Freelance Traveller

After-Action Report: TravCon 2025

by Timothy Collinson

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2025 issue.

As ever, this is my idiosyncratic take, and I can only be in one place at one time. My apologies to all those who didn’t get a mention or whose photos didn’t quite make the cut.

It’s often said that TravCon feels like a family. Perhaps because it’s so small with just three dozen of us or so in attendance. Perhaps it’s because the small motel we stay in feels cosy. Maybe it’s because we can’t choose each other. Perhaps it is because lack of room for growth means you tend to see many of the same faces each year. Perhaps it’s that we’re such a friendly bunch. Or perhaps it is just because we’re all growing old together, are vaguely irritated with each other, and consider that getting together once a year for our high day and holiday quite enough, thank you!

This year, the family effect was magnified with the loss of Derrick Jones during the year. His death had been keenly felt by the community a few months previously as news spread around social media. Now, that untimely loss was brought home to us with a large Derrick-shaped hole in the gathering. Before we kicked off formal proceedings on the Saturday morning, we had a minute’s silence for him and remembered the larger-than-life regular at our annual event. If you’d like some glimpses into his presence at TravCon, search for his forename in A Decade of TravConPWYW/Free. Any proceeds go to the Help for Heroes charity which was close to Derrick’s heart.

Of course, there are endings but there are beginnings too and it was great to see new faces this year attending for the first time. I met and played with (The New) Steve and Scott, but I’m certain there were others too. As well someone returning for the second time but this year having the courage to play as well. Clearly we hadn’t scared Kez off too much last year. It was great to hear her say at the end that she’d felt welcome at the tables and supported through her first face-to-face adventures.

Friday: Travels

I travelled up once again with long suffering work colleague Jane P who put up with me ‘rehearsing’ some new NPCs I’d written for the wine tasting which begins Zilan Wine. More of that later. It helped passed the time and I was very impressed how, as I read out twenty names and descriptions and potential lines they might deliver, she was able – whilst driving – to refer back to a character six previously and suggest that they might link up together with character Y for reason X. I’d struggle to do that with them all written down in front of me. It gave me a little confidence that I could run a complex scene with this motley bunch and it ought to be ok.

Ironically, my weekend was bookended by admin. Bwaps on the Friday night and the Zilan Wine bureaucrats on the Sunday afternoon. This was ironic because, as we drove up, I just thought I’d double check I wasn’t down for an a/v duty at church on Sunday while I was away. In checking that – my diary mercifully free – I spotted that I was down for a tour and lecture to a group of visiting Omanis on the Monday. Now I always book Monday off to recuperate from the convention, but I’d completely lost sight of that appointment. Not the worst of problems as I realized I could just struggle in to work for that event at lunchtime and go home. The snag was I’d not booked a room for thirty plus people so I could demo our website and resources. Previously I could have done that on my phone using the calendar system we had. Big changes over the summer at work had meant switching from Google to Microsoft (Gmail to Outlook, Meet to Teams, calendars changing and more) as well as our Library website changing both its front end and its back end which meant some quite complex new software to learn and a completely new ‘look’ to navigate and teach to students. (I generally deliver lectures with no notes but use the webpages I show off as my aide memoire which meant that all that was gone). Book ordering systems had also changed and a couple of other things too. I was running away to TravCon, at a bad time of year, in order to escape the ongoing mayhem. 

(Not that there’s not mayhem of various kinds at TravCon, below one of the labels around the hall reminding us of important health & safety tips).

I considered seeing if a colleague could step in for me with the tour but between the complexity and the fact that at this time of year everyone else is busy with teaching, I knew I’d have to go in and deliver it myself. But what about the room? The only real solution I could think of was to see if my boss was free right then, Friday afternoon, to get on the system and book a suitable space. To my huge relief, she was able to do just that and not chastise me too harshly for having fouled up. I looked up from all the emails we were exchanging and Teams messages we were swapping to discover Jane and I were driving north on the M1. That was a surprise. We don’t want the M1! I should have been paying more attention to helping navigate. Another failure. As we left the motorway to cut across to the A1(M), we got in the wrong lane and ended up going back down a sliproad onto the motorway we’d just left, still heading north. I really needed to buck up my Navigation skills or rolls. I felt like I was rolling poorly and applying the DM-3 unskilled penalty. Still, my boss, still online, found it amusing and sympathised that the junction, which she knew, is tricky.

The sting in the tail of that sorry saga is that  when I arrived home on Sunday evening, my family reported there had been phone calls on Sunday morning. Apparently, I had been on the rota (but had failed to copy the new rota into the new calendar) although fortunately someone had been able to step into my absence. More grovelling.

Anyway, I report on that sorry saga to show why it’s ironic that I’m attempting to do anything at all with bureaucracy. How can I think of running 50+ bureaucrats and a Bwap adventure when clearly my Admin ability also rates as unskilled? It’s laughable.

Friday: Bwappery!

While we’re on the subject of Bwaps, it’s perhaps worth explaining just why I had a Bwap adventure in my bag. TravellerCon – the US Traveller convention which runs in a week or two – had chosen the Newts as their theme for the year. In line with that, Jeff Zeitlin had announced that the September/October issue of Freelance Traveller would be Bwap themed. When he’d first announced that I’d decided that I would have to step back from offering anything mainly due to all the changes I mentioned above. I was already feeling overloaded and also didn’t think I knew much about the Bwaps.  (Although I had opened my running of The Traveller Adventure campaign with Weekea-da, a broker, who welcomed the PCs (and the players) to Aramis and dealt with the annual maintenance which kicks the whole thing off. Bakaka! Welcome!)

