Eclipse Phase: X-Risks by juggalo baby coffin

Part 1

posted by juggalo baby coffin Original SA post

Eclipse Phase: X-Risks Part 1

So X-Risks is essentially a high-faluting monster manual for eclipse phase. Most of it is made up of the monster entries, here called 'x-risks', which means 'existential risks' to humanity. But because they called it that, they had to list a bunch of other existential risks for humanity that aren't specific monsters. The book is framed as a briefing document for Firewall agents, with a bunch of documents from other sources included in there that Firewall is using for their briefings.

The first little chunk is about how Firewall rates and responds to X-Risks, ie they try and stop them, clean up if they don't stop them, and rate the risks they detect based on severity and likelihood of happening. Then there's a list of stock, solar-system scale x-risks, such as:

- Aliens attacking
- A big war
- Even more AIs become gods and fuck up humanity again
- 'Physics mistakes'
- Gamma ray bursts
- Asteroids
- We're in the Matrix and it gets turned off

Basically if you ever read that Exit Mundi site back in the day you know what is in there.

Next up is a section of more in-depth profiles of the major threat groups: Exhumans, Exsurgents, TITANs, and the sadly underused Factors.

The Exhumans are guys who want to become gods, and the bulk of their profile is a transcript of basically an exhuman TED talk an exhuman activist was giving to a big crowd of monsters, which is a funny mental image. There are predator type exhumans who want to just chase and kill stuff mostly, there's exhumans who want to get super smart and turn into biological TITANs, exhumans who want to adapt to every environment (these guys don't seem so evil), exhumans called 'parasites' who 'exist invisibly in transhumanity' but it doesn't tell you what they actually do, and then finally exhumans who eat other peoples souls for some reason. Because the path to godhood is absorbing some guys dumb memories about going to the mall.

can't sleep exhuman will eat me

Exsurgents are a group of viruses (digital, physical, nano, visual, etc) that turn people into alien AGENTS OF CHAOS!!! This section takes the form of a briefing document given out by a clandestine TITAN artifact smuggling organisation to their new hires. Apparently most people in-universe think the exsurgent virus is just one virus, and that the TITANs made it. But it turns out it's a lot of viruses, and aliens made it! oh no! There's all sorts of variants, from the nice one that makes you psychic, to a nasty one that makes you grow crab hands out of everywhere like the guy at the end of the movie 'Lord of Illusions'. There's also one that just makes you a really big fan of exsurgents so you infect everyone around you with a virus so they can be cool. Also there's a billion sleeper agents etc etc etc.


The TITANs: SCIENCE WENT TOO FAR!!! AIs got too good and started killing everyone for some reason. Maybe they got infected by the space virus and that made them crazy, or maybe they were already crazy. There are accounts of TITANs fighting each other during the war, and signs of them just going insane in general towards the end of the war, just before they went dormant. Nobody really knows where they went, why they attacked, or even if they were all one team. There's no signs of the Big Daddy TITANs being around still, but there are weaker forks of the TITANs in existence, and they are very scary. The Earth is still crawling with TITAN machines, and people like to steal shit because it's fancy. Also there's this picture of a giant ape zordon?


The Factors are a race of alien slime-mold slug boys, who are cool and like to trade. Because they are completely under utilised and left in a corner, all the info about them is a mystery. They like to trade, they can combine together into a bigger boy, and they are very alien. People want to kill them for some reason, because people are dicks. Be nice to the Factors.

i think in this pic they are rescuing a fallen human from H.R. Gigertron's 'Big Space Pussy' art installation

There's other threats too, but the only really interesting one is the Space Mormons whose bible was written by the TITANs oooOoooOOOOooOOOoo. Even spookier they were a cult BEFORE the TITANs attacked, so it seems like one of the TITANs gave them advanced warning and got them off-world fast. Even even spooker they are run by fat dracula, and no the text does not tell you why he has one evil werewolf hand:

The other slightly interesting one is mystery AI angels who turn up to warn humanity of disasters. They might be good TITANs, they might not be, like every fucking thing else it is a mystery.

NEXT TIME: THE MONSTERS YOU WERE PROBABLY HOPING FOR IN THIS POST

THIS TIME SOME MONSTERS

posted by juggalo baby coffin Original SA post

ECLIPSE PHASE - X-RISKS - THIS TIME SOME MONSTERS

Ok one last thing before we get into the monsters. Instead of having like a challenge rating or a level these guys have a threat rating colour code. It goes Yellow -> Orange -> Red -> Ultraviolet, from least to most threatening. You'd expect that in that sequence the highest level would be Infrared and not Ultraviolet, but you would be wrong pal!

Also, while the pdf is free to download, they are actually selling all the images from the book separately, and so the pictures in the book are formatted so its really fucking hard to crop just the monster out neatly, so the pictures will look like trash due to me not wanting to pay 10 dollars for the 'hack pack'. Unless I can find a nice pic on google images like I did for some.

Barbed Eel

ba ba ba ba-ba barbed eel
Threat level - Orange

I wish there was something cool to say about this guy cause I think the picture is very cute, and this is the first monster of the book, but it's literally an electric eel from space. It lives on the ocean planet of Droplet, and it is an eel that is electric. Its powers are shock and bite. That is all.

Blister Beast

those teenage years are rough
Threat level - Yellow

This lively lad lives on the exoplanet of Echo IV. It's a neo-chimp-sized (I don't know why they couldn't just say chimp sized I think neo chimps are chimp sized also) space monkey, who like most monkeys lives in the trees and swings around with its pack of monkey friends. Where it differs from most monkey is the poisonous stinger tail and the defensive blisters that pop and release foul smelling poison goo when you hit them. They can also beat you super hard and knock you on your ass with their shovel-like tail.

Blister beasts, like most monkeys, are pretty territorial and will come and kick your freakin ass if you go in their zone, so don't go in there zone. You would have to put a lot of effort in to get to their zone, so you would look pretty silly to do that and then have to come home and tell everyone you got the turds knocked out of your ass by lively space apes with skunk-pustules.

Causapod

Threat level - Yellow

I like the Causapod a lot. They were created as part of a contest to see who could design the best brand-new creature (ie not just combine existing creatures) to live natively on Mars. The Causapod won, and became the subject of numerous 'Mandibular Crawdiddy' memes online. I wish the book showed what one of those memes looked like, but they don't. Their genetic code got released open source, and people started making their own variants, and they inevitably got out there and colonised the fuck out of Mars, and also any Mars-like exoplanets they got taken to. As you can see one of the chatroom-style quotes about it mentions that bright pink ones with anime eyes are canon.

