North Star 2022

After two years of waiting, I finally got to go to North Star!

The pandemic is very much still happening, despite the government's best efforts to pretend otherwise, so Friday began with a covid test and the hope that all the other attendees would see things the same way and test too.  Then sorting out transport.  Fortunately I was going to be driving, so didn't have to worry about the rail strikes.  Unfortunately I'd found some chips in my windscreen a few days earlier, and didn't want to risk cracking the screen further on a long drive, so borrowed my husband's car for the weekend.

All of which was minor stuff compared to the organisation of the event itself, as the organiser had to do a lot of slot wrangling to deal with the effects of covid and rail strikes on game allocations.  But by some miracle, by Friday we had a timetable.

I spent a pleasant evening in the bar trying to figure out who everyone was.  When I say that gamers tend to have a certain look, people generally know what I mean, and when that's combined with face blindness, it can be really very difficult for me to recognise people.  However, we agreed that the gamer look can be very useful when you're trying to find an event in a new venue, as often all you have to do is follow the trail of nerds.

Game 1: Alien

With face-to-face gaming still being a bit new, I decided to pitch my Alien game in the first slot.  It's the game I ran for the first time at North Star 2021, but I figured there'd be plenty of people who hadn't played it yet.  Then I had to figure out how to run Alien without the aid of Roll20.

The official fillable PDF character sheets didn't really give enough room to fill in talents, or to include changing personal agendas, and the other sheets I'd downloaded also had issues.  In the end I concluded that the only option was to create my own.  Which also meant I could add a little creativity.

These turned out well.

In addition I'd brought sets of black and yellow dice for people to use, and a box of tiny skulls in different colours for tracking health and stress.  The sheets does have boxes for marking those off, but skulls were generally agreed to be more fun.  Finally I had the Alien card deck including initiative cards, meaning that for once initiative was not a horrible struggle to sort out in Roll20.

We were down a player thanks to covid, so the Pathologist had to take a back seat on this one, and I had one of the players roll the dice on the occasions when their skills were needed.  The four remaining players embraced their characters with great enthusiasm, and off we went.

The scenario was my own CSI: Weyland Yutani, which starts out with the team being called in to investigate a murder in a mining colony.  There are of course a lot more secrets to uncover than simply who the killer is, plus some horrible monsters to deal with.  Said monsters were rather more successful than usual, meaning that we made extensive use of the critical table, but for once didn't end up in a massive panic spiral.  Not that that was much comfort to the character who took the groin attack critical.

It was a bit of a push to fit this into a three hour slot rather than the usual four that I take for this adventure, even with things working faster in person.  That meant there was a little less thorough investigation of the murder - but that's not really what the adventure is all about, and all the important parts went ahead as usual.

While it was a little extra work compared to just resetting my Roll20 table, running Alien in person was really good fun, and I'll definitely be repeating this one.

Game 2: Tales From The Loop

Having just been watching Stranger Things series 4, I was entirely ready to be a kid in the 80s going to visit a haunted house.

Free League's organised play program, the League of Free Agents, provides scenarios for its members to run at conventions and this was one of them.  For characters we used the pre-gens from the Starter Set adventure, although I think we could have made original characters and still had it work out.  I picked the Jock, not having played this archetype before, and got Fredrik, a hockey player dating the Popular Kid, whose life was nowhere near as simple and perfect as it appeared from the outside.

Having shared our characters fears, and the stories we'd heard about what happened in the haunted house, we soon learned that our plans to spend Halloween there were scuppered by the disappearance of the friends who invited us and a rapidly imposed curfew.  There was nothing for it but to get on our bikes and go and find out what had happened.

Tales From The Loop is a delightful game, and this was a lovely scenario, full of things to investigate and some fun twists along the way.  The GM was one of the players from my Alien game, and I also had the opportunity to play with two people that I've known for some time but have never had the chance to sit at a table with before, and two people who were completely new to me (one of whom was at her first ever convention).

Game 3: Scum and Villainy

I'd initially planned to only run one game, as I did at Revelation and previous North Stars, but when the call went out for more games I decided I could step up.  Prior to the pandemic one of my convention standard games was a Firefly scenario using Scum and Villainy, which certainly fitted the sci-fi theme.  While I hadn't touched it over in two years, I figured I did at least have experience of running this one in person.

