Peaky 2022

Last weekend I attended the annual Peaky freeform writing weekend. I’ve attended previous Peakys and written about some here.

Four games

This year, we had four writing groups and all four games ran.

The Tower of the Moon (if I remember the name right) was a 12-player game set in Minas Ithil on the edge of Mordor during the Second Age (whatever that is—Middle Earth fans will know). A game of corruption and heists, it was originally pitched as “Thorin’s 11”. I played the Captain of the Guard.

Deimos Down features a crashing spaceship in an Expanse-type future for 14 players. Originally pitched as “crashing spaceship where everyone dies”. Lots of characters died. I co-wrote this.

Brest or Bust is 20+ player game based on Those Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines/Wacky Races. It wasn’t completed, but we played a short preview with just the characters (no actual plot), which was fun.

Smoke and Mirrors is a 12 players game set at the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Time travellers discover that things aren’t as history remembers...

Favourite moments

My favourite moments:

The Tower of the Moon: Clare’s wonderful orc (poetry!). The GMs letting me tell them off (they were hopeless guards and hadn’t told me when something important was stolen). Megan for her wonderful put-down of me (we had one five-second interaction and she crushed me). The slow dawning of horror at the start when I re-read my character sheet and realised how much trouble we were in.

Deimos Down: The players enjoying themselves with our hastily-written characters. My improvised (and ambiguous) ending.

Brest or Bust: Tony’s whisky string (!). The mad characters. Demonstrating that players can easily entertain themselves for half an hour if given characters and a little direction even with no plot.

Smoke and Mirrors: Whispering advice into Nick’s ear while he was negotiating. (And Graham’s complaint that his advisor wasn’t advising him!) Figuring out what was going on and realising what we had to do--and then trying to persuade everyone. This was my favourite game of the weekend.

Not very photogenic

I’m not a costume-y person, but it’s a shame Peaky isn’t a more photogenic event. This is the only photograph I took:

My only photo - and not even a good one

Things I learned

I learned a few things this time.

Plots then characters: Writing Deimos Down reminded me that I struggle to write plot information straight into the character sheets. I’ve written a whole process for freeform-writing (see here), and while it isn’t the only way to write freeforms, it works for me. Particularly when writing as a team.

This time, after we created a spaghetti diagram showing links between the characters (see photo above), we moved straight to writing character sheets. We wrote the plots (as understood by that character) directly into the character sheets. We missed an intermediate step to flesh out the plots in more detail. That meant that things were missed.

So as an example, I wrote a character who had tried to blow something up with a mining charge. So I wrote that, but I didn’t write the other characters who would have known about that—and we had to add that into several characters at the last minute. (We missed other things.)

Had we written from a plot-centred perspective, I would have known that it was my job to write that bit of plot for all the characters. I would have done this as a detailed plot document involving all the relevant characters. We would have checked and agreed this, and then we’d have copied it to the character sheets once we were happy.

Keep general background and character sheet separate: Rather than have separate background and character info, we kept it simple and wrote everything on the character sheet for Deimos Down. In hindsight, I don’t think this worked as character sheets mixed general background info with personal background, and they became confusing to read.

If we had more time, we could have straightened out the characters and made it work. But even then, I prefer to keep background info in its own document and leave the character sheet to include character information. (As I was writing, I realised this was one of my unwritten assumptions.)

It didn’t help that our game was set in the future and so we had to give the players some background information. Perhaps we should just have said that our game was set in The Expanse, which would put everyone on the same page.

Complicating matters further, we started the game with a flashback. We did that so our two groups of characters could get to know each other before the main part of the game, but doing it as a flashback made the character sheets more structurally weird. It would have been simpler had we prepared a briefing sheet for the players to read between the two scenes, but we didn’t want to slow play down by making the players read more part-way through. But that meant we needed to put much more thought into how we structured the character sheets than we did.

Organising Sunday

I’ve worked out the Sunday running order for the last few years. 2022 was no exception, but it was simpler this year because we had a single stream. (It gets very complicated when there are two parallel streams of games.)

The problem this year was that four games wanted to run. It’s a problem because we start at 9:30 and finish at 17:00 (to allow everyone to get home in good time). Ideally, we’ll have 30 minutes between each game and an hour for lunch. With three games, that gives each game a two-hour slot. With four games, we had less time. Luckily Brest or Bust only needed an hour, and Smoke and Mirrors only needed 90 minutes. So while we overran, we didn’t overrun by much.

One problem with organising the games on Sunday is that it takes me out of writing the game. It can take a few hours to organise as it involves finding out from the organisers what their games are, creating a casting sheet, and juggling numbers to make sure everyone is happy. (Or at least, as many people as possible are happy.)

Besides not wanting to disappoint anyone, sorting out the Sunday games always takes me out of the writing. I can never commit as much as I want, which I can find frustrating. I suspect my fellow writers also find it frustrating that I’m not 100% committed—but then nobody else offers to organise Sunday so maybe they’re just relieved that they’re not doing it.

Peaky 2023

Next year it’s a little later, in May. Hopefully the weather will be nicer, and we can spend more time outside.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I’ve just finished listening to the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobooks.

