Coming at you LIVE from my bathtub it’s the Late Night Pre-Game Blog Post! We’ve got some snazzy updates to fill you in on some story beats, mechanics updates, and final HYPE before we get into game tomorrow!
So lemme just precariously balance my laptop on the edge of this tub and let’s get started!
Tags and Pips and INVENTIONS!
This is a new concept for Bravado Bones! Tags and Pips let you do two different things - one enhances a roll and the other functions like having an extra achievement on your sheet. If you purchased a Grab Bag, you get to come into game with a [tag] already on your Bravado Bones character sheet. There will also be ways to earn [tags] through roleplay and crafting!
Here’s the crunchy details:
Throughout the event, a character may acquire temporary equipment, powers, or consumables in the form of Pips or Tags. Events may also provide players with the opportunity to craft Pips and Tags outside of mods.
A “Pip” is a one-time use item that adds +1 to any STAT roll. Narratively, these expendables are often grenades, drugs, or flashes of borrowed power. The use of a Pip to augment a roll must be declared before the roll is made. No STAT roll may benefit from more than one pip.
A “Tag” is an adjective noted in [brackets] on the character’s sheet for the duration of a Bones event. When a character gains a tag, that character may treat the tag as an additional achievement for the purposes of spending mind points when taking actions related to the [tag]. Narratively, Tags represent specialized equipment and knowledge the character has gained throughout the event.Example Tags: “[Explosive], [Attuned], [Researched], [Superheated], [Shielded]”
At the end of each Bones event, all Tags and unused Pips are lost, these items do not carry over.
Furthermore, there are a few key CRAFTING MECHANICS (culinary, artisan, and medical) that will be available in the soft (text) roleplay areas of the server this event! These mechanics are in addition to our standard Cali*co Caravan Points (aka, you still get your actual game loot), but the time spent roleplaying can count for both concurrently. Room Stewards can help you with tracking crafting times in these designated areas on the server.
Check out what these new crafting mechanics do here!
So while your spiffy crafted items won’t create new exclusive Lonestar Blueprints or physical cards, you are warmly encouraged to play up talking about your cool invention, creation, or wasteland staple - find ways to manifest it in the play space, and generally just riff off of this crazy wild science fair that no one really understands. In fact, it would be REALLY cool if you showed up at the INVENTOR’S GALA Friday night at 10pm to do just that!
*ahem*
Story Beats
Some of you may remember our catastrophic romp through the city of Essex in the early summer. Now we’re a few months along and things have been happening. Here’s some of the main things you will want to use to inform your roleplay as we kick off Bravado 3.0 Season Two!
Contracts and the start of a new season
It was always our intention to allow for contracts to be reset every September at the start of a new season. We know that sometimes the stories we want to tell can change, and for this reason, the majority of contracts signed in 3.0 Season 1 were only meant to last one year. Some folks elected to tell stories of longer contracts, and that’s super fine. Now that we are entering 3.0 Season 2, all contracts are considered expired unless you want them to continue.
This is a personal roleplay choice - we pushed you hard to buy into the story of contracts in 3.0 Season 1 to help us cement our setting. Now we are telling the next phase of this story, and there are entities in the wastes who are very much anti-contracts and we want you to be able to engage with their stories as well. So if you want to tell a story where your character is still bound by words and ink on paper to something they’ve committed to, great! But if you want to say that your character’s contract has ended, that’s also great!
You can expect that the main NPC factions you know and love in Bravado will have differing opinions on this matter and we encourage you to discover those viewpoints in the play space.
Waking and The San Saba Board
Waking hangs in the skies over the San Saba Territories like a dripping, industrial thunderhead. Gestalt, this city is made up of the weary remains of thousands of smaller airship vessels, dissolved wholesale and channeled into a mighty floating city whose attitude shares its namesake - Waking; The Shining and Sleepless.
