The journey has come to an end. There is only one mission left: to defeat Manjappa. Warden, the Promethean AI, has sent the Firewall team to Mars to track down and confront Manjappa, the author of Know Evil. Manjappa isn’t willing to go down without a fight though. Can they survive the final battle and even so, what will happen to them after the mission is completed? Everyone must face up to the decisions they’ve made over the course of their investigation. Find out what happens to Bartleby, Preston, SAIROC, Gerard, Quoth, and Fei Yin!
We here at RPPR would like to thank the listeners for their enthusiasm, comments, and emails about Know Evil. It was a great campaign that we all enjoyed playing and we hope you enjoyed as well! The Know Evil Fan Creation Contest officially ends on May 10. More Eclipse Phase is coming, but we have some great new campaigns in the works now:
Our next campaign is an Iron Heroes campaign called the Fortunes of War. It follows the saga of a group of soldiers turned merchants as they try to fulfill their destinies during a war along the Silk Road . After that, we have a Night’s Black Agents campaign called the Tribes of Tokyo – a group of security experts uncovers a horrific vampire conspiracy in the seedy underbelly of the city. Stay tuned!
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I don’t know if I’m ready for this. Taking the plunge.
I hear you, Sam. I hear you.
Same. I can’t decide if I want to listen all the way through tonight or savor it before the end.
RPPR
Thanks for a good campaign.
It’s been great.
Ach, this is what get, waking up an hour early: the most anticipated THREE plus hour experience of the season.
*sigh*
Still, I love you guys. Saving for later.
All hail the Glorious Calebus Immersius Maximus! 🙂
Wow.
“I got a higher crit.. 100 is zero-zero..I will argue this.”
Damn it RJ..err..Jason!
A great end to a great campaign. I’ll miss all the characters. I love the epilogue at the end and finding out what everyone is going to do next. Know Evil has been my favorite actual play, not just on RPPR but of all the actual play podcasts out there. As long as you guys keep making podcasts, I’ll keep listening.
Got my chance to listen…
Woah. Just woah.
You guys rock.
Well done all around. Ending a campaign is always hard.
Just finished. An amazing ending to an amazing campaign.
I want to say as a AP fiend, I always looked forward to the Know Evil episodes, and now it really hit me that this was the last episode. However, the ending really tied up all the loose ends and the epilogue choices were amazing and really speak to how all the aspects of the campaign worked together in unison to create such a great experience.
Kudos to the RPPR crew, and especially Caleb, for this amazing campaign! And thanks for letting us listen in to the games!
how can it be over. how can it be OVER. I love you all. I super hope you work something out and can make the KE Kickstarter a reality, Caleb. this has been…100+ hours of Eclipse Phase nonsense you’ve handed to us for no goddamn reason. we need to be able to endorse this kind of madness financially so there can be MORE OF IT IN THE WORLD.
Re: the mole, hating the Know Evil team isn’t a sign of guilt, it’s a display of pattern recognition.
Poor SAIRC, everyone he loves gets mad at him. Why was he programmed to care? Also, SAIRC’s adventure beyond the gates would be neat.
Brilliant.
I’m Currently doing a Visual Communication degree and next year will in theory be my last year. I’ve been listening to you guys since some time early last year and Know Evil and The Heroes of New Arcadia got me through a lot of tedious grinding assignments.
While Half of me worked in Photoshop and illustrator blankly refining my work, somewhere I followed SAIRAC on his detour through an ancient abandoned spaceship silently knowing that something terrible was going to befall him. As per usual. While I painstakingly measured out some aspect of my design or gripped a calligraphy dip pen in my hand I was also standing at the edge of a dance floor, on a massive floating cruise ship on Venus awaiting the arrival of pirates and for shit to get real.
As destructive and bloody minded and ruthless as you guys were you still managed to find time to try and reach out to npcs who were trapped in limbo and at least tried to give them a grain of agency. Against all odds and possibly good sense you found a seed AI and somehow you as a group managed to shepherd Augustine between simply killing herself and becoming something pretty terrible. I loved watching you guys interact with Augustine, the tension so often ended in a kind of hysterical relief when you survived yet another encounter with her.
“What do you do when the exterminator is late?”
“Burn down the apartment.”
This will always stay with me.
Thank you so much for making this podcast available on here and I can’t wait to see what you do next. =]
An excellent ending. I really like the idea of the final choices for each character — though I’m surprised nobody said, “I fork myself and do both.” Surely SAIROC at least could have!
