I can't find a good run-down of the fiasco surrounding this particular game, but I'll try to and be concise (please correct me if I forgot something).

1. WEG loses Star Wars licence and goes belly-up.
2. Eric Gibson buys WEG, announces hot new SF RPG by Bill Coffin (fresh out of Palladium) and starts taking preorders.
3. A lot of time goes by and no product. People start demanding refunds. Eric cites personal problems, complçete with entirely too much personal information, and finally admits that the money's gone and he can't pay them back.
4. Septimus is officially cancelled and Eric slowly but surely pays everyone back.
5. Eric declares WEG dead (again) and as a final act of [strike]sorry I fucked up, have free stuff[/strike] releases all extant D6 RPG books as freeware, complete with an Open Licence. Precis buys Bloodshadows, some German guys buy Torg and sit on it to this day, and last but not least, Septimjus gets a free release.

Septimus is still up and free to download over at DriveThruRPG.

Perhaps because of the clusterfuck which centered around the game and Mr. Gibson's mismanagement, or maybe because the release of the game happened six years after its announcement and three years after the quickstart, and the élan was gone, I don't know, but the fact is, I've never read about anyone, anywhere on the Internet running or playing or even reading the game.

It's a good game, too. It's balls-out space-opera with plenty of transhuman elements. The setting is really out there; spacetime is coming apart at the seams because excessive use of hyperdrives, and FTL is growing increasingly unreliable, and as the obligatory monolithic spacefaring empire fast approaches a Dark Age, they discover a real, honest-to-God Dyson Sphere, and it gets settled New World-like by all sorts of people.

If you don't like the system, you can use bits and pieces of the richly developed setting to spice up your SF game.

If you don't like the setting, you can cannibalize the mechanical bits (like genemods and nanomods) to make your D6 Space (or Space Opera, or Metabarons, or God have mercy on your soul, Star Wars) game more interesting. For example, I considered using the transhuman stuff for a D6-powered Revelation Space-like game of cybered-up, immortal free traders in humongous STL ships plying their trades between stars, each visit centuries apart from the next -- mere decades to them, thanks to relativistic time dilation.

Best of all, it's free.

Who's got it? Who's read it? Who's (gasp) played or ran it?

I had never heard of it, but I just downloaded it. I'm looking forward to reading it.

I had heard of it, probably on this forum, in the past but didn't know it was available for free. About to download it.

I like Coffin's work in Palladium Fantasy and Heroes Unlimited.

I was given an obligatory free copy by WEG in regards to my pre-order of which I never received my refund and that was all.  Then the damn thing goes free to download anyhow, geeze.

But as far as the game is concerned, yeah it was a great piece of work and all, just wish it would have went into print as promised, it deserved that much at least.

I only have the quickstart pdf, I didn't know the full products had been released at all, let alone free. To be honest the setting seemed a little intimidating.  I'm not really one for intricate settings. I prefer something that is instantly accessible without a whole lot of exposition.

In that category there is the other forgotten D6 Space setting, Fires of Amatsumara which actually did make it to print and which I still have. It's basically a space western in the vein of Firefly. The main twist being the default campaign sees the characters as law-enforcement, an isolated corp of Rangers trying to keep the lid on a wild, lawless frontier.

The layout of the book is terrible, and I'm not usually fussy about that sort of thing, but even so I can see myself running it someday.

Honestly, transhumanist stuff has a tendency to make me eyeroll anyway and having never really interacted much with the Palladisphere (that weird bubble of gamers and designers around Palladium Games who seem to never interact that much with the rest of the industry) I'd never heard of Bill Coffin so I was never enormously interested in Septimus from the start. Then the controversy happened and that kind of doomed it for me - there's no way the game could be as awesome or dramatic or heartbreaking as the fiasco surrounding it.

I got screwed by the pre-order and lost all interest.

at one point before it was cancelled and during wonky print issues he was having he ordered a few print versions from another print house specifically for Gencon.
I think it was Gencon 3 years ago but I may be wrong as to witch.
They were softcover and I bought one. He gave a cd with the pdf burned onto them with the purchase.

I even offered to take WEG merchandise instead of cash for the refund (a good deal for him) and he said he would ship it out.

Never happened.

Pic of the book in case anyone was interested in seeing it

No apostrophe on "Bill Coffin's Septimus" on the spine? Ew.

I had no interest in this in the first place.

RPGPundit

Got it, read it, but felt the setting was very meh.
Don't get me wrong, I like Bill's narrative/voice throughout the work, but it still felt fairly formulaic to me. Which may be a case of a corebook that had 10 supplements sitting in the writer's mind, that due to circumstances, never got to see print. Septimus does feel like a lot of "missed opportunities", to me at least.

heard the name, but didn't know the game.  will download it later tonight.

Just read the setting material in the core book and I was not impressed. The 7th  empire, that's lasted 7 centuries, and fought a 7 front war... blegh.

I didn't feel any of the excitement or energy in the text that previous Coffin stuff had. It actually made me sad.

Of course, I hate reading pdfs, so maybe I would think differently if I had a physical book to flip through. I couldn't even make it to the mechanical aspects of the game, and I'm unfamiliar with the D6 system (last played Star Wars 15 years ago)