Freelance Traveller

After-Action Report: Northstar 9

by Timothy Collinson

This was the featured article for the July/August 2026 issue.

This summer is a bit action-packed what with three family weddings (including my own daughter), two gaming conventions and one giant horror at work as they mess with pensions, contracts and a lot of unhappiness and gnashing of teeth. It’s the first time ever I’ve used up my annual leave well ahead of time.
So it’s good to have a bit of escapism and definitely worth spending two days of leave on something like North Star, now in its ninth iteration. If you lived locally, it does fit into a weekend, but between 6½ hours travel up there, the same back and the exhaustion to follow in any case, taking the Friday and Monday at least is wise. In fact, I’ve been “paying” for the event all week thanks to CFS really not liking quite so much demand in terms of travel, physicality and engagement with other people. Much though I love it.

North Star is held at the Garrison Hotel in Sheffield. Quite literally an old barracks, armoury and prison. Indeed, some of the games are held in former cells – a snug fit for four players and a referee! This year it was the 9th and 10th of May and it covers all manner of science fiction role-playing. Many of them I’d never even heard of, much less experienced. Having said that, it was possible to play in Traveller or Traveller-adjacent games all weekend. So even for this ‘one game man’ it’s worth attending! Around fifty others thought the same and Graham mentioned that they’re hoping to expand next year, so it could be even larger.

The journey up was as tiresome as ever on overly crowded and underly repaired English roads. Not helped by a very small car – a Toyota iQ (sold as the Scion iQ in North America). No rude remarks about the driver’s small IQ please! There’s just barely room in it for two of us, some weekend luggage and the odd map of some corner of Charted Space. Still, we get there in the end and I try to keep Jane P entertained. She’s a work colleague who I appear to have dragged into Traveller and never let go. The six and a half hours from the south coast of England includes two breaks totalling an hour. I did know someone who regularly did it late at night without stopping and claimed five hours for the trip, but I wouldn’t recommend it. We passed the time by taking inspiration from various lorries (trucks), places and names we were passing to produce ‘En Route’. It was slightly surprising how already Traveller-relevant some seemed to be.  Freeburn Transport?! Or is just slightly worrying that I appear to have arrived at a stage where I can turn anything into Traveller?

Anyway, the Garrison was much the same as ever. Perfectly serviceable but nothing to write home about. They’d berthed me as far from gaming and dining as they possibly could which didn’t help my step count but meant the noise from a wedding party on Saturday night wasn’t too thumpy. The convention doesn’t run any games on Friday night so the options are pretty much an early night or socialising in the bar (I presume). As it happens I have a friend in Sheffield (see above for the 5-hour traveller) and unlike previous years was free for a meal out at the ‘Lost and Found’ which appealed to my sense of humour. She’d just spent some weeks in Kenya and had lots of pictures to show and tales to tell, so there was travelling of a kind. (For those that like such meta detail, she’s the legal-adjacent friend that very very loosely inspired Shell O’Deedy).

Saturday Morning

A good night’s sleep is all important when you’ve got three games to play in the day! One advantage of the long drive was that even in a new bed, sleep came easily and deeply so I was all set for the day – helped by a good breakfast and plenty of (decaffeinated) coffee – referees wouldn’t like it if I were fully caffeinated.

Graham and Dom welcomed us and gave us a briefing on the convention. Much the same as previous years. Two flights of stairs down in the basement (and some labyrinthine corridors away) were two ‘Cargo Hold’ tables (and room for a third if need be). Three tables on the first floor or ‘Upper Jailhouse’, here renamed ‘High Passage 1-3’. Four ‘Lowberth’ tables (in the aforementioned cells) on a slightly lower mezzanine outside the lifts. This was also where a small bring-and-buy run of tables was situated and I resisted the temptation to take anything additional home. No, that’s not true. Dom was offloading a large colour poster map – in PVC no less! – of the Solomani Rim in the Interstellar War era, along with deck plans for a 400-ton Lightning-class Frontier Merchant. I couldn’t resist.  What’s an attic for, after all?

