Intelligence Office Report #3 – The Blackout

All of a sudden, everything stops.

There is a new update for 2402. Across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, warp travel, long-range communications, and long-range sensors have started to fail. This is an unprecedented catastrophe, and one which threatens the safety and security of the entire galaxy. But before there can be searing scientific insights and bold undertakings to resolve this, first, there is just the dark.

Members are invited to please read the Intelligence Office’s latest releases for the events of March 2402, and the calamity known as ‘The Blackout.’ The BFMS mission makes a few points clear:

The Blackout is not happening everywhere immediately (and is only ever happening in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants); it advances over the initial weeks of March and by mid-March 2402 seems to have ‘stabilised’
Members are not obligated to write and depict the Blackout. They may tell their stories either prior to the Blackout (January-Feb-early March 2402) or keep to a fringe the Blackout doesn’t quite reach until later.
Outside of a few key areas, specified on the wiki article, the ‘boundaries’ of the Blackout have been left vague. You are always free to define them for your member canon, including the regions surrounding your starbases, but please do not be more specific for canon (for eg, determining whether Earth is cut off from Alpha Centauri). Most such things, your characters wouldn’t know!
This is the prelude to the Fleet Action. The nature of the Blackout and how to resolve it will be addressed later. The Intelligence Office decided that the Blackout alone was, however, significant enough to warrant some time dedicated to experiencing the phenomenon before we throw what’s next at you!

If you want to get stuck in and write, please do! Again, with the FA coming at us fast, I recommend going for short, sharp stories. Don’t get bogged down in a sweeping epic of humanitarian aid that you’re only a third into when the FA lore-dump happens. You could depict snapshots of life under the Blackout for your crew, of the work they’re doing, or of character-focused, emotionally driven moments.

Don’t worry too badly about ‘where’ you dump your ships under the Blackout. You can, of course, stick to fleet canon areas, or your starbase – if you have them. Decisions you make now won’t nail you to the floor for the FA.

There’s more to come. In the meantime…

Are you afraid of the dark?

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Intelligence Office Report #3 – The Blackout