Shadowrun/Eclipse Phase Tie-in, Shadowclipse Phase? Eclipserun? Options

[SkepticInc]

Supposedly Catalyst Games was going to work on a crossover between Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase. Since Catalyst Games is going belly-up and it seems unlikely to happen, I thought I'd throw this out. Keep in mind that Eclipse Phase is an open source document, so we are allowed to use it all we want, and even quote it in forums. Neat, neh?

Eclipse Phase is set much further in the future than Shadowrun, and involves lots of use of nanotech and ubiquitous computing. It features an Earth that is a no-go zone, having been rendered uninhabitable by a Singularity-seeking AI uprising, and the rules of science don't seem to work the same down there, which is blamed on sufficiently advanced technology. The AI, known as the TITANS, killed most of the human population, forcing many of the recently deceased population to flee the planet in the form of "infomorphs," which correlate pretty well with the AI character options in Runner's Companion. For some reason, the TITANS never left the planet, and suddenly disappeared, leaving Earth a hell-hole of combat nanites, radioactive hotspots, and other, less explainable things.

The most important aspect of Eclipse Phase, as far as most players are concerned, is the clone-based immortality. In the game, players have a small system in their brain that records their memories and backs up their current state from time to time, and has a small payload of entangled quibits to get the recording out to a bodyfarm in case of sudden death. From there, they are uploaded into another clone, and are good to go. Death doesn't mean much, as long as you are insured, and is frequently a faster form of travel than lugging a meat-body across the solar system.

In Augmentation, the nanotech Flashback System gives a character Photographic Memory by storing "neural activity map." If you get brain damage, or just forget something, there it is. It's the equivalent of a simsense recording of the memory, but since it isn't storing the actual memory, just the neural activity map, it's unusable by anyone else.

The section at the beginning of the nanotech section of Augmentation covering nanotech computing discusses MCT and NEOnet researching quantum computing, particularly quibits.

A quick scenario: Simon Kerimov is a spoiled brat who's father is the eccentric space engineer on Evo's Board of Directors. Being a spoiled rich brat, the roughly 100,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) cost for a backup clone with a Flashback System, skillwires, and a Personafix chip based on Simon's last PAB scan is negligible. Suppose that Simon was hacking open his MCT Cyborg bodyguard so he could engage it in a philosophical debate about the impossibility of discounting the argument that you are simply a brain in a jar. If that cyborg, let's call him ADAM-77, suddenly figured out that it was, in fact, a brain in a jar, it might react badly and burn Simon's Azerbijan mansion down, killing everyone inside.

Well, we can't have that, so we boot up Simon2 in Seattle in a safe house where his friendly Vory buddies will keep him out of trouble. Simon2 doesn't have the skills or memories of Simon to begin with, but between the skillwires, personafix chip, and access to Simon's memories from the Flashback System, eventually the difference will disappear. So we have a primitive form of clone based immortality.

SR4 could easily be the Eclipse Phase universe, set before the TITANS came, and before the anarchist groups liberated the unrestricted nanoforges from companies like Evo, Ares, and MCT. Earth will eventually be a no-go zone because magic doesn't work anywhere else. Lots and lots of tech is great, but the fey's glamor power will still win every time.

Eclipse Phase is open source, and we have some of the writers here who could throw together an open source tie-in if they were interested. What do you all think?

[Adam]

Supposedly Catalyst Games was going to work on a crossover between Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase.

What? No, this is not true. It could be fun, and if people view Eclipse Phase as the future of Shadowrun, that's totally cool with me -- but there was no "bridging" game planned.

[SkepticInc]

Ah well, I guess rumors are usually dirty lies based on desired reality. It'd still be neat.

[Doc Byte]

Ah well, I guess rumors are usually dirty lies based on desired reality. It'd still be neat.

I guess you're mixing this up with Equinox.

[SkepticInc]

Given that I heard about it from someone working on a CuthuluTech supplement, I shouldn't be surprised that I'm wrong. So I guess rumors are dirty lies based on desired reality with a dash of phone-tag thrown in.

[Dr Funfrock]

Supposedly Catalyst Games was going to work on a crossover between Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase.

This is half true. Originally the ideas for Eclipse Phase came from Rob Boyle (IIRC) and a few others sitting around and talking about what the Shadowrun world might look like after all the magic goes away (owing to the cyclic nature of mana levels in the setting). Eventually these ideas blossomed into a full blown setting of it's own right, focusing heavily on many of the transhumanist themes explored in SR, as well as the heavy exploration of the potential of augmented reality and social media which went on in SR4.

