The following advice will assist gamemasters in running their games more efﬁciently. [[toc]]
=Awarding Rez Points=
In Eclipse Phase, characters earn Rez Points in order to advance (see [[Character Creation and Advancement#Character%20Advancement|Character Advancement]]). As the name suggests, these points are awarded so players can spend them to better deﬁne their characters—to bring them into higher resolution, sharper focus. As the gamemaster, you determine when and how many Rez Points to award, following the guidelines below. 
Rez Points should be awarded at the end of every story arc, at the break in the action between one adventure and the next. Depending on your style of play and the length of your sessions, this should roughly be every 3–6 gaming sessions. If a scenario goes shorter or longer, the Rez Point awards should be adjusted accordingly. In the case of long-term campaigns, the gamemaster should break down the action into digestible chunks, or “chapters,” and assign Rez Points after each such segment.
Every character should be awarded 1 Rez Point for each of the following criteria that is met:
* The character participated in that scenario.
* The character achieved (most of) their objectives in that scenario.
* The character failed to meet their objectives, but learned a valuable lesson.
* The character contributed to achieving success in a signiﬁcant way (e.g., right skill at the right time).
* The adventure was extra challenging.
* The character achieved a motivational goal (see [[Defining Your Character#x-Motivations|Motivations]]).
* The player engaged in good roleplaying.
* The player significantly contributed to the session’s drama, humor, or fun with roleplaying.
This should result in an average Rez Points award of 4–7 points per character, per adventure.
Gamemasters who wish to drive the characters’ advancement forward more quickly can increase the reward amounts.
==Editor's Note==
I like faster advancement, so I give my players 1-2 Rez per session, depending on whether we are playing in meatspace or online. This also provides a small incentive to show up for the damn game.
=Reputation Gain and Loss=
In addition to awarding Rez Points, the gamemaster should also adjust each character’s Rep scores according to actions they took during game play, according to the guidelines below. For simplicity, these can be applied at the end of the adventure, though gamemasters who seek a more dynamic game could apply changes to the characters’ Rep scores in game, as their peers judge them according to their actions (or lack thereof) and news about them in real time. Rep scores should only be modiﬁed according to public actions and interactions the character has with people capable of pinging their Rep with positive or negative feedback. Actions that happen in secret, without anyone ever knowing, should have no effect. Likewise, pissing off a Factor or a brinker isolate who never communicates with outsiders isn’t going to matter because no one else will ever hear of it (unless the character lifelogs it and posts it to the mesh later … ). Note that Rep modiﬁcations only apply to Rep scores tied to the character’s known identity.
Characters may gain and lose Rep score in networks they don’t actively participate in. For example, a character with r-rep of 0 may help bring out a major scientiﬁc discovery that is shared with the solar system’s scientiﬁc community at large, thus gaining the character a few points of r-rep even though they never hang out with argonauts or scientists—what matters is that people who access r-rep will ﬁnd positive details when they ping the person’s score on that particular rep network.
Certain actions may result in a character simultaneously gaining Rep with one network while losing Rep in another. For example, an anarchist prankster who embarrasses a major hypercorp ﬁgure in public will certainly gain some @-rep points, but their c-rep is likely to go down by an equal amount.
Rep changes provide an excellent way for gamemasters to include more roleplaying and more interactions with the Eclipse Phase universe in their games. Social networks are a two-way street, meaning that members of the character’s social networks might contact them for equipment, favors, and information during game play for things that are completely unrelated to the mission the character is on. A character who ignores such requests risks losing Rep. Fulﬁlling such requests may gain the character Rep and may also provide comic relief or even plant some plot hooks for the next scenario.
==Reputation Gains==
Rep awards are given for characters who help people out, beneﬁt a faction, do something creative, make a major discovery or strides in a particular area of activity, pull off successful publicity stunts, win a competition, and so on. Some suggested examples are noted here:
**Trivial Award** (1–2 points): Do a Level 1 favor, make a moderate contribution to free/open source projects, throw a good party, make your sales quota, do the job no one else wants to do.
**Minor Award** (3–4 points): Do a Level 2 favor, deliver a kick-ass or moving performance, make a minor contribution to science, win impressively at some public event.
**Moderate Award** (5–6 points): Do a Level 3 favor, make a serious business score, lead the winning side in a decisive engagement, create the meme everyone talks about for a week and then forgets, make the news for something positive, risk serious injury.
**Major Award** (7–8 points): Do a Level 4 favor, design the new tool everyone wants, throw an impressive planetoid-scale event, complete an extensive project (1 month work or 1 week of difﬁcult/specialized work), risk death.
