COLONIAL CULTURE
Colonial Life
Fashion, politics, culture and art are all similar to our modern American world, and it is that modern world which serves as a baseline for our portrayal of the Twelve Colonies on Battlestar Odysseys.
The presence of interplanetary travel - while significant - hasn't importantly affected the fabric of that life; the individual colonies function as analogues to states or nations in the real world, with the same sense of enduring cross-national elements and of particulars that inform life on one colony or another.
The lack of integrated computers into modern Colonial life for much of the last forty years is also a factor. In terms of computers and society, the Twelve Colonies are much closer to the late 1980s or the early 1990s than they are the early years of the 21st century. This also impacts communication - while modern Colonial society is largely interconnected, we still don't have the ability to transmit voice or video between planets in real time, and the telecommunications revolution is just now hitting society on individual colonies - and some of those colonies, like Sagittaron or Gemenon, are slower to adopt new technologies than others.
The broad consequence of this for Colonial society is that people are a little more provincial, a little less cosmopolitan, and that the difference between the city mouse and the country mouse - between someone from a metropolis like Caprica City and one of the farm hamlets that dot the Colonies - is larger.
A unified Twelve Colonies has been around for a much shorter time than the United States or many other liberal democracies; the Articles of Colonization were signed 52 years ago, at the start of the Cylon War, and the forty years since Armistice have had their share of insurrections, rebellions, and social discontent. In important ways, Colonial unity is still a young thing, and only the most recent generation of adults have really grown up in a unified Twelve Colonies.
Government
The Twelve Colonies is a federal republic with an elected President, his executive branch, a bicameral legislature and a judiciary, all in the general style of modern American democracy. The President of the Twelve Colonies is elected by a general vote among the population for a four-year term on a joint ticket with the Vice President, and after elections constitutes a cabinet of ministers and secretaries for the day-to-day running of the government.
The legislature of the Twelve Colonies is bicameral; the upper house, called the Quorum of Twelve, consists of one representative from each of the twelve colonies and has had earlier incarnations that predate the Articles of Colonization. The lower house is the People's Council, and seats on the council are apportioned by population amongst the colonies.
The Colonies have a separate judiciary with a Colonial Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and local courts on both the federal and colonial levels.
Additionally, there is an unelected advisory council of clergy which has a ceremonial function but no official power.
On a more local level, each Colony has an elected Assembly (a descendant of the historical assemblies of the Twelve Tribes) and a Colonial Governor. Each colony is further divided into a number of provinces governed by provincial quorums and municipalities with city councils and mayors.
Often, the mayors of the largest cities are largely autonomous, free of intervention on the part of the local provincial quorum or even the Colony's governor. The Mayor of Caprica City, for instance, is sometimes said to have the second-biggest bully pulpit after the President.
Politics
Political thought in the Twelve Colonies divides largely along two axes - first, along the question of federal power vs. colonial autonomy, and second, about the role of religion and social morals. Unlike in the United States, parties tend to pick a stance on one of these questions rather than on all of them, which - combined with the larger incidence of regionalism - lead to a multi-party system.
In general, politics in the Twelve Colonies are less polite and more heated than in its modern analogues; many smaller parties (particularly in the Separatist and Labor camps) are reputed to have ties to paramilitary groups, and localized armed rebellions are not entirely uncommon, though there has never really been a serious threat of civil war. Partly as a consequence of this - and partly as a consequence of the military threat which lead to the birth of the colonies - civil rights in the Twelve Colonies are much less advanced, with the government and military having broad-sweeping powers of search, seizure and detention in the name of Colonial security. This, in turn, fuels opposition groups who often characterize the use of those powers as having a pro-Caprican bias.
Secularism
The modern Twelve Colonies is largely a secular society. While religion is still enshrined by the state, many people - particularly Capricans and the urban, educated class - tend to be lax or nonexistent in their religious practices, and if they worship at all it is unlikely that they profess a belief in the gods. Myths are considered to be just that, and the prophecies and practices of the Sacred Scrolls are popularly regarded as the products of a more primitive time trying to explain the complexity of the universe.
COLONIAL RELIGION
Overview
Religion in the Twelve Colonies is state-supported, less diverse, and also polytheistic. In general, religious life and secular life are more intertwined, and there is a more natural continuum of religious practice between the most religious and the least religious. In form and format, the religion of the Twelve Colonies is polytheistic and similar to that of the ancient Greeks or Romans. The chief god of the Colonial pantheon is Zeus; he and the other twelve Olympians are broadly the most important deities, though there myriad other myths, legends and lesser spirits.