And when I say audiobooks, I mean the radio plays. Proper Hitchhiker’s, as I like to think of it.

I’ve been introducing Megan, my daughter, to Hitchhiker’s. I was about her age when I discovered it—I started with series 2 (the total perspective vortex, body debit cards, the Nutrimat machine, the séance, the statue of Arthur Dent, Belgium, the shoe event horizon, Zarniwhoop, Lentilla and the Allitnels, the ruler of the universe).

Series 1 (the destruction of Earth, Vogons, infinite improbability drive, Deep Thought, 42, Magrathea, Milliways, the Golgrincham ark fleet) never hit the mark for me—series 2 always seemed newer and crazier. It also had the benefit of never being fully repeated in print—it’s chopped up in the novels.

And series 1 was repeated. First as two albums (which I listened to repeatedly), then as the BBC television series, a computer game, and eventually as a movie. Series 1 was never the same twice: the TV series included the dish of the day, the albums replaced the Hagunenons with Disaster Area. But the radio series was always proper Hitchhiker’s.

(I didn’t see the play. However, I do have a towel and the radio scripts (which are wonderful for their footnotes.))

I’m not sure exactly what Megan thinks of Hitchhiker’s. She says she likes it, but I don’t think it will replace Harry Potter or Shadowhunters any time soon. We heard them in tiny sections, when I ran her to Guides or Rangers. (They’re not Mrs H’s thing, so we had to wait for when she wasn’t in the car with us.)

However, Megan lasted only about twenty minutes of the Tertiary Phase (the dramatisation of Life, the Universe, and Everything). “You’re right, not as good as the others,” was her damning assessment.

I carried on listening.

There are things I like about the later audiobooks: reuniting the original cast; using Susan Sheridan and Sandra Dickinson (radio and tv Trillian respectively) for Mostly Harmless; Douglas Adams as Agrajag. And little things, like Geoffrey Perkins (the original BBC producer) playing Arthur Dent’s producer.

And I liked the happy ending they gave the otherwise bleak Mostly Harmless. (I was intrigued to learn recently that Douglas Adams had admitted that he would like to write a sixth book with a happier ending.)

But… the latter phases aren’t proper Hitchhiker’s. The story makes sense (rather than seeming to be random flights of fancy), there are fewer random asides, and the ambient sounds don’t quite match the original.

But that’s because they are based on the novels, which felt less and less like proper Hitchhiker’s the longer they went on. (And let’s not talk about the sixth book, And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer. It was a nice try, but I wish they’d never bothered. The happy ending to the audiobooks was good enough.)

I haven’t re-read the books in a long, long while. So it’s probably time I revisited them.

I have two Douglas Adams stories.

He came to Leeds on a book tour, and I saw him in Waterstones. He read the opening to Mostly Harmless (which is much funnier when he read it than it was when I read it later) and the bit with Marvin and the Frogstar Robot in the Guide's offices.

Before that, I wrote him a fan letter about the Lintilla clones. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it was something about the 578,000,000,000 Lintilla clones—and if you assumed that it took a second to make each clone, that meant they were around 18,000 years old. While I can’t remember my letter, I can remember his reply almost word-for-word: “You’re right. Appalling, isn’t it?”

I wish I still had that letter.

All Flesh is Grass

All Flesh is Grass is the second episode of a series of first-contact freeform larps with the working title of The Fermi Solution. It was originally meant to be a prologue to the series, and I started writing it first. That’s until I realised that I wanted an even earlier prologue, set in Roswell in 1948.

So despite having All Flesh is Grass mostly written, I wrote The Roswell Incident and ran that first.

All Flesh is Grass is set in Millville Wisconsin in 1965. The locals have woken up to find a strange barrier surrounding the village. Solving that mystery is the heart of the game.

The game itself is closely based on Clifford D Simak’s 1965 novel of the same name.

After Roswell

Although it was mostly complete before I ran Roswell, but with Roswell’s completion I realised I wanted to make a few changes to All Flesh is Grass. The main changes were:

• Adding two characters from The Roswell Incident (my original idea for The Fermi Solution is that episodes will feature some continuing characters—not always the same ones).
• Adding a paragraph about what the characters knew of Roswell and what happened there.
• Improvements to how I managed/explained the Discord bot.

Adding two characters solved a problem I had with two of the weaker characters—it meant I could give them to a single player to play. That presented the slightly different problem of finding someone happy to play two characters, but I covered this in the casting form (see previous post) and it wasn’t a problem.

Running All Flesh is Grass

From where I sat, in the GM desk and flitting around, listening in, the game seemed to go well. Some notes:

• My original estimate of how long the game would take was too short. I pessimistically thought we would be done in two hours, but I wrapped the game after about 2.5 hours. I think that’s my brilliant players making the most of the characters I gave them.
• The Discord bot behaved itself and didn’t cause any problems this time—although not everyone had read the instructions.
• The returning players (those who had played The Roswell Incident) seemed happy, and the new players dived right in and embraced the daftness.
• I forgot to take any screenshots of play—so I’m afraid these are from Roswell. 

