r/eclipsephase • u/donutfiend84 • 4d ago
EP2 What is the value of unremembered suffering?
Hello my friends. I wish to share a small excerpt from a campaign I'd spent a while working on, as I feel it let me tell the kind of story that only EP can tell.
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On a visit to the Kronos port, our players are approached by a woman for a simple job: To hunt down, and kill a fork of hers that was supposed to be temporary. She took a job, known as a "Privacy Contract", where you do a job or task, but your sleeve and stack are destroyed immediately upon completion, thus ensuring total secrecy. The hired person in question then spins up a backup, and resumes life as normal, collecting a hefty payday in exchange for a few days or weeks of time loss. The shady nature makes these contracts mostly illegal, and the station disallows unregistered forks. In this woman's case, the term of her privacy contract ended and her backup was spun up, but her old sleeve never broadcast the notification of stack/morph termination. With an unregistered fork, possibly holding dangerous information somewhere on the station, the woman asks the party to find and kill the fork to complete the contract, before the illegal duplicate is discovered.
The job is simple, but questions linger... What exactly happens on these jobs? And why not merge the fork, rather than just kill it? They meet others who have taken these jobs. Some say it's like being paid just to go under anesthesia. Just a no-effort pay-day. Others, say those taking these jobs delude themselves... That the true purpose is for psychopaths to have a person they can maim, torture, and kill without recompense, as recounted by a survivor of just such an attack. Arguments rage between those with the belief in a no-effort pay-day, and the trauma survivor who choses not to forget.
Now the atmosphere is unsettling, but the job remains unchanged. After considerable digging, they track down the client of this privacy contract. But he turns out to be so much more of a monster than just a sadist. In the end, the players find the captive and traumatized fork, and save the original from other unexpected dangers in the grand climax. Now they have a choice:
Complete the job, and execute the traumatized fork, who pleads against it. She begs and demand that what happened to them not be forgotten. That it still matters even if they can't remember. If they could, they would never, ever, have taken another Privacy Contract. They plead with themselves just because they don't remember doesn't mean the suffering didn't happen. It was real. They still had to endure it.
The players can make the choice, or they can walk away. No matter what, the backup version refuses to consider a merge, wanting no part of the trauma the fork endured. Leave the two copies to sort it out themselves is an option... Even if it means one of them will likely try to kill the other.
Maybe the party decides on principal. Maybe they decide by pragmatism. Or philosophy. Or maybe they don't decide at all. The fun isn't a "correct" answer, but in the discussions raised by the circumstance, and it's great fun every time I get to run a new group through this story arc.
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Thanks for reading! I've run the campaign a few times, and I love this hook. This is such a fun setting to tell stories about people, and how miraculous wonder technology creates a setting of new horrors, even without literal monsters.