Aurora Horizon: design notes #1

Aurora Horizon is part six of my over-ambitious multi-part science-fiction first contact freeform larp. Previous episodes are: The Roswell Incident, All Flesh is Grass, Children of the Stars, Messages from Callisto, and The Stars our Destination.

This time, I decided to make some notes as I wrote the game. This is the first part.

The overall idea

In 2010, humanity sends a manned spacecraft (the titular Aurora Horizon) to investigate an alien spacecraft that has been parked on the surface of Callisto.

What do they find?

The problem

Writing Aurora Horizon as a ttrpg scenario would be easy. It’s a mysterious spacecraft with various things to discover. It would probably be a two- or three-session one-shot, I imagine.

But I’m writing it as a freeform larp for 13 players. 

And I must admit that I’ve been putting it off for a while, because it’s a bit tricky.

See, exploring a spacecraft (or a dungeon or a tomb or whatever) works fine as a ttrpg, but it’s not great for freeform larps.

Many years ago, I played in a 20-ish-player Lovecraft game, which included (among many other things) four of us exploring some catacombs below Arkham. While this was fine, it turned a larp into a ttrpg, which wasn’t really what I signed up for.  It also took one of the GMs out of the game, and I plan to run this on my own, so that’s not an option.

Whatever I do will need to be self-contained.

My plan

My plan is that the players will split into different groups at set times, when they go on EVA missions to explore Callisto or the alien ship.

They will choose an area to explore, and I will give them handouts explaining what they find. At the same time, there will be character-specific text.

My plan is to give them sufficient dilemmas to keep them occupied for 15-20 minutes before everyone reconvenes.

Inter-group communication

The game is set in 2010, and as a consequence, everyone can communicate with each other and see what’s going on via suit cameras.

My plan to deal with this is to let the players know that if they want to see what’s going on, they can.

They won’t be present, but they can respond, ask questions and offer advice. If they want to ask the captain something, they can.

(Although I’m not promising not to cut communications for dramatic effect.)

So that’s the plan so far.

Available to download

The first three episodes are available to download. Find them here:

The Roswell Incident (published by Freeform Games)

All Flesh is Grass (published by me on Itch)

Children of the Stars (also published by me on Itch)

(With the others to follow in due course...)

Airecon 2025

Ow. Ow. Ow ow ow.

So let’s get the bad out of the way first. Two days before Airecon 2025, I put my back out. Ouch! And to nobody’s surprise, spending three days at Airecon didn’t do it any favours. (I’m resting it now…)

But despite that, I had a great time. This is what I did.

Friday

Friday was my day for running tabletop roleplaying games.

Last year I left it a bit late and arrived at my table only a few minutes before we were due to start playing. I don’t like running late, so this year I set off from home in plenty of time (and this time remembering that driving into Harrogate during rush hour can be grim).

Anyway, I arrived at the convention centre at about 9:15 am. There was (unsurprisingly) a queue to get in, but that was okay. The doors opened at 9:30, and as most people ahead of me in the queue had checked in last night, it was only a couple of minutes before I was picking up my tickets and heading into the first of several cavernous halls.

I had plenty of time, so I got myself settled in and found the food hall, where I got a cup of tea.

10:15 to 13:15 The Aurors (Fate Accelerated)

At about 10:15, my players turned up, and we started playing The Aurors, my Wizarding World-themed Fate Accelerated investigation. (You can download it here for free.)

The players threw me an interesting curveball – during the minimal character generation, one of my Aurors developed a backstory involving Lidl and dark wizards. At our first location (the lovely town of Warkworth in Northumberland), he spent a fate token to add a story detail – Warkworth now has a Lidl in its centre. And so the players decided to check it out.

While one created a firework-based distraction in the front of the shop, the others went in around the back. So I mentally threw away the prepared start of the adventure and moved the first location to the Lidl storeroom, which the PCs investigated (while fire out front rapidly caught hold, drawing the fire brigade).

Anyway, the rest of the adventure played out (more-or-less) as expected, and our heroes defeated the villain.

I had a good time running The Aurors. The players were engaged and seemed to enjoy themselves. I don’t think any had played Fate before, but they certainly got into the swing of it.

I kept the pace up, as at only three hours, the first RPG session at Airecon is the shortest. Something to be aware of when deciding which game to run.

Lunchbreak

One thing to note if you’re running (and I guess playing) all day is that you only have a 45-minute break between session 1 and session 2. Given the food queues at previous Airecons, that might have been a problem, but luckily, it was fine this year.

Anyway, in my 45 minutes, I dropped some games into the bring-and-buy (which was extremely easy – it’s a very easy system to use – and by leaving it this late, I didn’t have to queue), and then picked up some sandwiches, which I ate back at the table.

