Peaky 2019 was a really good Peaky for me - I don’t think it could have gone much better.
(If you’re new here, Peaky is a freeform writing weekend. About 30 freeform writers meet on Friday evening and form groups of 5-6 writers. The rest of Friday evening and all of Saturday is spent writing the freeform, and the freeforms are then all run on Sunday.)
I co-wrote Tea at Longbourne and played two other freeforms and several boardgames.
Writing Tea at Longbourne (Friday)
I ended up in a writing group with Tony, Heidi, AJ and Phil. It felt a bit like getting the band back together - Tony, Heidi, AJ and I were part of the writing team for Once Upon A Time in Tombstone. So it was easy for us to write together, and we’ve all each written games with Phil.
Unfortunately, we struggled to come up with an idea. Peaky starts with a session where everyone pitches ideas for freeforms (that may or may not be written). In our case, I was getting a bit fed up with the process (nothing really grabbed me) when Heidi half-flippantly said that she didn’t care what she wrote provided she wrote it in the room next door. I agreed, as did Phil, AJ and Tony - and at which point we had formed a group. But we didn’t have an idea.
AJ had pitched an idea that involved meaningful decisions, so we kicked that around for a while. I’ve had an idea about a first contact situation where the players are members of the United Nations. They have to react to events (one of Jupiter’s moons goes missing, that sort of thing). We also talked about the old BBC tv show Crisis Command, which was like a Cobra emergency committee larp.
But someone wondered if we could do a different genre, and completely randomly I suggested Pride and Prejudice. And that stuck… We came up with an idea where the characters would make key decisions that would affect events further down the line. And because we’re all nerds and geeks, some of those decisions were a bit gonzo. (We really were taking the most appalling liberties with Pride and Prejudice!)
But we really couldn’t figure out how to do it. We kicked ideas around all Friday night. We thought about making it very Nordic and getting the players to do all the hard work. (That was appealing - we figured we could finish before lunch and spend the rest of Saturday playing games.)
We decided to sleep on it, and hope for inspiration.
Writing Tea at Longbourne (Saturday)
And inspiration didn’t come. We had some ideas, but they weren’t that much better and we couldn’t agree what to do. To me, the ideas felt a bit nebulous and I had a feeling that we had something, but we needed a bit more detail.
So I suggested that everyone spends 30-45 minutes writing their idea up - how they envisaged the game would work. (Tony reported to another group that at this point we were all writing our own game…) We then printed out everyone’s ideas and reviewed them all. We picked the best ideas from each and suddenly we had a structure we could use.
Once we had decided what to write, Tea at Longbourne turned out to be ridiculously easy to write. It helped that the characters are extremely well known, and we could take great chunks from Wikipedia. (In fact, the cast list was almost entirely taken from Wikipedia.)
Another thing that made it easy is that we had structured the game so that we had pairs of characters acting as a team. So once we’d written one, we just had to change the names and we’d written the other. That sped everything up and we ended up finishing by 6pm. (Another writing group finished before us, mind you.)
We spent the rest of the evening playing boardgames - and I organised the Sunday running order, as usual. (I have a system now and it works smoothly).
Sunday - playing the games
On Sunday we played the games. The running order was:
0930 The Circus of Wonders and Shadows and Here’s Dreaming of You Kid
1230 Tea at Longbourne and Berlin Station
1500 Seeds of Humanity and Imaginary Friends
In The Circus of Wonders and Shadows I played an insecure stage magician who had come into possession of a fabulous artefact - but unfortunately had terrible consequences. I had a lovely time agonising whether to continue using it in my show or not.
I didn’t play in Here’s Dreaming of You Kid, which was a four-player game about relationships. (The GMs ran two games simultaneously, otherwise we would have had spare players with nothing to do.) It sounded really interesting though.
Berlin Station was a cold-war spy game that I didn’t play because I was running Tea at Longbourne.
Tea at Longbourne went really well - apart from a few logic errors towards the end, the players seemed to have a great time and even held an impromptu dance. There are a couple of changes that I want to make - the main one to allow for an ending that makes everyone happy. In the current version of the game it’s not possible for everyone to get what they want, and I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do in a Pride and Prejudice game.
In Seeds of Humanity I played a Botanist on a colony ship leaving a doomed earth. Unfortunately I struggled a bit with this game - it mixed a murder mystery with a bunch of angst, and while that worked for some, my character was a bit too peripheral to be fully involved.
Imaginary Friends was the last game - which was about childhood imaginary friends (I think). It sounded good.