The rules for them suggest adding random biological-type attacks to them to represent variants people have made, which is kind of neat. It's a weirdly cute monster and I think the artist did a good job in making a creature that, if it was real, people would want to make memes about. Crabs and lobsters are already popular in memes, and this is a crabtopus. They're missing a variant with a cyberbrain so you can sleeve into it and become one, though. Maybe put that in the next Morphs book instead of 13 slightly different apes.

Chrysacid


commander shepard finally got crabs from fucking all those aliens
Threat level - Orange

The first Exsurgent of the book, this is the crab-hand disease I mentioned in the last post. Basically you catch the disease, then crab hands start growing out of your body. First they're little crab hands, like the size of a real crab's hand, but with freaking mono-molecular blades on. They just kind of twitch and make a mess of your clothes and bed at first, but when you get to the next stage they grow into full size limbs sticking out of you, and these limbs have eyes. The text literally says the limbs are all on the lookout for people to pinch and infect with their pinching. When the limbs get long enough they take over locomotion and just drag the poor guy they're attached to around the place looking for buttocks to pinch.

Eventually you will have so many crab hands on you that you are all crab-hand, and then you break apart into a swarm of animate crab hands who scuttle around and hide in dark places, lying in ambush to jump out and pinch people. Here's a video of a man falling prey to one of these rogue crab hands. While it may seem seductive to get pinched by a crab hand, you don't want to do it, it will only end in tears.

Crab Hands: Not Even Once

Creeper

this is how it feels to chew five gum
Threat level - Ultraviolet

Creepers are evil, TITAN-spawned nanoswarms. They look like a bunch of black bubbles, but they can eat anything, build anything, they're smart, they can set traps or go invisible or fly or make legs so they can run at you super fast. They can hack computers, hack your brain, hack your normal-style human blood, or even turn into special matter that repels normal matter like a magnet repels same-polarity magnets. You may now be wondering why they haven't completely destroyed the entire setting with all these powers, and the book actually beat you to that question:

They are very reminiscent of the Inhibitors from Revelation Space, who also appear as weird black bubbles, and are made of femtotechnology, just like the Inhibitors are made of femtotechnology. Femtotechnology is just Nanotechnology but smaller, so you know it is more powerful/better.

One problem the vast majority of sci-fi doesn't cover is that actual nanotechnology would be very fragile. Think about how weak a single sheet of paper is compared to a phone book, and then magnify that difference in durability by a million. If you're made out of a handful of atoms you can get shaken apart by even slightly elevated temperatures, due to the fact that heat is atoms vibrating. The heat generated by a nanoswarm breaking down an object might raise the temp enough to break the nanoswarm itself. Eclipse Phase kind of acknowledges this here by saying the Creeper stays at 45 degrees centigrade regardless of its activity level.

It'd also be very slow breaking something down with a nanoswarm, even if the entire surface of the object or person was covered in nanobots, for the same reason it would be slow cleaning the empire state building with a toothbrush. Human bodies are made out of a shitload of atoms, and scraping away one-atom-thick layers would be a very slow way of breaking you down. Scratching an itch scrapes away an amount of cells it would take a nanoswarm hours to do.

I mostly include this here because this is one mistake that even 'hard' SF makes frequently. The idea of a big sentient cloud of hollywood acid is a good scary image, but it's not even in the realm of possibility. The right place for nanobots is in temperature controlled environments where they can work slowly, or in concert with larger machines, like inside a fabricator machine or the human body. The original proposed 'grey goo' scenario included the nanobots combining into larger disassembler and factory machines to make breaking down the Earth itself much faster, and to make making more nanobots faster. Nanobots who consume matter then build more nanobots from it are a threat you could beat with a hammer and some patience.

Defiler

original morph do not steal
Threat level - Yellow to Red depending on form

To follow up our first Exsurgent, here's our first Exhuman. Defilers are guys who literally wanted to be the Xenomorphs from the Aliens franchise, but were too insecure in their hetero masculinity to stick with the phallic design and psychosexual-imagery-based life-cycle, so they just sting people to infect them with offspring now, and look less cool. The original Defilers are human minds in monster bodies, but their offspring grow as parasites in the living or dead body of the defiler's sting-victim, then burst out as the little gribbler dude at the bottom of the pic. If they live long enough hunting rats as a gribbler they metamorphose into a full defiler, but one with a feral brain.

So if you run into a nest of these guys, don't be surprised if one of them suddenly busts out an AK and goes loud on your ass. The little gribblers are yellow threat, the feral defilers are orange, and the smart defilers are reds. All of them emit pheromones that make you really scared, but I guess they couldn't get the acid blood working so they just spit acid instead.

Dreadnought

Threat level - Ultraviolet
Another exhuman thingy, these guys are made by the Rortians. Rortians are exhumans obsessed with hive minds, and they also want to take over the pandora gate network and make everyone be hive minds also. That is all the info we are given. They use these big tank bodies to accomplish their goals, which are crewed with networked egos that were evilly made into a hive mind by the Rortians. I don't really see what is so complicated about this body that it would need a hive mind to drive, considering any normal human can go and operate an octopus body with only minor difficulty.

Anyway, it's a big tough tank robot with a shitload of guns and missiles and every type of fancy subsystem to fuck you up. It also inflicts damage on you if you try to sleeve yourself into it, because you probably aren't a hive mind.

I'm starting to think the hive mind thing is just tacked on to prevent players from stealing a cool unstoppable tank robot body.

Extractor

better metal snake
Threat level - Yellow

Back in the TITAN wars, the TITANs had a minor obsession with stealing people's egos. Egos as in their mind, they didn't just make everyone really humble or something. They had a cool way of doing this, which comes later in the book, and then they have these guys. They are evil centipede robots who are a meter long, and inject you with drugs then try to bite out your cortical stack, which as everyone knows is your brain backup drive. The extractors would bite it out, then swallow it with a cartoon gulping noise. For some reason their bodies can only store 12 cortical stacks, which seems like a weird thing to specify, and a weirdly small amount of storage space for a meter-long snake.

Their short legs somehow enable them to pounce really far, and they have deployable helicopter blades in case they need to fly around. You could do a funny storyline where a guy keeps one of these in a cage and lets it bite him so he can get high off its drugs, but they don't do anything like that in this book.

Factors

so cool hes smoking freakin weeeeed

Factors, like I said before, are the most wasted part of Eclipse Phase. They're cool and friendly slime-mold aliens who slug about the place, can change shape, combine together to form a mega-factor, or a bunch of other stuff. The Ambassador in the picture above is their attempt at looking sorta human for trade dealings. Apparently they evolved intelligence and teamwork so they could trick larger animals into traps and then eat them, which is apparently totally different to the reasons humanity evolved intelligence. In their trade dealings they try to get the most technology out of transhumanity, while giving away as little of their own information as possible. Again, completely different to humans.