Religious Practice
As a matter of daily life, an individual's relationship with the gods is often personal - worship can be an individual practice, with personal idols or offerings, and temples tend to enshrine a particular holy site rather than just serve as a house or worship, though they also serve as a place for people to gather and hear the sacred scrolls read or to participate in mystery cults and devotions.
Religious practice in general is focused around descendant traditions of sacrifice. Many religious individuals keep a small shrine (or merely carry a set of idols to their favorite gods) and then light candles in a sort of symbolic representation of a burnt offering. Similarly, the devout may set aside a portion of a meal or spill a little drink on the ground (a libation) to honor the gods. Finally, many of the devout carry a set of prayer beads (a rosary or mala) which they use to recite short, ritual prayers similar in form to the mantras of modern Eastern religions.
Public religious displays are far less common in the modern Colonies than they once were. Originally, large public sacrifices opened festivals and great undertakings, but since the outlawing of animal sacrifice this practice has all-but-disappeared save in some agricultural communities during harvest festivals.
Festivals - celebrating some myth, god or natural event - are now the principal public religious event. Once, they served as an important cultural pressure valve, providing the people of the Colonies with a chance for some time off, but now their importance has diminished in the face of ample leisure-time and plenty of competition for public attention.
The Colonials also have a historical tradition of mystery cults, where individuals are initiated into the secrets of a god's private cult. Mostly, these mystery religions have died out, though every few decades there is a resurgence in popularity and there has always been a continuous tradition in religious communities.
Finally, a relatively new religious observance is reading or study of the Sacred Scrolls, where under the guidance of a priest religious members of the a community come together to study religious texts, discuss the importance to modern life and most of all affirm their devotion in the face of an increasingly secular society. Such meetings often include group prayer or blessings, inherited from the mystery cult tradition.
Sacred Scrolls
The body of myths about the Gods is largely oral, or has been passed down in non-canonical texts; the religious text of the Colonial religion - the Sacred Scrolls - is instead importantly separate from the mythography of the gods, though the gods and the myths that surround them are referenced regularly the Scrolls. Instead, the Sacred Scrolls represent a history of mankind on Kobol, told largely through prophecy and stylized narrative. They also contain broader creation myths and a selection of songs and devotions as a sort of psalter or book of common prayer.
Priests & Oracles
Clergy in the Twelve Colonies come - officially - in two sorts, priests and oracles, each of whom are trained differently and fulfill different ceremonial functions. In actual fact, the distinctions between the two categories have largely blurred due to the increasing secularism of society and the decreasing importance of public ritual. In both cases, clergy often has different jobs in addition to their religious role. Priests often 'double-hat' as civic leaders - part of a long tradition where the leaders of the Twelve Tribes were also their chief priests - and oracles regularly manage shrines or holy places or go into business as pharmacists or teachers.
Originally, priests were the people who presided over offerings, festivals and ceremonies; they were in charge of administering religious rites, of guiding prayers and sending messages to the gods, and their training tended to involve a great deal of study of the Sacred Scrolls as well as learning the particulars of various rites and rituals. Priests also administer oaths and preside over funerals - both situations where the gods are supposed to witness an event.
By contrast, oracles were those clergy who interpreted omens, received prophetic dreams and 'received' messages from the gods where the priests 'sent' messages to them. It was among the oracles that the practice of taking chamalla for visions began, and they still are often asked to give blessings to newborns, new enterprises, and people in seeking guidance in general. The training of an oracle focuses less on learning ritual and the Sacred Scrolls and focuses more on meditation and the interpretation of dreams and omens.
Both oracles and priests in the modern Twelve Colonies tend to be extensively trained in counseling and religious therapy; pro-religion laws allow individuals to request religious rather than psychological counseling, and priests of all sorts (the word is used in the modern parlance to refer to all clergy) are often sought out in an advisory capacity, up to and including the religious council which advises the government.
COLONIAL GOVERNMENT
Executive
Headed by the President of the Colonies, the Executive Branch of the Colonial Government is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Colonies, often with much broader power than most liberal democratic governments due to its wartime conception. The President is Commander-in-Chief of the Colonial Military, and the political cabinet (composed of ministers and more junior secretaries) runs the day-to-day operations of the Colonies, overseeing the military, matters of trade and the economy, national education and other such issues.
In case of the President's death, statute provides for an extended line of succession that runs through the Vice President and then down on through the Cabinet. Notably, the Quorum and Council do not figure in this line of succession, though in the case of an absence in the Vice Presidency the Quorum can choose a replacement.
