Peaky 2017

After a slightly shaky start, Peaky 2017 was the easiest Peaky for me for a long time. Here’s what happened.

Upper Rectory Farm Cottages, home of Peaky

Six games

Six games were written and tested. Here’s what we wrote.

• Second Watch SF horror on a space tug,. For 10 players.
• It's Everybody's War 1940s English village, war propoganda. For 13 players.
• The Apocalypse Agenda Torchwood meets Laundry Files meets Warehouse 13. For 12 players.
• Luck be a Lady 1950s Las Vegas "Come for the show, stay for the mushroom cloud". For 12 players
• The Root of all Evil Pressures of money and blood. For 12 players.
• Mean Street Inspired by Dollhouse and set in the future. Come and play in the mean streets of 1920s New York. For 12 players.

I’m sure most of these will be developed further and will get a second or third runs.

A shaky start

The shaky start I mentioned happened on Friday night, when it seemed to take an eternity to sort out the games we wanted to play. We started off with over 30 ideas - more ideas than we had players.

Inevitably, it took a while to work all that out, but by 9pm we were done (quite a bit later than usual).

Second Watch: the writing

I co-wrote Second Watch, along with James Bloodworth, Alli and Ric Mawhinney, and Laura Wood. I’ve not written with any of them before, and James and Laura were both newcomers to Peaky (and this was only Ric’s second Peaky).

Laura had pitched an SF horror game, so we kicked around ideas involving Alien, Prometheus, Event Horizon, Sunshine, and similar movies. We ended up with Second Watch, where the relief crew awakens from cryosleep to discover that the First Watch is missing, and things aren’t quite right…

Writing Second Watch was a delight. It seemed really easy - I think that was because from the very start we had a strong idea of what we wanted to do. Sometimes at Peaky the writing groups take a while to form behind an idea, but this seemed to just fly.

It went so smoothly that we were done by 9pm on Saturday evening, which left me plenty of time to finalise Sunday’s running order (more on that below) while the others played games. I went to bed at 11pm, relatively early by Peaky standards. (I had had a dreadful night’s sleep the night before, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake again.)

Second Watch, all printed out and envelopes stuffed

Playing the games

Second Watch was the first game on Sunday (up against It’s Everybody’s War) and seemed to go really well. Despite a few of the inevitable glitches, the game seemed to go really well and we got some good feedback. We’ll take that on board and improve it for the next time (possibly Consequences).

The main things items we need to address are:

• The queue for the GMs, we need to get the players to self-manage more of the investigation.
• More and stronger links between characters. (I could say that we didn’t have time to write that - but hey, we finished at 9pm instead. It wasn’t a critical loss, but more links would have been better.)
• The ending. Personally, I was hoping for a very downbeat ending where surviving players have to decide between several miserable options - but the players confounded us. Must do better next time!

The Apocalypse Agenda was written by Emory Cunnington, Ann De Vries, Max De Vries, Martin Jones and Tony Mitton and was a mash-up of Torchwood, the Laundry Files and Warehouse 13. I played a military chaplain from Section 13, clearly based on the Laundry Files. During the game we met two other teams and were forced to work with them, which led to some nice tension (as we all came from very different organisational cultures).

The Apocalypse Agenda went really well. It was split into several scenes, with short intermissions between. It seemed quite action packed and intense - it would clearly benefit from longer than the two hours that we had at Peaky. (The writing team did admit that at the start, so we were warned.)

A couple of things need a bit of looking at. The team-building workshop didn’t quite work, which made me wonder why. It was fun to do, but I don’t think it had the intended effect. (It has made me think about workshops and how to make them work in a freeform context. I’d like to see a good example.) And I think a bit more could have been made of the differences between the groups when we were supposed to be bonding.

Sunday’s final game (for me) was Mean Street, written by Nickey Barnard, Nick Curd, Philippa Dall, Clare Gardner, Megan Jones, Max Powell. Inspired by Dollhouse, Mean Street included strong themes and involved some abused characters.

I played Joey, a cigarette seller and I don’t want to say too much. Mean Street was intense, and the time seemed to fly by. My main concern is that towards the end of the game, I didn’t have any story left - once my character had worked out what was going on (and as a player I had worked it out sooner - but I had a good time playing being confused), then there was little I could do to influence things. It wasn’t a problem in a two hour Peaky game, but might have been a problem if the game was longer.

I didn’t experience It's Everybody's War, Luck be a Lady, or The Root of all Evil but it sounded like they went well.

