Eclipsearama - Paul J. Cook

PAUL J. COOK

Backstory: Pre-Fall, Paul lived in the New York Archology, firmly entrenched in the middle class. He had dreams of being a daring space explorer, but lacked the aptitudes for it. Working as a courier, he delivered a package to a Skinthetic facility working on a next generation Hibernoid morph. Due to a mixup, the Skinthetics assumed he was a volunteer for the beta testing. He was backed up, transplanted into the hibernoid, where the morph was placed in stasis, and sent to a satellite where he'd be revived in a decade. During that time, the Fall happened. A few months ago, a salvage vessel heard the "come get me" automated signal and investigated. They picked him up and attempted to sell him into indenture. He escaped and eventually found his way to Mars, where his last living relative, Professor Falkenstein, lives.

Falkenstein originally figured to give Cook a harmless desk job at Pandora Express, but on reviewing the bioscans and hearing Cook's story of how he got to Mars, realized there was more to Cook than he appeared. Something happened to Cook while in hibernation. He shows signs of being exposed to the Watts-Macleod Exsurgent virus. However, the only possible time it could have happened was while he was in hibernation, which is a mystery that the Professor wants to solve. Cook does not know of this, and simply thinks that he's lucky.

Role on the Team: Paul is something of a generalist, assisted by his uncanny luck.

Personality: Paul's a pretty easygoing, happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He's surprisingly adaptable, considering he went from a pre-Fall existence to a dangerous post-Fall career exploring strange new worlds. Of course, that's what he wanted to do all along.

Eclipsearama

So, I've recently become a fan of the Eclipse Phase RPG. The premise of the campaign setting is that humanity was on the edge of the Singularity. Nanotech replicators were becoming commonplace. You could upload your mind into computers, and then download into new better-than-human biological bodies. Octopi and other animals had been uplifted to human intelligence. There were still some bumps in the road, but the sort of techno-utopia some folks dream about was on the way.

And then these self-improving AIs went absolutely insane. And we're not talking "hey baby, wanna kill all humans" crazy.  We're talking the full on Call of Cthulhu, Great Old One, soul destroying reality warping crazy. And then they left through these possibly alien portals to parts unknown and haven't been seen since.

So Earth's a smoking ruin and the refugees are scattered across the solar system on colonies we'd made everywhere from Mercury to beyond Pluto.

The default assumption is that PCs are members of a secret society called "Firewall" that makes sure that "transhumanity" doesn't get wiped out.

So after listening to the Role Playing Public Radio Actual Play Campaign "Know Evil" I was totally hooked on the setting. The rules seem pretty straightforward, and there's a FATE conversion in development that's going into playtest this summer.

But I wanted to play with the actual character creation rules and I was going to make the cast of Firefly but someone already did it.

So then I thought, what about Futurama?

My initial idea was that the team was a Firewall Cell, the Professor was their Proxy and the "Pandora Express" was just a cover for them. Then I thought it wasn't really a good fit and instead threw away the Firewall connections. Don't get me wrong, they are Gatecrashers, and that is not a job for the faint of heart. These guys have a lot more on the ball than their counterparts onscreen. But Firewall is a meat grinder, and what I was writing was moving the characters so far away from their original conceptions that it was only connected in a "see what I did there" way.

So here's the core idea. In the theoretical game, the Professor in an NPC who owns and runs "Pandora Express," a scrappy little Gatecrashing supply company. They're not the guys who go through the gates first and get eaten by exo-threats. Pandora Express takes these guys supplies. Their primary vehicle is a GEV, "The Pandora Express", but it is modified with what is essentially a tow hitch for when they have to haul larger amounts of cargo through gates. Of course, due to nanofabricators and such, they rarely need to haul large cargo. More often, they carry plans or data back and forth through the gates.  Additionally, they often ferry unique artifacts back and forth.

Professor Herbert Falkenstein (PhD, Mars University) is a Professor of SCIENCE at Mars University. He spent a long time in the public sector at Omnicorp, but a bad experience led him to abandon his career and return to academia. He was one of the initial consultants when the first Pandora gate was discovered, and is considered to be an expert in many fields. However, his cantankerous personality (including his refusal to resleeve into a new body until this one finally breaks down) have diminished his reputation somewhat. He formed Pandora Express as a way to supplement his income and further his experiments.

Notes: The Professor has a rival on the faculty of the University of Mars (Professor Vernon Wormwood), and was once in a relationship with Dr. Margaret O'Malley, his former boss at Omnicorp and eventual chairman of the board of the Pathfinder corporation. He is sleeved in a basic synthmorph with only a few basic modifications.

Role: The Professor isn't a PC. He's the quest giver NPC. As such, I haven't bothered to give him stats.

{Side Note: Certainly Gunter the uplifted monkey and his clone/child are viable side characters. Cubert was slow-grown so probably doesn't have the problems the Lost do. He's a jerk, but he's not psychotic.}

Where Has He Been?

So I guess that the dual punches of MWP losing the Marvel license JUST DAYS before we'd have gotten the second Annihilation sourcebook, which would have given us official stats on the Guardians of the Galaxy AND that Cartoon Network decided that Young Justice wasn't moving enough toys kind of threw me off my game.

And then I got some freelance projects that took up my spare time.

And then I sort of just let things lie fallow because I didn't know what to say.

But I'm back now and I'm going to try to update this blog semi regularly.

First up, some Eclipse Phase stuff because that's my new crack at the moment.