14:00 to 18:00 Hillfolk

My second game was Hillfolk, and sadly, only two people had signed up. I really need at least three for Hillfolk (ideally four or five), so one of the other GMs (whose game wasn’t running) joined my table.

We had the Chief, the Curate, and the Captain, and this time, the game went in a very different direction. The tribe quickly became very weak (a raid on a neighbouring tribe went badly) and ended up merging with one of their rivals.

With only three PCs, I ended up running several NPCs. My favourite was Delight, the chief’s ex-girlfriend who deliberately undermined him whenever she was in a scene.

Two of my players had never played Hillfolk before – but the third had played in my game last year and come back for more!

Tea

We finished slightly early (which was always likely to happen with only three players), and so I had a leisurely hour for tea (a nice steak and ale pie with mushy peas) and chatted with old friends.

(And new friends. Someone smiled at me when I was walking gingerly through the halls, and although I smiled back, but didn’t recognise them. Our paths crossed again shortly after and they explained that they enjoyed my Cthulhu Dark adventure last year.)

19:00 to 23:00 Perfect Organism (ALIEN)

My final game was Perfect Organism, my ALIEN cinematic one-shot set a few months after Aliens and concerning the USCMC’s investigation into the loss of the Sulaco. (Download it here for free.)  

This went brilliantly. I created the characters to be deliberately antagonistic towards each other (lots of conflicting agendas), and for the first 45 minutes or so,, I did almost nothing but watch them roleplay. The players really leaned into their characters and it quickly got very intense. At one point I asked if everyone was okay, but they said they knew each other and were having a great time (but appreciated my concern for their wellbeing).

As ever with an ALIEN game, there were character deaths. We ended up with two dead and the other two in cryosleep tubes on LV-426 with no obvious means of rescue…

And with that over, I packed up and drove home.

Saturday

After a not-great night (bad back), this time I took the bus to Harrogate, getting there at about 9:45. I went straight up to the RPG area where I had signed up for a game of Slugblaster.

Slugblaster

I’ve reviewed Slugblaster before but this would be my first chance to see it in action. I signed up when Guy noted over on the Gaming Tavern forum that he was running Slugblaster at Airecon…

Unfortunately, Guy wasn’t well, and the session would have been cancelled – except the Airecon gods smiled on us. As luck would have it, we had a replacement GM, Iain, who not only knew Slugblaster but also had a one-shot session with him and wasn’t doing anything else at that moment. (As it turns out, Iain runs a game very much like Guy does.)

I took The Heart playbook. My character was Solstice, and I rode a Hardlight BMX (whatever that is).

One of the things I really like about Slugblaster is the character beats – mini dramatic arcs. Iain had already started a couple of beats on each pregen, and on mine, the Heart Arc had started: Solstice had started a relationship (with a girl I named Luna) with a member of another gang.

Iain structured the game so that we started play at the the end of a run, then we got to play some downtime, then we played through a full run, and finished with a bit of downtime.

It was all great, and I worked through two more beats in the Heart arc – the rest of the gang learned about my feelings for Luna, and it almost tore us apart.

It was brilliant, and now I want to play Slugblaster even more… (At the very least, I need to re-read the rules!)

Saturday afternoon

I chatted with Dom over lunch (I think we should start some face-to-face gaming in Wetherby), and then parted – him to run his game and me to socialise.

I bumped into Paul of Cthulhu (who runs the Yog-Sothoth.com Cthulhu website), who I haven’t seen in years. He runs a podcast and took the opportunity to interview me about the origins of Tales of Terror, the little ideas booklet I produced in 1990. I have no idea if it was any good or not or if it will actually appear. (And as I was unprepared, I forgot to mention my co-editor, Garrie Hall, who was so influential. Oops.)

I also took my proceeds from the Bring & Buy – through some aggressive pricing, I had sold all of my games.

I had arranged to meet another friend, Philippa, but she was playing Blood on the Clocktower, so I enjoyed a quiet beer while I waited. When I caught up with Philippa, she needed something to eat, and after that, we tried a demo of Rallyman GT (which was fine but not special).

Phillippa had a game of Root booked at 6 pm, and my back was giving me gyp, so I headed home.

Sunday

If I hadn’t promised to take my daughter to Airecon, I probably would have stayed at home and looked after my back. As it was, I came into Harrogate for my third painful day.

Sunday was a day of board games and demos. We played several: Finspan, Spokes, Word Colony, Living Forest Duel, Flow, Wizards Cup, and War of the Worlds: One More Day.