It's weird that this part of the book is so bitchy about the Factors, given that in the lore section earlier on they made this joke:
The Factors are super interested in biotechnology, and bio-engineer themselves a lot. They're pretty far ahead of humanity in terms of technology, and could apparently curb-stomp even pre-Fall humanity in a straight out war. Which means they're being nice and trading for the sake of being nice and trading, they could just take everything by force if they were assholes. This could be explored more, but it isn't .

Here's a picture of their Gestalt form, which is ultraviolet threat level. Apparently transhumanity has never seen this form, so I have no idea why there is a man in the picture trying to flamethrower this one:


I saved the best Factor entry for last, and that is the Minikin. The Minikin are the Muppet Babies to the Factors' Muppets, and they are little dudes who split off from the big Factors to go and do little tasks they are specialised for. They are also adorable:


Factors are the best. Replace Eclipse Phase with Eclipse Factors and make everyone be Factors.

THAT'S IT FOR NOW

NEXT TIME ON X-RISKS: TITAN SHIT, A PLANE, AND REALLY DUMB PARASITES!

MO' MONSTERS

posted by juggalo baby coffin Original SA post

ECLIPSE PHASE - X-RISKS - MO' MONSTERS

Take two of this post, I originally wrote it a few days ago but lost it and was too annoyed to write it again straight away. If I lose this one this shit is getting marked as 'abandoned' on inklesspen's website.

Fetch

bitch i look like goku
Threat level - Ultraviolet

Fetches are delta forks of TITANs. A delta fork of a human would be essentially what a hall of presidents animatronic is to a real person, but TITANs have brains and personality to spare so even when they're super stripped back to fit into a robot goku body they're way smarter than any human. They were created for specific purposes by the TITANs, but since the TITANs went awol they've been kind of at a loose end, and have started to go a bit crazy as a result. I guess they mostly inhabit the space internet, and act as the evil computer from pretty much any 90s movie about virtual reality, but sometimes they sleeve into regular bodies. They carry the electronic version of the Exsurgent virus, which turns you into an animated purple gorilla and makes you steal credit cards so the exsurgents can buy porno and ketamine off the dark mesh.

As for abilities they don't really have anything special, instead relying on incredibly high stats, skills, and a ton of cyberware. They have 80s and 100s in a whole raft of computer and intelligence related skills, with a note to the GM to give them 80s in additional skills based on their mission. If they were a D&D creature the only place you'd find a stat sheet like this is in Deities and Demigods. It is kind of disappointing though that the closest thing the player will meet to an actual TITAN doesn't have any truly unique skills.

Flesh Party

there ain't no party like a flesh party, because a flesh party don't stop
Threat level - Yellow

The TITANs, being massive edgelords, unleashed a nano-plague that made infectees melt and fuse together with other infectees, turning the environment they were in into a level from Dead Space. Naturally though they weren't just dead fields of flesh, they were alive and sentient, because otherwise it would not be grim or dark enough. Flesh Parties were used as area denial and psychological warfare during the war, because nobody wanted to walk on melted down people. They're still alive, down on Earth, I guess because nobody gave enough of a shit to try and euthanize them.

Their main offensive power is to give the PCs a bunch of stress due to being gross and grimdark, but they can also puke acid. They have a 50 in deception skill, for some reason. There's also a variant infected with Psychic Disease, which is orange threat and much scarier. They're all also infectious with the nanoplague that made them, and if the PCs contract it it's gonna bring a whole new meaning to 'party unity'.

It's literally just Bio Apocalypse. Some of the exsurgents are actually creepy, but to me the flesh party is just trying too hard. Here's the actual pic from the book, it looks like a bunch of CGI strawberry jam.

Fractal

in the wild west of tomorrow, even the tumbleweeds are deadly
Threat level - Ultraviolet

This jacked-up tumbleweed is basically the same thing as the Creeper from the last post, in that it's a TITAN created nanotech machine that is super powerful and does what it wants. The main difference is that this one looks like a tumbleweed instead of bubbles. The Fractal's branches, as you might expect, split fractally and end in microscopic nanotech tips. It uses these to rip stuff apart and make other stuff out of it. Shooting them with bullets is a very bad idea because they just catch the bullets and eat them, then build their own gun out of your bullets and fire their own bullets back at you.

As well as being able to regenerate they have a power called invulnerable, which makes them take half damage from area weapons, and minimum damage from everything else. They also feign death when their hit points get low enough, and break apart into individual nanoswarms that start to rebuild the Fractal straight away. And if all that isn't enough, their other main gimmick is disguising themselves as other objects to lure people in.

I guess this is what you deploy when you just want to kill your players.

Fractal Troll

Threat level - Red

No, it's not what you call a GM who overuses the previous monster, it's some guy who got mutated by the TITANs to do... stuff.. for them. They're 2 meters tall, scamper around on their big crab hands like gorillas, and have two sets of weird little fractal hands. To make things grimmer and darker, they still have their minds intact, but are crazy due to years spent scampering around on their big crab hands. There's a little chat box in the entry with someone saying 'hey maybe we should rescue these guys and they could tell us what the TITANs were actually trying to do' and someone else saying 'heh be my guest pal'. The fact that there are humans out there with their minds traumatised-but-intact who had a direct line to the whims of the TITANs is uh really just kind of ignored by the rest of the setting.

In this universe having fingers that split off fractally gives you amazing armour piercing powers, instead of just having a bunch of really small fingers you can't even see that break off in the breeze. Their MO is to grab you with their big crab hands then go apeshit on your face with their little fractal hands. They're also immune to cold and vacuum conditions, but still have to eat, and the main thing they have to eat is dead-ass bitch-ass transhumans, so watch out!

The fractal troll is nicely weird and I like it, but like the factors before them nothing is really done with them. They're just a mook to fight, instead of being either a humanitarian rescue project or a super important source of intelligence on the TITANs. Eclipse Phase loves to do this JJ Abrams thing where they come up with a fantastic, weird setup and just don't follow through with it.

Freak

charlesy no! get outta my head charles!
Threat level - Orange

Freaks are basically the psychic girl from Firefly. They're asyncs (space wizards) who have been enslaved and experimented on by any given bioconservative bad guy faction. They're used as living weapons and found alongside squads of handlers, who have psi inhibitors and drugs to control the freak with. Overall it seems like a pretty bad idea to me, having a barely-controlled insane psychic as a weapon, but then again I am not a designated baddie.

Compounding the badness of this idea, they also wire the Freak up with random TITAN, Exsurgent, or Alien weapons they're too afraid to give to their regular troops. Naturally it is set to self destruct if the freak's vitals dip too low. This is really just the space equivalent of giving a chimp a gun, only this chimp is also a jedi. You would think the smart thing to do with a mystery weapon is to test it in a lab somewhere under controlled conditions, but again I am not a jovian or whoever.

