The Black Campbell

Last week’s game session of Battlestar Galactica continued to see us pull from the RDM show, then twist it to fit our campaign. Events have led the fleet to look for more resources, as they don’t know how far their journey will take them. They’ve found tyllium on a moon in the upper levels of an attenuated gas giant in a highly hostile star system with a planetary nebula around a white dwarf. The radiation and ejecta are enough to be dangerous to the smaller ships, but also has the same Cylon-tech jamming signature of Ragnar. The upper atmosphere of the gas giant and it’s magnetic field cut much of the harmful radiation of the nebula, but has its own dangers.

They had found, in the previous night, a derelict galleon (they think) from Kobol that had the markings of the Libran tribe. They immediately add a mission to the hulk in addition to the mining operations they are going to have to run. The mining will be highly dangerous and the fleet population has been reticent to volunteer for hours of hard labor in a space suit exposed to high levels of radiation from the nebula and the planet’s electromagnetic field. As in the show, the vice president (a PC), decides to try and get some of the prisoners to volunteer for the work in exchange for points to release or expedited release for some of them.

As in Bastille Day, this leads to a hostage situation, with the Vice President, the Tauron delegate to the quorum (a former actress), and a PC police officer guarding them being taken by Tom Zarek and another leader of the mutiny — a new character named Janus Seii. Seii is a former colonel in the special forces that worked specifically for the Office of the President running high-level security checks, doing counterterroism, etc. He had been railroaded by the admiralty four years ago, allegedly for embezzlement of black bag funds, but there were always rumors that there was some political issue or that Seii had pissed off the wrong flag rank officers. He doesn’t even have a personnel file — he was being transferred under a simple convict number. Seii is convinced he was to be killed by some elements in the government and specifically the president, who was Minister of Defense at the time, and was not hot to save the colonel.

The prisoners move Astral Queen close to a few liners to prevent being shot down and issue an ultimatum — elections and release of the prisoners. The commander of Galactica (and son of the president) is a PC: he negotiates a meet with Seii in space, raptor to raptor and explains how the conditions in the fleet aren’t much better than prison, that they are willing to run elections — which were supposed to be in the offing in six months anyway, and agrees to release the 500 or so prisoners that haven’t taken part in the mutiny aboard Astral Queen. He has one condition for this — assassinate Tom Zarek. He’s a malcontent, arrested for terrorism and his first action is to take hostages and a ship. He’s a danger and will be divisive and dangerous force in the fleet. Seii agrees and offers to make sure the most dangerous of the prisoners are defending the ship when Galactica moves to board the vessel.

The sticking point is the president. The commander defends his father, but hears how Seii had been onto some kind of subversive or treasonous element in the contractors to the Fleet’s expeditionary fleet. He suspects he was onto the Cylon infiltrators that helped destroy their defenses, but he was shut down by large political forces — perhaps even President Adar — who were indebted to their contractors. Whether they knew it was Cylons, he doesn’t know. Whether the president is a Cylon “puppet”, he doesn’t know. They agree that the political and military leaders have to be tested for Cylon hardware, or bloodtests for being Cylons.

The evening ended there, but it’s opening the campaign to a new direction. Until this point, the characters were trying to follow the laws and norms of their society…now the commander is cutting corners. If it works, will he be horrified by his actions (or suffer consequences for acting without authorization by the civilian government), or if he’ll be tempted to take the easy route and start a slide toward military rule.

There was also a comedic/frightening bit with the Tauron delegate and the cop trying to escape that led him him getting beaten pretty badly, as well as discovering that the delegate is a drug addict. (They had arranged for first aid, took out the guard and prisoner/nurse, and “escaped” into the ship…where she helped him recover from his injuries with a judicious shot of morpha. She also partook. So, high as kites, outnumbered, and not overly competent, they were preparing to go Die Hard on the terrorists. Or hide. Or something…

The night’s play showed how you can take elements of a licensed property and play with them, keeping enough bits of an episode — in this case — to tease the players into thinking things might go one way, only to let their actions led you away from the path the original material took.

This week’s Battlestar Galactica continued to move away from the TV show canon, while trying to actually one-up the style and flavor of the same. Looking for resources to mine, a recon raptor discovers a moon orbiting in the upper limits of a gas giant’s atmosphere — the word have been severely attenuated by the white dwarf it orbits when the star went nova millennia ago. The whole system is engulfed in the planetary nebula of the nova, awash with radiation — including the signature that affects Cylons — and debris. It’s far too dangerous to hide the fleet in, but the moon is somewhat protected from the nebular radiation by the strong, also dangerous, magnetic field of the gas giant.

