[[toc]] All the clever tactics and maxed-out skills in the world won’t mean anything if the characters they’re attached to remain no more than numbers on a sheet. For many, roleplaying a character’s shifting personality and goals is the most appealing aspect of any RPG. While deciding how a character should act in any situation is the sole responsibility of the player, there are a number of complexities unique to Eclipse Phase that can challenge the imagination of even the most experienced roleplayer. What follows is advice for making some of the more abstract, challenging concepts in the game feel immediate and real at the table.
==Handling Death and Resleeving== 
There’s a reason the majority of transhumanity are clanking around in indentured synthmorphs: resleeving is prohibitively expensive. This can be problematic for the Firewall agent on the go, especially if the previous mission was taxing on their resources. A case morph might be the perfect choice in some instances, but when the fate of the universe hinges on defeating a TITAN, nobody wants their gun arm to fall off when the Lemon trait kicks in. If unveiling the Factor conspiracy requires meeting face-to-face with a hyperelite, its doubtful the bodyguards are going to let your spare morph scuttle inside to hobnob with the glitterati. To ensure characters can come out the other side of a resleeve with the minimum requirements to keep the story moving, the gamemaster might have to be ﬂexible. Consider letting players sell or rent morphs they have to farcast out of to cover the cost of resleeving. Networking skills and reputation might even be used to broker a morph exchange program where some lucky transhuman gets a free vacation in exchange for letting their friend swap bodies for a few weeks. Ultimately, if the complexities of resleeving are bogging down the game, Firewall can solve the problem. They have resources all over the system, and perhaps this operation is of such importance that they footed the bill for clones and matching equipment. RPGs are meant to be fun; Eclipse Phase should only be about accounting until accounting is no longer fun. Death only complicates matters. The gamemaster has to keep track of reputation, favors, NPC relationships, Rez points spent, in-game time, forks, and backup save points for the entire group. Add in the rules and the actual plot, and they have a dizzying amount of information to keep track of per session. How many skill points were lost in reverting to backup? What revelations about the plot were lost when that stack went unrecovered? The IRL logistics of getting a character sleeved and working again can be more a deterrent against death than in-character agony and insanity.
Games will go much, much faster if the players can be trusted to keep track of their own characters. If you can keep notes on your character’s credits, reputation, favors, Rez points, and plot revelations, it will free up the gamemaster to craft a more engaging and exciting experience. Granted, this provides an opportunity for players to cheat, but why would you play an RPG if you value winning above all else? There are better ways to fulﬁll that need. The game is about telling an unpredictable, collaborative story, and anything you can do to keep the poor gamemaster’s brain from overheating will help improve that story’s quality.
===Roleplaying Death and Resleeving=== 
Death was the one indefatigable certainty for the majority of human history. Just because transhumanity solved the problem doesn’t mean that the act of resleeving in any way feels natural. Millennia of ingrained biological instincts argue against the very concept, and while transhumans can overcome this fear, it should never be portrayed as easy.
Some players, once acclimated to Eclipse Phase, tend to change morphs with about as much distress as pairs of pants. While the morph selection in the game is meant to highlight the use of bodies as tools, it should be noted that continuity loss inﬂicts a minimum of 1d10 ÷ 2 SV automatically, sometimes much more. The WIL x 3 Test is just to see whether stress increases or decreases from there. In terms of mechanics and narrative, inhabiting a new body almost always feels fundamentally different if not wrong. Glossing over this fact in play can deny your character one of the richest, most thought-provoking conﬂicts in the setting.
The Integration Test comes first. Failing this SOM x 3 Test can inﬂict –30 penalties on every action for a matter of days or weeks, so this is a good place to spend Moxie. Whenever possible, players should also try to get modiﬁers in their favor by arranging to use cloned or familiar brands of morph or consider getting the Adaptability trait. Even in the event of success, a number of roleplaying opportunities arise from this single test and can help ﬂavor entire scenarios. Failure and the resulting negative modiﬁer can give characters opportunities for comic relief. Perhaps the uplift octopus tries to slide underneath a crate for cover before remembering that splicers aren’t invertebrates. Perhaps a critical failure causes the character to dress like their old morph in a desperate attempt to get things feeling right, despite the fact that novacrabs weren’t exactly built for tube tops. Successes provide just as much narrative fuel. What does it mean for the bioconservative’s motivations when a critical success makes that neo-avian morph feel so good? Can the synthmorph rights advocate stay true to the cause after feeling the sweet sensations of ﬂesh for the ﬁrst time in years? Whatever the result, don’t forget the mechanical consequences are just another way to advance your character’s story.