Waking’s history is shrouded at best, and utterly inscrutable at its worst thanks to the concerted efforts of its citizenry to build atop itself until the past is rendered a derelict foundation for the gleaming and new. The city beneath it, also called Waking, is one of the oldest settlements in the Lonestar Wastes and now - with the formation of the board, the oldest city in the San Saba Territories.
But the Waking that floats above, for clarity’s sake often referred to as Waking Prime, has flown only for the better part of a year. Some time before the launch of the Oxline, the first of the Conglomerate’s public works, the floating city made its maiden and only takeoff into the cloud layer. In the eighteen or so months since its ascent, the land directly beneath the city has been rendered a desert to rival the Dune Sea of the South.
The robust technology Waking uses to stay afloat, a hundred different energy sources passing through the arcane geometries of The Capacity Engine; the mechanism that feeds the monolithic and mortal engines that propel the city’s fifteen hundred stabilizing jets, creates such sulphurous byproduct that the runoff - which secretes from every seeping joint of the city’s vast hull, has poisoned the lands below and rendered the fields fallow and unlivable.
While the gleaming crown of Waking, Eureka, a tower so high and pristine as to belong in a different era of the world, beams archly out over the wastes of the San Saba - its inhabitants are still unable to see the filth for all the filigree.
In the Boardroom at the penthouse level of Eureka, the most powerful personalities in the Lonestar scheme and schism - while below in the gleaming streets of the Magnolia District the first ever Waste’s Fair is being held in celebration of the Merger between the Railroad Commission and the Conglomerate - and the formation of the San Saba Board.
But the smell of ozone and rainwater stirs on the horizon - and the gleaming visors of Stormchasers peek out from behind the stormwall - and bear down on the Shining City with all the fervor of a moth seeking a lonely and lurid flame.
THE INVENTOR’S BALL
Honorable denizens of Waking, temporary and permanent, consider the following proclamation the debut of the Inventor’s Ball! A greater invitation is cordially extended to those who have received intact timepieces with emerald, Ursuline, seals. These “big and little silver spoon” timepieces were issued to only an elite few. Exclusivity ensures the best Inventoria: inventors, debutantes, and people of worth are therefore invited to a cocktail hour in the Ursuline Ballroom, at the foot of the decadent Eureka Tower. Additionally, a keynote speech is rumored from the Chairman of the Board themself--perhaps delivered to attendees amongst the Lonestar hors d'oeuvres and charcuterie.
The Ursuline foyer, when necessary, is available for social overflow, backdraft, and coat storage.
Observe the beautiful Big and Little Spoon decorating the timeface…
Woah, what does that all mean??? Well I’ll tell you! Those who purchased a September Grab Bag have in-character received the aforementioned “commemorative” timepiece and invitation for some reason and will receive access to a special roleplay area on the Lonestar Skies discord server where the gala will take place. Kick-off the weekend via a soft-rp Inventor’s Ball at 10pm Friday with some sneak previews of events to come when we hit our main storyline on Saturday. Only those with the ‘pocket watch’ role on their discord handle may enter this Ballroom, however everyone can roleplay in the foyer with or without a grab bag. Characters of interest will be schmoozed, tea will be sipped, and the setting introduced! Rumors aplenty for these changing times in Waking, the Shining City. Won’t you join us?
Just ping a moderator once you’re on the Discord Server after our soft game-on at 9pm to make sure you have the right permissions.
Ok this shit is all dope but I need logistical info
Roger that, Bravadero or Bravederfriend. You can still find all the gritty HOW TO EVENT info in our previous blog post here:
LOGISTICAL STUFF, SCHEDULE, DISCORD SERVER, BRAVADO BONES RULES, AND TICKETS
The Discord server will open for soft rp at 9:00pm on Friday (there’s a loose opening announcements but really it’s super informal as the REAL opening announcements are on Saturday morning) and then the Inventor’s Ball will begin around 10:00pm.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see y’all virtually tomorrow evening in WAKING: THE SHINING CITY!!!