Casting Shadows

There are many things which I find compelling and satisfying about Blue Planet in all of its editions, but near the top is how it manages to give me at least part of an answer to any particular question I might have about its future setting of speculative science fiction grounded in a spirit of verisimilitude over fantasy, and depth versus vibes. I get this sense, though, that this post does not want to be about that. Look for that one in a few days. This post wants me to share something else, so I will go with its flow.

The focal location of the RPG, Poseidon, is a water world, and so comes at us with the soothing blue of pristine oceans and the mystical lure of boundary areas we call beaches, fog banks, advancing or receding storms, and the unexplored expanses and deeps of nearly complete oceanic cover. We see them as boundaries but they are portals from certainty into mystery and danger. It, as I said and its name claims boldly, is a water world – much more so than our native Earth. However, it is also a world of fire, both literal and metaphorical. It is dreaming itself into existence with volcanic blasts, titanic heaves, immense storms, hemispheres of lightning, and teeth smeared red with the fiery blood dripping from the chain of life’s inexorable hunger to consume life, as its two moons circle with their cold, grasping fingers pulling and straining at its skin and the surging salt sweat of its tides.

Most humans, and perhaps most of their manufactured cousins, do not see this struggle toward an as yet unrealized dream by Poseidon. Instead, they are blinded by the opportunity to commit the sins of the past anew, to upend the conditions their games of greed and status have been locked in, and to press reset on depleted resources so they may be depleted again… this time with immortal overlords to shepherd that consumption.

Is Poseidon a place where we could finally wake from the old dreams? Might we, on a pristine shore look across the illusion of boundary through a portal to possibility? With that image in our minds, could not our dreams change? Could we refuse the doom we seem compelled to meet?

It’s fun to speculate, but it is also true that the mind and its ability to evaluate, create, and iterate is a testing ground for our ability to act.

As a final thought, to return us to solid land and our daily lives, one other important framing device the RPG makes use of is that Poseidon and Earth are connected by the wonder of a wormhole in space, but characters we make for it are assumed to have made this transition already or were born on Poseidon. The Rubicon has been crossed. Our characters are of this new world and the course we steer now is part of its fate.

Will we make it a fresh start?

Will we instead let it be a lie? Will we have shed blood in our pursuit of the promised land and so in our haste and shortsighted action find that everywhere we go is just the old world once again?

The fire burns, and it keeps us warm. The ocean lulls us to sleep, and it drowns us.

Poseidon~

The name is the sound of waves crashing on a beach.

What amazing and terrible things have we done with the sand from that beach…

Which course will we set this time?

We are past the point of “Should we…?” we have nothing left but, “How…?”