The Black Campbell

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”)?

After concluding our first volume in our Atomic Robo game, we shifted fire back to Battlestar Galactica, where we began the first of a series of adventures chronicling what happened when Pegasus split from the fleet (In our campaign, that is….)

The characters are CDR Philip Oscari, the CO of Hecate, a Berzerk-class escort or “light battlestar”. He’s seems a quiet and thoughtful man, but underneath the tight control he has, he’s still the former enlisted marine that went into the service to avoid jail time. The other is CPT Danica “Fists” Tanner, a Gina Carano-esuqe former professional fighter than joined the Colonial Fleet to fly vipers, and who is also the commander of their marine detachment.

It started with a nice intro scene recapping the happenings at that time — the Kobol mission had just concluded, and with the destruction of that world and the ongoing Cylon Civil War, the leadership decided there was a good chance Pegasus could shake up the bad guys and keep them off of the fleet while it continued the Exodus to Earth. We had a nice cameo of some of our main campaign characters, and the challenge was to try and recreate their attitudes and emotions from that time. After some politicking and the threat of having to “terminate the command” of the commander PC from the main game, Pegasus gathered the materiel necessary to head back toward the Colonies to distract and harry the Cylon menace.

Using the intelligence from skin jobs captured by Galactica, they were able to stage an attack on a major Cylon staging post a few light years away from Kobol. The battle proved to be extremely difficult and the players’ ship, Hecate — a Berzerk-class escort — as well as Pegasus, took a hell of a drubbing, but managed to win out against a major base with tylium mine and a new centurion production facility.

They found that all the skin jobs had been murdered and stacked like cordwood outside the base in the minimal carbon dioxide atmosphere. They also raided the Cylon computer system using software Baltar designed to read and translate the data to Colonial formats. To their surprise, the Cylons are a lot weaker than they seem. Between the vessels that are chasing the fleet and the civil war, a lot of Cylon materiel is considered destroyed. They confirm that there are only six basestars running patrol in the Colonies, along with two battlestars they’ve cut out of mothballs.

They realize there’s a very real chance of pushing the Cylons out of the Colonies, if they can win the space game. The ground game, however, will be the real challenge. There are plenty of Cylons on some of the worlds — corps and army-level numbers, but other worlds have no more than a battalion or two holding them due to low population density. The other intelligence they’ve gleaned (remember, this is only a few months after the Fall of the Colonies):

Aerilon was mostly spared the nukes, as the humanoid Cylons (or Seraph, as they call themselves) needed the farmland; there’s heavy resistance movements around the world. There looks to be alliances between some of the survivors and the remaining humanoid Cylons. [20,000 centurions, mostly near the cities not fully destroyed]

Aquaria wasn’t really worth nukes — they used centurions. There’s a healthy and highly successful resistance in the snow and mountains of the world. Most of the floating cities were sunk. [down to 1000, mostly in the two major cities.]

Canceron was hit hard due to the large population, but they are still having trouble subduing the world — suddenly those survivalists don’t look so quaint or stupid. There’s heavy environmental damage, but it’s still habitable. The Cylons have large-scale industrial projects to pump out more centurions — they will be near completion by the time the characters get home. [50,000 centurions]

Caprica got hit the worst, after Picon. There are still survivors, but the world is mostly dead. The Cylons have large-scale industrial projects to pump out more centurions — they will be near completion by the time they get home. [10, 000 centurions, mostly in areas around Caprica City and Delphi.]

Gemenon — the world was borderline inhabitable, anyway; the nukes have killed it. [1000 centurions]

Leonis is much like Canceron — it got hit hard, but the world is big and had absorbed more radiation damage than the Colonials expected it could. The big cities are gone, for the most part, and there is heavy Cylon presence. Resistance movements planetwide, and there are rumors the Leonine Navy (their Coast Guard) is actively fighting the toasters The Last Ship-style. (This would make for an interesting B- story paralleling the rag-tag fleet in a campaign, I think…) The Cylons have large-scale industrial projects to pump out more centurions — they will be near completion by the time they get home. [50,000 centurions]

Libran wasn’t worth more than a few nukes. The world is proving very difficult to tame due to rough terrain and heavy jungle. A small but effective resistance has been winnowing down the centurion numbers…not bad for a bunch of hedonists and beach bums, eh? Setting up industrial bas to produce more centurions. [down to 2000 centurions]

Picon — Destroyed between the nukes and the reentry of Picon HQ. [5000 — mostly doing materiel collection]

Sagittaron — The cities are gone and there was almost no resistance to the Cylons. There are a lot of survivors hiding around the world, and the centurions are converting the industrial base to their needs. [10,000 centurions, mostly doing industrial work]

Scorpia — destroyed between the nukes and the shipyards falling out of the sky. [5000 centurions — mostly doing materiel collection]

Tauron — Destroyed between the nukes and the shipyard falling out of the sky thanks to Pegasus. [see Scorpia]

VIrgon — See Leonis.

