Prompted by Mo Holkar’s thoughtful reflections on how he started larping, I thought I’d do the same. My memory is hazy over a lot of this, as it was a long time ago.
1981: Traveller
Traveller was my first ttrpg. I was a science fiction fan before I was a roleplayer, so it was only natural that I was drawn to Traveller. (I’ve written before about how I stumbled across Traveller.)
At the same time, White Dwarf began being distributed in newsagents. I bought every copy, and I remember reading about Treasure Trap (probably the UK’s first larp) in issue 31 (June/July 1982).
I was intrigued by Treasure Trap, but larp/lrp didn’t appeal as I wasn’t interested in fantasy. I was an SF fan.
Why didn’t I like fantasy?
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when my tastes were forming, SF was much easier to get hold of than fantasy. Yes, there was some (Tolkien, Moorcock, Eddings, Donaldson, Le Guin), but I found none of it as interesting as the worlds of Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, Drake, Zahn, Clarke, Haldeman, Shaw, Foster and more.
Plus, there was Star Wars and 2000AD. Fantasy had nothing like that.
And even if fantasy had been easier to get hold of, I found them ponderous multi-part epics anchored in the past. I much preferred to explore bright futures full of spaceships, aliens and distant planets. I always have.
1987: Larping friends
In 1987, I became friends with some larpers in Brighton. I didn’t actually do any larping, but I knew about it and saw their costumes and elf ears. I wasn’t very athletic, and running around the woods trying to hit things with rubber swords really didn’t appeal.
Neither did the costuming. I guess my longstanding disinterest in costuming set in then. I remember visiting the Loughborough University larp stall (I’m guessing this was fresher’s week in my final year) and noting that they expected you to have your full costume by the third week. That put me off, and I never signed up.
I attended a games convention in London (Games Day 87?) where a few rooms were set aside for a short dungeon-style larp. The only thing I can remember about it was a room where the PCs had to defeat an NPC champion (named Achilles) by hitting his foot.
Late 80s/Early 90s: Aslan and The Freeform Book
The 1980s were a great time for fanzines, amateur magazines about roleplaying games published for love. I subscribed (and contributed) to a few, including Andrew Rilstone’s Aslan. In Aslan, Andrew described something called a “fantasy party,” which is what I would now call a freeform/chamber/parlour/interactive larp. It sounded fantastic – thirty or so people all playing the same political game. I wanted to play!
Brian Williams writes about Andrew’s fantasy parties in more detail here (he attended them).
Somewhere around this time, they started being called “freeforms” (to make them distinct from regular larps). The name was probably inspired by Morgana Cowling’s The Freeform Book, published in 1989. (I now call them “freeform larps” or “parlour larps” or “chamber larps” depending on who I’m talking to.)
1992: Home of the Bold
In 1992, I finally got to play in a freeform.
Home of the Bold was held at Convulsion, a Chaosium-themed convention run by David Hall (of the Tales of the Reaching Moon Gloranthan fanzine). Written by Kevin Jacklin and David Hall, Home of the Bold was amazing – and changed my life. I had a wonderful time, made lifelong friends and decided I wanted to do more of these crazy games.
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| Me as Count Stolwitz in 1996 playing Home of the Bold. Possibly the earliest photo of me larping... |
(I’ve now played Home of the Bold three times – the last time at Continuum in 2024.)
Home of the Bold was exactly what I was looking for – a game that was like a city filled with interesting people all pursuing their own agenda. While regular larping seemed to me to be little more than tabletop roleplaying done standing up (players went on adventures and there were monsters to battle), this was something very different.
I also realised that if you removed the SF/fantasy nerd elements, freeforms might be a great way to introduce people to roleplaying.
1992 to 1995: Eleventh Hour and more early freeforms
In this period, I played in a couple more freeforms and a “proper” larp, Eleventh Hour.
Freeform larps
In 1994 I played Life of Moonson, again at Convulsion. It was a more heavily Gloranthan freeform, and I can remember very little about it other than I had a ridiculous costume. I think I also played Last Voyage of the Marie Celeste then, playing a vampire. One of the characters in the game was the ship’s cat, which might be fine for some players, but I’m glad that wasn’t me!
Eleventh Hour
Eleventh Hour was a series of weekend fantasy larps that Lynne Hardy (whom I first met in Home of the Bold) invited me to. I played in two events, both held in youth hostels on the Welsh border. I played the same character, a devious scribe, and they were fine. I wasn’t bowled over by them, and much of the time it felt like we were making our own entertainment.
One thing I remember about the second larp is the big set-piece battle, which, as a non-combatant, I sat out of. I remember watching the magic users drawing chalk circles and chanting and thinking, “That looks so dull. I’d much rather roll some dice. I want to pretend I’m casting spells, I don’t want to actually do it.”
(So, as well as a disinterest in costuming, I’m not that interested in the reenactment-y elements of larp.)
1995: Café Casablanca
In 1995, Kevin Jacklin and David Hall (and their friends) brought Café Casablanca to the UK, held in a hotel in Nottingham. I had heard about Café Casablanca because at Continuum, Sandy Petersen would talk about it – I think he was one of the authors, although the game is credited to Cruel Hoax Productions.