They jump in to do a survey of the moon, battling strong atmospheric currents, the magnetic field of the gas giant and the powerful flux tube along the field line connecting the moon to its primary. They discover remnants of a settlement, badly eroded by micrometeorite, gas friction, and other elements…perhaps a mine? they estimate, based on the damage the place has been there for over 2000 years.

Despite the heavy DRADIS interference, they pick up on a massive object that seems to be trapped, circling the flux tube…it turns out to be an ancient, massive vessel that the pilot (the CAG, a PC) recognizes from a recurring dream I’ve been describing, as one of the galleons that brought humanity to the 12 Colonies!

A quick sketch I whipped up for the session…

The markings are those of Kobol-era Libra — the ancestors of the Librans, whose population we’d remarked on several times, has been historically much lower than the other Colonies. There was damage to the craft, indications of weapons impacts among the millennia of damage done floating in the atmosphere of the gas giant. They were making plans on how to board an investigate — having to take into account the heavy energy fields, the charges the recon raptor or shuttle’s hull would pick up, how to communicate through heavy communications interference, etc…

We ended there, but the hope is that the hulk will provide a key to the location of Kobol, and Colonial prehistory. The episode also shows how you can veer from the direct plot of an RPG setting based on an established property, and still keep — or enhance — the feel of the original material. In this case, the visions characters are having started as very ephemeral or confusing, but as events happen, they are making more and more sense.

One of the central tenets of Battlestar Galactica –both the 1978 and 2004 shows — was that the characters were trapped in events that were bigger than just their exodus. In the original show, the “ship of light” and its angelic beings were somehow interested in the plight of the Colonials; similarly, the Final Five were shown as being of light, draped similarly in white, and the “ship of lights” is riffed on in one of Starbuck’s paintings.

What I’ve been working toward is establishing that there may be some kind of cosmic force that is continually playing out this cycle of collapse, discovery, and rebirth over and over again, with differing protagonists and antagonists…but always toward some end that is unknowable. Kobol may be the home of godlike creatures that were overthrown by an angry, jealous “Blaze” (as per the cut scene in Kobol’s Last Gleaming), or maybe they themselves were just one set of oppressor-turned-oppressed in the Great Cycle.

I’ve kept the Scrolls of Pythia as a major plot point, but added the Aurelian Heresies — an apocrypha that might predate Kobol, itself — and which has strong influences from the Eleusian Mysteries of Greek myth — a cycle of decent into the underworld or some deadly event, self-discovery or rehabilitation, and the resurrection or rebirth of the character/civilization/etc. It ties tightly to Hades and his capture of Perephone, and I’ve dropped hints that “the Blaze” may have been Hades revolting against the Lords’ rule…but maybe not. Every point here has been to enhance the mystery and mysticism of the setting, but to temper it with some of the characters positing more sensible reasons — the Kobolians were some kind of alien race than made humans; the Kobolians were just exceptional humans; they were the Cylons of the Titans…

Don’t be shy when running a licensed setting to shred what you don’t like, pump up what you do, and go your own way. Your game is best thought as a reimagining, not a canon-inclusive sideshow. This gives the characters the chance to be the heroes, having real influence on their universe, instead of heroes playing in the shadow of the people in the property.

One of the things I liked about Babylon 5 and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica was that the characters had to make big decisions based on bad information, little sleep, and through the prism of emotional strain of surviving the apocalypse. It’s something that was present in my last BSG campaign, but it is firmly up front and center in the current game.

The last few game sessions revolved around the death of Sergeant Hadrian, the master-a-t-arms, found murdered near the water tanks. It gave me a chance to do a police procedural in the environment of Galactica. The characters chase down forensics evidence — surveillance cameras near the scene, fingerprints and other evidence on the murder weapon, and the like — there were a few red herrings in the episode, and they were tripped up by sabotage of the tanks ala the episode Water. They have to solve the murder and sabotage at the same time. One of the suspects is the still-present Aaron Doral. In our campaign, he was a Ministry of Education flunkie responsible for the museum transition on Galactica and who is now the Scorpia delegate to the Quorum of Twelve. Eventually, it turns out Doral was set up by a Cylon agent whom they stop in a desperate fight outside of auxiliary damage control, where the bad guy was aiming to vent the ship and kill the crew.

