Fate of the Sky Raiders session #1: The asteroid ship

I’m running FASA’s 1982 adventure Fate of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of our first session (which is also session #12 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign).

Click here to read my review of Fate of the Sky Raiders.

Oh yes, spoilers ahoy! (Probably – I am deviating from the text somewhat.)

The Travellers

Our players and their characters are Terry (playing ex-space pirate Sir Sidderon Dubois), Thomas (playing drifter Felix "Dusty" Pygrin) and Tom (playing Zhodani prole Mustafa Lama Doka).

As for me, I was a little nervous going into today’s session. I knew I didn’t have much prepared – just a vague sense of what was going on. Fate of the Sky Raiders really isn’t my kind of adventure, and I’m not a fan of exploration games. (I don’t run static dungeons – I’d rather have purpose in my games.)

But I trusted that my players would somehow create a direction for the session, which is what eventually happened.

Last time’s cliffhanger

As established at the end of the last session, I started the session with the Travellers in a modular cutter approaching the Sky Raiders massive asteroid base, when their ship (an 800-ton Explorer-class survey ship with the slightly sinister name of Inquisitor) disappears into jump.

Oh dear.

So with limited supplies, their only option is to head to the asteroid. Not that they had any other plans.

As far as entering the asteroid goes, I presented them with several options:

• A crater at the ship’s front has revealed an access tube
• The various laser batteries
• The meson cannon
• The fuel processor station
• The communications array
• The empty flight cradles (where ships would dock)
• The engines

Premonition of doom

Having set the scene, I asked everyone to make a difficult (10+) skill roll using Admin/Deception/Streetwise or something similar to see if they had picked up any hint of the Inquisitor’s betrayal. Felix and Sir Sidderon failed, but Mustafa made a successful Broker roll and had caught wind of something.

I asked him why he hadn’t told anyone: “I’m a prole. It’s not my place to raise such matters.” Perfect.

Anyway, we’ve banked the roll for later. Maybe Mustafa packed a vital piece of equipment or something. But what he did learn was that someone said the ship would be coming back. 

The expedition

Fate of the Sky Raiders provides an equipment list for the expedition and asks the players to decide what they are bringing. I didn’t do that – I had looked at the list and realised that everything would fit in the cutter anyway, so I said they had everything listed. (And maybe a bit more.)

As for the NPCs, I have a bunch to manage: six scientists and three helpers. So that’s going to be fun.

I’ve told my players that the NPCs will stay in the background. Even though the Travellers are actually just hired help, it’s their movie, so they will make the decisions. Where necessary, the PCs can use the scientist's skills and expertise. 

Hopefully, that will make sense.

The docking bay and the map

The Travellers entered the asteroid ship through a docking bay and found it pressurised, with a little power, but deserted. Not so much deserted as completely stripped of pretty much everything. (In my head, the inhabitants have stripped everything they can for the recyclers/3D printers.)

(I presented a map from Fate of the Sky Raiders. The players were unimpressed with the accommodation.)

They repaired the recyclers and unloaded the cutter. They found a map of the ship (etched into the wall – although I don’t think I said that out loud) and spent two days deciphering it (and also repairing the atmosphere recyclers).

Now that they are “looking” at a map of the whole ship (I don’t actually have one I can share), I explain that the asteroid ship is divided into modules. If they decide where they want to go, I will plot a route.

The Travellers decided they wanted to get to the main bridge (not actually a location in Fate of the Sky Raiders itself), and I said to get there, they had to pass through a control complex (a secondary bridge), an industrial complex, an agricultural complex, the meson cannon, and finally the main bridge itself.

Reaching the different modules required using the access shafts– large, zero-g tubes that crisscross the station. We talked about that, and I explained (out of character – maybe as one of the scientists theorising) that the asteroid ship was so huge that the Sky Raiders didn’t expect people to travel around it massively. They would live in the residential areas, do a stretch of time in whichever module they were assigned to, then go home. (So a bit like working on an oil rig.) 

That explained the functional staterooms and meant there wasn’t a fast-access system (no turbolifts) around the ship. (It also probably meant there were zero-g shuttles originally designed for the access shafts. Maybe we’ll find them.)

Access shafts

I’m making so much of this up.

To the bridge

For simplicity’s sake, we decided that everyone was heading to the bridge. So off the expedition set, down the appropriate access tube.

After about 100m, they reached the control complex (the secondary bridge).

The control complex

The dice told me that this section of the ship wasn’t fully functional – the doors and lights were out. It was also uninhabited. The Travellers cut their way in and found themselves surrounded by consoles. Again, anything that wasn’t fixed down had been stripped (for recycling), but as the computers were built into the consoles, they could be operated.

So, of course, the PCs tried to hack into the system. This was a very difficult task (12+) that would take a day, and we created a skill chain using linguistics, alien technology and computers. They failed, but I decided that didn’t represent an inability to 

With computers and power, they decided to hack into the computer. So they spend three days on a task chain that draws on the NPC scientists’ skills in linguistics, alien technology, and computers. It was a fail, but I just said it took much longer than expected – three days.

(The NPCs’ stats haven’t aged well. For example, Dr Vledistart Mirost is described as being “a specialist in linguistic archaeology and in the general area of most languages.” However his skills are Computer-3, Rifle-1, Jack-o-Trades-1, Electronics-1, Carousing-1! Back in 1982, Traveller didn’t have a science skill, so I decided Dr Mirost had Linguistics-3.)

Anyway, the computer was full of error messages. Some systems are working (including some laser batteries), but the drives appear to be completely inoperable.

Then a video call comes in from the main bridge. There’s a human dressed in weird clothes and with tattoos jabbering at them – it sounds like they are asking questions. The PCs can’t understand it, and the caller terminates the call...

Next time

Before we ended, I asked the players what they planned to do. Their plan is to continue towards the main bridge. So that gives me something to plan for.

Coming soon: Session #2, The Sky Raiders' descendants.

Previously: My review of Fate of the Sky Raiders,  or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.

Fate of the Sky Raiders review

Fate of the Sky Raiders was written by J Andrew Keith with art by William H Keith Jr and maps by Mitch O’Connell. It was published by FASA in 1982 and is the final part of the Sky Raiders trilogy, preceded by Legend of the Sky Raiders and Trail of the Sky Raiders.

