Travellers is a road movie set in northern Sweden, "Norrland" (literary: North land), the land of the midnight sun, somewhere in the late 80's. It is dark, snowing and well below 10 degrees cold and falling rapidly. Notably, there are no mobile phones. If you know nothing about northern Sweden, the film "Fargo" by the Coen brothers might be a good, available source of inspiration. A better but less available alternative is a 50's flick called "Terror in the midnight sun". The setting for this game could easily be changed for something else with the appropriate properties.
The story in Travellers is allegoric. For the players, it will probably come across as non-sensible and lacking a statement. This is alright, it will all change in the end. I like the story---I find it quite nicely put together, interesting but most of all highly enjoyable as a short role playing exercise. Having played Travellers quite a few times with different groups of players, I think the story is rather flexible, without losing its key points. This will be discussed later, once you too know the story. When Travellers was written in September 1998, I was dead tired of scenarios composed of disjoint scenes where the entire story was chopped up into small bits introduced piecemeal. I wanted Travellers to have a story not really using scenes and where the different parts of the story was seamlessly integrated. In this, I feel, I was successful only in part, and the play line is broken in a few places (opposed to constantly in many of the scene-based scenarios of the time, including my own). At the time, I simply didn't know how to get my story in there without taking control over the players like that. Although this is a revised edition, I have only made minor changes and tried to stay true to the original.- 3 players, 1 game master
- 2-4 hours
- Road movie, strong scenes, allegoric play
- Stockholms Spelkonvent, 1999