Paparazzi!, the card game of Trash-Celebrity Culture:
and Eclipse Phase, the Roleplaying Game of Transhuman Conspiracy and Horror:
Upcoming Games from Catalyst Game Labs and Posthuman Studios
EP looks fun. I can’t wait to read more.
I would really like to hear more about Eclipse Phase. What makes it transhuman? I can imagine conspiracy, but how does the horror fit in?
Any other place we could get more info?
Paparazzi? Yet another cute board/card game to fill store shelves. It may be worth a look depending on how off-color the humor is.
Eclipse Phase? Kinda reminds me of that game with the talking virus. The troubling thing is the whole RPG part. I’ll be waiting to see more, but I’m not enough of an RPG guy to salivate much. Seems like an excellent premise for a board game though…
It may be worth a look depending on how off-color the humor is.
That doesn’t say much. Would it be better if it was more off-color, or less?
Eclipse Phase? Kinda reminds me of that game with the talking virus. The troubling thing is the whole RPG part. I’ll be waiting to see more, but I’m not enough of an RPG guy to salivate much. Seems like an excellent premise for a board game though…
While EP could be translated into a few different board games, as the core the concept is very character-centric and much more aligned with a RPG-style game. That will be much more clear when more information is posted.
What is Catalyst Games thinking with Paparazzi!? The gaming industry is suffering, due to the downturn in the economy and they are going to gamble on a game that has absolutely zero appeal for your average gamer?
Stick with established brands and take on risky projects when you can afford to!
Sticking with established brands worked oh-so-well for a previous game company that you’re probably familiar with… 
Paparazzi! isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but there is value in having different games that appeal to different people, just as there’s value in having a certain amount of crossover. Appealing to “gamers” is sometimes less important than appealing to “people who play games.”
Feedback from retailers and distributors about Paparazzi! has been very good. Is it a risk for Catalyst Game Labs? Absolutely, but taking risks is an important part of growing any company.
Ya know, you guys had me at “Battletech”… That being said I’m looking forward to these new projects. An irreverent card game? May not appeal to everyone but I’m sure I can find a beer and pretzels audience at a party. A sci-fi game that focuses on character role-playing? No shortage of those out there, but there is always someone looking for a new universe to play with. I promise I’ll give ‘em a shot. Who cares if my CBT people don’t want to play Paparazzi and my Paparazzi people don’t want to play Eclipse Phase, as long as I can find somebody to play one of those every week I’m in gamer nerd-vana.
Ya know, you guys had me at “Battletech”…
And we’re going to have plenty more of that, too…
I don’t suppose you have a mailing list or something that I could subscribe to for updates on “Eclipse Phase?”
Or, I don’t know … an alpha tester …
runester — I can probably sneak you onto the playtesting team. Drop me an email to my company account, adamjury at catalystgamelabs dot com, and tell me a little bit about your gaming group, how many players you have, what sort of games you enjoy, etc — I’ll get it in front of the right person. Cheers!
Hey everyone, just wanted to pop my head in and provide some extra info on the upcoming Eclipse Phase game. This is a game that I’ve actually had in the works for awhile (over 2 years) but that has just come into active development in the past half-year. We’re still in the final draft, playtesting, and dev-editing stage, but it will be out later this year.
The game has a post-apocalyptic, post-singularity transhumanist setting. It’s influenced a lot by sci-fi by authors like Richard Morgan, Charlie Stross, Ken Macleod, Alistair Reynolds, Bruce Sterling, and Peter Hamilton. It’s a bit darker than Transhuman Space, and while we do try and stick close to a hard science approach, it does include things like psi and wormhole gates. It takes place primarily in the Solar system, with a few extrasolar colonies and opportunities to explore beyond via wormholes gates.
There’s an emphasis on backing up your mind and downloading into new bodies of different types (biological, synthetic, or mixed), allowing for character “save points” as well as optimizing your character’s abilities for specific missions.
Here’s some of the sell sheet text:
Humanity stands on the cusp of a new age, with accelerated technological growth converging toward a singularity point, promising an undreamt-of future. Despite the ecopocalypse and social upheavals on Earth, humanity has conquered the solar system and partially terraformed Mars. Advancements in biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and cognitive science have transformed our lives. Everyone is wirelessly networked with the world around them, AIs process vast amounts of information, and nano-fabrication enables people to “print” complex devices from the molecular level—at home. Biotechnology allows people to genefix, enhance, and clone their bodies, while others pursue body modifications to adapt to new environments or make themselves into something no longer quite human. People’s minds and memories can be digitized, uploaded, transferred over long distances, and downloaded into new bodies (biological or synthetic). Death has been defeated—for those who can afford it.
