TravCon - Friday 12th to Sunday 14th June 2026
1. Why I Went
The first Science Fiction TTRPG was called Traveller. It was “hard” science fiction with realistic space physics, weaponry, devices and character creation.
Famously, characters go through several terms of military service before they’re ready to play in the game. Some are killed due to events that happen during this service. They die in character creation and never survive to be actually played.
It has never been my personal choice of Science Fiction TTRPG. I prefer the less realistic, more drama- and action-oriented SciFi of Star Trek and Star Wars.
So I’ve never Refereed Traveller nor been particularly interested in reading the rulebooks. But I’ve played it many times, especially in my latter years attending conventions.
When TravCon was the only convention available on a given weekend, I decided to give it a try. I even decided to ask if they wanted me to offer to Referee a couple of games.
When they not only allowed me to offer to run games but seemed really grateful to me for offering, it cemented by decision to attend. Especially as it was at the Business Development Centre I was familiar with from the Continuum and Chaosium conventions.
2. The Shape of the Convention
TravCon has been running for many, many years. What I didn’t realise was that during that time it’s been relatively small - just a few dozen like-minded souls all playing in the same room. I’d coincidentally chosen to come in the year that they’d decided to expand into a larger venue and add a couple of dozen more players.
As part of these changes they were changing their method of signing up for games.
Previously they’d used a sign-up sheet system at the convention itself. Apparently there had been issues. Some people didn’t like the first come, first served basis. I’ve seen this happen when other conventions have used similar systems and even seen some shoving as people try to get into games they really want to play.
For this year they were changing to a spreadsheet-based system very similar to that used at the Garricons in Sheffield. Referees submit games, these are published on a spreadsheet online. Referees get to sign up for games they want to play on a one-for-one basis. Finally, players get to select games they want to play but give second and third choices in each slot so that they can be re-allocated if a game is over-subscribed.
Exactly who gets into each over-subscribed game is decided randomly. (I suspect dice are rolled.)
I got the strong impression that the organisers were concerned that - with the increase in numbers - they might not get enough games submitted to accommodate every player in every slot. Also that some Referees were slow in submitting their games. This is probably why they were so happy to have me offering to referee games despite me not Refereeing the system at a convention before. (I was completely up front with the organisers about this.)
This sign-up method involves a lot of work for the organisers, especially as - due to late game submissions - player allocation to games took place mere days before the event. At least one heroic organiser must have burnt the midnight oil to sort everything out.
The convention has 6 game slots - all four hours long.
Friday night - 19:30 to 23:30
Saturday am - 09:00 to 13:00
Saturday pm - 14:00 to 18:00
Saturday night - 19:30 to 23:30
Sunday am - 09:00 to 13:00
Sunday pm - 14:00 to 18:00
Communication prior to the event was excellent across email and social media platforms. For example, an enquiry was sent out confirming who was staying at the event Sunday afternoon so the organisers could ensure there were enough games for those who would be there.
Prior to the event everyone received a digital copy of a handbook explaining everything as well as the final player-to-game allocations. Printed copies of all of these were available at the event itself, along with forms for people to submit memorable in-game events for awards, lanyards and a free gaming bag branded for the event.
Good value on-site accommodation was available as well as multiple free coffee machines. Games are played in seminar rooms, which I’ve mentioned before in other reports. This is a superior venue.
Alongside games the event squeezed in a board game table, a bring-and-buy section, a stand staffed by representatives of the company that make and sell the game, a Traveller wargames table, awards and Q&A sessions with the publishers.
This was all managed extremely well. They’ve run this convention on a smaller scale for decades - and it shows - and they put in all the work they needed to - and more - to upscale it.
3. Games Played and Games Run
Not having refereed Traveller before, I downloaded a free PDF of a basic set of rules - Traveller Book Zero. There is a much bigger and more thorough free set of PDFs online but they were so detailed they blew my mind.
They’re REALLY good value though.
