Colony Wars: Relationship map

Quick post of opportunity as I sort through my notes from last weekend’s Big Bad Con: I wanted to show you the relationship map created by the players as we played Colony Wars: “We’ve Lost Contact with Epsilon 3…”  As advertised, I had brought three pages’ worth of possible character pictures, a big pad of sketch paper, scissors, coloured pens, and glue.

My husband has posted some notes on his experience as a player, and I have summarized my impressions of the system elsewhere as:

I need to write a post-game report, but here is the nutshell version: (1) Token economies are not intuitive for me and prep left me very anxious about this game.  (2) We only touched the basics and I deliberately omitted (or forgot) a lot of special rules.  (3) That said, with a group of six such marvellous players, we had a really great dramatic story.  (4) Once the system is mastered, it should be a fantastic game for a GM because it requires practically no preparation at all.  (5) Still, as far as prep goes: having the images and turning the relationship map into a craft project seemed to work well; they really got into it.

Most of the episode took place on 234 Ithaca, a Main-Belt asteroid on the outer edge (made up asteroid, I didn’t want to get tangled in, you know, science and facts…).  The story began shortly after Ithaca lost contact with Epsilon 3, a new outpost on a Hilda-class asteroid, the beginnings of a new colony for which construction was staged from Ithaca.  The cast included:

• John Ozee, the executive officer averse to making waves so soon before his retirement but hoping to leave a legacy (Susan);
• Riley Smith, the representative of the miners’ union, out to prove himself a leader and perhaps carve out independence from Earth for Ithaca (Bryant);
• Harjeet Diwan, second-generation Spaceborn trust fund kid and rebel (Hamish);
• Hitomi Aura Leica, third-generation Spaceborn corporate rep, exquisitely professional and unable to make true human connections (Gregory);
• Fredrick Azzizan, a Firstcomer and maintenance guru, the institutional memory and quiet lynchpin of 234 Ithaca (Oliver); and
• “Swash” Gutierrez, a con man positioning himself as advocate for the immigrants stranded on Ithaca until they could move on to the new colony; modelled after Sawyer in Lost (Edmund).

Blue is for player characters, green is for the recurring support cast.