AireCon 2026

Last weekend was AireCon, the three-day board game and ttrpg convention in Harrogate.

I couldn’t make it on Saturday this year, so instead I just attended on Friday and Sunday, running three TTRPGs.

Friday

Although my game didn’t start until 2pm, I arrived just after 11 and dropped off some games at the bring-and-buy. (My memory last year was that there was an early rush for the bring and buy, but leaving it until later was much more relaxed.)

I then wandered the trade hall, chatted to friends, and had a bit to eat from the food trucks (in their new position outside the convention centre in the grounds of the Hilton Hotel (which was used for ttrpgs and other events – a lovely new venue for this year).

ALIEN: Perfect Organism

I ran Perfect Organism, my five-player cinematic ALIEN scenario that focuses on a USCMC investigation into the loss of the Sulaco after Aliens. The investigation team have arrived at LV-426 and the W-Y station there. Things don’t go well...

I had five great players, and a higher survival rate than many of the games. (Although we burned through the NPCs at quite a rate.)

I had updated the scenario to the current ALIEN rules (Evolved edition) and was interested in seeing how it had changed. While there are lots of small changes (a full list here), the main changes as far as I was concerned were the new stress rules. However, having now experienced the new stress rules, I didn’t like them. Maybe they work in longer games (or where you are making lots and lots of dice rolls), but in a short game like Perfect Organism, stress was never a danger. I may go back to the first edition rules when I run it again.

Saturday

I didn’t make Saturday this year, which was a shame. If I had, I would have spent the day playing board games.

Sunday

Good Society

Good Society is Storybrewers’ Jane Austen game. After my experience at last year’s Furnace, I decided to bring my Wealth and Fortune playset to AireCon. The changes I’ve made are around character generation – I’ve created the base characters and links between them beforehand (just like a pregen), but letting the players create the minor characters.

After my experiences of Hillfolk not filling last year, I was a little reluctant to pitch Good Society, but I needn’t have worried – it filled up pretty quickly. 

I had a full table of five players, and after a slightly slow start, they soon got into the swing of the story and got up to all sorts of shenanigans (including a risqué scene in a lake). We reached a fine conclusion, which included a marriage proposal, so it was all as it should be.

(The slow start isn’t unusual with this kind of game. It can take a little while for the players to warm up properly.)

So I was very happy with how my playset worked. I’ve made a few tweaks and if you’re interested, you can download them here.

Thoughts on Good Society

With a second edition imminent, I had some thoughts on my experience.

Resource tokens: For a one-shot, we had an awful lot of resource tokens on the table. With two per main character and one each for the minor characters, that was 20 resource tokens on the table before we added any for the rumours. (And had I been playing strictly according to the rules, there would have been another 10 on the table – I allowed the minor characters only one resolve token each.) 

And as it happened, we didn’t use resolve tokens all that often. Maybe five or six times? So I think in future, just giving each player two resolve tokens to begin with will probably be enough for a one-shot. (And let them share the tokens between the main and minor characters.)

Reputation: While we used the reputation rules to assign new criteria, it didn’t have much impact on the game. I would be tempted to remove reputation completely from a one-shot, except that the players did adjust their reputation tags as they took actions they felt affected their reputation. 

(Technically, reputation tags can be traded for resolve tokens. As noted, we had masses of resolve tokens, so this was never an issue. Also, doing this removes the tag, which makes sense as a game mechanic but not in terms of character.)

Minor characters: With each player having two, we had ten minor characters involved. Not all of them became part of the story (many appeared only briefly). While I’m tempted to suggest just one minor character each, I think having lots of minor characters gives players more opportunities to find exactly the character they need.

Lunch

AireCon doesn’t leave a huge gap between the first and second sessions – just 45 minutes. I was slightly worried about getting back to the bring-and-buy to collect my earnings and unsold games, but it wasn’t crowded, and I had plenty of time to do that and grab something to eat.

Traveller: Calli’s Heroes

My last game was John Ossoway’s adventure for Traveller: Calli’s Heroes. The PCs are Imperial soldiers operating in a warzone during the Fifth Frontier War, and have the opportunity to loot an Ancient vault full of unimaginable riches.

I’d played Calli’s Heroes last year at Furnace, and so I knew it would be a solid con game. John was kind enough to let me have the files, and so at AireCon I took it out for a spin.

Calli’s Heroes was great. I had five good players, all happy to lean into the squad dynamics. They did appropriately soldierly things and ambushed Vargr mercenaries and Zhodani troops. They ended up with a handful of fabulously valuable Ancient artefacts – assuming they can figure out how to fence them. But that’s another adventure…

Next year

I’m already looking forward to next year. Hopefully I will be able to attend all three days…

Masters of Dune review

This is a first-impressions review of Masters of Dune, a campaign for the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium rpg. I’ve only read Masters of Dune, and below I explain why I’m unlikely to ever run it.