On holiday, far from home and my books, I’d happened to glance at TML – to which I still don’t seem to be able to resubscribe but can find the archives on the internet – and saw that despite it being well into October and Freelance Traveller being horribly overdue for Reasons, Jeff still wanted Bwap material. Again, I dismissed the thought as I had deliberately not taken my laptop on holiday. The aim was to properly ‘switch off’. Not to mention that with the loss of Google Drive facilities, I no longer have access to all my books online. But you know how it is, idly swimming in a Swedish lake I had all to myself and completely chilled out, I both had an Idea and realized I could access Aliens of Charted Space: Volume 3 via my Mongoose Publishing account. If I could download it to my phone, I could transfer it to my reMarkable and read it easily enough there to get my head round the rules and background. Now the problem was that it was ‘changeover’ day halfway through our trip as we moved from the middle of the country to the southern end of Sweden – a long, long day’s driving. Still, it gave me time to mull on my Idea. Female Bwaps generally stay in the crèche but what if there was a good reason for one being out and about but not being insane? I’d have to type my notes on my phone or handwrite the article on the reMarkable and then try the text conversion (ok, but not brilliant). Neither of those options is as fast as I can touch type on a decent keyboard. Not to mention that presumably Jeff wanted any articles yesterday. But I was able to send an email with a character write up for one Woba-ab Kabeb and feel relatively pleased with her.

The snag with that was that my brain started ticking over. I started thinking about putting a crew together for Woba-ab to join. The ship in AoCS3 would be perfect and I could give it some quirks to make that something of a character too. In thinking about NPCs, I was using Psych Profiles by Richard Honeycutt to develop them when I realized they wouldn’t have human virtues and vices, so an article on Bwap Psych Profiles was an obvious next step. By now, Akwek: A Bwap Merchant Trader and Crew had taken shape, and I was convinced Freelance Traveller would be being published any moment, so I doubted Jeff wanted any more, but he hadn’t told me to stop. Thinking about Newt philosophy and regeneration produced a conversation between the captain and the engineer – a piece of fiction I hope Jeff will use subsequently. I also could also see a ‘gap’ in producing a piece of equipment and came up with a skinmarker tattoo device for non-Bwaps who want to ‘fit in’. After all this it seemed obvious to write a short adventure for the crew to get involved in and The Lost Crèche of Perpethwe was the result. By now I felt I’d been living amongst the Bwaps and much though I wanted to turn my brain off, it refused so I typed the entire adventure rather stream-of-consciousness and definitely in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s state of flow. (Except for a debate with myself over whether it should be set on a desert world to make it even tougher for the humidity loving amphibians.) As Freelance Traveller still hadn’t appeared and I was back at work commuting by now, I thought I really ought to finally read Karel Čapek’s War With the Newts to see what that was like and whether there was any mileage in a review. I doubted there was time to send it in but it’s a short read and it turns out there was time and it did seem relevant. Finally, my brain seemed to have run out of ideas (burnt itself out?) and was letting me rest. Good job. I really needed to get my head into gear for running Zilan Wine.

All of that is to say that on the morning of departure for TravCon, I’d wondered about offering an ad hoc game to anyone interested. By interested, I mean those of us who find the tiny bar filled with excited travellers ready for a new convention just too noisy to be able to hear. If I was going to run something like that, I didn’t want anything big and sprawling. Why not try Lost Crèche?  I just managed to print out some half page character sheets before Jane arrived to collect me.

Friday: The Lost Crèche of Perpethwe

Thus, after the obligatory trip to Royal Spice Land next door to the motel for an evening meal and poppadoms, The Lost Crèche of Perpethwe broke several records.  First game I’ve run from a reMarkable as I didn’t have a printout (bit of a pain for quick referencing, but doable for something quite short).  First game I’ve run with no handouts (save the character sheets).  And probably the fastest writing to running time I’ve ever managed (just one week).  I think it is also the first game I’ve run where someone has come in costume; I jest, but Nigel was sporting one of his fabulous kaftans and fit right in!  It even had a hood!

I’d nearly called the adventure From Mudbath to Mudbath as it begins and ends with one, but my fears about it not having a proper climax proved unfounded.  The players seemed quite happy to have a philosophy debate in a mudbath as the fitting end of their exploration and discussions about what to do about the lost crèche. We didn’t go on too late so there was still time to go to bed and read Spindrift which I’d be running in the morning. And I think the players enjoyed it. Including (The New) Steve for whom it was the first experience of TravCon. At least he said he learned a lot about Bwaps. Perhaps more than he wanted to as a couple of weeks of indigestion on the subject got dumped into the three hours or so we spent with it. One player did opt to just watch as they weren’t feeling very well, but I suspect they’d have enjoyed taking on Woba-ab, so I wished I’d brought a printout of her as well. Stupid of me.

