In the last ten years, I find increasingly that I don’t head over to
the big stands at conventions to pick up the latest shiny thing, instead I find
myself drawn to the Bring and Buy sections of the trade hall. I’m not sure why this is to be honest, it could
be because so many new games these days are so very expensive and part of my
Gamer DNA remembers being poor and scrabbling for so many years. I can’t afford to risk eighty quid on
something I’m not absolutely sure
that I’m going to like, whereas at the bring and buy, there’s a whole bunch of
things that are available that I know
are good and being second hand, are mostly cheap…
Case in point was a small bookstore in Wakefield, England, in a
building with twenty other places that had a similar indie vibe to them, from a
tattoo parlour to a skateboard shop and the bookstore, which was clearly run
because the person behind the counted wanted to spend their whole life
surrounded by books. The sort where you
bring a book to the counter and you half wonder if they’re going to let you buy
it because you’re diminishing the volume of book in the shop…
In this case however, I shouldn’t have worried, because these weren’t
“Real” books, these were those shiny A4 size “Game” books, and he’d bundled
them together because he wanted to get rid of all of them and get more dusty
books back in there, so he was selling them as all or nothing and wanted a
whole fiver for them…
Blue Planet V2, every book in pristine condition.
Now at the time, I only needed the moderators guide to make the set,
but when you get something like this presenting itself, there’s no question
whatsoever in what you’re going to do…
Blue Planet is one of those games that you may not use the system for,
but the books are roleplay gold for anything that involves anything like the
environment that’s in them. There’s a
lot of research gone into how the world is presented, and it’s that wealth of
information that makes this such a brilliant game.
Set upon the world of Poseidon (Well, if you found a world that was
mostly water, you would, wouldn’t you?), Blue Planet is Firefly on water, with all the fun that that entails. Frontier Justice is a normal thing, and there’s
constantly people out there on the take, trying to make things better for
themselves and caught up between them and the law (working either side as they
need to) are the players. The thing
about Blue Planet is that it presents very much the feel of an isolated place,
there’s a few places where man and his kind are welcome, and the rest of it is
a largely inhospitable mass of water and what lies beneath. For games where you’re out on the edge with
little to no backup, making the rules as you go along and trying to keep a
track of your own sense of self, it’s an excellent game with few equals.
That and the fact that Killer Whales are a player character race
option…
So I got all the following…
Moderators Guide - Well, you need one of those to run it, but
this book also goes into why you should want to play Blue Planet, as well as
suggested ways in which to run it and how to cultivate the proper feel of the
world.
Players Guide – Killer, Killer, Killer, Killer, Killer, Killer
Whales....And of course everything else J
First colony – A guide to the city of Haven and Argos Island, but not
just that, also a guide to the political and social machinations and several
adventures to give players a straight run at the world without even getting as
far as the Oceans.
Frontier Justice – The guide to Law and disorder in the world, together
with a variety of adventures to get the players into scenarios where they could
encounter the same, both for and against Justice.
Fluid Mechanics – The Tech of Blue Planet, from the hard tech of the warsuits
and vehicles, to the cybernetics and biotech enhancements that are commonly
available, want to swim with the fishes (and actually swim...?), this is the
book that can make it happen.
And finally, Natural Selection – The guide to the Ecology of Poseidon, not
just a regular monster manual as the cover would suggest, it’s a real guide to
the world, why things come about, how certain lifeforms have evolved to be as dominant
as they are. From the various natural
phenomena, both under the waves and over, to the evolution of algae that floats
in gigantic iceberg like clusters, eating their way over everything that they
come across.
Blue Planet remains amongst my favourite settings of all time, there’s
a yahoo group running for it at the moment and the discussion is still active
despite nothing having come out for the game in some time. So come on...
You’re not afraid to go back into the water are you?