While I used to offer six spaces in this game, I decided to only offer four this time, to make things a little easier for me, but when rail strikes meant we were down a GM for the evening slot, I decided to offer a fifth space in the hope that that would make game assignments easier.  The five ended up including two more of the players from the morning Alien game.

While Scum and Villainy can be completely improvised and player-led, this particular scenario is a little more structured.  While the old Serenity RPG isn't particularly great system-wise, it does have useful setting material, including a complete deck plan for a Firefly class transport.  The scenario involves a drifting ship, with various items that the players can find.  What they do with said items, however, is completely up to them.  Some crews like to investigate thoroughly and figure out exactly what happened on this ship to leave it drifting in orbit.  Others, like this lot, decide to chuck the evidence out of the airlock and be on their way, only discovering later on that one thing they spaced might have been worth hanging onto after all.

This was not the easiest game to get back into after the pandemic hiatus, and I'm not sure this is going back into my convention standard scenarios, but it was good fun to bring it out again.  It remains my favourite game for Firefly adventures, and perhaps with more practice I'll get back into it.

Game 4: Avatar Legends

While I've not watched Avatar beyond catching the odd bit while my husband was watching, this game was pitched as more Cowboy Bebop inspired, so I figured my lack of knowledge of Avatar wouldn't be an issue.

I picked up Geb Hara, a 'Guardian' character who was a water bender with a monastic background and a mission to soothe the troubled souls on our ship.  I picked Mirabelle the fire bender as the character I was particularly devoted to protecting, as she was clearly the most likely to get herself into trouble.  My character was also a xeno, and with everything else on the sheet in mind, I decided that she resembled a giant capybara.

We set off to respond to a distress call, with Geb insisting to Mirabelle that setting things on fire was not the solution to every problem.  Once we discovered the exact events that lead to said distress call, Geb was willing to concede that on this specific occasion, setting things on fire was an entirely appropriate solution.  Although perhaps by the end of the scenario, a few too many things had been on fire...

 

The system was a PBTA game, but on the crunchy end of PBTA with a whole separate combat system.  Understandable, given that martial arts battles seem to be a part of the show, but it was a bit jarring switching between the basic moves and the combat moves, not to mention trying to figure out whether or not we were in a combat situation.  Balance also forms a whole sub-system, further complicating things.  It was fun to play, but not quite what I'd expect from a PBTA game.

Game 5: Fate Bulldogs

There was a prize draw before slot 5, in which I unexpectedly won a voucher for Patriot Games who were running a stall at the event.  I took the opportunity to buy a print copy of Blades in the Dark, and then headed to the final game of the weekend.

I'd signed up for "Zaggy Spacedust's Luxurious Private Space-Taxi" largely based on the title, and as I'd hoped, found myself as part of a team of anarchist terrorists who were also working for a big corporation as delivery drivers.  With the GM having forgotten to bring quite a lot of his stuff, including the character sheets, the session started off with us creating new characters.  With an option once again to play aliens, I decided to play an octopus pilot with a love of fast ships and bright colours, meaning she immediately took a liking to another PC, a chameleon-like alien played by my room sharer - the first time we've been in the same game in two whole conventions.

As Fate characters we all had a trouble, which for each of us was the person whose identity we'd co-opted when acquiring this ship.  My octopus was 'not a lawyer' - although by the end of the session she'd done enough lawyering with enough success that she decided she was getting the hang of it and might actually become a lawyer after all.

This was a great way to finish the weekend, with a game full of comedy moments using just enough of the Fate system to keep things interesting and unpredictable.  By the end we'd struck a decisive blow against corporate hoarding of intellectual property rights, while getting the group's frustrated punk rocker his moment of fame.

Reflections

Organising this was clearly a heroic effort with the number of last minute changes involved on top of the usual challenge of assigning everyone to a slot.  It's a testament to everyone involved how smoothly things went from my point of view as an attendee.

It was great to be there at last.  North Star was about twice the size of Revelation, at around 45 people, but still felt very small and friendly.  I got to reunite with people I met at Revelation while finally getting to meet people I've met at previous online events.  I'm full of enthusiasm for Furnace now.