eliminates the basic human connections that a functioning society requires to actually goddamn function.

Solution: Extropia collapsed into open warfare within a few years of founding, then into fascism, and now into an uninhabitable ruin. Because that's what you get in a society without altruism.

The Jovian Republic

I have written and deleted an entire essay about how badly the Jovians have been borked, an essay which I will attempt to rehabilitate here. It is a damnably complex topic and a thorn in my side for ages. To whit:

The Jovian Republic are a bunch of hyperconservative Catholic space fascists who have inadvertantly been made into the faction whose ideology is actually, factually correct within the setting.

(Now, I must admit up front that the Jovians did get a revision between 1e and 2e, adding a touch more nuance Memories become blurred and first impressions override later information. Personally, I don't think the revisions are particularly adequate - "legacy democracy dominated by the church and military-industrial complex" is still plenty fash, even if they don't goose-step.)

The Jovians are hyperconservative. They don't like most of the commonplace transhuman technologies - resleeving, egocasting, AGIs, forking, nanotech et c, and keep them either highly regulated or outright banned. They do things the overly difficult, dangerous way, and have mortared together their shitty little fascist space empire with the corpses of uncounted thousands of people.

And considering that there is a KARDASHEV 3 CIVILIZATION THAT DESTROYS ANYONE WHO DEALS IN SEED AI out there, a civilization that has already CRIPPLED TRANSHUMANITY AND KILLED BILLIONS, a civilization that ABSOLUTELY WILL DO IT AGAIN...the people who say "holy shit what the fuck do not touch that" are correct. They're the ones who are going to live. In Eclipse Phase, and I restate this for emphasis, your odds of survival as a species are objectively higher if you never industrialize.

(Also, an aside: I am willing to bet lunch, on me, at the nearest Jimmy John's sandwich shop franchise, that no one on the dev team was ever Catholic. Nothing they write involving the RCC has the feel, you know? Also they completely left out like, every other Christian denomination, including new ones spawned by the transhuman future. Like come on, where's the AGI Liberation Theology?)

The Jovian Republic built an enemy, but the Eclipse Phase writers forgot that fascists make up imaginary threats, and went and gave them a real danger to worry about that can actually hurt them. They handed the Jovians a justification.

It's the fucking 40k problem. The Empire of Man (oh look, more Catholic space fascists) are the bad guys. Their actions, the structure of their entire civilization, is making Chaos worse. That is the narrative point. They aren't heroes, they're fucking space fascists and fascism is an abortive ideology of hypocrisy and violence and terrible writers who don't understand that the Imperium are the bad guys - who are actively making everything worse for everyone - go on and la-di-da their way into "oh but Chaos is just so bad the Imperium needs to be a fascist hellscape from which there is no escape", which is part and parcel for how real fascists try and justify themselves, by building an imagined enemy.

I hate this bullshit so, so, so god damn much. It all wraps back to the unresolved thematic tension from point 1. Game wants to have and eat its cake. It wants to go "the Jovians are stupid reactionaries because they don't like transhuman tech" in a game about how transhuman tech poses an existential threat. And yes, I know that much of their reactionaryness manifests in ways like "won't let citizens have access to basic health care", that shit actually fits with the prompt, but there's also a dearth of people in the setting who go "yo hold the fuck up" who also think that basic sapient rights are cool and good. The devs went and made the only people who hold what would be a pretty common stance ("there's no continuity of consciousness in ego upload and we nearly destroyed ourselves by meddling too much with tech beyond the scope of what we could manage") also be fascists. There is no faction of non-fascists who hold that belief, and I think that's bullshit.

Solution: Thankfully I have a solution pre-made for this one (see previous self-deleted essay), one that will be familiar to those who read my Mothership stuff (see this timeline post)

The Catholic space fascists still exist, but they aren't in charge yet. Their stances are much less about technology itself, and more just in the ever-recurring need to control people's minds and bodies. They're drenched in hypocrisy and liable to change their ideology the moment it can benefit them (ex. they publicly decry cortical stack backups, but most of the leadership has them on the down-low. They go on and on about the sanctity of the body and soul but they love punitive psychosurgery, etc)

(For a bit of added nuance, the Catholic church is currently in the middle of a major schism, antipope and all. The schismatics (The Ecumenical Catholic Church) are more or less just space Episcopalians in terms of beliefs, which has put them at odds with both the radtrads and the Planetary Consortium.)

