Tyrannical hobbies

Earlier in the year, Mrs H complained to me about her “tyrannical” hobbies. She likes gardening and has an allotment, but at certain times of the year (notably spring), the garden and allotment become very demanding. If you don’t stay on top of them, then the weeds run wild, and the seedlings wither and die.

At the moment, for me, it feels like freeform larps have become tyrannical and are squeezing out ttrpgs.

This is all self-inflicted, of course. But here we are.

So these are my tyrannical freeforms.

The Highgate Club

As I recently wrote, I ran The Highgate Club at Continuum. It went well, but it’s not a case of just printing out a freeform and running it. There were a few other steps:

• Printing the game and stuffing 14 character packets.
• Creating a casting questionnaire and then sending it to the players and waiting for them to complete it. And nagging those who didn’t.
• Casting the game.
• Populating individual player folders on Google Drive with their character information and then sending it to them so they can read their characters in advance. (I use the YAMM mailmerge programme, which is pretty nifty and lets me track whether everyone has seen the emails.)
• Dealing with player queries. (Fortunately, there weren’t any this time.)

Then I ran the game.

I could have left it there, but during the game I realised there were a few improvements I could make, so I did. (And I also decided to try ChatGPT as an editor, and it picked up dozens of inconsistencies. So that was useful, but obviously more work for me.)

I’ve now re-pdfed The Highgate Club, so at least that is out of my head.

The Deadly Library

The Deadly Library is a game I’ve been preparing for Freeform Games. It’s pretty close to being ready for publication, and we’re in playtesting (by our customers). So that means getting the files ready for playtesting – and then updating them as comments come in.

Megan and her friends playtested The Deadly Library a few days ago, which was great but meant going through much of the pre-game rigmarole described above. (Although I didn’t cast in advance, so there was that.)

Following the game, I had plenty of edits to make – and that meant informing the other playtesters as well.

Playtesting is due to finish at the end of September, so that’s going to drag on for a while.

(By the way, if you are interested in playtesting one of our games, we advertise playtesting opportunities in our newsletter.)

The Enigma Machines

The Enigma Machines is episode seven of my series of SF first-contact freeforms. I spent the first half of 2026 writing it, and now I’m running it online next week and then again at Consequences in November.

So for the online game, I don’t need to print and stuff envelopes; I have all the casting and populating folders to do. Plus I also have to promote it and get players to sign up. (I really hate that bit; it’s the main reason I’ve never tried to form a Leeds larp club or a local board games/ttrpg club.)

With the game a few days away, there are a few things I need to sort out:

• Send an email to the players reminding them of the game (it wouldn’t be the first time that players have forgotten about an online game…)
• Deal with any last-minute dropouts
• Redecorate my Discord server for the game
• Prepare my notes and make sure I’m ready

Plus, as ever, there will be amendments. And in September, I need to think about getting it ready for Consequences (which means repeating the steps I did for The Highgate Club).

Read about the series here.

Assassination in Space

Assassination in Space is a 24-player murder mystery for Freeform Games. It’s the next game I’m working on, and I’m slowly working through the characters and providing feedback to the author.

Once The Deadly Library is published, Assassination in Space will be my focus for Freeform Games.

Café Casablanca

Café Casablanca is a 75-player weekend freeform larp that I’m helping to GM. It was written about 35-40 years ago, and it shows. It was last run in 2014, and it needs a bit of TLC to get it into shape.

There are seven of us working on this, so it’s not all on my shoulders. That’s fortunate. Anyway, right now I am in charge of sorting out relationship abilities for every character.

We are running Café Casablanca in February 2027. As we approach that date, I expect it will demand more and more attention.

(Register here – there’s a good chance you’ll get a place.)

So what?

So all this freeform activity leaves me with less headspace to do some of the other things I want to do.

Such as…

• Write a Traveller scenario. I have ideas, but I need time to figure out the details. (I had hoped to run this at Furnace – but not this year.)
• Finish a partly-written Other London investigation.
• Finish updating my Good Society one-shot based on my notes from Continuum.
• Revisit Hillfolk.
• Run other ttrpgs – I have Urban Shadows burning a hole on my shelf, and Cold City/Hot War are expected to land soon. Plus I have other games I’d love to run.

