March already?!? Hard to believe we are closing in on a year since the Kickstarter campaign began. 

Art and More Art

I wanted to start by sharing a preview of what may be my favorite illustration for the project to date - an amazing image by artist Peter Johnston. They say "a picture is worth a thousand words," and this one evokes almost every aspect of Blue Planet in a single image - the ominous nature of an alien sea,  the majesty of powerful creatures, the ubiquitousness of empowering technologies and the rising threat of war. Perfect is not a strong enough word...

And this just came in yesterday, so there's no way I'm leaving it out. It speaks for itself as well...

I also want to preview one of my favorite field guide images to date - the sea ghoul. Ben outdid himself with this one and I love it! It even looks like it smells bad...

Sea Ghoul (Voro inferi)

This avian analog’s name is apparently a nod to their seagull-like abundance and marine scavenger ecology. In keeping with their name, ghouls are ugly creatures with mottled gray-and-white skin. They have long wings supporting flight membranes that are so thin they’re nearly transparent. The bird’s body is lean and provides so little buoyancy that when floating in the water, the animal’s snakelike head and neck are all that’s visible above the surface. Petite jaws match the species’ small head and are tipped with pairs of bony plates, which serve as a mix between a beak and conventional cutting dentition.

BEHAVIOR: Ghouls have a number of dorsal and ventral eyespots, but seem to rely mostly on their sense of smell to find carrion. Ghouls forage in small flocks of up to 20 birds, which gather into larger groups if abundant or particularly big carcasses are available. When such feeding congregations occur, the grunting calls of the squabbling animals can be deafening. Individuals appear to spend as much time fighting over food as they do eating it. Native Poseidoners have learned to avoid large groups of sea ghouls as they typically indicate the presence of a substantial amount of carrion, implying that either a large predator is nearby, or at the very least, that scavengers more dangerous than ghouls may soon arrive.

Ghouls are abundant throughout the Pacifica Archipelago. They are edible but have a gamy, unpleasant flavor that keeps them relatively safe from native hunters. Ghouls are regularly eaten by people in survival situations, but care should be taken even then. Though their meat is edible, their liver organ analogs are rich in various chemicals that are highly toxic to humans. These chemicals are thought to be metabolic byproducts of the poisonous bacterial wastes that accumulate in the rotting foods they consume. The GEO has lost a number of soldiers and field biologists to ghoul liver poisoning, prompting the inclusion of this otherwise harmless species in this report. Sea ghouls are not otherwise a threat to humans, nor have they ever been documented attacking anything larger than a herring.
         DISTRIBUTION: All coastal and open-ocean habitats planetwide
         SIZE: 20 cm to 50 cm long and 1.5 kg to 2.2 kg
         ENCOUNTER RATE: 100%
         RESOURCE VALUE: Low
         THREAT LEVEL: N/A
         ATTACK: N/A
         ATTRIBUTES: -1/4/-3

Politics and Games

Those who follow such things may be aware that one of the current threads in RPG discourse is about the role of politics in games - whether games should reflect political agendas and how that question relates to escapism, storytelling and art. If you backed Blue Planet you likely did so at least in part because you appreciate the environmental and anti-colonial themes featured in the game.

Two weeks ago I contracted with an artist I had recently met via social media, to draw the tech illustrations for Blue Planet. His name is Vitaliy, this is his Artstation gallery, and he lives in Ukraine. I share this story because of the parallels in last week’s invasion of Ukraine to the anti-colonial themes in Blue Planet and the sad irony of an artist being unable to make art for the game because of real-world imperialism.

Politics in games is inescapable. What games we choose to play and how we choose to play them say much about who we want to be and the kind of world we want to live in. In whatever small way it can, I hope Blue Planet will encourage people to resist injustice and greed across our own blue planet.