As with my review of Legend and Trail, I am writing this review before running my players through Fate of the Sky Raiders. (Right now, my players have almost completed Trail – we just have some loose ends to sort out.)

As the review is a bit too spoilery, I've delayed posting this (and the subsequent session reports) until my players are far enough through the adventure that it won't spoil it for them.

And yes, spoilers ahead. Although it’s a 45-year-old adventure, so there’s that.

Memories from 1982

Physically, Trail of the Sky Raiders was a LBB-sized 60-page book with extra maps. I remember buying it back in the day, but I'm using a pdf right now. I can remember three things from that time.

1. I found Fate to be something of an anticlimax after the build-up in Legend and Trail.
2. I thought it would be difficult to run.
3. I loved the illustration on page 30 (ie, the centre pages), which fell open when you held the book. I mean, it’s not something that specifically happens in the adventure (although it could), but it’s a lovely bit of design that I’ve never forgotten. (Of course, it doesn’t work so well with a pdf.)

Fate of the Sky Raiders: Plot

At the end of Trail of the Sky Raiders, it is revealed that the Sky Raiders were a minor human race fleeing Vilani expansion 5300 years ago. They built a massive asteroid starship and fled their home in the Gushemege Sector, across the Great Rift (at sublight speeds, taking 300 years to do so), to the Far Frontiers Sector, where they resumed their pillaging ways. They had a civil war about 5000 years ago that damaged their ship’s jump engines, leaving the ship adrift, travelling at sublight speed. With data from an abandoned Sky Raiders ship, the location of the asteroid ship can be calculated – assuming it hasn’t changed course or been captured by a stray planet.

From there to here

Having proven themselves, Lorain Messandi employs the PCs to accompany her team to search for the Sky Raiders asteroid ship. Sure enough, they find it – and the team boards a cutter to explore it.

However, once the cutter reaches the asteroid ship, the expedition’s support ship pulls away and jumps! They have been abandoned!

All that is effectively prologue – Fate of the Sky Raiders is all about exploring the massive asteroid ship and finding a way to escape.

(This review of Fate of the Sky Raiders complains about how railroady Fate is at the start. I guess it is, but to me, it’s just setup. Fate is about exploring and surviving the massive asteroid ship. I’ve already told my players that I’m starting with them stranded on the asteroid – everything before that is backstory.)

Exploring the asteroid

The Sky Raider’s asteroid ship is vast: approx 10 km x 8 km x 7.5 km, displacing around 50 billion tons and carries millions of people. It may be one of the largest ships in the Traveller universe.

But there’s no overall map. Instead, there are floor plans of the various modules the PCs might encounter: control complexes, industrial complexes, agricultural complexes, power centres, docking bays, and surface modules. (Oddly, there are no recreational areas, schools, hospitals, laboratories, mess halls, or recycling centres. There are a bunch of staterooms, but given that this is somewhere people lived and raised families for maybe ten generations as they crossed the Great Rift, there’s nowhere you’d want to call home.)

The modules are connected by zero-g access shafts. The asteroid is riddled with these modules, with the large agricultural modules opening onto enormous dodecahedron voids used as fields.

Amazingly, the ship still has power. Not much, but some.

When the PCs explore the ship (by heading along an access shaft at random), the Referee rolls randomly to determine the next module the PCs encounter. They also roll to see if it is operable and whether it is inhabited.

The inhabitants

So yes, not only does the asteroid ship have power, but it also has air, water, food – and inhabitants. And the inhabitants are rolled randomly as well:

• Population (1D-2)
• Government type (2D)
• Attitude (2D-7+Government type); low = friendly and open, high = xenophobic
• Technology (population, plus some modifiers, but no higher than TL5
• Special characteristics (a random list, such as short of food, at war, or good at repairing equipment)

So the PCs will have to make contact, learn the language and so on. Luckily, the PCs are part of a large team, so some of the NPCs can help.

Events

Events occur every time the PCs enter a new module, or twice a day in an inhabited area. Event tables are provided for all modules and cover jammed doors, equipment failure, finding a fuel cache, encounters with the inhabitants, and more.

The NPCs

The PCs are part of a team that includes Lorain Messandi and a dozen or so other NPCs. Descriptions are provided for each, and some get a reaction table in certain situations.

As welcome as this might be, I know I will forget much of this unless I can somehow make it easy for me to use at the table. 

The bad guys

After three weeks or so, the bad guys turn up to start looting the asteroid ship. Maybe they encounter the PCs, maybe they don’t. But it’s Kalamanaru and his gang of treasure hunters, and here in deep space, where there’s nobody to stop them, they don’t care who they kill.

Escape!

Fate of the Sky Raiders suggests two possible endings:

• Find one of the Sky Raider’s old (jump-capable) scout ships, repair it and leave.
• Boarding and taking one of Kalamanaru’s ships.

(And apart from a TPK, there’s an unmentioned third outcome, which is that the Travellers settle down with the inhabitants and live their lives out peacefully aboard the starship. I’m not surprised it isn’t explored, but I’ve known players do stranger things.)

Fate stresses that boarding and taking one of Kalamanaru’s ships is likely to be tricky, given that his forces arrive with two 400-ton destroyers. However, it fails to recognise that if the PCs can repair a Sky Raiders scout ship, they can probably also repair the many, many laser turrets the massive Sky Raiders ship is armed with. And perhaps the ship has more powerful weapons elsewhere.

And it makes no sense to me that there are any scout ships left. If the Travellers can repair one, then so can the Sky Raiders, and the scout ships would have been taken thousands of years ago.

My thoughts

My initial thought is that I think I’m going to find Fate of the Sky Raiders hard to run. The previous two episodes are largely narrative, with a fairly obvious route through the adventure. Fate, on the other hand, is very different – a procedurally-generated dungeon with random tables.

I don’t run that kind of game, so it’s a bit of a shock – especially the different cultures. I don’t find inventing numerous NPCs easy, particularly at short notice and with different government structures and attitudes that I’ve just rolled up. Yes, I’m given some tools, but not the ones I need.

I can see I’m going to have to prepare things ahead of time, and I wish that’s what Fate had done for me.

