Good afternoon, Bravadocians! Bravosi! Bravagrants! Whatever! Pick a new name!
Great game this month, guys. We feel good about our progress as game-runners. We hope you feel as good about your part as players. We ironed out some logistical hoo-hah we hope made your game better. But there are many more irons in the fire and much hoo-hah to render unwrinkled yet. So let’s keep climbing the sheer cliff face of DR 3.0 together and talk some STORY.
Level 5
Last month our Brave heroes delved the rumbling belly of the earth where they faced horrific experiments out of time, haphazard piles of dilapidated paperwork, echoing caverns of unwoken semper morts and the occasional Killhouse penitent who thought it might be safer underground. They were wrong!
At the final level of the Delve last month we defrosted some very old, very disenfranchised cannibals in cryostasis. The Bloodghast, as the denizens of the Lonestar have begun to refer to them in fearful whispers, are terrifying monoliths of wordless rage and hunger - and they’re stalking the night just beyond the light of your campfire. When you enter Bravado next month it will be on the heels of four weeks of fear and guerrilla warfare. The Bloodghast are poorly understood, unreasonably strong, and can smell your blood like a gorger can smell meatpie on Xmas.
Winter Lights, Loop Trees, Cargo Net Day and Player Generated Holidays
Merry XMas! Happy Crisis! Mas Clinty-mas!!
That was three years ago, y’all. Let’s do something new. If you want to honor the old traditions we’re certainly not interested in stopping you. It’s all setting enforcement. But we do want to have a conversation about this cool opportunity we have to make something new.
Winter traditions have been part of the human experience since we're clawed out of the primordial muck using thumbs and thought to ourselves "I ought to buy my child nine pairs of socks”. First thing we did with those dexterous extra digits was to throw up a pine tree in the den and shove some well smoked meats under it to give to people on a specific day but not before. We’ve been doing that for about thirty thousand years, give or take. So let’s try something a little different?
The setting-specific holiday we’ll be focusing on this year is Winter Lights, a Quiet-Folk holiday focused on the notion of Ritual and Tradition, honoring the beliefs of the varied many across the Lonestar. The Lovelace Community celebrates this season every year not on a specific day, but as a kind of blanket period during which they assume and honor the traditions of their neighbors. What that looks like in the playspace, in terms of decoration, is a ton of tea lights all over the camp. So if you want to buy into this tradition and thusly the attentions of the Quiet Folk who celebrate the soft and quiet light of community, you should put tea lights all over your personal areas.
In addition, the Nomads who travel the Long 360 out of Essex have their own tradition of decorating “Loop” trees along the highways. What was once a seemingly out-of-place garish display of garland and lights that has slowly become an important cultural touchstone of the Winter season in the Lonestar. We can’t wait to see how our players bring the trees of Bravado to life with festive in-genre decorations (that of course, can be easily cleaned up after game off).
Similarly, The Junkerpunks will be celebrating Cargo-Net Day, another “new/old” tradition based on holiday themes we are exploring for the first time in Bravado. This holiday and its rituals have been completely designed by our amazing players, and we are excited to support it by honoring the related plot requests they’ve put in to our writers.We can’t wait to hear tales of Nopalito Joe and Kelpie that the community tells for years.
We encourage you to put your brilliant minds to work to come up with amazing holiday traditions to fit within our shared story. Something from your character’s past? Something entirely new? Winter Lights is all about discovering and celebrating tradition, and we are excited to see the creativity our players bring to that.
We’re attaching a link here to a useful article that we hope will give you something to think about when designing holidays for the LARPspace that are clever and respectful.
You Better Watch Out
Historians and Jones who have studied the ruins of the Ancient Lonestar know that some traditions associated with ‘Merican culture come from a deeper and more dangerous place. Something… jolly… has awoken and is making its way across the winter wastes and over the Ox tracks into Bravado.
In December we will also be introducing an over-arc opt-in mechanic for the Winter Lights season. But be careful about too much of a good thing. 🎅
The Long Night
Every year in January Camp Kachina closes its massive eyes and takes a long nap to rejuvenate itself and heal from all of our intense LARPing on its pine-studded spine. And by that we mean the Girl Scouts of America use that month to fix up the camp infrastructure and DR:TX takes a month off for holidays and our own sanity.
The way we’re explaining that in character is The Long Night; a period of time at the end of every year during which the sun does not shine on Bravado. Massive clouds appear over the town, huge stationary mountains that block the light of the sun. It lasts about a month until the sun comes out again and life resumes itself in all its baleful splendor. So when your LCs aren’t here in January (or maybe they are you masochistic maniacs) it’s probably because it’s VERY DARK and VERY COLD.
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We’ll leave you with a poem because you know exactly who's writing this blog post.
“When the haunted Hallows moan,
And the Long Night looms so near,
Remember child, dog, and delver,
That the dead can smell your fear.
Remember always to carry a light,
To ward off the fearful zed,
To remind them that they have no business here,
And that it is you that they must dread.
So in these small and quiet days,
When the world beds itself down,
Protect those who would bear your light,
Through the tired streets of town.
Plant a torch and be the Light,
That leads your family home,
In the last and frigid nights,
Come home to Bravado.”
A Lovelace Winter Carol, PHW 02’