Six out of six
So six freeforms written at Peaky, most of which I’m sure will be played again at some point. (I know I’m going to work on Tea at Longbourne.)
(If you’re new here, Peaky is a freeform writing weekend. About 30 freeform writers meet on Friday evening and form groups of 5-6 writers. The rest of Friday evening and all of Saturday is spent writing the freeform, and the freeforms are then all run on Sunday.)
I co-wrote Tea at Longbourne and played two other freeforms and several boardgames.
Writing Tea at Longbourne (Friday)
I ended up in a writing group with Tony, Heidi, AJ and Phil. It felt a bit like getting the band back together - Tony, Heidi, AJ and I were part of the writing team for Once Upon A Time in Tombstone. So it was easy for us to write together, and we’ve all each written games with Phil.
Unfortunately, we struggled to come up with an idea. Peaky starts with a session where everyone pitches ideas for freeforms (that may or may not be written). In our case, I was getting a bit fed up with the process (nothing really grabbed me) when Heidi half-flippantly said that she didn’t care what she wrote provided she wrote it in the room next door. I agreed, as did Phil, AJ and Tony - and at which point we had formed a group. But we didn’t have an idea.
AJ had pitched an idea that involved meaningful decisions, so we kicked that around for a while. I’ve had an idea about a first contact situation where the players are members of the United Nations. They have to react to events (one of Jupiter’s moons goes missing, that sort of thing). We also talked about the old BBC tv show Crisis Command, which was like a Cobra emergency committee larp.
But someone wondered if we could do a different genre, and completely randomly I suggested Pride and Prejudice. And that stuck… We came up with an idea where the characters would make key decisions that would affect events further down the line. And because we’re all nerds and geeks, some of those decisions were a bit gonzo. (We really were taking the most appalling liberties with Pride and Prejudice!)
But we really couldn’t figure out how to do it. We kicked ideas around all Friday night. We thought about making it very Nordic and getting the players to do all the hard work. (That was appealing - we figured we could finish before lunch and spend the rest of Saturday playing games.)
We decided to sleep on it, and hope for inspiration.
Writing Tea at Longbourne (Saturday)
And inspiration didn’t come. We had some ideas, but they weren’t that much better and we couldn’t agree what to do. To me, the ideas felt a bit nebulous and I had a feeling that we had something, but we needed a bit more detail.
So I suggested that everyone spends 30-45 minutes writing their idea up - how they envisaged the game would work. (Tony reported to another group that at this point we were all writing our own game…) We then printed out everyone’s ideas and reviewed them all. We picked the best ideas from each and suddenly we had a structure we could use.
Once we had decided what to write, Tea at Longbourne turned out to be ridiculously easy to write. It helped that the characters are extremely well known, and we could take great chunks from Wikipedia. (In fact, the cast list was almost entirely taken from Wikipedia.)
Another thing that made it easy is that we had structured the game so that we had pairs of characters acting as a team. So once we’d written one, we just had to change the names and we’d written the other. That sped everything up and we ended up finishing by 6pm. (Another writing group finished before us, mind you.)
We spent the rest of the evening playing boardgames - and I organised the Sunday running order, as usual. (I have a system now and it works smoothly).
Sunday - playing the games
On Sunday we played the games. The running order was:
0930 The Circus of Wonders and Shadows and Here’s Dreaming of You Kid
1230 Tea at Longbourne and Berlin Station
1500 Seeds of Humanity and Imaginary Friends
In The Circus of Wonders and Shadows I played an insecure stage magician who had come into possession of a fabulous artefact - but unfortunately had terrible consequences. I had a lovely time agonising whether to continue using it in my show or not.
I didn’t play in Here’s Dreaming of You Kid, which was a four-player game about relationships. (The GMs ran two games simultaneously, otherwise we would have had spare players with nothing to do.) It sounded really interesting though.
Berlin Station was a cold-war spy game that I didn’t play because I was running Tea at Longbourne.
Tea at Longbourne went really well - apart from a few logic errors towards the end, the players seemed to have a great time and even held an impromptu dance. There are a couple of changes that I want to make - the main one to allow for an ending that makes everyone happy. In the current version of the game it’s not possible for everyone to get what they want, and I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do in a Pride and Prejudice game.
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| A dance in Tea at Longbourne |
Imaginary Friends was the last game - which was about childhood imaginary friends (I think). It sounded good.
Six out of six
So six freeforms written at Peaky, most of which I’m sure will be played again at some point. (I know I’m going to work on Tea at Longbourne.)
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