Our Battlestar Galactica campaign has been on hiatus while we power through a very amusing Hollow Earth Expedition game, but soon we’ll be rotating back to BSG. For one of the adventures I put together I start fleshing out the Colonies with loads of background tidbits — sort of narrative greebles (the SFX slang for the loads of stuff on models to give them a sense of scale.)
Our Sagittaron is the site of an ancient set of ruins outside the city of Parises (originally I was going to call it Petra.) The ruins are well known to the locals, but they aren’t talked about and have never had an archeological expedition explore them due to the religious proscriptions of the Sagittarons. In the mission, the characters learn the carbon dating suggest the site is thousands of years older than the Colonies’ settlement — are they wrong? Is this the birth place of Mankind? Or have humans colonized these worlds over and over again across time?
Tauron transportation authorities frequently “false flag” vessels, much like Liberia today — giving them “legitimate” letters of ownership, etc. Smugglers, terrorists — often their vessels fly the Tauron flag.
Virgon’s royal family still exists and are titular heads of the government, but are nothing more than figureheads. The aristocracy isn’t as powerful as they once were, save for the ones that have managed to maintain their fortunes.
Colonial shipping have specific areas — bullpens — which the various shipping companies use for their jumps between the stars in Colonial space. This is to prevent vessels from jumping on top of each other. These bullpens are chartered from the Colonial government (and before that were governed by the various Colonies’ orbital traffic control.) These bullpens are usually a few hours travel from the various worlds to prevent accidents. Colonial Fleet bullpens are usually closer to the worlds. The schedules of bullpen use are leased out to other vessels.
The Black Campbell 
27 November, 2011 at 20:22
This a good post and actually dovetails with some fiction I’m writing.
I had a question regarding characters…How do you handle character generation? I’m not talking about points or such, but in the current game we have a Viper pilot, a Marine Gunnery Sergeant, a fleet medic/trauma doctor, and (before he was busted for insubordination) an engineer. How do you justify a diverse group of military characters “adventuring” together?
27 November, 2011 at 21:57
Simplest, they’re in the military and got assigned to the same unit or ship. You can’t exactly say no. If they aren’t, I’ve found the nest thing is engineer connections before play — they know each other and were friends from before this period, they’re related, something like that.
In our campaign, the characters are the ship commander, who is the son of a famed (some would say “the”) admiral from the first war. His CAG is also his brother in law, married to his sister who is a member of the People’s Council. We have the LT in charge of the MARDET and her first sergeant (who worked for the CO’s dad when he was SecDef.) The last is the command master chief of the ship, who is on his last tour before he can retire with full bennies and who served with the CO and the CAG on a former assignment. All but the LT have some kind of familial or service connection.
28 November, 2011 at 17:19
I understand the “how are we connected” aspect, but how does the commander of a battlestar “adventure”? Having characters in key command positions is nice as it gives the players a sense of control over their characters’ destiny, but it also makes it a little difficult for those same characters to get into the action oriented aspects of the game that most players enjoy. Personally, I don’t see the allure of combat scene after combat scene, but a lot of the people I game with seem to be of the “we kill things and role play the killing” style of gaming.
28 November, 2011 at 20:26
In ship combat they’ll be doing the important rolls for their departments, etc. for the commander, as we’re pre-attack there’s more politicking than fighting. The player in question enjoys that.
29 November, 2011 at 13:13
I usually have decent players, but they’ve been corrupted by the “kill it all” attitude of D&D. Couple that with barely three hours per game session and even then there are tons of interruptions, it’s almost impossible to do much more than an “Og kill. Og like killing” style game…which is not my preferred approach.