Black Cat Blues

Once upon a time, seven players were given a task: "I'm running a Firefly game. Make me a character with a dark secret." The result was three wonderful years of total anarchy, hating the Cortex system, and my players repeatedly wondering "How do five/three/two/whatever of us still have a secret worse than THAT?"

Black Cat Blues ran from January 2007 through December 2009. The GM was Beth with support from Humbleminion.

PCs

 * Luke Kano, Alliance tax collector and long-term passenger (season 1-6)
 * Birgitta Makar, ship's mechanic
 * Elisa Maza, investigator (seasons 5ish-7 I think?)
 * Mu Siqin, hacker
 * Nicolas Navarra, captain
 * Quinn Navarra, pilot
 * Osiris, doctor/dentist/undertaker
 * Jaya Singh, disguise and impersonation expert (seasons 1-3)

Allied NPCs

 * MsSgt Rose Archer, retired Alliance soldier and Daisy's estranged mother
 * Big Tom, old friend of Nicolas and frequent source of plot hooks
 * Dustin Henley, Project Panacea, a subject of Blue Sun medical experimentation whose blood had anti-nanotechnology properties
 * Daisy Sikamba, doctoral student in anthropology and long-term passenger

Antagonists

 * The Bluehands
 * Michael Gianconi, Nicolas's father and the captain of Inheritance
 * Sekhmet, Alliance special forces commander, so cool she gets her own page

Plot Summary
Nicolas Navarra and his half-sister Quinn, natives of the planet Lilac, were the owners of the Firefly-class ship Black Cat. They hired Birgitta and Osiris to round out their crew, and took on the remaining characters (Archer, Daisy, Jaya, Luke, Siqin) as passengers. Nicolas was an extremely superstitious person. He owned a black cat named Lucky who had the run of the ship, and required anyone aboard to abide by various rules, which included: no harming cats, no sex while the ship is in motion, no locked doors at any time, restrictions on the type of cargo they would carry, and many others (he added one per season). If anyone broke a rule, it meant bad luck was on the way.

Season One: Jaya
When the crew first encountered Jaya she was posing as a man and pretending to be a Mormon missionary, with Siqin posing as her wife. Her cover got blown pretty quickly. Jaya was fleeing an arranged political marriage and sectarian conflict on her homeworld, and the rest of the crew got inadvertently caught up in it by bringing her aboard. To save their own skins, they brought her back to her homeworld and helped her set things right. With the crisis there dealt with, Nicolas offered Jaya a long-term posting aboard Black Cat, but Jaya didn't stay for long before moving on to new opportunities as a recruiter for the Companions' Guild.

Season Two: Birgitta
Birgitta, the ship's mechanic, took obvious pride in her past as a Browncoat war veteran. What nobody knew was that Birgitta and her Browncoat buddies had been secret deep-cover Alliance operatives all along, tasked with assassinating high-ranking Browncoats and sabotaging the rebellion from within. Birgitta especially enjoyed the assassinations. Badly damaged by what she had seen and done during the war, she was still secretly murdering Browncoat sympathizers as a serial killer known as the Cat. The other PCs were just starting to notice that the Cat's killings seemed to be following them around and to get suspicious - but not as suspicious as Birgitta got when she realized that she hadn't killed some of the people who were dying by the Cat's MO.

(Yes, believe it or not, this was somehow the second least awful character background secret that I received.)

Things really got moving when Elijah Gore, Birgitta's former commander and old flame, reached out to hire the PCs to help him out in his new position as a director of the Alliance Planetary Terraforming Division on Shadow. The colonies on Shadow were experiencing major climatic problems due to a mysterious fungal infestation, and Gore dispatched the crew on various missions in search of a solution. This went pear-shaped in a lot of ways and led to Birgitta's secrets coming out as she murdered multiple people while trying and failing to cover her tracks (and, on one particularly disastrous night, effectively forced innocent bystander Archer to kill a private investigator in self-defense). The PCs also first encountered the Alliance commander Sekhmet on Shadow, who took an interest in both the fungus and the PCs' activities.

Ultimately, Gore decided to cut ties with the crew after giving them one last job: transporting him to the ocean world of Newhall so he could serve his soon-to-be-ex-wife with divorce papers. Gore's wife was stationed on an undersea research facility, and the crew got trapped there when the "Newhall leviathan" (a sea monster thought to be a myth) started attacking the base. The crew realized, to their horror, that they had somehow transmitted the fungus from Shadow to Newhall when they landed, and that Sekhmet's Alliance cruiser Blue Nile was on the way to decontaminate the region from orbit - with them inside it if they couldn't escape. Also trapped on the base was a Browncoat enemy from Birgitta's past, seeking revenge on her for an atrocity she had perpetuated on his crew; he was mimicking the Cat's kills to try to get her arrested so she would finally face justice. Birgitta killed both her Browncoat enemy and Gore, who snapped in the midst of the chaos and put many innocent people at risk.

Black Cat ran an Alliance blockade to escape Newhall just in time. Seeing how Birgitta had risked her life to save the scientists and how she chose the crew over Gore when it came down to it, Nicolas allowed her to remain with the crew and continue to seek redemption.

Season Three: Quinn
Coming soon

Season Four: Nicolas
Coming soon

Season Five: Siqin
Coming soon

Season Six: Osiris
Coming soon

Season Seven: Luke (and plot wrap-up)
Coming soon

Memorable Moments
Coming soon

Quotes
See Black Cat Blues/Quotes