(Here’s a post from someone who thought the same, and came up with four key cultures for the inhabitants of the asteroid ship. I thought this was interesting, but the result ended up a bit too fantasy dungeon-in-space for my liking.)

What I liked

The Sky Raider’s secret: I like the fact that we finally meet the Sky Raiders’ secret – their enormous asteroid base. (Although I’m not sure my players really care. They’ve never been that invested in finding out who the Sky Raiders actually are. I guess that parts of this episode are mainly for Referees and Traveller scholars. )

The asteroid ship itself: The ship itself is epic. (Or at least it could be, more on that below.)

But I’m afraid that’s about it in the positives column.

What I didn’t like

So, a few things I didn’t like.

Procedurally generated ttrpgs: I’m not a fan of procedurally generated ttrpgs. I’ve never been one for random encounter rolls, and I don’t enjoy sandboxes. And while rolling for the next module doesn’t bother me, I have more of an issue with randomly generating inhabitants.

The main issue for me is the lack of logic that leaving things to dice rolls can create. Unlike some, I don’t want to try to explain away what is patently obviously a stupid set of dice rolls. (If you’ve read my thoughts on Rethe/Regina, you’ll know what I mean.)

And I know I’m not good at re-rolling/adjusting on the fly. I’d much rather be given a few sample cultures to pick from rather than roll them randomly.

Maybe that’s picky of me, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. But I also know my players, and one of them has a scientifically logical mind. If it doesn’t make sense, he will question it. And I’d rather it made sense too.

The asteroid ship: The ship itself puzzles me:

• The ship was designed to be a self-sufficient generation ship for at least 300 years while it crossed the Great Rift. However, there’s no sign (other than the field chambers) that the ship is designed for permanent human habitation.
• 50% of the ship’s volume is given over to fuel. Presumably there are refineries and machines for capturing and processing ice asteroids somewhere, as it certainly isn't skimming fuel from gas giants!
• The ship has huge pressurised flight decks for the scout ships. Why aren’t they on the asteroid's surface, in a vacuum?
• Are there any low berths?

Entering the ship: Lorain decides the team should enter the ship through an access tube exposed by an impact. So that presumably is full of dangerously sharp metal… However, the surface of the ship is dotted with flight bays and turrets and airlocks – why not use one of those? (I will give the players a choice.)

Logic gaps: A few logic gaps I am struggling with.

• Why are there jump-1 ships still aboard? Why didn’t anyone take them after the civil war 5000 years ago when it was obvious the ship was just drifting? I will probably remove these.
• Given that the ship was set up as a generation ship, why is the inhabitants’ TL so low? Did they stop teaching and learning? Given it took 300 years to cross the Great Rift, clearly the ship was built to be ruthlessly efficient at recycling and maintenance. I can imagine recyclers feeding 3D printers and everything built to last. Yes, 5000 years is much longer, but if anything fails (power/air/heating/water/food), then everyone dies. And they’re still alive.
• If I had been trapped on the asteroid, I could imagine setting up a giant antenna to broadcast a distress signal, hoping that someone would stumble across us. It might be broken now, of course.
• The asteroid ship itself is truly huge and an engineering marvel. It must have taken years to build, and I imagine there might even be records of its construction back in Gushemege Sector. 

Of course, I can fix all these, but I find it slightly frustrating that I have to.

Overall

Overall, I found Fate of the Sky Raiders disappointing. While I like the big idea of a huge asteroid ship travelling the stars, I don’t like the randomly generated execution. Maybe that’s me, but I feel like I’ve been given an outline and I now need to construct an adventure.

I know that’s how some of the old Traveller adventures worked, but it’s a very different approach to the first two parts of the series.

And unlike the previous two parts, I don’t feel I can run Fate of the Sky Raiders as written. I need to make too many changes.

Coming soon: Fate of the Sky Raiders session #1.

Previously: Trail session #5 Rescuing Loraine or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders (or my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders).

My larp origin story

Prompted by Mo Holkar’s thoughtful reflections on how he started larping, I thought I’d do the same. My memory is hazy over a lot of this, as it was a long time ago.

1981: Traveller

Traveller was my first ttrpg. I was a science fiction fan before I was a roleplayer, so it was only natural that I was drawn to Traveller. (I’ve written before about how I stumbled across Traveller.) 

At the same time, White Dwarf began being distributed in newsagents. I bought every copy, and I remember reading about Treasure Trap (probably the UK’s first larp) in issue 31 (June/July 1982).

I was intrigued by Treasure Trap, but larp/lrp didn’t appeal as I wasn’t interested in fantasy. I was an SF fan.

Why didn’t I like fantasy?

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when my tastes were forming, SF was much easier to get hold of than fantasy. Yes, there was some (Tolkien, Moorcock, Eddings, Donaldson, Le Guin), but I found none of it as interesting as the worlds of Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, Drake, Zahn, Clarke, Haldeman, Shaw, Foster and more.

Plus, there was Star Wars and 2000AD. Fantasy had nothing like that.

And even if fantasy had been easier to get hold of, I found them ponderous multi-part epics anchored in the past. I much preferred to explore bright futures full of spaceships, aliens and distant planets. I always have.

1987: Larping friends

In 1987, I became friends with some larpers in Brighton. I didn’t actually do any larping, but I knew about it and saw their costumes and elf ears. I wasn’t very athletic, and running around the woods trying to hit things with rubber swords really didn’t appeal.

Neither did the costuming. I guess my longstanding disinterest in costuming set in then. I remember visiting the Loughborough University larp stall (I’m guessing this was fresher’s week in my final year) and noting that they expected you to have your full costume by the third week. That put me off, and I never signed up.

I attended a games convention in London (Games Day 87?) where a few rooms were set aside for a short dungeon-style larp. The only thing I can remember about it was a room where the PCs had to defeat an NPC champion (named Achilles) by hitting his foot.

Late 80s/Early 90s: Aslan and The Freeform Book

The 1980s were a great time for fanzines, amateur magazines about roleplaying games published for love. I subscribed (and contributed) to a few, including Andrew Rilstone’s Aslan. In Aslan, Andrew described something called a “fantasy party,” which is what I would now call a freeform/chamber/parlour/interactive larp. It sounded fantastic – thirty or so people all playing the same political game. I wanted to play!

