North Star 2023 (VI) - After Action Report

North Star, our SF TTRPG convention underway

This last weekend brought North Star, the sixth run of our SF tabletop roleplaying convention held at the Garrison, and I think the fourth held face two face (with two years lost to COVID and replaced with virtual conventions). I missed last year because we had COVID in the family and I didn't want to risk exposing people, which was disappointing after I spent quite a lot of time preparing.

Overall, the run up was smooth and the game allocation went well. A few GMs were disappointed (and I feel for them, because I've been there) but they all got games. We had reduced numbers on our peak, and lost some more in the run up. However, we got there and no game ran with less than three players and most games were full to capacity. It would be nice to get another ten people at the convention though.

I've pretty much got the method sorted now, so processing is simple. Everyone knew what game they were in coming out of the Bank Holiday weekend before. I do have to thank Dr Bob, as they were very accommodating about my need to move them from a game after I made a small error in allocation. Fortunately, their second choice was available.

I arrived to find the Garrison set up, just waiting for me to do table names, X-cards and get the allocation out. Graham had stayed over the night before to prepare. As we'd decided to have a bring and buy because we had no traders, I'd spent Friday night filling two boxes of games that I wanted to sell and happily the attendees made good in-roads into them.

Graham did his opening speech, and we were off.

I was typecast as an engineer (!)

I didn't play the game I'd planned to in Slot 1, because one of the perks of being the games organiser is making sure that games happen. I dropped out of the game that I'd been planning to play to make sure we had the minimum number of people when someone's car broke down, and found myself playing Dr Mitch's "New Eden", a Cortex Prime game set on a colony sleeper ship where we got to wake up early and deal with the issue of a megalomaniac starship Captain who had stayed up the whole voyage and then work out an accord with an AI lest we lost the last survivors of humanity in a pointless war. I really enjoyed this, and we had some fun discussions of ethics and psychohistory led by our humaniform android played by Graham. A lovely game run by a GM on form. It was the first time that I'd played Cortex Prime and I liked it. Echoes of Savage Worlds.

What Dark Heresy is this?

Slot 2 saw me in another game that I hadn't planned to play. I'd stepped into it at the end of allocation to make sure it went ahead. This was a hack of Dark Heresy, a game set in the Warhammer 40k universe, into the Genesys engine. Now, I've never really played Genesys before and the system seemed to give the Remi, our GM, a huge amount to do try interpret the runes dice symbols. I didn't really feel that the system added a huge amount, not to knock the huge amount of work that someone has done hacking an existing game to the engine. Remi did a splendid job though; it was in effect a police procedural, except that we couldn't really use our official status openly to avoid upsetting the nobility. I enjoyed the scenario, but the system didn't doing anything for me. However, I've no idea what the original game engine was like, so it could well be a billion times better!

Live long and prosper, TOS style

Slot 3 brought my first game, a duo of games set in both The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation (TNG) of Star Trek using Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures. I ran the TOS side, and Dr Mitch ran TNG. We'd originally planned to run this last year, but my absence stopped it happening. Due to a player dropping out, I ended up with three players and Dr Mitch with four. I'd put a fair bit of effort up front, getting some Eaglemoss models for the ships and also making sure the character sheets were nicely presented in some menu holders that you could dry wipe. We'd never really finished writing the scenarios, and it's fair to say that we put the finishing touches in on Wednesday the week before. It was a delight riffing ideas backwards and forwards with Paul, and I think we ended up with a fun pair of adventures. Naturally, it involved time-lines going awry, characters swapping between past and future and then a set of walkie-talkies when the characters worked out how to build a temporal communicator. The players took great delight when they got myself and Dr Mitch to role-play the two Romulan Captains talking to each other. 

My favourite bits? Debbie's young TNG Science Officer pointing out to Declan's TOS Captain that she looked like her mother. When she disappeared back to the future, the rest of the TOS crew said that Debbie's character was like a younger version of Captain Moore, who then replied "I was never that cheeky"! I also enjoyed Shachar's Lt. T'Pren stashing a vacuum frozen Romulan body in a shuttle 'for the good of science', directly against the gung-ho first officer's instructions. Overall, all the players embracing the genre and the scenario and it was fun.

I had been terrified of the game system before I ran, but overall the 2d20 engine worked smoothly, and Remi also was a star as he managed the momentum pool like a pro. I'm not a huge Trekkie (I have fond memories of TOS, but never really got into TNG or Deep Space 9 as I preferred Babylon 5 at that time) but I hope we caught the feel of the setting. Dr Mitch and I have been asked to do a sequel and some ideas have started to be exchanged.

I had time for a nice pint of Guiness with Jag, Dr Mitch and Glenn before last orders, and got a good night's sleep. I was up not long after seven in the morning and started to dive deep into Svalbard, the afternoon game I was running.

Happiness is Mandatory.

My first game on Sunday was 'The Traitors Among Us', a mash up of Among Us and Paranoia prepared with Declan. We all had the usual Alpha Complex hidden agendas from mutation and secret society, but we also had the issue that perhaps all of us were under some kind of alien influence. Which, naturally, was treasonous. A humorous PVP (or more accurately, Character vs Character) game followed. In the end, bizarrely, I managed to come to a deal with Simon's gelatinous imposter by feeding him Craig's clone bodies. It was fun, and a nice return to a game that I have not played for perhaps thirty years. I've never played a sensitivity trainer before either.

 

Preparing on the veranda

The last game was Svalbard, which was standalone game and setting. I'll post some separate notes on running this later in the week, but our brave players didn't hesitate to put their lives on the line repeatedly to try and save the world from destruction. I was a bit nervous with this because I thought that it could have become a bit dry and mechanical, so I stole some session 0 approaches from indie games to try and make things work properly. The players managed to succeed; their characters saved the world, but according to the number of runs they did, they died in their helicopter evacuation when rocks came down from the side of the mountain above the Secret Underground Base (tm) that they'd just destroyed. I think everyone one had a good time; we'd a great group and they riffed off each other well. I forgot to take a picture of the players at the table, so I've used one of my final prep looking out from the Garrison's roof veranda. 

The game wrapped at 17:45, and I cleared up and then headed out, just in front of the last few attendees. It was nice to see happy chatter about the games that had been played and the fun that had been had.

North Star will return in 2024.

Thanks to everyone who attended.

16 May 2023