The Black Campbell

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.

The end of our big battle on Aquaria happened last night. The characters had pushed into the industrial section of Kyros, much of which had been flattened by orbital bombardment, and found a “puppet factory”, as they were calling it — an installation where the Cylons were creating a new hybrid machine…the IL Series (after the “diplomat/leader” robots in the Old Series.) They found a charnel house of body parts — human and Seraph (what our humanoid Cylons are called) that had been used as parts to cover the robotic innards of this new series. It was a particularly gruesome scene that culminated with being attacked by a half-finished IL build out of a Six and a hand-to-hand fight with a “lamprey” — a 20 foot long machine lamprey with multiple sets of buzzsaw teeth.

The pilot PC, callsign Fists, got pretty banged up in the altercation, and Oscari, commander of Aegis, and another PC, had to jump in to save her. In the end, the Aquarian resistance, backed by the small battle group under Pegasus, managed to win the day and destroy the Cylon forces.

But there wasn’t much of a reprieve before the toasters jumped in in force. Three basestars, two captured battlestars, 60 large armed transports, and thousands of raiders jumped in, and the battle group was left on its back foot. Before the fight could commence, however, they got a call from a “Basestar Prime” that asked for a cease fire and parlay. For a moment, it looed like Cain’s hatred of the Cylons might lead them into a fight they could not win, but she got talked into hearing them out by the other commanders.

The meeting on Pegasus was tense and creepy, with the arrival of the Cylon delegate — IL-K, built out of a Two. She offered a truce to the Colonials: an immediate end to hostilities, except where they Cylons would have to defend themselves from the unruly resistance while the Cylons packed up over the space of a week, and then left the Colonies. They would retire to 3000 light years to antisinward. From that line starting at galactic center to the rim to 90 degrees, would be Cylon space; human space would be from that line to 270 degrees. They would agree not to interfere in each other’s space or the treaty would be rendered null.

The characters are suspicious — why? Why cut and run now? IL-K’s response: the costs now outweight the benefits of remaining in the Colonies. They have been fighting a proxy war for a God that is now dead. Their former masters (the Seraph) are no longer a threat. They do not need the biospheres the humans do, and… they have more important concerns than war; it is petty. Beneath them.

After a bunch of agonizing over the idea of signing, the Colonials agree, and to their surprise, over the course of a week, the Cylons either pack up, or destroy the facilities they are leaving behind, then they jump away!

The War is over and the Colonials…won? Tens of billions dead for nothing. An entire culture destroyed for nothing. Victory Day is declared, the characters get to take part in over-the-top revelry on Aquaria, but the hard part is ahead…waiting for the politics of the Twelve Worlds (really only eight now, not counting the worlds that have irreparable ecospheres…) to settle enough to start rebuilding.

The tag saw the admiral dispatch Aegis to find Galactica and tell them the good news. They can come home.

Next week will either be the return to the main campaign plot line, or a few weeks of Atomic Robo. I haven’t decided.

Last night saw the Big Push — the small task force, led by Pegasus, made their move to liberate both Aquaria and Libran. We started in media res with “Fists” — one of the PCs who has risen to wing commander of the task force — in her viper, caught in a flat spin in the clouds over Aquaria while a battle rages around her. She has to punch out, and as she falls out of the cloud deck, we can see the burning city of Kyros, the forests around it toppled and on fire, contrails, smoke, and dust from the orbital bombardment that preceded the assault on the Cylon stronghold. She is falling toward the frigid ocean to the east and desperately trying to get her chute to turn away from the water…

We then jumped back to show some of the preparation — on Aquaria, the other PC, Commander Oscari, is organizing the assault. We followed the long slog from The Complex, a miles long series of caverns under the Alhous Mountains which once housed the Aquarian HQ for the Fist Cylon War, and which has thousands of refugees living underground, to the outskirts of Kyros. Along the way, they had to test against the cold and fatigue. They lose people on the way to the elements, dropping them at the various woodland cabins, picking up other volunteers along the way. One vignette, they find a large farm that was the headquarters for a hundreds strong resistance cell burned to the ground.