I get the feeling that the boss battle was planned to be a little more elaborate — but a parked buggy on the escape ramp will screw that up! 🙂
Not only was it a good ending, it was also a staight-up good episode. It felt like everybody had the chance to be awesome — though session MVP goes to Gerrard, for the decapitation, and for the buggy driving.
Amazing campaign. To me, this is the gold standard by which any sci-fi campaign could be judged.
*spoilers*
Out of curiosity: what would have happened if any of the players had beaten him on that last initiative check?
*Spoilers*
Firewall would have taken him into custody, backed him up forcibly, and tortured the ever living shit out of him for as long as possible. However, Ozma, having already sold him out, would have moved or burned all assets he was knowledgable of by the time any actionable intelligence was gained. Furthermore, the team would know nothing about what was said or how Manjappa was dealt with; Zealot’s obsession with him had already proven potentially disastrous and the team was on its way out the system. Keeping them in the dark on any further dealings with Paresh would be top priority.
Like he said, “No easy answers.”
I wrote this right after the campaign ended (July 31, 2012)
For me, this song would be perfect for the end credits of Know Evil – a montage of every PC going about their new lives, dealing with what they’ve done and what they’ll do next.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTjF2_-bneM
For Bartleby, I imagine he might be on the path to maturity – after being told by Firewall he’s too extreme and too focused on the short term, and absorbing Manjappa’s memories, he’ll realize he will have to start thinking about how to live with his actions and their long term consequences. The first step being giving up Alice so she can be safe. The next step will be proving to Firewall he’s trustworthy. He’s started from scratch twice before (once when he was released from the Lost Project and once when he started as a Firewall agent) so he’ll look for a new path now. Maybe he’ll double down and go even crazier or maybe he’ll redeem himself. Who knows?
So the music plays and we see the new Bartleby lose himself in the crowd of the Jovian Republic as he reflects on the past year.
Fei Yin walks the streets, flanked by Triad flunkies, the chaos of the night market all around her.
Preston swimming, signalling to other octomorphs in the waters of habitat.
Gerard on Titan talking with his mentor at a cafe in Titan. Gerad gets up and walks off after saying goodnight. He sees a screen in a nearby store display pre-fall Earth. He stops and looks at it.
Quoth in his new habitat looking at bounty hunter and mercenary dossiers while cross-referencing intelligence reports on the Night Cartel. He sips wine. A poster of Paris hangs on the wall.
SAIROC’s avatar flits about in simulspace, as countless threads of data dance around him.
Bartleby stops and watches a group of children play. A little girl falls down but a boy that looks very much like her takes her hand and helps her up. She notices Bartleby looking at her and she smiles.
He smiles back, slightly.
Know Evil has been a great campaign, just wanted to thank you guys for making it happen and letting us listen to it.
It’s a bit sad to see it end, but i know you have som good stuff in store for us.
That was just amazing. This campaign got me to pick up the Eclipse Phase book, and start writing my own campaign. I can’t wait for the Night’s Black Agents campaign, spy thrillers have me hooked.
Eternal gratitude to RPPR crew for making this campaign happen and sharing it with all of us. We were there, right behind your backs, sitting with you at the same table and holding a breath every time the dice made their clicking sound, bouncing around a table. We wished we could be a part of your game but some art is not meant to be touched, but only be observed through a heavy glass shielding. That was THE best Eclipse Phase AP to date that made a huge difference for some of us. Eclipse Phase, as a game, as a setting and as an idea will live thanks to you. Freaking awesome, guys! You got yourself another die-hard fans that will keep watching your progress. Keep them coming!
Thanks Caleb, and Ross for the epilogue.
Really loved the arc of this game, and the ways the themes came together at the end. The team couldn’t even muster any hatred for Manjappa by the end. Was he even wrong? They burned all their rep and any chance of life in the inner system, and immortality is a long time to be an outcast. Is transhumanity any safer after the events of the campaign? Any better off? No easy answers.
For some reason this whole campaign made me think that firewall (and specifically WARDEN) is the greatest threat to transhumanity. Also in all seriousness Caleb, I really would pay you a whatever you deem is a reasonable price for a copy of your campaign notes. I have a few crazy ideas, not to run know evil per say, but to run a game where Know Evil is canon.
Specifically I have an Idea for a campaign I like to call WARDEN must die or possibly just “Ascend”. I’ve wanted to run an EP game since I heard the first episode.
Great campaign, it has entertained me for many hours. I was amazed at how you guys stayed on the same major plot through so many twists and turns. I’ve stolen quite a few bits of Know Evil for my own EP campaign, although were nowhere near as hardcore or focussed.
Mmm what an end to a great story. Thanks RPPR.