In the middle of the game, Andy brought in the convention freebie. There was much rumoured excitement about this and hints had been made that I was really going to like this. The hints weren’t wrong.  It was a gorgeous book with two BITS adventures done up in the style of an old GDW Double Adventure – i.e. tête-bêche (not dos-à-dos as some call it) [In the US, this is generally called ‘back-to-back’, or ‘Ace Doubles’ (the latter after a publisher that formatted SF novellas this way) -ed.]. This updates the adventure to Mongoose 2nd Edition, tidies it up and reformats it. It’s already a treasure. (You can see a picture in Dom Mooney’s AAR) They’ll be published as singleton print on demand volumes at some point I’m told.

Saturday: Spindrift

The usual breakfast, the usual dazed but friendly chat, the usual decamp from Redwings Lodge to Alconbury Hall a short drive down the road and we were all set for the first formal session. You may recall that for the first time last year, following our three-year Covid hiatus, we were staying in Redwings but gaming in a village hall a short drive down the road. The motel has converted the rooms we gamed in to bedrooms; everyone’s feeling the pinch. The village hall is large and spacious but essentially means we’re all in one room so the acoustics can be tricky. There’s one room to banish the Chirpers to and a kitchen for refreshments.

Andy welcomed us, we had the minute’s silence mentioned above and the signup sheets were laid out on the table just 15 minutes before. I was somewhat embarrassed/gratified that Spindrift attracted six names in about as many seconds. For something that’s been published on the web for a little while – rather than something de novo for TravCon as is my usual habit – I was surprised. I’ve run it at the Faversham gaming weekend where it ran over two three-hour slots. I’ve run it twice at North Star (four hours each and not really fitting into either slot), so I figured this would probably be its last outing. Not because I don’t like it but because I tend to get to the stage where I’ve ‘been there, done that’ and want to move onto something new. Still, there are sandboxy segments enough that it runs differently each time, so that helps.

If you want the plot, it can be found on the Zhodani Base website where it came second in that year’s adventure writing competition and it’s also in Freelance Traveller in English and Vuelo Raso in Spanish. However, that 2000-word version (the Zhodani Base limit) has now morphed into 80 pages with all sorts of options and extra details. So I was relatively confident that even if anyone did know it, there would be enough there to provide something entertaining even if slightly predictable. As it happened, no one claimed to know it. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved at that point! Although having said that, there was one brand new player to TravCon who may not have known it but did manage to have three remarkably prescient comments about possibilities which caused me some shock. Fortunately, none of the other players were paying much attention and the moments slipped by. It does give me pause for thought, however, about whether I’m writing a bit predictably.

I’d managed to forget my spritzer of salt water. Previously I’ve made a last-minute trip to the beach to fill a spray bottle with the real stuff from the beach. The idea is to give the characters arriving on Spindrift a literal taste of the atmosphere and storm. Without that, I made do with flicking water from a cup I’d, too lightly, salted from the motel’s bar. That was a mistake. The spritzer works well and has range. The flicking had limited range and put far too much water on a table filled with paper! Lesson learned. It’s questionable what it adds in any case. Though I make sure I include myself in the ‘spindrift’ splattering just to be fair.

There are some sidetracks in the adventure I’ve written that we didn’t get into as I knew time would be short and I’d have loved to do more of the ‘advertisements’ on the noticeboard (all of which have something, however small, behind them) but there just isn’t time in four hours. However, the characters, the players, bought into the patron’s request and some fifteen minutes before the end had uncovered what was going on and were more than ready to confront the baddies. An excellent approach on their part, some excellent rolls from all of them and some very poor ones on my part meant that the antagonists were soon a smear on a cave floor as a group on the cargo ramp opened up with their weapons while, just to finish them off, the March Harrier’s turrets let loose. The PCs could save the day, rescue the eroctopi and feel good about their future. If it was a farewell to the adventure, I certainly enjoyed it and I hope the players did too.

Also in this slot:

John G running Is It Dead Yet?

““I’m telling you everything is off… this shouldn’t be happening… So much for…””

""2 MINUTES AND COUNTING…”

“GET TO THE GRAV RAFT…!””

Jane P – Signal GK: Under Attack

You have successfully recruited the defector, Dr Arnold Rushorin, and got him home. However, can you keep him?

Jeff M – The Alef Gambit

Alef is a balkanised war-weary world where mercenaries like you found lovely long contracts. At least, that’s what those who’ve got here before you say. You arrived too late… the war has run out of steam. You’re too broke to leave, but luckily a Vargr made you an offer. It’s good pay for a simple job.

All you have to do is not be Vargr, sink a small boat on an interdicted world that barely scrapes the industrial age using only what passes for “weapons” down there. And do it all without the Imperium’s fleet in orbit noticing.

Jeff M running The Alef Gambit

Ravi S – Four Bounties. Three Weeks. 36 Million Credits [classic Traveller rules]

The galaxy is a cold place. Blackstar Recoveries doesn’t care about justice, only proof – DNA swabs, photos, or a body cooling in the hold. Four marks stand between you and the payday of your life: a soldier who became a ghost with a rifle, a syndicate queen who buys loyalty in blood and credits, a preacher who drowns the faithful in promises of salvation, and a shadowy crime lord whose grubby fingers are in every criminal pie. Alive, they’ll fetch fortunes. Dead, they’ll fetch enough. But leads reek of betrayal, contacts wait to sell you out, and every planet hides knives in the dark. Out here, the line between hunter and hunted is a coin toss. You chase them because that’s the job. And the job always ends the same: someone gets paid, someone gets buried, and the void doesn’t remember either way.

