Looking for: 1 more player Game System: (Modified) Eclipse Phase Time Zone: Europe Language: English Voice coms Playing once per week, whole evening Starting 3rd week in September About the game: Rho Cassiopeiae is an original setting, but heavily influenced by Eclipse Phase and to a lesser extent Stars Without Number. The system we use will be a modified version of Eclipse Phase. Player's Guide, character creation system and game system written by myself will be available as PDFs. Currently there are over 30.000 words in the player's guide alone, so you should enjoy reading if you want to join our game. My hope is that the setting will be appreciated by the players so that I can run several campaigns in it. The playstyle will focus on role-playing over min-maxing, and story over combat. There will be no strict tactical combat with hex grids and tokens. Having fun with the story and being creative will be the main focus of our game. There will definitely be "action", but mostly as a way of progressing the story, so do not expect any random dungeon crawling. Further, people who lean towards hoarder-style play will be disappointed with this setting as one of the main features is "sleeving"; moving your mind from one body to another. Therefore it will be hard to include the massing of material possessions in any relevant way. I have written the campaign in such a way that it allows the players lots of opportunity to go off on tangents and explore the world as they want, while (hopefully) giving them enough structure to always have a clear main objective. I always think of the games that I run more as cooperative storytelling than gaming. We will be playing once per week (3-4 hours normally), European time zone, and the language will be English. I hope to have everything done for the game by early September. Here is the introduction to the setting (for anyone familiar with Eclipse Phase and Stars Without Number, you will notice a lot of similarities, which is also telling for both how the setting and the game system in general are). We had achieved more progress than ever before. With exponentially accelerating technologies, we reforged our bodies and minds, casting off sickness and death. We achieved immortality through the digitization of our minds. We acquired the means to build anything we desired from the molecular level up, so that no one need want again. Yet our race toward extinction was not slowed and in fact received a machine-assist over the precipice. The first expansion came by way of the enigmatic “spike drives” that granted humans the ability to skip between stars. The spike drive touched on different worlds. It folded the tissue of space and time and pierced it to emerge at distant stars, but the space between touched in turn those who travelled it. Over the course of generations, this subtle influence started to reshape us. The resulting condition became known as “Interspatial Cognition Disorder” or “ICD”. At first it was thought to only affect those who were not mentally stable enough for interspace travel. So, the expansion continued, reaching out into the solar neighbourhood and beyond, as humanity slowly transformed into something else. When causes of ICD became clearer, new efforts were made to develop alternatives to the spike drives. Not since the first expansion had all of humanity shared such a fervent dedication to a single goal. The jump gates were arguably the most ambitious project ever undertaken by our species. These gigantic structures took centuries to finish, required enormous amounts of energy, and were each manned by thousands of engineers. They were capable of near-instant transportation from system to system and would eventually connect all the core worlds together in a great web. Spike drives were deemed defunct and became relegated to the frontier; to the distant systems that could not yet afford to build gates. As the yellow hypergiant Rho Cassiopeiae went supernova, an interspatial pulse of unimaginable violence erupted, washing over the whole of known space in seconds. Billions died as ICD either fried their brains or burnt a pathway through their sanity. The immediate shockwave of heavily irradiated atomic particles showered nearby systems, turning cosmic bodies into spacedust. A little further away from the epicentre, entire ecosystems soon succumbed to the onslaught of gamma rays and ultraviolet radiation. Finally, as the delicate infrastructure that supplied the jump gates crumbled, the core worlds found themselves cut off. Having become reliant on resources from the frontier to sustain their enormous populations and to fuel their vital technologies, they all eventually fell. Those lucky few that managed to make it out brought with them tales of horror, starvation, and frantic warfare over shipyards and orbital factories. The decades that followed saw unnumbered human worlds fighting to survive their sudden isolation. Some slid into barbarism or worse, their planets unable to support a starfaring civilization. Some worlds lacked metals, or fossil fuels, or any one of countless other vital ingredients for maintaining their industry. Now, a century later, humanity is scattered like dust among the stars. We survived, but only as a patchwork of desultory collectives. Human space is a vast canvas of mystery to most. The grand history of humanity’s golden age has been lost and the broken relics of a former day litter the skies around us. Existence seems to most to be without direction or meaning. Some say, however, that the end is just a beginning of something new…