The example TITAN beam weapon the freak is statted with is a powerful rapid fire laser weapon, that on a critical failure autotargets the nearest three people or machines and shoots at them with a higher attack skill than the freak itself has, then electrocutes the freak. Given that the nearest three people to the freak are likely to be its handlers, and that the weapon explodes powerfully if the freaks health gets too low, this seems like a very stupid idea.

Gut Eater

ooooh here he comes, watch out boy, he'll eat your guts
Threat level - Orange

Ignoring all biochemical barriers, and even basic biology as a whole, the Gut Eater is an alien parasite that infects a host via unknown means, then integrates itself into their body and grows a mouth and tentacles out of the host's belly. It does this because, uh, it has to eat prions in order to feed a yeast that the Gut Eater lives on, so it makes its host go and murder someone so it can eat their brain. Now, this makes so little sense it's insane. Prions are rare as shit, being misfolded proteins that make other proteins misfold, the chances of finding a brain with prions in to eat has to be one in a million or lower. How the hell would a creature that relies on prions to live ever evolve?

Look I uh can't think about this any more. Why would you not just say it eats neurotransmitters or something? At least all brains have those in them.

Headhunter

looks like HE'LL never be the head of a major corporation!
Threat level - Yellow/Orange

Flying buzzsaw drones who chop off your head and then steal it. I like these ones a lot, because the image of a drone swooping by and decapitating someone then flying off with their head to slam dunk it into a TITAN facility is very funny to me. They were a part of the TITANs' mass ego-uploading programme during the war, and there were a whole ton of variants of them, running the gamut from just headhunters with guns, to headhunters who puked up a special nanoswarm on crowds that ate everything but their heads, then came back later to scoop up all the heads on the floor. The chat box has a pretty funny thing about a giant headhunter who chopped the heads off neo-elephants.

In the years since the TITANs fucked off, the headhunters are still going. Some of the upload facilities still function, but others are shut down. The headhunters do not know this, and are just dumping the heads they collect in big rotting piles outside the closed facility doors. Apparently in the quarantine zones 'head hills' are a common sight, which makes you question exactly how many people are still going into the zones and getting their heads chopped off. It seems like it would have to be a lot.

The headhunters are one of my favourites from eclipse phase, even if they aren't quite as cool as the meat packing robot from numenera.

Hollow

slime time, bitch
Threat level - Red

Hollows are another interminable mystery monster. They're alien uh nanoplasma colonies, and their main deal is they melt people down and scan them as they do so, then construct a thin skin around their slimy body that resembles the victim. They're perfect mimics, as they take on the entire personality, memories, and abilities of the person they melted. Inside the goo is a hard diamond that stores the hollow's memories, and the only way to kill it is to destroy this diamond.

Unfortunately for the Hollow (and the reader), their habit of taking on different personalities has made them forget their origins and original personality, leaving them as a mish-mash of different personas and memories. Kind of like Daniel Day Lewis.

Anyway, they're very hard to kill or effectively damage, and they can cough up caustic smoke as a defense, in addition to having whatever skills their victim had. They're kind of interesting as monsters, the 'perfect doppelganger' thing is kind of a cliche in rpgs, but having a totally alien counterpart to the numerous TITAN-spawned nanoswarms is interesting. Even if they insist on not telling us anything about their origins.

Hookbladder

Threat level - Yellow

Hookbladders should be grateful for the existence of the Gut Eater, because otherwise they'd be the stupidest parasite in this post. They are alien jellyfish, who most of the time are basically harmless, but during mating season they gain the ability to jump 3 meters into the air using jets of water, then land on some poor dope's head. Like headcrabs they then take control of the poor dope's body, forcing them to kill others and pile up their corpses. Once the corpse pile is big enough, the hookbladder directs their host to lie down on the pile, where it strangles them, then explodes itself into eggs. Then the eggs hatch and eat the corpses, and the babies slide off into the water. THE CIIIIRCLE OF LIIIIIFE.

For whatever reason being parasitised by the hookbladder gives you the ability to survive in the unbreathable atmosphere of their homeworld, I guess the hookbladder acts as a living space helmet. You may question how this works, or why the thing is compatible with human biology in the first place, but there is a more valuable question here.

Neither this thing, nor the gut eater, can affect synthmorphs or robots. So why the fuck do gatecrashers ever go to alien worlds in a meat body? For a start they have way steeper requirements in terms of life support, and thus payload mass for a spaceship, than a robot body, but they also expose you to all sorts of horrible parasites. Also, how are peoples heads exposed to this thing on a world without a breathable atmosphere?

Hunter Killer

Threat level - Red

It's an evil plane the TITANs made. It has guns on it and it can fly. It's very boring, but at least it doesn't have some type of insanely dumb life cycle. It doesn't have to eat bezoars from one specific breed of cow to reproduce or anything. It just flies around really fast and shoots guys. It's ok.

NEXT TIME ON X-RISKS: SEVERAL EDGELORDS, SOME WORMS, AND [TRANSLATORS NOTE] KUMO IS JAPANESE FOR SPIDER

PART I FORGOT

posted by juggalo baby coffin Original SA post

ECLIPSE PHASE X-RISKS - PART I FORGOT - I'LL EDIT IN THE HEADER IMAGE LATER!

Sorry I've not done any more posts on this lately, a true homie of mine died irl and I have been channeling my sadness into becoming obsessed with Transformers again for some reason. Also this book just isn't as fun as the Numenera bestiaries. It has all the same OOooOOoOooOOOOooo MYSTERIOUS bullshit that Numenera has, but none of the whimsical stuff.

Speaking of which:

Iktomi Kumobot

translator's note: kumo is japanese for spider
Threat level - Red

So the Iktomi were a race of alien spiders who left ruins across a whole bunch of planets in the gate network, then vanished. Like all vanished aliens, they left behind extremely hardwearing technology that survived until some other race of adventurers found them. One of these pieces of technology is the spiderbot, which has a laser beam, and the ability to curl up into a ball and roll around really fast like sonic the hedgehog. Their limbs can detach and interchange with each other, leading humanity to naturally assume that the Iktomi could also detach their limbs and swap em around. You know, kind of like how we made our cars be able to change tires to mirror our own ability to remove our hands and feet (???).

One thing I don't really get is that, at least in humanity's case, the TITANs made/activated the pandora gate in the solar system, which led to the apocalypse. But the Iktomi left ruins on multiple worlds in the gate network. Did they not have any AI stuff to get infected by the exsurgent virus? The kumobot suggests they did have AI stuff. Did they survive and overcome their TITAN equivalents? If so what was a bad enough dude to make them vanish?