Neil M and one of the props for Sunken Treasure

Neil M – Sunken Treasure

The Angel’s Share – a 200-ton Free Trader, lost in the last Frontier War. You’ve landed in the Olympia system with intel that says she’s still out there. The damage isn’t as bad as the reports claimed. Salvage her, get her spaceworthy again, and you’ll walk away with a fat payday.

Saturday: Pioneer: Rescue in Low Earth Orbit

Just time to grab a sandwich – thank you Nigel! – and a stop (a half hour lie down of which I’m supposed to do three a day to combat CFS) before it was time for the next four slot from 1400-1800.  At least for this slot I didn’t have to feel quite so bad at missing out.  Dom M was running his Deepnight Revelation adventure which I’d played at North Star earlier in the year.  Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed playing again to be honest; it was a lot of fun.  He was also showing off his new reMarkable Move (Dom writes about it in his blog). This is a shrunk reMarkable PaperPro – but only shrunk in size, not in features. I can’t quite justify the cost of one as my PaperPro does the trick, but I did wipe the drool off it before reluctantly handing it back.

For each game you run at TravCon, you’re allowed first dibs on a game you want to play in. Whether The Lost Crèche of Perpethwe would have counted for these purposes was a moot point as there were only two slots I could play and I was already running games in two formal slots. However, it did mean that I could get on the roster for Pioneer.

Pioneer is the new setting from Mongoose just about to go into Kickstarter.  It’s near Earth, near future and looks like it will be really fun.  Although I did point out that it might need to differentiate itself from Zozer’s Orbital and Orbital 2100 setting which at first glance seems very very similar.  (I had rather thought the Orbital setting had been subsumed into Zozer’s Hostile setting, but I’ve just read that they’re about to bring out a new edition of it to fit with the Cepheus Universal rulebook.)  (Oh, and for anyone that is interested, I may have written the only support material for the setting in three adventures you can find in Freelance Traveller: The Edge of Humanity, The Edge of Power and The Edge of Helium.  Which reminds me, it’s high time I did another in the supposed series tracking in from the edge of the Solar System.)

The other draw of playing Pioneer was that it was being run by Mongoose’s new Marketing Manager. It’s great to see the company attending/supporting TravCon – you may recall that last year Matt and Isabella did a Q&A – and it would be good to see more of this; perhaps staying longer or even playing in a game or two so that they can see what grabs the interest of fans.  In any event, we met Liv Kennedy and she ran those of us who had signed up through Rescue in Low Earth Orbit. We were mission specialists after the fashion of NASA or ESA types who were tasked with rescuing six billionaires. Their hour-long spaceflight has gone wrong. They are running out of air and we’re on a tight schedule. We need to get the equipment, personnel and plan together, get up there into LEO and effect a rescue. Of course, with the billionaires painted in some detail that of course we couldn’t possibly match to anyone in real life, we weren’t sure that we actually wanted to rescue them, but fortunately one had a dog, so we went for the sake of the canine if nothing else. Well, we were professionals.

Pioneer is immediately recognizable as the usual Traveller rules but with some tweaks for the setting. From minor (vacc suit becoming spacesuit) to more major, I think, such as Reputation. We began to get into Reputation in the game, and it did force us to make some choices, but in a convention game rather than a campaign it was a little hard to see just how much it would impact events and decisions, so I’ll reserve judgement on that. Three things stand out in my memory of this slot. Firstly, Alex T for whom this really was his ‘wheelhouse’ I think the expression is. He was brilliant on getting into character but also having the knowledge of what might work, what might not and what we should avoid like the plague. I dare say we’d have had a much tougher time of doing any kind of rescue if he’d not been aboard. Secondly, we were given the opportunity to debrief Liv on elements we thought worked well and things that perhaps could be looked at or tweaked to improve them. Hopefully, those comments will translate at least into revisions for the adventure if not the game itself. I could certainly see a lot of really valuable role-playing (and Traveller) experience in some of the comments that were being made. Well done Andy, Jeff, Kez and Alex. Thirdly, I had my moment in the sun. Often I only think of the right line twenty minutes after the event, or even the next day, when it’s far too late, but for once something clicked.  I may have been failing my Admin rolls, but I hit double six with some kind of Art roll.

Andy Lilly, our glorious convention organizer, was playing a social media influencer type with the wonderful handle: Ink. S/he (all the character names for the scenario were cleverly androgynous, so kudos to the writer, Chris Griffen I think, for that) had all these media channels s/he needed to feed in order to improve Reputation and get us the funding we required and so on. There was a debate amongst the more knowledgeable types at one point as to how much bandwidth there would be for such purposes in low Earth orbit. My contribution was merely to point out: “Remember, in space, no one can hear you stream.” Unfortunately, it got lost in all the noise around the table and in the hall, but Kez had heard and dutifully got me to repeat it for the gang. Well, it was worth bothering with. Indeed, so much so, that we both won the Ping… F*** It! award at the end of the convention for most enforced laughter or something. (We’re wondering if there should be an addition to the awards for ‘best one-liner’ as well as the SEH and PFI). As the prizes were all things I had on my shelves, I deferred to Kez picking something and she very wisely picked up the last remaining copy of the wonderful BITS campaign In Search of Angels.

