The Christmas Game That Never Was

I'm still hoping to run this year's Christmas Game, albeit not this year and not at Christmas. By which point I suppose it will just be "a game", but I digress. Anyway, that being the case, I'm not going to share many great spoilers here. However, there are a few things I can talk about.

Over the last several years, the Christmas Games have occurred in a version of the 'Verse set a long time after the events of "Serenity" - in fact, I've been advancing the timeline roughly in sync with the passage of real time. So, "Memoirs of a Companion" took place ten years after the film (in 2528 AD), and "Book, and His Cover" will be set in 2529. Though that's largely irrelevant - for the most part the characters are assumed to exist in a sort of comic-book stasis. The only major factor in that decision is that it means Wash and Book are dead and gone, and Zoe now has a daughter.

Anyway, "Book, and His Cover" was going to find our heroes right back where they started - on the raggedy edge, with Serenity falling apart, and picking up passengers on Persephone after a job went south. At least the heat is off, for the time being.

Enter a young man looking to book passage, who picks Serenity seemingly at random... and who later reveals that it was anything but. He claims to be the son of the departed Shepherd Book, and has come seeking Mal Reynolds looking for some answers.

And that's more or less as far as I'd got. Obviously, Shepherd Book was one of the more mysterious characters on the show, and I was inclined to dig into that a bit, especially in light of some of the material in "A Shepherd's Tale". But I hadn't quite decided just what Book's "son's" agenda was going to be...

(The key, I think, was probably to mix in just enough truth with the various lies that get told in amongst it all. In particular, I was strongly leaning towards the young man actually being Book's son, rather than that being the very first lie. Plus, I was going to suggest that that character be one of the PCs for the session, which in turn suggests he shouldn't be entirely in control of all the agendas...)