Brian Williams writes about Andrew’s fantasy parties in more detail here (he attended them).

Somewhere around this time, they started being called “freeforms” (to make them distinct from regular larps). The name was probably inspired by Morgana Cowling’s The Freeform Book, published in 1989. (I now call them “freeform larps” or “parlour larps” or “chamber larps” depending on who I’m talking to.)

1992: Home of the Bold

In 1992, I finally got to play in a freeform.

Home of the Bold was held at Convulsion, a Chaosium-themed convention run by David Hall (of the Tales of the Reaching Moon Gloranthan fanzine). Written by Kevin Jacklin and David Hall, Home of the Bold was amazing – and changed my life. I had a wonderful time, made lifelong friends and decided I wanted to do more of these crazy games. 

Me as Count Stolwitz in 1996 playing Home of the Bold.
Possibly the earliest photo of me larping...

(I’ve now played Home of the Bold three times – the last time at Continuum in 2024.)

Home of the Bold was exactly what I was looking for – a game that was like a city filled with interesting people all pursuing their own agenda. While regular larping seemed to me to be little more than tabletop roleplaying done standing up (players went on adventures and there were monsters to battle), this was something very different.

I also realised that if you removed the SF/fantasy nerd elements, freeforms might be a great way to introduce people to roleplaying.

1992 to 1995: Eleventh Hour and more early freeforms

In this period, I played in a couple more freeforms and a “proper” larp, Eleventh Hour.

Freeform larps

In 1994 I played Life of Moonson, again at Convulsion. It was a more heavily Gloranthan freeform, and I can remember very little about it other than I had a ridiculous costume. I think I also played Last Voyage of the Marie Celeste then, playing a vampire. One of the characters in the game was the ship’s cat, which might be fine for some players, but I’m glad that wasn’t me!

Eleventh Hour

Eleventh Hour was a series of weekend fantasy larps that Lynne Hardy (whom I first met in Home of the Bold) invited me to. I played in two events, both held in youth hostels on the Welsh border. I played the same character, a devious scribe, and they were fine. I wasn’t bowled over by them, and much of the time it felt like we were making our own entertainment.

One thing I remember about the second larp is the big set-piece battle, which, as a non-combatant, I sat out of. I remember watching the magic users drawing chalk circles and chanting and thinking, “That looks so dull. I’d much rather roll some dice. I want to pretend I’m casting spells, I don’t want to actually do it.”

(So, as well as a disinterest in costuming, I’m not that interested in the reenactment-y elements of larp.)

1995: Café Casablanca

In 1995, Kevin Jacklin and David Hall (and their friends) brought Café Casablanca to the UK, held in a hotel in Nottingham. I had heard about Café Casablanca because at Continuum, Sandy Petersen would talk about it – I think he was one of the authors, although the game is credited to Cruel Hoax Productions.

Café Casablanca was incredible. I ended up falling in with the Resistance, and we were hopeless because we were infiltrated by a German spy. So they knew everything! 

Café Casablanca was followed in 1997 by The King’s Musketeers and in 1997 by 1897: Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, all written by Cruel Hoax Productions. And pretty much since then, a weekend freeform has been held at the Retford Best Western Hotel. This year it was Gateways, and next year it will be Café Casablanca’s fourth outing. (More details here.)

Mid to late 90s: A variety of freeforms

So, in the mid-to-late 90s, things freeform are picking up. The weekend games became a fixture on the calendar, and freeforms were a regular part of Continuum (Convulsion’s successor), and I was playing similar games at other conventions (such as UK Gencon).

An Incident at Two Bridge Junction

Some other notable events of that time – I don’t have exact dates for these.

• I set up the UKFreeforms mailing list so that UK writers and players could stay in touch and discuss freeforms. It has changed providers a couple of times, but it still exists, and you can join it here. 
• I joined the Continuum committee for two conventions as the freeform wrangler.
• I wrote An Incident at Two Bridge Junction, a six-player wild west vampire freeform. I played it with friends a couple of times.
• I wrote Death on the Gambia, but more on that shortly.
• I co-wrote Midsummer Mischief, a 25-player PG Wodehouse freeform. My first “big” freeform, I learned a lot about collaborating on a game. Midsummer Mischief was first run in 1998, and the files can be downloaded from this page.

1999: The Bradford vampire larps

Inspired by White Wolf’s The Masquerade (the larp rules for their Vampire: the Masquerade ttrpg published in 1993), a group of larpers decided to hold a vampire larp in the 1 in 12, an anarchist nightclub/social centre in Bradford. I can’t remember how I found out about this, but I remember heading off in a friend’s VW van and playing at being vampires overnight. While I have vague memories of hanging out in the club (I have no idea if there were any regular patrons in the club that night – it was hard to tell), I remember a few things:

• I have no idea if there was a plot. I suspect there was, but I suspected it involved the GM’s friends. (That was my experience of several larp events – including a couple of big ones at UK Gencon. If you weren’t part of the clique, you had to make your own fun.)
• Characters were based on a point-buy system (based on The Masquerade, I think). However, we were playing in a nightclub, and if you wanted to eat or drink, you needed a particular ability. So, of course, we all needed that ability because we were playing in a nightclub! (But I think most players just ignored it.)
• The GMs had an insanely unsafe rule about firearms. Basically, if you wanted your character to have a gun, it needed to fire blanks! A toy gun firing caps was no good. (They clearly hadn’t done a risk assessment.) Luckily, nobody was hurt – although the armed response squad was called out one night because there had been five reported shootings in Bradford that night!

Thankfully, the larp only lasted for two or three sessions. (Or perhaps I just drifted away.)

Late 90s: Murder mystery larps

One of the friends I made in Home of the Bold was Dixon Jones, who ran Initiative Unlimited and ran larps as team-building exercises for businesses with Adam Hayes and David France. They also hosted occasional murder mystery evenings, and I attended one in London with my brother.

They also sold murder mystery party games as pdf downloads, and I became an affiliate, creating a now-defunct website, Run Your Own Murder Mystery Games and earning a commission every time I sold a game.

Their games were fine, but I wanted to write and sell games with a little more depth and complexity. Such as Death on the Gambia, an introductory larp that anyone could play. It didn’t have a murder in it, and after failing to sell it to anyone, I realised I would have to create my own company. But I wasn’t sure how to do that.

