TravCon 2025 - After Action Report

The first weekend of October brought the second of the relaunched TravCon events, set once again just south of Peterborough in the south of the UK. It was a little problematic for me because I had Furnace the week after, so it cut into prime organising and preparation time for that convention. Fortunately, I didn't have to do too much on the convention organising side beyond prepare my games, but I did make a bit of a rod for my own back in suggesting what the attendees could get as a gift for attending.

Prep for the games was pretty simple; I offered to rerun two published scenarios that I had run back in May 2025 at North Star, Deepnight Legacy and The Hunt for Sabre IV. I've talked about North Star in other posts, but suffice it to say that if you are a Traveller fan, it's a SF dedicated roleplaying convention that's definitely work a look at (full declaration - I am involved in organising it).

I described how I prepared the scenarios in the previous North Star 8 post, so I won't repeat that here. All I needed to do was to reprint the characters and also a few of the handouts.

TravCon was located about 15 miles south of my workplace's head office, and I had an all-day face-to-face audit booked in there for the Friday, so everything seemed to have aligned nicely. I could drive down with work, recharge the car (I now drive an EV) on the chargers there, then trundle off to TravCon at the end of the day. Well, bizarrely the audit got moved to Teams, but I still headed down. The A1 was mostly fine.

It wasn't too late when I rolled into Redwings Lodge in Sawtry (picture a downmarket version of a Travelodge) which was the residential base for the convention. Once again, the gaming was taking place in  Alconbury Memorial Hall, about 5 minutes drive away. I caught up with my Garricon co-conspirator, Graham, and we joined the second sitting at Royal Spiceland's buffet. It was nice catching up with people that I don't see that often, but Derrick Jones' absence was notable since he passed away earlier this year. I didn't stay up late, and went to bed instead. It'd been a long week and I wanted to be prepared and refreshed.

Graham and I shared a lift the next morning, and we arrived at the hall. Richard T had done a fine job organising the whole event, and very quickly things were away. I was beaming like proud father when I got given a copy (number 01 of 50) of the book I'd produced for the event. This was the aforementioned. 'rod for my own back'.

Both sides of the Double Adventure.

We'd kicked around some ideas for the convention gift, and were struggling for something original, when I  foolishly suggested that as I was already updating two of the BITS scenarios that I'd written to get them back into print, perhaps I could do that and create a double adventure book in the style of the old Classic Traveller adventures. This means you turn the book upside down to read the second adventure. Doing this needed me to update the interior text to Mongoose Traveller 2e (2022), complete the layout (Andy was originally going to do this), size reduce the output to A5 from A4, then rotate the second book. Overall, it worked really nicely. I went with a refreshed inverted cover idea I'd first pitched over a decade ago and it looked really nice in print. The adventures were 'Delta 3 is Down' and 'Cold Dark Grave'. They'll be released as print-on-demand singles sometime later this year.

TravCon has four gaming sessions, and my first session was run by Neil McG, an old friend who I met through BITS. I got to play through the very rare kick off scenario from 'In Search of Angels' where we successfully carried out the recovery of a merchant vessel lost in the Fifth Frontier War. Before we started properly, there was a minute of silence held in memory of Derrick, which was lovely, especially as his cousin and cousin's son were there.

Surely the diagram makes this 'In Search of Angles' rather than Angels?

There were a few puzzles to solve (where the ship actually was, how we could get permission to carry out the mission, and actually lifting the vessel). We managed - somehow - to get the job done without resorting to anything illegal!

The second session, I ran Deepnight Legacy. This played out somewhat differently to the previous outing, with the players managing to avoid the base and risk of infection very carefully, before ultimately adopting a similar approach to the previous crew that tried this. It's a fun scenario and definitely works well on riffing on lots of classic movies that SF fans will have seen. There was a sense of paranoid worry throughout, but it kept them alive and with minimum risk of infection! Well played.

The evening session was run by Richard T, and was called 'Second Sons'. We were the heirs (both male and female) of Vilani nobles who wouldn't inherit, and we had become involved in what could only be described as a Vilani supremacist movement. Deeply unpleasant folk with a chip on their shoulders. Our cell was tasked with 'rescuing' and 'liberating' an ancient Naasirka symbolic encryption key, and it was suggested that we carried out a daring heist to do this. However, we had a group of devious and paranoid conspirators and it felt like a set-up where we would become martyrs, something we definitely didn't fancy. We went full political and approached the scenario in a way that give Richard lots of new areas to consider. I was the 'Black Sheep Enforcer', a rejected family member with connections to the underworld (not a Yorkshire Pub Bouncer), and it was great fun.

I got back to Redwings and no-one was about to play Mag*Blast, so I went to bed. Would have loved to have played it as Derrick loved a good battle with it. Maybe some other time.

Sunday only has one session, and I was running the introductory adventure from Mysteries on Arcturus Station, The Hunt for Sabre IV. This was the prequel to the famous Classic Traveller adventure Murder on Arcturus Station. The players took to their roles as corporate troubleshooters with gusto, and split the party up very successfully. I tried to build tension by cutting between scenes but they very effectively followed the clues and established what had happened. They even avoided the final battle option, leaving that to the police. Some clever advocacy work meant that they dodged the sting in the tail with the terms and conditions from the company hiring them, which was even more inspired. The only downside was the realisation that they'd really taken the side of 'the man' against 'the little people', enforcing corporate authority and oppression. But hey, they made Cr250,000 profit!

TravCon wrapped up with the usual 'Ping-F***-It' and Starburst for Extreme Heroism awards for attendees. Mongoose ran a playtest of Pioneer during the slot I ran Deepnight Legacy, and that was apparently good fun. They didn't do a keynote, but after the tone of the questions last year, that didn't really surprise me. Then again, it was a weekend and Matt may not have had time to do something like that. It was great of them to support the event though.

There was a small bring and buy, mostly dominated by BITS towels and a lot of Derrick's Traveller books which were free to a good home.

TravCon will be back next year. The majority of attendees asked for something closer to the old March/April slot, but Andy almost dismissed that when talking about it as being too soon. That's disappointing, as I'm probably not going to come if it's so close to one of the other events that I run. It just adds another level of stress I don't need. It'll be a shame to miss it, but if it's the week before Furnace, I don't think that I will do it. There was also talk of a new venue. I know Richard has been scouting them but nothing concrete yet.

I really enjoyed catching up with folks, and it was great to spend a weekend playing my forever game with them. It was also lovely to meet people I knew from forums and Facebook groups but have never met face-to-face before (waves at ADnD Steve). A fun weekend in the Far Future.

19 October 2025