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| Blade Runner - Replicant Rebellion |
Last weekend was the ninth run out for North Star, our science-fiction based gaming convention that seems to still be in good health. We had surprisingly low dropouts this year, so we had numbers in the 50s. This is enough for us to have the upper space and the cell downstairs, but not quite enough for the main function room. Of course, that was a moot point as the hotel had a wedding reception on for the afternoon and evening.
The team for North Star is myself, Graham (the face of the convention and the liaison with the hotel) and Shachar (who has increasingly been helping us market and prepare for the event). Registration and games are my baby, along with the usual badges. In honesty, we have the framework so it runs smoothly (mostly), with the only challenges being folks that somehow manage to miss direct emails, and posts on the multiple channels we use (Facebook Group, Garricon Discord and the Gaming Tavern Forum). That can cause slippage and stress, but fortunately it wasn't too bad this year.
Everything was going well in the preparation and I completed game allocation on time, only for a player to contact me by Discord asking why they weren't in a game in Slot 2. When I checked, not only had I managed to scroll the spreadsheet and miss them out, they were also the top scorer in the random number generator that we use to ensure fairness. When I looked, none of their games choices had spaces left, so I stepped out from my berth on Guy Milner's A Nocturne which was both their and my first choice. However, entirely fair as I screwed up. I'm told it was a good game. I could have actually played as a player dropped out on the day, but instead I used the time to make sure I was properly prepared for my game of Blue Planet Recontact in the following slot.
Unfortunately, Patriot Games couldn't be with us, but they offered a deliver to con service through a team member who was attending. Likewise Paul Baldowski from All Rolled Up and Just Crunch Games offered a similar service on the Saturday as he was only there for the Saturday. Because we had no retailers, I put together a larger pile of games to sell in the Bring and Buy than I originally intended, all priced with the intent to sell.
I headed over to the convention, reasonably early on Saturday morning, and we soon had everything shipshape and ready to go. We'd ordered some extra lights for some of the cells (lowberths on the timetable) as they didn't have uplighters any more, just fairy lights for ambience, and the second delivery of those arrived late morning. The one thing we have to do for Furnace is to get some acoustic deadening material as the top section is quite noisy, especially now the curtains and soft furnishings have gone in the space. It'a mainly a problem when a table gets really excited; most of the time it's fine.
Graham opened the convention with his speech, which - looking back - has become longer, mainly as we have tried to make sure we are catering for new attendees as well as regulars. He also kindly mentioned my swim to raise money for Cancer Research UK. And suddenly we were off.
Slot 1 - The Last Caravan
I picked up a copy of The Lost Caravan a while back and I really liked what it presented, a Forged-in-the-Dark derivative that explores a found family travel west over the United States to escape an alien invasion. It plays in a similar road trip space to Fria Ligan's The Electric State but it is focused on a more extended campaign. That was the reason that I put the game aside; I'm already committed on at least one campaign and had no space to do anything with it. I was delighted when I saw that Neil Gow was offering a one-shot of the game, and pleased that the randomiser was kind to me.
Now, one of the things about the game is that you can play an Innocent (a child who grows up and develops into something else during the game) or a Good Boi (the family dog). I ended up deciding to be a Golden Retriever, mainly because this was a chance to try doing something different! My name was picked by the other players; Steve (playing a divorced High School Teacher Dad) handed the job of naming me to the two kids (played by Josh and Jag), because I was brought in when their mother left. So Cherokee the Golden Retriever was born. The game actually has a very different set of skills that the Good Boi can use, which was really fun. In reality, they do much the same thing as the skills that the humans have, but they are phrased in a way more appropriate for a dog. The various feats that were available also give lots of flavour. I do think that the dog character could have worked longer term, not just as a novelty at a convention.