The Alienation Test is the ﬁrst stressful test in the resleeving process. Though physicality is an element of the test, the INT x 3 roll and potential stress indicates that it is largely an emotional struggle. Roleplaying a character’s Alienation Test means getting down into the speciﬁcs of why the test succeeded or failed. Are the morph’s hormones different because of sex or species? Are the sensations dulled in a pod or synthmorph model, or is it the social stigma that is most stressful? Remember to use aptitude changes provided by the bonuses/penalties of a particular morph for story as well as mechanics. A successful test might easily be blamed on the new morph’s COG bonus making the world seems so much clearer. A failure might be blamed on the same COG bonus, causing the character to recognize their innate ignorance and leading to self-hatred. Like the other tests, any result on an Alienation roll provides a unique tool for making your character’s story more interesting by helping color their mood for the next session.
The Continuity Test is one of the best ways for players to engage in the philosophical struggles of transhumanism. Where, physically, is the self located? Even in the event of an upload-to-resleeve with no continuity loss, the character’s old self has “died.” If the previous morph was rented or sold to cover costs, the character has the added complication of knowing someone else is walking around in “their” body. If the Integration and Alienation Tests in any way altered the character’s perspective or attitude, how can they know whether or not their last instantiation was their true self? For that matter, what about this one? Every resleeve is rife for exploring ideas about what makes up identity.
These existential crises are only ampliﬁed if the character has died. If resleeved from a cortical stack, the memory of death can have permanent effects on the character’s life more signiﬁcant than mere trauma. What if the stack hadn’t been recovered? What if their backup had been corrupted? A brush with semi-permanent death is still a brush with death: how does this experience put the character’s life into perspective? Do they feel like they are running out of time to achieve their goals? Was joining Firewall a huge mistake? Dying has the potential to completely rewrite your character’s priorities in interesting ways.
If restoring from backup without memory of their death, the initial confusion can develop into any number conditions. The obvious is memory or skill loss, which can make for very interesting scenes with NPCs and other players. Perhaps a romantic relationship, initially successful, is a disaster replayed. Maybe the character has prioritized combat skills after death and never again seeks to spend Rez points studying Academics: Bioengineering. More importantly, how can the character even know they actually died, not to mention the speciﬁcs? The technology of the setting is sufﬁcient enough to fake any kind of media and even memories can be edited; how can characters with months of time cut from their minds know whom to trust? Maybe they didn’t die, but instead had their egos illegally forked. What if their fellow Firewall agents committed the murder to cover something up? What if the character’s backup has been uploaded into an elaborate simulspace as a means to secretly investigate the conspiracy’s operations? Death and resleeving is rife with potential for paranoia and the severing of old relationships. Use this to give your character some gravitas and emphasize the awful price of defending transhumanity from extinction.
==Staying Lucid== 
Insanity is the greatest enemy of the front-line Firewall agent. When creating a new player character, it is very tempting to ﬁnd ways to save CP in order to buy the best morph, implants, and traits, but skimping on a decent Willpower causes unnecessary grief for your character in the game. Mental health is just as important as physical health, but there are fewer tools available to characters so you need to make use of every resource you can.
Willpower is the foundation of a successful ﬁeld agent. Sooner or later, every character needs to make a Willpower Test after undergoing a stressful experience, but Firewall agents face multiple tests on every operation. Characters with low Willpower are quickly bogged down with traumas, derangements, and disorders, to the point where the character is incapacitated. A high Willpower provides two key protections: a higher chance to avoid taking stress damage and a higher Trauma Threshold rating. It’s important to remember that stress does not cause any detrimental effects except when the character takes an amount of SV equal or greater than their Trauma Threshold, which inﬂicts a trauma, or when stress is higher than the character’s Lucidity, which causes the character to fall into a catatonic state.