The B story, however, seems to indicate where the meat of the campaign is going to be: BIG decisions. As the new government gets its legs, they are trying to decide what the government, laws, and life of the fleet is going to look like. One of the characters is the commander of Galactica and he is already showing signs of authoritarianism. He’s been floating the idea of a military dictatorship, something the vice president character seems to be somewhat supportive of. What kind of law and law enforcement are they going to have for the fleet? Concentrate on violent crimes only? What about crimes involving coercion or other kinds of “force”? They have two cops…do they form a bigger police force? What kind of authority should they have? What kind of surveillance and expectations of privacy should you have?

These kind of issues don’t turn up often in the average dungeon crawl or setting where the players are “street-level”, but they make for good fun for characters that have some level of power. What happens when your fighter becomes king of the realm..? Do you rule as a “good king”? Even if you do, what kinds of freedoms can you give your people? How does power affect your decision-making process — can you stay “good” or do you let the power go to your head?

What about the street runner that becomes a corporate exec in Shadowrun  or Cyberpunk — do you sell out? Do you work to fix the system from the inside? Do you convince yourself you’re doing one, while actually doing the other?

We’ve had to sharply change gears on how we play the Battlestar Galactica campaign since the Fall of the Colonies. Up until the Cylon attack, it’s been mostly a Cold War spy/police procedural where one set of characters have been ferreting out the Cylon conspiracy, and another set have been dealing with the politics of the Colonies and how they are hampering the search. Now it’s a post-apocalyptic survival game.

First thing we’ve done is create groups of characters that have a certain sphere of influence. We can mix and match as works, but there are 1) political characters involved in the civilian fleet and the politics of running a small town on the run, 2) military to handle fighting Cylons and finding Earth, and 3) civilian characters whose fight crime, boredom, and dispair in the Fleet.

We’ve had two short episodes since the Fall. Our version of 33 only took about a day’s time, as the characters figured quickly that the Cylons were tracking the fleet and managed to locate the devices that were aiding the enemy. I had the white disk thingees we see in the miniseries (the one on the DRADIS console) play the role of trackers, tied into the DRADIS and navigation feeds, and powered by the ship’s power grid. Unplug them and they’re useless. There was an Olympic Carrier moment, but a shoot down is averted early on.

However, unlike the show, where the tiny government gets its act together fairly quickly, we’re addressing the chaos that 60,000+ people on about 92 ships (our Fleet is a bit bigger and has two battlestars and a few support ships surviving) that have had almost no time to mourn, come to grips with the enormity of what has just happened to them, and who are packed like sardines in some ships with terrible sanitary conditions, would face.

After the events of 33, the next adventure revolved around Vice President Jones — a player character — trying to get a decent census of the people in the fleet, and a sense of the conditions. Because the president and military are fixated on finding possible Cylon collaborators or agents in the fleet, they have stopped traffic between ships while the crews — tired, overworked, and grieving — try to figure out how many people they got and what their food/water/air situation is. There’s simply been no relief for people who are stunned by the Fall, and many can’t or won’t cope. When he arrives at the freighter Epheme, he finds the ship — which has pressurized container vessels packed with refugees — on the verge of mutiny. The people have been sealed inside the containers, because they have overloaded the ship’s water and waste systems. The ship has no water, and the sewage ship has yet to get to them. The place is an open sewer, and inside the containers, it’s worse. The characters have to avert a mutiny, convince the government to lift the no-fly order (and risk agents moving through the fleet), and then try to sort out how to move people.

The contrast between the lives of these people and the government types, sitting on Colonial One with only a small staff and press corps aboard, is marked, and made more obvious when the rump Quorum (only ten members chosen from the highest ranking officials from each Tribe they can find) votes to move from the small liner to Cloud 9 with its spacious staterooms, plentiful meeting spaces and convention halls, and amenities like dry cleaning service. Politicians, even in during the end of the world, still act like politicians.

It also gave us the chance to introduce a new PC, Quorum member from Aerilon who is a Cylon collaborator. His minder, a Cylon humanoid agent, got him from gang member and dock worker to community organizer, to politician in a few short years. He knows he was working for the enemy, but never expected them to actually attack. It should be an interesting tight-rope for the character to walk.

