Being responsible for UK Freeforms

I think I’m responsible for the name “UK freeforms”, because I set up a mailing list in the late 90s and that’s what I called it. But as to why I called it UK Freeforms, that’s a longer story.

My first freeform

I played my first freeform at Convulsion, in 1992. That was Home of the Bold, and it changed my life. Until then I’d been happily playing and running tabletop games (mostly Call of Cthulhu), but Home of the Bold changed everything for me, and I’ve been a fan of freeforms ever since.

I’d heard of freeforms before Home of the Bold, though. I can’t remember exactly where I heard them, but I’d read reviews of Morgana Cowling’s The Freeform Book (here's Amazon's entry) and I really, really wanted to try one out.

(It’s possible I heard about freeforms from Andrew Rilstone, who in the late 80s was hosting “fantasy parties” and talked about them in his fanzine, Aslan. Brian Williams also talks about the fantasy parties.)

The Freeform Book was published in 1989 and contains three complete freeforms for a dozen or so players, along with a fair amount of advice. Things have moved on since then, but it’s still a pretty good start. Cowling says that her first freeform was in 1985, so I was a relative latecomer to it.

Home of the Bold

Home of the Bold was written by Kevin Jacklin and David Hall. Kevin had been to the USA to play in Cafe Casablanca, a 60-player weekend-long freeform set in 1941 Casablanca. Inspired by that, he decided to bring that style of game to the UK, starting with Home of the Bold. As far as I can tell, the authors of Cafe Casablanca (which included Sandy Petersen, who, at Continuum told us stories of that and their follow-up The King’s Musketeers) never described it as a freeform - it was always a larp to them (I don’t know if they described it as “theatre-style larp” back then).

But Kevin and David advertised it as a freeform. I can think of two possible reasons.

First, in the early 90s, larp in the UK was very defined: fantasy, foam weapons, mandatory costuming, player-generated characters, very simulationist. I’ve tried larp once or twice, and it didn’t really agree with me - and if Home of the Bold had been advertised as a larp I may well not have turned up.

Second, the term freeform was already being bandied about - possibly as a result of The Freeform Book.

So Kevin and David advertised Home of the Bold as a freeform, and Continuum became known for a while as one of the best places to try out freeforms on the UK convention circuit. (And its successor, Continuum, still is – Home of the Bold was held again in 2024.)

Following Home of the Bold I started writing my own freeforms, both on my own and in collaboration with others. They were largely inspired by Home of the Bold and Cafe Casablanca, and although I called them freeforms (and continue to do so), I can trace a direct line back to theatre-style larps such as Cafe Casablanca.

A mailing list – and more

In 1997 or 1998, I started a mailing list for people who wanted to discuss writing, running and playing freeforms in the UK. So I called it “uk-freeforms”, and it stuck.

(Why didn’t I just set up a discussion forum? Well, in the mid-nineties, it was much easier to start a mailing list than figure out how to start a new forum on Usenet. And things like Facebook groups and Discord servers were years away.)

UK Freeforms, as an organisation, formed from enthusiastic members of the mailing list in the early 2000s and took over the running of the weekend-long freeforms, as well as organising Consequences (and part-sponsoring the Peaky writing weekends).

And I started Freeform Games in 2001 with Mo Holkar, bringing freeform-style murder mystery games to the general public.

The ukfreeforms mailing list continues to this day (although it’s moved to groups.io), there’s a very underused wiki, and I set up a UK Freeforms Facebook group. There’s also a Discord server. 

What is a freeform anyway?

Every couple of years ago, there’s a discussion on what exactly a “UK Freeform” is or whether “freeform” is a good name for them. There’s never consensus, which suits me just fine: I’ve always been reluctant to define it.

Note: This originally appeared on the UK Freeforms wiki here.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Links to other posts I’ve enjoyed recently. (And when I say recently, I mean the last few months. I should probably try to do this more frequently.)

How Do You Role-Play?

On Fandomlife, Ian O'Rourke looks at what we mean when we talk about doing "role-play" and presents a dramatise/describe/decide model. I'm not sure the model makes complete sense - surely dramatise and describe are the two axes, as you can make decisions while describing or dramatising?