**Extreme Award** (9–10 points): Do a Level 5 favor, start this year’s hot fashion trend, make a major scientiﬁc discovery, close the deal on a major corporate acquisition, start (or put down) a revolution, complete a major project (1 year work or 1 month difﬁcult/specialized work), risk true death.
==Reputation Losses==
Rep losses are suffered by characters who fail to render aid when needed, lose professional credibility, make major or public blunders, doublecross their friends, and so on. Some suggested examples are noted here:
**Trivial Loss** (–1 or –2 points): Fail to do a Level 1 favor, inconvenience others, be involved in professional dispute, ruin someone’s day, never are available.
**Minor Loss** (–3 or –4 points): Fail to do a Level 2 favor, embarrass yourself at a public event, piss off somebody important.
**Moderate Loss** (–5 or –6 points): Fail to do a Level 3 favor, endanger someone’s physical safety, make the news for something negative, ruin an event for everybody.
**Major Loss** (–7 or –8 points): Fail to do a Level 4 favor, screw up a major mission or activity, endanger someone’s life, associate with hated rivals.
**Extreme Loss** (–9 or –10 points): Fail to do a Level 5 favor, botch a major mission or activity spectacularly, betray a faction to its rivals or enemies.
=Backups, Record-Keeping, and Save Points=
Thanks to cortical stacks and archived backups, characters in Eclipse Phase can recover from death. When restoring a character from an earlier backup, however, it is important to be able to know what the state of the character was as of that backup. Any Rez Points gained or spent, any character advancements made, any key information or memories acquired since that backup was made are lost. This means that in terms of game stats, resorting to an old backup can mean loss of a character’s hard-earned advancements—that’s the trade-off for being effectively immortal.
Since these changes can have a serious effect on game play, it’s important to conduct accurate record-keeping. This sort of bookkeeping isn’t hard, and there are two ways to do it. The ﬁrst is to simply make a copy of a the character’s record sheet any time a character makes an archived backup, forks off an alpha or beta copy, or dies (thus freezing the cortical stack backup). Each of these is considered a “save point.” In this case, carefully note the date and time (both in character and out of character), and what the event was that prompted the backup. Since what knowledge a character knows at different points in their life may be important, you may also want to note what important information they may hold in their head, as well as what the recent events in their life were (to help jog your memory later). This way, if the character ever reverts back to one of these save points, you have notes not only on their character stats, but what they remember.
Alternately, you can keep a log of all of your character’s developments, noted by in-character date. These developments would include: Rez Points spent or earned, character advancements made, key information acquired, backups made, alpha or beta forks made, and so on. In this case, if the character dies and reverts back to an earlier backup, it is easy to see what changes need to be “rolled back” to get back to that previous version of the character. When alpha and beta forks are made, you may also want to branch off a separate log for each fork, as their life stream may develop differently than from the original character they were spun off from.
=Gamemastering Practicalities=
Eclipse Phase is a game about a dark future in which the meaning of (trans)humanity and its very survival are at stake. In practice, however, your campaign can take on a wide assortment of ﬂavors or even mix several styles together. There’s nothing that says you have to play Eclipse Phase speciﬁcally according to the guidelines we set out. This section covers topics you should think about while preparing a campaign and running it, to help you do things the way that makes you and your players happiest.
==Gamemaster Responsibilities==
The gamemaster has certain responsibilities that will keep a game ﬂowing smoothly. The following is a short summary of the basics.
* The gamemaster should be familiar with the whole game. This doesn’t mean the rulebook must be memorized. An understanding of the core mechanics is a must, however, as well as knowing where to ﬁnd other rules quickly, as needed.
* The gamemaster should have solid notes on the plots and subplots created for each session. Nothing will ensure you prepare better next time like having the players catch you in a major continuity error due to lack of notes.
* The gamemaster doesn’t just set the scene, they play all the non-player characters that populate the universe. Making each NPC convincing, while not messing up a plot or losing the thread of a scene, can be difﬁcult. Notes are your friend.
* Know when it’s time to toss the dice and trust to the game mechanics to resolve a situation and when it’s better to ride out a situation through storytelling and dialog. This is an acquired skill. The more practice you have, the better you’ll get.
* Don’t cheat. Your NPCs should not have access to information they’ve not gained during game play. If you roll terribly for your major antagonist at the height of the story and they fall with a whimper, roll with it. Be ﬂexible and improvise in such situations. Your players are smart and perceptive and will know when you’re forcing a situation with unfair tactics. At the same time, they’ll also know when you’ve stepped up and run with the ﬂow—and they’ll thank you for it.