Masters of Dune is a 166-page campaign for the Dune rpg. Set over nine chapters, it continues directly from the Agents of Dune starter set (which I reviewed here) and puts the PCs in charge of Arrakis in a distinctly hostile universe.

Each campaign chapter consists of three or four acts, and between them, they cover all the elements you’d expect from an epic Dune campaign: the emperor, the Harkonnens, the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen and so on. The chapters are designed to be experienced in almost any order – bookended by Chapter One (the campaign’s start) and Chapter Nine (its finale).

Along the way, the PCs must deal with Harkonnen treachery, scheming houses, broker deals with powerful factions, learn the ways of the Fremen, and more. As they progress through the campaign, their actions will cause various indices to rise and fall, charting their house’s success and influence. Masters of Dune is everything you’d expect from an alternate-universe Dune campaign.

But I have no interest in running Masters of Dune. 

Why don’t I want to run Masters of Dune?

To be honest, there are a range of reasons. But these are the key ones:

I don’t really like Dune’s 2d20 system. As I explained in my review of the starter set, I’ve bounced off Dune’s system. It’s not the 2d20 system itself, it’s the combination of drives, skills, threat and conflicts that I find hard to grok. In the hands of an expert, I imagine the system works just fine – but it feels like a steeper learning curve than I can face.

I’m not a Dune fan. Masters of Dune rewards fans of the Dune books. I’ve seen the recent films, and I read Dune many decades ago. It’s fine, I’m not really a fan. So there were a lot of things that didn’t make complete sense.

So it was clear I was missing some things (what is kanly?), but I didn’t care enough to look them up.

However, as important as it is for the GM to understand the Dune universe, it’s as important that the players understand it as well. The PCs play the head of House Nagara – and I would expect the characters to be fully familiar with the politicking and negotiation that such positions bring. And yet, on several occasions, I felt that the campaign would let unwary players make decisions that their characters would never make.

Deeply political: On occasions, the campaign is deeply political, presenting numerous NPCs with their own agendas for the PCs to interact with. Not only do I find this a challenge as a GM, but it’s also a challenge for the players. It also reminds me that while I really like political games, I like them as larps, where each faction is played by its own player (or players). I struggle with political ttrpgs, just because I find it hard as a GM to keep everything in my head.

Flawed structure: Masters of Dune’s structure is such that the chapters are self-contained and address a single faction: the Bene Gesserit, the Harkonnen, the Emperor, and so on. They can be played in any order (some chapters contain triggers that happen when certain conditions arise), and some chapters might not even be used.

This is all very well, but it makes no sense to me to play the campaign this way. I would want to break the chapters up so that they are intermingled. So I would introduce the early parts of some chapters early in the campaign, and slowly introduce more complications leading to a climax.

There’s nothing stopping me from doing that, of course, but it means dismantling the whole campaign and rebuilding it.

Unhelpful layout: At first glance, there’s nothing wrong with the layout: two columns on each page, lots of headers and subheaders, a smattering of nice artwork. It’s only when I got into the details that I found a few problems.

Namely, the bullets and bold text are used inconsistently. Sometimes the text is broken up into bullet points (making them stand out and easier to read), but at other times it describes several different scenes the GM might present, hidden behind a wall of text. Bullet points would make them clearer, and I’m not sure why Masters of Dune is so inconsistent.

And the “map” on page 65 is so small and faint it’s virtually unusable. Why wasn’t this given a page of its own? (To be fair, the map is clearer in the pdf, as you can see below. Physically, the map is printed in grey and I found it unreadable.) 

Errors: Masters of Dune contains more errors than I expected:

• There are a lot of “see p.XX” errors – possibly more than I’ve seen in any other book.
• Most of the text on page 135 is repeated on page 136.
• At the end of the first chapter, on page 27, Masters of Dune describes the next steps the players might take and directs the GM to different chapters. Except that’s not how most of those chapters work. For example, while the players might want to seek an alliance with the Fremen, the Fremen chapter starts with the PC’s ornithopter crashing in a remote spot on Arrakis and then befriending some nearby Fremen. They can’t really choose to do that. And the Spacing Guild only becomes involved when the spice supply is threatened.

Overall

So, Masters of Dune isn’t for me.

It’s certainly an epic campaign, and in the hands of a good GM, I expect it’s brilliant. But for me, I would need to overcome my disinterest in Dune’s system and setting and rewrite the campaign’s structure. And I have other games I would rather play.