New season for Eldritch Sigils is on. This time we will play in the end of the 22nd century where the PCs are member of the organisation trying to keep the reality from shattering. It’s less than hundred years from “now” but Cyberpunk (as a time and style) is still a thing in the past and that means some changes in the way things work. And during the first session we had an interesting conversation about transhumanism.

THIS is actually my cup of tea.

Now I am first to admit that scifi is not really my cup of tea. I do enjoy even a mediocre movie once in a while but I have never been enthusiast about it. I consider this to be a good challenge for me as a GM. And I like the fact that my players are welcoming this new era and are keen on expanding it by participating the narration.

This time around I thought I had finished all of the playbooks before the season began. Naturally I was wrong and will still need to make changes. One of the main reasons for this is balancing the characters now that a new kind of playbook was introduced to the mix.

The Invisible is an Artificial Intelligence character that resides in the Cocoon – Cocoon being what the Internet is called after covering the whole world and people’s entire lives. The Invisible has the power to upload itself to different robotic frames. Yes, very Eclipse Phase, but that was what we wanted to dabble in.

Mikko was excited about this opportunity. He created an AI that studies the eldritch mysteries from the point of view of an artificial entity. Then he introduced his character as a robotic spider capable of climbing on walls. Though I think it was his way to introduce the character rather than actual superiority game-wise we delved into discussion about allowing such a character.

Since other playbooks were created before we even had a concept for the Invisible, some of them might feel lacking. This is just bad design from my part and I will address it before our next session in a fortnight. But as a subject of gaming it is one of the best ones.

I mean why would humans even want to digitise their minds if it would make them inferior? Sure, there might be individuals that want to be/feel special.

This wasn’t originally something I had in mind for the campaign. I even wrote a small war against a rogue AI in this seasons history to explain why there weren’t that many replicants and terminators running around.

But from this rather small point rose a totally new perspective for the whole campaign. Will the mankind of this campaign world eventually abandon their physical bodies for the sake of artificial once? And who do the actions of the player characters influence the first steps of this possibility.

Since the humanity (and the sins of our fathers) has been the main theme for this campaign I am actually surprised and a bit disappointed about myself for not thinking this at the first place. Now that has been brought up by another player I am going to embrace this question.

I think this season has a great potential of being one of the best yet.