Eclipse Phase “Think Before Asking” Chapter 1: The Question in the Box

On the drifting scum swarm Failance Recourse in orbit around Saturn, three Firewall sentinels are pulled out of their chaotic lives for a job that feels too big to be real. Vector, a forked infomorph tech; Nila, a hardened jack-of-all-trades with militia experience; and Maxine, a ruthless mind-hacker and psychosurgeon, are briefed in a surreal VR art gallery by their proxy, “Maestro.”

Their assignment: follow the faint trail of an antimatter device with a quantum-entangled trigger—an impossibly expensive, impossibly dangerous weapon that passed through Hicks Landing Station months ago and was last traced to their very swarm. With only partial scans, a suspicious old shuttle called the Lando Lando, and a pilot with capitalist leanings in a post-capitalist society to go on, the team begins pulling at the first threads: reputation networks, traffic control logs, and old contacts who may know more than they’re willing to say. As they plan their first moves, it becomes clear that even asking the wrong question in the wrong place could get them—and everyone around them—killed.

About the Chronicle

Think Before Asking is an Eclipse Phase scenario (originally written by Anders Sandberg and adapted to second edition) run on the scum swarm Failance Recourse, a tangled mass of salvaged habitats drifting around Saturn. In this story, the player characters are Firewall sentinels embedded in a lawless, reputation-based society full of experimental morphs, illicit tech, and fringe philosophy.

Firewall suspects that a quantum-triggered antimatter device—capable of being detonated instantly from anywhere, by someone who can never be traced—has been smuggled into or through the swarm. The chronicle follows Vector, Nila, and Maxine as they navigate scum politics, shady pilots, and fragile social networks, trying to locate the weapon, understand who built it, and decide what to do with something too dangerous for anyone to own. It’s a mix of investigation, social engineering, and transhuman horror, steeped in Eclipse Phase’s trademark questions about identity, power, and how far you go to stop an existential threat.

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