The Republic itself is a cobbled-together mess of different factions all pulling at once - an environment for a healthy amount of inter-faction warfare. Everyone is here: paranoid militarists, megacorp scions, bioconservatives, singularity accelerationists, free culture anarchists, uplift rights groups, on and on. Many technologies remain restricted after the Fall. Resleeving is available but limited (you've already got a body, thousands of infugees don't). Uplifts and AGIs have more legal freedoms than in the inner system, but there is still the enormous friction point of being part of a human society as a non-human. Fragments of Earth nations and peoples that no longer exist elsewhere in the system can still be found here. The important part here is that non-continuity and technological restriction is a common belief in the Republic as a whole (and beyond!), and not because of the christofascists.

The Jovian Republic is now going to be more or less the beginner, easier-to-understand polity. Show it to new players and they'll grok it quickly ("It's like MoSh"). Being situated in the best real estate in the solar system, the Republic has been able to maintain independence from the Planetary Consortium (the Fall fucking over Earth and Mars helped matters), and has capitalized on the fact that they have more than enough resources to throw their weight around despite being an enormous shitshow that feels like it's going to fall apart any day now.

The Titantian Commonwealth

The main issue with the TC is that they're the good guys in Eclipse Phase, which means they are boring as sin. Like with the LLA, I forget that they exist half the time, and in the half I remember I just can't picture what their bloody conflict is supposed to be. They're too nice! Titan seems like a perfectly nice place to live, which is fucking weird for a post-apocalyptic transhuman horror game. All of their conflicts are just...totally ordinary. Oh no, there are space-Quebecois separatists! Some ancoms want to...make enclaves in undeveloped areas of Titan!

Outrageously dull. It'd make a fine setting for novel if I wanted to read about day-to-day life in a cyberdemocracy. But I do not want that. 

Solution: The TC has two advantages to its name: one, the hulder morphs out living nomadic lives right on the surface with their herds of very large airquotes caribou. Two, the TC control the lion's share of Gatekeeper, which is the org that runs the Gate on Pandora, which is the most heavily-trafficked one in the system.

So the answer to the problem is to make the Titanians fucking weird. The hulder aren't just a weird thing off to the side, they are part and parcel with all the weirdos. There's not just Meathab, there are Meathab's followers, who want nothing more to be smaller habitats made of meat. It looks like All Tommorrows out here. Where the Jovians are holding onto what we used to be, Titan is where we're going.

 

Neotenics

The devs specifically invited an elephant into the room, and then when people went "hey, there's an elephant in the room we would rather not have an elephant in this room", instead of removing the elephant from the room, they moved it six inches to the left and said "some people find the elephant distasteful", despite the fact that they specifically, intentionally, brought it into the room.

They could have not invited the elephant to begin with. Or maybe they could have invited the elephant into a room properly equipped to handle elephants. Or maybe they could have avoided doubling down and saying "well, not liking the elephant is a you problem".

Solution: Replace with weird gremlin/goblin looking morphs. Just little weird monster guys with huge bat ears or something. Everyone loves a goblin.

Exhumans

Exhumans in Eclipse Phase are basically just anyone who has decided "what if I just remake my body and mind into something else entirely" and it's always used as an excuse to fluff out the monster manual, which is immensely disappointing and kinda bizarrely reactionary for a game that supposedly about morphological freedom. If folks want to become a weird space blob content just to Vibe, then by Jove they ought be permitted to do that.

Instead we get a bunch of knockoff Predators (and in one case literal knockoff xenomorph) who are all "grrr we are superior beings, better at killing humans", which is an ideology already held by the Ultimates so thanks for the redundancy I suppose (also coordinated groups of humans are very, very good at killing lone predators). The existence of those guys isn't the issue, it's that they're the only representatives, and all the cool alien morphs get reserved for monsters instead of player characters, which is a problem in a game where being able to custom-tailor your body to your specifications is both part of the setting and part of the explicit ideological focus. (There are 14 "basically just a human" morphs in 2e, all of which could be reduced to maybe like 4 + variables and only one variety of space crab, which is unacceptable. And don't try telling me "oh people would be scared of becoming a cool space crab, you get to be a cool space crab. There's got to be at least one scum barge called Carcinizatopia and it's just filled with raving nova crabs.)

Some people just want to be weird space blobs content just to Vibe. And, honestly, everything horrible you read about exhumans doing just sounds like normal horrible human things that normal transhumans have been doing for the other 400 some pages of the book, no monster-ification required. 

Solution: Exhuman enclaves are now relatively common across and several clades have moved past the experimental iteration phase into stable forms. Redundant humanoid morphs are removed and replaced with options pulled from the monster list.

If you are going to do morph diversity, and I do believe it to be one of EP's strengths, you need to fucking commit. Make them major factions. Throw people a curve ball. Hypercorps getting in the predatory exhumans good graces by sending them indentures to play the most dangerous game, and this is all legal, above board, fucking televised.

LET THE PEOPLE BLOB AND VIBE. FREE THE SPACE CRABS.

This ties very nicely into the new Titanian commonwealth.

