Eclipse Phase/YMMV


 * Alternative Character Interpretation: The Jovian Republic is commonly given this treatment. Tyrannical assholes who Put On The Reich to keep their people down and kill anyone who doesn't agree to their creed, or the defenders of humanity and the only voice of reason in a world of nanotechnology and genetic engineering gone mad?
 * Author Tract: The authors really seem to dislike organized religion. The last surviving diocese of the Catholic Church is a willing part of the ruling oligarchy that forms the totalitarian, backward, and racist and everything-else-ist Jovian 'Republic'. The only mention of Judaism is as one surviving reclusive space colony (and falls into the trap of assuming all Jews are ultra-orthodox Hassidic besides). Any mention of religion elsewhere is in the context of 'isolated Jonestown style cult colony of a handful of whackos on some isolated rock somewhere'. Further supplements revealed that the general Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions of the Eclipse Phase future was because 'organized religions were too hidebound to organize themselves effectively after the Fall' -- and this in a setting where ubiquitous wireless data networking and social media technology are so advanced that the single largest investment bank in the solar system doesn't even have a physical headquarters, because it functions entirely well as a crowdsourced group of salespeople (for the talking-to-clients side) and a purely virtual-reality central office staffed by telecommuters (for the administration side).
 * And said social networking technology is also so cheap that you actually have to take a disadvantage at character generation -- and have a backstory that essentially adds up to 'raised on a desert space island by wolves' -- to not have full access to it.
 * For bonus Did Not Do The Research points, the highest surviving Catholic official named is a Cardinal. Apparently the authors did not do so much as a five-minute Wikipedia search on the Catholic Church's organizational structure before deciding to write it into their setting.
 * Fridge Horror: Lots of this.
 * Game Breaker: Infolife hackers can be, in effect, up to nearly 200 Rez points ahead of their compatriots.
 * Specifically, infolife (i.e., they exist only as sentient software and don't even have a permanent robot body) characters pay half price for most intelligence and hacking-related skills in return for taking penalties on, or being unable to purchase, many of the social skills. Of course, as a purely digital lifeform that first category of skills is pretty much the only one you're ever going to actually use, so...
 * High Octane Nightmare Fuel: As a horror game, it's to be expected. For example, during the opening fiction piece, one of the commandos the story follows has his head sawed off and carried away (Presumably to have the contents of the brain uploaded to some computer left by the insane AI that built it) by a combat bot, and another is dissassembled molecule-by-molecule by a swarm of nanites.
 * Strawman Political: The aforementioned Jovian Republic. Imagine a caricature of current right-wing political memes, then make them Space North Korea, then inflate them to the size and power of Space Soviet Union to keep them as a major instead of minor antagonist faction, and you've got the Jovians. They exist solely to hate on all the things that make the game setting 'cool' (body-switching technology, nanite technology, transhuman brain augmentation, etc, etc).
 * Straw Hypocrite: Later supplements revealed that the ruling elite of the Jovian Republic quite cheerfully uses the same transhuman augmentation and life-extending tech they supposedly rail against and deny to their own citizens.
 * Straw Man Has a Point: And yet despite all this effort to make the Jovians wrong about everything, even if that requires contradicting themselves, some people still acknowledge that the Jovians have a valid point to the extent that 'Before we materially alter the entire nature of the human race using technology that rather epically failed us once before, perhaps some of us should agree to remain back here as an experimental control population so we have a reserve in case shit blows up TITAN-style again.'