Before the event, I leafed through the free PDF and noted that it contained rules for two “careers” for characters - Army and Navy. So I wrote a couple of blurbs for two scenarios. One simple one about the characters’ trading ship running out of fuel and coming across a giant alien spacecraft drifting in space and one based on the scenario I’d included in a set of my own rules a few years ago.
I started to prepare by trying to create a set of pre-generated characters using the rules. This proved to be an intensive and tedious process. So I searched online for some pre-generated characters created by other people. I then took the grab bag I found and tried to make them into a coherent group to man a rag-tag freighter.
To disguise this process I spent a bit of time making (I think) some quite nice-looking bespoke character sheets.
The second scenario was relatively easy. I just took the published scenario, cut out all the space combat (there were no rules for that in the Traveller Book Zero) and substituted what felt like appropriate Traveller statistics for skill checks and opponents.
For the first scenario I was working from scratch. But the pre-generated characters I had inspired me and I found myself designing a simple little mystery and hunt for fuel that deviated from my original idea. Out went the alien ship and in came a mystery involving a plot between two corporations.
Slot 1 - Friday 19:30 to 23:30
Because I’m retired I was able to travel cheaply in the middle of the day. On a previous visit to this venue I’d tried to catch a bus from Milton Keynes Central train station. With more of a deadline, when I’d missed it, I reverted to catching a taxi. I’ve always done this on past visits to this destination. With a more relaxed timescale I was able to catch the bus and use my senior bus pass. This was a saving of over £20.
I actually arrived slightly before the venue’s official check-in time and well before the advertised check-in time for the convention. This location is really well organised and has individual envelopes prepared for all convention attendees which they lay out on a table. I suspect this is why they asked the convention to publish a later arrival time for its players - to avoid a rush during their usual check-in time.
Not only did I arrive super early but the young lady on reception apologised for not having a room ready. She asked me to wait in the super comfy coffee lounge with the TV and free coffee machines whilst she sorted it out. She brought me my convention check-in envelope and I was in my room early.
I nipped over to the local Co-op to buy provisions. I’d decided to try economising by not eating in the business centre during this visit.
Later on I went to the Atrium to find the convention sign-in desk and get my lanyard, information pack and free gaming bag.
The convention started with announcements. Part of these included the organiser stressing role-playing over rules-playing - which reassured me a bit.
I’d been a bit nervous having my game allocated to Slot 1. I was hoping I’d be able to play in a game or two before having to referee.
Still, I was placed in a pleasant “breakout room” with my 5 players. My pretty, bespoke character sheets went down well. The players were there to role-play, not to show off their knowledge of the rules.
Everything seemed to go well except that I’d cut and pasted similar equipment between the characters. I’d given them all an Auto-Pistol as their main weapon. I hadn’t studied the exact rules for that weapon closely enough. When it came to a fight, the players’ characters prepared an ambush and shredded the opposition leader in a hail of gunfire.
Still, that was better that than a total party kill.
The game was due to end at 23:30 but actually ended at 22:00. The player characters managed to acquire the fuel they needed to continue their journey. They became aware of a mysterious, important and valuable cargo being transported that was just sitting in a disabled ship waiting to be taken. They decided not to risk it. All the players were in agreement and we finished early. No-one was disappointed.
Slot 2 - Saturday 09:00 to 13:00
After a decent breakfast, Slot 2 started with more announcements, welcoming people who hadn’t arrived for the Friday night games and the representatives of the publishers - who had a trade stand and who were offering a Q&A session at lunchtime.
In the morning I was playing in a 6-player game in a larger seminar room. This was fully equipped with audio-visual equipment and a screen so it would have been easy to prepare some digital assets to support your game and plug in a device to present them on the screen at the front of the room.
This was “proper” Traveller with rules and lore given their due. For me there were a couple of minor issues.
Firstly I was openly passed an extra sheet of information with my character. Ostensibly this was what I knew about the missing cargo and its placement in a war grave. However, every other player at the table instantly suspected more shenanigans. They were right.
If you’re giving one player an extra sheet, give every player an extra sheet.