==Fundamentals==
It’s possible to stumble into a campaign without ever really making an effort to ﬁnd out what everyone wants, shooting into the darkness and happening to score a bullseye, but it’s not a very reliable way to go. Successful campaigns usually begin with communication.
As you begin to prepare your campaign, talk to your players. Explain the basics of the Eclipse Phase setting and let them look over the options for characters and tell you what they ﬁnd interesting. Also take note of what they ﬁnd uninteresting or even repellent, so that nobody wastes a lot of time getting set for options that simply won’t be enjoyable in play.
==Challenges to Players==
Eclipse Phase is set in a time of catastrophic troubles and looming disasters, and it’s full of facts and concepts that may be heady or even uncomfortable to some players—not to mention their characters.
One of the fundamental questions for each gaming group is, how much challenge to the players’ sense of comfort is a good idea? There is no single answer, because tastes vary. There are groups whose players thrive on a diet of culture shock, ideological disorientation, gray areas, and difﬁcult ethical choices.
They love the moral and intellectual battleground gaming can provide, and are seldom so happy as when confronted with a really hard, really interesting dilemma. There are also groups whose players thrive on a diet of intellectual engagement, tactical and strategic challenge, and well-developed roleplaying that never pushes players’ buttons or puts them into harsh no-win situations. There’s a whole universe of responses in between these styles of play and none of them can conceivably be right for everyone. What matters to your campaign is what works for you and your players.
Keep in mind as you talk about it with your group that more shock doesn’t equal more maturity. The prime audience for gore in ﬁlm, for instance, is not well-aged men and women but teenage boys and young men. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is no less mature a tale than Macbeth even though it has a happy ending. It can be easy to confuse endurance with enlightenment, but in fact the two have nothing to do with each other. Endurance is about how much description of visceral nastiness the players can take (and deliver), while enlightenment (insofar as it ever happens in gaming) is about what insights players take away from whatever it is that happened in play. Don’t feel like a wimpy failure if you or your players would rather keep the darker parts of the game world suggested rather than delineated in hard-edged detail, since the point is that it be satisfying rather than it be as horrifying or mind-blowing as possible. The converse is also true: just as more is not better, so less is not better if your players do thrive on details. Your job as gamemaster includes knowing as much as you can about what it is your players actually prefer in this regard as in others and seeing how you can satisfy it in ways that are also satisfying for you.
That said, there is one technique you really should never use without very clear permission from your players, and that’s playing on their real-world fears and phobias. If you know that one of them is, for instance, genuinely phobic about spiders, you can count on getting some real shivers by adding arachnid features to robots and morphs. You can also ruin a player’s enjoyment of the session or the whole campaign that way, if it comes unexpectedly and leads to the real-world fear drowning out the experience of play. Some players are ﬁne with judicious use of their vulnerabilities, and others just aren’t. Under no circumstances should you poke at weak spots without making sure you’ve discussed it ﬁrst.
==The Problem of Secrets==
Uncovering secrets is a big part of this game. There’s a problem, however, in that a lot of the secrets are out there where players can come across them: in this very chapter, in reviews of the game, discussion in online forums, and so on. As gamemaster, you will need to decide how you want to deal with the potential for spoiled revelations.
As with so many potential issues, the place to start is with your players. Ask them how much it bothers them to know things that their characters are going to be ﬁnding out in play. Some players do a ﬁne job separating their own knowledge from that of their characters with mental ﬁrewalls. Others have a very difﬁcult time doing so, and knowing things in advance as players takes away a lot of the fun of character discovery for them. In addition, some players have a good sense of what degree of player-level surprise works best for them, and some don’t. Discuss it with them. Tell them that spoilers are available, and that you certainly can’t stop them from learning it all, one way or another. Ask them how much trouble this may be for them, and then proceed from there. Ask the players who have more trouble with spoilers to simply stay away from early commentary on the game, and tell them that you’ll let them know when the spoilers have come into play in your own campaign so that it’s no longer an issue. Ask the other players to work with you in keeping things fresh and fun for those players, too. In most groups, making it a matter of cooperation for the sake of everyone’s good time will draw out good responses. (If it doesn’t, the group may well have other problems in any event.)
There’s a related question for both you and your players. How much do any of you mind when a particular campaign’s version of an answer diverges from the stock one provided in print? There are two kinds of variation possible for this, and each one raises its own issues.
