Messages from Callisto: How did it play?

Messages from Callisto is the fourth part of my series of linked freeforms involving aliens. I ran it earlier this month, online, using Discord. Last time I talked about its design; this time, I’m reflecting on how it ran.

Scheduling

My first challenge was choosing a date for the game. I created a Doodle poll with some dates and emailed everyone who had played before (and was still interested in playing), and while I got the most popular date, I still couldn’t fill the game.

(Now that games are being run face-to-face, online games may be less popular. I’m not sure why – I enjoy running and playing them online. They’re not as good as face-to-face, but they’re better than not playing…)

Anyway, with about a week to go, I still hadn’t filled the game (and I didn’t want to run it with fewer players), so I pushed it back three weeks and filled all the places. (Happily, I got two new players – one new to freeforming.)

First contact with the players

Once I sent out characters, I started getting questions.

One player complained about their character, and I realised I hadn’t read their casting form response correctly. So I radically changed their character to suit what they were looking for – and I’m glad I did so; I think the character is much better for doing that.

I also received questions about science and the specific NASA timeline that made me realise I should have set it three years later. Not that it would have made any difference to the plots, but ‘realistically’, the flight time from Earth to Jupiter is about six years, leaving no time for the development and construction of the probe itself. So in the rewrite, I’m moving it to 1993.

On the day

The day didn’t start well as I had a player drop, and I spent a while finding a replacement. Thankfully Julie stepped into the breach.

As for Messages from Callisto itself, well, maybe there were too many meetings. I had five topics for discussion, but perhaps they didn’t all need to be meetings. And while I had identified those who needed to attend each, it turned out that everyone wanted to hear what was going on.

And despite scheduling the meetings to last only ten minutes, inevitably, they overran. So there was less one-to-one roleplaying than I had hoped for, and not everyone had time to talk to those they wanted to talk to.

But apart from that (and a few players said they liked the meetings), the game went well. The time passed quickly, and we had good decisions (and dilemmas) to manage.

As I now do with all the games I run, I asked for feedback and stories. I got a great response, prepared an epilogue for everyone, and shared some of the stories.

Future changes

I’m hoping to run the game face-to-face at Consequences in November, so I need to take on the feedback from this run.

The main changes I need to make are around the meetings (as discussed above) and the decisions.

One player noted that while making decisions was good, the decisions themselves were made by only a subset of the group. He wondered if decisions could be delegated to subcommittees so more players are involved.

So I may do that – or I may give each player a vote, even if their character wouldn’t necessarily have one. That steps outside the usual “you are your character” style of play that typifies freeforming, but I will try to word it so it’s not too jarring.

However, a more challenging change concerns Children of the Stars, the previous game. I’m also running Children of the Stars at Consequences, and if the players make different decisions, that will affect Messages from Callisto…

I’ve got ideas for how I manage this, but that’s a bigger topic I will probably cover in another post.

Overall

Overall, I’m pleased with how Messages from Callisto survived contact with the players. From the feedback I received, most of them enjoyed themselves (nobody seemed to have a terrible time), and I have good feedback I can use to improve the game for next time.

Messages from Callisto: Design notes

Messages from Callisto is the fourth part of my series of linked freeforms involving aliens. I ran it earlier this month, online. The overall series background is here. Previous episodes were:

• The Roswell Incident – a flying saucer crashes in 1947 in New Mexico. I ran this online in February 2022 and face-to-face in February 2023. I’m working it up for Freeform Games.
• All Flesh is Grass – a mysterious barrier is erected around a village in Maine. I ran this online in April 2022 and face-to-face in February 2023.
• Children of the Stars – mysterious children are discussed at an international science convention. Ran online in September 2023.

I started thinking about Messages from Callisto in October 2023. While I had finished most of it by the end of the year, preparing Roswell and All Flesh is Grass for face-to-face at Retcon meant I put Callisto on the back shelf.

State of the world – and what next?

By the end of Children of the Stars, I knew:

• Aliens had revealed themselves to be living among humans.
• The alien Cuculus villages would be isolated and studied.
• A space warning system was being developed.
• A mission was being sent to Callisto to investigate the artefact.
• The Russians continued to work on an advanced beam weapon.
• The Chinese were working on a warp drive.

So what would come next?

I set the next game six years later, when the mission to Callisto sends images of the structure.

