Peaky 2024

I spent the sunniest weekend in April in a small-ish room hunched over a laptop writing a freeform. Yes, I was at Peaky 2024. How did it go?

TL;DR I wrote one freeform, played in two. Played lots of boardgames. Talked bollocks with friends for hours. Slept badly. Would do it again in a heartbeat.

Friday

For the first time ever, I didn’t drive to Peaky. A car was coming down from Scotland, and I was kindly picked up. So I packed lighter than I normally do, but I didn’t have to drive, which was lovely.

We arrived shortly before 4 pm, found our rooms and said hello. Peaky started properly with its AGM, followed by dinner and the pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting

We had 32(ish) writers at Peaky 2024, and the purpose of the pitch meeting is to form them into six groups of roughly equal size (so 4-6 writers in each group) who all want to write the same thing.

It’s somewhat chaotic. The first part consists of pitching ideas for games – we typically end up with about 20 ideas. Then we vote to remove the less popular ideas, and this continues until we finally have our writing groups.

This is all done with flipcharts. It’s loud and chaotic and can be awful.

Ideally, we ensure the writing groups have at least one experienced writer. We’ve missed that before.

I’d love to find a better way, but we’ve tried forming groups in advance (which can be cliquey). Part of me would like to do it randomly or with team captains picking writers (like at school), but there are issues with those as well. Maybe there’s an app we can use?

Anyway, I pitched a “time loop game,” which was popular, but I wanted to help Suey write a freeform taster session that could be played in a 60-minute SF convention slot. Our group was me, Suey, Tym and Alli.

The Canals of Mars

I’d already been talking about this with Suey. I had a similar idea a few years ago using pirates as a setting (when Pirates of the Caribbean was all the rage), but we decided on a Martian steampunk setting.

The rest of Friday was spent deciding what we wanted to include in our game. We were writing something for newcomers to experience a freeform in under an hour, so we wanted lots of interaction and goals and abilities and so forth – but without overwhelming new players with text!

We kicked ideas around and came up with an election (for the “Grand Architrave”) as the spine for our game, the framework around which we would hang other things.

We also decided to write for eight players. I reckon it’s easily expandable, and we could have many more than eight, but we decided to keep things simple and start with eight.

Saturday

I had a terrible night’s sleep. Peaky does that. Too late, the wrong food and drink. Just meh.

At this point in the game writing process, I like to have the setting and background settled. So I started to write the setting:

It is 1888. In the forty years since the first colonists arrived on Mars, Nu London has grown into a bustling metropolis, rich from the profits of mining lift crystals, the precious jewels that power the solar transports that sail the etheric void.

But all is not well. Nu London desperately needs investment, mining accidents are imperilling lift crystal mine production, Olympus Mons is grumbling, the canals are blocked with red weed, and the marisaurs (Martian dinosaurs) seem to be dying out.

(This was expanded later, but it didn’t change much.)

IT glitches

The wifi was really random, this year. I had the best connection I think I’ve ever had, while others in the same room couldn’t connect at all.

We decided to write in Google Docs, which only two of us had access to. The others had to resort to swapping files back and forth via a thumb drive like it was 2010 again.

Characters

After breakfast, when the writing team reconvened, we agreed this text and then decided on our eight characters:

• Addison Fotherington-Porter: An artificer of marvellous inventions.
• Valentine Fotherington-Porter: A writer of popular romantic fiction and candidate for Grand Architrave.
• Phoenix Belcher: A popular philanthropist and candidate for Grand Architrave.
• Blake Belcher: A director of cinematic productions.
• Captain Amos Gridley: Explorer, inventor and captain of a steam-powered sea-dirigible.
• Emberlyn Cogsmith: Wealthy investor and philanthropist.
• Seren:  A Martian mystic and candidate for Grand Architrave.
• Valen: Wealthy Martian investor.

With our characters in place, we wrote each character’s introductory paragraph. This is the first paragraph that the player reads and provides a broad overview. The rest of the character sheet then flows from that.

At least, that’s how I do it, and it takes me no more than 15-20 minutes to do this. 

