Cradle’s Lullaby
Howdy Vados! Welcome back from the Winter Break!
It’s Jonathan here with another signature DR:TX Rules Ramble, leading up to our first official Dystopia Rising Live event CRADLE’S LULLABY! This first game in the new system will be led by Noah Goodman and Luka Drystan. Each week, I’ll discuss in detail an aspect of the upcoming event, compiling the rules and lore into one easy place to read! This week, we are covering the premise of our event, some content warnings, and some themes of our upcoming event!
TICKETS FOR OUR february EVENT ARE ON SALE NOW! can you survive the descent into the facility?
If you had a great experience at our last event FORGOTTEN IN THE DARK, or had some suggestions for how we can improve, we’d love to hear from you! We appreciate your high-fives and suggestions, and always want to seek ways to improve our events.
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Our photos for this post were taken from previous DR:TX events by our talented Photo Team, including Lily-Jay Jones, Miranda Farmer, Noah Goodman, and Max Pohlmeier.
THE PREMISE - FORGOTTEN IN THE DARK
Beneath the very dirt of Bravado, a mysterious relic of time before The Fall lies dormant; The Ruins, The Facility, or simply C.R.A.D.L.E. A monument to a bygone age, crumbling underground; the last vestiges of humanity erased by the sands of time. From rogue scientists to RRC investors, the Facility has been hotly contested since its first discovery so many years ago.
Whatever happened within this titan of earth and steel before, the only thing remaining is lumbering corpses hungry for flesh. Vicious Gorehounds, Towering Flesh Tanks, and Unstoppable Swarms of Shamblers clammer for the surface and bring sweeping death across The Lone Star. Unnoticed at first by Bravado, it’s now clear that the true cause of the crisis is underneath their feet.
Those seeking shelter flee their ruined homes into the safety of Bastion and General Mustang’s army, but are met with strict screening and callous requirements for useful skills. Even the fortress formerly known as Killhouse, home now to the Militia, must close its doors and turn away refugees as their forces and rations are stretched thin.
Bravado stands alone against an insidious threat growing beneath their feet. Strange new threats emerge from the CRADLE, awoken by some mysterious provocation. Will the citizens of The Lone Star survive the onslaught? How will Bravado survive in the face of a neverending Legion of Undead?
INSPIRATION & TROPES
This season in Bravado we have focused on bringing some new elements of Survival Horror to the forefront of the story. In our tradition of Radical Trust, we want to share some of the inspirational bits of media and movie magic that we feel help capture the themes and feelings of our upcoming event. If you are looking for a movie or show to inspire your role play for this event, here’s a list of our favorites to get ready for CRADLE’S LULLABY!
Dead Space
I Am Legend
Underwater
During this next event, you will be facing a horde of deadly undead. Many of the mods will delve into the Facility, a tomb-like haunt of these threats, much like the vessel in Dead Space. These things will dig into body horror, and you might need to complete tasks while under attack or deal with other environmental threats. These threats will be a horde of zombies like in the movie I Am Legend, and your survivors will need to learn how to deal with the new threats of Dystopia Rising Live together.
Lastly, one aspect of the event is meant to capture the feeling of claustrophobia and the enclosed spaces of the Facility. While we will be limited by some of our physical spaces, many of the mods will require you to deal with threats in smaller, marked off spaces. With the other threats within the Facility, you’ll be hunted by the things within, and some of them may have surprising new abilities. Will you survive your expedition into the underground beneath Bravado?
CONTENT WARNINGS
The themes of Dystopia Rising often touch close to our real world in ways we cannot always avoid. The DR:TX team believes that we can still tell these stories about challenging topics, but we also believe we need to be transparent about our intentions and set proper expectations for our content. In our tradition of radical trust, we want to also trust in each player that attends our game to know their own limits and be able to choose to avoid topics and situations that make them uncomfortable.
It’s important to watch for descriptions, situations, or events that you might want to avoid. You may find new limits that are unknown to you because the matter never came up. We encourage you to take the necessary steps for your own emotional safety. We want you to be comfortable with the types of horror in our events so you can enjoy the thrill of the zombie apocalypse and the nightmare creatures we introduce into the game space.
It’s one reason we take our OK Check-In system so seriously! We understand that these may not be stories you want to participate in, and that’s okay! Remember, you can always use the OK Check-In System to choose to leave a scene, even CVC!
You can always find a list of our Content Warnings on our website, but let’s talk about some of the specific things you might want to be prepared for during this December premiere event.