As I entered the new millennium, I was playing more and more freeform-ish larps. I had found what I was interested in. Importantly, I played some of Epic Experience’s games at Gencon UK and other conventions. And through Epic Experience, I met Mo Holkar.

2001: Freeform Games and Peaky

In 2001, two key events occurred: Freeform Games and the first Peaky writing weekend.

Freeform Games

In the summer of 2001, I called Mo and suggested we form a company that would sell freeform larps as murder-mystery games. I suggested we call it Freeform Games (perhaps not my wisest choice of name). Fortunately, Mo agreed. Even better, he had set up businesses before, and as a result, on 9 October 2001, Freeform Games was born. 

Shortly after that, we released our first game, Death on the Gambia. We now have more than forty… 

Peaky

In November 2001, 20-ish enthusiastic members of the uk-freeforms mailing list met in a converted farmhouse in Edale in the Peak District (hence, Peaky) over a weekend (Friday to Sunday) to write a freeform. Or more accurately, three freeforms.

The first time we met, it was a challenge to see if it was actually possible to write playable freeforms in a weekend. And we surprised ourselves – the first was ready by Saturday evening, and we played the other two on Sunday.

That first Peaky was so successful that the weekends are now an annual event and are my favourite gaming weekend of the year. Although they're no longer held in the Peak District...

2001 and beyond

Since then, both Freeform Games and Peaky have continued to thrive, and I’ve continued to play more and more freeforms. And that’s where my larp focus has mainly been ever since.

I have found the kind of larps I like, and happily, I have the space to run, write, and play them.

AireCon 2026

Last weekend was AireCon, the three-day board game and ttrpg convention in Harrogate.

I couldn’t make it on Saturday this year, so instead I just attended on Friday and Sunday, running three TTRPGs.

Friday

Although my game didn’t start until 2pm, I arrived just after 11 and dropped off some games at the bring-and-buy. (My memory last year was that there was an early rush for the bring and buy, but leaving it until later was much more relaxed.)

I then wandered the trade hall, chatted to friends, and had a bit to eat from the food trucks (in their new position outside the convention centre in the grounds of the Hilton Hotel (which was used for ttrpgs and other events – a lovely new venue for this year).

ALIEN: Perfect Organism

I ran Perfect Organism, my five-player cinematic ALIEN scenario that focuses on a USCMC investigation into the loss of the Sulaco after Aliens. The investigation team have arrived at LV-426 and the W-Y station there. Things don’t go well...

I had five great players, and a higher survival rate than many of the games. (Although we burned through the NPCs at quite a rate.)

I had updated the scenario to the current ALIEN rules (Evolved edition) and was interested in seeing how it had changed. While there are lots of small changes (a full list here), the main changes as far as I was concerned were the new stress rules. However, having now experienced the new stress rules, I didn’t like them. Maybe they work in longer games (or where you are making lots and lots of dice rolls), but in a short game like Perfect Organism, stress was never a danger. I may go back to the first edition rules when I run it again.

Saturday

I didn’t make Saturday this year, which was a shame. If I had, I would have spent the day playing board games.

Sunday

Good Society

Good Society is Storybrewers’ Jane Austen game. After my experience at last year’s Furnace, I decided to bring my Wealth and Fortune playset to AireCon. The changes I’ve made are around character generation – I’ve created the base characters and links between them beforehand (just like a pregen), but letting the players create the minor characters.

After my experiences of Hillfolk not filling last year, I was a little reluctant to pitch Good Society, but I needn’t have worried – it filled up pretty quickly. 

I had a full table of five players, and after a slightly slow start, they soon got into the swing of the story and got up to all sorts of shenanigans (including a risqué scene in a lake). We reached a fine conclusion, which included a marriage proposal, so it was all as it should be.

(The slow start isn’t unusual with this kind of game. It can take a little while for the players to warm up properly.)

So I was very happy with how my playset worked. I’ve made a few tweaks and if you’re interested, you can download them here.

Thoughts on Good Society

With a second edition imminent, I had some thoughts on my experience.

Resource tokens: For a one-shot, we had an awful lot of resource tokens on the table. With two per main character and one each for the minor characters, that was 20 resource tokens on the table before we added any for the rumours. (And had I been playing strictly according to the rules, there would have been another 10 on the table – I allowed the minor characters only one resolve token each.) 

And as it happened, we didn’t use resolve tokens all that often. Maybe five or six times? So I think in future, just giving each player two resolve tokens to begin with will probably be enough for a one-shot. (And let them share the tokens between the main and minor characters.)

Reputation: While we used the reputation rules to assign new criteria, it didn’t have much impact on the game. I would be tempted to remove reputation completely from a one-shot, except that the players did adjust their reputation tags as they took actions they felt affected their reputation. 

(Technically, reputation tags can be traded for resolve tokens. As noted, we had masses of resolve tokens, so this was never an issue. Also, doing this removes the tag, which makes sense as a game mechanic but not in terms of character.)

Minor characters: With each player having two, we had ten minor characters involved. Not all of them became part of the story (many appeared only briefly). While I’m tempted to suggest just one minor character each, I think having lots of minor characters gives players more opportunities to find exactly the character they need.

Lunch

AireCon doesn’t leave a huge gap between the first and second sessions – just 45 minutes. I was slightly worried about getting back to the bring-and-buy to collect my earnings and unsold games, but it wasn’t crowded, and I had plenty of time to do that and grab something to eat.

Traveller: Calli’s Heroes

My last game was John Ossoway’s adventure for Traveller: Calli’s Heroes. The PCs are Imperial soldiers operating in a warzone during the Fifth Frontier War, and have the opportunity to loot an Ancient vault full of unimaginable riches.

I’d played Calli’s Heroes last year at Furnace, and so I knew it would be a solid con game. John was kind enough to let me have the files, and so at AireCon I took it out for a spin.

Calli’s Heroes was great. I had five good players, all happy to lean into the squad dynamics. They did appropriately soldierly things and ambushed Vargr mercenaries and Zhodani troops. They ended up with a handful of fabulously valuable Ancient artefacts – assuming they can figure out how to fence them. But that’s another adventure…

Next year

I’m already looking forward to next year. Hopefully I will be able to attend all three days…

Masters of Dune review

This is a first-impressions review of Masters of Dune, a campaign for the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium rpg. I’ve only read Masters of Dune, and below I explain why I’m unlikely to ever run it.

