The Black Campbell

Another night of our side plot about Pegasus and her small task force causing havoc for the toasters back at the Colonies on Thursday. In this episode, we had some housekeeping from the aftermath of attacking the Boneyard and cutting out an older battlestar, Ares. The small escort they’ve had with them since the Exodus began, Demosthenes, is so battered as to be deadlined. The old, great Ares and Pegasus, too, require serious repairs. To find some respite, they have retreated to Ragnar Anchorage to repair, refit, and provision.

Ares‘ automation systems are unique — the Cylons didn’t use a hybrid, like the Seraph would, but a complex series of computers that use biomimetic materials, but aren’t biology. Their surveys of the Colonies have shown the Cylons are building old-style raiders, rather than the biomechanical ones the Seraph fielded. The characters were curious as to why? Is there some kind of ideological reason? Cutting the ties with their skin job masters? Or maybe they can’t do the biomechanicals?

While the ships are under repais, Admiral Cain doesn’t want to waste time and let their OPTEMPO slide. She assigns some of the senior officers with ground combat training to make contact with the resistance movements on Aquaria and Libran — the two worlds that look to have the most successful and cohesive movements, and have the lowest concentration of Cylon opponents. They need a beachhead for work from, and the commander of Aegis — a PC named Philip Oscari — gets the Aquaria mission.

After a dangerous low-altitude atmospheric jump (LAAJ), they hard land in the snows of Aquaria and quickly make contact with suspicious resistance fighters armed with a collection of hunting rifles. Soon after, they are aggressed by “steel wolves” — sleek, wolf-like robots with razor claws and teeth. They are fast, light, and designed for snow operations, but the hunting rifles and automatic weapons soon make short work of them. They are, however, the harbingers for the “centaurs” — centurion bodies mated to snowmobiles. They don’t get a good look at these that night; they are too busy escaping to the “Complex” — a series of underground caves with hot springs in the mountains outside Kyros, the nearby city.

Here they find thousands of people — children to adults — living in the labyrinth, fed well on reindeer and other game and fish. They are led by a historian and politician, and a bunch of local hunters. They also have a Two, which they use to ascertain if the crew are “human’…apparently, they know the 12 models of skin jobs (or fleshies, as they call them), but there’s a new kind of skin job, and it’s worse than they can imagine. They didn’t get into that too deeply, as the night’s session concluded.

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…

Last week’s game was primarily a “let’s talk about our feelings” and planning episode. Tonight, we should be getting down to the business of killin’ toasters.

The ending act to the last “episode” was last week — having captured a half dozen humanoid Cylons and their 10 human charges, the crew of Hecate was charged with interrogating them for intelligence on the disposition of the Colonies, and any other information that might be useful. The characters, and especially Admiral Cain, were horrified by the “traumatic bonding” they saw in the humans toward their captors.

The nominal leader of the skin jobs is “Victor”, a Twelve. (We have our own Cylon models for the game, for those just tuning in, and their personalities vaguely parallel the Lords of Kobol they were based on…no surprise as their “God”, the Blaze, was in reality Hades, one of those lords who warred on his family.) Victor is a massive, amiable Oliver Platt sort, who from the jump has been cooperative. He realizes that with the internecine fighting between his kind and the centurions, as well as the humans, he’s got little choice but to try and cut alliances.

We learned that he and “Kara” — an Eleven (our “Boomer”) — had been the commander and a lead researcher, respectively, at a “Farm”, a fertility research center to aid the Seraph (what the Cylons call themselves) with their inability to breed. The descriptions were appropriately horror movie quality. Victor claims to have been against the War with the Colonies, and the humans confirmed that from the start, Victor’s Farm regularly had mass escapes that they know were staged by Victor. Three of the humans — a father and his two little girls — had been rescued from experimentation and worked in “the Big House” because he took pity on them. Apparently, Victor has a soft spot for kids (and not in a creepy way.)

Kara, on the other hand, has a lover, a young biochemistry grad student she rescued from sex slavery to aid her in their research. It’s obvious this kid is badly traumatized and is convinced he’s in love with the 11. He’s also established something we learned with the Galactica fleet — the Seraph have strange mental blocks that prevent them from hacking their own software and hardware.

There is a Five from the same camp that was in charge of bringing back the escapees. She hates Victor, disagrees with him on almost everything, but in the end, when the centurions rebelled, he was the one that saved the three Seraph, and over a hundred humans by talking the centurions down. They had a small loyal cadre the Five commanded until a final battle with well-organized Cylon forces that destroyed mot of the Seraph and human resistance in their particular province of Virgon.

The last two Seraph: a Four (the Simon model from the show) was a sleeper agent that had been in place for about a decade, having taken the identity of a young doctor named Ross Andromachus. His research was actually instrumental in the treatment the commander PC received the repair his several spinal nerves after an accident in a viper seven years ago. (The reason he is no longer a Viper pilot.) Once activated, he attempted to rescue his wife, unsuccessfully, and wound up running a Farm near Boskirk, and attempted to make the situation for the subjects less than odious (unsuccessfully), but did set as many people free as he could once the centurions rebelled. He was captured by human resistance fighters, but vouched for by a few of those he set free. He was a prisoner of the human resistance and was their doctor until he was released as part of a deal to ally with Victor’s group of rebels.

