Writing Freeform Larps: Updating Venice

Over on my personal blog, I talked about attending Continuum and running Venice, a freeform that I mention in Writing Freeform Larps. Here, I’m going to talk about Venice and what I did (and why I did it) in more detail.

Venice

Venice is a 15-player freeform set in sixteenth-century Mythic Venice. The Doge has been murdered, and the five ruling families must elect a new Doge. Meanwhile, there are weddings to arrange, secret societies to discover and pirates to defeat.

Venice is what I call a “factions” game. The players play members of factions, each with their own goals. In Venice’s case, we have several overlapping factions:

The families (five of them, each with two rivals and two allies)
Societies such as the Inquisition, heretics and more.

Venice at Continuum - the Corleones (photo by Tsijon)

Faction games are an easy way to write a game for a lot of players quickly. Characters are rarely very deep, and as as much roles as they are characters. While they may have personal goals, they will also have goals on the faction sheets.

In Venice, characters have their own goals, their family goals, and their society goals.

Venice at Continuum

I haven’t run Venice since writing it at Peaky 2013. (I wrote about that here.)

Since Peaky, I gave the game a light edit (including the changes I talked about in that writeup) and uploaded it to Itch, where it has been downloaded 93 times (to date). I’ve no idea if it has been run at all.

When the call for freeforms at Continuum went out, I wasn’t sure what to run. I thought about it, and decided to run Venice. I wanted to see how the changes I made following Peaky 2013 actually worked.

So that’s what I did. I didn’t make any changes in advance – I just printed it out, packed the envelopes and ran the game at Continuum.

The Capulets (photo by Tsijon)

And I was really happy with how Venice ran. I was a little worried beforehand. As I was packing the envelopes, I could see that the characters were thin, but I could also see the bigger picture of how the factions and families might clash as they jockey for position.

Playing Venice larp - the Doge and his wife

The newly-elected Doge - and his wife (photo by Tsijon)

And that’s pretty much what happened. I felt there was a good energy in the room throughout the game – something I always watch for as it’s a good sign that players are enjoying themselves.

Always playtesting

At Peaky, many writers call the first run of their newly-written game a “playtest”. I don’t like that term at Peaky for a couple of reasons.

First, Peaky is often the only place where I will play these games. So for me, it’s not a playtest, it’s just playing the game.

Second, I’m always playtesting. After every run of any game, I always find something to change. Hopefully it’s just a tweak or two. Sometimes it’s something more fundamental. So in that sense, I’m always playtesting.

And that’s how it was with Venice.

The GM doing GM things (photo by Tsijon)

(Oh, for the Peaky runs, I prefer the term premier. Sounds much fancier. And they really are the game’s first run.)

Updating Venice

So although Venice went really well and lots of the players were engaged and having fun, there were a couple of players looking a little out of it. Maybe they were just having a quiet game (it happens – it’s not always the game’s fault), but maybe I could make a few tweaks to increase the amount of fun.

So I have made changes.

I made the edits immediately. I find my enthusiasm drops the longer I leave it, so I find it best to strike while the iron is hot.

So here’s a summary of the changes I made

Typos: Goodness, I was disappointed to find so many typos. I’ve fixed all the ones I could find, but no doubt a few more have snuck in.
Names: We didn’t put a lot of thought into the names back in 2013, and they didn’t feel very Venetian. I’ve now changed that.
Romance: The romance plots were solved very quickly, so I’ve made them a little more complicated. A little.
Information: I’ve spread more information around – so characters know a little about other characters that they didn’t know before.
Fonts: I now use Google fonts, so I changed the fonts and embedded them.
Secret societies: I added two more secret societies, and added a status tracker for societies as well
Casting: I included the questions I used to cast Venice in the instructions.