Eclipse Phase – After the Fall
This book is an anthology of 15 stories set in the world of Eclipse Phase, a pen and paper style RPG.
Before you get to the first story, there is a brief overview of the setting. It’s a bit of an info dump, but you can always come back to it later. It’s useful information that helps frame the world though, but if you’re already familiar with the game, you can skip ahead without missing anything.
With 15 different stories/authors, there is easily something for everyone in this book. There were a few that jumped out at me as instant favourites that I’ll definitely read again.
Spiritus Ex Orcinus was a great story for getting a sense of what it’s like to be an uplift, especially an uplift in a humanoid body. I’m going to be recommending this story to one of my players.
Interference is a story that is in one of the game books, and I’m glad to see it reprinted here. I liked the story when I first read it, and still do. It’s an interesting look at what we’ll do to for a cause, and what the human mind can handle in this transhuman future.
Stray Thoughts was a story I really enjoyed. The lead protagonist is a kick ass lady detective, and damn, I wish there was a whole book of her. The characters in this were really interesting, and I cried near the end. (Yep, on the bus, like usual.)
Lack is another story that was in one of the game books, in this case the core book. When I first read this story, it left me with a lot of questions about the world and what had happened (and why) in the Fall. It was a great introduction piece for the game. Muses and Resleeving are shown in ways that make it easy to understand how these things are a part of regular life.
Nostrums was an adventure and I could almost hear it being narrated by a pulp narrator. Interesting characters of many species and a great example of how different parts of Firewall work together (or don’t).
And that’s just a small portion of the stories in this book. I left it feeling like I wanted more to read, to write some myself, or to kick my gaming group in the butt so we could finally get some play of Eclipse Phase in. (Well, all of the above really.) I hope this book does well enough that they’ll consider doing another. And soon. I got my copy off iBooks, but it’s also on DriveThruRPG, and Amazon.