My favourite was probably Finspan or Living Forest Duel. Megan liked Spokes (and really didn’t like Word Colony, as trivia isn’t her strong point).

It was a nice break from revising for A-Levels, and we headed home shortly after 3 pm.

Airecon mementos

Next year

So what about next year?

As usual, I will aim to run three TTRPG sessions. It’s much too early to decide which games, but I like running Hillfolk, but it struggles to attract players. I wonder if I should create a more geek-friendly playset – maybe something set in the ALIEN universe. (I dunno, the leaders of the colony on LV426? That might be fun. I’ll have a think.)

And this year, Airecon had a couple of rooms set aside for “social games” – things like Werewolf and Blood on the Clock Tower. They’d be ideal for a small freeform larp, so I may investigate that. (I will try and persuade Graham to find out more – I’m happy to be involved!)

This year, I also learned how the game finder worked (thanks, Philippa!) – if you want to run a game of something, you can add it to the system and say when and where you’ll be. And then people can sign up. (Or you can just trust the lightsabres – which indicate a game looking for players.) As I so rarely play Cosmic Encounter these days (it’s best with 4-5 and doesn’t appeal to Mrs H, so it rarely sees the light of day), next year’s Airecon may be an opportunity.

But that suggests I’m going to be extremely busy…

And hopefully, my back will behave itself!

Urban Shadows 2e: A first impressions review

I find some games easy to grok from just reading them. 

Campaigns and scenarios I find particularly easy – I can easily imagine how they will play out at the table. (I don’t need to play Mysteries of the Ancients to see its flaws.)

Actual RPGs are a little different, but it’s usually pretty easy to see how they would play. After all, I’ve been doing this for over 40 years.

As a result, I feel quite confident writing reviews for TTRPGs on this blog without playing or running them. I’ve reviewed Good Society, Hillfolk, Most Trusted Advisors, Cthulhu Dark, Slugblaster to name a few. And usually, when I run them, they play pretty much as I expect.

But Urban Shadows?

I’ve now read (or at least skimmed) the Urban Shadows second edition rulebook. And I have no real idea what it looks like in play. So this isn’t really a review – it’s me trying to understand why I’m not “getting” Urban Shadows.

And why am I struggling with Urban Shadows? While the writing doesn’t help (it’s…overwritten), I think there are few reasons why I’m finding Urban Shadows hard to understand. First of these is that it challenges a fundamental principle of most TTRPGs: the players aren’t part of a group.

Hangin’ around together

Whether it's an adventure party or a crew or squad or school year or whatever, almost all TTRPGs have some kind of conceit that means the PCs are sticking together.

Which makes sense, right? After all, we’re all playing this game together, and the best fun is when PCs are riffing off one another. And scenes are more fun if everyone is present.

But Urban Shadows doesn’t do this. If you follow character generation faithfully, you end up with a bunch of characters who know each other and owe each other debts, but they don’t necessarily want to spend time with each other.

(I realised this while watching the start of a YouTube AP. The first 15 minutes (and maybe longer, I stopped watching) was just the GM and one character. The other players were just sitting there, silent. It looked awful… In another YouTube AP, the GM simply asked the players “Why do you guys work together,” which didn’t seem quite in the spirit of Urban Shadows. It was a one-shot though, so time pressures may have been an issue.)

If Urban Shadows were a freeform, this wouldn’t be a problem, as each player could progress their goals by talking to other players. But it’s not – it’s a TTRPG and everything has to go through the GM.

Urban Shadows recognises this problem and includes a GM principle to address it: “Push the characters together, even across boundaries” (page 201). But that only tells me that the authors know it’s a problem.

Core activity

Then there’s Urban Shadows’ core activity.  (The core activity is what the players do in the game: “You are X, who do Y.” Most TTRPGs have a core activity – and some trad games (D&D, Traveller and the like) may have more than one.)

According to the back of the book (the best place for a TTRPG to clearly state its core activity), Urban Shadows is an urban fantasy tabletop roleplaying game in which mortals and monsters vie for control of a modern-day city, a political battleground layered just under the reality we think we know. Vampires, faeries, hunters, and wizards fight to carve out a piece of the streets and skyscrapers, ready to make deals with all those who have something to offer.

Um, okay. So what exactly do you do in a game of Urban Shadows? What does it look like?

What is the core activity?

I can’t tell.

Between session zero and play

I like Urban Shadows’ character generation process.

You start by deciding which city you are setting your game in, then you choose a district of that city focus on. Then players choose playbooks, complete some nice leading questions and create some debts between each other and (maybe) some NPCs.

So far, so good. But what happens next? How does a group move from character generation to actual play?

For me, this is the critical moment for Urban Shadows. This is where everything can stall. Everything is pretty much step-by-step. Suddenly the GM needs to make sense of it all – and Urban Shadows leaves an uncertain GM flailing.

Here’s what the book says (page 235):

The players have given you a ton of hooks and mysteries to explore when making their characters: relationships that require attention, magical objects that attract thieves and scoundrels, conflicts with other PCs that are still unresolved. Grab something that interests you and bring it to bear immediately; show the players that you were listening when they said “I’m looking for my sister” or “My old mentor went crazy and disappeared.” Make your early moves soft and obvious, softball pitches that tell your players exactly what’s going on and telegraphs how they can “solve” the problem. Then follow the chaos they create!

But there’s no example here (an odd omission, given the number of other examples in the text).

Perhaps it’s supposed to be obvious. Perhaps what the players give you is enough – but what if it isn’t? What if you get all this stuff and you’re not sure how to start it? 

Examples and ideas would be a huge help.

GM advice

And the GM advice isn’t very helpful, either. It talks about not running the PCs through a preplanned plot or messing with their heads – but doesn’t clearly explain what you do instead.

What does the GM prepare in advance? Does the GM prepare anything in advance? I don’t know.

Yes, the rules explain the GM’s agendas (goals) and principles (broad guidelines) and moves (blow-by-blow actions) but I found none of it painted a clear picture of how the game played at the table – and what the GM does to prepare.

You might think that the examples would help. But they’re not as helpful as I would like – they’re very slick and don’t feel “real.” At least, not to me.

(I think we have a case of the curse of knowledge here. The writers know how the game is supposed to work, but because they are so intimately familiar with it, they can’t imagine what it’s like to be new to this game.)

What I did come away with was a sense that as GM, I would have to do a lot of improvising.

Now I can do that, but it helps to have some kind of sense of what the world is like. I find it easiest to improvise when I have a good grasp of the world, which brings me to another issue.

What does “urban fantasy” mean anyway?

“Urban fantasy” is a really wide setting. Urban Shadows features vampires and wizards and ghost and fae and hunters and more. Is this Buffy? Or Hellboy? Or Being Human? Or Harry Potter? Or Neverwhere? Or Hellblazer?

Are the werewolves like the ones in The Howling? Or An American Werewolf in London? Are the vampires like Nosferatu, or Near Dark?

This is all stuff that you create at the table, but for me, the lack of a coherent background makes improvising both easier and harder.

Easier in that I haven’t had to learn anything – I can make stuff up. (And as I hate learning backgrounds, this should be good news.)

But it’s also harder for two reasons. First, everyone may have different assumptions about the setting. If we’re not all on the same page, things can go awry and lead to frustration. Second, I don’t always remember everything that happens at the table.

Is this just me and PbtA?

It could be, but I don’t think so.

I’m not a PbtA expert and I do find PbtA games a bit weird – the terminology is often confusing and I find them arrogant; there’s a real sense that if you do things differently then you’re doing it wrong. (And that often spills over into discussion about PbtA. I’m a fan of Risus’ the “there’s no wrong way to play” school of gaming, so this rubs me up the wrong way.)

But I’ve read (and played or run) Monsterhearts, Dungeon World and Monster of the Week, and they all make sense. I can see how they work and I’ve enjoyed them at the table. They’ve been much like other TTRPGs, but I’m a fan of light rulesets.

But.

Pretty much all of the games have been convention one-shots. Most have had some kind of plot that the characters have had to engage with, and if I understand PbtA correctly, that’s not how it’s supposed to go.

And maybe Urban Shadows really is different.

I need to just trust the process

Ultimately, I suspect I just need to trust the process and run a game.

It’s on my list of things to try, but my failure to grok Urban Shadows isn’t making me want to run it.

Shogun (again)

A couple of weeks ago I headed down the A1 to Retford to play UK Freeform’s annual weekend freeform larp. This year it was the 72-player Shogun, conceived by Nathan Richards, Richard Salmon and Richard Perry, with additional material by Chad Brinkley, A.J. Smith and Carol Johnson. (Here’s the website).

This was my second time playing Shogun – it was my first run in 2018 when I played Kinyu, the moneylender. I wrote about that here.

This time I played Sakamoto Jin, the head of the Imperial Bodyguard and Lord High Executioner. I was close to the Shogun’s family, and this was a very different game to last time.

One of the things I really enjoy about these huge freeforms is that there is so much going on that it is easy to play the game again and have a completely different experience.

First, though, a word about the hotel.

