Durability. Security. Buyers remorse. These are the perils players face when selecting their new body in Eclipse Phase. The Morph Recognition Guide will help you find the right body for the right job.
The Set-up
Eclipse Phase is a game with a lot of fine moving parts. I won’t go over the details again for the setting, but it’s worth noting the signature element of the game in my opinion, which is to say the concept of the Morph. Transhuman characters in the game need not be human in form any longer. Players can be animal uplifts (intelligent animals), can opt for full synthetic bodies, mixes of both, or even extreme new things that have never before existed in biological evolution. This leads to a plethora of options. The Recognition Guide covers all of them.
Just skip to page 62. You want to be a Gorilla. We all do.
The Good
Much like editions of Dungeons and Dragons in the past, these Morph options are spread throughout various sourcebook volumes. While great from the point of view of getting some more money out of the fan base, it makes for difficult bookkeeping when volumes are shared or missing. Sometimes you just need everything at your finger tips. The Morph Recognition Guide solves that problem – and scores Posthuman Studios another couple bucks.
In this volume, you’ll find everything you need for morphs up to the point of its publication. It combines the options found in the core book and all current supplements (Transhuman, Panopticon, Sunward, Rimward, and Gatecrashing) into a single volume. Additionally, the book offers all of the accompanying rules you need for Morphs as well. Rules for resleeving, continuity, alienation are all reprinted here as well for convenience. It even has the basics for the resleeving industry including acquisition and rental systems for Morphs, as well as rules for cheap knock-off and specilized variants of popular Morphs.
I suspect making a knock off of this morph miiiight get you dead.
Looking through the book, it’s incredibly thorough (and well designed – it feel like reading the old Street Samurai catalogs from FASA), and will act as an incredibly useful tool in terms of centralizing the data on Morphs.
The Bad
I am all about creative companies and endeavors making some duckets, but I found the price on this a little high for a PDF. At fifteen bucks, you’re looking at gaining material you may have already bought (I certainly had all of the books the material drew from). This could probably benefit from a lower cost – around ten dollars would have seemed more reasonable for a retread. There’s also no physical copy available yet – though this is not uncommon for the good folks at Posthuman. They have a good system in place in which they weed out publication gremlins and release print-on-demand when they’re confident the product is ready.
The Sum-Up
Ultimately, this book is going to be super helpful in setting up my test group games. A single volume containing all the Morph information is essential. With six books to juggle between, the centralization should make this an easy, pass-around-the-room guide when it comes time to generate characters, and super helpful when players get fragged and need a new case. I’d recommend this compilation for anyone serious about playing the game.
Accept no substitutes.
Available in PDF Format; Publisher: Posthuman Sturios, LLC; ; Authors/Artists: Various; Released: July 14, 2014; MSRP: $14.99
Note: This review is based on product purchase at rpg.drivethrustuff.com