And so to my first game. This was ‘Orbital Reds’ run by Tom Paterson. A Paranoia game using Mongoose rules. I’ve long thought that should be a thing but apparently Mongoose Publishing haven’t seen the light yet. I’ve seen Paranoia being played – I think it was the time I went to a convention in the New Forest some years ago – but never had the opportunity myself. Despite having found a first edition rulebook in a charity shop for the princely sum of 75p. You can’t leave it on the shelf at that price. It’s always looked a lot of fun so, combined with rules I’d be familiar with, it was a no-brainer to sign up for this. In addition, Tom made my whole day when he said he was still playing Traveller ever since playing his first game at North Star last year. Which was my own ‘Batch 24381’ with all its melancholy faults. Clearly that hadn’t put him off.  Phew.

I took good notes in this while I was still fresh – they tailed off later on as I got tireder. My intention was to use the notes to inform some detail here, but the more I think about a Paranoia scenario, the more I’m not sure it’s worthwhile. You kind of had to be there.  Yes, I’ve discovered you can pick up the scenario for free, but it was the combination of players around the table, Tom’s excellent handling of our wilder inconsistencies, and the general mayhem that ensued that really made the session. There was a plot about us investigating a comms satellite that wasn’t reporting correctly or something and there may even have been some resolution in us deactivating the missiles aimed at Alpha Complex by a rogue AI (which was beginning to feel – and sound – a bit too close to real life). Although ‘deactivating’ was more along the lines of a certain real-world terrorist group ‘decommissioning’ their explosives in the most obvious way. But it was the journey along the way that made me think I should try this again. It was a moment for us to get used to death being a bit by-the-by with our five more clones regenerating at need, but I was pleased with my realization that when another PC needed medical treatment and was slowing us up, the best way to heal him was to shoot him so his stats were restored. I’ve been in PvP games before, but not like this!

At other tables:

Der Todesstern – Eat the Reich – Paul Lawrence
Star Wars: The Karbin Run – Outgunned – Pete Atkinson
The Raggedy Edge II: Routine service – Offworlders – Steve Hampshire
First Foray into the Maw – Coriolis: Great Dark (Year Zero) – Michael Southern
Tales from the Steel City Loop – Things from the Flood – Neil Hopkins
Mission to Lianna – Star Wars WEG D6 – Andy Sangar
Outta the Hamptons – The Last Caravan – Neil Gow
Like a Grindstone Cowboy – Judge Dredd – Paul Baldowski

Saturday Afternoon

After lunch (just a bag of crisps as breakfast had been large) and one of my much needed ‘stops’, it was time for my own newly written ‘GKAOs to the Rescue!’. For the very observant amongst you, it might be obvious that this was inspired by Alex Treacher. He wrote an all too brief article in the recent tranche of JTAS [Mongoose] – no.17 – about the Gishdim Khuluum Aid Organization. It didn’t take long for me to think that perhaps there was mileage – astronomical unitage? – in having the PCs as a rescue team dealing with some space emergency. Not much more thought had me think that colloquially they’d surely end up being called Gee Cows? A bit of digging around in a relatively surprising number of ‘rescue’ sources for Traveller turned up a Mongoose 1st Edition book I’d just about forgotten: Special Supplement 4: Rescue Ops which has some character generation for a Healer and a Rescuer. The latter seemed just the ticket and it didn’t take long to roll up six potential PCs and convert them to 2nd Edition. Perhaps not perfect and I might tweak them before publishing the adventure, but good enough. Possibly not Alex’s vision for the GKAO which was more volunteers in regular day jobs. Well, by the time you read this, it will be fairly public knowledge that I solved that by including another crew who were volunteers. And a bit narked at the PCs treading on ‘their patch’.

Anyway, I’d managed to have my slot put down in the Cargo Hold (basement) where I was hopeful that I’d be able to hear better than at the other tables where it can be loud when it gets rambunctious. The High Passage tables are on ‘open’ floor – although the hotel had put bamboo screens between them this year, it still wasn’t enough and Dom was threatening ‘blankets’ over the screens for next time. The Lowberths, or cells, you would have through would be quiet but their high doorways and arched ceilings seem to act as ear trumpets for the slightly higher floor above where the High Passage tables are. I fear the limits of my attendance may not be energy levels but hearing loss making it difficult to participate. Still, I managed to sit on the ‘good ear’ side of the ref each game and that helped.

