You may have noticed: this webpage has a bird.
I’ve been using it as my online avatar since 2017, and now that I’m expanding my usage of it here via my new blog, I wanted to take a moment to highlight it’s origins: it’s an artistic rendering of a Blackbird “Synthmorph” from the creative universe of Eclipse Phase.
Eclipse Phase itself is a wondrous tabletop roleplaying system from the folks at Posthuman Studios. It explores a world in which earth has been overrun by malevolent AI-based life forms, scattering the surviving human population amongst the many worlds and moons of the colonized solar system. In this chaos, and due to a lack of ships, many were forced to abandon their bodies and download their minds into advanced computer archives, a technology now common. They now sleep, awaiting the promised availability of replacement bodies (“synths”) to which they hope to download and resume their corporeal lives. Due to a lack of resources, and a certain amount of neglect, that time still has not come for many. Meanwhile, a small percentage of the human population is already awake, readily taking advantage of the ability to slip in and out of interchangeable bodies at will. With the ability to backup, and even fork one’s mind (or that of others’) the very nature of the human condition falls into question.
It’s an exceptionally thought-provoking scifi setting which may leave you as unsettled as you are entertained. I’ve had a memorable campaign in the system, one in which I was a snippy robotic blackbird. The very same as my avatar.
Beyond the allure of it’s lore, perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of eclipse phase is their license: CC-BY-NC-SA, a variety of the Creative Commons Non-Comercial Sharealike license. That’s right, their rulebook, compendiums, and all associated artwork are, essentially, open source. As allowed by those terms, I’ve adopted my old character’s morph (with a few cosmetic touchups) as my avatar. With any luck I can help spread awareness of this neat work of interactive fiction. Not to mention it looks damn cool. 😎
Oh yeah, and the moon, silly me. I took that with my Lumix 30x optical zoom. I thought the bright regolith made a nice contrast with the dark feathers.
Anyways, I’m always looking for someone to play with, so if you’ve got a group that would be interested in giving the system a go, send me a message on Twitter. 🙂 (link up there on the top right)
Skyoptica's scratchpad 