One week to the end of the Blue Planet: Recontact Kickstarter, and it's been a surprising and gratifying trip! If hard sci-fi roleplaying on a contentious, frontier water world with a dangerous ecology and undercurrents of alien mystery interests you, check us out.
What: Blue Planet-Recontact live Q&A
When: Saturday, 4.24, at 2p Pacific Time
Where: Discord (https://discord.gg/663PtKrvcX)
Join us for a voice chat to discuss the new edition, the Kickstarter, water-world-building or whatever other marine sci-fi goodness you want to explore!
Check out the Blue Planet: Recontact Kickstarted updates. We blew through our initial funding goal in just 4 hours, knocked down 19 stretch goals and just passed $80k! The Blue Planet community is killing it, the books are going to be gorgeous, Wormhole and World of Hurt are both getting made and we still have two weeks to go!
Thanks to the support of our awesome community, Blue Planet: Recontact is now a “Project We Love” on Kickstarter. This means a higher profile on the site, more potential backers and even more stretch goals going down. Thank you Crew, you are killin’ it!
The Blue Planet: Recontact Kickstarter is now live. If you appreciate deep world-building and character-focused mechanics you’ll love the fully-realized ecology and sociopolitics of the ocean planet Poseidon and the reimagined, character-centered system in this definitive edition of the classic, hard sci-fi game.
Click here for notification of when the Blue Planet: Recontact KS launches tomorrow morning.
“Entering orbit.
Telemetry online.
Velocity 40,320 kph.
On final approach to Poseidon.”
Click here to sign up for notification when the Blue Planet: Recontact Kickstarter launches.
Today we are one week out from the launch of the Blue Planet: Recontact Kickstarter on Tuesday, April 6th. To mark this moment in the countdown, I want to share something no-one but the creative team has yet seen - the new edition cover art!
The covers are by the incredible Jeff Zugale and intentionally evoke the imagery and wonder of the popular, first edition cover. The illustration is a diptych of the Player’s and Moderator’s Guides, as shown by the mock-ups below.
I hope you love the image as much as we do and are as excited to see the rest of the project come to life as we are. Thank you for your ongoing support and welcome back to Poseidon.
Curious about the background of this banner? Well, every good game book needs a fantastic cover…
We are just two weeks from the launch of the Blue Planet: Recontact Kickstarter and are super-excited for everyone to get involved. To mark the moment in the countdown, I thought I’d share a few teasers.
Teaser #1 - Here’s a current work-in-progress by our amazing interior artist Stephan Shoz - the finished version of which I can’t wait to see.
Step 1
Step 2
Teaser #2 - Instant rewards! The day after the end of the campaign, every book reward level will get PDFs of the previous editions of Blue Planet, and if you pledge for a book set (both Player’s and Moderator’s Guides) you will receive PDF copies of everything ever published for Blue Planet! That’s over 1700 pages of waterworld wonder, as soon as the Kickstarter closes!
I know this might not motivate the hardcore Blue Planet fans out there who already have access to Poseidon, but since one of the goals of this campaign is to bring the game to a new generation of players, I’m psyched to get folks through the wormhole on day one!
Lambda Serpentis II
Teaser #3 - Here is a draft of one of my favorite reward levels. I’m excited about this one because it will allow backers to plant their own little flags on Poseidon. Note in particular, the last line below…
Reward Level - Book Set and Naming Rights
• One physical copy of the new Blue Planet: Recontact Player's Guide
• One physical copy of the new Blue Planet: Recontact Moderator's Guide
• Blue Planet Recontact PDF set
• All funded stretch goals
• PDF versions of all 10 previously published, 1st and 2nd edition Blue Planet books the day after the campaign ends.
• Naming rights for a previously unnamed cartographical feature of your choice - landmass, surface or sea floor element. You provide the name and we will add it, like an aquatic easter egg, to one of the new, in-game maps.
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.
Turns out Three Beasts is not produced via Lightening Source and so will remain available for print-on-demand from DriveThru RPG. Incursion however, will still be discontinued at the end of the month, so if you want a hard copy, get your order in by 2.26.
I just learned that DriveThruRPG will be discontinuing their Lightening Source saddle-stitched book print-on-demand services at the end of February. Accordingly, if you've been planning to order a physical copy of either the Three Beasts mini-campaign or the sky ship combat game Upwind: Incursion, you should get your orders in before it's too late and the paper books become as rare and valuable as Masters' artifacts!