Traumas are a more serious problem than physical wounds, because while the penalty is identical, wounds are far easier to mitigate than traumas. Characters have many ways of ignoring wound penalties outright, including morph type, traits, psi sleights, augmentations, and drugs. It’s possible to create a character who is functionally immune to wound penalties. Only a few drugs (comfurt and orbital hash), however, allow a character to temporarily ignore the penalty of a trauma. Firewall agents who expect to operate for long periods without sufﬁcient downtime to remove derangements and disorders need a high Trauma Threshold to avoid the traumas in the ﬁrst place.
With all of this in mind, look at the [[Mental Health#Mental%20Health-Stressful%20Situations|Stressful Experiences]] table. Think about what kind of experiences your character may encounter and try to raise Willpower so your Trauma Threshold is higher than the average SV of the experiences you’ll encounter the most often. If your character expects to ﬁght exsurgents on an alien world, where Willpower Tests will be frequent and inﬂict high amounts of SV, a high Willpower (and high Trauma Threshold) is essential. A Willpower of 20 or higher is a good baseline. A character undercover as a Martian hypercorp employee is unlikely to face multiple stressful experiences in a short time and may take a lower Willpower, but no lower than 15.
Consider the average transhuman, with a Willpower of 10, a Lucidity of 20, and a Trauma Threshold of 4. They are betrayed by a trusted friend, which inﬂicts 1d10 ÷ 2 SV, rounded down. They need to roll a 30 or lower on their Willpower Test, which they fail. The 1d10 ÷ 2 SV is the lowest amount of stress any stressful experience can inﬂict on a character and there’s a 30% chance (a 8, 9, or 10 on the 1d10 roll means 4 or 5 ﬁnal SV) the roll will inﬂict a trauma on this average transhuman. Trauma inﬂicts a –10 penalty on all rolls, which stacks with wounds and other traumas. Our experimental subject needs at least 12 hours of psychotherapy to remove the trauma (4 hours for 4 stress points and 8 hours for the trauma, assuming the therapist succeeds in the appropriate skill test). The trauma penalty deﬁnitely applies to future Willpower Tests, and they are less able to resist further stressful experiences. The ﬁrst trauma causes a downward spiral where the character becomes less and less effective until they are completely incapacitated.
Even though Willpower is not linked to many important skills, it is a crucial aptitude. Madness can mean the end of an otherwise great character, and it usually only takes a higher Trauma Threshold to avoid the downward spiral in the ﬁrst place.
===Roleplaying Insanity=== 
The challenge in roleplaying a character that has undergone a great mental change is ﬁnding the proper balance. Mental derangements and disorders received from stressful experiences can alter a character’s personality and outlook, but that is still part of the character’s overall life history.
Many players overact and handle character trauma with excessive and extreme behavior, but true madness is unpredictable and often quite subtle. Remember that characters with a derangement or disorder still think of themselves in rational terms; only their perception of what is real and acceptable is skewed. An insane character usually thinks they’re still sane but that others won’t understand their point of view. Hence, insane characters will usually try to hide their illness so they can remain in society. Characters don’t instantly act out after receiving a derangement or disorder. The mercenary who gains OCD from a traumatic gunﬁght won’t act on that disorder during the ﬁght. Eventually, they have to act on their madness, but there’s no set rhythm or pattern to these outbursts. Other players and the gamemaster will appreciate one dramatic outburst more than constant attempts to work in a particular disorder in every scene of the game. This isn’t to say that a character has to remain perfectly normal for the rest of the game, but unpredictability captures the essence of roleplaying madness better than outrageous behavior or even a reliable tic or quirk.
Each type of disorder should be roleplayed differently in a way that makes sense based on the character’s history and baseline personality. Two characters with impulse control disorder can exhibit very different symptoms, so much so that untrained observers would not realize they both have the same disorder. Because there are no hard guidelines for interpreting how a particular character manifests mental illness, it takes some creative thinking to ﬁgure out how your player character would act if they gain a new derangement. Think of the experience that triggered the new disorder and then base it on your character’s personality and previous life experience. The insanity is a coping mechanism for the character to understand the trauma and ensure it can never happen again. For example, an ambitious and crass Direct Action mercenary becomes a megalomaniac after a traumatic encounter with a group of terrifying exsurgents. The mercenary decides that they are uniquely able to lead transhumanity on a new crusade to wipe out the remaining exsurgents. Their megalomania takes the place of their usual efforts to climb the corporate ladder of Direct Action, including assassinating or blackmailing colleagues and executing innocent civilians based on groundless suspicion of exsurgent infection. However, should the same mercenary gain megalomania as a result of prolonged torture from Ozma agents, they could become an erratic soldier who eventually leaves Direct Action, blaming the corp for leaving them behind, eventually ﬁnding their place as a criminal enforcer or brinker survivalist.