Masters of Dune is a 166-page campaign for the Dune rpg. Set over nine chapters, it continues directly from the Agents of Dune starter set (which I reviewed here) and puts the PCs in charge of Arrakis in a distinctly hostile universe.

Each campaign chapter consists of three or four acts, and between them, they cover all the elements you’d expect from an epic Dune campaign: the emperor, the Harkonnens, the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen and so on. The chapters are designed to be experienced in almost any order – bookended by Chapter One (the campaign’s start) and Chapter Nine (its finale).

Along the way, the PCs must deal with Harkonnen treachery, scheming houses, broker deals with powerful factions, learn the ways of the Fremen, and more. As they progress through the campaign, their actions will cause various indices to rise and fall, charting their house’s success and influence. Masters of Dune is everything you’d expect from an alternate-universe Dune campaign.

But I have no interest in running Masters of Dune. 

Why don’t I want to run Masters of Dune?

To be honest, there are a range of reasons. But these are the key ones:

I don’t really like Dune’s 2d20 system. As I explained in my review of the starter set, I’ve bounced off Dune’s system. It’s not the 2d20 system itself, it’s the combination of drives, skills, threat and conflicts that I find hard to grok. In the hands of an expert, I imagine the system works just fine – but it feels like a steeper learning curve than I can face.

I’m not a Dune fan. Masters of Dune rewards fans of the Dune books. I’ve seen the recent films, and I read Dune many decades ago. It’s fine, I’m not really a fan. So there were a lot of things that didn’t make complete sense.

So it was clear I was missing some things (what is kanly?), but I didn’t care enough to look them up.

However, as important as it is for the GM to understand the Dune universe, it’s as important that the players understand it as well. The PCs play the head of House Nagara – and I would expect the characters to be fully familiar with the politicking and negotiation that such positions bring. And yet, on several occasions, I felt that the campaign would let unwary players make decisions that their characters would never make.

Deeply political: On occasions, the campaign is deeply political, presenting numerous NPCs with their own agendas for the PCs to interact with. Not only do I find this a challenge as a GM, but it’s also a challenge for the players. It also reminds me that while I really like political games, I like them as larps, where each faction is played by its own player (or players). I struggle with political ttrpgs, just because I find it hard as a GM to keep everything in my head.

Flawed structure: Masters of Dune’s structure is such that the chapters are self-contained and address a single faction: the Bene Gesserit, the Harkonnen, the Emperor, and so on. They can be played in any order (some chapters contain triggers that happen when certain conditions arise), and some chapters might not even be used.

This is all very well, but it makes no sense to me to play the campaign this way. I would want to break the chapters up so that they are intermingled. So I would introduce the early parts of some chapters early in the campaign, and slowly introduce more complications leading to a climax.

There’s nothing stopping me from doing that, of course, but it means dismantling the whole campaign and rebuilding it.

Unhelpful layout: At first glance, there’s nothing wrong with the layout: two columns on each page, lots of headers and subheaders, a smattering of nice artwork. It’s only when I got into the details that I found a few problems.

Namely, the bullets and bold text are used inconsistently. Sometimes the text is broken up into bullet points (making them stand out and easier to read), but at other times it describes several different scenes the GM might present, hidden behind a wall of text. Bullet points would make them clearer, and I’m not sure why Masters of Dune is so inconsistent.

And the “map” on page 65 is so small and faint it’s virtually unusable. Why wasn’t this given a page of its own? (To be fair, the map is clearer in the pdf, as you can see below. Physically, the map is printed in grey and I found it unreadable.) 

Errors: Masters of Dune contains more errors than I expected:

• There are a lot of “see p.XX” errors – possibly more than I’ve seen in any other book.
• Most of the text on page 135 is repeated on page 136.
• At the end of the first chapter, on page 27, Masters of Dune describes the next steps the players might take and directs the GM to different chapters. Except that’s not how most of those chapters work. For example, while the players might want to seek an alliance with the Fremen, the Fremen chapter starts with the PC’s ornithopter crashing in a remote spot on Arrakis and then befriending some nearby Fremen. They can’t really choose to do that. And the Spacing Guild only becomes involved when the spice supply is threatened.

Overall

So, Masters of Dune isn’t for me.

It’s certainly an epic campaign, and in the hands of a good GM, I expect it’s brilliant. But for me, I would need to overcome my disinterest in Dune’s system and setting and rewrite the campaign’s structure. And I have other games I would rather play.

Box Northern Larp festival

On Valentine’s Day this year, I left my wife (I know, she had words…) and went to the one-day Box Northern Larp Festival in Headingley, Leeds.

This was Box’s second outing – the first was back in 2024 in Sheffield. I couldn’t make it then, because it clashed with the weekend freeform in Retford. This year, the dates didn’t clash, and so I went to both.

The HEART of Headingley

The venue for Box was Headingley’s HEART Centre, an old primary school repurposed into a community, enterprise and arts centre. There’s a café and several businesses operating from the building – but most importantly, a number of accessible rooms that can be hired.

With eight larps on offer (four in the morning, four in the afternoon), BOX needs plenty of rooms!

If I have one (minor) criticism, it’s that parking in Headingley isn’t great. BOX encourages everyone to use public transport, but I’m a 30-minute drive away or a 90-minute-plus bus ride. So it’s no contest, unfortunately.

So I arrived early to make sure I could find somewhere to park. I wasn’t the earliest, though, and soon found other larpers. And as we were early, a few of us headed to the café to get a hot drink and start making introductions.

(I saw a few friendly faces – Mo, Daniel, Heather, Ian, Emory, Nyx and maybe a couple of others. And I made more friends.)

Both of my games were in Ridge, at the top of the building. For those with accessibility needs, there’s a lift.

Arsenic & Lies (10 am – 2 pm)

My first game was Arsenic & Lies by Karolina Soltys and facilitated by Hazel Dixon.

Arsenic & Lies is a replayable murder-mystery larp for 5-12 players that lasts three hours. It uses a deck of cards to randomly assign relationships, secrets, and the murderer.

