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.