However, if you look at the history presented in Eclipse Phase, whilst they deliberately avoid giving specific dates, the order of events just doesn't match up. For example, the construction of a space elevator is specifically placed at least a decade before cybernetics first begin to see usage amongst the wealthy elite (let alone ordinary gangers). Similarly widespread use of AR takes place about a decade after the construction of a mass driver on the moon, the initial terraforming of Mars, and several megascale geoengineering projects on Earth, and nanotech assemblers do not become commercially available until well after the development of the first transhuman species, and the successful uplifting of dolphins and chimpanzees.

It's clear that whilst Eclipse Phase may have begun life as the Seventh World of the Shadowrun/Earthdawn chronology (of which either Equinox or Battlerun actually forms the Eighth World, depending on how silly you feel), the finished product has severed it's ties somewhere along the way. That being said, it's established that when magic left, a new history filled the gap, so the same might be true of Eclipse Phase. Certainly, it's been established within the setting that there's very little solid factual material available from before the fall, and what there is might have altered itself to fit with the rewritten reality of a world without magic. So, yeah, if you wanted to you could easily establish SR and EP as a single chronology.

[SkepticInc]

If that was how Rob Boyle and his friends came up with the idea for Eclipse Phase, it makes sense that we ended up at the same place. The character Simon was born while I was exploring what it would be like to be one of the scions of the megacorporate world, when newyen means nothing, and your friends are the scions of those who built the Matrix infrastructure. He would appear to the earthbound the same way that free spirits and AI do: aloof, untouchable, and always coming out on top without having had to actually do anything.

The hardest part about the economies of space travel for us to grasp is that it's far more profitable if you never come back down the gravity well. All of the resources gathered and mined in space can build more of the same things in space for far less than it cost for them to be developed in the first place, and you get economies of scale. And since it costs far too much to move up and down the well, you wouldn't want the populace on the planet to demand that you divert your resources to bringing them all up the well, so you'd lie to them.

Imagine if the AAA megacorps actually got along quite well, and used shadowrunners not to fight each other, but to have convenient terrorists to garner public sympathy and keep media attention off of what you are doing up past Orbit. It's too polluted for them to look up to the sky as a hobby, and no one comes back down, so information leakage is quite slow. You can use tripchips, BTLs, and especially AREs to keep up the ruse even longer. It pretty much stops mattering at that point if dragons and elves are even real or consensual reality. History? Which history do you use?

You wouldn't be able to keep it up forever, eventually the unrestricted nanoforges will get leaked. Once they do, the Earth will burn as everyone who hasn't figured out that they have entered a post-scarcity economy tries to keep a grasp on reigns of power that don't really exist anymore. Imagine a netwar let loose in a world with ASIST and PAB technologies, and Techomancers to let the worms and virii loose even in the most secure of databases. Memes really are weapons, and history ceases to matter.

How that isn't dark enough for the Shadowrun universe, I don't know.

[Demonseed Elite]

Yeah, from what I've read, the origin of Eclipse Phase started in Shadowrun-related brainstorming, but it went its own direction. Which is a good thing, in my opinion. EP doesn't need the baggage of being tied to SR (especially now that Posthuman isn't with CGL anymore). The EP setting is strong enough on its own.

Of course, like Adam said, with EP being Creative Commons it's perfectly fine if someone wants to take the EP system and adapt it as a future SR setting. It certainly could be done.

[nezumi]

If you were to cross them over, I'd say the Earth has been fragged up so badly, and the other human colonies are so small, that there is no safe manasphere anywhere else in the solar system. However, psychic powers are a form of magic that ignores background counts/vacuums, so is really, the only game in town. Obviously the metahuman races have disagreed, but no one really cares. And the whole idea of essence was proven to be bunk.

[hobgoblin]

Since Catalyst Games is going belly-up

did i miss a memo?

[Demonseed Elite]

did i miss a memo?

No, the original post had a few inaccuracies.

[LurkerOutThere]

Not that i'm aware:

[SkepticInc]

I guess "belly up" is a bit off. CGL and Topps Inc are both privately held companies, which I didn't know when I made the original post. I assumed they would be being torn apart by investors for failure of due diligence, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead, the Eclipse Phase and CuthuluTech systems (Posthuman and Wildfire) have left CGL and joined Sandstorm (if I have that correct). Which, if I'd taken five minutes to look up, I would have known. Sorry about that.

When I found out that Eclipse Phase was Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-SA license, not open source; another mistake a quick Google check would have fixed, sorry again) I thought that it was a brilliant move. The power of Creative Commons is that it creates something that everyone can write into if they want to, and their works get covered by the same license. That isn't just a neat, it's a powerful business tool.

Catalyst Games Labs has lost a few of the Shadowrun writers over this mess, and this has led to the dumpshock release of PACKS. Ancient History mentioned that it is fine to produce Shadowrun material and publish it online as part of the Shadowrun universe as long as the writers don't try to profit from it. They can't profit from it because CGL holds the license.

