North of the Borderlands

 Last weekend we ventured north, stayed with friends, and experienced the wonders of Tabletop Scotland.

It has been a while since I’ve crossed the border into Scotland. As a kid, my parents loved Scotland, and one of my happiest memories of my entire childhood was a quiet little self-catering cottage in the middle of a forest in the Borders. I hadn’t been to Scotland for over twenty years, but Stoo from we-evolve invited us to join their table at Scotland’s largest tabletop gaming convention, so that I could help sell copies of WILD, and Debs could sell her Goth-gaming wares from Misery Makes. 

Scotland was just as beautiful as I remembered it. Crossing the border on the train all you could see were green fields, epic hills, sheep, and dry-stone walling. It was the highlight of the 8 1/2 hour train journey that was (on the whole) exhausting. 

We stayed at Stoo’s, his awesome partner Rhi (author of the awesome Action Potential, and A Show of Hands, as well as a host of mini games) driving us and the piles of stock to and from the convention every day. (Thank you both for your amazing hospitality). 

Friday, we set up for the ‘half day’ of trading. We got used to the layout, checked out the other stalls, and managed to sell a few things. I saw a handful of things I liked, but resisted the urge to purchase - it was Friday after all. There were two more days of this ahead of us.

I did, however, find the most amazing dice in the world. I instantly fell in love with these dice, and pondered spending monies on them…

I mean, look at them. They are amazing. So beautiful. And readable too!! Especially important at my ancient age. Unfortunately, by midday on Saturday, they had sold, and my hopes were dashed. One day, I’ll find them again, and I won’t be so slow to snap them up… (I found them on a great stand called Trayed and Tested - I’ll be keeping an eye on that Etsy to see if they return)

Saturday was busy. Very busy. As you’d expect! I got to meet face to face with a couple of my work colleagues (and former colleagues) and a few regular convention faces from other publishers - but as with most of these conventions, everyone is so busy I don’t want to bother them with gossip about the gaming industry. 

Sunday, however, was like a veritable ghost-town for the first half of the day. I think everyone was either gaming, or sleeping off the late night gaming from the night before. I mean, look at how busy the aisle we were on was at 12:30pm…

Weird, huh?

Anyway, it picked up in the afternoon, and before you know it, it was all over. I thought about popping up to the gaming floor upstairs where a game of Doctor Who was being played on Sunday afternoon. Y’know, just to say “Hi, I wrote that!” but I thought it may be a bit weird. If you were in that Doctor Who game, let me know how it went.

Ho well… we just about covered our costs, so it wasn’t a complete wash-out, but it was certainly exhausting and before long we were back on another 8 1/2 hour train journey home. 

All I want is some good with my bad…

While the sales were a little disappointing, it was worth going. There were certainly a couple of highlights, and I’m not just talking about getting to chill with some awesome cats…

In addition to getting to stay with some great friends (and their lovely cats), there were a few other good takeaways from the weekend. 

I bought Debs a copy of Be Like A Cat from the fab people at Critical Kit, along with the super-cute dice with little paw prints as pips. 

Debs, in return, bought me an amazing tie with dice on from the lovely people at Witch Hunt Tabletop Treasures. 

Everyone at the stands were especially lovely, and there was some awesome stuff on display. From super-expensive top of the line gaming tables to low price zines. In fact, speaking of zines, Stoo bought a copy of the Mothership boxed set which was an inspiration to us all. 

I mean, I’ve been ranting about how I wanted to do an RPG about the size of those classic Traveller RPG books from the late 70s, and here comes an RPG which does exactly that. In a cute box with loads of cool stuff…

It set the brain whirring while sitting on that stand. Many notes were made… 

Many. Notes. 

Anyway, I thought our stand looked fab, and Debs put a heck of a lot of work into all that stock. 

Next stop, Dragonmeet. While we won’t have a stand there, I think I’ve convinced Debs to come to Dragonmeet this year to experience the UK’s second largest gaming convention - at least it’s only a couple of hours on the train…

Maybe we’ll see you there.

Stay Multi-classy!!

Travelers with one 'L'

(Disclaimer: This post initially appeared on my Substack on 25th August)

We’d just finished our particularly epic TTRPG campaign of Aegean (though playing as mythic Vikings, rather than Ancient Greece) and the question arose of what to play next in our weekly game. Our GM is a big fan of a sci-fi TV series called “Travelers” which is thankfully on Netflix, and said he had been wanting to run a game based on the series for a while. 