Secondly the target ship was tumbling in space. Now I accept that matching vectors with it would be a difficult task. But in a film or on TV a competent astronaut would be able to do it in a couple of minutes. We were required to make several difficult die rolls. Of course some of these failed and we ended up with a dangerous and difficult-to-deal-with loose tether. This wasn’t even the result of a critical failure.
If a scenario has a difficult task to complete, at least one of the pre-generated characters should be skilled enough to overcome that obstacle, in my opinion.
However, this was a classic, professionally written and produced scenario supervised by a competent referee with a good range of handouts and maps. We completed the mission.
Of course my character betrayed our group to a band of savage space pirates. The other players decided to go down fighting and the scenario ended with a Total Party Kill.
Slot 3 - Saturday 14:00 to 18:00
Lunch was a Co-op meal deal in my room. I didn’t attend the publishers’ Q&A but did attend announcements before the afternoon game. These seemed to be mostly about how long people could go on playing into the night and how late the bar would stay open.
I was refereeing again in Slot 3. In the same room as I’d played in during the Friday game.
In this adventure they were rudely awakened from “low passage” when the ship carrying their cryo-pods was attacked by an alien. The characters had to fight their way through other people waking up - mostly vicious criminals - to find escape pods or a shuttle to get off the ship before it was destroyed.
Then they had to find their way to a nearby habitable planet, deal with the mysterious aliens it was home to and evade the aliens who’d attacked them in space and were now hunting them for sport.
Rather than investigate the mystery I’d put on the planet for them, these players chose to take the fight to their alien nemeses. One of the players used the whiteboard in the room to plan out their group’s ambush on a shuttle full of the aliens.
This went even better than my Friday night game.
Slot 4 - Saturday 19:30-23:30
I seem to recall there was another short announcement before the evening slot.
My evening game was again in one of the large presentation rooms with the screens and audio-visual equipment but these weren’t needed. The referee had boxes full of laminated hand-outs to produce as needed.
There were only three players in this game, and I knew the other two very well from other conventions.
Of course we could!
The referee had clearly refereed his scenario many times before. We had a lot of choices in our actions and he was prepared for anything.
Given that everybody in the room had a few decades on the clock, we again finished well before 23:30. Not until we’d had a great time, though.
Slot 5 - Sunday 09:00-13:00
There were announcements again, mainly reminding people to be in the main lecture hall at the venue at lunchtime for the awards ceremony.
In the morning I was playing in a game called “Chirper Storm”. This was again in one of the main presentation rooms. (Only my games seem to have been in a breakout room.)
It didn’t take me long to work out that this referee - one of the convention organisers - has been running a Chirper game using these exact same pre-generated characters on a Sunday at TravCon for years. This was just a new chapter in an ongoing saga. Some of the players had played before and had characters they usually play.
These characters had very low ability scores and skills reflecting the fact that they were bite-sized comic relief characters. Somehow I actually got a character with a bonus for high dexterity.
I generally don’t favour comedy-first or play-to-fail role-playing. As people arrived and started talking in high-pitched voices, my heart fell.
But I should have trusted the referee. What he actually does is design a standard Traveller spy intrigue scenario which he tries to deliver straight. Complete with figures and battle maps. He then lets the players run riot with their mad little lizard aliens and plays to find out what happens.
It worked extremely well, and I will happily sign up for the next chapter of the story next year.
Slot 6 - Sunday 14:00-18:00
Toward the end of lunchtime everyone gathered in the large lecture hall in the venue. (This is where I tried to watch an Actual Play presentation at Chaosium Con.)
Three awards were presented:
- Most spectacular failure
- Most memorable or heroic act
- Best roleplaying
Referees had been asked to fill in nomination forms at the end of each of their games.
For me, one of the greatest things about TTRPGs is their ephemeral nature. Players at a particular table all share an experience. Usually “you just had to be there” to truly understand the special moments.
So I didn’t intellectually agree with the purpose of the awards. However, they did form the basis for a nice event which brought all of the convention attendees together towards the end of the event. So it was another unique selling point of TravCon.