Legislative
While the legislature of the Twelve Colonies is bicameral, it is the upper house - the Quorum of Twelve - which dominates legislative politics. In many ways, this is due to the Quorum's pedigree; the Quorum of Twelve is in important ways the direct descendant of the council of the Twelve Tribes that lead the mythical Exodus from Kobol, and legends of the days before the Colonial Dark Ages suggests that the Colonies were loosely associated under a Quorum. Once intercolonial travel was rediscovered - and long before the colonies were officially unified - the Quorum began to meet again sporadically, serving as a forum for the representatives of each of the Colonies to debate matters of import in a fashion similar to the real-world United Nations.
At the start of the first Cylon War, when a special convention was held to write the Articles of Colonization, the Quorum was created as it is today, as the upper house of the Colonial legislature. Like the People's Council, the Quorum is often a source of opposition to the President, as the Presidency is traditionally held by the pan-Colonial Federalist Party whereas coalitions of regional parties tend to dominate the Quorum.
COLONIAL POLITICS
Federalists
The only truly 'Colonial' party is the Federalist Party, which has with only a few exceptions held the Presidency for most of the last fifty-two years. The present President of the Colonies, Richard Adar, is a Federalist, and he has pursued a policy of increasing the power of the Colonial Government, decreasing economic controls (a move that tends to squarely target labor groups) and liberalizing social policy across the Twelve Colonies. The Federalist Party is also staunchly in favor of social and civil liberties, both attitudes inherited from their core constituency of Capricans the urban educated classes colonies-wide. Their record has been quite progressive on social issues, earning them emnity from the religious, but has spottier on the question of civil liberties.
Partly due to a concerted policy of suppressing opposition, there is no pan-Colonial party to oppose the Federalists; instead, there is an array of regional or issue-based parties which group largely under three banners.
Separatists
There are a host of Separatists or Anti-Federalists, who argue that the expansive powers given to the Colonial Government under the Articles represent a wartime necessity that is no longer required. The most radical of them (iconically represented by the Sagittaron separatists) believe that the Colonial Government should be purely voluntary, and that those Colonies which which to leave the federation should be allowed to. Attempts at secession have been put down sometimes brutally, most notably on Sagittaron in the two decades following the end of the Cylon War.
Religious Forces
The colonial party of Gemenon and a series of religious parties on every colony believe strongly that the social fabric of the Twelve Colonies is disintegrating and that the general populace is turning away from the Sacred Scrolls. They consistently advocate for more social controls in government, and while the coalition itself tends to be pan-Colonial as an article of evangelism many of its core constituency also holds anti-Federalist views. More than anything, the religious parties tend to 'swing' elections, as they are a potential ally for any bloc.
Labor Parties
Finally, there is a growing series of regional Labor Parties who are opposed to the pro-corporate positions often held by the dominant Federalists, who Labor accuses of being anti-worker and supporting the interests of multicolonial corporations. Of all the major political forces, the labor elements are the closest to the fringe, as the state of organized labor in the colonies is sometimes uncertain. Labor has a desire to form a pan-Colonial party, but so far has been stymied by government policies that restrict political activism by labor unions on the federal level - laws they allege as draconian tactics by the Federalists to squelch the Labor voice.
COLONIAL SECULARISM
While the fundamental facts of Colonial history are agreed upon both by the secular and religious communities - mankind settled the Twelve Colonies from somewhere else, experienced a great dark age, and then slowly clawed its way back to progress - the mainstream view is not that humanity came to the Colonies from a paradise inhabited by gods and men.
While there are several competing theories, the most popular one is that the original colonists fled the destruction of the human homeworld - remembered in myths as 'the Blaze' - and settled on the Colonies, which had been in the process of being prepared for human expansion. The homeworld's destruction is typically assumed because there has been no contact since the founding of the Colonies (unless one believes a number of conspiracy theorists) and because the ensuing dark age suggests that mankind was not in fact prepared for its exodus.
The religion of the Twelve Colonies is thought to be the efforts of the early colonists - having lost the technological culture they fled from - at explaining their flight and their origins, reconstructed from the oral history of the shattered original colonists, most of whom were suffering from severe shock at the transposition and the destruction of everything they knew. These myths coalesced over the course of the first few hundred years after colonization into the Sacred Scrolls, whose present form was finalized on Gemenon about seven hundred years after the founding, during the last gasp of interplanetary travel prior to the Colonial Dark Age.
Archaeological evidence seems to support this; the oldest extant copy of the Scrolls is from Gemenon and is from about the time scholars believe the canonical Scrolls were compiled, and references and fragments from other colonies about the same time suggest significant deviation from the Sacred Scrolls canon.
