It was great to meet you, DickNervous!
My events went very well, despite my nervousness about them. Recall that I was in a similar boat at last year's event. Last time around, I had never actually refereed a game of Traveller and I was running an ATU game for all the (not really) cranky grognards who were (not really) going to tell me I was doing it wrong.
This year, I ran the same Nova Roma event I ran last year, giving John Watts a chance to play this time. It went amazingly well. I debuted two new games.
The first new one was my Time Traveller adventure, set 75 years into the future of the Nova Roma adventure. In fact, the group went back in time to STOP the actions of the Nova Roma game that we had just played out, and it was big fun.
The second new one was a normal Imperium game that I called Merchants of Venus. It was a "mustering out and starting a free trader" game, but I had prepared six beat-up ships, all between 100 and 300 tons, and badly in need of repair. I don't believe in the "highly optimized" build in my games, so these ships had all kinds of weird issues that the PCs investigated. I also got to try out my four-term accelerated character generation system, which got good reviews from the players.
All three games were a success, despite me being extremely tired. I'd taken Thursday off work to finish my adventure prep and stayed up till 4 AM finishing, then drove up to Lancaster on Friday afternoon. I ran all three of my four-hour game sessions on Saturday, starting at 8 AM and finishing at 11 PM. I was so wiped out that I just slept in on Sunday and missed that morning game session.
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