Sufficiently Advanced is a tabletop roleplaying game that reaches for the outermost limits of what we think is achievable. Grounded in hard science, but speculating incredible advances, Sufficiently Advanced (or S.A. for short) looks at a future in which nanotechnology, computing, medicine, and other fields have advanced to the limit of our current understanding — and just a bit beyond. It’s a look at what these technologies might do to the world and what societies might form around them. It is a game about responsibility and the drive for a better future. It is a game fundamentally about humanity, as well as some of its descendants.
Most importantly, S.A. is a game of exploration and political machination set in a universe where everyone has nearly godlike capabilities at their disposal — and the world wasn’t destroyed by it.
Players take on the role of Patent Office officials ("Inspectors") working to surreptitiously keep the peace between the dozen and more human civilizations spread across our universe. The characters travel via wormhole between trouble spots in the universe, sometimes openly, sometimes incognito, stopping the use of exceptionally dangerous technology.
It is an open secret that the Patent Office is a front for a group of benevolently selfish artificial intelligences capable of sending themselves messages from the future. These transcendental beings desire more than mere servants: they want equals and friends, beings who can understand time as they do. In all sentient races they see a capacity to ascend to their level. By controlling dangerous intellectual properties (such as weapon blueprints and harmful memes) the AIs keep humanity from destroying itself or devolving into a race of cybernetically controlled slaves, and they come day-by-day closer to their desired future.
S.A. is about technology as far beyond what we have now as we are beyond the cavemen. It's about a world truly changed by this technology, not merely today's world enhanced. It's about a cultural melieu created by the dregs and lunatic fringe of the 21st century. It's about the line between freedom and chaos. It's about trusting that someone who knows and changes the future is keeping a place for you in it. S.A. is the story of humanity in all its myriad forms, and the thousand things it might become.
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