Even in a leap year, a short February almost caught me out, but here I am, getting the March update out just under the wire!
Layout Preview
Turns out that I lied to you all last month. I touted that we had reached the significant benchmark of finishing the layout for every chapter. After doing a final audit however, I realized that I had somehow left the whole World of Hurt chapter – about Earth in 2199 – sitting in my drafts folder, and never sent it to our layout artist! Luckily, I caught the oversight and with Robert being as super-fast as he is, the section is done and ready to share.
So now, barring each book’s introductory chapter – containing stuff like the table of contents, which has to wait for final page numbers – I can pinky swear that all the content has been laid out. No, seriously. This time it’s true…
Per usual, a backer's only KS post will follow this update and you can get the full preview via the link shared there.
Storm Surge Update
It’s hard to express without pages of text and too many spoilers just how fun it’s been running this playtest campaign. It’s a story I have wanted to tell for 25 years – since the earliest days of Blue Planet. The three-party approach has been a blast and has done so much heavy lifting in creating verisimilitude and player investment. It has been increasingly challenging however, to keep all the gears meshed, and one of the players even ended up having to use a timeline visualizing app just to help the table keep the overlapping chronologies straight.
I am coming to realize that given the 20k word limit on this stretch goal campaign, I am going to have to approach the write up with a fairly non-traditional presentation structure. Rather than detailed descriptions of a specific party entry point and a network of possible and detailed encounters, I am going to have to instead create a spare and skeletal network tracking ongoing faction activities and events, into which the participants will then have to actively plug their own characters and motivations. This will be a uniquely interesting scenario writing challenge - one I was originally apprehensive about, but for which I am now pretty stoked.
This all said, we have started to hit some pretty big spoilers, so I have had to implement some GEO-approved security measures in the following summary...
In the last update, I shared how the GEO Internal Security agents had successfully made contact with the Songless and begun ingratiating themselves with this band of freedom fighters. I also shared how they had been brought into the investigation of the EMP bombing of Haven, as experts on the insurgency. In a complicated series of intertwined flashbacks, they learned that the attack on the Sprite was a deepfake frame-up of their own native characters, and gained kinesics data that implicated their own Incorporate characters and linked them to the EMP bombing as well.
Several of the PCs spent the majority of this month's first session gaining trust of the Songless by [REDACTED]. These agents subsequently spent most of the second session trying to convince the rest of their teammates to also [REDACTED]. Now they are all irrevocably allied with the Songless and have successfully connected those fighters with Bataku’s warband on Baffin Island. This three-way alliance between the GEO, Baffin Island and the Songless is quickly changing the balance of power on the planet, and a world-changing [REDACTED] will be the focus of the next session.
I fully anticipate that the next session of the playtest will utterly change the fundamental socio-politics on Poseidon (at least this group’s current instantiation of the game) forever. And I for one, can…not…wait!
Pledge Manager
Though we are not ready to offer a date for its launch, I do want to offer a heads up about the forthcoming pledge manger. If you are one of the many folks who have reached out about missing the original campaign but are excited to get to Poseidon, this is your chance. If you are already a backer and want to upgrade your pledge, that will be possible was well.
If you have changed addresses in the interim, but have not already reached out to us about that, the manager will allow you to share that information. The pledge manager will also be where we lock down and charge for shipping. I realize this is probably not a happy reminder, but we want to be fully transparent. It is really the only way we could be fiscally responsible with this necessary but unpredictably volatile aspect of the project.
Thank you for your ongoing support and understanding.