Cyrannus Shipyards — the ‘boneyard’ saw Cylon action and the last information they have was that the centurions had equipped a bunch of the mothballed ships for combat to bolster their basestar numbers. There’s mostly transports and raiders in the area, and a company’s worth of centurions automating the hulks they’re cutting out.

The better news — there are at least three other Colonial vessels harassing the Cylons — 2 Erynis-class light battlestars positively identified as Aegis and Valkyrie, and one Berzerk-class battlestar, Enyo. They might be able to find these ships on their way to the Colonies.

It’s been a while since I’ve thrown up an AAR for our Battlestar Galactica game, mostly due to a series of missed nights here and there, and a plotline that didn’t finish ’til last week. When last I wrote an update on the campaign, we had once again faced down The Blaze, or Hades, who was attempting to regain control over the Cylons and the humanoid “Cylons” or Seraph using an old shard of a TITAN. The ensuing battle was brutal and a lot of people and Seraph from a rogue basestar that the fleet had allied with wound up dead, and one of their vessels, Cygnus, destroyed.

The two surviving ships limped back to Argos, an ancient Kobolian outpost that had been left, more or less, unprotected during the mission. Among the survivors were the Lords of Kobol ATHENA, HERMES, and HEPHAESTUS. The last began directing repairs and refit to the two warships with an estimated time of about two months to finish. This gave us the choice of jump the game two months and get on with it, or delve into the politics and personal responses to battles with gods, three different races trying to coexist in an uneasy alliance, and some sci-fi exploration of the giant city and citadel the Kobolians had been driven out of by the Blaze 3000-4000 years ago. We went for the latter…

One of the main plotline that dominated the next weeks involved the settling on Argos to harvest food and collect food animals, as well as to do archeological work at the citadel. Earlier, the DNA and DNA-storage of memories for the Kobolians had been found, and the bodies of these lords resurrected. POSEIDON is the main antagonist in this mix — he’s trying to get the Citadel up and running, and is generally fixated on trying to recover the Olympian archives from their DNA storage…but the machines of the place are millennia old, and one of the PCs — a computer engineer turned policeman in the fleet — and Dr. Baltar have to cobble together patches to get their machines to read the data. Other Kobolians include the violent, frat boy-ish ARES, Athena’s major domo NIKE, and ARTEMIS, who is mostly gathering women into her own little cult and hunting animals with abandon. Over the course of the adventures, they were finally able to crack the database and find out that 90% or so of the DNA was still legible. Massive amounts of history, technical achievement, and the DNA and memories of 256 Kobolians were recoverable. More on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, one of the PCs, a veterinarian-turned-medic who had been working on the issue of Seraph reproduction (and with Baltar cracked it) has stirred up some animosity between the Seraph of the vessel Resurrection 3 and ATHENA, the prime minister to the interim president. (We’ve already had a coup attempt that killed many of the government officials.) Tensions are high, so that when a strange virus that eats the silica-based circuitry of Seraph turns up — giving encephalitis-like effects and causing data disruption during direct communications between models — things quickly spin out of control.

The characters manage to quarantine the diseased Seraph — the humans are immune, save those with “puppetry” implants — but the Health Minister, Dr. Michael Robert, sees his opportunity to destroy the Seraph once and for all. He infects the vet and clears her to go back to her research on Resurrection 3, where she immediately spreads the infection to several dozen Seraph. After the fleet isolates the ship and shuts down the various Cylon ship networks, they are able to contain the outbreak. However, it becomes quickly apparent this was no accident, and the marshal’s service that handles the civilian policing figures out that Robert was at fault. Under questioning by police, aided by Hermes, Robert admits he tried to commit genocide.

