North Star 2026

Another exciting journey to North Star! Unfortunately neither my husband nor my usual roommate could make it this time, but that did mean I was going to get a hotel room all to myself.

I kicked things off with the usual pre-convention outing, this time to Envers, the local Turkish restaurant. We had some first-timers joining us, who asked about the menu, and what we recommended. As it turned out, basically everything, unless you don't like aubergines, in which case everything that isn't made of aubergines. By cunningly not having a starter, I had enough room left at the end for some baklava and Turkish tea.

I'd planned on an early night, but between the disco in the pub and the people in the next room who were still talking loudly even after the music had shut down, that didn't happen. Nevertheless I was up and about in time for breakfast and made it upstairs just in time to catch the opening speech. I put out the items I'd brought for the bring and buy, and headed for my first game.

Game 1: Those Dark Places

A rules-light game that clearly takes some inspiration from the Alien movies. Given that we only had three players, the GM gave us two characters each. I had a ranged combat and piloting specialist, Blackbird, and a leader/medic, Ibis. We sat down for a session of industrial space horror as our crew of salvage operators made our way into a mysteriously silent space station. At least, that was the idea. The dice disagreed. The dice had other ideas. And those ideas were Red Dwarf.

My favourite part was the first combat with the loader with attached skeleton. By the time we got to Ibis's turn, all that had happened is that some of the others had thrown themselves at its feet, and Blackbird had shown it that her gun was unloaded. So rather than attempt to use her terrible combat skills, Ibis instead assured it that we were not in any way hostile and told it to stand down, which under the circumstances seemed pretty plausible.

Other dice ideas included an absolute determination to kill one particular characters, Tom, with the vast majority of attacks going his way. Tom was the only one who didn't make it back alive, and none of us were at all surprised.

Despite the dice's best efforts to turn things to slapstick, I overall thought this was a pretty great game. I don't like it as much as the Alien RPG, but if Alien isn't quite to your tastes I would absolutely check this one out.

Game 2: Alien

Straight back into space horror for the afternoon, and a scenario based on William Gibson's unfilmed Alien 3 script. I picked up Yelena, a roughneck working for the U.P.P. and off we went to dock with a space station, only to find something very strange had happened there. And then the xenomorphs showed up.

The secret agendas aspect of Alien was working very well here. Yelena had her own plans, and I had a lovely time acting on them. The other players were all clearly up to something, and by the end we had effectively split into factions, which could loosely be termed the ones trying to abandon the others to get killed by xenomorphs, and the ones trying to avoid that happening. We had some dramatic near death experiences, really leaning into the cinematic aspect of the game where it looked like one character was dead but then came back unexpectedly as Yelena was on the point of death, causing her to shout out some vital information just in case she didn't make it.

Most of my time playing Alien has been from the other side of the table. It was an absolute delight to get to play it myself, especially with such a great group of players.

Game 3: Darkness of the Demimonde

Victorian pulp horror might not be the obvious thing to run at a sci-fi themed convention, but when you look at the gothic and adventure novels that provide inspiration for this game, there's plenty of sci-fi to be found in the works of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Accordingly I picked out the most sciencey of the adventures I've written for this game and pitched them both.

I started with Panic at the Palace (title subject to revision), in which our supernatural detective agency set out to solve the mystery of why a previously respectable butcher was selling tainted meat, and more lucratively, what had happened to Mrs Winfield's prize Pomeranian. I handed out the usual set of pregens, and the players did a brilliant job as the detective, alienist, werewolf and psychic.

Normally I like to have a trial run of a scenario before running it at a convention, and this one should have been played by my regular online DotD group, but for various reasons we only got halfway through it. Meaning I didn't really know how the second half was going to go. It ended up being a bit quicker than I intended, but given that it was the evening game and some of us were a bit tired, that wasn't really all that bad. And if I trim it down a little more, it'll work in the 2 hour taster session at Owlbear and Wizard's Staff. So that was all useful, and gave me good pointers for the final version.

I thought the early finish would let me have an early night, but once again I was kept awake by the disco (a wedding this time) followed by loud people in the courtyard outside my room.

Game 4: The Code of the Spacelanes

This was a Star Trek game, where after a quick prologue where we played TOS characters to get used to the rules, we created our own characters: Starfleet Academy cadets.

It's times like this I realise I just don't have the comprehensive Trek knowledge of some of my fellow nerds. We were told we could play aliens from TOS, but with my original Trek being TNG and favourite Trek being Lower Decks, I didn't have much grasp of what that included. But the GM was happy for me to play an Orion, and K'Reen being a disappointment to her species due to being somewhat defective in the Orion wiles department gave me a good reason for her being the first Orion Starfleet engineer cadet rather than staying at home.