There are no answers to any of these questions, and nobody in the setting seems to give a shit about these questions or this other race of advanced aliens.

Immolators


Drone up top and mother below
Threat level - Orange

Because we can never escape the shitty Glory module, the Glory virus is here again. Patient zero gets turned into a big pile of pussies, now tastefully redone as a more classical gibbering mouther type creature, and the other infectees get turned into horned up alien fuck beasts. Their life cycle makes no sense. The drones all fuck each other, then inject the eggs into the mother, then when the mother has enough eggs it tries to crash into the sun to release the eggs on the solar wind to do.. something?

Why do they need to breed? In the real world sexual reproduction came about as a more effective way of combining advantageous genetic traits to help the species survive, but this virus rewrites your genetic code to be a monster man. What different traits do they have? Why doesn't the nanovirus just make a whole bunch of eggs inside itself to start with? Why all this rigamarole?

The answer is because the inventor of the Glory virus is a hack, and wanted to steal some of that 'psychosexual horror' from Alien, but did it very badly. This exsurgent strain sucks, glory sucks, and to remind us of the shitty module Tara Yu pops up in the chat bubble on the Mother picture.

Jelly

IT'S SLIME TIME!
Threat level - Orange

This is another exsurgent, and it's literally just a dungeon slime from any RPG you could name. They're made of acid, have tendrils studded with toenails (for some reason), and can change shape so you can't really punch them to death. I wish I had more to say but this is literally just a classic rpg slime. The picture is cute at least. There's also a variant that can disguise itself as objects and even people, thus duplicating the Hollow from last post, which is a much more interesting version of the same idea.

Killer Spambot

it looks like a tapeworm for some reason
Threat level - Red

The Killer Spambots were one of the actually more successful attempts at directly fighting the TITANs. They were designed to just completely DDOS the TITANs' server brains, which they did a good job at. They were also designed to be self evolving, and started doing stuff the designers didn't expect. Some even hijacked 3D printers to build robot minions to destroy TITAN assets in the physical world.

Now you'd think 'Damn, humanity actually managed to start fucking up the TITANs with their own creations, I wonder what happened next?'. The answer is nothing. The text just smash cuts from 'hey the spambots even started taking the TITANs to clown town IRL' to 'Some of the spambots are still around in the present day'. Because of being required to be a monster in this book, rather than an interesting plot hook, the spambots who are still alive have somehow lost the ability to tell the difference between TITANs and anything else. So they'll spam you, they'll hack your house, hack your toaster, hack your 3D printer, hack your mom, fuck your dad, and then make a robot to bite your dick.

The text doesn't say if the spambots are just constantly going around hacking stuff, if they lie dormant in disconnected server, or what. They are mysterious like that.

Land Anemone

it's like Speed 2 but on a bus!
Threat level - Orange

It's another bullshit alien monster. It's a sea anemone that lives in the forest instead. Aside from being called an anemone, it just behaves like a mimic octopus. It blends in with colour and texture, then gets you with its tentacles. It has a symbiotic relationship with little winged monkeys called Clown Sprites, who are cute but lure you into the land anemone because they're dickheads.

The Clown Sprite is not pictured.

Leftover Special

welcome to the edgelord block of this book
Threat level - Variable

I feel like these should be called 'leftovers special' not 'leftover special'. The first one implies a special made out of leftovers, the latter implies a special that IS left over. Anyway, they're twisted freakin sicko frankensteins built by the damn edgy exhumans because they're like the joker on crack and crime is funny to them. Apparently when you spend all your time trying to build a cool new body for yourself you end up with a lot of bits and bobs lying around, so the logical thing to do is make a frankenstein out of them. Most of the time these are controlled by a low level fork of the exhuman who built them, other time they put the ego of a victim in there to be freaked out, and even otherer times they just have an AI run it till the exhuman feels like hopping in the body to fuck with normies.

There's like 50 variants of this thing, I'll cover a few:

Limbwalker - The one in the pic, apparently these are built mostly to impress other exhumans or freak out exhuman newbies. If the newbie gets too spooked by it they get killed, like when a crime gang makes you do drugs to get in and its a problem for the undercover cop in a movie.
Spider Head - It's the spider head from The Thing, but with robot spider legs and full of explosives. Everyone loves suicide bomber enemies.
Freezer Trap - This doesn't really seem like a monster so much as a trap. It's an exhuman's victim strapped to an operating table. The victim draws in the player asking for help, but SURPRISE! their limbs were replaced with freezing bombs that go off and freeze the damn team! Classic.
Snack Bar - A prey animal body with the ability to rapidly regenerate so the predator exhumans can just hunt it over and over and eat its sweet flesh. Apparently the egos who get sleeved in these get told they can become a predator if they kill one of the other predators while in the prey body, and sometimes it's even true.

Those wacky exhumans sure are twisted, like the damn movie SAW on crack!

Mantis Worm

Threat level - Red

Mantis worms are little worms who live in space. They live together in a big hive, and when anyone gets near the water they shoot out of the hive like little torpedos and embed in people's flesh. Once they embed in your flesh they puke up a bunch of acid to melt you then they eat the melted you. Again, not 100% sure why anyone would be on an alien planet and not wearing some kind of armoured space suit. Maybe it's one of those situations like D&D where the rules can't really represent armour just making you 100% immune to certain levels of damage, so these little guys can just act like little anti-materiel bullets. The text says they have sharp, pointy heads, but the art shows them looking like wise catfish.

Neurode

i know what i want, and i want it now / i want you, cause i'm mister brain
Threat level - Red

More exhumans, these guys want to be the smartest guys ever, and they do it by making their brains really big or having a lot of brains. And it kind of works, I guess. They mostly attack through drones and other robot proxies, cause they can control a lot of them using their super smart brains. They're pretty weak in person, being a giant brain, but because they are geniuses they are always one step ahead. This is not represented mechanically, so I guess they are meant to be used like a sci-fi Acerak from Tomb of Horrors, ie the GM invents some horrible hell fucker of a dungeon and the neurode takes credit.

Now see if I was a really smart brain monster, personally I would put myself in one of the many giant robot bodies on the market, maybe even design my own really good one using my smart brain, then live like Krang from teenage mutant ninja turtles. That's like the best of both worlds. You could still have a whole network of drones and cameras and traps and whatever, but you'd also have an extremely killy robot to live in.

The little chat bubble sidebar says that although most Neurodes claim to have purged themselves of primitive human emotion, the most effective way to get one to make mistakes is to remind it of its pre-neurode life. Probably by calling it a bitch nerd and threatening to swirly it. There's also a thing saying nobody has ever heard of one successfully becoming a watts-mcleod psychic giant brain, BUT MAYBE THAT'S CAUSE EVERYONE WHO SAW IT GOT KILLED BY IT OOOOO!!!!