But not until I put those tyrannical freeforms to bed.

Continuum 2026

 The last weekend of July saw Megan and me at Continuum for a weekend of gaming. Mostly freeforms, with some ttrpgs and a few board games. Plus seeing lots of old friends and talking nonsense all weekend. What’s not to love?

Playing Mycelia in the atrium

TL;DR: We had a great time!

Here’s what we did:

Friday

We arrived mid-afternoon and didn’t do much other than check in, chat to a few friends, and have a bite to eat.

Four Gods and a Funeral

Four Gods and a Funeral is an 18-player fantasy game written and run by Megan Jones. It is set in the world of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Five Gods books, which I’ve not read. Luckily, I didn’t need to know anything about the world as it was all contained in the game materials.

I played Sarlos, the 18-year-old heir to the Vardo empire – and my mother’s puppet. And not just my mother’s puppet – I had been kidnapped twice and used in other players’ machinations. So I was a fairly useless kid and pawn to the real powers.

I was also in love with a queen, and was trying to work out how to marry another character. (Unfortunately, that other character was played by Megan, which made that side of my game somewhat awkward and we just didn’t go there. That was a casting goof by Megan J, but wasn’t a huge problem.)

Anyway, the game was good – political and angsty. There was a whole side of the game (magic) that I didn’t know about and, amazingly, I think I was still the heir to Vardo at the end of the game. That’s probably because I was no real threat to anyone…

Game material reading order

One thing that I noticed when reading my character information was that my character made much more sense after I had read the game background material. It did make me wonder if we ought to spend a little more time thinking about the order in which players read their characters.

For me, most of my games have a “setting and cast list” document which I send to players with the casting questionnaire. That way the overall setting is the first thing they read, and that puts everything else in context.

(Hopefully they haven’t forgotten that when they receive their character – but I do always give them another copy of that initial document.)

Similarly for Freeform Games, the front cover of the character booklet has the same short boilerplate text roughly setting the scene and explaining the setting. Hopefully players read that first.

When a freeform character pack contains several documents, it's not always clear in which order to read them, and I find that can cause some confusion. Anyway, something for me to ruminate on. 

Saturday

After a hearty breakfast, we had nothing scheduled, so Megan went back to bed, and I played a few light board games. After a meal deal from the Co-Op, it was time for our first proper game.

Hades Plan

In Hades Plan (for 12 players and written/run by Ray Hodson and Simon Clark), we were Greek gods who were putting together the third series of a reality TV show that involved lots of puzzles. So while being bickering gods, we had to come up with ideas for a show. (Ray and Simon provided lots of props.)

I was Demeter, the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture, the harvest, and grain. (I’ve just looked that up; I know next to nothing about Greek gods.) We chose the gods pretty much at random, and ironically I ended up being one of Megan’s parents. (Megan was playing Persephone.)

The game was silly and energetic, but not really my cup of tea. It’s the kind of larp where the players bring the game (characters were two paragraphs long). That’s okay, but I have two issues with games like this:

First, they rely on the players having a common understanding of the game world. As already noted, I know next to nothing about Greek gods (or Norse gods or Roman gods for that matter). That’s less of an issue when nobody knows anything about Greek gods, but in this case we had a lot of players who knew a lot about them. So less fun for me.

Second, the games often work on the basis that whoever is loudest gets their way. And I’m not a shouty type.

So it wasn’t really my kind of game, but those for whom it was their kind of fun seemed to have a good time.

With that done, it was time for tea.

The Highgate Club

After tea, I ran The Highgate Club, a game I co-wrote at Peaky back in 2010. I ran it with Alan Paull, one of the authors, who brings the Continuum board games library.

The Highgate Club is a private member’s club filled with weird people – aliens, elves, immortals, zombies, Atlanteans, cyborgs – even an angel. It has lots of crazy plots, and while I expected it to take about two and a half hours, the players were still going strong at three hours in. 

