Blue Planet (role-playing game)

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Blue Planet
The cover of Blue Planet 1st version
Designer(s)	Jeff Barber, Greg Benage, Jim Heivilin and Jason Werner
Publisher(s)	Biohazard Games (v1) Fantasy Flight Games (v2)
Publication date	1997 (v1) 2000 (v2)
Genre(s)	Science fiction
System	Custom (v1) Custom "Synergy System" (v2)

Blue Planet is an environmentalist science fiction role-playing game and setting from Biohazard Games. It could be described as Cyberpunk meets Waterworld.

[edit] History

The first edition was demonstrated and released at Origins in 1997 to critical acclaim, receiving a nomination for the Game of the Year Origins award.[1]

The rulebook, weighing in at just under 350 pages, is almost a worldbook, with about five-sixths of its length dedicated to the alien setting. In keeping with its environmentalist theme, the game was dedicated to Jacques Cousteau, and 10% of the profits were to go to his Cousteau Society.

The game received criticism for its overly involved character generation system and extremely lethal combat system.^{[citation needed]} A second version of the game was later released in 2000 in association with Fantasy Flight Games. This used a new role-playing game system commonly referred to as the Synergy System instead. The rules and modules were released in several books.

There was also a GURPS Blue Planet conversion[2] of the original product released in 2002 by Steve Jackson Games.

[edit] Setting

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Blue Planet is fairly unusual among sci-fi RPGs in that its setting is exhaustively researched and scientifically accurate [3]. It is set on an alien water planet, with believable climate, geography, ecology and political situations. While even an oceanographer would admire the details (not surprising, since Jeff Barber teaches oceanography when he's not working on Blue Planet), it's hardly boring or staid. Poseidon is a frontier planet rife with danger, intrigue and possibilities a dozen campaigns.

200 years from now, the human race has pretty much wrecked its environment. Uncountable plant and animal species have gone extinct, and humanity has just begun rebuilding in the wake of a 75-year worldwide famine. Just before the disaster, a mysterious artificial wormhole was discovered a fair distance out beyond the edge of the solar system. Expeditions discovered that the wormhole led to another star system 35 light years away. The second planet of the system covered with a single vast ocean and amazingly suitable for human life, was named Poseidon, and one major colony ship was sent there before civilization collapsed on Earth, and the colonists were given up for as lost.

Recently, however, the GEO (Global Ecology Organization) and various Incorporates (read: Mega-Corps) have rebuilt the Earth's economies (but not ecology) and have recontacted Poseidon, only to discover that the colonists have gone "native," abandoning their run-down technology for simple, tribal life as fisherfolk. When the discovery of a "xenosilicate" ore revolutionizes genetic engineering, a new gold rush brings new settlers, greed and Incorporate warfare to the planet, threatening to destabilize the ecology of Poseidon. Some natives start ecoterrorist groups to protect their oceans from being despoiled, while the GEO tries to maintain law and order with their genetically engineered Supertroopers and Marshalls. Meanwhile, the rarely-glimpsed and enigmatic aborigines which dwell beneath the ocean surface begin reacting to the human presence in a decidedly unfriendly manner.