The Black Campbell

Last week was supposed to be the start of the next “volume” of our pulp game, taking place in 1937 New york, Philadelphia, and possibly Washington DC, but a last minute cancellation left me hanging so I ran a Battlestar Galactica episode.

Episode 107 was titled Agent Provocateur: The ship is at Scorpia Yards for repairs after the terrorist attack on her, using a freighter jumping out while in the flight pod as a weapon. The MARDET commander/intelligence officer is going over mission logs from before her taking her position and finds that one of the missing members of a deep-range observation post (from the first epsode) was one of the diggers on the Sagittaron archeological find in a later episode…does he know what happened to everyone? Were they taken by the Cylons, and if so, what danger does he pose?

The commander passes the information up the chain of command, but also informally sends it to his father, the president’s security advisor. Suddenly, he gets tasked with bringing in the man — who was posing as an archeologist from the University of Leonis, but who was actually a Canceron astronomer than worked for the Defense Department — and finding out what he knows.

They arrive on Leonis and Luminere was portrayed as a “city of lights”: elegant, “old world” feeling, and an ancient cultural center. Think a very, very high tech Paris or Rome. They are working with the Colonial Fleet Security Bureau, and their liaison is a baron in old Leonine aristocracy (he family fled to Virgon after they were struck from the civil list.) They find the guy’s apartment, were attacked by his security bot which didn’t call the police, but a cell number they’ve tracked to a woman from Caprica who also seems to have spoofed the credit card numbers of a rich Luminere citizen. They figure out from credit card and phone records that the two are in Hedon — sort of the Monaco of the Colonies.

They are on route to find the two.

The good: the episode brings back an NPC I always liked from our first campaign. One of the players was ecstatic to see her, but they were both happy to see connection in this “reboot” of the old campaign. Another PC turned NPC for this episode was the Colonial Security Services man (originally a character of the commander’s player.) Fan service at its best.

Each episode has been attempting to show more of the colonies and their unique flavor. I’m trying to build a realistic feel for the setting so that when the Cylons show up, there’s a real sense of danger and loss.

The bad: I didn’t have all the player so there was a lot of tap dancing around some of the PC’s roles in the episode. Also, it wasn’t as well planned as I like for investigation-type adventures, so while it’s allowing for more improvisation, it’s also (to me) feeling a bit kludged together.

With one of the players out for the week (he’s got a big reveal in the upcoming Supernatural session), we shifted to a Battlestar Galactica one-shot last night. The mission was a follow-up to the attack on the ship in the last episode.

The vessel is limping to Scorpia Yards after Sagittaron Freedom Militia terrorists used a revictualing freighter as a weapon, jumping out of the portside landing bay as they were landing and tearing the pod up badly. They get intelligence from a courier raptor that the FTL signature of the ship was spotted by a couple of ELINT/SIGINT trainees at a post near Canceron. The sharp-eyed recruits spotted a ship jump in and change it’s transponder to an Intersun liner, even though it jumped outside the “bullpen” (the companies in my campaign purchase jump areas for their exclusive use to avoid jumping in on top of each other), and flagged the craft. Columbia BSG has a gunstar on route to the freighter’s destination, Aquaria.

They also have intelligence from an investigation on the Colonial military post on Sagittaron from which the attack originated. They have positive IDs on two of the four hijackers of the vessel. One is a Sagittaron Freedom Movement (shut down after Tom Zarek’s arrest and reborn as the Sagittaron Freedom Militia) terrorist, and one is a Colonial officer that spent 5 years in prison for selling materiel to Ha’la’tha criminals on Tauron. Two others are unidentified.

The commander (GM played for this session) sends a small detachment to find and recover the bad guys. they arrive at the Scandinavia-like setting of Skellinsgard, a small city with a municipal spaceport. The freighter is there, and they find the real crew executed (and the supplies for their ship still aboard…) The police aid them in going through possible SFM sympathizers from the Restoration Party — a political party seeking to return to pre-Articles of Confederation independence. They get a hit on a suspected arms dealer with ties to the disgraced colonial officer.

The denouement put them at a snow-bound farm in the boonies, where the hijackers were holed up with the arms dealer and a few of his friends. There was a big firefight with bad guy snipers, countersniping, a grenade launcher that nearly killed one of the characters (BIG plot point expenditures here!) They also found the arms dealer and some local buddies were keeping kidnaped women for “fun”…and food.

Eventually, they only captured one guy, had to cut some bureaucratic wheeling and dealing with the commander of the gunstar (not pleased to have his mission snaked from under him!), and were able to return to the ship, avenged.