Also in this slot:

Paul G – Blood, Tears and Valkyries

My life had been a series of calculated steps, each one leading to a new horizon, a new mission. Then, the mission ended, and the steps stopped. The career, a blur of forgotten faces and silenced threats, was over. For a year, I was a ghost, a drifter in the vast blackness, and with each jump, the past became a little more distant, the future a little more uncertain. One failure bled into another until I found myself marooned on a backwater world, a dead end with no way out. The ship was gone, the funds were a memory, and the person I used to be was just another ghost.

Six months. That's how long I had been rotting in the dust. The routine was simple: find a bottle, find a corner, and try to forget. Tonight, however, was different. The bar, a grimy pit of broken dreams and cheap liquor, was a tinderbox. A wrong word, a lingering stare, a half-empty glass – it was all it took. The odds were stacked against me. But then, a flicker. A glimmer of something in the eyes of the other lost souls around me. A shared desperation. A flicker of hope. I don't remember who threw the first punch, who drew the first blood. I just remember the rhythm of the fight, the synchronized chaos of our movements, a perfect storm of survival. We fought not as strangers, but as a unit, a pack of wolves against a world that had forgotten us.

We walked out into the cool night air, battered but unbroken, a silent camaraderie forged in the crucible of violence. We were no longer just survivors; we were a brotherhood. The universe had taken everything, but in that grimy bar, it had given us something back: a common cause, a shared purpose. Our luck, it seemed, had changed. The funds were still gone, the ship was still a dream, but the fire had returned.

Then came the Scout. Andre Santo. An old traveller, a relic of a bygone era. Andre appeared out of the shadows, a whisper of a forgotten past. Where we met, how the conversation started, it was all a blur. All that mattered were the stories – tales of a life lived on the edge, of stars seen and worlds left behind. The person was a living legend, a testament to a life of freedom. Andre offered us a chance, a way back into the stars, a second act.  We couldn't refuse.

Three months later, we had a ship. The Svalbardi, a 70 year old rust-bucket with a long history and a longer list of repairs. It was a ghost itself, a “long retired” vessel held together by spit and duct tape, but it was our ticket. A long-term lease, a handshake deal, a whisper of a promise. The payments were simple: keep it running, keep it flying. The jump drives groaned in protest, the hull creaked like an old man’s bones in the void, but it flew. And unless war came, we were free.

But there was always a catch. One job. One last job, a final piece of the puzzle, and then we were free to roam. The message from Andre was clear, a ghost in the machine: “Find the Bruce.” And then, a name, a whisper on the wind: The Blood Angels. Who were they? Why had Andre left? The past was catching up, the ghosts were coming out of the woodwork, and the person I used to be was knocking on the door. The game had started again. And this time, I was not just a player; I was the target.

Steve Q – A Simple Job

The freighter Baldur has been chartered to take a scientific survey party to an uninhabitable world. Take them there, wait while they do their work, bring them home. What could be simpler?

Dom M – Deepnight Legacy

Rift Hauler 5A7 has been posted 6 weeks overdue, on her mission six parsecs into the Great Rift. An emergency crew has been pulled together for Rift Hauler 4A4, diverting her from planned maintenance at the Imperial Naval Base at Giikur. It’s most likely that the 5A7 has technical issues which have prevented a timely return, but she’s out in the Great Rift and there’s a base there that could be missing supplies if the worst has happened. You’re assigned to the crew for this important emergency response mission; resupply the base, help recover the missing vessel or find out if she made it to this outpost, all alone in the dark.

Richard T – Sons of Suul: Cubes

Richard T runs Sons of Suul: Cubes

The Third Imperium rests in uneasy peace – a golden age built on fragile treaties and forgotten corners of space.

Far from the core worlds, in a quiet, unremarkable system, the crew of the Shaggy Destiny hunts for lost relics and ancient tech – chasing the dream of one big score.

They’re scavengers. Treasure-seekers. Desperate or daring, depending on the day.

But some things buried in the dark were meant to stay forgotten.

This is their story. One lucky find could change everything – or destroy them all.

Robin F runs Little House on the Outback

Robin F – Little House on the Outback

Life on the frontier: harsh, unpredictable, and full of possibility.

Saturday Evening: The Sixth Sense

No time to rest, well, maybe a quick lie down thanks to Alex and Kez kindly getting me an extra portion of fish and chips. But more importantly, it was Chirper time for some of us. Andy’s annual outing with the diminutive and dim-witted trash collectors had only been scheduled for Sunday. I’d been disappointed to realize that I’d have to miss out this year. However, popular demand had apparently prevailed and Andy was running it in another slot. Hurrah!  I’d love to have played in Alex’s adventure – great to see him face-to-face and not just a small rectangle on a laptop screen – but my earlier whinging about the Chirpers meant I couldn’t really say no. Thus I took on Rurv, the hapless driver, once again.

The 1930-2330 game had been banished from the main hall where all the other tables are. We would be playing in the foyer.  There are those who complain that four hours of a nearby table full of players, sorry Chirpers, chirping away in their trill voices, just “does their head in”. I don’t see it myself, but to preserve sanity, we’d been sent to a secluded, if somewhat draughty, spot by the front door. One advantage for me was that the general noise levels were lower so I could actually hear what was going on a little better. I fear that the limiting factor on my attendance at TravCon won’t be energy levels – although they’re close to forcing me to give it up – but being able to hear around a table of seven in an echoey hall. Still, new hearing aids during the year now meant I have a ‘Restaurant’ (or lecture) setting where you can suppress noise behind you in favour of speech in front of you. The weekend was just the moment for that setting.

