As ever, the first thing I'm going to say here is that I'm one of the organisers of this convention, so my opinions are going to be biased. However, once I get there, I'm playing or running games in every slot like the rest of the people attending. I just get to do other things around the day!

North Star is our annual roleplaying game convention focused on science-fiction games. This was the ninth convention, and the seventh face-to-face, as two of the conventions ended up being online during the COVID-19 lockdowns. It has a special place in my heart, as it is something that Graham and I conceived of after attending one of the TravCons. Initially, we were looking at a northern Traveller based convention, but there wasn't an appetite from BITS, so we decided to do a more general science fiction based convention, which has proved popular. This ranges from science fantasy like John Carter of Mars, through to horror (form example Delta Green) through classics like Traveller and Cyberpunk, and on to post-Singularity based games.

PREPARATION

We started planning for North Star straight after the last convention in 2024. As a convention, sits in the middle of attendance levels between Furnace and Revelation. We had 52 sign ups this year, up six on the previous year. However, we continued to see the challenge that we've had with very late decisions to attend and respond to things like game pre-booking. That can be pretty challenging; we have four different channels we use for communications; the email address people provide when signing up, and then the Discord Server, the Facebook Group, and the Gaming Tavern. All key updates get sent out across all channels. However, some folks we only realised weren't coming because they didn't reply to anything. That makes things very difficult when doing game allocations. 

Of course, we always assume that we'll get some drop outs, usually around 10%. That's real life. People get sick, family events happen and life intervenes. If we know this, it's manageable. Throughout the process, we're trying to balance number of seats at gaming tables offered (ie the GM + players) against the number of attendees in that slot during the convention. I say in that slot, because one of the changes we've seen increasingly is that some slots (for example, Saturday night) get less player demand. We now ask a question during sign-up to try and manage this. I try not to have GMs preparing for games that won't run.

If a player drops out, it's usually simple to address, provided it doesn't take us below three players in a game. When that happens, we initially check if the GM is happy to run with two people. If they are, we then check if the players are happy to play with two players. If anyone says 'no', then we're trying to find all three of the people involved spaces in another game.

If a GM drops out, it's more challenging. We do have some people who will act as reserve GMs or offer to run twice, but the numbers involved and complexity jumps in getting people into another game. We used not to care so much about this; I'd bring a big bag of board games, and the sign up was a free-for-all at boards (well, this was Furnace's original method). If you didn't get into a game, there was space to play and enjoy yourself. However, this also meant people didn't get into games they wanted to, hence we moved to pre-booking, which Elaine championed (despite the extra work), something that North Star adopted from the start.

During the preparation, we all have different tasks. Hattie (who joined the team a couple of years ago) is preparing marketing material to pitch the convention, I'm doing the forms for registration and managing games, and Graham is handling most of the comms and the liaison with the hotel. It generally works smoothly.

Hattie did a fantastic job with the new marketing material and finding alternative spaces. It was nice to have some variety, and to try new channels for people to find the convention. We haven't asked people how they found us in the registration process, so we don't know how effective it was, but the numbers were up, which helped. It was a real shame that she couldn't attend as she had to be in the USA with work the week of the convention.

The numbers meant we opened up a second space in the bowels of the hotel (the main space handles around 38 easily, and can go to 45 at a push), which meant we ended up with a feeling of space on the Upper Jailhouse and the alternative area. That's great, because it means that noise from other games doesn't tend to impact the adjacent tables. 

The fortnight before North Star was pretty crazy for me; working had moved some reporting periods forward, so it was pretty full on. At the same time I was juggling preparing two Traveller scenarios to run and trying to finalise the game allocation. I think I had to redo it three times in the last week. I took Friday off and dedicated to preparation. Fortunately, I'd bought extra paper 'just in case' as I ran out (it's either that or toner usually) while printing the badges for attendees. The main annoyance was that I couldn't find my 'stationary bag', the Furnace con bag with my dice and lots of different goodies from All Rolled Up and others.

I finally finished all the prep after midnight; not what I planned, but the various changes and work had put my on a back foot. However, I felt ready to run and I knew that the material for the convention was ready, and that Graham had checked the venue the night before so that we had minimal effort to do in the morning.

SLOT 1 - THE ELECTRIC STATE - INTO THE BLACKWELT

I arrived early enough that it wasn't a problem, and immediately found out that another player had dropped out due to illness. That pushed three games below two players, so there was some shenanigans that went on past the opening speech while I made sure everyone had something to play in.

The strangest part of the preparation on the day is standing on a chair taping baking paper to the window. When the hotel refurbished, the hotel got rid of the curtains upstairs, and sometimes the sun will come in quite strongly. We have improved with baking paper to let light through but take the brightness and heat down. By Furnace this year we should have some proper coverings sorted.

Badges, X-Cards, signs and everything was out, and we were off, with Graham opening the event with his well-trained patter.

