The Gates of Hell [pdf] is a one-shot scenario for the Battlestar Galactica Role-playing Game by Margaret Weis Games. I wrote it for my gaming group’s playtest of the game, which I used as the basis for my subsequent reviews at SCIFI.com and Nuketown.
Since that playtest ran, a number of people have asked me for a copy of my scenario notes to get a sense of how I ran the game. I’ll warn you in advance; this is a are fairly rules-light, straightforward scenario. It was designed to be run in a single session, and as a result, it’s exceedingly linear.
Of course, one of the many cool things about the Battlestar Galactica RPG (and Cortex system that its based on) is that players have the opportunity to hack the scenario by spending Plot Points. What may seem overly linear on paper can bend and change in unexpected ways depending on the player characters. This is the case with most RPGs, but it’s doubly true with Battlestar Galactica,
The attached Adobe Acrobat document includes the main scenario, vehicle stats, a rules summary and character bios (with assets and complications but not full statblocks; if I have a chance, I’ll add those as well). It also makes reference to music tracks; when I ran this scenario I had a custom playlist drawn from the Battlestar Galactica Season 1, Season 2 and 300 soundtracks.
Related Nuketown Reading:
- “The Gates of Hell” scenario [pdf]
- Game Day: Battlestar Galactica: The Flight of the Cerberus
- Playtest Results: Battlestar Galactica RPG
- Review: Destroy Cylons, Save Humanity with the Battlestar Galactica RPG
Web Resources: