Freelance Traveller

After-Action Report: TravellerCON/USA 2025

by Jeff Zeitlin

This article appeared in the November/December 2025 issue.

As usual, travel was done and fun was had. As usual, I managed to forget to take pictures.

There Again

Getting a slightly later-than-planned start Friday morning turned out to be a bit of bad luck – the Cross Bronx Expressway (I don’t know why they still call it that; there’s nothing “express” about it) was backed up for more than half its length from the George Washington Bridge; this time there was construction “under the apartments” – but not really; the lane blockage started under the apartments, but the actual construction was right before the final approach to the bridge, and closed off part of the deceleration lane for the last exit before the actual bridge. Right after you pass the construction, there’s a lane closure for the left lane actually getting onto the Bridge proper, so between that and the … unfortunate … configuration of the interchange from the Major Deegan Expressway (and that’s another misnomer) it’s not hard to understand the backup.

Once on and across the Bridge, I-80 and I-287 were clear to I-78, which was an easy trip with a half-hour stop to stretch legs, empty bladder, and grab a quick snack at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center. A bit into Pennsylvania there was some congestion where they’d posted “work on median” and three lanes narrowed to two, but once past that, there were no delays, not even on US222 with its many construction segments, including the big interchange at US30. Arrival was at about 15:00, check-in was quick, and off I went to socialize.

Friday Afternoon session

It turns out that our regular main room was in use, so the Friday sessions were crammed into two small rooms, on two different floors of the hotel. The Friday Afternoon session is usually generally mostly pickup games with a few scheduled games, so it was a bit awkward to play in the comparatively cramped quarters. Since I arrived about halfway through, I wasn’t going to be playing; it was an opportunity to catch up with a few other Friday arrivals that weren’t playing. This year, the theme was “Bwaps”, and looking through the schedule revealed a few Bwap-focussed games.

For this session, Ken was running a session of character generation for the “Traveller: Encounters” Living Traveller campaign, Patrick was running “Something’s Stirring in Newport” using the Traveller: 1700 rules and setting, Bob was also using Traveller: 1700 for his “DGS Presents: Fair Trader or Smuggler”, and Carl was running “Triplanetary: The Grand Tour”.

Friday Evening session

We were still in the two small rooms, but there was a promise that we’d have our regular room tomorrow. I signed up for Dave’s “From Marhaban With Love”, in which the PCs are “Emperor’s Eyes”, a covert investigation team that reports directly to His Imperial Majesty. Each of us had a Warrant, but if we actually invoked it, it would blow our cover, and would result in being retired (well-taken-care-of). We were a mixed-species team (Vargr, Aslan, Human, and a Chirper (me) with some attributes that were distinctly atypical for Chirpers) “covering” as roadies for a band that was going to be playing on a Bwap world, primarily for the non-Bwaps. Our real mission was to find out what was causing some Bwaps to briefly disappear, and then once they returned, commit murder-suicide. There were several “incidents” of increasingly destructive effect, and we had to investigate them, prevent any new ones, and find out just what was going on, while not blowing our cover on a world where simply by being not-Bwap we were going to stand out. Without giving any spoilers, we did manage to solve the mystery, and in doing so brought official attention to certain abuses of Imperial policy. Definitely fun, and my Chirper character actually played to my “real life” strengths.

Other games this session: BCG was running two different Dumarest Traveller games (one in each room), “TOY: Experience the Adventure” and “The Slaver’s Trail”; Bill was running “Strange Happenings at the Old Pond”, Pat ran “DGS Presents: Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots”, Greg H ran “Paperwork, Permits, and Promises: A Bwap Adventure”, Dan ran “DGS Presents: Containment Breach”, Greg C ran “Trillion Credit Cargo – A Perpetual Traveller Adventure”, Ed ran “Avast Ye Dirtwalkers.

The game I was playing was solved and wrapped early, so I was able to get to bed and adequately slept.

Saturday Morning session

We’re in our normal room now! We still have one of the two cramped rooms, but this was expected; TravellerCON/USA has been growing, and between that growth and adding panel discussions, the extra space is helpful. Cramped room is less cramped since we could take out one of the tables. We have ten tables in the main room, and four in the small room (instead of five). We also have a few vendors in the main room; somehow, there’s a bit of flavor of Halloween in some of the merch.

I signed up for “The Bwap Starmap” being run by Colin. This varied somewhat from the description in the book, but there wasn’t a reason to complain. The PCs, an ex-Army special operations team, have been retired to a mostly pastoral planet; there is a medical facility that most of the PCs had been treated and rehabilitated at. One of our team, played as a semi-NPC, is known to us to be a strong psion, and has not been recovering well, and so remains in the facility. He is kidnapped by persons not known, but determined to be associated with some less-than-savory individuals on the world; it turns out that they’re being paid by a Sinister Doctor With Ulterior Motives who needs our friend for some reason. Some freelance detective work provides clues both to our friend’s location and the reason he was “needed”; we manage to rescue him, and find out some things that it’s better not to understand. Good fun, possibly made a bit too easy by good rolls and a lenient referee.

Other games this session: Dan with “DGS Presents: Operation Accreditation”, Ken with “Traveller: Encounters: Truffles, Bubbles, and Transport Troubles”, BCG with “Moon Base Countdown” and another run of “TOY…” and “The Slaver’s Trail”, Rich with “The Adventures of the Dread Parrot, Chapter 3”, Samantha with “Third Shift at Waffle Port”, Greg C with another session of “Trillion Credit Cargo”, Pat with “DGS Presents: What Lurks Beyond”, and Alexander with “System: Traveller”.

Because of the room issue, the traditional Friday Night Absent Friends Memorial Pizza Party was moved to Saturday lunch.

Saturday Lunch Panel

“Post-Human Soldiers”, speaker Bob Hranek. This was an overview of the future of warfighting, with the development and deployment of AI-based weaponry. The viability of including humans in the decision loop was looked at, both the ‘benefits’ and the drawbacks. Some discussion of ‘enhanced’ soldiers was included, but Mr Hranek seemed to believe that the human ‘front-line’ soldier would become a thing of the past, as human societies are increasingly opposed to casualties.

Saturday Afternoon Session

I signed up for “The Adventures of the Dread Parrot, Chapter 3”, being run by Rich. It wasn’t necessary to know what came to pass in Chapters 1 and 2; the key takeaways from them are that you have a ship, it’s got Certain Capabilities that the Imperium would prefer to have in their hands not yours, and you need to register the ship with Imperial authorities without giving away what it has that they would want to take away from you. The answer to this is a Bwap administrator on Marhaban that had such strong feelings about a perceived wrong done to his creche many years ago that if we (the PCs) were willing to do him a certain favor, he would be willing to file a registration for us that didn’t mention the Certain Capabilities, and made it look like an ordinary ship.

We had to go to a secondary Bwap world, find a certain document, and return it to the Bwap administrator on Marhaban. Being a Bwap world, it had a law level that makes the People’s Republic of China look like a liberal and open society. We had to first determine where the document was likely to be held, then gain access to it, and then get out with it. The first part of the adventure turned into an exercise in discovering that a totalitarian government wasn’t going to make it easy to get your hands on something that they don’t want you to have. Every possible “legal” avenue proved to have insurmountable obstacles; we ended up having to hijack a truck on the starport and proceed to our target location, interrogating the original driver to find out what we’d need to know to get into the building in question. Once in the building, a series of fortunate rolls got us well inside the security perimeter that seemed so impenetrable, with a guarantee of an hour before the security people would realize that they’d been penetrated. The clock was now running for us, although not in real-time like with an adventure I played in a couple of years back; the referee was tracking how long our various efforts to disarm security systems or search for things would take. We had to disarm multiple layers of security, and then in effect find a FedEx Letter in an Amazon warehouse. Not an easy job, and the referee admitted that he’d probably set the difficulty level too high, so he ‘tweaked’ as we went to try to make our task rolls more effective, as some of us had amazingly coöperative dice. It wasn’t obvious that he was doing so, though we knew it because he’d admitted it, and it didn’t detract from play; the tweaks were ‘seamless’. We did succeed, and escaped with the security behind us first realizing that something wasn’t right, and scrambling to find out what was going on and stop us. That was where play ended; we could assume that we made it back to the starport and our ship, and returned the document to Marhaban, and got our ‘clean’ but quite mendacious registration.

Other games in this slot: Casey with Traveller: Encounters character generation, BCG offering to run a pickup game, Alan with “Journey of the Daphne”, Carl running the classic “Kinunir” adventure, Patrick with “Argo Station” for Traveller: Encounters, Bob with DGS Presents: Ancients are Blue, Bill with “From Stripes to Solids – Part One”, Colin with “The Bwap Starmap” again, Timothy with “The Trouble With the Hive”.

Saturday Evening Panel

Bob Hranek presented on “Current Lasers to Future Phasers”, focusing on the military potential of lasers and laser-like weapons, and discussing some of the drawbacks. The biggest problem with militarily-effective coherent energy weapons is currently power; lasers that do the science-fictiony things portrayed in popular science fiction are simply not in the cards; we don’t have any power storage systems that have high enough power density, and lasers as currently known can’t deliver what energy is available fast enough to produce the kind of damage portrayed in the time portrayed. If we change our expectations to simply ‘mission kills’ (that is, rendering the target unable to perform its intended mission, even if we don’t outright destroy it), effective lasers are already available for some uses, and within reach for others.

Saturday Evening Session

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a game that interested me, so I used this session to catch up on writing this AAR and sorting through the sadly thin bucket of submitted articles for additional material for this issue.
It occurs to me that I prefer games where combat isn’t baked into the scenario; I find it much more rewarding to think my way past obstacles than to try to turn them into little pieces of former obstacles. Only in “Bwap Starmap” did we end up in “combat”, and even there, experience and some surprisingly good rolls gave us a lopsided victory – the bad guys suffered TPK, while our side, while picking up some injuries, were easily healed back to full capability by our medic with only field expedients and med skill available; in the other scenaria, it’s pretty certain that getting into combat would have meant that our mission had already failed.

Games in this slot: Dan with “DGS Presents: Operation Accreditation”, Ken with “The Moon Cries Out Over Dostoevsky” for Traveller: Encounters, Casey with “What You Talkin’ About Vilis?” for Traveller: Encounters, BCG with “Moon Base Countdown” and another pickup game slot, Scott with “The Apocalypse Squad”, Greg C with “Trillion Credit Cargo” for Perpetual Traveller, Patrick with another session of “DGS Presents: Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots”, and William with “From Stripes to Solids – Part Two”.

Sunday Morning Session

I had wait-listed myself for Dave’s “Inheritance Now”; I got in when one of the other players had double-committed and chose to sit the playtest he’d volunteered for. In this game, we were a group of Bwaps with the assignment to repossess a Safari Ship that had been stolen (“repossess” rather than recover because there was documentation suggesting a legal transfer of possession, but there was countervailing documentation that asserted that the other was invalid – more detail here would be spoiler). Completion of the mission would consist of taking possession of the ship and delivering it to the nearest or most conveniently reachable Imperial Navy base to wherever we took possession of the ship.

One of the disadvantages of playing a Bwap is that you, the player, as a human, don’t tend to think in terms that a Bwap actually would, and this can lead to trying to set up subterfuges to accomplish something where a Bwap wouldn’t bother; he’d just go the straightforward administrative route. We were on Marhaban, waiting for the stolen(?) ship to come in, and trying to set up ways to delay the ship’s processing including reprovisioning and refueling, to give us a chance to figure out how to “take” the ship. Dave is subtle, and it took a while for us to pick up on his hints that we had useful contacts and that we should just go straightforward and make the requests through more-or-less standard channels. Even doing that was somewhat attention-getting, and we ended up in an administrative hearing – not quite an actual court trial, but definitely a legal proceeding. Although in requesting impoundment pending determination of legal ownership we “blindsided” the possessors, they recovered quickly, and moved to request expediting of the process, or, absent the ability to expedite, relief under the equivalent of maximizing the public good and minimizing harm pending resolution of the dispute. It was clear that the administrative hearing would not be able to decide the question of ownership quickly, so our group prepared for the eventuality by arranging passage to the expected next port-of-call of our target, just in case the hearing administrator granted the relief. Which was, in fact, granted, so we’d done the right thing, and also managed to do so such that we’d be a day ahead of our target even in the worst case for jump duration.

Our destination (and our target’s) was a low-population world just outside the Imperium’s border, with a nominally Class A starport, which the referee declared was the anchor for a route shortcutting across one arm of the Lesser Rift, connecting the Imperium near Marhaban with the Julian Protectorate. The highport was basically a framework of a dock for a J6 tender/shuttle between this world and one six parsecs away, and only serviced the shuttle. The ground component, which was basically Class E, serviced the small traders that used the shuttle.

If Bwaps have a concept of Hell, this world might do as an example. It wasn’t a desert world, but the inhabited area certainly wasn’t humid enough for Bwaps to be comfortable, and while it was rated as having a representative democratic government, the government didn’t really do much – and didn’t really need to do much – so there wasn’t anything resembling what Bwaps would consider a useful administrative structure. Basically, if you needed something done officially, you approached the council (which happened at the moment to be entirely composed of Vargr) and made your case to them; they’d then decide what they needed to do to support your request (or deny it). Fortunately, the member of our party that we put up as our group’s nominal leader was able to establish a rapport with the council, and we got sufficient coöperation from them to arrange an impound of the target ship and a hearing to see if we could repossess the ship. The crew of the target tried to hold out that they were a religious order, and appeared at the hearing in monks’ robes, reading from scripture, and censing the hall with “incense” that was found to be a modified ‘pepper spray’ that remained an irritant to unprepared humans (or Bwaps), but was potentially lethal to Vargr. One of our (all-Bwap, remember?) party was able to stop the censing before too much damage was done, and stunned and restrained the crew of the target while the rest of us dragged the Vargr out of the contaminated meeting-hall and attempted to mitigate the contamination by opening windows and doors, and finding fans or other methods of moving air. This “rescue” plus the earlier rapport (and a potential trade agreement) left the council quite definitely favorably disposed to us, and the end result was that the council documented their findings and the events surrounding the hearing (including calling our incapacitation of the target’s crew a “lawful citizen’s arrest”) and granted us possession of the target ship. The question of what to do with the miscreant crew was slightly more difficult; as they’d done nothing (to our knowledge) directly that was actionable under Imperial law, and there were ‘nuances’ to the action that led to the need for us to be called in to repossess the ship, we would have to rely on the Navy to decide, based on the documentation provided us when we were hired to repossess the ship, on our reports concerning the repossession action, and the report of the council. When the council ruled in our favor and agreed to provide the documentation of the hearing and events surrounding it (including the attempt at murdering the council with the “pepper-spray incense”), Dave decided that that closed the adventure; our trip to the Navy was declared to be unremarkable and without further incident, we got paid (or rather, our creche did), and our creche was able to convert the potential trade agreement into a real one.

