TravCon 2024 - After Action Report

My character, ready for action.

Five years is a long time. That's how long it has been since the last TravCon, and perhaps the most uncomfortable thing about this pilot relaunch was just seeing how all the familiar faces have aged. However, it was a fun-filled weekend of Traveller focused gaming with friends old and new, which very much captured the feel of past events.

There were some differences; although the accommodation was still at Redwings Lodge in Sawtry, the gaming moved three miles down the road to Alconbury Memorial Hall. This was a forced change because Redwings have got rid of their meeting room suite, so we had nowhere to game onsite. The format saw three normal (~4 hour) length slots on Saturday and one longer slot on Sunday. Mongoose were present over Saturday lunch and Matt Sprange gave a keynote on the state of Traveller, which was especially interesting given that most of the rights have transferred over from Marc Miller.

Although I've been active with BITS in the past, I've never really got involved in organising TravCon. Instead, I just turn up and run and play. Richard Talbot was key in the background, finding the new location and helping pull things together. He deservedly won a Starburst for Extreme Heroism for this by general acclaim of all present, and was given a limited edition book donated by Mongoose as a prize! The "P*ng, F*ck it!" prize was won by Graham Spearing for his brave but futile and fatal attempt to take a sample from a xenomorph with a spoon.

He's won a book!

I offered to run two games for the convention, figuring that I could draw upon the Scoundrels of Brixton setting zines that I've picked up recently. This is a crime focused setting, with a very cyberpunk edge to it. Officially, it isn't part of the Traveller universe, but you can easily hack the Brixton star system to being a Terran deep range colony set up a long distance rimward of the Solomani Confederation. The setting material uses the Traveller SRD in Cepheus form, and I decided to use Cepheus Universal as the engine. At the table, it just felt like Traveller.

Scenario development (screenshot of reMarkable file contents)

Two scenarios were possibly a bit ambitious, especially as Furnace falls the week immediately after TravCon, and I'd already committed to running three games and also have the con-organiser duties to deal with. I read through the three zines I've got (two physical, one PDF at the moment) and identified a number of adventure seeds that looked worth working up. Cepheus Universal outlines a recommended 5-stage approach for adventure session design, so I built everything around that, sketching out notes on my reMarkable and building the two adventures in parallel.

Loke Battlemap in action

I decided to avoid needing to prepare any maps by picking up two of the Loke Battlemap sets that I'd been eyeing up for quite a while. I grabbed the Cyberpunk and SF Giant sets, and they proved great to use in play. I think the Cyberpunk set is more useable, but both are excellent. 

My first game 'A Nice and Easy In and Out"

The two scenarios were each a little different - the first one involved at heist where the party needs to extract some valuable equipment from a remote warehouse on the edge of a corporate mining town and get it back to orbit. The second was escort duty for a courier; take them to a meet, make sure that nothing bad happens to them, then get back to Sky City with the merchandise. On reflection, the first scenario provided more freedom for the party to find their own way and have some great character-led interactions. The second was much narrower; yes, it had lots of scope for the party to find its own way, but overall there was quite a clear path to follow. It wasn't a railroad, but the options were limited. It was fascinating that the players in the first group managed to mostly avoid violence, whereas it was more prevalent for the second mission. Perhaps I got the 15 and 18 ratings I gave the scenarios right.

My second adventure - "Drugs for Life".  A right dodgy crew!

I generated up six characters using the UPP strings and points build method, and then rolled life path options. I did mostly flesh out the skills not taken on the career life paths as Level 0 (ie competent but no bonus). I left some of this deliberately vague so the players had the scope to tweak what was there and how they could use it in play; the first group made good use of family connections, the second leaned on their friends.

The final thing I did was steal from The Sprawl, using the Legwork and Action clocks, and using variants on the 'You get the Job' move. These worked really well, and built tension, encouraging the players to push forward and not get lost in analysis paralysis.

I was pretty much ready by Wednesday before the convention, which was when the complication struck; the kids brought 'back-to-school-itis' home and I came down quite hard with it on Thursday. I ended up deciding not to come down on the Friday night and to miss the first session (which was a shame as I was looking forward to Jeff's game of 2300AD using the Bayern mission). It was the right decision; even though I loaded up with paracetamol, Lucozade and plenty of throat lozenges, I was definitely in a better place that I would have been when I was running. The disappointment to this was missing the first 15 minutes or so of Matt Sprange's address. 

The Keynote

I had a lot of fun playing Graham's game on Sunday morning; very much a frontier exploration of an Ancient's site. What was strange was that it gave me echoes of the Coriolis: The Great Dark Quickstart adventure that I played at North Star earlier this year, and then I realised that Traveller has been doing this for so much longer with Twilight's Peak and Shadows leading the way. I played a cocky pilot and we stumbled our way through the adventure to find potential riches for our very crippled merchant venture.

"A Ticket to see Oasis" - Graham's Traveller game

 

It was great to see so many old friends, but a bit scary to see them suddenly five years older.

Redwings was much as it ever was, pretty much on par with a Travelodge that has a small bar and games room. The Alconbury Memorial Hall was a good venue; lots of space and enough for us to easily have five games underway. I suspect that this could have been pushed to seven if we'd had enough attendees.

Andy Lilly (BITS lead) answers a question in the keynote.

It's likely that TravCon will return around March/April 2025; it's been noted that the comms needs to be better, and we'll get an opportunity to feedback some more over the next few weeks. It would also be nice to broaden the group attending, although space may limit that opportunity. Most likely it will be in the same area. There was a brief discussion on TravCon North, but there wasn't much enthusiasm for that from Andy. 

The nearest thing we'll have to that is North Star, which happens in May next year in Sheffield. It's larger than TravCon already, and covers all SF RPGs, so that may well be worth pursuing if you fancy a North of England based SF con where Traveller is welcome. 

In conclusion; a fun weekend playing my long term favourite roleplaying game.

6 October 2024