Café Casablanca was incredible. I ended up falling in with the Resistance, and we were hopeless because we were infiltrated by a German spy. So they knew everything!
Café Casablanca was followed in 1997 by The King’s Musketeers and in 1997 by 1897: Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, all written by Cruel Hoax Productions. And pretty much since then, a weekend freeform has been held at the Retford Best Western Hotel. This year it was Gateways, and next year it will be Café Casablanca’s fourth outing. (More details here.)
Mid to late 90s: A variety of freeforms
So, in the mid-to-late 90s, things freeform are picking up. The weekend games became a fixture on the calendar, and freeforms were a regular part of Continuum (Convulsion’s successor), and I was playing similar games at other conventions (such as UK Gencon).
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| An Incident at Two Bridge Junction |
Some other notable events of that time – I don’t have exact dates for these.
- I set up the UKFreeforms mailing list so that UK writers and players could stay in touch and discuss freeforms. It has changed providers a couple of times, but it still exists, and you can join it here.
- I joined the Continuum committee for two conventions as the freeform wrangler.
- I wrote An Incident at Two Bridge Junction, a six-player wild west vampire freeform. I played it with friends a couple of times.
- I wrote Death on the Gambia, but more on that shortly.
- I co-wrote Midsummer Mischief, a 25-player PG Wodehouse freeform. My first “big” freeform, I learned a lot about collaborating on a game. Midsummer Mischief was first run in 1998, and the files can be downloaded from this page.
1999: The Bradford vampire larps
Inspired by White Wolf’s The Masquerade (the larp rules for their Vampire: the Masquerade ttrpg published in 1993), a group of larpers decided to hold a vampire larp in the 1 in 12, an anarchist nightclub/social centre in Bradford. I can’t remember how I found out about this, but I remember heading off in a friend’s VW van and playing at being vampires overnight. While I have vague memories of hanging out in the club (I have no idea if there were any regular patrons in the club that night – it was hard to tell), I remember a few things:
- I have no idea if there was a plot. I suspect there was, but I suspected it involved the GM’s friends. (That was my experience of several larp events – including a couple of big ones at UK Gencon. If you weren’t part of the clique, you had to make your own fun.)
- Characters were based on a point-buy system (based on The Masquerade, I think). However, we were playing in a nightclub, and if you wanted to eat or drink, you needed a particular ability. So, of course, we all needed that ability because we were playing in a nightclub! (But I think most players just ignored it.)
- The GMs had an insanely unsafe rule about firearms. Basically, if you wanted your character to have a gun, it needed to fire blanks! A toy gun firing caps was no good. (They clearly hadn’t done a risk assessment.) Luckily, nobody was hurt – although the armed response squad was called out one night because there had been five reported shootings in Bradford that night!
Thankfully, the larp only lasted for two or three sessions. (Or perhaps I just drifted away.)
Late 90s: Murder mystery larps
One of the friends I made in Home of the Bold was Dixon Jones, who ran Initiative Unlimited and ran larps as team-building exercises for businesses with Adam Hayes and David France. They also hosted occasional murder mystery evenings, and I attended one in London with my brother.
They also sold murder mystery party games as pdf downloads, and I became an affiliate, creating a now-defunct website, Run Your Own Murder Mystery Games and earning a commission every time I sold a game.
Their games were fine, but I wanted to write and sell games with a little more depth and complexity. Such as Death on the Gambia, an introductory larp that anyone could play. It didn’t have a murder in it, and after failing to sell it to anyone, I realised I would have to create my own company. But I wasn’t sure how to do that.
As I entered the new millennium, I was playing more and more freeform-ish larps. I had found what I was interested in. Importantly, I played some of Epic Experience’s games at Gencon UK and other conventions. And through Epic Experience, I met Mo Holkar.
2001: Freeform Games and Peaky
In 2001, two key events occurred: Freeform Games and the first Peaky writing weekend.
Freeform Games
In the summer of 2001, I called Mo and suggested we form a company that would sell freeform larps as murder-mystery games. I suggested we call it Freeform Games (perhaps not my wisest choice of name). Fortunately, Mo agreed. Even better, he had set up businesses before, and as a result, on 9 October 2001, Freeform Games was born.
Shortly after that, we released our first game, Death on the Gambia. We now have more than forty…
Peaky
In November 2001, 20-ish enthusiastic members of the uk-freeforms mailing list met in a converted farmhouse in Edale in the Peak District (hence, Peaky) over a weekend (Friday to Sunday) to write a freeform. Or more accurately, three freeforms.
The first time we met, it was a challenge to see if it was actually possible to write playable freeforms in a weekend. And we surprised ourselves – the first was ready by Saturday evening, and we played the other two on Sunday.
That first Peaky was so successful that the weekends are now an annual event and are my favourite gaming weekend of the year. Although they're no longer held in the Peak District...
2001 and beyond
Since then, both Freeform Games and Peaky have continued to thrive, and I’ve continued to play more and more freeforms. And that’s where my larp focus has mainly been ever since.
I have found the kind of larps I like, and happily, I have the space to run, write, and play them.
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