(the psychic giant brain is not statted)

Although I've made fun of the Neurode a lot here, I do like it. The idea of achieving singularity level intelligence biologically is cool, brain monsters are cool, the implementation is just a bit lazy. It gets no special skills, it just has high skills and high intelligence stats. You could swap the stats of the Fetch and the Neurode and it would make no fucking difference because neither have any unique powers, just a butt ton of skills.

I also don't get why only exhumans would want to push the limits of how smart you can get. There's the menton morph that is a standard body meant to be smarter, but if getting smarter is just as simple as daisy chaining regular brains or cyberbrains, why aren't non-evil people doing it?

Ny'knikinn

Threat level - Orange

So the TITANs, apparently having nothing better to do, fucked around in simulations putting animal brains in humanoid bodies to see which adapted better. The Freaking Epic Mantis Shrimp from the Oatmeal Comic Dot Com did the best for some reason, so the TITANs put their brains into the internet hyperbolic time chamber and let them evolve in human bodies for thousands of subjective years.

Then, in a thing cribbed directly from Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, the TITANs used endocrine response conditioning to teach the Ny'knikinn everything they needed to know, from hunting humans to making more of themselves. Then they set them loose into the real world. They also cut off their lips to be more scarier.

These guys are just the Reavers from Firefly with a more elaborate origin story. They rape and kill people, and steal certain bodies to put a ny'knikinn brain into. But beyond the fact they speak in radio signals and pheromones, they're basically just regular human barbarian types.

THAT'S ALL FOR NOW, NEXT TIME ON X-RISKS - YET MORE EXHUMANS, AND A BUNCH OF SHITTY ROBOTS!

THIS TIME IT'S BOO-URNSONAL

posted by juggalo baby coffin Original SA post

this should give me time to bash out the rest of X-risks at least. speaking of which...




ECLIPSE PHASE - X-RISKS - THIS TIME IT'S BOO-URNSONAL

Predator

the text on this pic is worth reading
Threat level - Red

This is basically a 'generic exhuman' stat block. The predator is kind of the archetypal exhuman, a survival-of-the-fittest dickhead who just pays for his fitness. It's one of the more believable things in the book, because it would be primarily rich dickhead kids who would do this stuff if they could, it's the same demographic as trophy hunting is in real life. Hunting the 'deadliest prey' without any real risk to yourself. Like the chat bubble says, the main weakness of the exhuman body is the brain inside it.

Not a super interesting entry in lore terms, mostly because we've already covered exhumans extensively, but useful for representing a wide-range of predator-type guys.

Puppet

i dont think you can do the cool neck snap move on robots
Threat level - Variable

Puppets are humans reprogrammed by the TITANs. They're not exsurgents, they are more subtle than that. They're used for a variety of things, from full on covert ops, directing entire nations as leaders, or just being a janitor with a backdoor in his brain that makes him lock the door on you when you're in danger. A lot of them don't even know they're sleeper agents. The problem with this entry is the two stat blocks it gives (Sleeper agent and elite agent) are just regular characters. There was basically no point giving them stats, because being a TITAN sleeper agent is more of a story element than a statistical one. I don't know what purpose listing 'Behavioral modification: Awareness block' on a stat sheet has, but they did it. You could just take any NPC and then say they're a sleeper agent. I don't think the player will ever get to look at the character sheet to see that it says they're one.

Self-replicating Nanoswarm

Threat level - Ultraviolet

So uh, this is the exact same thing as the creeper. Remember how I said the fractal was very similar to the creeper and seemed redundant? Well, at least the fractal was a different shape. The nanoswarm is exactly the same as the creeper, even down to its powers being basically 'does whatever it wants'.

Shifter

how can you hug your kids with knifeclear arms?
Threat level - Red

Shifters are an exsurgent, but this time instead of being fleshy, it's a robot! This is the type of exsurgent virus you can catch if you're a synthmorph, so don't think you can go tapdancing around Earth just because you're a robot. It will get you, and it will turn you into the T-1000. The picture is kind of misleading, according to the description they mostly use their mimic powers to impersonate other humans, then only make weapons when they're revealed. Unless that shifter in the pic was impersonating a famous robot with knives for hands. Statistically it's just a synthmorph npc, but with the power of mimicry, and a superior version (twice as fast and more sophisticated stuff) of the Shaper morph's abilities.

Again, it feels kind of redundant. This is the third mimic monster in the book, and the second exsurgent mimic monster. At least this one isn't also made of acid, and can turn its hands into guns.

Skitter

Threat level - Red

The creeper was a femtoswarm, the nanoswarm was a.. nanoswarm, and now the Skitter is a microswarm. These are lil bug bots who go around in big groups being fuckers. They have blinding laser beams (to blind you with), toxin injectors (which make you hallucinate, which is mechanically represented by placing your character under GM control lmao), and 'sabotage', which just lets them fuck up mechanical stuff and people faster. They also have an ability called 'Harry', which involves them 'clustering around eyes and orifices', so enjoy having a sabotage bug crawl up your asshole.

I am looking forward to the impending milliswam, swarm, centiswarm, and megaswarm.

Skrik

they really muddled this concept by having the pic be an infected novacrab
Thread level - Yellow

Skrik is both the name of the exsurgent virus strain, and the little bastards it produces. Infectees experience no outward physical changes (apparently), but are mentally subverted (but it does not say how). Every few days they puke up 2-6 mini versions of themself, sometimes with small variations based on environment (wings, claws, stingers etc). These mini versions aren't sapient, but can use tools (???). Once they're puked up they run away and hide, forming secret nests like an evil version of the Borrowers.

I like the idea but it doesn't go into anywhere near enough details about these things. It doesn't tell you what the infectee does, it doesn't tell you what the lil babies do, it just says they are evil and make nests.

Later on in the back of the book, there is an entry for rules for the skrik virus (and some others) which says that infectees try and spread the virus by catching the little guys they puke up, then putting them in other peoples meals!? "Oh hey tony, made you some noodles, ignore the little guy in there, it's just for decoration". Wouldn't it be easier to spread the virus by just having them be regular infectious like a common cold or something? Why bother with the little guys if they're just there to get cooked?

Slouch

Threat level - Red

Slouches are alien robots with claws and gun turret shoulders. Their main goal in this life is to take control of the pandora gates and prevent people coming through. To do this they set up traps and defenses, and proactively hunt down and fuck up anyone who gets past them. Some people have seen them excavating alien relics on some worlds, for unknown reasons. Most people think they are some type of TITAN robot, but they aren't. In fact, any time the slouches do meet TITAN stuff, they completely take the TITAN shit to clown town.