Winning the hotel room lottery

We’ve been using the same hotel now since 1997 – nearly 30 years! It’s perfect for our needs, and over the years, we have become used to them, and they’ve become used to us. This time, however, I won the hotel room lottery and was allocated the four-room honeymoon suite (known, I think, as the Dukeries Suite).

How ridiculous! All this and only me!

I didn’t even know there was a honeymoon suite!

It was quite absurd, but set me up nicely for a lovely weekend. (I met someone else who has had that suite in the past – I think it really is the luck of the draw.)

Anyway, back to the game.

Sakamoto Jin

According to the who’s who, “Sakamoto Jin is a former peasant who rose to become the head of the Shogun's Bodyguard. Once deadly and fearsome, he has become old and should surely have retired to a monastery to make way for someone younger.”

Investigating a murder...

So that was me. It was nice to play an older character.

Problems problems

So I started the game with a few problems. Biggest of which is that the Shogun had just been murdered, which launched us into a political crisis. It was also a stain on my honour – would I have to commit seppuku before the weekend was out?

Working through that mystery was a significant part of my game – and it was nicely paced that it wasn’t definitively resolved until Saturday evening. (Although I was getting close – I had a pretty good idea of who had done it by then, but not why.)

That was only one problem, though. I also had spies to track down, a group of dissidents to uncover (I think they thought they were the Rebel Alliance), various artefacts to find, an heir to mentor, a Ninja leader to apprehend, and resolve my love interest.

Some I succeeded, some I didn’t. Others went off in strange directions and others never really kicked off. There was so much going on it didn’t matter.

Abilities

Ability cards are a feature of weekend-long freeforms, and while I often find I forget to use them, this time I found them helpful. I think that’s because they felt really key to the character – it felt like they’d been thought about. Some of the ones I really liked:

• Step Down with Grace and Harmony: Appoint a new bodyguard to the family of the Shogun. Give the person your 'Devoted Protector' ability. You gain 1 Honour as does the character you appoint. One Use (This was rather nice, but in many ways it ended my game as soon as I used it.)
• You Can Always Tell a Killer by Their Eyes: Look into any character's eyes for 5 seconds, then play this card. That character must then tell you if they have ever, personally, killed someone (other than in battle). They don't have to tell you any details but they can do so if they wish. Once per time period. (A lovely ability that I used several times. Gave you a sense of a character without giving anything away.)
• No-o-o-o-o!!! Use this special ability whenever an ally or close friend is killed or wounded by an opponent. You gain a +2 bonus the next time you engage in a combat contest against that opponent. One Use. (I like the Obi-Wan feel of this one.)
• Old but Experienced: You are still a deadly opponent, but age is creeping up on you. Subtract 2 from your Iaijutsu score in a formal duel – in normal combat, use your full score Permanent (I think this is the first time I’ve seen a negative ability – it really gives the sense of a character ageing.)

The abilities were also formatted so they fit on a perforated sheet that I separated before the game. We should remember this next time we run Tombstone!

Shogun highlights 

So, my Shogun highlights. (To avoid key spoilers, I’m using player names instead of character names.) 

• Investigating the Shogun’s murder was interesting. It was frustrating to begin with, but things started to come together when I traced the sword used to kill the Shogan to an incident in the geisha house that Steve B (playing the killer) had been involved in. Then on Saturday evening, a key clue dropped and so Sano Ichiro (the magistrate played by Mike S) and I arrested and questioned him.
• We let Steve B go, but he later attacked the Shogun’s widow (Elyssia K) and heir (Alex S). I gave chase, but Steve B got away – I then killed him (well, his character) later on Sunday morning.
• Tracing the insurgent Heaven and Earth Society was fun (although also slightly frustrating as I struggled to find others particularly interested in that). Fortunately, Musashi (leader of the 47 ronin played by Tony M) was keen to prove his worth and be a double agent. I do wish I'd interrupted their meeting a little later, though! (I should probably have had an out-of-character chat with Karim about it first. Ah, hindsight!)
• I enjoyed my interactions with Kirstine H, playing a ninja. She was drifting a little, so on Saturday afternoon she caught me and suggested that I catch her breaking into my home. So we did this, and I nearly beat her, but she got away thanks to some ninja trickery. (Dastardly ninjas!) On Sunday, I retired and appointed her as my replacement as Imperial Bodyguard and High Executioner. That prompted some raised eyebrows from Elyssia (the Shogun’s widow).
• And I had a pleasant old-folk romance with Shimako (Julie W), the head of the Drunken Monkey school of fighting. We avoided overt romantic displays of affection but had a nice romance involving tea ceremonies, cherry blossoms and helping each other with our problems. On Sunday we married.
• I converted to Catholicism, which I didn’t expect! I had been poisoned by Kirstine’s ninja darts and needed treatment. The nearest doctor was Father Rodrigo (Ben A), who sneakily converted me while treating me. That then prompted a crisis among the Council of Regents as to the number of high-profile Japanese who were being converted to Catholicism…
• I enjoyed watching the play on Saturday night. And this time, I was in the audience, compared to the last time when I was a member of the players.