So what’s the point of all this? In your campaigns, it’s important to realize that — especially in fast moving, large events like battles, emergencies, etc. — the characters will never have full knowledge, or even accurate knowledge, of what’s going on around them. Think of the Boston Marathon bombings…even figuring out who the suspects were with mounds of photographic evidence took days, and over a week to start connecting them to those who aided them. In this game, after 3 days the Colonials still don’t have firm numbers on their survivors, don’t know how many lawyers to run courts, doctors to treat people, computer specialists, miners, and what have you they have in the fleet. To make these sorts of events real, you need to feed your players information. Then contradict it. Then do it again. Get them confused, worried, and make them act on imperfect knowledge. That’s how it really works, and when they screw up the consequences should lead to good drama and role play.

There are a few game systems that do a nice job of handling large scale battles, and the participation of characters in them, but not all RPGs — particularly those that focus more on character and story — deal with the different scales of a Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica-style capital ships, fighters, people running around shooting stuff all at the same time kind of action, especially when you have characters operating at all of these levels.

We’ll use the latest Battlestar Galactica session I ran last week as an example (with some augmentation here and there to illustrate some points…) We have finally reached the events of the miniseries in our campaign, and the characters have replaced those of the show for this iteration of the story (search this site for “after action report” and you should be able to find postings that will explain more on this.) Last night was the breakout from Ragnar Anchorage, which meant going toe-to-toe with the Cylons. As in the series, Galactica — this time with the aid of other surviving military units — have to scatter the Cylons and hold the line over the anchorage while the civilian vessels jump to safety. This means coordinated capital ship action (one of the PC, Commander Pindarus, running that), Viper on Raider action with PCs flying the vipers, and we would have had another character aiding in damage control in the fight, had they attended that evening.

Battles in BSG, Star Wars, and Star Trek often take hours, not minutes, or the seconds of personal combat in many games. To capture the difference in scales, I suggest that at the start of combat, the capital level stuff goes first — battlestar and basestar exchange their initial salvos, and any character involved in gunnery or command of the vessel, or electronic warfare gets to take their actions for the round. Next goes the fighter/vehicle-level action, then the personal-level stuff. Now to show longer time frames of battles for such a fight, I typically allow the personal and vehicle scale players to have another two or three rounds to show the speed with which their combat or actions take before returning to the capital-level attacks. (In the case of the damage control stuff, I would most likely call these extended tests and have them roll at the same time as the capital level actions.)

Here Galactica launched her fighters, set up her flak barrier with the point defense, but before she could start wailing on the nearest basestar, they were hit by a missile salvo from the same. (They lost initiative.) Galactica returned fire relatively ineffectually for the first round. Next, the CAG rolled for the fighter groups. Here I was assuming his pilot and initiative counted for the vipers vs. the Cylons. They won, he rolled brilliantly for the first round of engagement and they splash a bunch of toasters and only lose one guy. The other pilot character got to duke it out one on one with a raider — she’s a pilot, it’s her schtick — always let your players get a chance to strut their character’s stuff, if you can help it.  The viper squadrons rolled again, this time only a few toasters go down and no vipers. A third go-round for pilots and blasting Cylons.

Galactica got initiative on the next round and did well, pasting the basestar hard. However the viper squadronds do almost nothing and the Cylons damage 12 of the vipers in the round. They break through and start a run toward the EW raptors, to try and clear the jamming the Colonials are using to keep the missiles from damaging the battlestar and civilian ships. The next two rounds are viper squadrons and pilot characters dogfighting with raiders.

The next capital round, the Cylons are done playing. Galactica gets a radiological alarm and the Cylons fire a nuke. The EW raptors jam it and keep the ship safe. Finally the civilian ships are all out. The next two rounds are the pilots attempting their combat landings before the ship jumps to safety.

Now originally, I had planned for a Cylon agent to have been activated in Galactica during the breakout and there to have been a fight between a marine PC and the bad guy that would have been resolved like a normal fight at the same time as the viper combat — three rounds of action to every one for Galactica and other capital ships. It would have happened in the CIC and anything that distracted the command staff, or injured them, etc. would have had an effect on the way Galactica was fighting during her rounds.

You can experiment with the time between capital ship rounds, but I find three is enough to allow for fast paced action for the characters in teh thick of things, but not so long that the commander and/or other characters involved in shiphandling get bored.