The game was fantastic flavour, and felt like the pilot for a series. I'd have loved to have continued playing and exploring the relationships and adventures when we finished. We dealt with escaping from an alien attack on our home town, then trouble with a lone alien warrior coming out of the surf on the beach that we'd camped at. We decided to avoid the dubious looking lighthouse, but struck a deal with a local fisherman to try and rescue people from a town where a militia had established itself. The endgame with the militia and town was pretty brutal and scary, and we only just succeeded in freeing people. However, we knew we couldn't stay because we needed to find our Mom, who had called us for help from Montana. A really fun game, with a great GM and players.
Lunch was a salad from Morrisons.
Slot 2 - Sitting Out
I spent most of Slot 2 in my hotel room making sure that I was fully prepared for the Blue Planet Recontact game in the evening. On reflection, I was probably fine, but the rushing about with work the week before the convention had left me too tired to put in the time I wanted to in the evenings getting the game in my head, so this was all about getting me into a confident slot.
Around 6pm, we had a meeting of the Garricon Saturday Bookclub at the local KFC. The founding members (me, John, Keary) were joined by Malcolm. We talked books and films over fried chicken, then headed back for the evening games.
Slot 3 - Blue Planet Recontact - Red Sky Charters: Making Ends Meet
I've run Blue Planet several times at North Star and Furnace, each time building out from the setting in the Quickstart. This is the third scenario I've used, and it puts the players in the space where they are the employees and owners of a boat charter company based out of Harmony in the Zion Isles on Poseidon, a water world and the first colony that Earth has established. Since the last time that I ran this, the full game has come out (and it's gorgeous), but I left it a bit late to read, which put me on a back foot when I was preparing as the book is quite information dense (in a good way), but I managed to work my way through it. Fortunately (especially as there's around 700 pages in the core books), only about 40 of those pages are rules and aside from a few tweaks to terminology, not much had changed.
I already had some PVC maps of the Pacifica Archipelago, where Red Sky Charters is set, but I decided to get some of the more detailed maps add, and the full planetary projection. As ever, Pixel2Print delivered on time and great quality. I think that they really make an impact on the table. The only last minute challenge in preparing was writing two new characters, who were going to be the clients for the boat trip. One was an influencer, and the other a researcher. If you had both in play, then they were written as a couple, but the scenario would have worked if they were just friends, or even just with one of them. This meant I could offer the players more characters than people sat around the table, which gave some extra choice. I did manage to miss out one of the characters skills when transposing from the older Quickstart Character Sheet to the new sheet, but fortunately that was easily resolved at the table.
I was having a bit of a challenge trying to work out exactly what I'd do for the scenario earlier on, so I sought inspiration from reading the plot synopses for 'Tales of the Gold Monkey', and then mashing up one I liked with one of the hooks in the Blue Planet core books, in the 'Access Denied' GM sections.
I had a great group; Remi, John, Adrian, Dr Bob (one of the other playtesters from when I ran the game previously), and Tim Collinson (of Traveller fame). In the end, only one of the new characters was in play, the influencer. John took her on, and thus Proxima Nova was introduced to the table. A well connected and rich young woman, who had hired Red Sky Charters to take her out to shoot a documentary. Tim had never played Blue Planet before, being more used to Traveller, and the other players helped him adjust to the lightweight dice-pool roll under system. He chose to play the dolphin character, and both larked around and tried to understand better the Whalesong beliefs.
They were a fantastic group, and managed to resolve the challenge of the scenario with a minimum of violence and a lot of influence. Sadly, they didn't every manage to get the footage of surfing in the storm that was coming in as they headed away from it, but they foiled the machinations of one of the incorporate states who were planning to take extreme measures involving a tailored bioweapon to deal with the native insurgency against them mining xenosilicate ore.
After the game, I went to the bar for a single drink, then headed to bed.
Sunday
Breakfast was the Garrison's finest, and it was really nice to chat with the staff who we've come to well know over the last twenty years.
Slot 4 - Outgunned Star Wars.
I loved this game.
I'd picked up Outgunned when it went through crowdfunding, and subsequently backed both the Adventure and Superheroes expansions. These come with several theme books (Action Flicks) that let you shape the game to different flavours. The game is action focused and uses a Yahtzee style resolution mechanic. It looked like it would be fantastic fun and I reviewed it when it first landed. To my shame, I've not got it to the table yet. However, when I found out that Pete was running two sessions of Outgunned hacked to Star Wars, I knew it was one of the games that I wanted to play.
