NorthStar 2025

Northstar is always a highlight of the gaming year, featuring SF games that simply don’t get played anywhere else. This year seemed to be suffering from a higher than normal amount of dropouts, requiring some last minute schedule wrangling from Dom and Graham, but in the end everyone was matched with games in every slot.

My first game (continuing the Wild West theme that I’ve been on recently) was Cowboys vs Xenomorphs, a mash up of the familiar Mongoose Traveller rules with a western setting and (naturally enough) a fine selection of xenomorphs too. The rules are comprehensive enough that you could probably play this as a straight western game, and indeed that’s how we started with our characters moseying into town, finding employment (or new guns) and settling down, before meeting with an old prospector who seemed to have been driven crazy by the unusual metals and gems he had panned out of the river. Then there was the mysterious sounds as if something was flying overhead, screaming like a banshee. Of course, things went south pretty soon after that with a mystery to unravel and a satisfying shootout. Excellent fun!

Sandwiches from Morrison’s for lunch and a chance to catch up with old friends round the tables in the bar, before setting up for the afternoon session. For this, we were down in the Cargo Hold, which was pleasantly cool on a warm day.

The game was an x-files style investigation into a ufo shot down over a small Texas town using Cypher system. Our objectives were to recover any evidence and make sure that everything was appropriately covered up. I was playing as an expert mycologist whose eagerness to inspect a mysterious rash on the arm of a young witness nearly lead to her being infected by a virulent alien fungus. There followed a race against time to track down the wreckage before anyone else was infected, deal with a crazy religious cult and Mexican drug cartels across the border. It was a close run thing, but we pulled it off with the rest of the world none the wiser.

Sunday morning was a new spin on a Star Trek game, using the Unicorn Next Generation rules that I’d not played before, run by Paul Baldowski of All Rolled Up fame. This proved to be an intriguing and fast paced investigation with a great crew, and everyone playing their roles to the full. The conclusion was an appropriately technobabble group effort to thwart the bad guys, and for once I wasn’t playing a Klingon so my voice was intact.

I had my traditional Garrison Hotel Sunday lunch and was pleasantly stuffed, nicely set up for the afternoon game, a player improvised game using the Ironsworn Starforged rules. Everything was generated using random tables and cards, setting us up as representatives of a religious faction searching for a new messiah after a misjump into an uncharted area of strange space. It was supposed to be grimdark but turned out to be somewhat more lighthearted, with a screaming ostrich hunter and a space rhino with its own custom vacc suit. We faced biological horrors inside a monstrous space conch that was an ancient religious weapon. An excellent end to a weekend of out of this world fun!