After a six month hiatus from the main storyline of our Battlestar Galactica game for an Atomic Robo adventure and a side mini-campaign dealing with Pegasus in our game universe, we returned to Big G and her smaller fleet on Thursday.

This was essentially the equivalent of a teaser/first act for his adventure, titled Remnants of Apotheosis. We rejoined the crew with a teaser that recapped the goodbye party on Cloud 9 where the fleet was splitting — 47,000ish survivors of the Fall of the Colonies were remaining on Argos, an old Kobolian outpost world, where they had found enough arable land and a strong enough ecosphere to survive. They had also discovered the old Citadel of Zeus, and with the aid of a few Kobolian leaders — the “Olympians” Athena, Ares, Artemis, Hermes, Hephaestus, Nike, and Poseidon — had managed to overhaul enough of the place to support settlement and repair the old planetary defense systems. Out tag on the final episode of the last “season” was that Poseidon was resurrecting some of the other Olympians and Kobolians from the DNA patterns they had located in the data archives. (The Kobolians used DNA for data storage as it is much more robust and long-lived than other forms of data storage.) Athena, realizing that Poseidon was setting the world up to be his own personal kingdom, made certain that Zeus’ pattern would be one of the first batch resurrected.

The other portion of the fleet was 18,021 “pilgrims” headed to Earth under a quasi-military dictatorship led by a PC, Admiral Pindarus. The civilian government is small, as appropriate for a population the size of a small town, with a lot of the powers resting with the ship captains. The whole enterprise, however, is being overseen by the Triumvirate — Athena, Hermes, and Nike — who are advising the fleet. Athena also knows the Olympians will be needed when they get to Earth.

Part of this pilgrimage are 1300 “Seraph”, the “humanoid Cylons” that had been the servants of the Blaze, whom they later found out was Hades. The god of the underworld had gone to Earth to fine the TITANs, those ancient machine intelligences that had created the Olympians and humans on Kobol after having destroyed all life on Earth sometime in the past. He came back having “touched the face of God” and was driven mad, seeking to set himself up as God. The Seraph traveling with the Colonials have been released from behavior restraints (including infertility) that the Blaze had placed on them out of gratitude and a realization that their race will die off in a few generations without Mankind.

This first evening saw Admiral Pindarus and the Seraph commander, Tana (a Three [think Gabrielle Reece for the look]) starting to develop a friendship. Other characters are still trying to recover from the shock of the Fall, the discovery of their Gods, the destruction of the Blaze by an incarnation of Athena that had, in essence, inhabited the body of one of their senior officers (and then girlfriend to Pindarus.) Now the fleet is split, they are having to come to grips with their new allies (and it is just as hard for the Seraph.)

The B story is the impending marriage of a Three, ow a viper pilot aboard Galactica, and that ship’s operations officer, a LT Rhadmus. The Triumvirate, the human and Seraph leaders see this as a symbolic thing that might pull the races together; the two lovers just want to get hitched. One of the other PCs is a Nine (think the Leoben model from the sho) who resurrected after the final battle with the Blaze despite the resurrection system being offline. He was downloaded with programming, and is possibly a messenger from (the real) God. He is finding himself in the middle of the Seraph’s politics, which has been exacerbated by the models seeing greater individuality since their sudden acquisition of free will. He is convinced that Athena is some kind of messenger or angel of God, and is finding himself at the tip of the spear on the politics of this marriage.

Meanwhile, the fleet has jumped away and started its six month trek to Earth, with planned stops at worlds the Seraph had known had been settled by the 13th Tribe, which had traveled with the Blaze to Earth 3000 years ago. Their first stop is New Ophiuchi (named for the 13th Tribe) where the final battle with the Blaze happened.

We broke about that point. My estimate is four to six more “episodes”, which means between eight and twelve more evenings of play in the campaign. If I’m right, we should see the end of this long-running campaign sometime around the end of the year.