Plus I really enjoyed all the fabulous costumes, plus seeing old friends and making new ones.

Becoming Catholic.

My one criticism of my character was that the character sheet was a little disjointed. In particular, I was the bearer of a legendary sword, and in preparing to step down, I had given it to Fiona L. Unfortunately, this was the first time the character was mentioned and it would have helped to have had some history to show that they respected each other. (Fiona said she was a bit puzzled as to why I had given her the sword as well.)

Two Steves, locked in deadly combat. (No really, this is a fight!)

And compared to last time?

Compared to last time, I had a very different game. This time, I was very busy with various investigations – and while I wasn’t caught up in the detailed politicking as the daimyos jockeyed for power, I was on the edge of all that. I certainly had no time to indulge in acting!

Did I enjoy it more? The first run was so long ago that I can’t compare – but I know I was busier this time, and I like to be busy. (But I didn’t quite have the thrill of my first “acting” performance.)

Contingencies 

I will say that the contingency envelopes were better this time. Last time, I complained that the contingency envelopes triggered off a number, which was hard to manage. This time, I had two contingencies and I had a hint as to who it applied to.

For example, I had one that said, “Open this envelope on encountering Character No XXX (one of the Ambassadors).” That helped enormously – I opened it after I attended the timetabled greeting of the ambassadors. At that point, I didn’t know which ambassador the envelope referred to, but after the ceremony, I quickly checked the badge names and learned who it applied to.

(I wrote about Shogun’s contingency envelopes after the first run – I was pleased to see an improvement!)

My advance prep (or lack of)

I have an extremely bad habit (which I think is well-known among my fellow freeformers) of not reading all the background. I certainly hadn’t read the detailed rules and much of the general background of Japan I had skimmed. (I’m not proud of this.)

I did do some prep – I printed out the character sheet and marked player names alongside the character names (I found Japanese character names very hard to remember). I’m glad I did that, as I found the A5 booklets the GMs provided a little too small for my ageing eyes.

However, I wish I’d done what Tony did…

Tony’s little black book

From what I could see, Tony had bought an A5 black hardback notebook, printed his character sheet and stuck it into the notebook.

Each plot had its own page(s), which included the original text and space for his notes. Additionally, each other character in the game had their own page. He’d cut out the public information from the Who’s Who and put it at the top of the page, leaving lots of space for further notes.

So while I was carrying around my character sheet (and other bits of paper) and a notebook, Tony just had a notebook. That was a much more elegant solution – both in ease of use and how it appeared (clutching envelopes and looking through tatty sheets of paper never looks good).

Anyway, I am writing this out in more detail than may warrant to remind myself that that’s what I should do next year!

Next year: Gateways

And speaking of next year’s game, it’s been announced. It’s a science fiction game called Gateways inspired by things like The Expanse, Babylon 5, Firefly and many more. You can read more about it on the website.

If you are interested in the game, registration closes at the end of March. There’s then a lottery, as these games are usually oversubscribed. There’s a waiting list which is often burned through as life intervenes and people drop out, so I wouldn’t lose hope if you end up on it.

Being responsible for UK Freeforms

I think I’m responsible for the name “UK freeforms”, because I set up a mailing list in the late 90s and that’s what I called it. But as to why I called it UK Freeforms, that’s a longer story.

My first freeform

I played my first freeform at Convulsion, in 1992. That was Home of the Bold, and it changed my life. Until then I’d been happily playing and running tabletop games (mostly Call of Cthulhu), but Home of the Bold changed everything for me, and I’ve been a fan of freeforms ever since.

I’d heard of freeforms before Home of the Bold, though. I can’t remember exactly where I heard them, but I’d read reviews of Morgana Cowling’s The Freeform Book (here's Amazon's entry) and I really, really wanted to try one out.

(It’s possible I heard about freeforms from Andrew Rilstone, who in the late 80s was hosting “fantasy parties” and talked about them in his fanzine, Aslan. Brian Williams also talks about the fantasy parties.)

The Freeform Book was published in 1989 and contains three complete freeforms for a dozen or so players, along with a fair amount of advice. Things have moved on since then, but it’s still a pretty good start. Cowling says that her first freeform was in 1985, so I was a relative latecomer to it.

