Posted in: Movies, Video Games | Tagged: Bundle of Holding, Eclipse Phase, entertainment, gaming bundles, Posthuman Studios, rpg, RPG Gaming, transhuman

Eclipse Phase In A Short Term Bundle of Holding

By Christopher Helton

Now up, for a very limited time, at the Bundle of Holding site is a bundle featuring the transhumanist roleplaying game Eclipse Phase from Posthuman Studios. This bundle ends on Thursday, June 12th at 11am EST (that's U.S. Eastern Standard Time).

Eclipse Phase is a difficult game to nail down in a quick, concise sound bite/elevator pitch because it isn't your normal game setting. It has a far future transhumanist setting, but with elements of horror, conspiracy and post-apocalyptic ideas as well. The game won three ENnie awards (the ENnies being an award given out at Gen Con each year) in its first year for Best Writing, Best Cover Art and Product of the Year. This means that it must be doing something right.

The base cost of the bundle is $8.95, and for that you get the core Eclipse Phase rules, NPC File Volume 1: Prime, Sunward: The Inner System and Eclipse Phase Sample Characters. And 10% of the monies raised go to the charities of choice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Ada Initiative.

The core collection gives you everything that you need to play in the Eclipse Phase setting. In this harsh setting, you participate in a conspiracy called Firewall that seeks to protect civilization from "existential risks" such as biowar plagues, nanoswarms, terrorists with WMDs, rogue AIs, and worse. Along the way, you might hunt for prized technology in a gutted habitat falling from orbit, risk the hellish landscapes of a ruined Earth, or follow the trail of a terrorist through militarized stations and isolationist habitats. You may even step through a Pandora Gate, a wormhole to distant stars and the alien secrets beyond.

Eclipse Phase is based on a d100/percentile system with skills instead of classes, allowing you to customize your role on the team. Scenarios can focus on high-tech dungeon crawls, dangerous explorations, or faction-based intrigues. In other words, you can do just about anything with this game. You can even use "Save points" to backup your character's mind for functional immortality. All of this is detailed in the core Eclipse Phase rules, and then with Sunward, the setting is expanded with more detail about the inner solar system of the future.

Then if you pay over the threshold amount (just over $18 at the time of writing), you get the additional bonus collection as well. In the bonus collection you get: Transhuman (a player's guide with expanded rules on infomorphs, flexbots and other fun things in the Eclipse Phase setting that can be the "sleeves" for your character), Panopticon (expanded setting information, rules for uplifted animals and a guide to living in and being a part of space habitats), Continuity (a one shot adventure that can be used as the kickoff for your Eclipse Phase campaigns) and The Devotees (adventures about a new surgery technique that leads to the discovery of new antagonists in the setting). The retail price of the entire package would be $80, and you can get all of these DRM-free PDFs just for the cost of paying over the threshold amount.

One of the other cool things about Eclipse Phase really has nothing to do with the game itself. The publishers have released the game, and all of its supplements, under a Creative Commons 3.0 Non-Commercial Share Alike license. This means that fans can remix, transform and build upon the material of the games and share it (and the publishers have extended this sharing to themselves uploading their PDFs to torrent sites in the past) with others. Considering how some publishers have been in the past about fan material, this is definitely a step in the right direction for how game publishers treat their fanbases.

Christopher Helton is a blogger, podcaster and tabletop RPG publisher who talks about games and other forms of geekery at the long-running Dorkland! blog. He is also the co-publisher at the ENnie Award winning Battlefield Press, Inc.  You can find him on Twitter at @dorkland and on G+ at https://plus.google.com/+ChristopherHelton/ where he will talk your ear off about gaming and comics.

Christopher has a crowdfunding page to help raise money to defray the costs for going to the Gen Con gaming convention and cover it for his Dorkland! blog and Bleeding Cool. Please click here to go to the page and help out.

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