Athena has to take this to the Seraph, who want blood and are ready to spill it for satisfaction. She and the vet are able to talk the Seraph down, but the Fours — who suffered the brunt of the infection — are not pleased with the prime minister’s solution: Robert will stand trial for his actions with a tribunal of Kobolian (Poseidon), human (ADM Pindarus), and Seraph (a Nine — our version of Leoben) presiding. They are expediting the trial, but this is not enough for the Fours, who conspire in their model, and with some help from the Fives (a vicious female model in our campaign) and some Sevens (Ares-like warrior) launch an attack on the prime minister and the Kobolian who had set themselves up on Resurrection 3 to control the impressive biological labs and other medical equipment.

They use cyanobacteria to make tetradotoxin and manage to nearly kill NIKE, but only injure Athena. In a brutal bit of combat, the goddess of war takes down about three dozen Seraph, in our first real look at what she can do when fully armored, armed, and angry. The commander of the basestar, a Three that’s not fully trusted by her people as she was suggested by the Colonials, is trying to hold everything together before they find themselves in a fight with the mostly repaired Galactica; their basestar, on the other hand, is surrounded by flattops and foundry ships working on her…they are in a terrible tactical position.

There was a lot of politicking and trying to convince both sides to stop making the same damned mistakes over and over…allowing their hatred and past to drive them into retributive actions. In the end, they manage to keep their shaky alliance together, especially after the Robert trial finds him — almost by necessity — guilty. This angers a lot of the Colonials who saw him not as a prospective mass murderer, but as a hero to the people. In the end, the efforts to keep the fleet together to continue to Earth have mostly failed, with 40,000 or so remaining on Argos, while 17,000 travel with Galactica and Basestar 19 to that mythic world.

One of the things was saw was the different Seraph, now avoiding the dangerous use of direct electronic communication between their units, starting to take on different characters. Just among the Threes, one self-hating sleeper agent that had helped destroy a major base is now firmly on the side of the Colonials and is even in a love affair; the commander of the basestar is increasingly interested in military camaraderie and a developing friendship with the admiral that started more out of necessity and is now about how alike they are; another is trying to develop a sense of humor and is terrible at jokes… The Seraph are becoming people.

The rump fleet left for Earth at the end of the last adventure, leaving the people under the care of Poseidon’s citadel. The sea god had a number of his fellow Kobolians resurrected using fancy flesh 3D printing, etc…onyl to find out that Athena had convinced one of the techs to bring back one particular DNA signature. Instead of ruling as king here on Argos, Poseidon found himself facing a new ZEUS.

We’re now taking a break to do some Atomic Robo, but the last “season” of our now four year long campaign will focus on the weird posthuman/transhumans of the worlds near Earth, as well as checking in on what happened to Pegasus, which – realizing the Seraph/Cylon war put them in an advantageous position, returned to the Colonies to try and destroy toasters and save more survivors on the 12 Worlds.

We should be getting back to Galactica later in the summer, I suspect.

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.

This week’s game session saw our fleet discover the remains of a Kobolian outpost from millenia before the 13th Tribe decamped. The place is identifed by ATHENA as Argos, one of the colony worlds set up in the Olympians’ attempts to find the Titans that made them. The place is abandoned — cities standing empty and in collapse. There are plants and animals on the planet, however, and the idea of setting down and letting the grieving Colonials get some respite is quickly gaining popularity. The characters had been thinking of leaving the civilian fleet here with some protection so that they could race ahead to Earth to scout that world.

They do reconnaissance of the world and find the place deserted…except for the massive complex in a mountain range up against a glacier. Scouting the location, which they haven’t been able to get good data on due to a weather event, the scout raptor is shot down, and it’s viper escort nearly dropped, as well. They spot a SAM site with centurions operating it, and a heavy raider launched to escape. One of the characters does a strafing run that takes out the SAM site, and eventually drops the heavy raider before it can jump.

The SAR mission includes some of the humanoid Cyln (Seraph) who access the mind of one of the dead centurions and find out they’ve been assigned to 1) find any recoverable data — the Kobolians (Olympians, whatever…) store their data in DNA because it is more robust than optical or magnetic storage; millennia is easily possible. 2) There are other missions like this to other Kobolian outposts, and they were 3) given the mission by a massive, darkly-handsome man Athena identifies as Hades. Their nemesis is still alive.

Worse, he’s looking for a Titan body — a “ship of lights” — to inhabit. They now know the Blaze is alive, apparently in physical form, and is waiting at a world, New Ophiuchi (the Ophiucans were the 13th Tribe, in our game) for the scouts.

There were several action sequences as they explored the Olympian citadel — a massive, 50-story arcology — and in the end they discovered not just data storage, but DNA samples of some of the Olympians that had remained behind after whatever happened…happened.