(Ian suggests he is all about reaching the bid, dramatic choice or judgement. Yes - but how does he get there? I imagine he describes or dramatises. I can't work out how he makes those decisions in his game without doing either. But maybe I'm missing something fundamental.)

As for me, I find describing easier than dramatising. I'll do both, but tend to default to describing. (Interestingly, it's completely the other way around in a freeform larp - I only rarely describe as the games are designed differently – I rarely need to describe. Instead I do.)

The Games Behind Your Government's Next War

On YouTube, People Make Games talks about wargames and the uncomfortable overlap between board games and wargames. It’s a great video, and I suspect any queasiness about the subject is probably related to whether you can imagine serving in the armed forces. 

My father served in World War 2, so I find the subject less controversial. Using games to model situations and strategies makes sense to me – I enjoy using simulations to wargame scenarios. (It doesn’t have to be the military, either – my brother-in-law created an asset management game for Sellafield, and I enjoyed the project management games I played on training courses.)

I listened to the book referenced in the video, A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II, by Simon Parkin. A fascinating account of the wargames used to develop WW2 anti-submarine tactics in the North Atlantic.

Drive Thru RPG's New Site Isn't Great For Smaller Publishers (Now With Numbers!)

On Improved Intitiative, Neal Litherland discusses the challenges and economics of being a small publisher on DTRPG. My sales are so low that I’d not noticed a dropoff – but luckily I don’t put things there to make money. (I put things there because I like to share them. I give them a price because I think they have value.)

If I was doing this for the money, I’d create a newsletter and put myself out there more on social media. I loathe social media, so that’s going to be an uphill struggle… And judging by which posts are popular on my blog (the ones about Traveller and ALIEN), I’d pick established RPGs to write adventures for.

But luckily for me, I don’t depend on my DTRPG income.

Reality Tunnels

On Development Hell, writer Julian Simpson talks about everyone having a reality tunnel (the world as they see it, shaped by their experiences), and how authors must get inside their character’s headspace. This can mean looking at characters like Elon Musk and Donald Trump and trying to understand why they think the way they think and do the things they do.

You don’t have to agree with Musk or Trump or whoever (and Simpson certainly doesn’t – and neither do I), but it feels like a more helpful approach than what we usually see on social media.

Stop Hiding the Apes in Your RPG

On Explorer’s Design, Clayton Notestine argues that some RPGs don’t clearly explain what it is the game is about. For example:

What is Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: the RPG actually about? What do you do?

The back cover of Liminal says it is “A roleplaying game about those caught between the ordinary and extraordinary.” Really? That’s not how it plays – or reads. Wouldn’t “A British folk urban fantasy roleplaying game of solving Hidden World cases” be more accurate? (Liminal’s core activity, solving  Hidden World cases, is tucked away on page 63 rather than being front and centre.)

The Future of RPGs is Pregenerated Characters

On Grinning Rat, Nate Whittington argues that pregenerated characters are the future of RPGs.

I often loathe character generation and would almost always prefer a pregenerated character designed to fit whatever we’re playing. (And, for me, the option to tailor the character is nice but not essential.)

But the future of RPGs? Much as I would like to think so, my experience of playing and players suggests that many (most?) prefer to create their own.

Energy Consumption of ChatGPT Responses

This article by Michal Aibin looks into ChatGPT’s energy consumption. TL;DR – ChatGPT-4 consumes approximately enough energy to power 170 US homes annually. (ChatGPT-5 is projected to double that number.)

That’s for running ChatGPT, once the model is trained. Training the model takes place over weeks or months, and uses enough energy equivalent to the energy budget of another 160 US homes (ChatGPT-4).

That’s a lot, but it’s not as terrifying as I’ve heard some day. (Assuming it’s true, of course.) But it’s only one of the AI models out there. (And if the stories about Deepseek are true, it uses much less energy compared to other AIs.)

Is it worth it? That’s difficult to say.

(And this article is an exciting/terrifying look at DeepSeek and the future of AI: "The best AI models were about as intelligent as rats four years ago, dogs three years ago, high school students two years ago, average undergrads a year ago, PhDs a few months ago, and now they’re better than human PhDs in their own field. Just project that into the future.")