October already? Wow! The Recontact project continues apace...
Art Updates
In the art department, Ben continues to slay the creature section, and here are a couple more works-in-progress as proof - the Hangin' Joe and the Trident Fish.
In the spirit of full transparency, I also want to share that for reasons beyond our control we have lost a couple of artists from the project - a primary interior illustrator and the artist we had lined up for the tech section images. This is a bummer, but we are working to spin up a number of new folks and I hope to be able to share previews of their work soon.
Writing Assignments
We had a bunch of freelancer writer deadlines in mid-September, and their sections are all on track. I also have brought on Tyrone Cawston (@LammaticHama) to write the Native insurgent campaign archetype, and if they dig doing that my hope is they might take on some additional assignments. I hope to be able to announce a couple more awesome freelancers for the new section on future-culture and the Outback stretch goal soonest.
For my own part I have updated some big sections and passed those on to our editor Rachel. I have been plugging in new content here and there to dress things up and to hide a few textual Easter eggs that tie together backstory elements. One such egg is a bit of foreshadowing regarding the wormhole.
The 14 Minute Conundrum
"In 2192 HCST astronomer Eden Wu and her team published some unlikely findings regarding long-recognized but trivial discrepancies in astronomical positions when measured on either side of the wormhole – discrepancies that until Wu’s study were thought to be within the margin of error for the available instruments. Wu’s work however, corrected for this error and lead to her discovery of a 13 minute, 57.43 second discrepancy between the positions of the astronomical bodies when observed from the Sol system and when observed from the Serpentis system.
The release of the study initially made Wu and her team laughing stocks and almost cost Wu her career. She stood by her science however, and after the subsequent introduction of new observatory technologies and independent verification, her conclusions were confirmed. Though the discovery caused a short-lived media sensation, the facts were too nuanced, the science too rarified and the practical consequences so irrelevant that the public quickly lost interest. The astronomy community however, was not so quick to move on, especially those studying the wormhole. Suddenly, fringe hypotheticals and ephemeral mathematics understood by only a handful of physicists in either system, become the focus of a dozen new lines of excited inquiry into wormhole research.
Now, in 2199, some scientists – at least those who understand the math – are beginning to think that it is possible that dense theories about the relativistic velocity of wormhole termini and temporal displacement might be true. Simply put, the Serpentis system might actually exist approximately 14 minutes into the Earth’s future."
I have completed final drafts of the three new player character stretch goals - the Skink, the Xeno and the Sperm Whale. I have also all but completed drafts of the three new high-pressure station locations and have been sharing short previews on Twitter. Accordingly, I thought I would close out this update by sharing the rough draft of the entire Proteus Landing station gazetteer entry.
Hope you enjoy the previews! Follow us on Twitter for more frequent insights and snippets, and see you in November.