One part of Code games that I always enjoy, even though I struggle to think of something to write every time, is where we all write down a plot point on an index card, which are then shuffled and handed out. I put in 'you are being blackmailed by a Ferengi', a bit of a stretch given that I don't think Ferengis showed up until a later show, but we could just read that as a mysterious unknown alien. In return I got 'you have smuggled an alien pet on board and it's escaped', meaning I spent some of the adventure serruptitiously dropping pet treats on the floor until I got my tribble back. And a few more tribbles, of course.

The downside of these cards is that they can occasionally derail things a bit, with one player identifying our academy instructor as a secret Klingon spy and tackling him to the floor, but ultimately there was no way our mentor was going to be around much past the first scene so that was OK.

While generally I'm happy with theatre of the mind for everything except games that actually need battle grids, this was a game where we actually could have used a map, just to keep track of which spaceship was inside which other spaceship, and who was where at any given time. One of the other players ended up sketching it out on a spare index card, which did help.

While in Those Dark Places the dice were determined to make things Red Dwarf, in this one they just kept on pulling out doubles, which resulted in people's special talents activating remarkably often. Which meant in addition to regular engineering stuff, K'Reen was able to pull off a number of amazing pirate stunts.

Overall a fun game, despite getting a bit lost in the middle. I still prefer Star Trek Adventures as a system for Star Trek games, although I feel like for an academy game there might be a better option out there. I have no idea what it is though.

Game 5: Darkness of the Demimonde

A different scenario this time, Brides of Brixton, which I've run several times now, and which I was confident would come in at 3 hours. Which it did.

With two of the same players back again, I offered them the same characters, so the werewolf and alienist were back again. The detective was chosen again, along with the criminal and the magician. Given the events of the previous game, we concluded that the psychic had been sent to rehab.

And so off they went to discover why Mr Barnabas Sprout had seen the ghost of his dead wife outside his kitchen window. At least, once certain party members had stopped laughing about the name Barnabas Sprout. And how the poor man was in hot water.

It's not the first time that's happened, and I absolutely will be keeping that character's name.

My goal is to publish my DotD scenarios as a set of five (which means I have to write one more) and it's great fun seeing how a different group of characters takes on each challenge. 

A lovely conclusion to a lovely convention. 

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.

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.

North Star 2021

As a fan of sci-fi games, what could be better than an entire weekend of sci-fi games?

Game 1: Tales from the Loop

Four kids dealing with serious problems at home went out on Boxing Day 1984 for a snowball fight with their friends, and somehow ended up getting recruited as Time Police, helping prevent an incursion of killer robots from the future that strangely didn't look anything like the killer robots from the future in that new movie that none of us were allowed to see because we were only thirteen.

I was lucky enough to get into another game with the same GM I played with at ConTingency.  My previous choices of Bookworm and Computer Geek had already been claimed, so concluding we could probably use a character with social skills, I went for the Rocker.  A quick google told me that Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry had come out in 1984, and she was ready to use inspirational quotes from the lyrics in the cassette liner at any moment.

The 1980s is always a slightly weird era for me to game in, since I technically lived through it, but don't actually remember very much.  Fortunately the internet is there to fill in some of the details, and the GM's liberal use of handouts does the rest.

The most notable thing about this game though, is that we used Roll20 for the A/V and it actually worked!  I can no longer claim a 0% success rate.

Fair use, Link

Game 2: Alien

My own adventure, CSI:Weyland Yutani, has been a long time in the writing but I managed to push myself to get it finished (even if that did mean I was still tweaking character sheets between the morning and evening game slots.)  As the name suggests, a murder mystery, although of course it also included the kind of body horror that an Alien game calls for.

With this being the first outing for this particular adventure, I wasn't sure how it was going to go.  My three act structure was a bit off, with act 1 going on significantly longer than planned and acts 2 and 3 blending together, so possibly I need to tweak the agendas to fit with that.  The players were also reasonably lucky with their panic rolls, meaning the panic spiral never really kicked off.

That said, while I don't think it delivered quite as much horror as I'd hoped for, the mystery solving aspect seems to have landed really well.  Clues unfolded at a reasonable rate, and when the team departed, all rather surprisingly alive, they'd got the answers they were looking for.

I put some extra work into the Roll20 implementation for this adventure, using a base map I made on Dungeon Scrawl and implementing a card deck to use for initiative and a rollable table for the monster's attacks.  The thing I had most trouble with was the card deck, which kept telling me that I didn't have enough cards to deal to everyone despite the fact that I clearly did.  Adding people to the turn tracker was also not particularly fun, and I guess I need to figure out if there's a way to streamline that (although I did appreciate being able to add the monster in more than once to allow for its multiple attacks.)