My first game was Robin's The Electric State, which I was really looking forward to. I've read the Simon Stålenhag artbook that it's based upon, and have the roleplaying game. However, I'd not had a chance to read or run it, so this was an opportunity to explore the game and the setting. I played a Nevadan Veteran of the War that tore the United States apart. We were a group of misfits with past history who didn't really know each other, but were on a road trip to try to get out of Pacifica to Tonopah, Nevada. Each of us had troubles that were pursuing us, and the journey became an exploration of our back histories. Robin kept on throwing in things that hooked to our stories. We managed to reach Tonopah, and also to resolve a few character's goals, but for me the journey was the thing. I loved the way we got to find out about each other and the interactions as we crossed this very broken USA. This version of the Year Zero Engine just faded into the background. A fun game with great players.

If you're interested in seeing the background to the scenario, Robin has shared it on his Substack here. 

After the game, I nipped to Morrisons for lunch, and spent a bit of time reading my scenario for the evening.

SLOT 2 - FADING SUNS 4e - A ROAD SO DARK

The next slot brought Fading Suns, run by Graham. We've both got history with this game, and ended up inadvertently going for the same bundle of books for the current edition on eBay. I won that, but Graham beat me to the table. The fourth edition rules read as quite complicated, but in play they're really smooth and easy to use. At the heart of the engine, you're rolling a D20 to get under a target number, but you want to score as high as possible because that gains you action points that allow you to overcome resistances to your action and get better results. 

The setting is very Dune-like*; in the future, humanity expanded using alien jump gates but the representative democracy of the Second Republic collapsed a long time ago. The stars are fading, and darkness threatens. The Prophet brought worship of the Pancreator, the source of light. Worlds are dominated by major and minor houses, counterbalanced by the Guilds. Society is balanced on a tripod of Guild, Nobility and Church, and the Emperor tries to keep it all in balance. The Emperor Wars only ended recently. Into this, our party was a group of House Decados nobles and their retinue. Decados are the sneaky but decadent house. They aren't quite as bad as the Harkonnens but there is an edge to the game that they play.

*Also shades of the set up in Dan Simmon's Hyperion books.

It started with a party (don't all the best adventures?) where the Decados had been invited to the 'coming out' party for the daughter of a minor noble house. Tom played a metro-sexual Decados noble to the hilt, with intrigue, flirtation and little sharp daggers. John played his much more 'honourable' cousin, a questing knight, but still underneath a Decados. Tim had the noble's personal cleric, a Sanctuary Aeon healer, and Guy and myself playing the Guild representatives. I was the Charioteer (responsible for starships and piloting, and some mercantile aspects) and Guy was the Muster mercenary. I had to pick that character as it had the same name as I do!

We ended up with a great dynamic, and chewed the scenery between us for the first hour or so. I could see Graham starting to think that the scenario may not actually happen, but to be honest, that wouldn't have mattered from the player's perspective as we were loving it. However, somehow we managed to get back on track and broadly achieve success. I really enjoyed it, and if Graham had offered to carry on a mini-campaign then I would have been up for it.

After the game, Keary, John and myself set off for our usual Garricon bookclub meet up at the local KFC. Increasingly, we've other folk joining us for this, which makes it a great opportunity to share what we've read that we've enjoyed. Of course, part of this was ambushed by discussions about Andor, partly spoiler free as some people hadn't seen the new series.

SLOT 3 - TRAVELLER - THE HUNT FOR SABRE IV

This was the first of two Traveller scenarios that I was running at the convention; it was the first that I'd settled on and comes from the recent Mongoose Traveller revamp of the Classic Traveller scenario. Murder on Arcturus Station. The updated version has two scenarios; the first one was a prequel that sets the scene, in which a team run by the players gets brought in to investigate a missing mining ore carrier.

I'd turned the entire scenario into a mind map for easy reference using Scapple, and also extracted a timeline (the mindmap is above and obviously includes spoilers). The other key preparation was getting all the handouts and pictures of people available for the players to have in hand, and generating characters. 

I used the alternative package based character generation from the Traveller Companion 2024 Update. That was really useful and allowed me to half the time I usually spend building characters. It does this by having you create the ability scores for the character's UPP, after which you choose a background (eg Belter) that may modify the abilities and give you some initial skills. You then choose a career package (for example Agent) which give you more skills and some benefits. Finally, there are some options to tweak your skills at the end, either to give a high score or to boost across a number of skills. It works really smoothly.   The characters were set up a franchise Hortalez et Cie audit team who were delayed in systems while a part was delivered for their starship.

I created the character sheet as half an A4-page, then went on 'thispersondoesnotexist.com' to generate a set of random images for character portraits. I turned them black and white. While doing it, I realised that there seemed to be an unconscious bias in the way that the model had been built. If I remember correctly, it had been done by analysing images of people on the net for patterns, enabling it to produce random portraits. The model's training clearly didn't have a large number of black subjects as the output was predominantly White, Asian and Hispanic. This may well reflect the source data used but it took about thirty refreshes before a black person's face appeared. However, after lots of refreshes, I had a decent selection of images.