However, I quickly found that other writers did things differently. One wrote in bullet points; others went into detail. (We made them more consistent later on.)

Plots

With the characters defined, we each picked a “plot” to write. I picked the election plot while others wrote about inventions, great works, and investments.

My plot document included brief rules for how the election worked, a timetable for hustings and the voting deadline, and a little bit of character background and goals. I also included a page of voting slips.

With that done, I put the text into the character sheets and the setting documents. (And for those that didn’t have access to Google Docs, I did the same for their plots.)

And that was it for plots. Given the players were only playing for 40 minutes, we estimated that most players wouldn’t have time for more than one plot.

Review and edit

With all the text added to the characters, we printed everything for review. Everyone made notes on the character sheets, which we then incorporated. (At the same time, I polished and buffed to remove the differences – so where one character was written in bullet points, I fleshed it out into full sentences and paragraphs.)

We then did the same again until we were happy with everything, at which point we printed it all out and called it quits.

With only eight characters, we finished quickly (before 6 pm). We could have written more characters (and I would have been happy to), but we agreed to limit it to eight. So we played boardgames instead.

Sunday

And on Sunday we played the games. Graham managed the Sunday running schedule, and this is how it went for me.

Starship Theseus

Starship Theseus is a 10-player game written by Adam Hayes, Nyx Hollindrake, Michael Jones and Christi S.

I played part of the crew of a colony ship. We spent most of the voyage in cryosleep, and the ship would wake us occasionally when it needed the command crew to deal with something it couldn’t manage. I played the security officer. As the game progressed, we discovered things about ourselves and the world we thought we knew.

I had a lot of fun with this game, although it finished somewhat abruptly because we ran out of time. It deserves a longer slot.

(Meanwhile, in another room, Elevenses had its premiere. Elevenses was written by Kirstine Heald, Malk Williams, Julie Winnard, Ewan Munro and Michelle Minett. When Dundee Bakewell does not return from travelling after a year and a day and is declared dead, the villagers gather over tea and cakes to divvy up their possessions. For 11 players.)

The Canals of Mars

Our game. Suey ran it while I kept track of time. The game went well – certainly no serious problems, and the players seemed to think it worked well as a freeform taster. 

We kept it to 60 minutes (including setup and debrief), which gave us an extra hour to relax while we waited for the other game to finish.

(That other game was Full Circle by Nickey Barnard, Nick Curd, Philippa Dall, Tony Mitton and Mike Snowden. For 12 players and inspired by Logan’s Run and Rollerball.)

Love Letter: The Silver Rush

Set in the American Old West, Love Letter: The Silver Rush is a 12-player game played over three scenes. The scenes are split by gaps where one half of the game goes prospecting while everyone else stays at home. During those gaps, the players write letters to each other. Events happen, and it’s an angsty game of romance and feelings.

(It’s also the third Love Letter game – the first was set during the Great War and the second during the Crusades. I was part of the Crusades writing team some years ago, but I can remember nothing about it now.)

I won’t say who I played (because of spoilers). I enjoyed Love Letter: The Silver Rush, but I’m not sure how I feel about it being longer. Two hours was about right for me – playing it for longer doesn’t appeal (although I know the games are very popular).

Love Letter: The Silver Rush was written by Ben Cole, Natalie Curd, Clare Gardner, Heidi Kaye, Elyssia McCormick, and Richard Perry. 

(And running simultaneously was Hotel Requiem, a 7-player game written by Malcolm Campbell, Emory Cunnington, Bethan Griffiths, Peter Jones and Elynor Kamil. You can check out, but can you ever leave?)

And then it was all over and I spent Sunday evening chatting and playing board games.

Overall

Peaky is lovely. I always have a great time seeing friends, writing and playing games. I wish I slept better, but it doesn’t take me long to catch up.

And I’m looking forward to Peaky 2025.

About Peaky: To learn more about Peaky, see the website (actually a wiki). If you’re interested in attending Peaky, bookings will open sometime around December. Keep an eye on the ukfreeforms mailing list or Facebook group.