There are matters that the game leaves unresolved, so that there is no single authoritative answer, like the number of TITANs in the solar system in the game’s present moment. If you choose to give a speciﬁc number, it’s your choice, and any number that seems to work for your campaign will probably do the job, whether it’s one, three, seven, a dozen, or something else. Your campaign can’t diverge from the baseline unless your answer is relatively extreme, like “there are no TITANs, it was all a hoax before contact with the exsurgent virus and then purely alien technology after that.” In this case, your players can have read all the game’s secrets and still be surprised by the revelation you present. The potential for trouble here is not a conﬂict of expectations based on the game, but based on expectations raised in other contexts. 
Some games, like some movies, TV shows, and other stories, develop a following with strong ideas of its own about what the real truths and important matters are, and if the following thrives, its members may end up with ideas that have less and less to do with the original inspiration. This isn’t good or bad in itself, but it can be a problem, which is why it bears conscious consideration and discussion, both before play and as the campaign evolves. Ask your players to tell you about conversations and insights that shape their expectations for the game world and storylines. Sometimes you’ll want to work those in with your own plans, sometimes you may want to deliberately play against them for the sake of a delightful surprise (generally more delightful for players than characters, but that’s life as a character for you). In either case, it’s better to be thinking about it than missing it.
Then there are matters that the game does give deﬁnite answers for, but which you wish to change
for the sake of your own campaign’s characters and stories. This is perfectly ﬁne. There are no game police roaming the countryside and forcing you to accept answers you’d prefer not to use. But your players will, as with the ﬁrst question, have expectations, and your campaign will work better if you make sure you understand what those expectations are. How much would it bother them if it turned out there were no TITANs and it was all a hoax, and so on? It’s hard to guess what friends will say and impossible to predict the range of responses strangers might give, so ask them. (This particular answer is one that’s unlikely to appear in anyone’s campaign, but it makes a handy example for your conversational use precisely because it’s extreme. So their answers to it are likely to be about the same as to any other potentially extreme change, and this one probably doesn’t give away any of your own plans.) Some players are ﬂexible on most matters but have particular points of attachment; if yours are among them, ask them to explain what those points are for them, so that you can keep them in mind. Other players have a hard time having fun with any major shift from published standard answers, and if you have players like that, you’ll want to know it so that you can see how to adapt your plans to work within that framework.
==That's What I'm Talking About: Shared Inspiration==
It’s not quite true that everything changed from the early 21st century to Eclipse Phase’s universe, but a great many things did, and it can be hard to keep track of them all at once. This is where shared inspirations can come in handy. One striking illustration can convey a lot of details for both foreground and background, suggesting an aesthetic standard for design, an exotic environment, people doing futuristic tasks with appropriately advanced tools, and so on. A prose passage from a rewarding novel may set an ambiance or nail down some aspect of the characters’ circumstances.
There are potential pitfalls, and it’s important to be aware of them. The greatest is obsolescence, the meaning of something evocative changing because the players’ reality has changed since the inspiration entered it. William Gibson’s ground-breaking cyberpunk novel Neuromancer begins, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Supporting details make it clear that this is an industrial port at night, the sky gray from pollution and ﬂecked with ash and other debris. But that was an image published in 1984. A decade and a half later, Neil Gaiman pointed out that to his children, the color of television tuned to a dead channel is bright blue, thanks to ubiquitous cable delivery. In another decade, the default color of a station not in use may be something else entirely. The moral is that it’s not enough to agree that an image is very striking. You’ll want to make sure that you all agree on what it is about it that’s striking, to avoid a tangle of misconceptions that could derail play later on.
The [[References]] page offers a wide range of immediately relevant inspirations, but it’s not the ﬁnal word on the subject. If the people in your group have a long-time favorite space scene, or description of life in the midst of a high-tech investigation, or poetic glimpse of what it might feel like to modify the body in ways not possible in real life, or something else that’s stayed with them a long time and seems like it might bear on your campaign, encourage them to share. Remember to be courteous with each other’s personal treasures, whether you end up using them or not; there’s nothing like earned trust to encourage more sharing.
Images can be particularly helpful for what they convey about the world behind and around the foreground events. For instance, think of a corridor on a typical spaceship or habitat in Eclipse Phase. Did you imagine it as being a standardized size and shape, so that its counterparts elsewhere would be very much the same or a more individualized work intended for use just where it is without concern for interchangeability? Did you imagine it as well lit even when not in use, lit well when sensors show people present and otherwise dim or dark, or perhaps planned to be well lit but in practice haphazard and unreliable thanks to lack of maintenance and funds? Did you imagine its surfaces smooth and clean, with equipment, maintenance bays, and the like all behind hatches and covers, or was it cluttered and lumpy? None of that matters all the time, but when it comes to the investigation of a derelict, the hunt for someone (or something) trying to hide, a race against time, or other dramatic complication, these things could affect your play, and rather than try to tally all possible contingencies in advance, having some general-purpose references can save everyone time and confusion.