With all of this in mind, it’s important to remember that the purpose of playing Eclipse Phase is to have fun, so try not to make your character functionally useless or an enemy to the rest of the group. It is tempting to use insanity as an excuse to make every scene about your character’s personal turmoil and steal the spotlight from other players, but that isn’t fair. Remember, the insane will try to blend in with the rest of society as long as they are able to do so. Often the best way to make a player character’s mental illness into a tool that makes the game more exciting and dramatic is to invoke it at key moments in the game, particularly when tension is at its highest or for (questionable) moments of comic relief. During times of great stress, the façade of normality falls apart and the true nature of an insane character is revealed. Don’t use this moment to directly harm other player characters if you can help it, though. Use it to increase the challenge of the game or undermine your character’s personal goals or beliefs. For example, the megalomaniac attacks a civilian when they refuse an order, even though it will end their career with Direct Action. Insanity in a roleplaying game should be used to create a more challenging (and thus more memorable) experience, not as an excuse to sabotage a game.
===Random Derangements=== 
The rules for derangements encourage gamemasters and players to cooperate and pick a derangement appropriate to both the character and situation whenever a trauma is incurred. In some cases, however, a quicker or more random solution may be desired. In this case, use the tables below to determine the result.
Since multiple traumas often result in a previous derangement being upgraded to a more potent one, suggestions are provided for the next derangement to proceed to when more trauma is incurred.
||||||||||||||||~ Random Derangements ||
||||||= **First Trauma** ||||||= **Second Trauma** ||||= **Third Trauma** ||
||= d10 Roll ||= Derangement ||= Upgrades to: ||= d10 Roll ||= Derangement ||= Upgrades to: ||= d10 Roll ||= Derangement ||
||= 1 ||= Anxiety ||= 1-7 Panic, 8-0 Tremors ||= 1 ||= Chills ||= 1-6 Hallucinations, 7-0 Psychosomatic Crippling ||= 1 ||= Blackout ||
||= 2 ||= Avoidance ||= 1-8 Narcissism, 9-0 Mute ||= 2-3 ||= Confusion ||= 1-7 Blackout, 8-0 Irrationality ||= 2 ||= Frenzy ||
||= 3 ||= Dizziness ||= Confusion ||= 4 ||= Echopraxia ||= Irrationality ||= 3 ||= Hallucinations ||
||= 4 ||= Echolalia ||= Echopraxia ||= 5 ||= Mood Swings ||= 1-4 Frenzy, 5-0 Hysteria ||= 4-5 ||= Hysteria ||
||= 5 ||= Fixation ||= 1-6 Narcissism, 7-0 Mood Swings ||= 6 ||= Mute ||= 1-5 Blackout, 6-0 Paralysis ||= 6 ||= Irrationality ||
||= 6 ||= Hunger ||= 1-5 Mute, 6-0 Mood Swings ||= 7 ||= Narcissism ||= 1-5 Hysteria, 6-0 Irrationality ||= 7-8 ||= Paralysis ||
||= 7 ||= Indecisiveness ||= Confusion ||= 8-9 ||= Panic ||= 1-3 Frenzy, 4-8 Hysteria, 9-0 Paralysis ||= 9 ||= Psychosomatic Crippling ||
||= 8 ||= Logorrhea ||= 1-3 Echopraxia, 4-7 Mood Swings, 8-0 Panic ||= 0 ||= Tremors ||= Psychosomatic Crippling ||= 0 ||= Other or Choose ||
||= 9 ||= Nausea ||= 1-5 Chills, 6-0 Tremors ||||||||||   ||
||= 0 ||= Phobia ||= Panic ||||||||||   ||

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