So Messages from Callisto is set in 1990, six-ish years after Children of the Stars. It’s another conference, which makes it easy to reuse old characters. Looking ahead, I’m concerned that if I have too many conferences, the freeforms might be a bit samey with lots of high-level meetings or conferences. There will always be some of that (I want characters to repeat and the players to make the high-level decisions that affect the overall plot), but I will mix it up in future games.

Six years passing

So what’s happened in the intervening six years?

Aliens among us! First, I decided that the human reaction to the presence of aliens would bring out the worst in us. So, aliens are second-class citizens (if they are citizens at all – they are certainly not covered by the European Convention on Human Rights). All aliens must wear identification revealing themselves as an alien. (Do all comply with this? Hmmm.)

Callisto: With more detail from Callisto, the structure has revealed itself to be something artificial. So what do the players want to do next? Do they send another mission? A manned mission? Do they send a nuke? What they decide here will affect future games.

Other aliens: I’m enjoying extrapolating what the aliens presented in some classic SF would do. So the Consciousness is based on the alien flowers in Clifford D Simak’s All Flesh is Grass, and the Cuculus is based on John Wyndam’s The Midwich Cuckoos. So what happens after those stories? In Messages from Callisto, both are petitioning the human race.

A new alien: While I haven’t introduced a new alien this time, a mysterious object has been detected outside the solar system that is likely to arrive in about three years. How do the players want to prepare?

More science projects: There are yet more science projects to enjoy. New projects include artificial hibernation research, Moonbase Alpha, AI research and a mission to seek hydrogen breathers in Jupiter.

More messages: I decided that Messages from Callisto was a better title than Message from Callisto – but that meant I needed more than one message. So there are now two…

Decisions

So these are the large decisions I want to explore:

• The Callisto object: What happens next?
• The Cuculus request: The Cuculus will offer the players a dilemma. What will the world decide?
• The Consciousness: Back in All Flesh is Grass, the Consciousness kept its barrier up. How will the players react if the Consciousness drops it?
• The incoming object: How do the players prepare for the visitor?
• Symbiote hosts: How are new Symbiote hosts arranged?

Plus, I’ve included other, personal decisions that need making. No real angst, though. That’s something I should probably add to the series one day.

Writing

This game has more briefing sheets than earlier games:

• A setting and cast list, with a short “the story so far” covering key details from the previous episodes.
• A general sheet on the different aliens on Earth.
• A report on Callisto.
• A report on the intrusion web and its intruder.
• A report detailing the other science projects.
• A game schedule.
• Background sheets for the Tau and Symbiote aliens, giving them more detail from their point of view.

As a result, I wrote less on the character sheets because the details were in the briefing sheets. (I say I wrote less, but the character sheets were no shorter than the previous games, so perhaps there’s more in this one. Or that as the series progresses, there will be more and more baggage to include.)

As for writing the Messages from Callisto, it was relatively painless. I followed the process I outlined in Writing Freeform Larps (explained in more detail when discussing Children of the Stars part 1, part 2 and part 3), and everything fell into place.

Series evolution

A few things have evolved as the series has developed:

Tau: I changed the name of one of the aliens from Tau Ceti to Tau. I discovered that Tau Ceti is only 12 lightyears away, which is much too close. So I dropped Ceti. I don’t know if the players noticed. (I’ve not specified exactly where their homeworld is located – one of the players asked this time.)

Stardrives: I realised I needed to decide how the aliens travelled between the stars. I came up with six or seven modes of stardrive. I told the aliens but didn’t tell the humans. (Arguably, the humans had enough time to ask the aliens before the game, but I wanted this to be something the aliens and humans could talk about.)

I also need to decide how this affects earlier games. For example, I am running Children of the Stars and Messages from Callisto in November. Different types of space travel aren’t necessary for the earlier game – but do I keep things simple and add the information to the alien briefing sheet anyway?

The big-picture story: I also did some work on the big-picture story. I want to keep my options open and let the players dictate where we end up, so I created options that gave me a sense of where we are going.

The overall name: I changed the series name from The Fermi Solution (which was always a working title) to The Dark Forest (which is the hypothesis that we don’t see signs of alien civilisations because predators are out there).

Running the game

This post is long enough, so I’ll talk about Messages from Callisto’s premiere next time.

Receiving feedback

Peaky was only last week and is always a good time to reflect on feedback. It’s something I find both rewarding and difficult.