It definitely needs two GMs, though. So I’ll update the guidance. (Along with a load of other tweaks – as always, I found lots of little things needed improving.)

Megan told me she enjoyed it, which was a relief as she influences which games I run at Continuum.

The Highgate Club before the players got their hands on it...

Sunday

We had another free morning on Sunday, so Megan and I played Mycelia and Sanctuary, a couple of weightier board games. We preferred the sprouting, fruiting and decaying mushroom fun of Mycelia over the zoo-building fun of Sanctuary.

Good Society

After lunch, I ran a tabletop session of Good Society while Megan played in a horde larp.

For Good Society, I had four players and used the pregenerated playset I talked about here, updated to use the second edition reputation consequences.

My four players were all blokes but had no problem playing female characters. One had run a swashbuckling game of Good Society the day before, and agreed that trying to create a coherent backstory at a convention takes a long time.

As is often the case with Good Society (and Hillfolk), the game took a few scenes to get running, but it didn’t take long before the players were busy creating drama and interfering with each other. Most of the time I just listened, occasionally suggesting scenes between characters or jumping in when I felt that a scene was over. (That last skill is important – players are often so caught up in their characters that they don’t spot the obvious end to a scene.)

I had been slightly hesitant to bring Good Society to Continuum, as it’s very different to many other ttrpgs (and Hillfolk was a bit of a struggle last year). But unlike last year, where I got the impression it was the last choice for at least one player, all my players were keen to play Good Society – and wanted to play it because it was so different from the other games on offer. And as a result, we had a great game.

(Good Society is like Fiasco and Hillfolk in that it is very dependent on the players. With the right group, these games are brilliant. But with more reserved players (or players who expect more direction from a GM), they can struggle.)

A few thoughts

So much going on: With four main characters and eight minor characters, I found it hard to keep on top of everything that was going on in the table. There were main arcs, yes, but there were also a lot of minor things happening that didn’t always get picked up later.

(I couldn’t now, for example, tell you much about what the story – and it’s only 48 hours later as I write this.)

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but worth bearing in mind. I think I’d need to take a lot of notes were I playing a game over several sessions. (My recent online game of Good Society only had three players, which probably made it easier to hold in my head.)

Perhaps I need to figure out a way to take notes.

System doesn’t matter: Once again, I found that we didn’t use many resolve tokens. One or two, perhaps? The game flows brilliantly without needing the tokens, and for most of the game they sat on the table, ignored. (At least with Hillfolk, a drama token is at stake in each scene – even if they don’t really have much use either. Perhaps I should try mashing the two systems together?)

So that was Good Society. While I was doing that, Megan thoroughly enjoyed her larp. We had tea, another game of Mycelia (where Megan thrashed me), and then it was our final game.

Plan 8 from Outer Space

Plan 8 is an eight-player game written by Mike Young and run by Ezzy Pearson and Vikki Sterling. It’s an extremely silly game of aliens completing a post-mortem of their previous plans for dealing with Planet Earth, and preparing their 9th plan.

Broadly, the game consists of being in a ghastly business meeting (it even has a PowerPoint deck), trying NOT to take the blame for the previous plans, and then coming up with daft ideas for the next one.

It’s lots of chaotic fun, with a lot of laughter. It’s not a good game for wallflowers, though – be prepared to be loud and argue your corner.

I played the Head of Marketing, while Megan played the Head of Accounts. Her costume was so much better than mine, but that was true of most games. It was about two hours of frantic fun.

Head of Accounts

(The game takes its name from the legendarily bad movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space. I’ve not seen the movie, so I can’t say if it is in any way relatable.)

Locked in

We had one final bit of excitement on Sunday as the bathroom door handle broke and trapped Megan in the bathroom. Luckily, I was able to get help from reception, and it was sorted, but it could have been serious had I not been around. I don’t know how easy it would be to raise the alarm from inside the bathroom.

Monday

And after breakfast on Monday, we headed home.