July is here, and though the summer is hot, this update is pretty cool...
Layout
Blue Planet: Recontact is coming together fast as Robert blasts through the layout. This month there are two big chapters for you to preview (and proofread). The first is the largest section of the Moderator's Guide. It's the Archipelagos chapter and features all of Poseidon's regional gazetteer information, as well as the all new Outback section.
The second is the Biotech chapter, covering all the cybernetic implants and genetic enhancements available to characters, including the new stretch goal Skink and Xenos mods.
As with previous layout previews, this update will be followed with a backers' only post on Kickstart that contains links to these chapters. Please note: We are making a couple of last-minute adjustments to these section layouts, and I will send that follow-up update asap.
22 Years!
Despite the books being tardy, I can't overstate how much of my time and effort have gone into to this project, and I therefore occasionally wonder why I'm doing it? Then, I get a note from someone who loves the game reminding me. A few weeks ago, a post on our publishing partner Gallant Knight Games' Discord shared what is perhaps the most touching such reminder I have ever received, so I thought I would repost it here.
"I just want to share with you that in 2001 I bought Blue Planet (v2) and my group who just had met the 2nd week of my freshman year of University decided to play a small campaign in this system as we all loved sci fi games. We really loved the setting and one of the girls in the group decided to be the storyteller and we all sat down and decided that we wanted to play a small Lunar company who had invested in a small underwater laboratory on Poseidon. Yesterday, almost 22 years later, our campaign came to an end. We have seen so many fun things in the storyteller's interpretation of your game and we have seen so much together:
• I met my then girlfriend-now fiancee and mother to my daughter in the gaming group
• We have gone to cruises in the Baltic sea and between Copenhagen and up around Iceland and back, and we brought our RPG with us and borrowed a conference room and played
• People have met their loves of their lives
• One of them got a divorce and later found a new love, whom they married in April this year
• A few of us have had children
• We lost one of our players to a disease in 2019 and our game will forever be a memory to all the fun that she brought us
• We have had our children sit by the table and join us when they grew up and wanted to join. Later we have waved two of them off to university
• We have had so much fun, sadness, joy and laughter
• After 22 years of playing, we are still 6 people who enjoy hanging out together and being there for each other when life is good, bad or in between
All this thanks to you. In a way, you gave us 22 years of fantastic fun. So whatever happens in your life, or if you have one of those days when you are not sure why you are working on this project, we all want you to know that you gave us so much meaning and happiness together. So from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you from a very sunny Sweden!
- Amanda, Elenya, Marcus, Mathias, Tia, Veronika"
Storm Surge Playtest Update
In the ongoing playtest, the characters, sobered by their too-close encounter with the Greater White (see June post) arrived at their destination - a notorious site known among the Northwest Territory natives simply as "The Mangrove." This towering marine forest hides an abandoned Biogene facility with an ominous reputation - one that leads the superstitious to claim that it's haunted. The truth is perhaps less supernatural, but certainly no less ominous.
-Spoiler Alert-
The plan was for the characters to execute their propaganda sting by meeting an investigative journalist at the site to conduct a live interview. The unique location would allow GenDiver search algorithms to ID their location, hopefully luring away security forces from another regional installation and the insurgency's actual target.
There was a lot of roleplaying among the family members around recent events as they set up perimeter sensors and planted the anti-personnel mines they'd brought along. The RP was interrupted by an enigmatic and ultimately terrifying midnight encounter with what the characters now suspect was a Nereid. They simultaneously discovered that the old Biogene facility was being used as a weapons depot, but that something stranger still was going on at the site when their exploration revealed that most of the structure's interior seemed to have been "melted away."
Their investigation was cut short by the arrival of the journalist and her cameraman and the roleplaying of the in-character interview. Having estimated potential response times for the security forces, the characters were not surprised when their perimeter electronics alerted them to intruders and the first explosions went off. As I closed the latest session with this cliffhanger, the players realized that their non-fighter characters had not really planned an escape route...
We are taking a break through July as several of us will be traveling, but we will resume playtesting in August with the GenDiver security thread.