One of their turrets is a laser, and the other is a tractor beam that can push or pull. They like to do a neat trick where two slouches team up to tear something apart with their beams. To maintain their mysteriousness they carry little bombs inside them that go off if they are disabled or tampered with. This means nobody knows if they are AI controlled, remotely controlled, or even just actual aliens in synthmorph bodies.

Personally I think they probably have the right idea trying to stop humans from messing up the whole gate network, and I wish them the best.

Smart Mines

Threat level - Yellow

Smart mines are real dickheads. They're designed to cripple, not kill, so they will grab onto you and calibrate their explosive payload to blow off or cripple a limb. Then they wait for your comrades to show up to help you so they can ambush them too. The description even says they do medicine on you so you don't bleed out, but the stat sheet does not represent this ability at all. Apparently they will also torture you if you are too stubborn to call your friends, but it doesn't say how. They seem over-engineered as shit to me.

The most twisted thing of all is that while most people think they are TITAN inventions, the truth is that it was really MAN ALL ALONG WHO INVENTED SMART MINES!!!!

Snapper

he's trying to eat the text box! stop him!
Threat level - Red

These are the big daddy versions of the extractor snake from earlier. They're formed from synthmorphs infected with yet another TITAN nanoplague. Their main gimmick is that instead of walking normally, they are so flexible and so covered in legs that they just roll around in a really fucked up confusing way, like they are constantly falling down the stairs. They're pretty crude, most of them just attack by being a big metal snake and biting people, but others are equipped with railguns.

I guess its another titan robot thing to throw on the pile, if the little version is too weak. This one does not have the power of stealing your cortical stack, however. It will just roll on you till you die.

THAT'S IT FOR NOW CAUSE I'M REALLY SLEEPY, NEXT TIME ON ECLIPSE PHASE XRISKS: MORE TITAN ROBOTS, AND SOME ALIENS FROM VIDEO GAMES!

I REGRET DOING THIS BOOK AND NOT NUMENERA BESTIARY 2

posted by juggalo baby coffin Original SA post

ECLIPSE PHASE - X-RISKS - I REGRET DOING THIS BOOK AND NOT NUMENERA BESTIARY 2

this time round we've got some bullshit. I've spent a lot of time trying to find interesting stuff to write about 'its an alien dog', but there just isn't anything, so if it's an alien dog i'm going to say so and leave it at that.

Stalker

get out of here stalker
Threat level - Ultraviolet

According to the text this is basically meant to be a TITAN praying mantis robot, but luckily the artist decided to do something more interesting. Beyond the obvious spiky limbs, they have inbuilt plasma weaponry, an infrasonic emitter that gives you a shitty debuff that makes you nauseous, and deployable chain-tentacles that they whip around like 50s greaser gangs. They also have a bunch of stealth shit because they are the secret assassin robots.

The little chat bubble says that these things were responsible for killing the british and saudi royal families during the Fall, so who says the TITANs never did anything good?

Stinger Hound

Threat level - Orange

Evil alien yoshi. Their tongue has a stinger on the end, and they gang together and inject you with space novocaine till you're paralysed. Humans, by pure coincidence, emit the exact same pheromones as the hounds' favourite prey animals, so that is the excuse for them to attack you all the time instead of behaving like real predatory animals. I still don't know why nobody in eclipse phase wears armoured space suits. It's gotta be tiring getting stung by different aliens in your tit-window.

Switchwing

Threat level - Yellow

Meter-long alien flying scorpion who attacks you all the time for no reason. Its got claws, mandibles, and a stinger. Its got one set of wings for speed and another for maneuverability, hence the name.

Think Tank

johnny five is alive!
Threat level - Ultraviolet

It's a big tank robot that the TITANs made and it's also really smart and has the biggest guns in the world. It has a deflector field which is totally hard sci fi because they said 'electromagnetic' and 'capacitor' in the description. There is nothing else interesting about it, it just exists for the pun.

Veiled Leech

did i already say 'get out of here stalker'?
Threat level - Yellow

This is literally just the bloodsucker monster from STALKER, down to having cthulhu face, feeding on blood, and going invisible. The only difference is this one is smaller, weaker, and has gliding wings. It's also an alien, which makes everything worse. It's got a specific diet of blood, but apparently any type of blood will do, even blood from a completely different planet with a different biochemical makeup. This would make a lot more sense as an exsurgent, but then it would be even more of a ripoff of the bloodsucker, because the bloodsucker is already a mutated human.

Void Crawler

Threat level - Yellow

Controversially I actually like the void crawlers. They are little geneticaly engineered boys designed to live in microgravity environments. Genetically engineered... BY ALIENS dun dun duuuuun! The weakest part of the entry is it doesn't actually tell you where they live, apart from 'in beehive warrens carved out by unknown aliens'. Carved out of what? I'm guessing big asteroids, but it doesn't say. There's not really anywhere else that is low gravity and carveable apart from asteroids. They can also make their own tunnels in open areas, using their hardened doo-doo. They eat fungus (which is probably also bioengineered) and can survive in low-oxygen environments indefinitely, and even vacuum for a few hours.

I don't know where they get the oxygen in space, but just roll with it. Their radially symmetrical bodies let them scamper through tunnels really fast, and they have two powerful tails to hold themselves in place. Bizarrely they are infected with the Watts-MacLeod psychic virus, but they only use it to link minds with their friends, trick intruders into leaving, and learning how to operate complex devices. They live in big packs and are capable of tool use, but it doesn't say how sapient they are. They like to collect odd things, and sometimes use their psi powers to get humans to do strange things, but it doesn't say what kind of strange things.

I like these little peaceful space boys. They are speculated to be a pet species that outlived their creator, and has evolved since their creators race died. They're like a combo of a pack animal, a hive insect, and magpies, which is very charming. I hope they do well.

Vydra

Threat level - Red

Vydra, the hydra from space! The artist gave it a pussy! I don't know why! It's just a big animal from space that attacks you, it doesn't have any type of head growing back gimmick. It's an ocotopus that decided to lie upside down and get ideas above its station. Get outta here, vydra.

Warbot

warbot, the bot who wars
Threat level - Red

I like the art on this one, I think it's fun, but the entry is very boring. It's an evil AT-ST from star wars, made by the TITANs, who has tentacles as well as guns. Statistically it is just the Think Tank from like 3 entries ago, but with the numbers reduced a little bit. The writers even knew it was boring, because this one comes with a huge chat bubble telling a story about how Sicko TITANs used to chain civilians to the warbots as living armour so people wouldn't want to fire at them, and how it was super traumatizing.

It also shows how basically useless the threat levels are, because this robot with reactive armour, rocket launchers, laser beams, and full auto railguns is rated as being the same threat level as the 'several lively snakes tied together' Vydra from the entry above.

