Casting Shadows

It is Setting Sunday for #RPGaDay2022, which means sharing an intriguing (interesting is insufficient today) detail from a game setting we enjoy. For this post I want to take you on a trip to Poseidon, an incredible water world which serves as the center stage of the tenacious RPG Blue Planet which is in the final stages of a new metamorphosis. Soon, it will reemerge, shedding its black and white markings, to spread colorful and inspiring wings of new art, detailed maps, new system, and new understanding of itself. When that happens, the old name shall be gone and it will come to us as Blue Planet: Recontact.

The setting detail I wish to share and by which I am intrigued as both player and as GM, is the extremely valuable substance colloquially called Long John.

There is something curiously and perhaps deliciously nautical about that choice of nickname, isn’t there?

Imagine first that there were a frontier for us to explore, discover new things on, expand into, and which might be the answer to an environmental, economic and societal (at least unified and supportive society) death spiral on our once-blue homeworld. Into this heady mix of possibilities, add in an ore the properties of which allow us to better manipulate DNA and sing us siren songs of longevity or more.

What wouldn’t we do to get there and stake claims?

Blue Planet has, throughout its history managed to compellingly and believably create a lure for its characters and their players to want to see the pristine beaches, hear the ocean whispering and booming, revel in the wonder of its breath (or life) taking fauna, and look up dazzled at a glittering canopy of new stars and constellations, unobscured by pollution. Among these attractions are sprinkled the challenges of violence, of possibility warring with inevitability, of irresponsibility wearing the brazen guise of responsibility and reinforcing its deceit with uniformed security and automated defenses.

All that and that is still saying nothing about the uplifted animals and the amazing technology.

Under, behind, in, through, over, and around it all, however, is the ore. It offers wealth, it offers fame, it offers freedom, it offers lies of easy money on black markets, it offers dreams of comfortable retirement in exchange for hardwork, it offers new discovery, but most of all – it offers more life.

Healthier life.

Better life.

Come to the offworld colony of Poseidon.

Come to Paradise.

Live forever…