It’s rewarding because feedback is a great way to improve. It’s difficult because I have thin skin, and sometimes I take criticism a little too personally. But I’ve learned to deal with that.

But I’m not going to talk about Peaky feedback; instead, I’m looking at the feedback for Writing Freeform Larps. (But my overall response, and the process, are much the same.)

I had the first draft of Writing Freeform Larps done in January, and I asked on the uk-freeforms mailing list for volunteers to give me some feedback. I had a few responses, so I sent pdfs of the book to my volunteers – and waited.

Red reviews

Luckily, I’m used to receiving feedback. For the last decade or so, I’ve been a bid writer (and bid manager) on numerous tenders. Part of the tender process always includes a review (we used to call this red review), which can be punishing.

I always warn new bid writers that red reviews can be punishing. It feels like personal criticism. However, I find it helps to remember that the reviewers are not criticising the writer (well, they shouldn’t be) – everyone simply wants to make the bid as good as possible.

I’ve weathered plenty of these, but I still find receiving feedback a little challenging.

Feedback

I go through several stages when receiving feedback.

Initial response: When the email lands in my inbox, my first response is an immediate adrenaline spike. What will they think? Will they like it? I then read through the feedback, from start to finish, without thinking too hard.

It’s always tempting to defend my work – that’s almost always a mistake. If someone misreads something or has a reaction I didn’t expect, I try not to get defensive. Instead, I try to work out what I need to change to ensure I convey my message more clearly.

(At Peaky, most feedback is given verbally. I find it best to record it in my notebook rather than try and engage with the feedback at that point.)

Wait: As I know my initial reaction is to reject any criticism or suggested changes, I usually wait a day or two to process the suggestions. I’ll try not to think about them in this period, but I know that by leaving a gap between the first read and when I come to action them, I will be in a more positive state of mind.

(During bids, I didn’t always get the luxury of waiting this long, unfortunately.)

Reviewing the feedback and making changes: My process for dealing with the suggestions was straightforward: I printed the suggestions and then worked through them, crossing out each suggestion once I had finished with it.

Sometimes I worked methodically through the feedback; sometimes I flitted from one piece to another.

For Writing Freeform Larps, I got feedback at different times. So once I’d completed that, I asked those who hadn’t commented whether they wanted an updated copy. One advantage that gave me was that I didn’t get contradictory feedback. (It wasn’t unusual to get contradictory feedback during red reviews.)

Accepting feedback

For Writing Freeform Larps, I accepted about 80% of the suggestions. All suggestions had some merit – but some pushed the book into a direction I wasn’t interested in or wasn’t how I would write a freeform larp.

Often, the feedback made me adjust the text, even if I didn’t directly respond to the suggestion.

Second edition

So now that Writing Freeform Larps is published, if I get any more feedback I want to include, I must decide: do I update the files immediately or wait for a second edition? We’ll see. 

(And I'm pleased to say, the feedback I’ve received so far has been overwhelmingly positive.)

Peaky 2023

And what did you do during the coronation, Daddy? Well, I went to Derbyshire and wrote freeforms. Isn’t that what everyone did?

So yes, last weekend was Peaky 2023. 25 gamers congregated in Appleby Magna and wrote four freeform larps, worked on other freeforms, and watched the coronation.

I’ve talked about Peaky before, so I’ll just concentrate on the games.

That Second Difficult Album

I wrote That Second Difficult Album, an 8-player freeform with Kevin, Theo, Tym, Heidi and Mikey. (In typing that, I realise we had almost as many writers as players, which may have contributed to its smooth running.)

Here’s the teaser blurb:

August 1971. The Appleyards have been ensconced at Hurstmere Grange in the wilds of Sussex to record the follow-up album to their well-received debut. Tonight, they will reveal to the world the new album’s title, and some of the new songs, and announce where their next tour will be.

But has anyone seen the drummer?

As I hinted a few lines above, the whole experience was painless. We kicked around ideas on Friday night and got the shape of the game and ideas for plots and characters. On Saturday morning, we nailed down the characters and their concepts and started on the plots. By tea time, we were proofing the plots, followed by copying them into the characters. We finished shortly after 10 pm.

Observations and thoughts

While this is the first time I’ve written a music-based game, it’s not the first time we’ve done one. The Day the Music Died is a Peaky game and covered many similar themes (it’s set on a pirate radio station), and at Freeform Games, we have The Karma Club, featuring a similarly dysfunctional band.