As for the adventure, it begins with a posh fund raising dinner as there’s an upgrade to the PCs’ ship that needs paying for. Thrust 1 to Thrust 6. Which also necessitates upgrading the power plant. And deciding what gets removed. The hot tub of the subsidized liner for one! I considered making these decisions part of the game but decided there just wouldn’t be time. I was not wrong as I’d failed to remember in good time that North Star slots vary from three to four and half hours. I was in a 3.5 hour slot, not the four of TravCon. The dinner itself is an opportunity for the PCs to meet the great and the good and increase donations by their tales or their sycophancy or whatever. One of them even has to make a speech. I may have been influenced  throughout the months of writing this – or at least, thinking about writing it – by the fact that I was also working on a father-of-the-bride speech (see above). I think this segment would have worked better with more time devoted to it and better role-playing (from me) of the diners. I pushed on however, aware that my games always seems to expand to fill the time.

Naturally there had to be a Signal GK to respond to and off we went. Now this is where, far too late in the process of preparing, I’d discovered that a rendezvous in space is complicated. I can manage the standard Traveller equation for covering a certain distance at a certain G with flip over halfway. Maths even this bear of little brain can manage. But as soon as you start adding vectors and ships, rescue balls, debris, etc all moving away from each other, it starts to get complicated very quickly. Quadratic equations anyone? Certainly not at the table and not even at home with a weekend to work on it. There may be better ways of doing it but I calculated some approximate distances and times and decided that a certain moving at the speed of plot was probably the best way to go. I was just hoping no maths majors or physics nerds had signed up to play. Not a safe bet at an SF gaming convention. Still, no one seemed to mind and they got into the decision making about what and who and how to rescue the various elements. I think it went well. The subplot seemed to work out nicely too with my clues not being too subtle and not being too obvious which is always hard in design.

At least we got to the end without the overwhelming melancholy that assailed me both times I ran ‘Batch 24381’ with its theme of aging. Despite this having moved onto death, somehow it didn’t seem as personal. Which may be a fault of the adventure. My only real disappointment was with myself in that all the hullabaloo I completely forget to take any photos. Again.  I did actually think of it at the start but we were still waiting on the final player, so I postponed it. Indefinitely as it turns out. I think at TravCon I will set an actual alarm for the halfway point and take a break whatever the situation is.

At other tables:

The Arbiter of Pelocra – Space 1999 (2d20) – Dr Bob
Fall Out, New Vegas – Savage Worlds (Fallout) – Paul Lawrence
The Omega Doctrine – Alien – John Ossoway
Eating the Deadships – A Nocturne (Forged in the Dark) – Guy Milner
The Solar Empress – TinyD6 – Assaf Hershko
Echoes In the Black – Stars Without Number – Adrian Atkins
Bloody Redcoats Upon Ochre Sands – Space 1889 Ubiquity – Remi Fayomi
The Vision Between Stars – Space: 1999 – Paul Baldowski

Saturday Evening

After a rather disappointing fish and chips – it might have been my tiredness, it might have been my recent non-greasy diet, or it might have been the fish – it was time for my first non-Traveller game. This was ‘Red Sky Charters: Making Ends Meet’ with Dom Mooney running a Blue Planet: Recontact adventure. This is a kickstarter I’d bought into but, much though I love the setting, hadn’t got into with so many other things going on. I had at one point thought it might inform my adventure ‘SpindriftIn long form, not yet published, but in short form here’ but the kickstarter didn’t fulfil in time.

Here we were a troubleshooting team trying to make ends meet to pay for the boat we were using. Ah mortgage payments that need to be made! I said it was Traveller-adjacent. To help keep ourselves afloat we were taking on a charter with a documentary maker and taking her out to interesting places. Unsurprisingly, little did we know how interesting.