Home of the Bold

Home of the Bold was written by Kevin Jacklin and David Hall. Kevin had been to the USA to play in Cafe Casablanca, a 60-player weekend-long freeform set in 1941 Casablanca. Inspired by that, he decided to bring that style of game to the UK, starting with Home of the Bold. As far as I can tell, the authors of Cafe Casablanca (which included Sandy Petersen, who, at Continuum told us stories of that and their follow-up The King’s Musketeers) never described it as a freeform - it was always a larp to them (I don’t know if they described it as “theatre-style larp” back then).

But Kevin and David advertised it as a freeform. I can think of two possible reasons.

First, in the early 90s, larp in the UK was very defined: fantasy, foam weapons, mandatory costuming, player-generated characters, very simulationist. I’ve tried larp once or twice, and it didn’t really agree with me - and if Home of the Bold had been advertised as a larp I may well not have turned up.

Second, the term freeform was already being bandied about - possibly as a result of The Freeform Book.

So Kevin and David advertised Home of the Bold as a freeform, and Continuum became known for a while as one of the best places to try out freeforms on the UK convention circuit. (And its successor, Continuum, still is – Home of the Bold was held again in 2024.)

Following Home of the Bold I started writing my own freeforms, both on my own and in collaboration with others. They were largely inspired by Home of the Bold and Cafe Casablanca, and although I called them freeforms (and continue to do so), I can trace a direct line back to theatre-style larps such as Cafe Casablanca.

A mailing list – and more

In 1997 or 1998, I started a mailing list for people who wanted to discuss writing, running and playing freeforms in the UK. So I called it “uk-freeforms”, and it stuck.

(Why didn’t I just set up a discussion forum? Well, in the mid-nineties, it was much easier to start a mailing list than figure out how to start a new forum on Usenet. And things like Facebook groups and Discord servers were years away.)

UK Freeforms, as an organisation, formed from enthusiastic members of the mailing list in the early 2000s and took over the running of the weekend-long freeforms, as well as organising Consequences (and part-sponsoring the Peaky writing weekends).

And I started Freeform Games in 2001 with Mo Holkar, bringing freeform-style murder mystery games to the general public.

The ukfreeforms mailing list continues to this day (although it’s moved to groups.io), there’s a very underused wiki, and I set up a UK Freeforms Facebook group. There’s also a Discord server. 

What is a freeform anyway?

Every couple of years ago, there’s a discussion on what exactly a “UK Freeform” is or whether “freeform” is a good name for them. There’s never consensus, which suits me just fine: I’ve always been reluctant to define it.

Note: This originally appeared on the UK Freeforms wiki here.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Links to other posts I’ve enjoyed recently. (And when I say recently, I mean the last few months. I should probably try to do this more frequently.)

How Do You Role-Play?

On Fandomlife, Ian O'Rourke looks at what we mean when we talk about doing "role-play" and presents a dramatise/describe/decide model. I'm not sure the model makes complete sense - surely dramatise and describe are the two axes, as you can make decisions while describing or dramatising?

(Ian suggests he is all about reaching the bid, dramatic choice or judgement. Yes - but how does he get there? I imagine he describes or dramatises. I can't work out how he makes those decisions in his game without doing either. But maybe I'm missing something fundamental.)

As for me, I find describing easier than dramatising. I'll do both, but tend to default to describing. (Interestingly, it's completely the other way around in a freeform larp - I only rarely describe as the games are designed differently – I rarely need to describe. Instead I do.)

The Games Behind Your Government's Next War

On YouTube, People Make Games talks about wargames and the uncomfortable overlap between board games and wargames. It’s a great video, and I suspect any queasiness about the subject is probably related to whether you can imagine serving in the armed forces. 

My father served in World War 2, so I find the subject less controversial. Using games to model situations and strategies makes sense to me – I enjoy using simulations to wargame scenarios. (It doesn’t have to be the military, either – my brother-in-law created an asset management game for Sellafield, and I enjoyed the project management games I played on training courses.)

I listened to the book referenced in the video, A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II, by Simon Parkin. A fascinating account of the wargames used to develop WW2 anti-submarine tactics in the North Atlantic.

Drive Thru RPG's New Site Isn't Great For Smaller Publishers (Now With Numbers!)

On Improved Intitiative, Neal Litherland discusses the challenges and economics of being a small publisher on DTRPG. My sales are so low that I’d not noticed a dropoff – but luckily I don’t put things there to make money. (I put things there because I like to share them. I give them a price because I think they have value.)

If I was doing this for the money, I’d create a newsletter and put myself out there more on social media. I loathe social media, so that’s going to be an uphill struggle… And judging by which posts are popular on my blog (the ones about Traveller and ALIEN), I’d pick established RPGs to write adventures for.