Other games during this slot: BCG held a slot for pickup games, Samantha ran “Third Shift at Waffle Port”, Casey ran “Prelude to Adventure” for Traveller: Encounters, Patrick ran “DGS Presents: The Hangover”, Greg C ran another session of “Trillion Credit Cargo” for Perpetual Traveller, and Bob ran “DGS Presents: Escape or Capture”

This was the last session of the convention this year; all that remained was to take the traditional group photo, award the Starburst for Extreme Heroism and PING! F*** It awards, and Megan’s closing remarks.

The SEH went to Steve, during Matt’s running of “Moonbase Countdown”. The party was travelling through a biodome in which wheat was growing (on an airless world); they startled a swarm of (mutated) bees that were the size of basketballs. Most of the party readied their weapons (laser rifles), but Steve explained to Matt that he has a neighbor who is a beekeeper, and the neighbor keeps the bees calm and non-hostile by singing to them. Steve’s character is a musician, and had a flute in his physical possession at the time; he went to play the flute to calm the bees, Matt had Steve roll for performance, and the dice came up boxcars. More bees show up, but Steve continues to play, and the party isn’t molested (although they’re followed).

The PFI is a two-part nomination: In one of Pat’s sessions of “Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots”, Dave’s character was in a position where he needed to try to “softball hit” a live grenade (using the stock of his [gauss?] rifle as the bat). He missed, rolled snake eyes, and took massive damage when the grenade went off, leaving him alive but not very. Shortly after, same session, Ed’s character is taking blind shots into rooms as he runs past, and hits Dave’s character, finishing him off. Acclaim went to Dave, but he chose to concede the prize to Ed.

For the rest of the day, anyone who didn’t leave was at loose ends; I was one of a very few who could and did choose to stay one additional night and head home Monday.

Monday: And Back

I got on the road about 9:45; this ensured I missed whatever morning rush Lancaster proper had, plus anything it feeds to larger nearby cities and possibly as far as Philadelphia. Traffic through downtown Lancaster was heavier than I expected, but not really any slower than when I’d left on Sunday in past years. Once on US222 heading for I-78, it was smooth sailing, with my usual stop for beef-’n’-cheddar at the Arby’s in Kutztown, and there wasn’t even much of a slowdown in the places where construction was constructing – and since it was Monday, I actually saw men working, not just signs claiming they were. There was one section of I-78 eastbound where it did slow down noticeably; they were working on the median and left lane of the highway, and for some reason, instead of compressing to the two right lanes, they split the lanes – the left lane was brought across the median and took one lane of I-78 westbound for eastbound traffic, the right lane was constrained by “Jersey barriers” but open to traffic to allow access to the exits to the localities. This was where I-78 had congested on the trip to the Con; it wasn’t obvious that they’d stolen the left lane for reverse traffic.

Once past that, there was nothing to speak of in terms of delay conditions all the way to the New Jersey border, where I switched from listening to the Philadelphia all-news radio station to listening to the New York all-news radio station. This became important rather than just semi-interesting noise, because the NY traffic reports were going to determine the last segment of my route. The NY station reports on traffic every ten minutes, and over the course of three or four reports, the reported delays on the inbound George Washington Bridge went from ten minutes to forty-five due to an accident. That made the decision; I was crossing the Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge instead – that route adds about a half-hour to travel time, but that’s still better than sitting fuming in traffic for an hour or more waiting to cross the GWB. And who knows what would happen to the Cross Bronx Expressway…

There was nothing unexpected between the TZB and home; I closed my apartment door behind me at 14:12, bringing this year’s TCUSA trip to a happy end.

The dates for the next two TravellerCON/USAs are set; 2026 will be the weekend of October 16/17/18 (and the theme is The Fifth Frontier War), and 2027 – which will be both TravellerCON/USA #20 and Traveller’s 50th birthday – will be the weekend of October 15/16/17. Mark your calendars and start planning now!

 

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