We followed the approach I laid out in Writing Freeform Larps and it worked well. However, with some extremely experienced freeform writers in the group (Kevin wrote the first freeform I ever played), I was a little hesitant to do things “my” way. However, when I did a little project management and nudged the team in the direction I think we needed to go, they didn’t object and happily agreed.

To my amazement, Theo wrote on his phone. I couldn’t have done that – I need a proper keyboard.

We used Dropbox, which was a little frustrating as the wifi wasn’t reliable and created numerous conflicted copies, which we had to manage. In hindsight, a Google Drive folder might have worked better.

Paths not travelled: 

• We talked about players having more than one character, for some of the more minor roles. In the end, we didn’t write those but they’re something to consider if we expand the game.
• I asked ChatGPT for an example background for The Appleyards, and it produced a frighteningly comprehensive reply. While we didn’t use it, it was a clear indication of what AI can do for us.

Sunday running order

We had a few people writing games that weren’t planned for Sunday, so I asked Graham to sort out the Sunday schedule. As we had four games, the slots went as follows:

• 0930-1130: Across the City
• 1200-1400: The Restaurant and the End of the Dinosaurs
• 1500-1700: The Ashlight Labyrinth and That Difficult Second Album

As The Ashlight Labyrinth was a player short, I played in that instead of helping to GM our game.

Across the City

Across the City was written by Julie, Adam and Peter. It’s a horde game set in a Discworld-esque fantasy city. Bad guys have stolen a statue, and the guard must recover it. Three members of the guard are the players – everyone else was a member of the horde.

The guard in their splendid fezes (thanks Julie for the photo and Kevin for the fezes)

I’m not a big fan of horde games, but Across the City was the best I’ve played. The game was very structured – we started in the guard house (with two members of the horde to play with) and then visited three other parts of the city. Each part of the city felt different as the horde was different in each – the marketplace had stalls and people selling (and buying) fruit and veg. The artificer’s sector had more refined shops. The docks had fishermen and the like. 

As a non-horde player, I did find the horde overwhelming at times (noisy, chaotic, unhelpful, and easily distracted), but I really liked the sense that we were moving into different parts of the city. However, it was often hard to get any sense from the horde or find anyone who would help.

We failed to recover the idol before the villains made off with it, but we had fun doing so.

Things I liked: 

• A map of the city that meant something. We had time to visit three places, and it was up to us where we visited. (Poor writers, that meant there was material they wrote that never saw play – at least in this run!)
• Gentle roleplaying in the guard house. We had time to bond as a team (whether deliberate or not, that’s what happened), and it was fun to roleplay without having to chase the McGuffin or be overwhelmed by the horde. 
• As I said above, each area of the city had its own flavour – the city felt like a city.
• I liked the structure of the game – we were basically in four locations, and about 30 minutes in each. That was about right and helped keep the game from overstaying its welcome.
• As the watch, we all had fezes. Kevin had brought a box of hats with him, and found fezes for us all to wear.

The map!

Across the City felt like the most unique of the games at Peaky 2023 – it tried something different, and I would play it again.

The Restaurant at the End of the Dinosaurs

The Restaurant at the End of the Dinosaurs is a 12-player game written by Megan, Nickey, Phil, Kirstine, Megan, Ali, and Rich. It’s a “shenanigans” game with the players travelling back in time to view the last days of the dinosaurs before the asteroid hits the Earth. Of course, things don’t go according to plan.

I played Finlay, who, although being written as ungendered, I struggled to get my head around as I only know male Finlays. However, once I’d settled into the character and worked out that my spouse was being played by Mikey and my estranged son by Adam, I decided to play the character as female.

And as it was clear that I was an atrociously appalling mother, I modelled her on Jennifer Saunders’ character in Absolutely Fabulous. While it was fun, it ruled out any angsty resolution with our estranged son. (It was also potentially triggery, so care with casting is needed.)

I had a lot of fun in the first half of the game, roleplaying being just awful. Unfortunately, as a tourist, I had little to contribute when things started kicking off and going wrong. I’m not sure how easy it would be to make Finlay more relevant at the end of the game – it might be easier to give the character a second character and let them swap as needed.