SUDDEN VIOLENCE, JUMP SCARES, DEADLY SURPRISES
The dangerous threats in the Facility will be mostly zombies, but they are much more dangerous in DR Live. It’s worth mentioning that any threat with the Cannibalism skill is functionally “killing blow active”, capable of killing your characters without need for quarter. Some threats will have dangerous abilities that can make traveling by yourself in the darkness very dangerous indeed, so make sure to bring a buddy!
Given the dark environment of the underground, many of these stealthy threats will hunt the living from the shadows. Anyone that makes noise or strays from the light, so you can avoid the sudden violence by avoiding their attention. You’ll need to stay quiet and hope they find other prey elsewhere.
There are many traps, deadfalls, and dangerous environment threats in the Facility. If you are not careful, you could run into a deadly surprise behind a closed door, underneath a trigger plate, or connected to that trip wire you just broke. Some threats may be even more insidious than you realize…
When the things below the earth emerge, these will be deadly, quick, and sudden attacks out of nowhere. These threats may be able to emerge into places you thought safe, behind closed doors through the network of tunnels below Bravado. You’ll need to be prepared to suddenly get ready for a fight, have someone you to protect you at the workbench, or stick to well-populated areas for protection.
MISTAKES, RULES ERRORS, and CORRECTIONS IN FIELD
This is literally everyone’s first game. We will all be learning a new system at the same time. We will make mistakes, we will get the rules wrong, and so will you. While many of the new systems are intuitive and we’ve planned a number of workshops for Thursday, it’s still a lot of information to absorb at once. We must treat every moment of this event as everyone’s first game ever, and treat our fellow players as if they were tender-horns experiencing the world for the first time. For some of our players, it literally will be!
Please show your fellow players and our staff grace and forgiveness. For this event, we will especially ask for your grace, patience, and forgiveness as we experience the ups and downs of our first event ever under DR Live rules. Please be kind to your fellow players and especially our volunteer staff, as we all have the same goal — telling an amazing story in the zombie apocalypse. We will learn and explore this new system together.
Correct and Move On. If we make a mistake in the field, as either a guide or player, we will practice a strategy of fixing it for future encounters. We won’t try to reset or roll back any major rules calls, but trust our Guides to make the call in the moment. If we find an error later, we will correct and move on with the right ruling for any future instances. We might have to calibrate a combat encounter on the fly, so be prepared for sudden ends to fights, and generally expect us to continue to improve as the weekend goes on. We will try to avoid any major scene or continuity breaks, and try to keep everything in game as much as possible.
There may be delays at the Post Office. We appreciate your patience as we work to swap everything over to the new Dystopia Rising Live system. Because of this, there may be some notable delays at the Post Office for your crafting and gathering needs. Please be prepared to show some grace to our Logistics Guides!
Resource scarcity, and the struggle to provide for yourself in the apocalypse
The DR Live economy is brand new. With the major change of Impact Skills, the Mind economy you are used to in the 3.0 system doesn’t really exist in this brave new world. It’s one thing to look at a proposed break down of blueprints and mind points and try to anticipate how it will function in a live space, and it’s an entirely different thing to actually do it live. Part of this event will include learning a new cadence to the flow of economy and crafting, and it WILL be different than the previous edition.
Items are less necessary in DR Live, and you may have less gear than you are used to in 3.0. Many of the tricks you needed items for in 3.0 are now included into the various Impact and Development skills. Other items only really function for Professions. Healing is significantly improved, and your combat skills don’t need a steady supply of Mind brews to stay ready. While cool items can be nice, they certainly aren’t a requirement for surviving in this new apocalypse. Many of the blueprints have very niche applications that won’t necessarily come up during every event, so don’t worry about trying to build out a perfect set of gear!
Expect a scarcity of some resources. One lesson we saw during Downfall was that certain items (like Herbs) were scarcer than folks imagined they would be. Now, while some of that was due to the nature of the one-shot event and fewer people taking the Agriculture skill, there’s still going to be a LOT of folks building new equipment and items that is brand new to the DR Live system. Crews will likely be focused on copying new blueprints, making items for their team, and harvesting resources for their personal use. There may not be as many people selling the goods you need, so plan ahead!
Wrap Up
That’s it for today, Vados.
We hope that you will come join us for our next event, our first DR:TX event using the new rules for Dystopia Rising Live. We have some fun surprises in store for you during this game, and we hope that you are ready to try brave the dangers of the Facility. Will you discover the source of the zombies that are plaguing the Lone Star? Will mark a hard choice about a fellow survivor seeking shelter and refuge? Will you put to rest the things that lay sleeping in the Facility once and for all?
Next week we will cover some of the LORE behind the mysterious Facility! See you soon, Vados!
