Eclipse phase is set in the medium to near future, and things are a bit different.
Mankind has ascended to a posthuman level, capable of digitizing his mind and transferring it from body to body, cloning, "forking" in which various levels of copies of the mind are duplicated, they have created uplifts, which are other animals artificially forced into sentience, and can jump from Morph to Morph, a morph being basically a "body".
Characters are mostly defined by their mental attributes and skills, and the body they choose provides most of their physical stats, and can enhance or impede their mental attributes. Physical bodies can be abandoned and resleeved, they are a commodity and you can purchase them in character creation.
People can back up their minds into the "mesh" (internet) and recover them later if they die. This would seem like waking up and missing some time. Suppose you back up and then jump off a building. If you don't manage to bail out of your morph before you die, then you will wake up (hopefully) shortly after you died unaware of the time that has passed. It might be a few hours, or a few days, weeks, years, that has gone missing, but you'll be as you were when you were backed up last.
Mankind was nearly wiped out 11 years ago in an event called "the fall" in which TITANs, rogue self improving AIs, attempted to exterminate mankind and nearly succeeded, before leaving basically by surprise, have reduced mankind to about 500 million people, the majority of which are "infomorphs" that bailed out of bodies just in time before being killed by carnivorous nanoswarms, viruses of varying types, weaponized robots, plagues, nuclear weapons, and countless other horrors.
Characters work for a secret organization called "Firewall" that seeks to protect mankind from "Existential Threats", defined as threats to the existence of mankind.
In answer to some questions about the kinds of Morphs you can use and what it might be like to play the game at higher power levels, here are two screen caps from the source books.
This is an Octo-morph, either playing with his friends or robbing someone, or something like that:
And here is the Fenrir Morph, which is not available at character creation, can actually contain up to 6 "Egos," the minds that are the characters, and is a goal that characters could work towards by saving up money, or something that might be dropped in as "treasure." The weird thing sticking out is a machine-railgun.
Any Questions?