We were a rebel team on the swamp planet Zarblos, and we had been tasked with raiding in Imperial facility on the the planet. I was playing Nykira Merr, a Night Witch force user, and the rest of our team was similarly rag tag, with a Mandalorian, a scoundrel, a hacker and our long suffering Captain.
The game mechanics sang in action and we had lots of fun. My character kept on trying to do the sneaky bit, only to be frustrated by the other players leaning into their 'shoot first and ask questions later' approaches. Lots of Star Wars got quoted or paraphrased and I was quite sad that we had to end when we did. A cracking game, and I do want to get this to the table now!
Lunch was from Morrisons again, which was fortunate because the Garrison had a member of staff not turn in so they were short handed, which meant that although folks had pre-ordered their food, it didn't arrive in time, and they were still waiting for either main courses or puddings when we were due to do the raffle. We delayed, but by the time we were 20 minutes over, I decided to get Graham on the phone (as he was downstairs waiting for sticky toffee pudding or some other delight) and we did our first multi-location raffle. This did mean that I got to do that 'thank you and have fun' speech at the end.
Slot 5 - Blade Runner Replicant Rebellion - Deliverance
It's no secret that my favourite film of all time is Blade Runner, despite its problematic elements. I backed the crowdfunding from Fria Ligan, and I have played it several times with Remi and Phil running brilliant games at Garricons in the past. I've never got it to the table, and this looked like a great opportunity. I'd recently received the Asset Pack and the Replicant Rebellion book. Reading the latter, I decided that I'd run the opening scenario from the campaign presented there, which is a rescue mission. It was pretty straightforward, but would rely on me reaching to how the players responded rather than having a strict linear plot line. Yes, there was a timeline of what the antagonists would do if the characters did nothing to intervene, but it was very much understand what the players wanted to do to resolve the challenge.
Preparation; I printed a PVC A1 map of Los Angeles, even though there's a large paper one in the game materials. I'd rather have something that can be wiped off in the event of a drink being spilt. I decided to use the Asset Pack location maps as I wasn't sure where the players would go. If I'd have a had a bit more time, I'd have had a look through my Cyperpunk themed Loke Battlemaps and would have seen if they'd work, but that wasn't to be. Finally, I recreated the character sheets in Affinity so I could use my A5 men stands for the characters. I used one of the archetypes on one side, and game statistics on the other. They did look lovely, and paired well with the cardboard standees that Fria Ligan created in the Asset Pack (unfortunately, I appear to have lost one of the those at the convention).
I had a great group of players again; Tim, Remi and Dr Bob returned from Blue Planet, and we were joined by Steve and Ric. We had a late start thanks to the food delays, which unfortunately meant that the scenario ended up being cut short so I had to drop the final scenes. However, everyone seemed to take that well.
The game systems worked well, and grabbed the feel of the setting, but the variety of dice sizes was frustrating for Tim as it was another system that he'd never tried. Once again, the other players were lovely and helped him. Part of me does agree with Tim's comments after the game that you could have run either Blue Planet or Blade Runner with Traveller's engine, but I do think that both of the game's own engines define the style of play quite well.
We had a mix of investigation approaches from the players, and then they decided to ambush the prison transport. Sadly, the 'keep it quiet and don't cause a bloodbath' went out the window! One of my memorable moments was Tim's human influencer (yes, another influencer), opening up on the antagonist Blade Runner on full auto, and then saying 'this isn't like the movies' when he survived (albeit with a single point of health, only because he had armour and a very high pool to resist damage). I liked the way the game handled combat, and it felt messy and dangerous.
Overall, I think people enjoyed the game. I certainly did.
Then it was time to pack up, and folks were lovely in how they helped. I collected my much reduced pile of games from the bring and buy, and headed home on the A1M.
North Star will return in 2027.
31 May 2026
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