During the Colonial Dark Age, the texts of the Sacred Scrolls began to drift apart due to lost contact, but the Gemenon tradition (which had the least drift from the Gemenon Codex, thought to be the ur-Scrolls) was adopted Colonies-wide once contact was reestablished. In the popular view, then, the Colonial religion is largely a Gemenese export that incorporated the local folkways of each of the Twelve Colonies, all of which were developed as a sort of cargo cult following Colonization to explain the monumental, culture-wide trauma which had just occurred.
MILITARY LIFE OVERVIEW
Marines
The Colonial Marines are soldiers tasked with ship security, boarding and anti-boarding actions, and ground missions carried out at the direction of the Colonial Fleet. Unlike today's real world U.S. Marine Corps, the Colonial Marines are far more beholden to the Navy for all forms of transport, and ultimately for orders. Battlestars typically carry anywhere between a platoon and a company of Marines, with the commanding Lieutenant or Captain answering directly to Fleet for all matters. While the Marines often receive a high amount of publicity, the Fleet keeps their egos in check by reminding them who's in charge.
Deck Crew
The crew aboard Colonial Fleet vessels generally splits up their schedules into three groups that are on duty for four hours during every twelve hour cycle. Crew members often trade watches to allow for the scheduling of special duties and leave, but the watch commanders (CO, XO, and senior Officer of the Watch generally) must be informed (and approve) of these changes ahead of time (usually twenty-four hours). The watches are split up as follows:
- First watch - 2000 to 0000
- Middle watch - 0000 to 0400
- Morning watch - 0400 to 0800
- Forenoon watch - 0800 to 1200
- Afternoon watch - 1200 to 1600
- Dog watch - 1600 to 2000
The three shifts are generally given idiosyncratic names depending on the ship, but can include ancient nautical terms such as: Foremast, Mainmast, and Mizzenmast, or colors such as Blue, Green, and Red.
Games & Recreation
While the Twelve Colonies has a vast number of games and sports played, two loom most significantly in its culture - the card game Full Colors (named after its best hand) and the ubiquitous sport of Pyramid.
Full Colors is played with hexagonal cards in a fashion similar to modern poker; players wager and bluff, with the highest hand being 'Full Colors' and another good hand being 'Three on a Run', perhaps similar to a poker straight.
Pyramid is a basketball/rugby style game played in a triangular area, with the goal in one corner and rebounding barricades in the other two corners and along the straight sides. Marked-off areas in each corner and at the center of the court allow a ball held against the ground to be uncontested, but in other situations the game is full-contact. The goal is curved, making shots from the corners much more difficult, and consequently much of the game consists of battling over the center area in front of the goal in order to take the best shot.
Predjudice
While sexism exists, women are allowed in combat roles in the navy, sometimes rising even to the rank of admiral. Sexism still remains in military units, but the Colonial Navy appears to be doing very well on integration. Racism in the Twelve Colonies is based largely along tribal lines.
MARINE LIFE
Marine life aboard a Battlestar is a bit different from the rest of the crew. Regardless of what shifts are on or off duty, those off-duty are expected to attend several daily functions. Besides watches during which the Marines typically act as guards, scattered about the ship and especially in CIC and at Weapon Lockers, the Marines that are capable are expected to attend Morning Formation at 0700 during which announcements and daily orders are passed along and heads are counted. There is also the showing of the Colonial Colors. At 0715 is Sick Call, during which those that have taken ill report to Sick Bay. If a marine does not attend Morning Formation, Sick Call, or is not currently on watch, they will likely be punished for their absence.
Once during every twenty-four hours, Marines that are not in the infirmary are expected to do at least an hour of PT, Physical Training. Usually this is done by lifting weights, or running the halls, and is recorded with a simple sign-in sheet. Occasionally the Marine leadership will organize communal PT in the form of a Pyramid tournament, or some other group game. This type of PT is encouraged as it is thought to develop esprit de corps. A Marine is also expected to spend an hour in some form of additional training once every day. This can take the form of visiting a firing range or attending classes that review tactics, survival practices, or even such things as unarmed combat. If the Marine leadership has not prepared a class, they may show a training video, though this is discouraged as a regular practice.
At least once a week, there is a room inspection and a rifle inspection. Both are expected to be immaculately clean and maintained.
At 2000 every day, all marines that are not on watch or in the infirmary are expected to attend Retreat Formation, during which the Colonial Colors are once more shown and furled. Announcements and orders may be passed along, and any upcoming events, special duties, and missions are usually announced at this time.