Behind The Scenes: Strangers at the Door - an Eclipse Phase campaign setting

This is an Eclipse Phase campaign setting/PDF release I pitched to Posthuman years ago. They didn't bite and I eventually took some parts of it for my EP campaign, Duality.  

Strangers at the Door: A Jovian Conspiracy Alternate Setting

Overview: The Jovian Republic prides itself on the purity of its citizens, guarding them from corrupting technology and knowledge. But a conspiracy of exhumans within Amalthea threatens the entire habitat. Calling themselves the Strangers, they have found the Jovian Republic a perfect site for their work. The Jovians hate Firewall yet their own internal defenses are no match for the bleeding edge covert technology and async powers the Strangers use to keep themselves hidden. Each of the Strangers has assumed the identity of a normal citizen, including some of the habitat’s leaders. Only a group of disparate citizens has begun to realize the truth. Stopping the exhumans in a police state without being mislabeled as terrorists is a daunting task at best, especially when they don’t know who is human and who is a Stranger at their door.

Themes: Strangers at the Door could be described as Delta Green/Hunter the Vigil meets 1984. Paranoia, fear and desperation are the watchwords for this campaign. The player characters are citizens of a police state with few rights and limited access to transhuman tech that Firewall agents take for granted. The monsters they hunt down pose as normal people but possess inhuman power and will stop at nothing to keep their secrets. The only real weakness is their need to stay hidden from the government as well. Unfortunately the player characters can’t go to the authorities because some of them are Strangers or work for them, knowingly or unknowingly. Even the normal authorities will think the PCs are insane or terrorists conducting memetic warfare if they tell them a cell of exhumans is operating inside Amalthea.

The Conspiracy: Amalthea is the perfect laboratory for the experiments of the Strangers. While they wish to perfect themselves, they have realized that transhumanity will not let them achieve their goals in peace. Organizations like Fireall and Oversight destroy them whenever they are discovered. As a result, the Strangers wish to turn Amalthea into a sanctum for exhumans. This plan is extremely complex, involving many smaller plans and goals and each Stranger has a personal agenda as well. But their goal is to subvert the Jovian government on Amalthea and they have already partially succeeded. Agents of the Strangers are scattered throughout the government in low and high places. Most are unwitting pawns, controlled by psychosurgery, puppet socks and psionic manipulation. A few are willing lackeys, as they want to strike back at the government or merely want more power for themselves.

The Strangers: Only a dozen or so exhumans infiltrated the habitat, but each one is a unique horror. As obsessive self-experimenters, no two exhumans are alike. Thematically, the Strangers will act more like vampires, pod people, or Slender Man than ‘typical’ exhumans or exsurgents. They can pass as normal flats or splicers if they need to but each is a dangerous killer. A few examples:

Slender Man: A long limbed man in a dark suit with no face, the Mortician is an async with psi-epsilon level powers. He stalks the bee hive warrens under the main city, subverting the habitat’s infrastructure through nanoswarm manipulation. His powers make him invisible to biomorphs and those that see him through remote cameras tend to disappear.

Neighbor: A skilled impersonator and actor, Neighbor jumps from identity to identity with ease. He’s also a serial killer with inhuman predatory skills and implants and cannibalistic urges. He hunts down potential threats before they can hurt the conspiracy.

Archivist: A living ego repository and ego bridge, Archivist harvests as many souls as she can for later use. She can swallow a cortical stack to download an ego or read a mind with her experimental ego bridge implants. Once she has a soul, she can torture them in a simulspace hell or edit their minds to become a slave to the Conspiracy.