Meanwhile, the fleet finally gets their ships in order, and the 170 or so vipers are ready for the fray. With Pegasus, the post-war build Columiba-class Ares to provide high orbit protection from any Cylon response, and the Berzerk-class Hecate, and the Erinyes-class Aegis tasked with orbital bombardment of the two main bases of operations on Aquaria, they jump out from Ragnar to their target. As they do, their old armed tender Demosthenes and the exploration ship Striker jump to Libran on a suicide mission — they are going to use the ships to destroy the Cylon positions on Libran.

The bombardment goes swimmingly, with the Cylon airbase at Kyros destroyed quickly enough that only a squadron or two of the raiders get airborne. They hit the large industrial park where the Cylons are barracked and their construction facilities are located, smashing them flat. Oscari leads the 2500 man strong assault into the city, only to receive the krypter call from Fists. As the character has a fatherly connection to her, he leaves the assault in the hands of his capable brigade commanders and rushes to save her from any Cylon attack.

This led to a fight with centurions near one of the only standing skyscrapers that saw a few injuries, but they rescue Fists and try to get back to the main force, only to be cut off by a four-story high Decurion tank (go here for the stats.) The 40mm autocannons of the tank make short work of the entire street, kill six of their ten people, but they were able to call in air support to make good their escape.

Plot points were flying fast and plentifully in this episode. Fists got injured a few times, the commander was suffering from the cold with his Flaw of Chronic Injury from a viper crash a decade ago.

Eventually, they work their way back to the lines and take part in a raid on the “puppet factory”, where they think the Cylons are making their creepy new IL-Series cyborg — a more “Terminator”-esque creature than the skin jobs from the show. We left off with them assaulting the seemingly empty, half-destroyed facility, only to be confronted with something “horrifying.”

Next week, we should see the conclusion of this battle, and depending on how things go, maybe even the Pegasus storyline.

A couple of comments on a few of the Battlestar Galactica related posts brought up an “issue” with the Cortex system — that the Cortex system is not really set up for simulation-style combat. I see this as a feature of the more story-oriented focus of the Serenity and BSG settings, but it is certainly a legitimate complaint if you are looking for a lot more viper on raider action, rather than talking about our feelings action.

So I thought I’d expand on some of my “fast and dirty” fleet-scale rules.

ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE

The Battlestar Galactica game lends itself naturally to mass combat — be it fights between hundreds of fighters, multiple capital ships banging away on each other, or large numbers of resistance fighters battling the toasters on the Twelve Colonies after the Fall. (It would equally well for doing some flashbacks of the Unification War, if you are playing Serenity…)

These large set pieces can be settled several ways to lend that element of randomness that can lead to surprises in your game.

THE EASY WAY…

The leadership of the combat groups can run a straight test against each other to see if they meet a specific goal, like “capture the high ground”, “push the Cylons back to liberate the Farm”, or “destroy or rout the resistance group.”

In this case, you could have the respective commanders roll a test like ALERTNESS or INTELLIGENCE+PERCEPTION/TACTICS versus each other to succeed and hand wave the number of losses. This removes the tendency for GM fiat, and can give the players some kind of input on how things play out.

However, if your players aren’t in the upper echelons of command, you might want to give them a bit more influence on events…

Zoom In, Zoom Out

One way to address the various scales of combat is to focus on a select mission or task that is essential to the goal. Maybe you’re a rifle team on Omaha Beach and you need to hit that machinegun emplacement to allow the rest of the Allied landing parties to get ashore in one piece. You play out that mission, then any success might give bonus shifts for the overall conflict.

Say your group is fighting to clear an area of a basestar group over a planet. You might have the initial TACTICS test to by the commander of your battle group set up initiative and give a bonus for the first actions.

You zoom into the squadron or player-level fight between the vipers and raiders to see how they are doing in their goals. Then you zoom into a particular dogfight, or maybe it’s an electronic warfare mission by raptors to jam Cylon transmissions. You play out those low-echelon character’s actions, then if they succeed/fail, have some kind of consequence. Maybe the EW mission jams the Cylon missiles (use as the defense test for the battlestar against being hit); maybe the vipers were flanked and get to launch an attack on your battlestar.

Then zoom back out as the fight unfolds and apply shifts to the actions of the characters to the TACTICs or other tests of the leadership.

