Reciprocity

Aldo: Note this is based off my vague recollection. It's probably not much interest to people, but it is a useful example of how NOT to plan a campaign

A campaign which underwent several iterations of storyline before being abandoned. All were set at least initially in Ikeya (being one of those fringe systems handy for setting isolated events, and also as somewhere the Shivans emerged in FS1).

• First iteration
  • Based around the rough notion of a former NTF/NTF-allied admiral using his private military contractor to illegally create Human-Shivan hybrids. The title came from the concept of sending in a small, elite SOC taskforce in to exact retribution and end the nascent rebellion.
  • Aldo: really, I should have just stuck with this one and completed it.

• Second iteration
  • This was the more developed and fatally overambitious campaign. The notion of a rogue, rebellious company was kept, but rather than developing Human-Shivan hybrids it was building a Knossos to Shivan space (i.e. Capella) to bring back Bosch. This, for some vaguely inexplicable reason, ended up leading to a 3 way war with a new, ultra-belligerent, species called the Nightmares warring with the Shivans in GTVA space. The SOC group was expanded into, effectively, a fleet sized force.
  • The campaign had a two way split at the 2/3 point - either the player would travel through the Knossos and have to escape through a firey Capellan nebula (retrospectively, this had shades of a Battlestar Galactica episode, The Passage) and destroy a Shivan node on that side, or they would fight a battle to contain the Shivans in Ikeya and latterly in Vega.
  • The role of the Nightmares - the new race - was pretty ambiguous, although it was intended to imply that the Shivans destroyed Capella in order to avoid being distracted by a minor flanking war with the GTVA. They then had to reestablished the node as an escape route when their war with the Nightmare went south.
  • Aldo: I'd also like to mention the steady escalation of this campaign is probably a testament to over-ambition. To be fair, the 2nd iteration reached a point where the key stuff - namely models, backgrounds and weapon tables - was complete but there was simply a lack of people to make missions. Plus, it's worth noting the original name gets more and more meaningless as the story changes.

• Third iteration
  • I can't remember too much around this version, but it changed the Nightmares into a primary antagonist, which had ships 'hibernating' in GTVA space for many years. Aside from being an excuse to try and rip-off the Mars Shadowcrab scene from Babylon 5, it was intended to explain the Shivans wanting to destroy Vasuda et al as being in order to kill embryonic Nightmare craft.
  • The general synopsis would be the GTVA being so battered by the Nightmare war that they deliberately re-opened connections to Shivan space (again, Capella) in the hope of the two races destroying each other.
  • The end - a rather convenient deus ex machina (literally!) involved a truly ancient alien (another race, named the Progenitors until Homeworld 2 used it) device which was capable of banishing both Nightmares and Shivans to their own pocket universe.
  • Aldo: my memory is particularly fuzzy on this as quite a few plot devices were latterly recycled into the also-abandoned Lost Souls campaign (in itself a sort of reimagining of the latter versions of Reciprocity)

List of Races from Reciprocity

• Nightmares

List of Ships from Reciprocity

(incomplete)

• GTF Claymore (old)
• GTF Claymore (revised)
• GTF Claymore Mk 2
• GTB Gagana
• GTB Peregrine
• GTFr Vela & Vela Cargo
• SOC Orc
• SOD Segomo
• GVC Mafdet
• NF Unknown
• NB Unknown
• NCv Unknown
• ND Unknown