Set in a grand house at a New Year’s Eve party on 31 December 1919, a new decade is about to start – but not for everyone!

The game is played in three parts: character creation, Act 1 (at the end of which the murderer strikes) and Act 2 (at the end of which we decide who to hand over to the police).

I played war hero Lt. Joe Middleton and was married to my lovely wife Violet (who was having an affair unbeknownst to me). I had come back from the war a changed man – I had lost my faith in god.

(I also became embroiled in two other characters’ backstories – both deserters, oddly. There must have been something in the water.)

I wasn’t the murderer – but I was influential in persuading the group to vote for the deeply dodgy Harry Ryland. I had no idea if Harry was the murderer, but his character suggested that he certainly could have been the murderer, and that was enough for me. And my arguments were strong enough that we handed him over to the police – leaving the actual murderer, Lady Beatrice, to escape!

Arsenic & Lies works really well. It creates a lot of game from a single deck of cards, and I can imagine playing it again fairly soon. We had a dedicated host for the game, but having played it once, I’d be happy to host and play Arsenic & Lies simultaneously.

(I’ve also put a review of Arsenic & Lies on my Great Murder Mystery Games website.)

Lunch

We finished Arsenic & Lies shortly before 2 pm. There was a 30-minute wait for food in the café (I think we might have been the last game to finish), so I went around the corner and into Headingley with a couple of other players to grab a bite to eat.

A Haunting in Hartwick (3 pm – 7 pm)

I ran A Haunting in Hartwick in the second slot. A Haunting in Hartwick is a murder mystery larp (two murder mysteries in one day!) written by Mark Schaefer that I’m developing for Freeform Games. It’s pretty much done – this was one of the playtests. Here’s the setting:

It is 1958, and Quinn Hartwick is selling the ancestral home in Hartwick, Connecticut. The new owner will be Blake Crowley, who plans to turn it into a "spirit sanctuary" for ghosts. But not everyone thinks this is a good idea…

I’m always slightly nervous about running our games for “proper” larpers. I’m well aware that the games are introductory larps, designed for people who don’t normally do larping. So it was delightful to see that the players take the game and run with it.

One thing that makes Box different from other places where I might run larps is that it doesn’t allow character assignment in advance. This has positives and negatives.

Positives of casting at the door

I don’t have to worry about casting questionnaires. Instead, I laid out the character envelopes and let people pick them based on the character's name. (Except one – I thought that Daniel might enjoy the scientist character, so I gave that character to him.)

It helped that all the characters were ungendered, so it didn’t matter who played which character.

I didn’t have to send characters out in advance. I can’t be the only person who hates this part of larp admin!

Flexibility in moving players between the groups. This approach makes it easy for the organisers to move players between the groups. Box had a couple of no-shows, and I had one character move from one game to mine.

Negatives of casting at the door

No costuming: No pre-casting did mean no costuming, but that didn’t prevent anyone from getting into character and having fun.

Barely a costume in sight - just one lab coat

Allow time for pre-reading: Of course, assigning characters at random meant I had to give my players plenty of time to read their characters first. But I allowed for that, and the pre-game notice warned that there would be reading.

Feedback

Anyway, the game went great, and the players picked up a couple of things that I need to look at. Nothing significant, just a few tweaks that will make the game run smoother – I’m pretty sure we will release it next month.

Delightfully, partway through the game, a player told me that they had already played and enjoyed two of our games, which was lovely to hear.

Overall

So Box was great. I wrapped up a little after 6 pm and chatted to the organisers for a bit before heading home for tea. I hope to make it next year.

For another take, here's Mo's review.

Gateways

Gateways is a 79-player weekend freeform larp set aboard Threshold Station in the far future. It’s based on many, many science fiction shows, movies and novels. (See here for a list of influences.)

Gateways was conceived and written by Martin and Helen Jones, and Nickey Barnard, with additional material by Alan and Charlie Paull, and Megan, Michael and Peter Jones.

Anyway, this is my post-game write-up. I was very busy, and things were non-stop. I’m only scratching the surface of what went on here – I had so much fun, and I can’t do justice to it in a blog. I don’t want this to be too spoilery, so to preserve some secrets, I’ve often used player names rather than character names.

Avery Grayson

Photo by TsiJon

I was Avery Grayson. According to the background, Avery is a Solar Federation Naval Science Officer and advisor to Angelina Cygni. Lead officer of the Roanoke expedition.

So, I’m doing science. 

My prep

Last year at Shogun, I was impressed by Tony’s little black book (see here for my thoughts on that), and so I thought I’d do something similar for Gateways. I was, however, unprepared for the sheer amount of detail in the game!

Gateways’ background is astonishingly deep. To start with, there’s a 22-page setting guide. Then there’s a 12-page who’s who, a 2-page universe essentials guide, and detailed faction/society briefings. Then there are the rules. Plus, of course, my 44-page character sheet.

Fitting that all into a little black book and still making it readable was going to be a challenge, but with the help of AI, I had a go.

I used two LLMs to help me prepare for Gateways: ChatGPT and Notebook LM.

ChatGPT

I used ChatGPT to create an overall summary of my character, to get a “big picture” sense of Avery. I just copied all the character text (minus the list of goals and who you know), and asked, “This is a character for a larp. Summarise the character, outlining major themes and objectives for the character during the game.”

ChatGPT gave me a really useful summary: “Avery Grayson is a brilliant, curiosity-driven Science Officer of the Solar Federation Navy: a fair-minded polymath with a lifelong weakness for mysteries, forbidden questions, and elegant solutions. Outwardly easy-going and collaborative, Avery is also someone who has repeatedly brushed against the edges of ethics—sometimes bending rules for what feels like the “right” reason, sometimes just because the puzzle was irresistible. That tension defines them.”

While all of that is in the character sheet, I found it really helpful to have Avery defined so clearly. (I like a character sheet to start with an overall summary, to help set the scene for everything that follows.)

Notebook LM

Notebook LM is Google’s research tool. Load documents into it, and then ask it questions. I uploaded my character sheet and the background, and then for each of my contacts I asked, “Tell me about…”

It then pulled together everything from across those documents and summarised it. I then gave it a light edit, formatted it for my black book, printed it, cut it out, and stuck it in the book. Doing all that helped me absorb all that background.