Things I liked: 

• Dinosaurs! Why haven’t I written a game with dinosaurs in it? I had fun telling the experts that my favourite dinosaur was stegosaurus and that I wanted to see one. (And all the while knowing, as Steve, that stegosaurs had been extinct for millions of years by the end of the Cretaceous. But I figured Finlay wasn’t that bright.)
• Being awfully self-centred and rich with Mikey. I hope Adam wasn’t too upset with his awful parents.

I enjoyed The Restaurant at the End of the Dinosaurs – I hope we’ll see it again. 

The Ashlight Labyrinth

The Ashlight Labyrinth is an eight-player game written by Christi, Ben, Nick, Natalie, and Michael. It’s a character-driven last-ditch attempt to save a doomed land from an evil mage.

I must be careful what I say here, as the authors don’t want me to spoil the game for others. So, what I will say is:

• I thoroughly enjoyed The Ashlight Labyrinth.
• It’s very angsty. Very.
• Of all the games at this year’s Peaky, I think it needs the least work. (Probably just typos and layout. And maybe some GM instructions for others to run it.)
• It’s going to be compared to Critical Path, which is a highly regarded freeform larp. I played Critical Path in November, and while I enjoyed it, I wasn’t as blown away by it as I expected to be. The Ashlight Labyrinth addresses the issues I had with Critical Path – I think it’s better.
• I’m looking forward to playing it again, but maybe not for a while.

If you see The Ashlight Labyrinth being run anywhere, you should sign up for it. And as it takes only eight players, convention organisers should insist on multiple runs…

That Second Difficult Album

I didn’t see That Second Difficult Album being brought to life (as I was deep in the labyrinth), but I heard it generally went well. There were a few kinks, but we got some good positive feedback we can address.

The question will be whether to simply fix the things that need fixing, or do we add the extra characters we talked about during the writing?

Peaky 2023 overall

So three nights, four games written and played, 25 writers (plus the awesome Alison, who looked after us all), and a coronation to distract us on the Saturday. A brilliant weekend.

Plum plum plum and La-di-da

 In the spirit of The Floor is Lava (see last post), here are two party games that have been a staple of our Christmas parties for decades.

Plum plum plum

Plum plum plum is noisy and boisterous – how a party game should be. You need six to ten people for this, sitting in a circle with one person in the middle.

Starting with the youngest player, each player in the circle chooses a different fruit. (Plum, apple, grape, and so on.)

The object of the game is for the person in the middle to point at another player while saying the name of their fruit three times before that person says the name of their fruit just once. It doesn't matter whom the person in the middle looks at – it’s the player being pointed at who must answer with their fruit.

If the person in the middle wins, they and the person they beat swap places - but the name of the fruit stays attached to that position. (So, after a while, nobody will be in their original positions, and everyone must remember their new fruit.)

Notes

• I suggest banning long names – ones with three or more syllables. My father once chose ‘pomegranate’, and we never shifted him.
• It’s totally fair to look at one player and point to someone else. It’s the player you’re pointing at (and saying their fruit) that counts.
• While searching for this, I found an old article of mine here. It has a couple of other games on it.

La-di-da

This is chaotically fun. It has a weird, ritualistic flavour, which is also fun.

You need a few (five, six, ten?) people sitting in a circle, each with a walnut or similarly-sized object. I find it easiest to kneel. With the walnut in front of you:

Pick the walnut up and place it in front of the person to your left. As you do so, chant “La-di-da”. (Release the walnut on the “da”.) You should now have a new walnut in front of you.

Do it again: while chanting “la-di-da,” move the new walnut one space to the left.

(Now the tricky bit)

Now, pick up the walnut in front of you, move it one place left but do not let go of it yet, then bring it back to your space (again, not letting go), then finally move it one space to the left and let go of it. While you are doing this, you are chanting: La-di-da-di-da-di-da! (The “da”s show when the walnut should touch the ground – to the left, in front of you, to the left.)

And continue.

La-di-da. La-di-dah. La-di-da-di-da-di-da.

The game should speed up as you play – and at some point, someone will mess up, and it will collapse chaotically. They then drop out, and you play again. Eventually, you will end up with two players, furiously swapping walnuts and chanting crazily.

Notes

• I once met someone who played this using cans of fruit on a wooden floor. I gather it made quite a racket (and probably didn’t do the floor any favours).
• While I was searching for this online, I found the diagram below. So someone else knows the game – it’s not just me. (Although the longer chant has slightly different words.)

There – have some fun!