Monday, May 13, 2024

Northstar 2024

Northstar is probably my favourite of the gaming cons held at the Garrison Hotel in Sheffield, featuring sci-fi games that sometimes get overlooked at other cons. There are a regular core of players and it's gradually increasing in size every year.

This time I was running my hybrid of Tales From the Loop/Alien game that takes the premise that the players are the kids from the colony, having adventures and solving mysteries in the Alien universe. The challenge as a GM is to design a scenario that is challenging and scary without involving violence, death or explicit body horror. I was pleased with the results and I'm pleased to report that Ann, Julian, Dick, George and Timmy the dog solved the mystery of the disappearing kids at Alpha Base on LV-187. 


The afternoon session was These Dark Places, a much grimmer take on space horror, run by Debbie (aka @dragongirl74) which had our crew of space troubleshooters investigating a pair of brutal murders at a mining colony and a missing person. We started to piece together what had happened on the mine level and the outcome was truly horrifying. What larks!

I skipped the evening session due to low energy levels, but was back bright and fresh for my second run at playing Bladerunner, this time with the Fiery Angels casefile which was the sequel to the one I played last year at the same con, featuring the same characters.

This ran all day with a delightfully convoluted plot that took some dark twists and turns. No spoilers, but I was pleased to be able to use the line 'I like your owl' at one point! Cheers to Remi for superb GMing and putting our investigators through the wringer before the inevitable noir conclusion.



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