It ran swiftly and smoothly, and shows that — when you’re out a player for the week — swapping games for a one-off isn’t a bad way around an absence.

Here’s a few of the house rules traits from our BSG campaign:

Chronic Injury (Complication d2-d10): The character has a chronic injury that effects their performance. A d2-d4 might be a bad knee or shoulder — an injury that effects the character’s physical tests involving that particular area that suffers from the injury. A d6 or higher could be a serious injury or injuries that haven’t healed properly and effect the physical characteristics on tests.

Done It 100 Times… (d2/d4): The character has been through particular types of training, intensively. This might be a constant round of combat flight exercises or heavy practice doing atmospheric reentry and fast landings with marine combat shuttles (applies to Pilot tests), damage control (applies to Mech or Tech Engineering.)

Intelligence Officer (d2/d4): The character is trained in intelligence analysis. They can use the trait on Perception/Investigation and Interrogation tests.

Soft Touch (Complication d2/d4): The character might play tough, but is actually sympathetic to their shipmates or companions. The complication adds to any social tests to convince the character to see things their way.

The final bit of our Sagittaron interlude sees the ship come under attack by Sagittaron terrorists, who use a resupply freighter of a defense contractor to get inside the flight pod of the vessel, then jump out while inside the pod, doing a ton of damage to the craft. There was a bunch of important scenes: the CAG, who had been running a PT test in the companionway near the entrance to the flight pod has to get his people out safely and seal the section. They lose three pilots and about a half dozen enlisted. The command master chief has to run the damage control board and to keep the fires that are sl]pinning out of control in check, he vents the compartments effected — fast! — and then does an excellent job managing the damage containment from the CIC. The commander has to coordinate getting the ship under control: it’s been knocked into a flat spin and lost enough energy it’s slipping into a lower orbit.

While all this is happening, another (they assume connected) attack on the Sagittaron archeological dig they’ve been defending is aggressed. The MARDET commander has to secure the location and send out skirmishers (led by her gunnery sergeant PC) to gain intelligence and knock ’em down. They finally get support from the local base and air support from Aegis once the characters have everything under control. In the end, they manage to keep the dig site safe.

The ship is headed for Scorpia Yards for repair, so they are pulled off the mission on Sagittaron, which is passed onto the Night Flight battlestar group. But there’s questions unanswered: Where did the ship jump away to and can they find it? Were the dig attack and the attack on the ship coordinated and connected…? It seems unlikely they weren’t. Who stood to benefit from stirring up trouble between the Sagittaron separatists and the Colonial military? It was almsot assured this would go badly for the Sagittarons, and would spur military action…was it a false flag mission?

…and here I thought i was done with the BSG-related posts for a couple of weeks.

While looking around for a nifty internal cutaway the inestimable Ice Dragon did (at least I think it was him) on the battlestar Valkyrie (and did not find, by the way), I was looking at his excellent fleet size graphic, comparing the various canon and otherwise vessels and found that my estimate of this class of vessel was smaller than I had originally written up.

So here’s an adjusted version of what I call the Erynis-class (there’s no official class name.)

Erynis-class Light Battlestar

DIMENSIONS: Scale: Spacecraft, Length: 2680’, Beam: 1019’, Draught: 426’, Decks: 17, Crew: 919, Passengers: up to 1000

ATTRIBUTES: Agility d6, Strength d12, Vitality d6, Alertness: d8 **, Intelligence d8, Willpower d10

Initiative: d6+d8, Speed: 5 [SL/JC], Life Points: 18,  Armor: 4W, 4S

SKILLS: Heavy Weaponry d6, Mechanical Engineering d4, Perception d6, Pilot d4

TRAITS: **Early Warning Variant [Has the roll bars seen in Razor] Features a large interferometer wing that gives an Alertness of d10; New Ship Smell d4, Slow to Launch [Complication] d4***

ARMAMENT: Heavy Skirmish-Range Point Defense System [d12W Vehicle-scale], 14 Capital Range Heavy Railgun Batteries [d12W Spacecraft-scale] which can also fire Short-DRADIS Heavy Railgun-Fired Missiles [d12W Spacecraft-scale], 6 Short-DRADIS Nuclear Missile Systems [d12+d4W Spacecraft-scale]

AUXILIARY CRAFT: 18 Vipers, 10 Raptors, 5 Shuttles

*** The Erynis was designed for the primarily modern mission of the Colonial Fleet — piracy and criminal interdiction, and deep-space early warning missions…not Cylon fighting. She only has six launch tubes under her landing bays and either must launch a flight at a time, or launch her other fighters from the launch bays, which takes an extra action to get her fighters into the fray.