They’ve figured that the Cylons that were here were on an indefinite assignment, and are thinking of having the civilian fleet remain and do harvesting on the world, while they race to New Ophiuchi and deal with Hades.

This is leading toward the denouement of the campaign much quicker than I had anticipated.

New Year’s Day saw everyone able to get together for an extended gaming session over jambalaya and beer. We picked up after a few rough starts because I had forgotten a few of the going-on last session, but finally we hit the ground running and the adventure I thought would be done by third hour ran five, almost until we knocked off for the night.

The Cylon player character (a Leoben type) and “Tana” — meaning “commander” in Kobolian — a Three than the Colonials had as a POW in earlier episodes figure out that someone has been tweaking the programming of the “humanoid Cylons” or Seraph when they have been going to the resurection ship to have their experiences downloaded directly. (They can’t simply upload wirelessly as they once had.)

The commander of the ship, a player character, was promoted to admiral, and after some politicking the Seraph leadership accepted him as the commander of the military assets. There was a moment of tension when ATHENA recommended not the One model to command the Cylon basestar, but Tana Three. After some consultation between the models that had come for the alliance confab, this was made the case. She was made a “commander” and the second highest ranking officer in the military, over the objections of the Colonial colonel commanding the light escort they have in tow.

Tana askes for Colonial help in sussing out what is going on, and during a state visit to the basestar, the admiral brought along two of the characters working on Cylon reproductive issues. They went with the PC Cylon to the resurrection ship and in a great display of mad scientist moments, they were able to distract the Caretaker of the ship and got a look at Cylon/Seraph coding. They discovered with a spectacular roll by one of their programmers that the Ones were trying to program in fealty to the models. He also found all the deep psychological blocks that the Blaze — their once God — had programmed into their machine part of their brains, preventing them from all manner of behavior. Essentially, they were slaves to this Blaze, fugueing out whenever they tried to address their infertility issues, or discuss certain things tied to the Blaze, or other important issues.

Despite the dangers, the programmer character wrote a virus that stripped all these inhibitors out of the Seraph and set it loose in the Cylon fleet. This not only freed them from the inhibitors their God put in place, but allowed them to know about the manipulation of the Ones. A full-scale uprising and overthrow of the Ones occurred in about a minute and a half as the models conferred and voted to keep most decisions a democratic quorum of the models, but they placed Tana 3 in command of the fleet’s military decisions. They also view the programmer as something of a hero of the Seraph, now.

The alliance looks solid, they are on their way to Earth, and the episode ended with the trial of the various ringleaders of the mutiny — which included the cousin and last remaining family of one of the PCs, the new CAG. She was able to make herself vote for death. Lots of role playing pathos ensued.

We started the next episode before closing out the night. One of the recon missions, following leads that the ATHENA had generated for possible Kobolian outposts, finds Argos — a colony of the Lords of Kobol that predates the 13th Tribe’s exodus by almost 1000 years. The place is barely habitable in a New Caprica sort of way, but there is the added possibility of ancient tech to be plundered. Athena seems intent on doing so. Might she have ulterior motives?

One of the things the players started tossing about was the idea of settling the civilian fleet, which has been slowing their travel as older vessel, and those not really designed for extended space and FTL travel are increasingly experiencing malfunctions. Additionally, the fresh food is about to end, and they’ll be on stabilized and canned stuff for the next six months or so it will take to get to Earth. But Argos has indications of familiar crops and animal life. After five months stuck in tight quarters, grieving over the loss of…everything, the players are starting to think it might be necessary to drop the civilian fleet someplace relatively safe, and press on at best speed to Earth.

That was where we ended the night with some big decisions that could decide how much longer the campaign goes on. The end, I think, is in sight after four years.

(This isn’t the longest continuous campaign I’ve run, but it’s damned close. IT has been, by far, the most rewarding from a storytelling and fun standpoint of any game in the last fifteen years.)

This week saw our last game of the year, most likely. (Damn you, holidays!) However, we did get the chance to start a new arc for the fleet, post mutiny and coup.

The first half of the night was concerned with picking up the pieces after the whole of the elected government was killed off. Rather than reconstitute the tradition set up of a quorum, there will be a council of ship captains, who will report their concerns to the small bureaucracy that is still mostly in place. Logistics Minister to handle food and other supplies; a morale and welfare minster for the necessary “bread and circuses” to keep people stuck in 74 tin cans occupied and out of as much mischief as possible; a justice minister (also our head and only judge) to handle criminal cases (and who is overloaded with the coup conspirators); a health minister; and a security minister controlling the civilian police force. The commander of Galactica, a PC, is doubling as defense minister — he is the last word on military matters. There is an “interim president”, which sounds better than “president placed there by the very angry military commander that just had his president dad murdered.”