THAT'S IT FOR NOW! NEXT TIME ON X-RISKS - THE FINAL CHAPTER: LOTS OF TENTACLES, A HAPPY BOY, AND A RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS SONG

FUCK TO THIS BOOK

posted by juggalo baby coffin Original SA post

ECLIPSE PHASE X-RISKS - THE FINAL CHAPTER - FUCK TO THIS BOOK

I started this book almost blind, I had skimmed it before and looking at the pictures it looked like a cool book. I was expecting these monsters to be a more positive contrast with the huge amount of dross in the Numenera bestiary I did.

I was very wrong.

Not only does this book have an EVEN HIGHER dross:good stuff ratio, it's also much more depressing than Numenera. At least Numenera had a sense of whimsy about it. It also doesn't help that the Eclipse Phase system, or maybe just how these monsters are made, means that the only difference between a PC and a godlike shard of a TITAN is the number of skill points they have. It's not a fun way to do things.

That said, there are some guys I like in this post! Look out!

Wastewalker

SSSSSSSSSMOKIN'!
Threat level - Orange

If you see a cool mask in the quarantine zone, don't touch it! It will make you put it on, and once you put it on you will go from a nebbish loser everyone picks on, to a zoot-suited, green-faced, cartoon trickster. Or, well, that was what they did in the 90s. Now to fit in with the grim cyberpunk future, you get tall and skinny, and your skin turns into polymer armour. You do at least get a hump on your back with some mini-smokestacks that can spray out disassembler or assembler nanoswarms, which I assume is how you accomplish your cartoon style hijinks.

Unlike most exsurgents, these guys are still fully intelligent, talk to each other in radio noises, and have a tribal structure out there in the wastes of Mars or Earth(hence the name). There's usually a boss wastewalker in each tribe, and everyone else does what they say. Which is mostly hunting transhumans and small animals to eat. It sounds like a pretty good time, no rep score, no hypercapitalism, not a phone in sight: just guys bein' dudes.

Whiplash

feed me seymour
Threat level - Yellow

It's grimdark weepinbell from pokemon. It climbs around in the trees of some alien world using its root tentacles, then ambushes dudes and eats them with its long-ass tongue. That is all. The most interesting thing about this guy is that in the book of bodies for EP there is a body based on this thing, so you can be a cool plant guy.

Whipper

i wasss onsssssce a maaaan
Threat level - Yellow

This is a strain of the exsurgent virus that turns you into the thing in the picture. Then you scuttle around on your tiny little legs and whip stuff with your deadly, deadly tentacles. They constantly, eternally whip their sharp tentacles around like its meatspin dot com up in here. It seems like maybe one of the most useless things you could turn someone into, compared to all the other exsurgents, since when guns exist your tentacles are much less useful. I guess that's why it's threat level yellow.

Wild Artificial

bro you shouldnt eat at mcdonalds their burgers are wild artificial
Threat level - Orange

Uuuh so according to this entry there are enough wacky anarchists on Mars releasing robots into the wilderness, either by carelessness or as art projects, for there to be a 'booming population' of rogue robots. Now I recognise this for what it is, Eclipse Phase, this is just an attempt to reskin a generic wolf as something more interesting! Well it won't work on me, pal!

They do at least list a few variant traits you can give them, like one that spits freezing goo, one that is an escaped smuggler bot which has stealth and hidden compartments, one which suicide explodes (great) and some others. The best thing about this entry is the chat bubble, which tells the story of someone actually trying to do the 'paperclip maximizer' thought experiment, so there are just packs of robots out there turning everything they can eat into miles-long chains of paperclips.

Wrapper

it's SO HAPPY!
Threat level - Yellow/Orange

Now we're talking! This is my favourite guy in the book, and that is 90% down to the art. It is a big jolly starfish that drops onto your head and eats it. Pretty much exactly a classic D&D monster, except this is an exsurgent, so that happy starfish used to be a man. If I could be one exsurgent it would be this guy or the wastewalker. They can't digest artificial stuff, so they just barf up any cortical stacks they swallow, which means they have a small ecosystem of extremely lazy TITAN robots hanging around their hunting grounds, hungry for those stacks. They can't get enough of those stacks!

The chat bubble has a guy getting mad people keep deleting his edits to space wikipedia where he is adding the 'mind wrapper' variant which has psychic powers and puppeteers the bodies of people it drops on. Everyone else is telling him its not real, but he is adamant that it is. The entry confirms that it is real, btw, which is why this entry has two threat ratings. It would be fun to be a giant happy starfish with mind control powers, imo.

Xenosampler

banned from every surviving Costco
Threat level - Orange

Is what it says on the tin. It's an alien drone that samples things. It's forgotten how to get home for whatever reason. Firewall doesn't know it exists, which kind of fucks up the framing device that this book is a Firewall reference document, good going on that. Ya blew it. It's got a freezy-cone attack, a taser, a sampling needle, and one of those poles they use to catch stray dogs with, the one with the hoop on the end.

They're not really hostile, and are wary of sentient life, but have still come into hostilities with a gatecrashing team for some reason? The book doesn't say why.

Zombie Crab

Threat level - Orange

Not a crab that is a zombie, but a crab that creates them. Zombie crabs like to scratch you with their claws, then let you go home. Little do you know, you are infected with a disease. An infectious disease that spreads to your friends. It makes you stupid, and really hot, not sexy hot but temperature hot. That means you wind up seeking water to cool off in, and guess who is in the water? Zombie crab.

Genius. Zombie crab is the investment banker of the ocean, reaping its deadly ROI.

I like the art for this guy a lot, it looks like a magic: the gathering monster or something.

Zephyr

https://can
Threat level - Red

Zephyr's are the whale-sized apex predators of an artificial ecosystem on a gas giant world out there in the pandora gate system. That's a pretty cool sentence. Aliens apparently built a whole custom ecosystem that could survive in a world entirely made of gas, and it's a pretty cool idea. I don't necessarily know how likely the average player group is to go to a gas giant, given that there's only really gas there, but I guess you could make up a story about some type of ship being marooned there with valuable data or whatever.

It's main power is its size, it can easily swallow you whole or drag you away into the infinite sky with its two tails. It's a fairly simple adaptation of a big ocean predator type to a gas giant, but the backstory is cool enough that I like the Zephyr. It's not an exsurgent, it doesn't have a stupid lifecycle, and it looks cool. Keep on truckin', Zephyr!

THAT'S ALL FOLKS, NOW HOPEFULLY I HAVE LEARNED MY LESSON AND WILL NEVER DO AN ECLIPSE PHASE BOOK AGAIN

The back of the book has rules for about 3000 diseases and minor critters, but there are no cool pictures so it is too boring for me to cover.