The work in running an Alien scenario is extremely front-loaded, so now I've got the adventure and VTT set up all sorted out, it should be fairly simple to run it again once I've figured out how I want to tweak it.

This is fine.

Game 3: Mothership

I'd never really thought of Mothership as a comedy game before, but thanks to the Scott Vanden Bosch artwork the GM was using, I wasn't surprised when it turned out that way.  The general incompetence of Mothership characters ended up contributing admirably to the slapstick tone.

In addition to the random output of the character generator, the GM also gave us a few character details.  My character, Magdalena, had a general disatisfaction with the way guns don't make cool noises in the vacuum of space.  So when the adventure started with us visiting a clinic to get cyberware installed, I naturally had her pick the 'Loudmouth' - an internal recording and playback device that can be used at high volume to stun people, but more importantly, could be used to record a variety of music, sound effects and so on, which could then be played back throughout the mission.  Team members hearing gunfire could feel reassured that the fight had gone OK when they heard Magdalena's victory music playing.

I don't like Mothership for space horror as much as I like Alien, because I think the randomness gets in the way sometimes, and the low skills mean people who should know what they're doing are frequently highly ineffective.  But it turns out all of that makes it pretty much spot on for space horror comedy.

pic.twitter.com/IdkzuRotS5

— Scott Vanden Bosch (@scott_v_b) May 5, 2021

Game 4: Hammerheads

My first time playing Cortex Prime.  Like SWADE, this seems to be the latest iteration of a game I previously disliked, but which has now sorted itself out and become fun.  While I don't think I completely grasped the rules, the basic concept of assembling a dice pool and choosing two results to keep wasn't too complicated, and with a skilled GM to keep us on track, things went pretty smoothly.

Smoothly mechanically, anyway.  With a game inspired by Thunderbirds, we were obviously going to be dealing with some kind of disaster, and the adventure's description involving 'Prehistoric Park' was all the motivation I needed to give it a go, as we found ourselves faced with not only hoards of angry dinosaurs but a significant number of disgruntled humans and a malfunctioning time portal, all of which we had to find a way to deal with.

By the end of the adventure we'd killed significantly more dinosaurs than my character had been planning on, discovered the many uses of an ice cream van and its contents, and even slightly expanded our knowledge of paleontology as we found ourselves pursued by what another player described as 'badger pigeons'.

How exactly Cortex Prime works for adventures whose premise is not Thunderbirds + disaster movie, I don't know, but for this it works well and makes for a very funny adventure, full of surprises.

Playing Cortex Prime for the first time with a bit of help from @AllRolledUpUK bit trays. pic.twitter.com/xK6XWAMvG8

— SavageSpiel (@SavageSpiel) May 9, 2021

Reflections

This time last year I thought we'd be playing in person again long before now.  I'm glad the Garrison conventions have managed to adapt, but I still hope that next year we really will be playing in person.  I've met so many lovely people at these events, and North Star feels a bit extra special because of that unique sci-fi focus.  I hope I feel ready when it's time to step out into that brave new world.

North Star 2020: Our Last, Best Hope

North Star 2020 was to have been my first convention at the Garrison.  I signed up, pitched two games, booked my hotel room...and you all know the rest.

And then came a glimmer of hope.  Do you want us to organise a virtual North Star?

With four slots rather than five and with not much idea how I'd go about running Scum and Villainy online, I decided to just offer one game: Alien.  I've already run the scenario at MK-RPG so I knew I could do it online and the Roll20 character sheet would help things run smoothly.

This was my first time offering a game at an event with pre-arranged game assignment.  It's nerve-wracking at on-the-day events, waiting to see if my game is going to get enough players to run.  Doing it all in advance just shunts the anxiety back a few days.  I'm new to North Star.  Most of the attendees don't know me.  Would anyone want to play my game?  And since I also had to choose the games I wanted for the rest of the weekend, would I get into the games I wanted?  Would enough other people want to play the same games as me?

Obviously it was fine.  Plenty of people wanted to play Alien, and I got my first choice in all the other slots as well.

Game 1

My first game was a Ghost in the Shell game, using the Fate Accelerated system.  I'd just been watching Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 and loving it, so was very much in the mood for some cyberpunk action, especially since the game pitch suggested that we'd be playing original characters rather than the usual Section 9 team.