Cortex uses “scales” to address the differences between a player character, or a vehicle, or a massive spacecraft. These scales are PERSONAL, LARGE (Planetcraft in BSG), and MASSIVE (Spacecraft in BSG). Each represents a 10x difference in power. For example, a character attacks a raider with personal scale weaponry. Only with a damage of 10 would they have any effect, and that would be a 1 to the raider.

For mass combat, these also apply in time. In MASSIVE scale combat between capital ships, each round is about 10 minutes. For planetcraft, it’s about a minute/round. For personal, it’s roughly 6 seconds. This may seem short, but many modern naval battles between fleets have taken place in the space of an hour.

You can zoom in and out of the fight from capital level, into a personal dogfight or task, then back out to the squadrons duking it out. There are roughly 10 actions for the character in each squadron-level fight, 10 in each capital ship fight. (I typically truncate squadron to capital fights to three rounds for the fighters to each round of big ship action.

ADDING “CRUNCH”

Gaining Initiative

The commanders of both sides roll an ALERTNESS or INTELLIGENCE+PERCEPTION/TACTICS contest to determine initiative. With a successful test, they can lend a die shift up for one of their subordinate units’ test — a gunnery shot, a squadron/group conflict between fighters; on the ground, this could be given to an artillery battery, or a tank platoon, or even an individual character.

Size Matters…Zoom Out, Stay Out

One issue with a large-scale fight is that addressing every single fighter would take a sizable number of sessions to play out, and would lose the dramatic impact. (Think about the fights in Battlestar Galactica, they don’t show a whole battle — usually, the dramatic highlights are shown and the fight is over in a matter of minutes.)

To get around this problem, there are a few things you can do.

Option 1: Have the CAG or leader of the fighter flight/squadron/group test against a Cylon raider — AGILITY+PILOT vs. the Raider’s stats and use that as an overall indication of how well the fighters are doing. It also, by extension, give you an idea of how good the player character is doing.

The number they succeed by is the number of raiders that have been damaged/splashed by the vipers. The raiders, then get their chance to hit the vipers, same roll, same effect. It gets you a quick and dirty idea of how things are going in the fight without knowing it was poor Jo-Jo that caught a packet. The downside is it does not take into account disparate numbers of force. I like this for quick fights of small, relatively evenly matched groups.

Our vipers are usually up against anywhere from 3-1 to 6-1 odds against them…this first suggestion tends to favor the small group, especially if they are led by a PC who can throw plot points around.

Option 2: Enter scale again. A planetcraft/large-scale vehicle like a viper can attack a basestar, but they need to score 10W to do any real damage. Let’s assume that to achieve that kind of hit would take several vipers, so let’s assume (and admittedly, we’re rounding down heavily) that a flight of vipers could probably hit with the equivalent of a d2W in spacecraft or massive scale.

So using that as a baseline, let’s break down the size of various units for a quick and dirty idea of what kind of damage they can dole out, and what they can take (using the 10x scaling, a viper can take 1.4 points of damage. We’ll round that down if you want to play this dark and gritty, or 2/bird if you are playing more cinematic-style.)

For the sake of simplicity, you can assume that a unit retains it’s abilities until 1/2 their life points are taken, then they have the usual two step down presented in the rules. At 0 life points, the unit is rendered ineffective or destroyed (depending on the style of play.)

Typical unit sizes follow (based roughly on US Naval standards and what we’ve seen in the show.)

One reason for using the spacecraft scale is to allow planetcraft to assault large targets and vice versa, and also brings the time and damage scales of fighters in line with the capital ships.

Example: A wing of raiders is lunched from the basestar and quickly aproach Galactica, the raiders break into several groups to attack the vipers screen — a groups’ worth (100), with three other groups going after respectively, 1) the civilian ships, 2) Galactica, and 3) acting as a defensive shield for the basestar.

Galactica is banging away on the basestar, but also has their point defense system firing on the raiders and their missiles. The PDS can be used as a defensive roll against the raiders’ attack roll, or they can attempt to destroy any raiders that breach it. (Due to the planetcraft scale, and the large number of PDS batteries, you don’t get a damage die, but you hit them at spacecraft scale with all Basic damage translated to Wound.)

