New Year’s Day saw everyone able to get together for an extended gaming session over jambalaya and beer. We picked up after a few rough starts because I had forgotten a few of the going-on last session, but finally we hit the ground running and the adventure I thought would be done by third hour ran five, almost until we knocked off for the night.

The Cylon player character (a Leoben type) and “Tana” — meaning “commander” in Kobolian — a Three than the Colonials had as a POW in earlier episodes figure out that someone has been tweaking the programming of the “humanoid Cylons” or Seraph when they have been going to the resurection ship to have their experiences downloaded directly. (They can’t simply upload wirelessly as they once had.)

The commander of the ship, a player character, was promoted to admiral, and after some politicking the Seraph leadership accepted him as the commander of the military assets. There was a moment of tension when ATHENA recommended not the One model to command the Cylon basestar, but Tana Three. After some consultation between the models that had come for the alliance confab, this was made the case. She was made a “commander” and the second highest ranking officer in the military, over the objections of the Colonial colonel commanding the light escort they have in tow.

Tana askes for Colonial help in sussing out what is going on, and during a state visit to the basestar, the admiral brought along two of the characters working on Cylon reproductive issues. They went with the PC Cylon to the resurrection ship and in a great display of mad scientist moments, they were able to distract the Caretaker of the ship and got a look at Cylon/Seraph coding. They discovered with a spectacular roll by one of their programmers that the Ones were trying to program in fealty to the models. He also found all the deep psychological blocks that the Blaze — their once God — had programmed into their machine part of their brains, preventing them from all manner of behavior. Essentially, they were slaves to this Blaze, fugueing out whenever they tried to address their infertility issues, or discuss certain things tied to the Blaze, or other important issues.

Despite the dangers, the programmer character wrote a virus that stripped all these inhibitors out of the Seraph and set it loose in the Cylon fleet. This not only freed them from the inhibitors their God put in place, but allowed them to know about the manipulation of the Ones. A full-scale uprising and overthrow of the Ones occurred in about a minute and a half as the models conferred and voted to keep most decisions a democratic quorum of the models, but they placed Tana 3 in command of the fleet’s military decisions. They also view the programmer as something of a hero of the Seraph, now.

The alliance looks solid, they are on their way to Earth, and the episode ended with the trial of the various ringleaders of the mutiny — which included the cousin and last remaining family of one of the PCs, the new CAG. She was able to make herself vote for death. Lots of role playing pathos ensued.

We started the next episode before closing out the night. One of the recon missions, following leads that the ATHENA had generated for possible Kobolian outposts, finds Argos — a colony of the Lords of Kobol that predates the 13th Tribe’s exodus by almost 1000 years. The place is barely habitable in a New Caprica sort of way, but there is the added possibility of ancient tech to be plundered. Athena seems intent on doing so. Might she have ulterior motives?

One of the things the players started tossing about was the idea of settling the civilian fleet, which has been slowing their travel as older vessel, and those not really designed for extended space and FTL travel are increasingly experiencing malfunctions. Additionally, the fresh food is about to end, and they’ll be on stabilized and canned stuff for the next six months or so it will take to get to Earth. But Argos has indications of familiar crops and animal life. After five months stuck in tight quarters, grieving over the loss of…everything, the players are starting to think it might be necessary to drop the civilian fleet someplace relatively safe, and press on at best speed to Earth.

That was where we ended the night with some big decisions that could decide how much longer the campaign goes on. The end, I think, is in sight after four years.

(This isn’t the longest continuous campaign I’ve run, but it’s damned close. IT has been, by far, the most rewarding from a storytelling and fun standpoint of any game in the last fifteen years.)