This is Roswell...

Epilogues

After the game, I sent out a feedback form to capture feedback and allow players to tell me some of their highlights and what their characters would be doing in five years. I used this to create an epilogue sheet (which I enjoyed creating—I hope the players enjoyed reading it).

I based the epilogues mostly on the player’s description, with some curating as I have an idea of what is coming up. My favourite epilogues are where the player ran with an idea and did crazy stuff to their character. My favourite:

After reporting on the events in Millville, Preston quits her job as a journalist and writes a tell-all book: Millville: Village Under the Dome. Preston passes it in instalments through the barrier, and when the FBI finds her manuscript, she is arrested. Nevertheless, her manuscript is published and becomes conspiracy fodder for cranks everywhere.

Stars

When I wrote about stars and wishes I noted that I’d not used them for a freeform larp. Well, now I have.

As part of the feedback, I asked players to award stars (Give a star to someone and tell them what they did that was so great). This was my favourite bit of the feedback—an outpouring of lovely stories about the game.

I shared this with everyone—I hope they enjoyed reading it as much as I did.

Feedback

Feedback included ideas for arranging the spaces to allow people to talk privately. I feel strongly about not limiting game spaces, having been bitten that way before. But some players didn’t like having other players drop in on them when they were deep in a private conversation. So in future, I will highlight some channels as PRIVATE and encourage players not to disturb anyone in those channels (without limiting them by numbers).

One player wanted more pronouns on the character sheet, which I understand but I’m not going to do. I wrote the characters as gender neutral so anyone could play them—and I don’t want to go through the character sheets adding he/she/they pronouns each time I run it.

A couple of suggestions were made to give those in power more reason to think that aliens (rather than Soviet agents) were behind the events. I agreed and have tweaked some characters so that should be more likely.

Someone suggested that I make the game structure clearer. For example, at the end of the game there’s a big decision to be made, and it’s worth identifying that at the start of the game so the players don’t become distracted by trivial matters. So I think that’s worth trying next time.

Next time

So now I need to write the next one—we’re leaping forward to the 1980s (I think) and will be more international in scope. No title yet, but I have ideas of things I want it to include.

Casting All Flesh is Grass

I find casting freeform larps much more stressful than I suspect they need to be.

Here’s how I did it for All Flesh is Grass.

The questionnaire

I try to keep casting questionnaires fairly simple—I don’t ask many questions. That’s mainly because as a player I find it hard to answer a detailed questionnaire. That’s partly because I rarely know what I want from the game, but also because I don’t know the assumptions behind the questions because I know so little about the game. And so I struggle to answer them.

So my questions for All Flesh is Grass Were:

I am interested in playing:

• A resident of Millville
• A visitor
• Someone in authority
• An alien
• Two characters
• I don’t mind who I play

[These were all Yes, I don’t mind, and No. I stressed that I would consider the “No” answers first to avoid casting anyone in a role they didn’t want.]

Are there any characters in the cast list you really want to play? [Free text—for those who want to play a particular character based on nothing more than their name and occupation]

Are they any characters in the cast list you really DON’T want to play? [free text]

If we become oversubscribed, would you be willing to be a reserve player? [Yes or No]

Is there anything else I should know? [Free text—for anything else]

May I use a photograph of you playing the game in future publicity? [Yes or No]

Characters who needed care

The first thing I needed to consider were the two characters needing the right players:

• The alien character was a disembodied voice. I needed a player who didn’t mind being an alien.
• Captain Yip and Jamie Flanagan would be played by the same player, switching between the roles as required. (These two roles were slightly underdeveloped, and while I’ve enjoyed playing more than one character in the past, it’s not for everyone.)

So I needed to make sure that the person playing those had ticked “yes” or “I don’t mind”.

Questions I should have asked

As All Flesh is Grass is based on the novel of the same name by Clifford D Simak, I really should have asked the players whether they had read it. For some characters, it’s best if they haven’t read the book, while for others it matters less.

Player restrictions

I had a couple of players who put detail into their free-text sections explaining what they like in a game. That was wonderful, although worried me slightly in case All Flesh is Grass wasn’t exactly what they were looking for.

How I did it

I cast the alien and the player playing two characters first, as I was worried about them most of all. One player noted that they had read All Flesh is Grass. As they said they would like to be the alien, that’s how I cast them. Only one person answered ‘Yes’ to two characters, so I cast them as the dual character. (There were several who said they didn’t mind, so I had fallbacks.)

I then cast those players who had given me some detail on what sort of character they wanted to play.

Then cast those who said they wanted a particular character.

Then cast those who were flexible but with one or two requirements.

I cast the most flexible people last—they filled in the gaps. (Thank you, flexible players!)

Emails

I then wrote an email to everyone telling them who they were playing, and sometimes I explained why I had cast them that way (especially where I hadn’t exactly followed their casting sheet).

I also reminded them of the date, and noted that I would send a Discord invite later on.

Then I let the reserve players know they were on the reserve list.

Casting success or failure?

We’ll cover that next time, when I talk about how the game ran.