(It wasn’t perfect. I still needed to consult my character sheet for precise details.)

I know at least two other players used LLMs to help them prepare. One just used Notebook LM and created an audio summary that they. They used Notebook LM on their phone during the game instead of carrying their character sheet. Another used Gemini and, as they drove to Retford, conversed with Gemini and asked it questions.

Plot highlights

These are highlights from my favourite plots. All of these are way more involved than I suggest here, each of them involving many, many players and multiple layers. They are in no particular order.

The Shaleel and the Celestes

At the start of the game, I was heavily involved with the Shaleel and Celeste aliens. Avery had been the first to contact the Shaleel, and I think I was one of the few humans they knew in the game. Avery was their first contact because they appeared over Roanoke, where he was in charge of an investigation into the failed human colony.

My involvement was early on, as we tried to understand the mystery. Later on, while I was busy with something else, I discovered that we nearly had an interstellar war with the Shaleel over a misunderstanding. I don’t think I was responsible.

Nero’s nemesis

I nearly sabotaged Nick’s game by badmouthing his character early in the game. His character and mine had crossed swords in the past, and because of what he did back then, I warned a few players that he couldn’t be trusted – which meant they weren’t talking to him.

So, towards the end of Saturday morning, I found Nick glaring at me from about five feet away, which was rather intimidating. We had a chat, and he explained his predicament (out of character). We talked about it with Nickey (a GM), and Nick explained his character’s perspective.

It was persuasive, but I felt Avery would need something more, so I asked for a character reference, which Matt provided. I then told the other characters that I had been mistaken (well, partly), which reopened his game.

Nero and Avery were always prickly, though. (Not Nick and Steve – no falling out among the players!)

Romance

I had a lovely romantic arc with Kris Alice (playing waldo operator Kay Nightingale), which I thought would be complicated by a previous flame of mine, but ended up being much stranger (and more complex) than that.

The arc ended with a serendipitous use of Dust late on Sunday morning, and was the perfect ending. Maybe my favourite freeform romance.

Photo by TsiJon

The rehabilitation of Earth

About 250 years ago, a war devastated Earth, leaving it too radioactive to be habitable. Humanity fled to the stars and space habitats. But the dream of healing Earth lived on.

Towards the end of the game, my game became more about Earth. Late on Saturday evening, Mark invited me to visit Earth on a waldo mission (completely out of the blue, as I don’t think we’d spoken before). Discovering Earth was now open to waldos, I immediately booked another mission to Earth with Kris Alice to see if her plan to deal with the radiation would work. (It looks promising!)

Cool mechanics

There were lots of mechanics in Gateways, some of which I was involved with, many of which I didn’t touch. Here are a few that stood out.

Dust

I only found out about Dust right at the end of the game. Dust lets users see a (secret or guilty) memory of another character, which is a great way to reveal secrets and memories in a way that is likely to be more nuanced and sympathetic. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t find out about Dust earlier!

(Dust might have different effects on other species. I don’t know. And there were other drugs – I have no idea what they did.)

Waldos

Waldos were remotely operated vehicles that allowed players to go on missions away from Threshold Station. They were a great SF mechanic that allowed players to roam beyond just Threshold Station without handwaving time, which often occurs during freeforms.

Relationships

Gateways had an optional mechanic to track relationships of different sorts – allies, romance or rivals. So it built on similar mechanics we’ve seen before, and I think it was the best version I’ve come across, as it seemed to work equally well for all three types of relationships. I’d like to see it used again.

Mechanically, being an ally or rival gave you a card that gave you an edge (or penalty for rivalries) in skill checks – but it was the same for everyone, rather than needing unique heart/rival abilities for each character.

Printed materials

I really appreciated the fact that the A5 character booklets were readable at A5. Yes, that meant my booklet was 44 pages long, but the font was large enough to be readable. Thank you! (I know that’s not a mechanic, but I wasn’t sure where else to put it, and I wanted to acknowledge it.)

Favourite moments

A collection of small moments in the game that I enjoyed. In no particular order:

• Ray spotting me across the room and bellowing, "Science! Find out all you can about <something about Threshold blowing up, I think>". Then Ezzie shouted, "It's in hand!" "Good." I didn't have to do a thing (which was good, because I was in the middle of something else).
• Having a quiet chat with Ewan and saying to them, "But aren't you [redacted]?" "Ah, I didn't know you knew that."
• After inspecting and incinerating a dead alien with the Shaleel, Suey said, "Right. I'm nuking Roanoke." "Er, can I get my team off first?" (And later, in the break, Martin came up to me and asked about the Saurian grove ships that had landed on Roanoke. The Shaleel said they would warn the Saurians, but I guiltily realised I hadn't actually checked that they had done so...)
• Giving Jon the long-service medal that I was supposed to present (I had double-booked myself) to the Admiral, and seeing the gleam in Jon’s eye as he realised how he could use it.
• Tom’s attempted misdirection in our mission to find a missing waldo. (A side mission with Ewan, Lucya, and AJ.)
• A friendly-ish interrogation about advanced sensors by Dixon, Nick, and Natalie. I told them everything I knew, but it didn’t get them what they wanted.
• The frotoise (a frog with a tortoise shell) and terrifying monkey spiders on Earth.
• Taking Antonia, Rosemary and Kris Alice to see the dead alien cadaver, and soon after taking the Shaleel (Suey, Paul and Liz). The two sessions were very different…

Photo by TsiJon

Reflections

Often, I come away from a weekend larp wishing that I’d done something different, or been more proactive, or had some kind of regret. Not this time – I wouldn’t change anything. It’s not often I can say that.

I hope the GMs run it again – I can’t wait to play! Or maybe help them run it. (But I’d rather play.)

And maybe there will be other larps (shorter, perhaps), set in the same universe. I hope so.

Café Casablanca

And speaking of next time, 2027’s game will be Café Casablanca. This will be its fourth UK run. It was first run in 1995, and the first weekend game of this type in the UK. I played in that run, and it changed my life in so many ways. I’m still friends with people I met during that game.

This time, I’m on the GM team, as I was for the last run in 2014.

You can register your interest in playing in Café Casablanca here. (And the game website is here.)