The reason I did this was to slip the two items into an A5-menu stand - one site with the character sheet, the other with the image. I also created a random table of names for inspiration. I gave each character a short paragraph bio, but I wanted to have the players own what their character looked like, and what they were called. Implicitly, they also got to choose their own age, which works quite well with the package character generation as it doesn't define the number of terms served. I let the players choose anything between late twenties to early fifties, pretty much in line with the character images I'd generated.

I'd gone with an already published scenario as it minimised the amount of work that I needed to do before the convention. The main plot was there and it was all about becoming familiar with it. I had a really engaged group of players, and they successfully navigated their way through the plot, pretty much uncovering the whole conspiracy. It was great to see how they approached it. As I had five players, the party did end up split, but it worked along the niches that the characters had on their character sheets, with the generalists backing up the specialists. We had a forensics team, an interview team and an undercover agent (Steven leaned hard into using his character's backstory of 'Profession (Belter) 2' to fit in with the asteroid mining workforce. I really enjoyed watching them crack the case and avoid some of the potential problems that would have meant that they didn't get paid. Thanks to Steve H, Steven P, Paul, Dr Mitch and Eugene for an enjoyable evening!

I only regret that I forgot to take a picture with all the bling on the table during the game, which is why you got the mind map above.

Initially, I was going to head straight to bed, but then I decided to nip up to the bar to be sociable and have a good natter with Dr Mitch, amongst others. We play regularly but rarely get to meet face-to-face. I did get to sleep at a reasonable time.

SLOT 4 - JOHN CARTER OF MARS - YOU ARE THE HEROES. YOU?

Morning came around quickly enough and I enjoyed the usual fantastic Garrison cooked breakfast. Perhaps my only disappointment was the lack of tinned grapefruit! That may sound weird, but they've always had it before and it reminds me of visiting my grandparents back in the 1970s. I think it has gone with the modernisation. I nipped back to my room and read the whole of the Traveller scenario that I was running in Slot 5 to make sure it was fresh in my head, as I knew that the lunch break would be pressed for time.

I owned John Carter of Mars for a while, but never got it to the table. I sold it at the bring and buy stand at another Garricon to Keary. Keary brought it back to run at North Star and a thought it would be rude not to. It was a simple pulp tale of derring do. Our characters were co-opted into trying to rescue a young princess who had disappeared, potentially abducted by Green Martians. As a Green Martian myself, my character was very concerned about this. We investigated and quickly found a trail, and then we had an exciting air ship chase followed by a rescue that the young lady wasn't that impressed with and then we managed to survive being shot down. We drove off or killed our attackers, realising that this was in fact an evil Zodangan false flag operation to drive division between the races of Mars!

Overall, it was a fun game, with 2d20 doing its thing. I was suffering from bleed between the various different versions of 2d20 that I've played, but enjoyed it all the same. My conclusion was that I was glad to play, and would happily do so again, but I was also content in my decision to sell.

Lunch was from Morrisons again, and then we had the raffle (for Patriot Games vouchers) and a birthday cake. We'd had an attendee contact us to let us know that it was Tim's 60th birthday the next day, and asking if we could do a cake. We arranged that with the hotel, much to his surprise. Tim is an absolute stalwart of the Traveller community and has some great scenarios and other supplements that he's published. It was nice to be able to do this; it's the second time we've been approached like this for members of our community, and it's lovely to see the care.

SLOT 5 - TRAVELLER - DEEPNIGHT LEGACY

My final scenario was Deepnight Legacy, one of the two published scenarios that lead into the epic Deepnight Revelation campaign that I've reviewed previously.

Deepnight Legacy is a sandbox with the potential to kill the whole party. The set up is that they are a crew that's been flung together to travel into the Great Rift to an Imperial outpost as a ship is overdue. The outpost needs resupply and they're also tasked with checking for any news of their sister vessel. There are potential elements of body horror and links to the Ancients. 

I actually used the same initial builds for all the characters (attributes and background package) and then selected different career packages. It was amazing how much difference that it made. Graham had the resupply ship's captain, Keary had one of the engineers, as did Tom. They were backed up by Tim's Scout who was working passage, and an academic who had a twelve month sabbatical at the Outpost was played by M. 

I loved the way that the players leaned into their roles, and despite knowing the type of scenario that they faced, they acted with a realistic level of ignorance until they had evidence that something was not right. After that, they took the right decisions and managed to rescue the remaining survivors of Candling Station, before turning tail and heading back to report the disaster to their home naval base. There was some nice interplay with the characters, but this was very much a game of cautious exploration and information gathering followed by some dramatic rescues.

I'd prepared maps (strangely missing from the scenario as published), using the Travellermap.com site, plus the linked T5 world generator. Characters were presented in a similar way to the previous scenario, and again it seemed to work quite well. Overall, a good scenario which would definitely be an opener to a campaign if you wanted it to be.

With that, the convention was over, and after some tidying up, I headed home to the family.

North Star will return on 9th-10th May 2026.

18 May 2026