From within, disaster struck. Transhumanity reaped the rewards of its arrogance when a group of military AIs known as TITANS achieved full sentience, autonomy, and rapidly began exponentially incrementing their own intellectual growth. The AI intelligences spawned by this hard-takeoff singularity quickly turned against transhumanity, enveloping the system in unprecedented levels of violence, disaster, and warfare. What began as a struggle between man and machine escalated into a whirlwind of conflict between political factions, revolutionaries, and hypercorps.
In less than a year, transhumanity was nearly wiped out with nuclear strikes, biowarfare plagues, destructive nanoswarms, infowar attacks, mass uploads, and other unexplained singularity events, ripping the superpowers of old to pieces. Our planetary home—Earth—was transformed into a toxic and strange hellhole, while many major habitats were left frozen sarcophagi in the vacuum of space. Just as quickly as they came, the TITANS disappeared, taking millions of uploaded minds with them, leaving behind a network of wormhole gateways. Known as Pandora Gates, these poorly-understood devices allow instantaneous teleportation to distant star systems—often one-way and/or fatal. Though only a handful of Pandora Gates are known to exist—each highly contested—the foolish, brave, curious, and desperate are already risking certain death to enter and explore what lies beyond.
In the aftermath of the Fall, transhumanity lives on, divided into a patchwork of hypercorp combines, survivalist stations, transhuman faction species, and city-state habitats. Under the oppressive police states of immortal inner-system oligarchies, advanced technologies remain highly restricted, and refugee infomorphs are held in virtual slavery or resleeved in robotic bodies and forced into indentured labor. In the outer system, rebel transhuman scientists and techno-anarchists struggle to maintain a new society—from each according to their imagination and to each according to their need. And on the fringes and in the niches lurk networked tribes of political extremists, religious fanatics, criminal entrepreneurs, and bizarre posthumans, among other, stranger, and more alien things …
Though most claim the Fall was carefully orchestrated by the out-of-control TITANS, others whisper that the driving powers behind the wars—both AI and transhuman—were infected by a mutating virus with multiple infection vectors—biological, information, nano—dubbed the Exsurgent virus. Whatever its source, this virus has been known to sometimes transform its victims into something unexplainable … something monstrous and reality-altering. Whatever the truth, the remnants of the TITANS and this virus were left to the desolated ruins or driven to the edges of the system, where they remain hidden away in dark corners, quietly waiting to infect the minds of the scavengers and explorers who find them …
The game system is a simple d100 variant, optimized for quick resolution so people can focus on the setting more than mechanics.
We’ll have a website up soon at http://eclipsephase.com. Feel free to post questions, but I may wait to answer them over at the forums we’ll have on the website.
[...] (RPG.net has a thread about a new game called Eclipse Phase - “a game of transhuman conspiracy and horror”. [...]
Eclipse Phase sounds VERY interesting, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about this one…
I’m very interested in Eclipse Phase. Looking forward to it.
Eclipse Phase looks very interesting. I have all of the THS material from Steve Jackson, but it would be nice to have a different take on this idea. It looks like you’ve found one. I saw the art at our local game shop, but no more than that. When can we expect to see something more solid?
Catalyst Game Labs will be launching a site for EP in the near future, and there’s a bunch of discussion about the game going on in this thread at RPG.net: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=394144
Is there anything you’re particularly interested in learning about EP?
For anyone who hasn’t seen, the EP dev team has started a blog while we work on the full site for the game: http://eclipsephase.com/blog/
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Talkin’ About is the weblog of Adam Jury — it focuses on his career in the hobby game industry and his interests of Apple computers, graphic design, professional wrestling, and general internet dorkism.
Adam is 28, and still manages to be invisible when turned sideways. He works for Catalyst Game Labs as the head of Media Design & Production; managing their print production and online operations. He’s contributed in some way or form — graphic design, layout, writing, editing — to over fifty products in the hobby gaming industry. You can reach him via email at adam at adamjury dot com.
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