Here’s a pdf of the new, alternate humanoid Cylons for our campaign. Feel free to use, don’t, alter, or do as you will with it. Comments are welcome.

It should be obvious that there is a parallel to the Greek God/Lords of Kobol here (the models might not match my last post on this. Oops.) but they don’t have to be played that way. The Ones and Twos are supposed to be “more equal” than the other models, but it follows the notion on the show that the Cylons do everything democratically.

It should be obvious that I kept certain characters from the new show — the Threes are much like the D’Anna model, the Fours are almost exactly the “Simons”, the Sixes similar to “Caprica/Gina”, the Nines are the “Leobens”, and the Elevens have a bit of the Eights in them. I made a small effort to make the numbers balance where I could at the veteran level (48 attribute/4 trait/68 skill die), with the Cylon package taking away 28 points from the skills (I did the Serenity style 1 to 1 trade for trait/complication die and skill die.) Added complications gave back points for skills. In the end, though, they were built to what I thought would be appropriate for their portrayal in play.

The game really picked up tonight. Last week, the crew finally ventured into the dig site on Sagittaron and were met with the obvious remains of a city street. The caverns they crawled through were the interior of buildings that have been calcified from millennia of being under water. They find the flash image of a couple of people on a wall, and decide to isotope test the place for iodine, strontium, and cobalt — with the carbon dating they estimate the site was hit about 10,000 years before colonization! This screwed with the fairly religious characters — it implies that there was human habitation on the Colonies millennia before they arrived.

The chaplain character posited that if the Cycle of Time is true then all of this has happened before and all will happen again. Perhaps there was a cataclysm before the settlement of Kobol; maybe that’s how the Lords of Kobol knew which way to send the 12 Tribes.

Meanwhile the fallout from the attempted assassination of the commander and the chaplain hits — the Sagittaron Planetary Quorum wants answers about military operations that have not been approved on the planet. Pindarus (the CO) biffs the roll to try and calm the situation in a closed session of quorum. Hours later, the archeologists are to be arrested for heresy, and the military forces are ordered to vacate the dig site.

Pindarus decides to remove the scientists, bolster the military guard there, then lights out for Picon HQ to talk to the expeditionary group’s admiral (his boss) and successfully links the find to the ancient mine they found in their first episode — also very old and obviously a human settlement. Now that it is a national security issue, he is able to pressure the government to allow him to secure the site militarily.

While all this is going on, the investigation into the attack on them hits a wall of silence from the Sagittarons who are not aiding them in their search for the terrorists that attacked them. Worse, they have no legal authority to hold their prisoners and must turn them over to civilian authorities for trial.

The stage is set for a show down between the planetary government and the Colonial military unless they can figure out a way to defuse the situation and protect the dig site.

[Once again, players in the campaign, don’t read this post: Spoilers abound…]

Now that we’ve dealt with the chomers in the last few posts, what are we doing about the humanoid Cylons for our new campaign? I’m sticking less closely to the new show that I did in my original campaign, which would have fit into the show canon nicely. First, I’m ignoring the whole Earth Cylons came and convinced the Cylons to stop their war, yadda yadda…the Final Five reveal was a massive disappointment (although it didn’t run me off from the show as it did some fans.)

So — going with what we saw in Razor, I’m positing the Cylons were trying to make life-like infiltration units to collect intelligence and sow dissension in the Colonial ranks; I covered sexbots and similarly android-like toasters in an earlier post. Attempting to reate a more lifelike hybrid android would seem to have led to the modern humanoid Cylon.

In keeping with the new show, there are 12 models that are widely copied and use a shared consciousness (hinted at several times in the early episodes where one Cylon would know things its siblings would.) I’m going with the idea that they vaguely follow the archetypes of the Lords of Kobol or the 12 major Olympians…with their “god” possibly being “the Blaze” or “jealous god” mentioned in the cut scene from Kobol’s Last Gleaming. (I’ve yet to decide on this…)

However — the Cylons can build an android “clone” of a person using 3D flesh printing and programming of the doppleganger. They cannot scan the human brain yet, so they use publicly available information to create as deeply accurate a copy as they can. These can be tripped up by the gaps in their knowledge and mistakes in emulating behavior, but it’s subtle enough people might mistake it for the person “having an off day” or some such. Only with capture and heavy interrogation can the Cylons get a better picture of the person, and create a more lifelike copy. (I’m still tempted to allow destructive brain scanning — they can do a near perfect job, but only if they destroy the original brain…but that doesn’t allow for rescue or escape options.)