The wrinkle here for me was that I was playing a dolphin; named Dancer. The rest of the PCs were humans (or nearly so with all the gene editing and so on). I wondered if I could use my TravCon chirper training to make trilling cetacean noises but it wasn’t going to happen. The character sheet said that Dancer was a joker and I’m not sure I leaned into it very much but I did manage to kill a nasty Blood Hunter (think piranha-cum-triffid in schools) and popped the corpse on my nose to pop up near the boat and attempt to prank the captain. I could see Dom thinking it might be a long afternoon…

Although we were supposed to be keeping things under the radar, our efforts not to be ‘disappeared’ by the baddies resulted in perhaps a lot more shouting to anyone we could contact about what was going on – including a large data upload – so our superiors had some ‘clean up’ to do afterwards. But I think we managed to save the day from a nasty gene changing virus being released on the world.

At other tables:

Periphery – Cosmic Dark – Ric Baines
Hypersleep Terminated – Hypersleep Terminated – Gav Thorpe
Star Trek: Beneath the Mask of Logic – Cold City – Declan Feeney
Welcome to Your Doom – Savage Worlds (Hell on Earth) – Gaz Bowerbank
Sparks in the Void – The Code of the Spacelanes – Simon Burley
Darkness of the Demimonde – Panic at the Palace – Sue Savage
Get Rich or Die On Stream – Mothership – Robin Poole
Twilight ImperiumYes, an RPG based on the massive board game I’ve long fancied playing if only I knew someone with a weekend to spare and some interest!: Inspection Tour – Genesys – Graham Spearing

Sunday Morning

Another reasonable night’s sleep; another luxurious bath before breakfast and it was time for my first Sunday game. Now I had offered to run ‘Gee Cows to the Rescue!’ a second time and it would have been in this slot. But a week or two before the convention I’d been informed that there wasn’t enough interest – even I could see it would be hard to run with one person – so the two of us were redeployed. Well, I ceded the desired game to my erstwhile player as I’d have felt bad taking the slot. In any case, I was pretty certain I’d be struggling by then and so the option to not play anything and just have a morning off was appealing. However, anyone that knows me knows that FOMO looms large with me and I was also aware that Jane had space at her table. So despite having played it back in February at the Holy Rood games’ night I think I reported on a while ago, I thought it would be supportive – and fun! – to give it another go. Fortunately, between my atrocious memory and Jane’s freeform style, I couldn’t remember any detail about it and as it did start coming back to me it was all different anyway.

Then I’d played the captain – a hopeless leader; now I was playing a retired colonel. My one mission was to ‘protect’ (and fancy the socks off) a just past her best model called Candice who was another passenger on the liner.  Unfortunately, the way it worked out was that I didn’t actually meet her until quite late in the proceedings so Amelia F, playing the model, was spared any unwanted attention from me. Sorry, my character. Instead I transferred my overprotectiveness to the captain who I could see was floundering. Excellently played by Neil H he did a great job of failing to coral Tom Z playing a bolshy chief engineer. I can still hear him negotiating danger pay now. I can also still hear the incredible scream Amelia produced (in character) which it was a good job she had warned us about. It’s a mercy hotel staff didn’t descend on us in a panic over some mortal injury, but we were in the basement. 

Also memorable in this game was Jane and Amelia really going at each other (in character) and clearly channelling much pent-up frustration with the world in general or perhaps males in particular. There were x-cards on all the game tables and I did wonder if this might trigger someone into playing one. It was uncomfortable in some ways but fascinating to see the two of them really dig into the scared of spiders PC and the dozy NPC scientist who’d caused the problems through carelessness.

I was also impressed by the way that Jane, having established that Tom like his alien races, switched things up at the end to have us rescued by an Aslan crew. Incidentally utilising one of the Library Data entries we’d written together in the car on the way up. She did say her game would be improvised but the relaxed way she manages that puts my total overpreparation to shame.

At other tables:

Grey Area: Lost Luggage – Blade Runner“But less lethal” – Dr Bob
Star Wars: Black Ice – Outgunned – Pete Atkinson
Prior Claim – Free Spacer – Tom Paterson
Contagion Clause – Shadowrun Anarchy 2.0 – Declan Feeney
Starfleet Academy 2270:  Milk Run – The Code of the Spacelanes – Simon Burley
Ghosts of The Ship Graveyard – Stars Without Number – Adrian Atkins
Sisters all even unto death – Dark Heresy Genesys – Remi Fayomi

Sunday Afternoon

Given that we’d all ordered food a week or three before, it seemed an interminable wait at lunch for our food, but the steak pie I had was very acceptable. Although I should probably only have eaten half of it. There was, just barely, time for a ‘stop’ before the final game.

