North Star 2026

Last weekend, I returned to Sheffield’s Garrison Hotel for North Star.

North Star is a two-day SF ttrpg convention, but I was only there for Saturday. I met lots of friends, chatted about games and other nonsense, and played two good games.

The Last Caravan

I didn’t know anything about The Last Caravan before we started playing, but according to the website, it’s a “cars and aliens tabletop role-playing game about a midwinter road trip in the wake of an alien invasion.”

Alien invasions – right up my street!

Neil Gow was running it, and my fellow players were Dom, Jag and Josh. We played family members – I was the responsible father (high school science teacher, Jeff) with my two sons, Jacob (Josh) and Pearson (Jag). Dom played the family dog, Cherokee. Dom didn’t get to name his character – and I left that to my sons.

(I’m not sure how much fun playing the dog would be in a campaign. For a one-shot, fine. But for much longer? Probably not for me.)

So that immediately created a fun family dynamic, which we played on during the game. As for the game itself, Neil gave us a quick rundown of the alien-invasion background, and then I received a text calling for help from my ex-wife, Sarah (who I only referred to as “your mom”). That was followed by an alien attack that destroyed our house (and stopped us dithering over what to take), and so we hit the road, where we fought an alien and rescued terrified citizens from a crazy militia.

As the start to a campaign, it would have been great. I can imagine how the relationships would have developed, and the truth about how Sarah and I had split up would have come out. (We didn’t develop that – but I had chosen “regret” as Jeff’s inadequacy, and I’m sure that had something to do with his ex-wife, but I hadn’t decided what that might be, and inspiration didn’t strike until we were almost done, so I never got to explore it.)

And apparently, there’s plenty in the book to explore. But not in three hours.

My character sheet - and a typical dice roll!

Mechanically, The Last Caravan is a FitD game. I’m sure it was fine, but I failed every single roll but my last one, so I might be feeling a bit sore about that…

Anyway, a lovely session to start the day with. Really enjoyed it.

Gee Cows to the Rescue!

And after lunch, something completely different: Traveller.

Gee Cows to the Rescue! was written and run by veteran Traveller player/ref Timothy Collins. We were playing the crew of a rescue organisation a bit like a cross between Thunderbirds and Médecins Sans Frontières. (This was inspired by an article in JTAS, and the organisation’s acronym, GKAO, led to the “Gee Cows” in the title. Timothy had copies of the article for us to read, and gave us neat patches for our ship uniforms! See the photo below!)

I played Chief Medical Officer Sion Alman, with the other four players (Steve, Jane, Josh, and Chris) playing the rest of the crew. We were a player down, so we had one NPC. Given we only had 3.5 hours and it was quite an involved game, I think we would have struggled with six players.

The scenario was in two parts. It started slowly, at a GKAO fundraising event. I found this a little underwhelming – but luckily we were then summoned to our ship to deal with a distress call (two ships had collided), and then it was all hands on deck as we had to rendezvous with two different ships, avoid collision debris, and treat the wounded.

My favourite bit was choosing whether to prioritise the Type S Scout with no comms, the Long Liner with many injured passengers but an onboard medic, or the four rescue balls with limited air. We went after the rescue balls, dropped a launch off at the Scout and docked with the Long Liner.

The GM carefully timed everything and had a detailed timetable in his notes. (The effectiveness of our dice rolls affected how quickly we did things.) That felt very OSR, and I prefer a more narrative approach – if you’re going to have a countdown, make sure the players understand the implications of their actions. The one time this worked was with the rescue balls – we knew they had only two hours of air, and it was touch and go whether we would rescue them all.

Notebook, character sheet - and patch!

There was an interesting subplot about smuggled battledress, which we got hints of. Some of the other players tried to investigate, but I was focused on the rescue. (To make more of the subplot, I would make one of the PCs an undercover agent. Probably not the Chief Medical Officer, though.)

Amusingly, everyone who tried to diagnose the Long Liner’s captain’s injuries failed their roll – badly. (I rolled snake eyes.) So it became a running joke that the captain was hiding his injuries very well.

Anyway, a fun game and a very different to The Last Caravan.

Overall

So that was North Star. I had a lovely day and look forward to returning next year.