Five of us had been assigned to this game, but one person wasn't well and couldn't make it, and another had technical problems not far into the game and had to drop out.  So it was with a rather reduced team of a driver, a hacker and a CSI that we set out to solve a very high-tech crime and save the Japanese economy.

The story was exactly the kind of cyberpunk weirdness I was hoping for, with murderous robots, brain hacking and international espionage.  And I also really enjoyed the Fate Accelerated system.  I've previously played The Dresden Files RPG, and thought Fate was an excellent fit for that setting, but with Fate having such a strong focus on narrative play, I found the rules excessively complicated, particularly things like the skill pyramid.  Accelerated cuts out a lot of the complexity, and really encourages the mechanic where you create advantages that you can then tag to boost your rolls.

So overall I found that once I got into the right mindset I was thinking far more about the situation and how to work with it than any specific skill, which I thought gave the whole thing a cinematic feel that really worked with the Ghost in the Shell setting.  I would love to play more of this.  Although I should probably watch the original Stand Alone Complex first.

Game 2

I wanted an evening slot for Alien because it seemed right to be playing a space horror game in darkness.  All five players made it to this one, and in we dived.  I ran my own scenario, The Toxic Jewel, with some minor tweaks from the previous outing, the chief one being that everyone had a bit more equipment to start out with so there wasn't much time spent on sorting equipment before heading planetside.

Much like my Scum and Villainy game, this scenario was written according to the principles of 'situation, not plot'.  The players are free to take pretty much any approach they want to the situation, and this group took an entirely different route through the map and very different actions along the way.  Combined with the randomness of dice rolls, this made for an all-new experience for me as well as the players.

Stress really ramped up in this game, and I had the fun of dealing with recursive panic rolls.  I think that interpreting the panic table is an important part of running a good Alien game, and I think I did a decent job this time as all the PCs ran around screaming at each other.

I can still see areas for improvement in this scenario and how I run it, but on the whole I'm happy with how this one went and I think I gave a good demonstration of how cinematic mode works even if you don't have any xenomorphs.

Game 3

10am is not a time I like to be up and about on a Sunday, but for a game convention I'll do it.  Slot 3 was Agents of Concordia, a relatively new game that I'd only heard about recently.  One of my fellow players gave the best summary of the setting I've seen: "Concordia is basically Men in Black, but run by off-Earth folks who live in Shadowrun."  Although maybe there's just a tiny bit of Stargate in there as well.

So a human, an elf, an ogre and a goblin donned our magical disguises and headed for earth to rescue an ancient Egyptian from 1960s New Orleans.  We not only rescued our man, but uncovered and thwarted a nefarious plot and brought the perpetrators to justice.

I didn't love the system the way I love Alien.  One or two interesting ideas (individual skills being independent of attributes but tied to a meta-currency called veterancy was one of them) but overall it didn't grab me.  The setting, on the other hand, I really liked.  I've been vocal about how much I hate the blend of urban fantasy and cyberpunk in Shadowrun.  This has the urban fantasy aspects of that game without using them to ruin cyberpunk, and combined with the Men In Black flavour and the novelty of the 1960s time period, it absolutely felt fresh and exciting.  While I'd be tempted to use a different system with it, it's a setting I'd definitely play again.

Game 4

Time to let someone else run me some space horror in Mothership, the Alien-minus-serial-numbers RPG.  This was the only game I played that didn't have pregen characters, but we ran them up pretty fast using the Mothership Character Generator.  Last time I played Mothership I played an android, and I wanted to try something else this time, so went with the first thing the generator threw at me: Griselda West, a scientist whose stats suggested that she'd really want to be an athlete but had been pushed into archaeology by her family.  Along with a marine and two androids she set out to inevitable doom.

I got to see a fair bit more of the top part of the Mothership panic table this time, which is a bit different to the Alien one.  Griselda's stress level rocketed once the monsters started moving around, and a simple attempt at first aid was what did for her.  I like to think I took the fall for everyone else though - everybody else made it to the end relatively unscathed.

Mothership is an excellent game, and while Alien remains my first love where space horror is concerned, I'm sure I'll be playing more of this one too.

Reflections

My first online convention.  And the way things are going, I doubt it will be my last.  The organisers did a great job of getting everything arranged, and despite a few technical hitches, things largely went pretty smoothly.  I got to game with some brand new people, plus some people I've wanted to game with for a while.  I got to introduce more people to one of my favourite games, while discovering new games.

While an online convention is never going to take the place of meeting up in person for me, I've still had a fantastic weekend of gaming and I'll eagerly look forward to the next one, whenever that might be.  We might all be living in a grim cyberpunk future, but at least we can temporarily escape into much more entertaining grim cyberpunk futures for a few hours of joy.