The big move was the Quorum of Priests who demanded Lady Athena of Kobol rule them. She declined, but took the position of prime minister. She is not legally empowered to make policy or law…but everyone knows that she is guiding the whole show, now. This has actually created more stability in the fleet, despite her having to spend several weeks selling the people on the new government and more importantly, the announcement of the alliance with the Seraph (humanoid Cylons) of Basestar 19.

There was a lot of politicking and changing of the guards — including the PC pilot who was cousin of the mutiny leader finding herself as CAG — but this was overshadowed by two new plotlines:

1) The inclusions of Basestar 19‘s ships, including Resurrection 3. We introduced a new PC — a Leoben-like “messenger” model. This one, named Devet Cavil as a tip of the hat to the new show, is trying to find stability and answers in the wake of The Blaze turning out to be a false god (Hades, armed with Titan’s technology, to be specific) and his continuing revelations from God. He is convinced Athena is the key to figuring it out…what does she know? He has a second problem — the Seraph that have recently been “decanted” are showing odd personality traits — they are very docile, and overly amenable to the policies of the Ones and Twos…are they being programmed? Is this a move by a few of the models to be more equal than the others?

This is leading toward some espionage and politicking in the Cylon fleet.

2) They have gotten close enough to have their first distant survey of Earth’s star. This has raised morale (if only the mutineers had held their fire a few days!), but more important is that as they have moved past the stellar nurseries of the Orion Nebular group, they are picking up what look to be super high frequency and bandwidth communications from dozens of systems in the Orion Spur. These are between 500 and 1000 years in the past…but this section of the galaxy looks to be alive with settled worlds! What might be waiting for them out there, even the Seraph/Cylons — who had sent “Seeks” into the area to find humans to bring under the embrace of the Blaze — can’t know…

So we are about to wander further away from the show, and more toward the post/transhuman elements that have been hinted at throughout the campaign. We know the TITANS created the Lords of Kobol to rule/supervise the humans that they recreated on Kobol after destroying Earth. We know Hades left with the Ophiuchan Tribe (the 13th Tribe) and apparently contacted the Titans, and in his effort to find “God” or understand the universe, went mad and came back as “the Blaze” to overthrow the Olympians on Kobol and rule over the people there. He eventually created the Seraph (our humanoid Cylons) in the image of his brothers and sisters he destroyed, and had them reign in his stead, and also send them to find the rest of humanity and bring them under his gaze.

What we’re finding out: the Seraph lost any of their Seeks to unknown elements at Earth and other worlds near it. We now suspect that the Titans or humans from Earth or the 13th Tribe have settled this region of space…but the transmissions seen suggest they are far more advanced technologically than the Colonials or Seraph; what might they be encountering soon?

We’re in the home stretch of the campaign, and the flavor of the game is moving more toward a combination of the spiritual, but also more transhuman sci-fi. I’ve pretty much got the main elements of the next few episodes mapped out, but only can really plan an episode or two ahead of where I am, as player input is driving us in directions I hadn’t anticipated. (I know my players well enough to usually know where they’ll take us…this hasn’t been the case of late.)

The final acts of our mutiny arc were played out this week. Previously, one of the player characters connected to the black market, and who had been the Security Minister until it was discovered his aide was a Cylon, led a coup d’etat against the government. He and one two of his conspirators did for the entire Quorum of Twelve, as well as the president (the father of the commander — played, funnily enough, by the same guy with the coup leader.) Once they had secured the quorum chambers and president’s office (on Cloud 9 in our game because no politician is going to “rule” from a bitty liner…), they set about finding out what was going on with the mutiny on Galactica.

This play session was mostly on the battlestar. Of the two players there that night, one had his viper pilot and a veterinarian-turned-medic (and budding mad scientist researching Cylon infertility); the other had his coup leader and commander of Galactica as their characters. The viper pilot is the cousin of the mutiny leader — a very popular engineer who is also a master organizer, and whom managed to pull of the mutiny in a matter of minutes. They engineered a malfunction of the communications while most of the pilots (the majority of the officers) were out on an exercise, raided CIC, and placed the command staff in the brig until the mutiny was complete.