The adventure this year carried immediately on from events last year – suggesting that had we actually stopped clarting around we could probably have done it all in one slot – but that’s not really the point of the Chirper games. The point is to have fun, chirp in high pitched voices and to indulge in a bit of, a lot of, silliness. I think the game really is to see how much we can exasperate Andy with how little of the plot we can do and yet still feel we’ve filled four hours productively!

There’s probably not much point in trying to rehearse the plot here – something to do with some nasties using a yoga teacher to psionically subvert the young humans we’ve befriended. We spent maybe three hours doing pretty much anything but the plot and then the last 45 minutes or so actually getting somewhere.  As I say, a lot of fun!

One of the most interesting aspects of this game for me was sitting next to the brand new TravCon attendee, Scott. A young man, I think the son of Pete, or was it Paul? I try to keep up but there’s so little time. Anyway, I’m not at all sure he had any idea of what he was getting into. Andy needed a two-minute voice test to choose between the two recording devices he wanted to use to try and capture some of the mayhem. Us old-timers immediately fell into character with two minutes of jabber about absolutely nothing. Scott looked a bit shocked at the way everyone had just started up and kept it up and seemed to have entirely lost touch with reality. He said, “I don’t think I can do that.” I reassured him he could and sure enough just a few minutes later he was ‘in character’ and chirping with the rest of us. Poor lad, he’d ended up with the leader character and spent a valiant few hours trying to exert some sort of authority or direction on his clueless, chaotic and constantly troublesome team. I checked with him once or twice during the game and once at the end, and I’m fairly confident he bought into the fun and had a good time. We’ll see next year perhaps!

Unfortunately for me, the most frustrating aspect of the game was that maybe an hour from the end I was really losing any ability to think or to move. And this despite having excused myself for a twenty-minute lie down. In the face of all the travel the day before and the Travelling today, I’d reached the end, passed it and was now facing something of a collapse. I’m afraid Rurv was rather quiet for much of that period, but fortunately his driving duties were over by that time and he could fade away a little. Just to be clear, this was absolutely not a fault of the game with which I was thoroughly engaged. Just life with CFS and not pacing myself adequately. I wasn’t sad, however, that we wrapped up fifteen minutes early. I think I was asleep within a few seconds of being back in my bed. If anything was happening in the bar, I didn’t hear it!

Also in this slot:

Edd Q – Snakes

You’re an integral part of a highly sophisticatedActual level of sophistication may vary team specializing in asset extraction. There’s a life-changing opportunity on the table. If you accept it, you could end up being a (very wealthy) legend. Or dead. Dead is definitely a very real option

Steve H – On Casteria

Casteria is an unappealing low tech ice ball with primitive inhabitants. So why did a prominent scientist make such an effort to go there? And why hasn’t he returned? You are available, in need of money and have an atmosphere-capable ship, so it seems like a job for you.

Alex T – The Extraction

You are agents of Imperial Naval Intelligence, posted to Yres, on the Imperial frontier close to the Vargr extents. Day-to-day business of keeping tabs on the local inter-factional strife is interrupted by an urgent mission. Someone needs rescuing, whether they like it or not. The clock is ticking.

James F on stage worshipping the gods

James F – Dropship Alpha

Strap in and brace yourself. You’re outnumbered, outgunned, and cut off from support – yet in your hands are the Imperium’s finest tools of war.  Time to prove they were worth the cost.

Richard T – The Second Sons: Winds of Change

The Third Imperium endures – a gilded age of peace, where the engines of expansion hum quietly beneath a polished surface. But peace is never permanent. And beneath the ancient stone of Old Vland, something old begins to awaken.

The Ziru Sirka is gone, its empire scattered to dust. Or so they say.

In the hidden chambers of the Old Houses, ancient bloodlines remember too well. They do not forget. They do not forgive.

And now, the Second Sons – unwanted, unheeded, and unbound by duty – hear the call.

Not all legacies die in the dark. Some are waiting to be claimed.

The past is reaching forward.

Sunday: Scenes from The Traveller Adventure

Sunday sees a slightly later start (half an hour isn’t much but is more than welcome at that point) and again, breakfast in the motel bar. Cereals and toast; orange juice coffee and tea. And some pre-wrapped vacuum-packed thing that called itself a croissant and I was warned not to try.

Back at the hall, I didn’t have to sign up but could watch the second running of the Chirper game sign up in no time at all and my offering fill its slots just a short time after. This surprised me. Those who’ve followed these reports over the years will know that I’ve been trying to recycle some of the effort I put into preparing and running The Traveller Adventure campaign by doing ‘scenes from’ at TravCon. Those who know The Traveller Adventure will know that the next scene in chapter order is Zilan Wine. Those who know Zilan Wine will also know that it’s the infamous Traveller adventure, which also exists as Exit Visa in The Traveller Book and Escape from Arden elsewhere. Infamous because it’s essentially a labyrinth of 47 bureaucrats the characters (and the players) must negotiate in order to obtain five forms that they need so that they can export said Zilan wine from the planet Zila. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Although to give it credit, it does make a change from the usual pace, and it isn’t uninteresting if you like that sort of thing.

