Sufficiently Advanced designed by Colin Fredericks 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, SA 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, SA 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.
SA 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 milieu 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. SA is the story of humanity in all its myriad forms, and the thousand things it might become.
A fantasy version called Sorcerously Advanced, has also appeared.
So far, the following as appeared:
- Sufficiently Advanced (first edition)
- Travelogue, for the first edition, with new civilizations, societies, cargo cult ideas and other materials
- Sufficiently Advanced (second edition)
- Chronotech, for second edition, covering time-related and prophecies technology.
Official site here
Provides examples of:
- Artificial Afterlife: The foundation of the Builders of the Great Beyond's entire civilization. Their minds are recorded while they live, and they run in simulation after they die.
- Brain/Computer Interface: The Mesh works like this and is necessary for anything Cognitech 3 and above.
- Brain Uploading: Possible, but not quick.
- Clarke's Third Law: It's literally the name of the game.
- Cool Starship: Starships are not actually very useful if you have wormhole technology. The Stardwellers use them anyway because they're cool.
- Deflector Shields: Averted. Force fields are listed as an "impossible technology."
- Dreaming of Things to Come: Some low-level Chronotech works this way, providing unclear prophecies in the user's dreams.
- Energy Weapon: Compression beams, transmutation beams, inversion beams, plain old lasers...
- Fake Wizardry: The Technomagi specialize in hiding their tech and making its use look like magic. They're a combination of con-artists, mystics and master engineers, and all three are part of the same whole.
- Faster-Than-Light Travel: This is impossible in theory but not in practice. The usual way to get around is through a wormhole, and the Alcubierre Drive is an advanced stringtech drive that allows a ship to be accelerated in a gravity bubble at effectively FTL speeds without breaking the lightspeed barrier in its own spacetime.
- Generation Ship: Spacers travel on slower-than-light generation ships that were originally planned for colonization, but after the Diaspora have turned into space nomads.
- Grey Goo: One of the standard nanotech weapons is the nanophage, a Grey Goo with limited duration.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Used to explain a skill bonus from Chronotech-based expertise: you're basically repeating an action until you get it right, then letting things move forward.
- Humans Are Psychic in the Future: Seems that way from the outside. In actuality, everyone just has a Brain/Computer Interface.
- Invisibility Cloak: Not quite played straight or averted - yes, you can make invisibility devices, but they're limited in the frequencies of light they can hide... and because so many people can see outside the usual "visible" spectrum, it might just make you stand out worse.
- Magical Gesture: If you don't have a Brain/Computer Interface, you use special gestures and words to activate your more dangerous technology (so that you don't trigger it by accident). Wave your hands, chant some words, and voila - lightning bolt!
- Matter Replicator: Yup. Used especially by the Association of Eternal Life (a.k.a. the Replicants), who are more than happy to replicate themselves.
- The Metaverse: Every world has an Infosphere, so named because it's as all-pervasive as the atmosphere. Nearly everyone has continuous access to it.
- Muggles Do It Better: The game tries to balance high-stat characters and low-stat characters by giving the players of low-stat characters more ability to warp the plot.
- Nanomachines: I mean, one of the basic stats in the game is Nanotech...
- Organic Technology: ...and another one of them is Biotech.
- Our Wormholes Are Different: Different settings for the 2nd edition have different rules for how wormholes work.
- Person of Mass Destruction: Oh my goodness gracious yes.
- Reactionless Drive: Averted.
- Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology: Not really, but it can look however you want, so groups like the Tao of History (a historical recreation society) have ancient-looking things that function just as well as everyone else's futuristic stuff.
- Technology Levels: There are five techs in both editions. 10 levels in the 1st Edition. 5 or 6 levels in the 2nd Edition with a sixth tech with the Chronotech supplement.
- Biotech - Biological technologies
- Cognitech - Brain related technologies
- Metatech - Social sciences
- Nanotech - Nanotechnology and material sciences
- Stringtech - Physics related technologies
- Chronotech - Temporal related technologies
- Teleportation with Drawbacks: You can wormhole from place to place (at phenomenal cost in energy), but the only way to "teleport" short of that is to (destructively) read yourself into a replicator in one place and print yourself out in another.
- Time Machine: Mostly averted. You can make one with a wormhole (in certain settings), but Chronotech does its job purely with data transfer, not with moving large objects.
- Transhuman Aliens: Due to transhumanist technologies and morphological freedom, plenty of civilizations resulted in alien forms, particularly with the Stardwelling Armada.
- Transhumans in Space: Obvious with the Stardwelling Armada but every civilization are usually transhuman at some level, except for Cargo Cultists and Old Worlders.
- Wet Ware CPU: The culture of the United Planets of Mechanica believes in the brain being the sole signifier of one's humanity and so they varied from normal organic humans to cyborgs to brains in a jar in a robotic body.
- Words Can Break My Bones: Not exactly, but they might get you to stop, or run, or relax, via a Metatech technique called the Voice of Peace. If you research someone enough you can pull an I Know Your True Name and get better hooks into them.
- You Already Changed the Past: Used to explain why the Transcendentals don't change the past: they already did. In fact, from their point of view, they currently are, by talking to you.
