Eclipse Phase: Brain Soup

You are immortal, thanks to digital backups and copies of your mind and vat-grown bodies to inhabit, but does that make you a person, or just software?

Eclipse Phase is a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic transhumanist game set in the Sol solar system, removed from the surface of Earth. The timeline begins after a World War III project to create artificial intelligence went rogue under the influence of an extraterrestrial entity known as the "Exsurgent" (best described as an organic computer virus with the capacity to infect both machines and animals with sapient qualities). The AI project, codenamed TITANs, was infected and subsequently wiped out 95% of humanity in an orgy of nuclear, biological, chemical and nanotech weapon exchanges, causing the rest to abandon Earth in favor of space-based habitats, moons, and other planets. The TITANs forcibly copied minds and then fled the system but the threat of them is ever-present.

Eclipse Phase has a lot of influences. The Reference page in the main book is packed with movies, fiction and even non-fiction titles, such as Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, other RPGs like Shadowrun and Traveller, and movies Blade Runner and Event Horizon.

Oh, and it's free. Here's the PDF for the main book http://robboyle.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/ps21000_eclipsephase_3rdprinting1.pdf All the other supplements are also free but they have versions with hi-res graphics and/or audio for $5 on DriveThruRPG and you can even buy hard cover print editions.

The fine folks over Role-Playing Public Radio have done a few EP one-offs as well as an awesome campaign that is currently at 11 sessions. You can find links to the Know Evil campaign and some of the one-offs in this thread at the the EP forums: http://www.eclipsephase.com/rppr-actual-play-eclipse-phase