Singing Senator Patreus' Beard - Out of Character Note
19 Jun 2018Jellicoe
The Coma Campaign was a genuinely epic saga fought out between the Newton's Fusiliers player minor faction and its allies against the Denton Patreus Power Play groups supported by the wider Imperial PP community. It was conducted via BGS, Power Play, forums, Reddit etc, involving PvP, PvE and a lot of propaganda as both sides tried to open up new fronts to outflank the other, the planning (and no doubt counter planning) was almost as enjoyable as attempting to put those plans into practice in the game. Coma was a superb example of the kind of emergent game play and player driven (in this case player created) content that Elite can provide when people actually get on with playing the game rather than complaining about lack of content or 'the grind.'The problem when it came to writing this up as fiction is that while taking out system authority ships, Power Play undermining, BGS mission running etc all the while being hunted by hostile player wings is certainly riveting game play, it risks the story turning into nothing but a series of space battles which, unfortunately, I'm not nearly a good enough writer to keep interesting though I did try to at least touch on all aspects of the campaign. With this in mind I tried other things, the personal sub plot involving Admiral Sleer and Nedm Rickard which had two purposes, one was just to tie up the loose end from last years Delkar story (which I couldn't resist once I saw how close Delkar is to Coma), but the other was to explore the often uncomfortable looking relationship between BGS and Power Play, especially in a system like Coma which is 'ruled' by a Federation minor faction but 'controlled' by an Imperial power, how would that work? Who would he system's rulers look to for support? Who would answer? How would a Federation system come to be in the pocket of an Imperial senator? I've tried to offer my own interpretations and hopefully anyone reading won't find them too jarring.
The Coma story did not end with the events described here, but it does now appear to have been resolved and the story of how that happened would be well worth telling, but that is a task for someone else.