The Black Campbell

The last two weeks saw the big denouement of our Battlestar Galactica campaign. In it, the fleet was stopped at Argos — site of ancient Kobolian colony, where the civilians were engaged in harvesting food and collecting livestock. After six months of running for their lives, the civilians don’t seem overly enthusiastic about picking up and looking for some mythic planet, Earth.

The humans have set up New Caprica — the new “capital” of the world, centered on one of the ruins of a city and surrounded by spacecraft which are providing housing, production, and protection as the pre-fab houses start to go up. The interim president is overseeing the half dozen or so “temporary” settlements from New Caprica, while their divine prime minister, ATHENA, has set herself up in the resurrection ship to keep an eye on the big production vessels and liners that cannot make planetfall. They are protected by a slice of Basestar 19‘s air group, but the majority of their firepower is off to assault Hades at New Ophiuchi.

The military mission does several jumps a day, using Cylon navigational data, and 48 hours later, launches an ambitious three pronged move on the forces there. A small group, led by a pregnant Six, and including PCs that were responsible for giving them humanoid Cylons (or “Seraph”) free will and ending their reproductive issues, attempt to win over the Seraph there with the gift of free will. It almost doesn’t work, but the skin jobs take the programming upgrade to free themselves of the domination of the Blaze. In turn, Hades — now aware something is wrong — sics the centurions on the humanoids of the “infected” basestar, and the other ships begin firing on it. The team jumps away to report their failure, and the main assault jumps…

…and horribly biffs the roll! “Their” Basestar 19 jumps into one of the two modern basestars and badly damages both so that they take several minutes to get into the fight. A judicious expense of plot points by the commander of Galactica saw her just avoid one of the older Cylon War basestars. Cygnus, their gunship, jumped straight into the middle of the “infected” basestar — destroying both immediately.

One of the player’s PCs, the CAG, lauched her forces right into the middle of a 6:1 dogfight, with the point defense of the nearest basestar and Galactica overlapping right on top of them. It’s a bloodbath for all sides, but they are able to nuke the older basestars out of the fight (and eventually, they’ll fall out of orbit…can you say “extinction event?”) In the midst of massive debris fields, raiders, kinetic kill rounds from Galactica and missiles from the basestars, the air group gets pasted.

On the surface, the other prong of the attack had come in at the same time as the political move to try and win over the Seraph. Landing a Cylon transport packed with centurions, led by the original version of ATHENA, Threes (the lead being NIKE), Fives (led by ARTEMIS), and Sevens (the lead being ARES), Eights (led by POSEIDON), and with a contingent of Nines (these are our Leobens) led by HERMES and a PC who has had visions of this battle, the ground assault attempts to infiltrate HADES’ operation to awaken a shard of the Titan HECATE.

The resulting fight is a classic James Bond underground base style fight — centurions and Seraph on both sides blazing away. In the middle, Hermes (in the body of a Nine) managed to get to a control system and cut power on the massive commandstar on the ground. (The bad guys were using it to try and access the shard.) Athena and Hades have an impressive god on goddess fight that winds up with Athena revealing her angelic nature, buring Hades to a cinder, and many of the nearby combatants. she pulls him into the shard, which goes active.

The Nines, led by the player’s character rush into the shard after them, seeking to answer all their questions about existence. As they do, he can almost see the three faces of Hecate regarding them impassively. In they go, never to be seen again…

The battle in space is finally won at high cost by the players. The first night of this story ended there.

The second night (Tuesday) saw a “talk about our feelings” A story and an intriguing mystic B story. The night revolved around one player’s troupe of characters (the other was away on business…), and saw the CAG trying to come to grips with the loss of half her people, the need to use more Seraph, and her attempts to reorg her air group to be ready for combat. There were scenes with the injured in the infirmary, with the mundanities of moving their assets to be able to use them, as well as a wake for the fallen pilots.

The B story was the push portion of the “episode” — back at Argos, a resurrection tank goes active an pulls together a Nine…but without a download from the “soulstone”, long dead when the Blaze was first bested. The player’s Nine emerges, his memories of what happened when he ran into the shard somewhat muddled, more a dream than memories. He is at peace, calm, determined, and as a prophet, has been given the chance to spread the Truth. He and the copy of Athena on the ship discuss  “God” and the rules — the importance of intelligent life, the inevitable evolution of the same toward god-like creatures (like her), and the inviolate nature of causality. He also knows they should continue to Earth, which is “being made ready” for them. He doesn’t remember much more than that.

This surprisingly filled the second night quite nicely.

Next week, Galactica returns to Argos, there will be big politics trying to get the people to up and move to Earth — several more months away — and trying to integrate the two peoples while retaining the stability of their weakened society.

Oh…and Earth.

Tonight was one of those nights where it seems nothing and way too much happened in the game. We continued on from the last session where the fleet had found an old colony world of the Kobolians, Argos. They investigated, retrieved some DNA-based data storage, including the DNA and mind-states of six Lords of Kobol. Their resident lord, Athena, is unsure they should reconstitute them. She doesn’t think that waking thousands of years later to their culture destroyed will make these “gods” each to manage.

But they also have two other big problems: Argos is a habitable world for a tired fleet. The civilians are ready to give it a go on this uninhabited, but habitable world. The civilians want to stop. The second: they have found out the Blaze — Hades — escaped the destruction of Kobol and is regrouping with the remnants of his Cylon followers at a nearby world the humanoid Cylons (Seraph, as they are now known) “recovered” 200 years ago by force. A recon mission shows four basestars, and on the surface, Hades’ commandstar (a super-basestar, if you will.) He is conducting some kind of operation at the ruins of a large city centered on a huge skyscraper. Athena thinks he might have a shard of a Titan (a Ship of Lights) hidden there.

There was a lot of character interaction, including a dream sequence for the Leoben-ish character, who dreams of a great battle under the three faces of Hecate between centurions and Seraph on both sides, and Athena and Hades. In the end, Athena reveals herself to be an angelic creature — wings and all — who burns away Hades (and everyone else.)

A plan of attack is formed. They had established that the Cylons can imprint new memories and consciousness on those Seraph bodies still in storage on the resurrection ship. Also, their recon vessels are not being identified by the Cylons at the Blaze’s rally point; the centurions cannot tell the humanoids apart. Athena is going to implant new Seraph with the memories of her fellow lords, slip into Hades area of operations on the ground, and stop him before he can recover the shard and either become a real threat again, or worse…if it’s from Hecate’s body, possibly attempt to break causality (the only real immutable law of existence) which could go so far as to unmake everything.

Meanwhile, the fleet — Galactica leading Cygnus, their pocket escort, and Basestar 19 — will hit the Cylons in orbit and when the time is right, nuke the grounded commandstar. If they pull this off, they destroy the Blaze forever, and end the Sacred Cycle once and for all.

To do this, they are taking the massive risk of leaving the civilians at Argos, with only a few squadrons of rebel raiders and heavy raiders for protection.

Monday: the denouement of a four year long campaign.