I've just signed up for Tabletop Scotland 2026, which takes place on the weekend of the 4th - 6th September at Ingliston Showground by Edinburgh Airport.
I'm pretty hyped about going. I went last year for the first time and loved it. The buzz was great and I met some lovely people and was introduced to new game genres, mini makers and rpg systems. I also ran two games of Dirtbags!. That was a steep learning curve, as I'd never run a convention game with a hard time limit of 3.5 hours.
Running a convention game is a real test of your game mechanic knowledge. Running a convention game for a newly released rpg system is doubly so. Thankfully, last year's games went well and both tables of players were fully engaged with the system and appeared to have a lot of fun.
I ran my own published adventure, Rescue on Gillon V, a short hex-crawl. I wanted to give the players some form of visual representation to help dial in the focus on the setting - a mix of fecund jungle, open woodlands, hill country and savannah. I bought mdf hexes and painted them with watercolour paints then sealed them. They looked great and really helped the players to see the path their Dirtbags were taking toward their objective.
This year I've again signed up to GM two game slots for Dirtbags! I'm going to run an urban point crawl. I'm at the early stages of plotting out the scenario and working out the adversaries, locations, clues, and breadcrumbs to help the Dirtbags along.
I've become hooked with the concept of player agency, as opposed to railroads. Rescue on Gillon V was designed to provide players the freedom to decide how they were going to achieve their objective and which route they would take to get there. Each hex had its own challenges which may or may not be activated depending on player actions and choices. Some hexes provided a boon, whilst others were more inherently dangerous. Rescue on Gillon V was very much a game about the journey, with reaching the objective being the climactic finale. It worked out well when I ran the scenario at Tabletop Scotland 2025. I've had great feedback from other Dirtbag referees who have ran it in their own groups or at conventions.
For the scenario I'll run at Tabletop Scotland 2026, I want to replicate that freedom of choice, that sense of journey and adventure. I'm not sure if an urban hex-crawl will work. I suppose that it should be no different from a wilderness hex-crawl, as it's all about location, and the challenges and rewards of that location, or cluster of locations on offer.
The new scenario I'm designing is entitled, Dr Theoloph's Semi-Autonomous Return, a scenario about a mad doctor and his robot army that are trying to take over the city. The Dirtbags are employed to oppose that coup. Unlike in Rescue on Gillon V, the end objective is not a hard place that the Dirtbags can see and have to journey to. Dr Theoloph's lair is somewhere in the city. The Dirtbags have to 'discover' where the BBEG is before they can then attempt the objective.
And so, I've been doing a lot of research into hex-crawls and point-crawls, reading numerous blogs, reddit posts, and falling down the Alexandrian rabbit hole. I don't want the scenario to be too complex, after all, it should be fun and achievable within 3 - 4 hours.
I've done a lot of thinking on the topic and it's high time that I start putting pen to paper. Tabletop Scotland 2026 takes place in early September. I've got four months to design, write, playtest and finalise the adventure before then.
Time to get to work.
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