Hello!

The campaign is nearing its end, and there are less than 40 hours left to join over 590 scientists to delve the depths as part of the Substratum Expedition!

We took delivery of the proof prints this evening and they look great! Printed on 80lb uncoated paper, I love how the colors turned out. And even better, there are no major layout issues that need to be corrected, such as margins or colors!

So what do we need to fix? 

Honestly, that's it. And it's all easily fixable. We'll comb through each page in the coming days to ensure we didn't miss anything else, too.

 

During our interview with Rascal News, we realized we had made a fundamental mistake in writing the open-ended mystery: We said what was at the core of the planet: an interdimensional portal.

An interdimensional portal being at the center of the earth is now just one possibility. We spent last weekend updating all the writing to now be an anomaly. The otherworldly abilities you get from taking stress are now Anomaly Influences, rather than Portal Influences, for instance.

The Expedition can still decide it's a portal, but calling it an anomaly opens up a huge range of possibilities. What is the anomaly that's splitting the earth open?
 

Substratum Protocol is about letting the clues and your answers determine what is really happening, and we think this update opens the floodgates for it.

Join the expedition before it's too late!

It's time for another sector deep dive! Liquifying Crystal Caverns won the last poll, which, we think, is a pretty cool sector. Here is where scientists get a glimpse that it's not just rocks and dust deep below the surface. They are in for an exploration of many strange biomes.

This sector is full of hazards, with the unstable caverns causing gas filled crystals to explode, filling the area with corrosive poison and ejecting dangerous shards at the expedition members. However, this could also be a place where players discover submerged structures still in operation - what secrets do they hold if they can get to them safely? 

Flora and fauna are amazing bioluminescent creatures living around the plasma-like crystals that seem to shift and flow like non-Newtonian fluid. 

This close to the surface, we still lean more to the hard science fiction aspects of Substratum Protocol, imagining how this high-pressure sector could be filled with creatures who have evolved to use the mineral structures around them. One of my favorite events from this sector is the scientists stumbling upon sentient fauna that use the crystals to communicate.

The civilization ruins above may have been long abandoned and dead, the these caverns are full of life and signs of intelligent activity. What clues will the expedition discover about the anomaly here?

Until next time,
-Andy Boyd
Pandion Games