The gender agenda

The gender agenda was more prominent this time at Peaky, notably with the presence of three members of the LGBT community. Emory produced a very useful Gender and Sexual Orientation Diversity Cheat Sheet, which clearly explained how diverse diversity really is.

That had an interesting effect on the writing:

• In Second Watch, we decided to make all our characters genderless. In keeping with the genre, we just used last names throughout.
• My character in The Armageddon Agenda, if I remember right, didn’t feel sexual attraction to anyone (I can’t remember the technical term). Along with all the other characters, I had a gender neutral name.
• All but one of the characters in Mean Street were gender neutral, but they had a nice touch of putting “he/she/they” underneath the character names on the name badge. As a player I got to chose my pronoun.
• I didn’t play the other games and I don’t know what the impact was, but from a distance they appeared to have the more usual freeform gender split.

I found the gender agenda quite thought provoking and I’ll write more when my thoughts are a bit more coherent.

Game wrangling

Game wrangling was a huge improvement compared to last year. I think that’s because of three things:

• I checked with everyone early to find out when they were due to leave. (And we didn’t have any last-minute drop-outs, thankfully.)
• I worked out in advance that on average each group could expect 11 or 12 players, and I made sure that everyone knew that. (Everyone took note, happily.)
• After last year I put together a spreadsheet that let me work out the options, and that worked really well.

So that was Peaky 2017. Still my favourite gaming weekend of the year.

Approaching Peaky

Player created NPCs

One of the easiest methods I’ve used to get players invested in a game background is for them to create contacts for their player characters. This works particularly well for urban settings, and it gives the sense that the PCs are part of the world.

It also helps me in several ways:

• As sources of information and clues (“Hmm, that sounds like something your ex-boss would know something about”)
• As emotional hooks - if the players have created the NPCs, it’s likely they care about them. And if they care about them… (“I thought you ought to know, Sam is missing.”)
• Fleshing out the world in ways I hadn’t thought of (“So there’s a cobbler on Grape Lane, I didn’t know that.”)
• Interesting NPCs allow me to have a bit of fun roleplaying.

I also do this for my pre-gen one-shot games. For example, I am currently running The Bone Swallower, a Fate Accelerated urban fantasy adventure set in London (inspired by Neverwhere, Rivers of London, and anything else that has taken my fancy).

I gave each character a list of three contacts, and asked them to choose two and also to define their relationship.

Contacts (Choose two)

• Jet Brewer: Half-fae pavement artist, usually found near Trafalgar Square. Relationship: Jet is my lover / mentor / ex-pimp / ______________.
• Mr Spleen: Enigmatic shopkeeper who runs the Old Curiosity Shoppe, a general store and magic shop of no-fixed location. Relationship: Mr Spleen is my advisor / ex-boss / rescuer / ________.
• Ted Neath: Lord Boston’s tough troubleshooter. Relationship: Ted is my father-figure/ teacher / enemy / ________.

Because this is a one-shot (and because I will publish it online in due course), I’ve developed each of the NPCs so that someone else can use them. (If these were player-generated, I would expect them to do as much of this as possible.)

Tiberius
Immortal Roman Centurion, Lady Serpentine’s bodyguard, hunting my true love’s murderer
Skilled (+2) at: Fighting, killing, protecting. Tracking, finding Other London’s hidden spaces
Poor (-2) at: Modern technology, falling ill, holding my liquor
Stress: O O O
Tiberius was born in 80AD, and simply didn’t die. He served on Hadrian’s Wall, and stayed when the Roman forces withdrew. In 1668 he lost his one true love, Serena, to a vampire called Zerkisti, and has been hunting it ever since. Tiberius has been serving as Lady Serpentine’s bodyguard since 1888, when she sought personal protection following the Ripper murders.

As for The Bone Swallower, the characters have already visited one of their contacts - they did it in the first session.

Note that I didn’t do this for The Crasta Demon nor In Whom We Trust because in both cases the scenarios involve the characters going into the wilderness and leaving their contacts behind. Adding contacts would have been a distraction. When I come to write a follow up to The Crasta Demon set in the great city of Broken Arch, then I will give the characters contacts.

(And I didn't do it for my older adventures because I hadn't learned this trick then.)

Why don’t we do this more often?

I find that creating NPCs is such a powerful tool for creating plot, background and helping the characters get involved in a setting, that it seems a bit strange to me that we don’t do it more often.

But maybe that’s a result of our wargames heritage - it seems to me that many tabletop rpgs are little more than thinly-disguised miniatures wargames with hero figures, but that’s a topic for another day.

(Ironically, given what I said about sandbox games previously, this probably works better for sandboxes than it does for adventures.)