Art
I am pleased to announce that all the Recontact art - from creatures to tech to maps to scenic interiors - is complete! Well, mostly. There are a couple edits pending, and Mark is pasting in your geographical names, but everything has been submitted, and it all looks awesome! The scope of communication, talent and effort that went into the production of these images is impossible to overstate. It was truly global, encompassing hundreds of hours of inspired work by artists from across the planet. Looking at the collected files, I am boggled at how much there is and how fantastic the books are going to look. Every time the latest image came in, it became my new favorite. I had to force myself to hold off sharing this image in particular because I wanted something special for this update. If you don't see it at first, look again...
The tech art has also been zooming in, and I want to share two of my favorites - the hypersail-boat and the nictitating membrane biomod.
I won't even try for words about the maps. Mark has blown all my expectations out of the water, so I'll just let the latest Down-Home Station map speak for itself...
Words
The writing of the various sections of new text is also wrapping up and should be done shortly. I'm excited to share it all, but I thought one piece in particular would make a cool preview. Graeme Barber - still no relation - nailed his assignment and I thought I would share the current draft here (please note this has not been to the editor yet).
I also want to thank the hardcore among you who accepted my offer to review the game mechanics text last month. I got some great feedback and have already incorporated the majority of it. The result is a clearer, cleaner, tighter system, and I feel really good about the community collaboration.
And if that's not cool enough, I'm stoked to announce that Greg Benage, my partner in the production of the original Blue Planet, and the designer of the v2 Synergy System, has joined the project! A change of jobs means more writing time for him, so he is now contributing to Recontact. If there's any good writing in the earlier editions, it is probably Greg's, so this is fantastic news. In fact, when I was casting about for a subtitle to distinguish the new edition, it was Greg who suggested "Recontact."
The Greater White in the Room
If you have been tracking our updates and side-eying the calendar, it's pretty obvious at this point that we are not going to make our planned delivery date of October '22. This has probably been evident for a while, but I want to be transparent about it here.
I have a weird day job - well, 24 hour/day job - as an administrator at a boarding school. In a typical pre-COVID week, I'd work 50+ hours. During COVID, however, I've been working 70+ hours per week, as caring for 130 teenagers during a pandemic is...a lot. This has left very little of me for anything else - especially creative work like RPG writing. Though there have so far been no critical bottlenecks - a fact of which I am kind of proud - the reduction in my own capacity means the overall workflow was slower than it would otherwise have been.
This said, the project moves forward a little every day, and we have been making substantive progress every month. As you can see in the updates, the writing, art and design are coming together, but good work takes time, and without a wormhole, there's no getting around the physics. Given my job and the ongoing pandemic, I can't say with certainly when Recontact will deliver, but I can promise we will continue to communicate, be transparent and work diligently on the project. You will continue to know as we do how production is going, and when we finally go to press, we'll be able to accurately forecast shipping and delivery dates.
In the meantime, thank you for your ongoing support and patience. Truth be told, it has been your constant enthusiasm and appreciation for Blue Planet that has kept me going over the last year and a half when little else could. In a very real way, you have all been vital to the project, and I am deeply grateful.