If the freelance Shadowrun writers wanted to move the Shadowrun universe into the Seventh Age using Eclipse Phase, then that version of Shadowrun is Creative Commons, and freelance writers can find a way to make a profit from it. This takes some of the license power away from CGL, and helps to make Eclipse Phase more prominent. Eclipse Phase gets to jailbreak Shadowrun.

Eclipse Phase is such a gargantuan setting that it is very hard to choose what to play. Bridging games like Shadowrun allows the gamemaster to use only the relevant parts of the EP setting, and it becomes much more tractable. Sandstorm and Posthuman then get the benefit of crowdsourced settings to publish, and a great deal more customer involvement than most games get, which hopefully translates into sales.

[LurkerOutThere]

If the freelance Shadowrun writers wanted to move the Shadowrun universe into the Seventh Age using Eclipse Phase, then that version of Shadowrun is Creative Commons, and freelance writers can find a way to make a profit from it. This takes some of the license power away from CGL, and helps to make Eclipse Phase more prominent. Eclipse Phase gets to jailbreak Shadowrun.

This will get you taken to court by Topps and potentially Microsoft. Saying that your making an open source universe, that's a thousand years after star wars doesn't mean you have just "jail broken" star wars.

[SkepticInc]

Well, don't call it Shadowrun. I mentioned earlier that the advent of ARE technology means that for all practical purposes it doesn't matter if magic exists or not. Writing a pre-history version into Eclipse Phase that includes a mass consensual reality that is similar to "Tolkien in the Big City" isn't going to get you sued. Shadowrun is an amalgam of William Gibson's cyberpunk world and Tolkien's Middle Earth, so if CGL tired to sue, they'd be stopped by the same fair use laws that keeps the Shadowrun license from getting sued by the Tolkien estate. Elves, wizards and dragons are not CGL's intellectual property, nor is cyberpunk. Names like Dunkelzahn are, but just translate it from German to "Dark Tooth" and you are fine. Harlequin? He's from Arthurian legend, so that's not intellectual property either. Tropes aren't patentable.

[martian_bob]

Tropes aren't patentable.

I think you mean copyrightable.

[SkepticInc]

Oh words, and your "meaning things." I did mean copyrightable, thank you martian_bob.

[Demonseed Elite]

When I found out that Eclipse Phase was Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-SA license, not open source; another mistake a quick Google check would have fixed, sorry again) I thought that it was a brilliant move. The power of Creative Commons is that it creates something that everyone can write into if they want to, and their works get covered by the same license. That isn't just a neat, it's a powerful business tool.

Catalyst Games Labs has lost a few of the Shadowrun writers over this mess, and this has led to the dumpshock release of PACKS. Ancient History mentioned that it is fine to produce Shadowrun material and publish it online as part of the Shadowrun universe as long as the writers don't try to profit from it. They can't profit from it because CGL holds the license.

If the freelance Shadowrun writers wanted to move the Shadowrun universe into the Seventh Age using Eclipse Phase, then that version of Shadowrun is Creative Commons, and freelance writers can find a way to make a profit from it. This takes some of the license power away from CGL, and helps to make Eclipse Phase more prominent. Eclipse Phase gets to jailbreak Shadowrun.

Gah, Skeptic, you need to do just a little bit of homework before you post, because you keep posting things that are just plain wrong. First of all, though EP is using a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, that doesn't mean people can make money off of things remixed from EP. That license is pretty clear about that:

Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

So first, no making money off of remixed EP material. And then mixing Shadowrun material in with it does not attribute the CC license to the Shadowrun material at all. Period, end of story. It doesn't jailbreak Shadowrun. More like the opposite; it makes the CC license that EP is under less flexible.

You can do all the elaborate dance you want to try to cover up that you're ripping off Shadowrun material, but why? If you tried to make money off it, you're going to have Posthuman after you too, because you're breaking their license! So why bother? Instead, don't bother with trying to make money off it and instead enjoy the freedom of the CC license to make unofficial EP material and rely on the fact that CGL doesn't typically go after fan material that isn't being used for commercial purposes.

[SkepticInc]

Gah, Skeptic, you need to do just a little bit of homework before you post, because you keep posting things that are just plain wrong. First of all, though EP is using a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, that doesn't mean people can make money off of things remixed from EP. That license is pretty clear about that:

So first, no making money off of remixed EP material. And then mixing Shadowrun material in with it does not attribute the CC license to the Shadowrun material at all. Period, end of story. It doesn't jailbreak Shadowrun. More like the opposite; it makes the CC license that EP is under less flexible.

You can do all the elaborate dance you want to try to cover up that you're ripping off Shadowrun material, but why? If you tried to make money off it, you're going to have Posthuman after you too, because you're breaking their license! So why bother? Instead, don't bother with trying to make money off it and instead enjoy the freedom of the CC license to make unofficial EP material and rely on the fact that CGL doesn't typically go after fan material that isn't being used for commercial purposes.

