Peaky 2021

It’s been over two years since the last one, but in early October I attended my favourite gaming weekend of the year: Peaky.

And yes, still my favourite.

Thanks to the pandemic, we had fewer people than usual. That meant Peaky was a little more spacious than it had felt in the past.

And for most of us, we haven’t socialised face-to-face much lately. And while meeting 20+ other gamers simultaneously in the same space took a bit of getting used to, it wasn’t too long before it all seemed normal again.

Organising the games

As usual, I organised the games for Sunday. We had fewer games this year – we had more players than games. I think that was another effect of the pandemic – more groups were happy to start work on a game rather than get something ready for Sunday. (We also had a request from Consequences for bigger, 20-30 player games, so that had an impact as well.)

As a result, while we split into five groups, only two were writing games that would be ready for Sunday. We played three as we also ran Culture Crash, which was written at Virtual Peaky earlier in the year.

So while previous years have usually involved trying to work out how to ensure there are enough players for each game, this time I knew that we would have players spare and that most people would need to sit out at least one game.

As usual, organising this took a fair bit of Saturday for me to arrange, which meant I didn’t contribute to The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight as perhaps the others would have liked me to.

The writing team hard at work. (Well, the others are hard at work, I’m just messing around taking a photo.)

The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight

Based on the ribald works of singer Jake Thackray, The Castleford Ladies Magic Circle Meets Tonight was written by Phil D, Kevin J, Suey L, Christi S and me. And although I’ve put the team in alphabetical order, it was definitely Suey and Christi’s game. (I had not heard of Jake Thackray until Peaky, so it was educational for me.)

The game is a horde game for around 13-15 players. A magic ritual has gone wrong, and the main characters are the Castleford Ladies Magic Circle, and the horde are ghosts summoned by the ritual. (It’s so tempting to call them players and NPCs…)

We tried to structure the game so the ghosts had plenty of reasons to talk to each other rather than just the main characters (which is a fault of other horde games we’ve played). Our experience on Sunday suggested that we had succeeded, and little polishing will be needed before it is rerun.

Some thoughts:

• It’ll need a content warning. There’s a fair amount of filth/smut/innuendo, which is very true to the source but isn’t very modern.
• Most of the characters are women, which is a pleasant change.
• The two above points mean it isn’t for everyone.
• I would have run the horde slightly differently than Suey did, but I didn’t make a big deal of it as it’s her vision, not mine.

The Coolham Caper

Roger G, Helen J, Charlie P, Rich P and Julie W wrote The Coolham Caper, a light-hearted game of misunderstanding and misappropriation, gangsters and garden produce for nine players.

I didn’t play in The Coolham Caper, but I heard good things about it from the players.

Other games

Games that were started but not finished:

• The Shining Ones (provisional title), a Fae game for at least 30 players.
• Casino Royale, a Bond-inspired game about spies, glamour and gambling. For 30-ish players.
• An unnamed game set in Restoration Britain for 25-30 players.

Hurrah for more games!

Culture Crash

Our last game was Culture Crash, by Jeff Diewald, Roger Gammans, Heidi Kaye, Richard Perry, and Julie Winnard. It was started at Virtual Peaky 21 but has had some work done since, and this was its third outing.

I played Quilh, Watcher of Stars and I was an alien in a first contact situation. (I didn’t think of myself as an alien, of course.) The game was splendid fun, with lots of mysteries and misunderstandings.

In full costume as Quilh, Watcher of Stars

Some thoughts

• Culture Crash was long by Peaky standards – it took around three hours. It started with a workshop for the alien cultures to sort themselves out, which added to the time.
• The character sheets need some work. They’re very long, and I found it hard to find key information during the game. Some condensing/restructuring is required.
• The ending suffered from the one-big-plot problem (once the big plot arrived, everything else became irrelevant and if you weren’t involved you had nothing to do). The ending was also very GM-intensive, and as a player, I felt I had little agency. But we gave the writers some feedback which hopefully they will consider. Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed Culture Crash, especially the first two thirds.

The Culture Crash website is here.

Looking forward to Peaky 2022

And as always, the weekend was over much too quickly… But Peaky 2022 is already in the diary.