But luckily for me, I don’t depend on my DTRPG income.

Reality Tunnels

On Development Hell, writer Julian Simpson talks about everyone having a reality tunnel (the world as they see it, shaped by their experiences), and how authors must get inside their character’s headspace. This can mean looking at characters like Elon Musk and Donald Trump and trying to understand why they think the way they think and do the things they do.

You don’t have to agree with Musk or Trump or whoever (and Simpson certainly doesn’t – and neither do I), but it feels like a more helpful approach than what we usually see on social media.

Stop Hiding the Apes in Your RPG

On Explorer’s Design, Clayton Notestine argues that some RPGs don’t clearly explain what it is the game is about. For example:

What is Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: the RPG actually about? What do you do?

The back cover of Liminal says it is “A roleplaying game about those caught between the ordinary and extraordinary.” Really? That’s not how it plays – or reads. Wouldn’t “A British folk urban fantasy roleplaying game of solving Hidden World cases” be more accurate? (Liminal’s core activity, solving  Hidden World cases, is tucked away on page 63 rather than being front and centre.)

The Future of RPGs is Pregenerated Characters

On Grinning Rat, Nate Whittington argues that pregenerated characters are the future of RPGs.

I often loathe character generation and would almost always prefer a pregenerated character designed to fit whatever we’re playing. (And, for me, the option to tailor the character is nice but not essential.)

But the future of RPGs? Much as I would like to think so, my experience of playing and players suggests that many (most?) prefer to create their own.

Energy Consumption of ChatGPT Responses

This article by Michal Aibin looks into ChatGPT’s energy consumption. TL;DR – ChatGPT-4 consumes approximately enough energy to power 170 US homes annually. (ChatGPT-5 is projected to double that number.)

That’s for running ChatGPT, once the model is trained. Training the model takes place over weeks or months, and uses enough energy equivalent to the energy budget of another 160 US homes (ChatGPT-4).

That’s a lot, but it’s not as terrifying as I’ve heard some day. (Assuming it’s true, of course.) But it’s only one of the AI models out there. (And if the stories about Deepseek are true, it uses much less energy compared to other AIs.)

Is it worth it? That’s difficult to say.

(And this article is an exciting/terrifying look at DeepSeek and the future of AI: "The best AI models were about as intelligent as rats four years ago, dogs three years ago, high school students two years ago, average undergrads a year ago, PhDs a few months ago, and now they’re better than human PhDs in their own field. Just project that into the future.")

GURPS Time Travel Adventures

GURPS Time Travel Adventures was published in 1993 – I have an adventure in it called Titanic! set, yes, aboard the Titanic, the doomed transatlantic liner.

It’s been out of print for years, but in 2020, Steven Marsh at SJ Games tracked me down. It seemed they’d lost the contract and wanted to know if I had a copy as they wanted to publish GURPS Time Travel Adventures as a pdf through Warehouse 23.

Unsurprisingly, I also couldn’t put my hands on the contract, but I clearly remember it being a work-for-hire (ie, they hold all the rights), and told him.

The quitclaim

However, SJG needed me to sign a “quitclaim,” (which basically says they have the rights to it). I was happy to renounce everything (after all, I’d been paid back in 1993) but, because it was another contract, we needed an actual physical consideration of $1. So, at some point in 2022 or 2023, I received a dollar bill from Steve Jackson Games.

(I tried to get them to give it to charity. But no, that wasn’t an option.)

I have no idea what I did with the dollar bill. I guess it’s around somewhere, but it’s effectively worthless as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, I mention all this for two reasons.

First, at the end of December 2024, I received my complimentary pdf of GURPS Time Travel Adventures. So it’s now available on Warehouse 23.

And second, glancing through Titanic! again, I remember how much I hated creating the NPC stats. 

NPCs, why did it have to be NPCs…

The idea behind the adventure is that the PCs are time agents sent back to the Titanic to ensure that some people (passengers and crew) are saved, while others are not. This is to secure their future. Meanwhile, a rival set of time agents want to save a different bunch of people to secure their future.

So what with the passengers and crew and enemy time agents, Titanic! features 30+ NPCs, most of which are fully statted out. Dear god, what was I thinking?

(There is absolutely no need for most of the NPCs to be statted out. But that was the house style, and so that’s what I did.)

Moving on

It was also, if I remember right, the end of my interest in GURPS. The early 90s was when I started playing and writing freeform larps, and my gaming was heading in a very different direction…

(Trivia note: Lynne Hardy, now Chaosium’s Associate Editor for Call of Cthulhu, helped proofread Titanic!)