Ah, I see. So it can be done, but only if the material is given over to the public under the CC license? That's still a good thing, isn't it?

[Demonseed Elite]

Ah, I see. So it can be done, but only if the material is given over to the public under the CC license?

Sort of. You can't apply the CC license to the Shadowrun material, that is still covered under standard copyright. Fortunately for us fans, Topps doesn't really go around shutting down fan-made Shadowrun material. They could, under copyright law, but they don't. It's generally good for Topps that fans are making material as long as those fans aren't charging money for it. It increases the visibility of their product and encourages support from the customers.

So yeah, this unofficial material would need to include some note about the Eclipse Phase material being covered under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license and the Shadowrun material being covered under copyright, I imagine. But if you're not charging anything for the material, that should be fine.

That's still a good thing, isn't it?

The Eclipse Phase Creative Commons license is an awesome thing. It not only means that fans can expand on the game (as long as they don't sell that material), but it means that they can work in the original material where you need to. It's a terrific thing for fan-made material. Unfortunately Shadowrun isn't under a similar license and really can't be because of the complicated state of Shadowrun's ownership (with it being licensed by Topps and with digital material being owned by an entirely separate party).

[Doc Chase]

Sort of. You can't apply the CC license to the Shadowrun material, that is still covered under standard copyright. Fortunately for us fans, Topps doesn't really go around shutting down fan-made Shadowrun material. They could, under copyright law, but they don't. It's generally good for Topps that fans are making material as long as those fans aren't charging money for it. It increases the visibility of their product and encourages support from the customers.

So yeah, this unofficial material would need to include some note about the Eclipse Phase material being covered under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license and the Shadowrun material being covered under copyright, I imagine. But if you're not charging anything for the material, that should be fine.

Reh? I wouldn't think Topps would be able to shut down fan-made SR stuff given the nature of the copyright itself. To me, that sounds like they would be able to shut down GM's for running their own campaigns.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, which is entirely possible(probable).

[SkepticInc]

So, if I have this correct, fans can and should expand Eclipse Phase under the Creative Commons license, but by it's nature they cannot ever make a profit off of it. Making Shadowrun material gets more difficult because it can only exist at the tolerance of Topp, but as long as it makes Shadowrun more visible Topp is unlikely to shut it down. Is there any way to get Topp's permission to bridge the two under the Creative Commons license? That way it could be done without having to worry about and dance around legal hair splitting that I'm apparently not that good at.

[Doc Chase]

So, if I have this correct, fans can and should expand Eclipse Phase under the Creative Commons license, but by it's nature they cannot ever make a profit off of it. Making Shadowrun material gets more difficult because it can only exist at the tolerance of Topp, but as long as it makes Shadowrun more visible Topp is unlikely to shut it down. Is there any way to get Topp's permission to bridge the two under the Creative Commons license? That way it could be done without having to worry about and dance around legal hair splitting that I'm apparently not that good at.

If I read that right, you're asking Topps to throw away a source of revenue, something they'd never do.

[Demonseed Elite]

Reh? I wouldn't think Topps would be able to shut down fan-made SR stuff given the nature of the copyright itself. To me, that sounds like they would be able to shut down GM's for running their own campaigns.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, which is entirely possible(probable).

Distributed fan-made material is derivative work, technically. Topps could issue cease-and-desist orders to prevent you from distributing it, just like J.K. Rawling can send cease-and-desist orders to shut down Harry Potter fanfic. Just like Topps, J.K. Rawling doesn't typically do this with Harry Potter fanfic, but she has when someone was posting X-rated Harry Potter fan fiction (note: the link itself is just to the letter, so it's work-safe! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ). With typical copyright, the copyright owner has that power to shut down derivative work.

Can Topps stop a GM from running a campaign? Likely not, it's considered the intended use of the product. Just like music studios won't come after you for listening to a CD you just bought. But they can come after you for ripping those songs off the CD and posting them on the Internet.

So, if I have this correct, fans can and should expand Eclipse Phase under the Creative Commons license, but by it's nature they cannot ever make a profit off of it.

Yes.

Making Shadowrun material gets more difficult because it can only exist at the tolerance of Topp, but as long as it makes Shadowrun more visible Topp is unlikely to shut it down. Is there any way to get Topp's permission to bridge the two under the Creative Commons license? That way it could be done without having to worry about and dance around legal hair splitting that I'm apparently not that good at.

I doubt Topps would extend that permission. But again, if you're not charging money for the fan-made material, you're very likely safe. People have been making free unofficial Shadowrun material for years without any crackdown.

[SkepticInc]

Catalyst Games allowed the publication of Eclipse Phase under Creative Commons, didn't it? I don't have any details on how that came about, but allowing a 7th Age crossover under CC gives Topps more visibility for Shadowrun in the same way Eclipse Phase gave visibility to Catalyst Games, so its win-win, isn't it?