Last Thursday, we had our next “episode” of the BSG campaign, where we are following a side story of what happened to Pegasus (in our continuity), when they returned to the Colonies to keep the Cylons busy while the fleet headed for Earth.

One of the elements I threw at the characters were that their Cylon prisoners all “feel” a presence — the means by which they uploaded seemed to be trying to make a connection to them. The players, of course, know this is about the time of the Blaze (Hades) reaching New Ophiuchi and attempting to reboot an old sliver of the TITAN, Hecate.

Worse, reconnaissance of the Colonies shows the Cylons, freed from their Seraph masters, have been busily setting up infrastructure to make power, and more centurions and old-school raiders. (The assumption is the method for making the biomechanical ones is either beyond them, ideologically dissonant, or takes too long.) They find out there are resistance movements on nearly all the Colonial worlds, but that the situation is more chaotic than expected. Rather than humans vs. the bad guys, there are Seraph-human alliances, but also widespread human on human post-apocalyptic “gang” warfare. Pulling everyone together to fight the toasters might prove more difficult than they expected. They also find out the Cylons are firing up some of the old materiel the Colonials had in storage, which gave us a new setting location GMs might find useful: the “Boneyard.”

After the Cylon War, the Colonies didn’t need as many ships in operation, and many of the old vessels were pretty battered. Fortunately, space is really big, so they mothballed a large swathe of their old warships at the Cyrannus Military Aerospace Repository (C-MAR) or “Boneyard.” Positioned at the barycenter of the four suns, it’s a stable, gravitational liberation point. C-MAR consists of a massive anchorage for parts, ammunition, and other storage, and is surrounded by ships spaced in a arc around the station, spaced 200 miles or so apart, that occasionally have their positions stabilized by tugs. There were, at the time of the attacks, about 150 escorts, tenders,flatops and other mobile docks, and other light vessels from the first War to the present in storage and in various conditions — from a parts ship waiting to be cut up for scrap, to ships that could be restarted and made ready with a few weeks work. Also here were five salvageable “heavies” — two of the surviving Columbia-class from the first war: Athena and Atlantia (which had been replaced with a Mercury-class), as well a post-war build Columbia, Ares. There was also the “death ship”, so called for her myriad failures that caused her eventual decommissioning  — a Minerva-class named Hera. 

The Cylons were restoring Athena, Ares, and Atlatntia to operational status, and the place is only defended by raiders on CAP. It was decided to go in and destroy two, and attempt to “cut out” one of the ships. They chose Ares to grab, used their escort Demosthenes to carry shuttles with nearly every marine they had, and a large, armed DC team. They jump in, Pegasus and Hecate banging away on Atlantia and the still-crippled Athena, maneuvering on her reaction props only. The ships are moving slowly, and their combat response is lackluster — they suspect the ships are mostly automated. They quickly destroy the latter, but the Cylons try to ram Pegasus, and succeed only in glancing off of her (still does a lot of damage!)

Meanwhile, the PCs aboard Aegis make their attempt to shield Demosthenes assault on Ares, first hitting the landing bays to clear out the few raiders aboard the old battlestar. This turned into a good dogfight, while Old D launched her boarding party. Problem the first: Ares was mostly complete — her engines are online, the FTL is operational, and she’s got ordinance to throw. There was a good fight that with judicious use of plot points by the PC commanding the ship lead to no damage to Aegis and Ares’ guns disabled.

The boarding party, with had a “10” along to help them with the automation, meets solid resistance, but they have numbers on the Cylons. The 10 is able to gain access to the ship’s network the Cylons established and trick the centurions into repelling a fake assault in a place that Aegis could hit with their guns (the arm to the flight pods.) He’s able to get the FTL up and running, and they take the ship with relatively low losses.

We ended the night there, as we had run late and the wife and daughter were wanting to get to sleep…