North Star 2023

This North Star was an unusual convention for me, as I managed to convince my husband to join me. Despite having been roleplaying for almost as long as I've been alive, and being by far the more social and outgoing of the two of us, he's always been reluctant to join me at conventions. This time was different. The prospect of a full weekend of Star Wars and Star Trek might have done the job.

Game 1: Starforged

I've been playing a solo Starforged game in the Firefly setting to help me learn how it works, and loved it, so I had to take the opportunity to play someone else's Starforged Firefly game. The premise was we were a group of bounty hunters who were chasing the Serenity crew to win a bounty placed by Niska.

We randomly rolled for character types, and got a scoundrel, a fugitive hunter, a medic and an occultist. With Firefly not being a particularly occult setting, I decided my character's ability to veil herself in shadows was something she'd learned at the same institute as River Tam.

Things went as unsmooth as things in Starforged are inclined to do, and there were some injuries when our captain got into a fight with Zoe, but we were able to take her and Wash captive and track down Malcolm Reynolds and co. Things were further complicated when we discovered that there were quite a few more members of the Reynolds gang than we were anticipated, including River, who my character remembered from her time in the institute.

Apparently previous groups have decided to join forces with Reynolds at this point. However, given how many of us River managed to stab before we could react, this didn't happen. By the time we were done, River and Wash were both dead, and the latter's corpse used to take out a minefield. We got our bounty, stayed on the right side of Niska, and the 'verse presumbly went very differently from then onwards. Perhaps it was our crew who eventually discovered the secrets of Miranda?

Starforged is my new favourite system for Firefly and this was a blast. One of those games where the only negative is that we won't get to spend any more time with those characters.

Game 2: Things From The Flood

My own scenario, Witchlight, is set in 1996 and features the somewhat reluctant members of the school film club discovering the secrets of the Vac. Being a 90s teen myself, this setting resonates for me and it was fun to take the group twenty-seven years into the past (even though a part of me is convinced it can't be more than ten years ago.) I set it in the Norfolk loop, as it's the setting that I'm most comfortable with. I've never been to Sweden or Nevada, but a significant amount of my family are Norfolk farmers.

I could still use some practice with this game, this being the second ever time I've run it, but I'm pretty happy with the adventure. One to keep in the convention rotation for a while. Things From The Flood doesn't get as much love as Tales From The Loop, but I really like what it does with the setting.

One tweak I might make for future in-person runs is to have handouts for people's iconic items - not least because one of them is a mobile phone and absolutely nobody can remember exactly what a 1996 mobile phone looks like without googling it. Some period appropriate images should help with the atmosphere as well. And for online runs, having everyone's favourite song queued up in WatchTogether should be fun.

Given how popular this was in sign-ups I'm going to bring this one to Furnace to give a few more of the Garrison crowd a shot at playing it.

Game 3: Star Trek Adventures

I'm not a big enough Star Trek nerd to be completely at ease with Star Trek Adventures character creation, but I do know it well enough to play a pre-gen character. And with the prospect of two linked games, one in TOS and one in TNG, I was keen to give it a go. My husband also got into the TNG game with me, and he's a massive Star Trek nerd, so I was confident this would be fun.

And it certainly was, with all kinds of wibbly wobbly timey wimey things happening, characters swapping tables as they got displaced in spacetime, and finally the GMs pulling out a pair of walkie talkies when we managed to establish communication between the two times. The best moment was when we insisted on the two Romulan captains in different times talking to each other and the GMs had to roleplay between themselves.

This game was supposed to happen in 2022 but got pulled when covid meant one GM had to drop out, so I'm very happy to have got in this time. Linked games have to be difficult to pull off and this one was a delight.

Game 4: Monster Of The Week

While MOTW isn't typically a sci-fi game, the preview documents for the latest kickstarter arrived not long before the convention, and included new team playbooks. One of them, Agents In Black, was clearly modelled after Men In Black. And Men In Black is all about aliens, which is definitely sci-fi so...

I'd been intending to write a scenario involving the notorious concrete cows for a long time. I thought it was going to be Liminal, but when I started thinking about what alien threats the Agents In Black could take on, the cows came to mind once more.

From the fairly large pile of playbook options, I picked five that seemed to fit the concept. With three players in the game, that gave them a variety of options without being overwhelming. Choosing names was simplified by using the naming convention from the movies where everyone has a single letter codename. So the highly experienced Agent Q, newly recruited rookie Agent X, and small but deadly alien Agent B set out to solve the mystery of the concrete cows and save Milton Keynes.

As with Witchlight, this was only my second time running not only the scenario but the game itself. Again, I think I need more practice, but overall I'm happy with how things went down. This particular scenario could use more handouts. I had a few photos ready on my tablet, and Google Maps ready to go, but a couple of printouts would have sped things along.

I'm planning to run this again at Concrete Cow, because how could I not? And given that it's a PBTA game I'll probably bring it out for Revelation as well.

Game 5: Tales From The Loop

And back to the Loop, this time in Sweden with one of the adventures from the core book. With the title 'Creatures from the Cretaceous' I was expecting dinosaurs, and we certainly got dinosaurs in this terrifying adventure. While I knew we were playing Tales From The Loop and kids can't die in this game, my character didn't know that and Elin's fear was very real.

Sunday afternoon is normally the point where I start flagging, and as usual it took quite a lot of coffee to keep me going through the early stages. Fortunately, when the dinosaurs showed up, adrenaline started to take over.

Reflections

I love having a specialist convention. The sci-fi theme really pushes me to be creative in my convention games, and provides opportunities that might not come up as often at general conventions.

This North Star felt a little calmer on the scheduling side of things with only the normal challenges of numbers, slots, etc. to deal with rather than the multiple covid related drop-outs that have been plaguing Garrison conventions for the last couple of years. The complication seems to have been at the event itself, where a combination of multiple games with only three players and a last-minute drop-out seems to have caused some headaches. I can only express my admiration for the organisers who do an amazing job dealing with all this and making sure games happen.

It was a little smaller than last year's North Star, and another ten or so people would have been nice. Perhaps Eurovision was a factor - it sounds like it made hotel bookings more difficult - and rail strikes probably didn't help either. We did seem to be missing a few 'regulars' though so perhaps this was a one-off.

My husband had a good time. We only had one game together (he couldn't play mine because I'd spent so much time bouncing ideas off him while writing them) but that just made for good conversation in the car on the way home as we told each other what we'd been doing. He enjoyed meeting the other players and it sounds like he'll be joining me again next year. I couldn't ask for a better outcome.