Things start to go wrong when some of the mutinous pilots with marines in tow try to capture the Three — who had been a sleeper in the Colonial Feet and is wracked with doubt and guilt over her actions — the commander had put back in uniform (along with our version of Boomer.) She was in the infirmary giving eggs for the vet’s experiments, along with Lady Athena — the Lord of Kobol they picked up in the Tomb of Athena. The mutineers attempt to take them into custody, only to get mangled badly by the two of them. (With some help from the vet.)

Athena sends the Three (call sign Trey) to round up the loyal officers currently being held in the pilot’s briefing room by one of the mutineers and the pilot PC, who was having a crisis of conscience. The PC decided she needed to find out what was going on and was being held at gunpoint when Trey arrives to aid her. The loyal pilots break out — some headed for the brig to rescue the command staff, some headed to the CIC to aid Athena, who had disappeared to go “get dressed for the party” — getting into her high-tech (yet Greco-retro looking) armor, with shield and energy-weapon firing spear.

A lot of the violence happened off-camera, but the vet (as their field medic) aided Trey, Helo, and a few others in rescuing the commander and his staff — who then headed for the CIC. The pilot PC, with Starbuck, and a few worshippers of Athena headed for the CIC and managed to link up with Athena before she raided the place on her own. In the ensuing fight, a bunch of the mutineers got dropped, but the pilot managed to talk down her cousin, who wound up in the brig. The Lady of Kobol chewed through the opposition scarily easy; the first time they’ve really seen her in action.

By the time the coup leaders called into Galactica to check on the situation, the ship had been retaken (or at least the CIC), and they were surprised to find themselves not talking to their woman on the inside, but Athena — who told them she was coming for them next. This lead to a chase to capture the coup leader, who was ultimately shot down.

In the end, both players each lost one of the troupe of characters, some of the former PCs were killed, and a host of main supporting NPCs went under the bus.

The players were left with a badly fractured fleet, a sudden loss of a lot of their officer corps, about half the marines of the fleet dead, and no political leadership. they instituted an interim president and decided to run with a periodic meeting of ship captains to manage the big issues, but they need to get the bureaucracy back online to keep supplies and services going. There was some talk of martial law, and the pilot PC is looking to fill their badly depleted ranks with pilots from the humanoid Cylon fleet they are weakly allied with; another idea is not to intermingle the pilots, but have the Cylons — now that everyone knows they’re out there — join the fleet to bolster their air assets.

The next episode, however, will show us that things aren’t exactly stable on the Cylon side of things, and that their “leadership” hasn’t bee playing on the up and up…

After a week off for the holidays, a couple of simmering plot thread finally came together tonight. Between the president having been sick and uninvolved, the interfleet gang war that left the Salamir Cartel in charge of the black market, the loss of important characters on Kobol (and the finding of Lord of Kobol — Athena — inhabiting the daughter of the heretofore unknown head of the cartel), the putting Boomer and another turncoat Cylon back in uniform, and the discovery that the fleet has been working with a faction of the humanoid Cylons running from the centurions…one of the player’s black marketeers staged a violent coup d’etat, while a simultaneous mutiny is going on aboard Galactica.

The set up involved the shooting of a well-liked madam and matchmaker on Cloud 9 (where our government resided…seriously, politicians wouldn’t live on the nicest ship in the fleet?) The investigation starts chasing the murder suspect, who is the main fixer for the Salamir, and was eliminating a person that knew their plans. The cops are sidetracked by a corrupt officer and are not there when the action goes down in the quorum chambers.

Meanwhile, Galactica‘s mutineers — led by the popular, hyper-competent, and thoroughly destroyed by the apocalypse chief engineer — get most of the pilots off the ship in a big combat exercise, sequester the ones they are unsure of, and stage a big fire by the main antenna that requires, in the engineer’s plans, the shutting down of the main power trunks to the antenna. Galactica is suddenly deaf and dumb, and the internal comms go down, as well. The warning about losing comms caused the president to call the quorum — three of whom are coup leaders — together.

While the cops are chasing down the bad guy, he is leading thugs against the quorum security, and the gangster PC, and the two other NPCs, gun down the quorum, but not before there was some serious action hero moments by the 76 year old president, who managed to stab one of the gunmen in the eye and turn his weapon of several of the others. In the end, one coup leader was dead, several of their mooks, and another leader injured, but the other nine quorum delegates were killed.

Next week, we resolve the situation on Galactica…