==Things That Should Not Be: Horror==
The universe of Eclipse Phase is a time of horrors unleashed. Every character has had to come to some personal accommodation with the existence of things that offend our basic expectations of decency and practicality all at once. Horror comes in many ﬂavors, and no one campaign can make use of all of them. There are at least as many theories of horror as there are people who create horror stories. Everything here is necessarily a generalization. You and your players can ﬁnd exceptions to every single point in it, and if you like the way those work better, go with them. This discussion is intended to trigger ideas, not to close off anything. That said, there are some useful generalizations about horror, starting with an insight expressed well by H.P. Lovecraft: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” All horror can be thought of as built around encounters with the unknown, beginning with the realization that there is something unknown present, learning something about the scope of its nature and activities, and then trying to respond one way or another.
In this game, the discovery part is half over. There’s no question about the presence of the unknown. Yes, there really are monsters beyond transhuman understanding loose in the universe, and everyone in the Eclipse Phase universe knows how bad and how strange the TITANs could get. Many people also have some idea of how exotic life on the far side of the Pandora gates can be. There’s no room left for characters to respond to some new strangeness with conﬁdent skepticism, sure that they know the range of what’s possible and plausible within transhuman experience anymore. Almost anything might exist, given the facts of what’s already known. Instead, the question for Eclipse Phase people facing a mystery is whether this particular unknown will turn out to be simple and straightforward to deal with, more complicated but nonetheless a part of their routine lives like malfunctioning machinery or a sabotaged and unusually modiﬁed morph, or something beyond the normal like a TITAN-programmed weapon or alien life. Sooner or later, if they keep poking around, the characters can count on running into all sorts of unknown and maybe even unknowable challenges. Are they there yet?
Horror is seldom very far from humor. Humor serves many roles in human psychology, and one of them is helping us whittle down the mental “size” of mysteries and threats to something we can deal with.
Furthermore, horror usually involves a balance of improbable elements, with things lined up to go wrong in interesting ways, and it doesn’t take much for a particular rickety ediﬁce to go from strange and menacing to ludicrous. When your players start laughing, sometimes the best thing for you to do is to roll with it. Laughter can do everyone good, supporting the “play” part of roleplaying. In addition, some events actually are funny or at least can be taken as funny, even (sometimes especially) when most of what’s going on is serious. On the other hand, if you really would like to keep a scene serious and the players break out in giggles, it’s often wise to go ahead and take a break. Tell the players what you’re doing, too; trying to deceive a group of your friends isn’t very reliable and can backﬁre badly. Make the break long enough for everyone to get the giggles out and then continue. 
At the end of the day, through communication with their players, the gamemaster will know how much horror their group wishes to encounter. A group may decide that they want to be 100 percent immersed into the various horrors of Eclipse Phase. Another group, however, may decide that while they enjoy the meshed theme of horror with the other aspects of Eclipse Phase, they don’t wish it to be a principal element. In such a situation, horror would remain just that, a theme, while the plots woven by the gamemaster would spin around the myriad of other elements that make up the game.
==Transhumanism==
Humanity has embraced transhumanism for survival, harnessing science and technologies to catapult physical and mental faculties to super-human levels, while eradicating involuntary death and enabling near immortality through the digitization of consciousness and the ability to transfer bodies at will. This is one of the cornerstone themes of Eclipse Phase. The technologies inherent to a transhuman future raise many questions and ethical issues, however, and these are some of the central themes that Eclipse Phase seeks to explore. We encourage both gamemaster and players to play around with the possibilities and contradictions enabled in such a universe. How do our mindsets change when death no longer looms over us? What does identity mean when our bodies are disposable and our personalities can be edited? Are we the same person when we are revived from a backup or sent off as a fork? Are technologies like nanofabrication something to be feared and restricted, even when they can eliminate poverty and greed? How do we ensure public safety in a world where technology makes weapons of mass destruction easily available? How do ideas inherent to religious and spiritual thought cope with AI, backups, or resleeving? What does it mean to be an uplifted animal in a society centered on humans? Who decides our future? These are just a few of the issues that Eclipse Phase raises, and many of them can be used as the central theme for an entire campaign.

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