Watching Caprica, it’s occurred to me that some of the aspects of their retcon universe work well for the role playing game.  While the original idea of the colonies being in one star system was taken from Ronald Moore’s blog posts, there’s no real onscreen stuff to counter the new (and more scientifically sound) idea of the colonies being in a star cluster or multi-star solar system.

I’ve always liked the star cluster idea, myself:  it gives the Colonies a reason to have created FTL systems, for one; it also provides more scientific realism (much as the map of the Firefly ‘Verse from Quantum Mechanix provides a much more believable setting that the original show did.)  There are some benefits, as well, to an RPG setting:

1)  It better explains why some other ships might have avoided contact in the initial Cylon attacks.  They might have been on survey missions, broken down with FTL troubles, or on training missions.

2)  With colonies scattered around a few stars — even if they’re only a few light months apart — there could be weapons caches, fuel depots, and other facilities that the survivors could raid to supply themselves to either run, or attack…

3) It gives surviving ships the chance to skulk about between the stars of the 12 Colonies, collecting intelligence, making hit and run attacks that are hard to track.

Battlestarwiki.org has started to incorporate the information from Serge Graystone’s Twitter account.  It’s worth the look.

UPDATE:  I slapped together a retcon’d “chapter” on the 12 Colonies.