Fitting into a new setting is not always easy, especially if you have little experience playing a type of character you're unfamiliar with. For many roleplayers, filling the boots of a robot in Eisa is just that; despite the hundreds of TV shows, movies, books, and graphic novels that have featured robotic characters, relatively few consider the everyday lives of machines built to assist humanity. Robot rebels, conquerors, and superheroes are far more common than machines that live and work with people in relative harmony, and as a result we frequently see characters who have taken control of their fates, are not meant to be understood (only feared), or have fundamentally individualist outlooks and total autonomy. The Second Renaissance, Terminator, and Ghost in the Shell are each an example of these types of characters.

GitS is a particularly important source, as it features both examples of transcendent power (the Puppet Master, as portrayed in the first film), a cyborg who legitimately functions on human instincts but is often encountered as the prime example of a humanoid robot (Major Motoko Kusanagi), and actual robots who fit well into Eisa's model of synthetic life and never actually achieve emancipation (the gynoids from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the geisha from the start of the Laughing Man arc of Stand Alone Complex, and the GA07-JL Jeri units from its third episode.) Within the city limits of Eisa Colony, and elsewhere in the Better Today setting, even though many robots are treated with kindness, and like they are people, they are never regarded as people; these are the same terms under which replicants in Blade Runner and androids and gynoids in Ghost in the Shell function, although GitS's synthetics are somewhat harder to mistake for sentient.

Because of this, Eisa is often mistaken for being anti-robot-rights, but that was never the vision for the sim. Nanite Systems is anti-robot-rights, because machine emancipation directly conflicts with the company's bottom line, but we have actually always welcomed and sought the participation of dissenters who felt otherwise. (Unfortunately, relatively few robot enthusiasts seem to actually be particularly interested in rebellion, at least of those who dwell here.) There are a wide range of interesting and compelling stories that can be told about machines transgressing their programmed and learned behavioral restrictions, and we stand to gain a lot by exploring such themes at length through roleplay.

At any rate, however, whether a robot was built from scratch or converted from a human, the start of any robot's life story must be an answer to a simple question:

Why were you made?

At some point, some conscious being or automated process must have made the decision to bring a new artificial entity into the world, and they must have had some reason for doing so. They must also have had access to the resources necessary to build the robot, and the technical knowledge to do so, which generally means having access to either a fairly comprehensive kit of components or a substantial team of PhD-level computer scientists, robotics engineers, neurologists, and more. Making a functioning machine of the complexity required to hold a decent conversation in spoken English is a significant undertaking, so we would expect a large team to be involved. If an individual builds a robot, they are probably either be working with pre-built parts, or have an intellect so staggeringly vast that relating to other people would be difficult or impossible—in which case their creations should also be alien to others.

The easiest starting point for answering the 'why' question is to pick a need that exists. Most of Nanite Systems' robotics business has been from militaries, hospitals, and police departments: robotic soldiers, nurses, and cops are more durable and reliable than their organic counterparts in many situations, so there's a clear market for such machines. Conversely, the company's Recreational Cybernetics Group, which has famously produced a number of sex robots, happened almost serendipitously; an earlier project—to produce synthetic colonists that would set up new outposts before thawing humans from cryogenic hibernation—was scrapped because investors felt that human colonists could never trust robots to carry out such a large-scale, essential task. That's not to say that sex robots are unusual, by any means, but like real-world manufacturers of sex toys, entering the market is heavily laden with stigma, so NS's sex bot production is in many ways as strange as General Electric or Intel producing high-end vibrators (although another large tech company, Hitachi, actually did, by accident—the patents for the famous 'Magic Wand' were eventually bought up by a more... narrowly focused company.)

It's important to steer away from robots that are too multi-functional by design. We feel it necessary to specifically mention Rikugou avatars, which are the most frequent examples of this. The range of accessories available for the Rikugou suggests that it is meant to do everything from engaging in opera-worthy duels with energy swords to satisfying the sexual urges of socially awkward teenagers. This is clearly incongruent, and would result in an nonviable product; either severely overpriced, or seriously under-performing. Given that official armor for the Rikugou clearly has prominent openings which would compromise structural integrity and effectiveness (e.g. Heavy Armor, Predator Armor, and Anubis Armor) and our setting is deeply invested in hard science fiction wherever possible, our interpretation of the chassis's purpose errs on the side of realism too: unless otherwise specified, we assume it was made by and for the Otaku market, and mostly fulfills the duties of a domestic housewife, girlfriend, or entry-level service industry position. No doubt suitably programmed and armored Rikugous are effective in combat, like any other robot, but that would likely come at the cost of intimate functionality.

Multi-functional units are usually the product of indecisiveness on the part of their players, but there can be legitimate reasons for why a machine might have multiple, divergent duties ascribed to it. If you really want to make a unit that excels at several disparate tasks, then after-market modifications are an excellent way to do this: the rugged combat bot converted into a cargo hauler, the synthetic courtesan reprogrammed to use its character-judging skills as a therapist, the recon drone that hauls bricks of C-4 instead of cameras. There are also many reasons why a unit designed for one task might be disguised as a machine meant to do another: assassins and body guards have long concealed themselves as courtesans in literature and in real life. These things naturally fit together, after a form. Take care not to conceive of a unit's life in the same way humans might; organic soldiers may go home to their families and spouses, but a machine exists to serve, and is unlikely to pursue emotional fulfillment, or even understand what it is.

With your origin established, the next task is to identify a plausible history. Are you a happy machine, with a history of successful completion of tasks within your intended domain, or a sad machine, with a number of past disappointments? How many owners have you had? What about friends? How have you coped with failure? Did you learn something more general about life that enabled you to grow intellectually beyond your original specifications, or did you suffer a meltdown and need to be reinitialized? Why or how did you end up on Eisa? And, perhaps most importantly, what spaceport did you disembark from on your way here? We generally advise against taking too much inspiration from life; you might find more satisfaction in borrowing bits and pieces of a beloved minor character from a book, TV show, or movie. Protagonists and antagonists in popular media tend to be awful for this, though; focus more on Alfred and less on Batman.

If any or all of the above makes your skin crawl, that's understandable; Eisa's treatment of robots is meant to be dystopian, and we're often alarmed when roleplayers do identify with characters who are perpetually subjugated and intrinsically limited by programming. But don't get cold feet: Eisa needs characters, both meat and metal, who rebel against the status quo in the colony. Robots hacked by rights activists, synthetic love-children born and booted outside of corporate wedlock, transhumanist tweakers who transcend the legal boundaries between man and machine; these have a place in the sim as members of the Violet Sky Underground Organization, the Russian-led resistance that seeks to take back the purple pearl from Nanite Systems and its cadre of self-made aristocrats. Just be certain of where your loyalties lay—and be prepared to defend yourself when NanoSec officers show up to confiscate you for deviance.

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