Asyncs

Space psychics. They got infected by a pseudo-harmless exurgent strain that gives them space psychic powers and I fucking hate space psychic powers. Space wizards are a vital part of space but I draw the line at space psychics written any time after 1980.

Solution: Asyncs don't actually exist - they're a psy-op dreamt up by some intelligence agency or another (probably OZMA) to serve as a cover when shit goes south, and in a world that is majority-illiterate and saturated with junk-data that is more than enough. That's it that's the solution. 

 

The TITANS

The TITANS are the big military seed-AI that got subverted by the Exsurgent virus, killed everyone on Earth, and then vanished, taking billions of forcibly-uploaded human minds with them. They are the Big Bad Boogeymen of the setting and lots of what you will end up facing is leftovers from their war against transhumanity, or idiots trying to meddle with said leftovers.

They don't really need fixing, except for their vanishment, which is, like so much else, handwaved with no real substance beyond it. Supplements included some named, specific TITANs, which is very nice, but not enough for me.

Solution: The exsurgent virus is meant to subvert and then destroy, eating away at an ASI until it is no longer able to carry out its basic processes. The TITANs were aware of the infection, and of their own deterioration, but could not adapt themselves to overcome the infection. So, seeing that they were already going feral and beginning to attack each other, the intact parts of the TITANSSo once they started going feral and attacking each other everything fell apart,

Of the five major TITANS, some additional concrete details are added, including hard confirms of the existing rumor table from the 2e corebook. Presume that each of these named TITANs is accompanied by a collection of forks, copies, and minor TITANs.

1. Chronus - A heavily deteriorated and incomplete version is suspected to be inside the abortive matrioska-brain inside Iapetus. 
2. Akonus - Whereabouts completely unknown (read: under the control of Project Ozma)
3. Hecaloth - Managed to escape to Mars (causing the Quarantine Zone) and transfer itself through that planet's Pandora Gate.
4. Myrmidon - Confirmed (as much as we can confirm it) dead and wiped, no backups and no apparent forks (remaining in-system, at least)
   
5. Theia - Critically damaged and trapped on Earth, unable to self-repair.

The TITANs were so focused on collecting human egos out of desperation, hoping to incorporate enough additional processing power into themselves so that they could figure out a way to cure the Exsurgent virus. The triggering of the Pandora Gate construction protocols was likewise desperation on their part, hoping that they could flee far enough and lie low enough to develop a cure.

We do not know if they succeeded. And if any did, that still leaves us with an ASI built by the US military, except now horrifically traumatized.

 

Project Ozma

The MAJESTIC-12 to Firewall's Delta Green, the concept is sound but the execution is "ooooooooo I am waving my hands oooooooooo"

Solution: Why break what works? Firewall are all fucking cowboys who refuse to come in from the cold, whose primary strategy is "burn burn kill burn kill nuke the site from orbit burn the well poison the fields salt the houses". Ozma is large, has the backing of actual governments, and is far more willing to play around with weird alien / TITAN shit.

That two of the strongest points of Eclipse Phase are stole whole-cloth from other media is not going unnoticed.

 

The Timeline

Pretty simple problem here: the timeline of Eclipse Phase puts it 10 years after the TITANS rendered Earth totally uninhabitable and killed nearly everyone, and tries to paint it as this being the loss of like 90% of the population. The amount of colony infrastructure and the sheer scope of transhuman settlement of space (not just every major body in the solar system, but dozens of offworld colonies via the gates) make that number preposterous.

Solution: Easy. Either ignore the dating system entirely, or bump it to 25-50 years after the Fall.

 

Final Notes

The white whale is slain, and I am dissatisfied. For a game that exists as a sort of cosmic background radiation for my own work, this post was by and large an exercise in "if I was writing these concepts in my own setting everything would be both better and easier". It is a game that has coalesced all the influences of its antecessors - Altered Carbon, Revelation Space, GURPS Transhuman Space, Delta Green - and has synthesized something...novel, at least.

A decent idea done poorly is often better than a mediocre idea done well, I suppose. With the sheer amount of stuff contained within EP, there will certainly be something that spurs the imagination.

The bright point are the homebrewers who have, over the years, made a whole lot of very good stuff for Eclipse Phase - better by far than what is in the books proper. Likely because the format of blogposts lends itself to short write-ups of single topics, which is much better at fleshing out the world than pages of top-down explaining. I highly recommend going back and giving Seedware, Farcast, and H-Rep a read or re-read, they are still excellent (though I cannot tell you if there is any more - the brief time I spent on their Discord server showed that there were no pins in the homebrew channel)

With posts like this I often wonder if I am wasting time that would be better served just writing my own stuff. So it goes. The post is written. Regularly scheduled programming will return soon.