I am excited to share that in exactly one month (April 6th), Biohazard Games will return to Kickstarter to fund the production of a new edition of our flagship roleplaying game, Blue Planet. If you want to dive right in and explore, you can download the Blue Planet: Recontact Quickstart Guide here. This 80+ page, full color primer is free and contains the new version of the rules, a setting introduction and a demo scenario called "Trouble in Paradise," complete with ready-to-play characters.
If you'd like a more casual introduction, please read on...
Short Premise:
Blue Planet is a compelling RPG journey into humanity’s precarious future on a distant planet where sociopolitical unrest and a hungry alien ecology threaten the nascent colony effort. A world where GEO marshals struggle to maintain peace, Incorporate mercenaries wage amphibious proxy wars, and native insurgents fight for their adopted planet. A frontier where human desperation and corporate greed ravage an uncanny ecology, threatening to plunge humanity into a war of survival with an ancient, alien legacy.
Though the original Blue Planet predates many of these titles, the setting is evoked by the movies Avatar, Blade Runner and Outland, the television series The Expanse, Firefly and Earth II and the books Legacy of Heorot, Songs of Distant Earth and the Mars Trilogy.
If Blue Planet interests you, watch this space for a reminder when we launch, or follow on Twitter at BiohazardJeff for more frequent updates.
Full Premise:
Blue Planet's uniqueness and enduring appeal are in its deep, realistic, hard science fiction setting, and to really describe it requires more than a few sentences. For those new to the waterworld, we recommend exploring the more detailed premise here.
The project includes...
• Production of two beautiful, 300-page books - player's and moderator's guides.
• A complete evolution of the core mechanics, taking advantage of two decades of RPG development.
• All new, full-color artwork bringing the waterworld to life in stunning, evocative imagery.
• Full-color world and regional maps, including submarine geography, redesigned and rendered by professional cartographer and game designer Mark Richardson (Green Hat Design).
• A series of campaign archetypes to help moderators jumpstart their games in the vast adventure space of Poseidon (see below).
• Updated speculative technologies.
• New sociopolitical systems, organizations, institutions and conflicts.
• New locations, settlements and facilities.
The project does not include...
• Fundamental changes to the core sociopolitical tensions - the themes will remain staunchly pro-environmental and anti-colonial. If you don't share these sentiments, this is likely not your game.
• Timeline advancements - the setting was originally, intentionally, poised on a sociopolitical precipice, rife with plot and storytelling potential, and we want to maintain that same narrative tension.
• Global rewrites of the setting material - though updates, sensitivity edits and additions are being made throughout, we believe Blue Planet’s deep setting is why the game has endured, and so we are not making major alterations to that essential content.
Blue Planet has received broad acclaim, particularly for its deep, detailed, and realistic setting, and the game has remained well regarded since its original publication. However, that publication was almost 25 years ago, and in the intervening decades, all versions have gone out of print and game design has evolved dramatically. We are therefore excited at the prospect of giving the game system an overdue overhaul and the opportunity to share Blue Planet with a new generation of players.
More personally, Blue Planet features critical environmental themes, presenting a precarious future shaped by the dire consequences of ecological collapse. If issues like biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and climate change were only obscure concerns within the scientific community when Blue Planet was first published 25 years ago, they are now clear and present existential threats to the human species. This new edition will let us add our own small voice to those demanding true stewardship of our original blue planet.
Compelled by these reasons, the original creators at Biohazard Games (www. BiohazardGames.us) have teamed up with Gallant Knight Games (www.gallantknightgames.com) to produce a fresh new edition of this classic RPG.
Recontact is the in-game term for the fateful day in 2165 when the UNSS Admiral Robert Perry entered orbit around Poseidon, “reestablishing contact” with Earth 69 years after the original colonists were abandoned. Given that more than two decades have passed since the publication of the first edition of Blue Planet, RECONTACT seemed a fitting subtitle for this new version of the game.