This was ‘Deliverance’ with Dom M once again in the referee’s chair.  Blade Runner: Replicant Rebellion – also on my shelves waiting to be read in detail. It was great to be able to come home and see just what was in the book and how Dom had masterfully brought it to the table. I played the ‘PowerBroker’ – Taylor Vaugn – who is quite the coolest character I’ve every played before and perhaps the most misspelt. I’ve no idea why I left the ‘h’ out; I can only claim the end of a long weekend.  She (although androgynous enough that I could have been a he as well) was a scion of a wealthy family but now fighting, with the rest of the PCs, for replicant rights. Indeed, some of the PCs were replicants. It was nicely set up as we went about our cover jobs and got our own individualised ‘bat signals’ calling us to action. In this instance, a rebellion leader to rescue as she’d been arrested by a particularly nasty cop, Brooke Marlow.

As with Blue Planet: Recontact, I’m fairly certain that this adventure could have been run with Mongoose rules, but I was taken with the Heat mechanic which ratcheted up tension through the game as it became harder to do things if the police were paying more attention. But I’m fairly sure you could lift the mechanic over to a suitable Traveller game wholesale without much difficulty. Having said that, I did begin to see how the rules – at least as much of them as we encountered – did seem to replicate something of the films as I remembered them. Which I guess is the point. Or perhaps it was just the gear we had, the locations we were in and Dom’s well done descriptions. I did become aware of just how familiar everyone else was around the table with the films and decided it was probably time I gave them another go. It’s not that I don’t like them, but I haven’t watched them endlessly. Also slightly embarrassing was my inability to instantly see, in a loaded dice tray, d10s vs d12s for example, so a very patient Remi F next to me would help me get them rolled more quickly than I might have done.

The final big bad combat was something else as the nasty cop was really hard to kill, but we did our best – although any pretence of doing things quietly rather went out the window. Especially when I thought I’d easily kill Marlowe (how wrong I was) because of what my cop boyfriend had told me about him.

This game went past its finish time but that was largely thanks to a late start due to food being delayed and then a break because one of our number, struggling with disability, needed a break when other tables nearby got a little too rowdy. To be honest, I was with him on that as it was a struggle to hear and by this stage of the weekend, was rather on the edge of coping myself. Well done him for being brave enough to ask us to stop, but I felt for Dom who could see it becoming harder to wrap things up in the available time. Still, it was the end of the convention and as I was staying another night (neither Jane or I could face a really late drive back to the south coast) I had nothing better to do and would happily have gone on longer. With some painkillers and pep pills!

As it was, we could help Dom and Graham pack up and carry things to their cars and then collapse. I headed for bed but did finish up watching a new Count of Monte Cristo series that I’d highly recommend. (On BBC iPlayer).

At other tables:

The Armageddon Run – The Code of the Spacelanes“Blake’s 7 does Total Recall” - Simon Burley
Absolute Zero - Night Drifters: Second Stage – Guy Milner
The Raggedy Edge III: Friends Reunited – Offworlders – Steve Hampshire
Dakka Dakka – Savage Worlds (Space Orks) – Gaz Bowerbank
Brides of Brixton – Darkness of the Demimonde – Sue Savage
The Tartarus Intercept – Call of Cthulhu 7e – Andy Sangar
Shadows Dark Agents (B5) – Nights Black Agents – Neil Gow
Perturbation in Paliphone – Cepheus Universal – Graham Spearing

The journey home was pretty much the same as the trip up. With similar length breaks of 40 minutes and 20 minutes. No really bad traffic, just heavy all the way and only a couple of errors that were no doubt the result of failed Pilot and Astrogate rolls or just plain Endurance rolls. I was too tired to create more Traveller content – although I would like to have done some edits on my adventure while they were fresh in my memory or started sketching out my father-of-the-bride speech. Instead, a cryptic crossword passed some of the time and we managed to return safely thinking: it’s only a month till TravCon!

 

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