The one-offs and copies are similar to the 12 models — they are not biomechanical, other than the cybernetics in the brain, so a DNA or blood test won’t reveal their nature; only a detailed scan or biopsy of the brain would do that. As they are essentially a clone assembled kit-like, they are not super strong or fast, but they have the following traits in common: ELECTRONIC INTERFACE d6 — this is an unconscious uplink to Cylon handlers that allows them to access the perceptions, thoughts, etc. of the agent without their knowledge. They have the complication BACK DOOR d10, where their mind can be hijacked and their actions controlled by their handler. The agent can fight this with a WILLPOWER+DISCIPLINE/RESISTANCE test vs. the WILLPOWER+DISCIPLINE of the handler + the agent’s BACK DOOR complication. Also, they gain the VIRTUAL IMMORTALITY d12 trait, if the Cylons want to resurrect the agent from stored mind-states.

More dangerous are the 12…the command and control Cylons. How these creatures came to rule the Cylons when they were originally just another tool for the centurions to fight Mankind is unknown (or in other words, I haven’t made it up yet…) They are biomechanical androids and gynoids who are good enough copies of humans that they cannot be detected save through a specific test for synthetic material through a biopsy or blood test. They share their memories through staggered data dumps to a resurrection ship or facility (they can do this willingly or schedule times to not distract [usually while they are asleep]) and can communicate wirelessly up to a half mile in urban environments, twice that in open areas. Their muscle fabric is dense and powerful, and run through with synthetic nerve tissue allowing for very fast perception and reaction. Their brains are augmented with biomechanical molecular computers that allow them to store vast amounts of data, recover information faster and with little loss, but their perceptive abilities are hardly better than a human — they see, hear, taste, feel along the same parameters as a person, with only slight improvement to their acuity.

The 12 have the following traits: ELECTRONIC INTERFACE d8, IMMUNITY (most diseases and radiation) d12, PHYSICAL PUSH d8 (they make break the die up to cover any physical attribute for a minute. They need five minutes between each push, and each extra push requires an EASY VITALITY+WILLPOWER test to gain the benefit, +3 each extra time until they can rest for twelve hours.) VIRTUAL IMMORTALITY d12 — if they can run a backup, they can be downloaded into a new copy. The range of these downloads is astronomical and might be some form of quantum entanglement. (this might explain why they don’t spawn their memories outside of their particular model.) Lastly, humanoid Cylons’ cybernetic brains are more robust than their mechanical cousins, and hacking a Cylon is near impossible…but they are also more susceptible to certain radiation frequencies that do not effect humans — VULNERABILITY d8 (they must make an EASY WILLPOWER+VITALITY test after the first hour, with the difficulty increasing each hour by +3. On a fail, they suffer d8W each hour afterwards.) They can be jammed for their communications, if their frequency can be found by brilliant player characters (Difficulty HARD.) ( But not the immortality infodumps!)

My 12s: 1) This is a powerful, very intelligent middle-aged looking man [Zeus-like] who is usually the senior commander and rarely scene outside a basestar. 2) More matronly looking leader, also often a senior commander. 3) Smart and vicious females, these act as spies, provocateurs, and front0line commanders. 4) Doctor/scientists, the males are often in charge of Farms, or are colocated with collection teams during the War. They are surprisingly compassionate, but this won’t stop [most] of them from doing their duty. 5) This woman is a hunter/soldier unit with little compassion or mercy. [I’m thinking of keeping the “Simon” 4 and making this 5 a black woman to keep the Artemis twin vibe to 4’s Apollo.] 6) Similar to the show’s 6, this is a spy and provocaeur with a massive sex drive [Aphrodite] and bigger ego and need to be loved. Might use a different actress. 7) This warrior is not concerned with tactics and good order [unlike the 3]…he’s a killing machine and loves it. 8) This is a mid-management commander, usually on par with the 3. He chafes at his secondary position vis-a-vis the 1s and doesn’t like the favored position of the 3s with the 1s. [Think similar to the 5 from the show, but a bit more Gerard Butler-ish.] 9) Going with the Leoben from the show — he’s a trickerster, messenger, by turns vicious or compassionate. 10) These are the scientist/engineers of the humanoid Cylons: brilliant, methodical, and heartless. Often colocated with Farms during the War. 11) Another scientist type, this female is much more emotionally engaged with her subjects. She is usually running the breeding programs and most of the effort went into breeding a highly intelligent model. 12) This male is handsome, charming, and unstable, so much so the empathy some of this model show for humans is a concern.

There is rumored to be a 13th model — some kind of machine-man hybrid from early on in the android program. These act as oracles with the One God? Still thinking on this one.

So that’s my ideas for the humanoid Cylons…