Last is a Ten they call “Chief” of “the Engineer”, who had been just that on Basestar 16. He is ambivalent about the humans — he was a soldier at war with them. It’s nothing personal, but they were the enemy. Now they both have a more pressing issue — the toasters. As such, he’s willing to work with them to try and figure out how to kill the murder machines. He had little knowledge of the situation on the ground, but was able to confirm the general numbers of the Cylon forces in the Colonies — six basestars and two battlestars that had been taken in combat. He also confirmed something the others commented on — the centurions have been rapidly retrofitting factories to build more Cylons. If they don’t hurry to the Colonies, they might soon find themselves up to their necks in machines. The upside, building even the simpler, older versions of basestars will take months.

The characters learned that the situation on the ground is better and worse than they expected. The big worlds, like Canceron, Aerilon, Virgon and Leonis, survived the nuclear assaults much better than anticipated. While the environments are badly toxic in many places, the worlds are still habitable in the right areas. The resistance groups, both human and Seraph, are fighting relatively small number of centurions — battalion to division levels, at most. However, Virgon — for instance — had a long history of weapons ban and regulations; the resistance fighters are making due to cobbled together arms, low-capacity hunting guns, bows and arrows, and whatever they could grab from the centurions and Colonial units destroyed. Many of the survivors are locked in conflict with each other for food, water, medicine, or power — people gone mad. (Cars in the post-apocalyptic desert!)

We learned that certain worlds are doing better than others in fighting back: Canceron, with its rich liberal/libertarian tradition, was long considered “crazy” for their tendency to prep for disaster, for their love of guns and free speech, and being left the hell alone. Now, with a gun behind every blade of grass, and despite being one of the targets for heavy nuclear bombardment, Canceron is holding up quite well against the toasters…but their problems with in-fighting and crazies just trying to get by is exacerbated by their individualistic tendencies. The two worlds doing the best are the jungle-heavy Libran, and the Scandinavian-like Aquaria, where the centurions have a hard time with the environment.

There was a lot of concern about what to do with the captives. The admiral doesn’t want to waste food and time on those they can’t trust and have no utility to the mission, Hecate‘s CO (a PC) wants to wring them for all the utility they have and certainly doesn’t want to dispose of the humans, and the CAG of Hecate (another PC), finds herself in the unenviable position of pushing the policies of the government they left behind — treat the Cylons as POWs with a certain level of human rights.

Our series of adventures concerning the Pegasus task force continued last night. After a hard fight at the main Cylon staging base, we picked up a few weeks later. The ships are repaired, and are close to arriving at the Colonies. There was some character stuff for this episode involving a B story in which the ship’s command chief “lost” his coffee mug he’d been working on for years of his service. (Most of the navy guys I know would only do a cursory cleaning of the mug, claiming the brown staining on the mug aided the flavor. One guy, at DLI, lost his mind when a young airman, hoping to earn points with him, cleaned his mug spotless…this is where I first heard the term “fuck knuckle”.) The mug had been a last present from his father, who had retired from the same ship the chief was first stationed on, and who passed away shortly after from cancer.

(We’ve established that most people who serve in the fleet for a few tours come down with some form of cancer in the future. It’s one of the realities of living in a high radiation environment.)

Eventually, the MARDET commander/master at arms find out that a few of the CIC crew that were ridden hard by the chief stole the mug and took it to the mess hall to be power washed. She stops this, returns the mug, then quietly lets the chief know who did it, so he can exact his revenge.

While this is going on, a recon mission to one of the Cylon supply depots returns to reveal that they found two basestars — one new design, and one of the basestars from the first war — destroyed and in close proximity to each other. There’s enough heat from the ships to suggest they were slugging it out only a few days ago, and weak wireless transmission show there are surviving skin jobs of centurions on the respective vessels. Cain gives Hecate the go-ahead to investigate.

They find a dense debris field of dead raiders, heavy raiders, bodies of humanoid Cylons, and centurions of old and new design, all drifting together over the small world with the supply base. They board the newer basestar, hoping to gather intelligence, and after a long search, they find supplies — food, medicine, munitions…and survivors. They come across a Twelve (in our campaign, a large Oliver Platt-sort), and an Eleven (these are our Boomers) protecting a half dozen humans, including a pair of little girls. The humans, surprisingly, protect these two from injury, and after a tense standoff in which the children protect the Twelve — whom they call “Victor”, they are able to secure the skin jobs.

Victor helps them locate the other survivors, and after a short fight with a fire team of centurions, they rescue three more humanoids Cylons, and four humans that had been rescued by a Four (the “Simon” from the show.) After salvaging what they could, the team had to abandon the basestar ahead of a group of surviving centurions, and destroy the ships.

The basic story they had managed to put together was that the modern basestar, allied with Seraph (the humanoid Cylons serving “the Blaze”) had come here to raid the supply base and return home to Kobol, and that the older basestar showed up. A point-blank fight ensued and both ships were killed in the fight.

They returned to the fleet with their prisoners and supplies and we ended the night with the inevitable “what to do with the skin jobs” conversation with Admiral Cain, and interrogations, in the offing. and what to do about the humans, who appear to have traumatic bonding (one of the players coined the term “Delphi Syndrome”)?