Afterwards, myself and two other players went to a room to play our last game of the event. The Referee failed to arrive.
The other two players were taken into a game by a willing - but in my opinion over-confident - referee who ended up with eight players. I chose not to join in and left early. I’d had 5 good games and was happy.
Heading out to catch a bus to the station, I met one of my players from earlier in the weekend in reception waiting for an Uber. We agreed to share it.
It turned out my decision to leave early was a good one given that there was disruption on the railways on my way home.
4. Play Reflections
Traveller is not my chosen game. It is “hard” sci-fi and can attract people who are even nerdier than your typical TTRPG player. However, of the three games I played in, only one of them was what you’d think of as a “typical” Traveller scenario.
These people have been playing the game for years and now seem to be looking to push its role-playing boundaries. This was typified by the “Chirpers” game I played in and the one about adventuring in a space station during a mass evacuation. The two scenarios I brought along to referee were actually more like classic Traveller scenarios than the games I played in.
Two of my pre-generated characters were too similar in their roles. I also could have looked more closely at the equipment lists and given them more appropriate items. Both of these were fairly minor things, however, and my games went better than I could have hoped. As always this was due to having great players who just wanted to have fun.
The suggestion from an organiser to all referees at the end was to bring these same scenarios to TravCon next year - rather than design anything new. I think I’ll make the adjustments I’ve alluded to above and do just that.
5. Cost, Time, and Value
How I calculate this
This section looks at what the convention cost me, as a participant, and what that worked out as per hour of actual gaming. It is intended as an illustrative case study rather than a universal guide.
I do not include routine food costs, as I would incur these whether or not I attended.
I do report on the cost of a pint of lager as this is an important metric for some of my readers.
My travel costs reflect my own circumstances (travelling from Birmingham and making use of available rail discounts), so readers should treat the numbers as indicative rather than directly transferable.
Headline figures
Convention cost (ticket): £15*
Travel cost: £28.69**
Accommodation cost: £128
Total convention-specific cost: £171.69
Total hours of gaming (played and run): 20
Approximate cost per hour of gaming: £8.58
* Wait a minute! It only cost £15 and we got a free gaming bag? Ludicrous value!
** Plus potentially £20+ each way for a taxi from Milton Keynes Central to the venue.
Cost of a pint of lager: £6
6. What I Took Away
TravCon is the convention of BITS - the British Isles Traveller Society. That's a society with a long and illustrious history. I’d always assumed it was a large affair. It was a bit of a surprise to find out how small and niche previous events had been.
This was a step up in size for them. A move to a newer venue. A change in the way they organised sign-ups for the games.
Because of the fact that they’ve run the event so professionally for so many years, they handled all of these changes with aplomb. Clearly they were a bit apprehensive about this step-up but they needn’t have been. Everything was handled superbly.
If I were to suggest areas for development:
- The move to a managed pre-booking system for games is extremely positive. It avoids the “first come, first served” issues with sign-up sheets and booking apps such as WarHorn. It IS a lot of work for organisers though. This can be mitigated by giving Referees strict and early deadlines to submit games. If insufficient games are submitted, I am sure some of the more organised referees would be happy to run their games twice.
- Three four-hour games in a day is a lot. Most conventions have slightly shorter slots for some or all of these. Moving to shorter slots would create more time for all the other events you want to fit in.
Unique and special things about TravCon:
- It’s a full weekend starting with a game session on Friday night.
- There is a photographer who goes around to every game to take photos for the BITS newsletter.
- There are extra little events like announcements, awards, Q&A sessions with the publishers, etc.
- Games are submitted but the organisers decide which slots they are each placed in to create a balanced event.
- Pre-convention communication is exemplary across a range of platforms.
= The organisers made a point of stressing role-playing rather than rules-playing.
- The convention ended with a sensible suggestion that Referees simply offer the same games again next year. If the scenario worked for a group this year, why shouldn’t a different one enjoy it next year?
I only went to TravCon to fill an empty weekend. It’s far from being my favourite game. I was worried about fitting in - especially as a referee. I needn’t have been.
I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
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