Eclipse Phase

Quick, name a fantasy RPG, one of the old pen-and-paper types.  What did you say?  Dungeons and Dragons, probably.  Maybe not though, maybe it was Pathfinder, or Exalted, or Dark Sun, or Nobilis if you're so indie it hurts.  Now name one with an SF setting.  Shadowrun!  Except that has magic too.  Cyberpunk 2020, you offer, tentative because it's such an ungainly system.  GURPS?  Yes indeed, there is a great lack of role playing games set in the bold future instead of the never-past, and I've never understood the reason for this.  Surely we ought to get more excitement out of imagining our possible futures than remixed editions of fairy tales, that owe their origins to a time when a pointy rock was seen as the pinnacle of human science and engineering.

Seems like someone out there agrees with me.  Specifically, those ones are Posthuman Studios.  And that agreement is Eclipse Phase.

Thunderstone!

I remember when I was, oh, about 11 or 12, my dad bought me a huge binder of Magic: the Gathering cards.  I held it with a strange reverence, this giant block of unspeakably rare and valuable pieces of a brilliant game.  What made Magic so brilliant, apart from it's elegant, crisp rules, was that playing the game was only really half of the game; the other half was DECK BUILDING.  Assembling my 60-card machine, from which I would draw my cards and make a giant mess of it.  Seriously, I was trash at playing Magic; I couldn't even manage when I made a card-for-card remake of a champion deck.  But the deck building, that's what enthralled me.

Flash forward to the futuristic gaming-paradise of 2011 and deck building has become a genre in it's own right. What happens when Magic's meta game gets its "meta" appendix removed, the fantasy gets more grimdark, and all of a sudden it's a race to see who can stop the end of the world?  Thunderstone!