I love it when a character comes together

One of my favourite parts of writing freeform larps is when I have written all the plots, and I am starting to assemble characters.

I’ve just gone through this with The Enigma Machines, and, as always, I get a thrill of pleasure to see the characters form before my eyes.

Playtesting A Haunting in Hartwick

In Writing Freeform Larps, this is part of step 7, writing the plots. But actually, I don’t start copying the plot text into the character sheets until all the plots are written.

Building a character

This is how it works:

• I start with a blank character sheet and change the name from “blank character sheet” to the character name.
• Then I add the character’s opening paragraph (from Step #4).
• Then I go through each plot document, copying the plot information for that character. (And other people, goals, and whatever other information is going on the character sheet from that plot document).

As for the order of plot information on a character sheet, I order it by how important it is to that character. So a major plot for that character would be earlier in the sheet than a minor piece of information about another plot.

(As I copy text over, I change the font colour in the plot document so I can remember what I’ve copied and what is left.)

Then, I read through the character and give it a light edit to make sure the character sheet flows. (Sometimes, I find I need to merge sections of text to make them read better. This is particularly true for other people, who often appear in more than one plot.)

Immensely satisfying

I find building characters this way immensely satisfying. While you’re deep in the plots, writing a freeform can feel like a bit of a slog with no end in sight. 

And then I start assembling characters – and suddenly the freeform is there, right in front of me!

Writing and publishing Messages from Callisto

I’ve just published Messages from Callisto, episode #4 of my long-running science fiction first-contact freeform larp campaign.

That’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s break it down:

Episode #4: Previous episodes are (in order) The Roswell Incident, All Flesh is Grass, and Children of the Stars. I’ve written two more episodes (The Stars Our Destination and Aurora Horizon), but they need to be worked up into a presentable state. I think there may be two or three more episodes in the saga.

Science-fiction first-contact: Some of my favourite SF books and movies involve first contact with aliens – so that’s what these are. They are set on Earth – and we are not alone…

Freeform larp: A type of larp involving prewritten characters with detailed backgrounds shoved into a situation they must deal with. (Or in other words, the kind of games that this site is written for.)

The premise: Classified images from Voyager showed a regular, pyramid-shaped structure on the surface of Callisto. The structure looked too regular to be natural, and in 1983, the US government sent a follow-up mission, Arcadia, to Callisto to learn more.

It is now 1993, and the first signals from Arcadia have arrived. UNET (United Nations Extraterrestrial Taskforce) is meeting in London to discuss Callisto along with several other issues that have all come to a head at once.

Writing Messages from Callisto

I wrote Messages from Callisto using the process explained here and in my book. It came together fairly easily, once I had my main ideas. 

My design notes for the game are here, which explain my thinking behind many of my decisions.

Running it

I have run Messages from Callisto twice so far. The first time was on Discord in 2023 (see here for a more detailed writeup) and then later that same year at Consequences (see here).

The second run was particularly ambitious, as I also ran Children of the Stars at the same convention, and I wanted decisions in the Children of the Stars to affect Messages from Callisto. That made everything much more complicated than it needed to be – as this blog post explains.

I next expect to run it in 2027, which is when the third campaign is due to get to it.

Making it publishable

It took me a while to get Messages from Callisto ready for publication. The main challenge is that it follows on from three other games, and decisions made in those games mean that history might change. 

This may even mean that different runs will have different characters!

The way I have dealt with this is through different coloured text. Black text is the standard game text – that doesn’t change. Red text is my “default” text. If you’re playing Messages from Callisto as a standalone game, then use the red text. Blue and purple text represent variations – including some that haven’t yet featured in my games, so I had to write that from scratch.

The game files are MS Word files, so that GMs can make whatever changes they need.

So when you come to run Messages from Callisto, you can amend the coloured text to suit your particular campaign. 

And if your campaign has gone in even stranger directions – you’re free to make whatever changes you need to make.

Publishing format

The other thing that took a bit a longer was putting it into the format I’m using to publish the games. When I first wrote Messages from Callisto, I hadn’t started publishing these games. When I did, I changed the format of the files a little. That meant that I needed to change the format first.

That shouldn’t be a problem going forward, as I now know how I am publishing the games.

The British Library version

The final thing I did was prepare a submission for legal deposit at the British Library. 

Before the 2023 cyber attack, they had a portal that could be used to upload electronic copies of documents. That hadn’t been available since the attack, so I dropped them an email to find out what  I should do.

Anyway, the British Library isn’t set up to manage lots of different files, so for a larp like Messages from Callisto, I’ve combined all the files into a single pdf. (This was their suggestion when I got in contact with them for Freeform Games.) After all, the files are for record, not to be actually played.

So that’s what I did. (In Messages from Callisto’s case, I turned the MS Word files into pdfs first, before combining them.)

Messages from Callisto

So there we have it. You can now download and play Messages from Callisto. Enjoy!

Using AI to help write freeform larps

A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of posts on my blog about using AI to help write freeform larps.

I'm not going to move them to this blog, but instead I will link to them. (I have no doubt I will revisit the subject in due course.) And I'm not going into the ethical or moral considerations of using AI to create games.

It's worth noting that AI has moved on since 2023, and no doubt the AI responses would be better.

Using AI to help write freeforms was my first post, where I take a few tentative steps in exploring how AI might help identify potential characters for a freeform.

Using AI to help write freeforms: Plots looked at using ChatGPT to help write plots. The takeaway for me, was not to take AI's first response, but to ask further questions.

Using AI to help write freeforms: Angst covered the challenge of writing an angst-filled plot.

Using AI to help write freeforms: Hordes looked at using ChatGPT to help writing a horde game.

My AI takeaways

AI is great for brainstorming and coming up with ideas.

AI is terrible at producing finished text. You will need to edit it.

To get the best from AI, ask questions and drill into the answers.

Writing Children of the Stars

I wrote Children of the Stars when I was putting Writing Freeform Larps together, and I wrote about the process on my blog here:

• Part 1: The game’s genesis and the first part of writing.
• Part 2: Developing the characters and background.
• Part 3: Writing plots and pulling everything together.
• Part 4: Running Children of the Stars.