However, managing all the bureaucrats and the adventure is quite the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The procedure is hard enough. Making the ’crats feel different is even harder. The book doesn’t even name them and yet suggests they should have names. I agree. So, to run it with my gaming group maybe a decade previously, I’d worked at naming them all, giving them all heights, weights, hair/eye colour etc and some other distinctives. I’d even determined all their birthdays so we could have the fun of an office full of birthday cards or congratulations and so on to give the PCs something to riff off. Worse than that, some of the ’crats have titles which imply other administrators who are not even listed in the book, such as Assistant to So-and-so or Supervisor of Thingamajig. It doesn’t take much imagination to think the PCs might want to see those bureaucrats.  So I didn’t have 47, I had 53.

It was worse than that. I had heard, in the intervening years, that one group’s solution to the whole problem was simply to go to the local noble – who surely deals with such things on a daily basis – and find out how they get anything done in such an environment. I looked up who the local nobles were and travellermap told me they were a knight and a duke. It didn’t take long to knock up a Duchess and a Sir as well as figuring that they’d have aides the PCs were more likely to encounter. I now had 57 NPCs to handle. Mr Heinz would be proud of me.

It gets worse still. The chapter opens with the PCs going to a wine tasting which is where they meet the patron who wants to employ them to export the wine off world. I thought it might help the adventure along if we actually had some wine to taste. Now there’s a handout. Jane P kindly helped me source some small bottles of red, white and rosé which looked suitably unusual. That could stand in for Zilan Wine and Jane even found some shot glasses to give it more of a wine ‘tasting’ feel. (I hadn’t of course thought through the fact that some players would be driving home later that afternoon and wouldn’t want to be imbibing too much.) 

If you’re going to have a wine tasting, however, you need some people to network with and meet and greet. Although I suppose it would be possible to stand in a corner as a crew and make a clique of your own. Twenty more NPCs later (see notes on the drive up, above) I was simply making a rod for my own back. 77 NPCs. I don’t think I’ve ever run an adventure with more potential people for the PCs to meet.  (Ashfall II: Under the Dome has a fair few, but not that many).

When I first ran the adventure as part of the TTA campaign, we spent an evening working through the various encounters and other things and had a lot of fun. But we’d maybe done a little more than half when it was time to quit. I polled the players all those years ago on whether they wanted to continue next time or just take the forms as ‘obtained’ and ‘signed’. They all opted for the latter. Clearly once was fun but twice was pushing it.

With all that in mind, you can see why I had little confidence in my ability to make the thing interesting, and I had little confidence that (jaded? experienced?) Traveller players would have any interest in playing it. I prepped the next chapter as well in case they decided they just wanted to move on. But I seriously thought about not offering it at all.

Instead, to familiarize myself with the bureaucrats again and, in my head at least, to make them easier to manage, I decided to write them all out on their own 5×3 card. I was heavily influenced in this by my antinet of course. This actually worked really well. Although it took pretty much all of my Wednesday off, it meant that I’d spent time with them and felt as if I’d either briefed them on what they needed to say or how they had to behave or how the PCs might wine and dine them. Some of them were beginning to feel like old friends. This made it much easier to picture them when their name came up in the adventure and I’d like to think made them come more alive to the players. I don’t know. You’d have to ask them. One player, Nick G – again a newbie to TravCon although an experienced Traveller player/ref who I’d met online previously – revealed that he’d once run Zilan Wine and he could at least appreciate the effort I’d put in. I think having their birthdays rather tickled him. As did actually having the forms for the captain to fill in which is a nice, if obvious, conceit.

Anyway, all that preparation aside, I discovered that the adventure’s success wasn’t really down to me. It was having six excellent and experienced players around table that really made the difference. There was a moment when a younger player – thank you Karl! – asked why they couldn’t just fly in and grab the wine regardless of the bureaucracy. But just as I was formulating a response, that indeed it was an option although Lisa Fireau and her father would like to maintain the reputation of their family company, the other players or was it the characters?, pointed out that it was illegal and what about the company’s reputation?! I do love Traveller players! No mini-maxing here!

One highlight was a moment towards the end when Pete, playing steward Fred, was being followed by one of Tukera’s goons. He decided the best way to shake his tail would be to present his ID to a nearby policeman and point out the miscreant. Whereupon Pete, who was good friends with Derek and had evidently inherited some of his Traveller paraphernalia said he wanted to offer a small memorial to our departed fellow traveller. I feared the worst thinking it could be crass, it could be uncomfortable, not to mention possibly time consuming and in danger of halting the role-playing immersion in its tracks. I was completely wrong; Pete had judged it perfectly. With a flourish he presented me with one of lovely patent of nobility ID cards Marc Miller doles out with FFE purchases, this one with Derek named as a Duke. Fred, claiming this as his persona, politely informed the policeman that there was a ne’er-do-well causing trouble. I thought it a perfect tribute and couldn’t help but allow him an (unrolled) double six for reaction. The Duke, or rather Fred, moves on, the tail comes up to bribe the policeman to find out what they’ve just been discussing, and is a little taken aback to be promptly arrested and marched off to the station.

