Bravo Fleet
Shore Leave is over!
After 4 weeks and 172 Stories, our second writing campaign of 2025 has come to an end. This one has been a bit different, a bit experimental – shorter, slower paced, with lower IC stakes and opportunities for members to focus on characters, relationships, and moments over sweeping plots and epic adventure. It’s also been a chance for more collaborative writing in a campaign than ever before, with a slew of joint posts. My particular gratitude goes to the task force staff who managed TF-level collaborative writing on a scale we’ve not seen in modern BF, and to my deputy, Brennan, for spearheading that collaboration. Thank you to everyone who participated in Shore Leave.
This isn’t the end of Intelligence Office activities for 2025 – far from it. As usual, we will look to a campaign in Q4; something to round off the year. This will be more of a traditional campaign with plot, adventure, action, the lot, though we’re hoping to build on the successes of Shore Leave. Hopefully, we can blend the excitement of a traditional campaign and its traditional story with the opportunity for a slower pace, more world-building, more collaborative writing, keeping our writing active without risking burnout. Keep your eyes peeled for more news, but this won’t go live until at least very late October – you have two and a half months before the IO comes knocking on the door of your captain’s ready room with a new assignment!
Until then, take a breather – you’ve earned it. This is a great time to write your own adventures, as usual; your own plots, characters, corners of the setting. The 2402 BFMS Mission remains live, sketching out the state of the wider galaxy in the post-Vaadwaur world, not materially changed just because the Fourth Fleet took a 4-week vacation.
Now is also a great chance to look at the wiki. The wiki isn’t just a repository for fleet canon that sets the stage for writing – it’s a record of your adventures, too. You’ve written sweeping missions about the Vaadwaur invasion, and fleshed out details of paradise worlds where your characters relaxed, and everything in between. Few people go on deep dives of BFMS command mission archives, but the wiki? Everyone can see that. The IO encourages and supports you in not just updating your ship articles with your history, but what about the places your ship visited, the people they saw?
Remember, fleet canon is just the big picture stuff, the stuff which must impact your story. Member canon doesn’t mean it’s not real – it just means it’s of a scope that doesn’t bind the hands of other writers. You can still share it, write it, publish it – pick up a world someone else created with, play with it, put it back.
The Intelligence Office invites you to take stock of your adventures so far, and record them as best you can. Then? Start a new one.
We’ll be in touch.