What a fantastic experience. Thanks so much for sharing this with all of us.
Great ending to a great campaign. Hopefully this wont be the last time we’ll see the members of firewall.
Loved it! Amazing stuff!
Excellent! So sorry to see it end, but what a great way to do it.
Was Manjappa even wrong? Well, look at it from a Firewall perspective. Sure, he might have found a way to reclaim Earth (maybe?) but look at what he did for fun in his spare time. The guy was a full-time x-threat cornucopia machine. What are you supposed to do with the guy who creates a plague that can wipe out humanity? Ask him nicely not to do it again?
Amazing job all, simply stunning. Mahjong will never be the same again.
As for the write-up / campaign notes, could this possibly be the next Hebannon kickstarter?
A rather excellent ending, all told.
That was a good campaign!
I was not very interested in Eclipse Phase at the beginning of it all. But I got into the setting by listening to you guys and understood it well enough so that all the in setting scary things made me go “Oh Shit!” along with the players. So thank you for bringing it alive for me. I got myself the books since and played Eclipse Phase once. Maybe I will run it myself someday.
so, players of Know Evil:
was/were there any time(s) when you felt morally/ethically challenged (not your character) during the campaign?
@Quickrelease I didn’t feel morally/ethically challenged as a player. In my case, I tried to act as Gerard would react to the events surrounding the game. I don’t go around shooting people with plasma in real life, but Gerard would certainly have no compunctions about taking the law into his own hands. He had lines he would not cross, and he certainly wasn’t a bad guy. Sure his past resulted in him abandoning his post during the Fall, but it was never a deliberate or rational response. It was simply his flight-or-fight response taking the flight route for the first time ever and going into protective mode when overwhelmed with the insanity of the TITANs. Despite having edited memories of the event, a part of him always knew about that reaction and to remain vigilant of it occurring again.
As for Manjappa’s end goal, Gerard believed in it but could not condone Manjappa’s actions of getting there. In fact, the final session would have gone a little differently if he had his druthers. At one point, in between sessions I thought Gerard might start the game out by shooting Fei Yen in the back of the head, but decided Gerard might need her. Instead Gerard figured he’d get to Manjappa first, and being the only one with groundcraft and spacecraft, fly him off world to extract all the information he could about the cylinder. But I failed that final roll…because it’s me.
This was fantastic. I’m excited to see what campaigns are in store for our future ears. Ahh the memories.
I <3 Preston Crowley forever.
Loved it- this was my first AP (althoguh I took a break every now and then to listen to other APs you guys post) and it was quite the experience. I have just started my own EP campaign and hope that it will be half as good as Know Evil.
Just one note: So SAIROC is now “part” of Augustine. So Augustine is now a Seed AI with knowledge of many of Firewall’s protocols and assets AND, possibly, access to SAIROC’s unlimited Gatecrashing pass. Excellent. Thats a new campaign right there! Know Evil 2: Augustine Rises (Electric Boogaloo)!
Thanks for the experience, Caleb, and everyone who contributed through playing the Know Evil campaign! The ending was ominous and awe inspiring at the same time(like the rest of the game)!
*spoilers*
So was the Know Evil virus just something to get the players into the fight vs. Manjappa? At some point, it just became something that happened in the background. Did firewall find enough detection and countermeasures so it became moot? And congrats, Caleb- every time I think about the implications of Know Evil on Transhumanity, with it’s “corrupt save game”, but with your mind/soul… I stop and think about it deeply. 🙂
I procrastinated forever on listening to this AP-series to the finish, but I just wanted to say that it was bloody amazing. Everyone, Caleb as GM, and all the players brought so much life to the world of Eclipse Phase. The original EP actual play you folks did, “Fall without End”, was what brought me to this, and I’ve been enjoying this place since.
Thanks, all, for the wondrous tale!
Damn good campaign both with the whole story & sub-plots going on as well as the players going down so much of an insane trip it just is boggling on how survival happened. Cheers to firewall & the Proxy Zealot crew.
Jason really showed his stuff here, usually he’s pretty quiet and intense, but I actually started to get a feel for Gerard.
The entire campaign, at first, was one I actually dreaded listening to, because it was so unusual mechanically and the setting itself. I get it now.
It was an incredibly impressive story, I wish I had the capacity to run something that elegant.
Well done, Caleb.
FOR FIREWALL!!!!!!
Just finished listening to the campaign and it was absolutely splendid!
Thanks a alot.
Bad news guys – it’s 2018 and I -didn’t- get to watch this on my entropics. 🙁
It’s still really good, though. 🙂