Funnily enough, that was part of one of my learning points from this game. For all the preparation I’d done, three of my favourite moments came from moments of interaction that were completely off the cuff. That one with Fred, and also (The New) Steve on the train interacting with a shoe salesman, as well as Kez doing a whole scene as Adma, the medic with a shady past, going off to talk to a gang leader to try and get information on Tukera. None of it scripted; all of it fun. The lesson is that I really should be more relaxed about ‘making stuff up’. I simply fear that if I’ve not got it written down and thought it out in advance it’s unlikely to be any good.

Also in this slot:

Richard T – Sons of Suul: Cubes [see above]

Graham S – Pirate Bait [Cepheus Engine]

Graham S runs Pirate Bait

The unstable political situation on the non-aligned and balkanised world of Janastatja (C55267A-A   Na Ni Po   SA  121  NA) appears to have spawned a further pirate problem. The system is on the border of the Teknan League, one of the Eventide susbsector’s two influential polities. As notorious independent operatives, you have been contacted by Hapag-Ming, an interstellar shipping conglomerate that has seen its business further disrupted by this new problem.

In a sterile business hub, located amongst the Wattiennie downport sprawl, you are to meet with High Adminstrator Vuurst to discuss a straightforward mission, with a well-managed risk profile…

Dom M – Mysteries on Arcturus Station: The Hunt for Sabre IV

As experienced corporate troubleshooters, you’ve been hired by the mining company Lamarck Minerals, LIC to carry out an investigation to locate the Sabre IV, a 1500dT, 310 MCr, jump-capable ore-carrier, which has gone missing from Arcturus Station 3, a backwater system controlled by Banasdan in the Solomani Rim. Foul play is suspected, and recovery of the carrier and its cargo is a matter of urgency.

Simon B – Incident on Tarsus [Stargrunt 2 rules]

These pictures don’t really do Simon’s efforts justice

Operational Briefing – Garda Vilis

Unit: Aces & Eights Mercenary Company

Objective: Hostile elements have seized Mining Station Kappa-17 in the outback. Intelligence confirms a well-armed terrorist cell holding both the site and its personnel.

Mission Parameters:

• Deploy immediately to Garda Vilis, grid reference 43-17.
• Secure the mining facility.
• Neutralise or capture hostile combatants.
• Minimise collateral damage to infrastructure and personnel.
• Stand by for detailed orders.

Andy L – The Sixth Sense

Yes, it's a highly skilled military covert operations team… consisting of Chirpers?

Sunday Afternoon: It's a Wrap!

Andy was doing the rounds of the tables to tell us it was time to wrap up just as the crew were getting the last of the administrative forms, so it seemed a good moment to finish even if we hadn’t quite obtained every signature. It felt like a reasonable ending to cut to the wine loading and planetary exit and hint that there might be more to come.  But that’s for another year.

Time for the usual rounds of thanks, notices to be given, Ravi to give Andy his (now) traditional hug and for the Starburst for Extreme Heroism and the Ping… F*** It! awards to be given out. You may recall that the first is for a great moment around the table and the latter for a terrible moment. The PFI I’ve described above under Pioneer (and see picture on right below with the precious In Search of Angels as a prize. Andy looks distinctly worried that I’m about to ask him for part 2 of the campaign). The SEH went to (The New) Steve (pictured with Andy receiving the collector’s Core Rulebook as a prize, more properly known as ADnD Steve but we won’t talk about that. In James F’s Dropship Alpha, he was playing Ballbuster, a Sergeant of Marines. Said sergeant managed to save Ravi’s admiral character not once, not twice, but three times from near certain death. First when he used countermeasures to counteract incoming fire on two occasions; second when he used a grav belt to physically hurl him upwards to avoid an FGMP blast; and thirdly, the clincher, when he had headbutted a Zhodani trooper trying to psionically attack the admiral.

An honourable mention should go to the close second on the Starburst Award. Alex T was running his first one-shot adventure (having only attended TravCon for the first time last year as a player) and had apparently done as much prepwork and had as many handouts/paperwork as I’ve become known for producing. It looks like I’m going to have look to my laurels and up my game. Or perhaps more sensibly, hand over the baton to the next generation… Alex had also prepared gifts for his players as a thank you for taking part. Shout out to his marvellous A2 battlemap books (pictured with Alex, next column) which in a pair really open up colourful gaming space. And all I could muster was some shot glasses of wine and a squirt of saltwater in the face…

We were all but done but there were also hints that perhaps next year TravCon would be in a different venue. It turns out we like being in one place on one site. It contributes to the family feel of the event. Who doesn’t like spending the weekend in slippers? An old-timer who sadly couldn’t make it this year said something similar to me via email during the year. TravCon might also be at a different time of year as several attendees in education find October a difficult time to be away from work.

It only remained to clear the hall and head home. I should note the work put in by several to make the place starshipshape before we all departed. I’ll miss folk out if I try and name everyone, but I know that Andy, Richard, Simon and Dom at least laboured hard. I’d also like to add my personal thanks to Andy and Richard for organizing another successful year – we probably don’t appreciate it enough, but you do a sterling job in busy lives that gives a great deal of joy to many. Thank you! Jane and I had a much more direct journey home than our drive up and could only reflect as we travelled on yet another brilliant edition of TravCon and already start to look forward to Travelling next year with such a unique and varied alternative family.

 

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