So the group, at varying speeds, have all watched the series over the last couple of weeks, and I must admit to being surprised.

The basic premise is a bit like Terminator. The future is well and truly screwed, and an AI known as The Director is trying to save humanity from itself by sending ‘Travelers’ back in time to the 21st Century to try to prevent all of the major disasters from happening. However, they can’t come back to the past physically, they can only upload their consciousness into a host body which effectively kills the host. As this has terrible ethical problems, the Traveler is only uploaded into a host that the Director has identified as dying in the past. Once the TELL is determined (Time, Elevation, Longitude, and Latitude) the Traveler is transmitted in, overwriting the host personality, in what would be their final seconds of life. They arrive with the knowledge of the host’s death, so they can avoid and rectify the situation and take over the host’s life, having memorised their life through internet records and social media that has survived through to the future.

It’s a bit bleak, and I remember sitting down to watch it about five or six years ago, watching it on my lunch break at work. The doomed future, the doomed characters and their mission to save humanity from itself just was a little dark for me first time around and I only got a couple of episodes in before I started on something a little lighter and completely forgot about the series. So when the GM suggested we played it as an RPG, I was a little skeptical.

However, we fired up the first few episodes, and pushed on through.

Each Traveler team consists of five members - A Leader (FBI Special Agent Grant MacLaren, played by Eric McCormack), a Medic (Marcy Warton, played by MacKenzie Porter), a Tactician (Carly Shannon, played by Nesta Cooper), a Technician (Trevor Holden, played by Jared Abrahamson, and a Historian (Philip Pearson, played by Reilly Dolman). Each would have come to a suitably nasty end (pushed down a lift shaft, attacked by thugs, killed by an abusive boyfriend, too many head blows in underground fighting, or drug overdose), so you can see why those first couple of episodes can come across as being particularly gloomy. The characters pick up the pieces of their hosts’ lives, discover why they were in such a bad place, and try to get on with things while awaiting orders from the Director for a series of missions to save the world.

It takes a bit to get going, but it’s the time the series takes over the struggles of these characters that makes it so compelling. The first real mission they undertake is quite a small one, and it doesn’t happen until the end of episode 2, but it leads into something bigger that’ll make sense by episode 6. Things develop, there’s another faction of travelers (called, simply, ‘The Faction’) who believe the AI Director is wrong and humanity should choose its own fate. And there’s a slightly psychotic first Traveler (0001) who was supposed to die during 9/11. But these missions seem unimportant compared to the struggles of the characters in their real lives.

There are a whole set of protocols that they have to adhere to in order to preserve the timelines, including ‘don’t reproduce’ (Protocol 4), ‘don’t take a life, don’t save a life, unless otherwise directed to’ (Protocol 3), and 'in the absence of direction, maintain your host’s life’ (Protocol 5). 

In each case, Protocol 5 becomes the what makes these characters special. Agent MacLaren has a suspicious (and slightly paranoid) wife who falls pregnant. Marcy falls for the social worker who was looking after her (David, the social worker, played by Patrick Gilmore, is easily my favourite character in the whole series). Carly has to deal with an abusive boyfriend (who is also a cop) and the constant threat of having their child taken into care. Trevor may be a teenager, but the Traveler within (0115) is one of the oldest living humans, while Traveler 3326 has uploaded into the body of Philip, a heroin addict. 

Together they work through their problems, fall in love, overcome the threats, bond, develop further problems, and as an audience, we grow to love every single darn one of them. To the point that when bad things happen to them (and they happen a lot) we’re so invested in these characters that you can’t help but get emotional. 

Heck, David’s speech at the funeral of one of his clients as a social worker is incredibly powerful, and many of the scenes afterwards are absolutely heartbreaking. The poor team hardly gets a break, and it goes from one emotional gut-punch to the next before the series was unceremoniously cancelled with Season 3. Though, the storyline is perfectly wrapped up with the opportunity for a follow up.

On the whole, it’s highly recommended, but be prepared to be dragged through the wringer emotionally by the end. 

Will it work as an RPG? Can we bring the same emotional attachment to our characters as the TV series? I doubt it in my case, but we’ll see.