Galactica’s weak air group (40) vs the raiders have equivalent life points and STR, and resolve the fight from the CAG’s tests (or the PC, if they aren’t the CAG…why? Because you’re in the credits.)

Now, if you want to give the PCs a bigger slice of the action, you could zoom in and break it down into the squadron they command, or even a single dogflight.

Remember that at 1/2LP, the unit loses -2 shifts to their strength (at d0W, they can only do 1W of damage to their target, no matter their success.)

MEANWHILE, ON THE SURFACE…

These rules can be applied to the surface, as well.

Infantry vs. Armor

One issue to content with is scale, again…infantry or characters are personal scale, but can gain access to planetcraft/large scale weapons like shoulder-fired missiles, satchel charges and IEDs, or anti-materiel rifles.

While you should resolve character actions by zooming in on their efforts, the general scale of the battle is set by the scale of the units involved.

Echelons

Echelon refers to a formation or the level (scale) of troops involved in a fight. Personal level fights are conducted by the PCs and perhaps up to a half dozen NPC. Anything larger than that is

But really large battles, need a bigger scale:

Massed artillery exchanges with vehicle or personnel should be conducted at the Massive scale, due to the amount of firepower being talked about.

Low echeon battles take place over the space of minutes to an hour — each round of combat is the equivalent of 10 personal scale action rounds, or about a minute. High echelon rounds take place about 10 minutes/round. Keep in mind that high echeon battles have frequent periods of maneuvering or regrouping, that can be added into the overall length of the battle.

DAMAGE REPORT

The original rules were not designed to address how damage could effect the performance of a vessel. To give players a bit more “crunch” and provide more flavor here is an alternate, expanded system for damage and repairs.  There’s nothing that says the GM has to roll on these tables or use the ideas, but they can provide some guidance for how damage could be handled in a space battle.

Instead of suffering effects at 1/2 the life points of the craft, damage begins to pick away at a ship or vehicle at 1/4 the damage, 1/2, 3/4, full damage, and greater than that damage.

Up to a quarter the total life points (round up), the vessel takes nothing more than cosmetic damage: scratched paint, dents, small holes to hulls or windows…nothing that is immediately harmful.

Between a quarter and half the total life points, the vessel is damaged badly enough that some systems could be effected — fuel lines could be holed, valves blasted open, power lines or hydraulics cut.  The effects are felt, but not seriously enough to stop operation of the craft.  Check to see what system is hit each time the vehicle take damage in this range to see what systems could be compromised.  Check the vessel’s ENDURANCE at Easy (3) and if it fails, apply a -1 die step to the appropriate attribute.

Between half and 3/4 of the life points, the damage is now serious enough to effect two systems at -2 die steps.  Check to see which systems are hit, and apply the modifiers.

Over 3/4s but less than full damage, the systems are seriously compromised enough that the vehicle now suffers -2 die step to all attributes, and an ENDURANCE test at Average (7) is made to see if the effected systems fail.  This can mean a loss of important function, like propulsion, or simply the loss of something like communications.

Once damage exceeds the total life points, the craft is on borrowed time, and the vehicle is coming apart around the pilot or crew’s ears…the ENDURANCE test Hard (11), but the results of failure are much more severe — the craft will start to come apart around them. The craft is dead and can take no actions.  They have one chance to “punch out” in something like a car or a fighter; in a capital ship, the craft takes 2W/round until the craft reached double it’s Life Points, then it has come apart, sank, or otherwise ceased to be a viable transport.

Here are some ways to determine systems that are damaged:

Stun damage is assumed to be minor — blown circuit breakers,  crashed computers,  cut electrical lines or hydraulic hoses — stuff that can be fixed quickly (in a matter of a round or two) or with jury rigging, if the system can be gotten to.

Wound damage is much more serious, and might not be reparable without significant time (longer than a battle, for instance…)

Not crunchy enough..? Here’s a tighter breakdown for you…

Repairing damage is as in the book — you run a repair test against the total number of damage the ship has taken.

These are still a bit rough, but if anyone runs them, or improves on them, let me know how they’re working.