After a two week break to play some Hollow Earth Expedition, we jumped back into the action with our Battlestar Galalctica campaign. The rag-tag fleet had send a recon mission to New Ophiuchi to confirm that the Blaze was absolutely, completely, posilutely, irrefutably dead…and ran smack into the middle of a fight between a Seraph “Seeker” ship and a small fleet, and Cylons in basestar. The characters were captured, tortured, and escaped, and the fleet jumped to preserve their location security.

However, they had not confirmed that things were still copacetic on the ground, in the nuked, long dead city of Hecatopolis, where a shard of the TITAN — the ancient machine intelligences that had destroyed Mankind, recreated Man after a fit of guilt and created the Lords of Kobol to rule over them — was being “jumpstarted” by the Blaze months ago. This led to the final battle between the fleet and the Cylon/Seraph god.

Concerned about the Cylon activities on the ground, Athena leads a mission composed of herself, Nike, and Hermes (see early AARs for more on this) and a group of Seraph to check out Hecatopolis in a couple of raptors. They find a massive field of carnage, thousands of Seraph and centurions strewn for a quarter mile around the shard. They find a few Seraph survivors, and Cavil — the Nine who was resurrected despite resurrection being defunct (and an agent of God?) has a vision: He finds out the Blaze has “returned to that which made us all” and gets his instructions for leaving some f his brethren to spread the Word to the humans, members of the 13th Tribe that either never made it to Earth or left that world for here, that still remain on the planet.

At this point, they are aggressed by a company of centurions, backed by a stories-tall decurion “tank” and we get to really see the Kobolians in action for the first time. Two fo the players have characters — Hermes and Nike — that they are playing, and Athena is an NPC, more because she is so fleshed out I didn’t want to hand her off to one of the players. Athena leads a 10-man fire team against the toasters and cleans house over the space of 20 minutes or so, Hermes (leading another fire team of ten) and Cavil try to get the Seraph survivors to the raptors, and Nike uses her flight suit/armor (wings!) to provide aerial support. We got to see how the character design I put together for the Kobolians — specifically an Asset called PHYSICAL EXEMPLAR came into play.

To try and model these paragons of bioengineering, this asset apply to all physical tests, giving them a third die. In play, this means they are usually first to act, hard to hit, and deliver a hell of a wallop. For mental assets, they have a few that are tailored to show their particular specialities: Hermes is the MESSENGER GOD which gives a die to any influence or social type test; Athena’s GODDESS OF WISDOM adds to any Perception tests (where deduction and intuition, etc. are parked.) The result was their support got chewed up — 6 dead, about the same injured, of 18; the Kobolians blew threw the bad guys exuberantly, but could still screw up. Hermes stumbles at one point. He has a pair of jams on his gun back to back. Nike misses a perception queue. Athena flubs an athletics roll and cannot get to the people she wants to aid, but overall, these “super-assets” gave them a super-human, but not divine, quality.

In the end, they discover that the Seeker ship was the last of her kind, a museum of sorts to the early attempts to force conversion of the scattered human populations to worship of the Blaze. When the centurions revolted, a massive civil war rocked Kobol (prior to Galactica‘s arrival and the destruction of the planet by Athena) and a few thousand Seraph rescued their Kobol-human charges and fled to the stars. Now, Galactica is looking to find the other fleet and attempt to extend their alliance with the basestar, Unity, to this new group.

We also had some nice character vignettes — the new PC, Alala (a Seraph) and Boss, the CAG, showing concern over the very young pilot that was brutally maimed in their escape from the Cylon basestar, and Alala’s sudden realization that the humans had some worth. Boss handles her PTSD through work, and playing busybody in people’s love lifes, etc. She’s — we realized — the “Leslie Knope” of the BSG universe. The admiral (a PC) has an increasingly complex and frustrating love life, stuck between Athena and the Seraph commander, Tana.

Overall, the campaign has continued to be a solid, rich game that we’ve all enjoyed tremendously.

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