New player looking for an online group

How do you play on running the show? Skype? Text-based?

If you don't mind it not real time, I run a pbp group with a few other guys over on www.rpol.net . Unfortunately there's normally a bit of a lag between accepting players, because we have more players than GMs, but we're always open.

I've never used Skype but I am down for giving it a try. I certainly don't mind talking.

I'd also like to be a player first, before attempting to GM. I've read the whole main book minus the gamemaster section at the end.

Long term though I'd like to be a GM, after I have a good feel for the game.

I have a problem with GMing, since i was ever the GM in every Eclipse Phase game.
And playing with english native speakers, certainly has its kicks (my motherlanguage is german, but i am a avid speaker/writer of the english language, so there's no problem there).

So Voicechat would be no problem for me.

Another important question is timezone. Something i totally forgot to check and which could complicate live-playing a lot (except i lose my job, then bets are off).

I suggest we exchange contact information, so we can discuss things in private and maybe sometime live.

As for egocasting, it depends on the character, but i have no problem with it, if i know about the "heavyness" of egocasting, since i won't design a character with "deep" roots locationwise.
A scavenger campaign could be interesting.

Skype would work fine for me too. I'm on CDT, so it's right around 7PM as I write this. I'll put up some contact info once I get Skype set up and pick a username. Schedule-wise, what days work best for people? I'm free evenings Monday through Thursday, usually I get home around 7, and I'm awake until midnight or so. Is there a four-hour block in there that works for everyone?

Drat. Greenwich Mean Time here.
Skype name is chaki-chan. The full username would be "Dr. Unpr. Nekr." etc etc

Alright, so we are playing sometime between 7PM and midnight UTC-6 time (US central time), somewhere between Monday and Thursday. We look to have scummer, Extropian_Knight, sinhound, possibly one of sinhound's friends, myself, and GreyBrother sadly at UTC+1 (unless he(?) becomes unemployed). We are planning to use Skype, with a diceroller plugin. Skype also has a file transfer system, so we can exchange visual resources like maps if I ever manage to make any. Cool beans.

As for what type of game, we seem a bit up in the air. If everyone would list me their top three favorite science-fiction movies, authors, books, comics, video games, youtube clips, anime, etc, that would give me a better idea of what your sci-fi expectations are.

Random last thought: what do you think about podcasting game sessions and posting them on the Darkcast site? If not that, then I was thinking of writing up session summaries to post on the forums. We could get some good feeback that way, and all the lurkers could enjoy telling us how we're doing it wrong.

LMAO. I love that line of thinking. I didn't really have anything planned, I just wanted to see - if it came down to it, if the concept deemed it necessary - what your verdict would be.

Just to chip in - podcasting/writing session summaries and putting them on Darkcast or here sounds awesome. I would definitely read/listen to them.

Good luck with your game guys.

My favorites three at the moment would have to be:

-Vernor Vinge (author)
-The Sarah Connor Chronicles (tv show)
-Sunshine (movie)

Another question before we get started on character building: Who is your favorite antagonist (from any setting), and who is your favorite protagonist (also from any setting)?

I'm thinking that we will be playing somewhere around Mars. Any thoughts or preferences on that?

Definitely gonna have to second scummer with the John Crichton one (Though definitely the him from later seasons that's acclimated to their existence and isn't a blundering fool). Really though, any hero with just the right amount of insanity works for me (Mal Reynolds, for instance). Granted, they only really work if they've got other people on the team to balance them out... Honorary mention to Anti-Heroes, though.

As for antagonist? Well, the ones that think they're doing the right thing. Taking from Farscape, Scorpy would fit the bill pretty damn well. I mean, Staleek and Grazya were just kind of.... there, and Bialar was way too - understandably - revengy (I gotta give it to him, though, he was a much better hero than he was a villan). At least, that's the antagonist that I identify with most. Of course, the antagonist does have to have a bit of mystery surrounding them or where would the fun be?

And yeah, I can be good with Mars. Granted it's not like you're stuck there after we get into it. Wherever you feel you have a story you'd like to tell... just... take us there, you know? I mean, you've gotta be having fun, too. Personally, instead of what we like, you should be asking us what we hate.

So did this ever get off the ground? I'd be interested.

So is there still room for another player in all of this? I'm not sure what everyone else is comfortable with player count wise but I thought I might ask. If nothing else you can put me on some sort of waiting list.

I think i have to officially resign. Timewise, i won't get unemployed (which is good in a way, since i can eat and stuff) and second do the timezones really f*ck this up if we'd be going at it in a live-chat manner.

I know the EP rpol.com game has that going on. Its more or less a sandbox game if I am thinking of the right one. So a group of players say they want to play, a GM says cool lets go and they play in the same universe as the other gms.

We could coordinate with them and add to their list of people that want to pbp, I personally like it, and create a new list for people that want to do live gaming, which I am also interested in.

All that being said I am going to answer those questions from earlier:

Top 3: Pandorum, District 9, Soft Apocalypse
Protagonist: Sherlock Holmes from the most recent British series, not the American film
Antagonist: The evil monkey from Rise of the Planet of the Apes, forgot his name. I know he really wasn't an antagonist in that film but I don't like him as an antithesis to Caesar.

Hate: I absolutely hate technophobic scifi like the outer limits, the most recent ones as I have not watched any of the earlier series, and the idea that Dresden Codak is parodying in his comic 'Caveman Science Fiction'.

I was entirely taken by Pandorum and I still think that the hand crank station was one of the most amazingly utilitarian device I have ever seen in any piece of fiction. Or reality really. I think it partly has to do with the fact that it completely surprised me, I was going in for a kinda campy jump-happy space horror and found an interesting psych horror instead.

Yeah I don't mind dealing with the Jovians either, although I still do not like them. Technophobia gets people no where. Techno-pragmatism or techno-realism are ok though.

When was the patternmaster series written? I haven't heard of it and the character you mentioned sounds very interesting.

Azlinea,

The Patternist series was written between 1976 and 1984. The books were not written in chronological order with regards to the story (Butler went back and filled in gaps, wrote prequels, etc). Wild Seed is the best place to start. It's the fourth book, but the earliest point in the story.

You'll often see the whole thing anthologized as Seed to Harvest. Check it out

When they anthologized it, they put it in chronological order and I think it reads best that way. If you could only read one, definitely read Wild Seed. In my opinion it's the best written.

Don't even get me started on too many books. With the Borders down the street liquidating everything, I'm buried in them right now!

What character concepts do people have so far? Are we interested in Firewall agents, struggling hypercorp personages, singularity seekers, some twisted mixture of transhumans struggling against the immortality blues, Barsoomian revolutionaries? I have a number of ideas brewing, so knowing your character concepts a bit will help me to plan.

Well, I've got a few... One's an OSC/Scum (Real name [Redacted], Alias: H1v3m1nd) who has a large focus in programming, robotics, and electronics. Obviously, he has most of the nanoswarms (Protean, especially), and one of those shrouds that protects the person's identity. There's a lot more to the background, but that's the basic concept and I don't want the other players knowing everything yet.

The other is similar, but different, Uplift/Argonaut basically based on Lexington from Gargoyles.

There are a total of 3 GMed games going on right now in the RPOl EP forum, and it looks like most of them are nearing completion (which means soon more openings) probably within a month or so, one or two might have openings to replace players who've dropped out, and there seems to be a fourth one that is petitioning for players with the idea of starting soon.

Eclipse Phase: A Time of the Eclipse on Roleplay Online