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Changes in Season 6

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Howdy Vados!

It’s Jonathan here with another signature DR:TX Rules Ramble, leading up to the start of our new sixth Season and the first DR Live National Event! This week, I’ll be discussing some of the big changes you can expect in our game and story for Season 6!

Our photos for this post were taken from previous DR:TX events by our talented Photo Team, including Max Pohlmeier, Lauren Guzaldo, Sidney Betzina, and Jason Dumas.

The story for season six

Another deadly war has shook the foundations of Bravado, and the San Saba has settled into an uneasy and chaotic peace after the collapse of the San Saba Board.  Travel and communication across the area has grown more difficult, and towns turn their focus inward, towards their own fraught survival.  

It happened more quickly than many expected.  The outer rail lines that once reached as far as the Broken Coast and across the Dune Sea have been abandoned in favor of closer, safer routes between the immediate towns near Bravado and Essex.  Telegraph lines stripped for salvage and murdered postal runners mean that all but the most persistent communication between settlements has stopped, and the points of light at the edge of the map have dimmed.  Soldiers and mercenaries recruited for the war, now without a common cause, consider new allegiances, brutal banditry, or violent reckonings on rival settlements ill prepared for trained and well armed survivors at their gates.

In this new world, the implacable equilibrium of the wasteland churns onwards, reclaiming abandoned settlements in overgrowth, and damning once vibrant towns to destruction, returning the land once more to a lawless waste ruled only by what a survivor can claim for themselves.  Strange and dangerous raiders have overtaken the north, their war path marked by blood and the sounds of drum beats.  The dead have risen in even greater numbers, the Grave Mind turning the countless deaths of the War of Antlers into new and more deadly variants, bent on feasting on living flesh.

The factions of the San Saba have been broken and worn by the war, but each has consolidated what remains of their fortunes closer to the new heart of the San Saba, Bravado.  While it should be a new shining beacon on a hill, a pervasive sense of insignificance has rendered the town forgettable and alone, a ghost town tucked into a forgotten corner of the region.  A fog of memories, casting a shroud of forgetfulness and absence has settled over Bravado, perhaps a last dying gasp of an ancient terror trapped within or perhaps just the unfortunate reality of a world that has moved on after the fall of the Board.  As the town wanes in importance, new rivals flourish nearby, threatening to complete the fall into obscurity for our humble home.

Forgotten and left to decide their own future, our survivors face the harsh and horrific realities of survival in the wasteland.  Now, once easily secured resources like power, clean water, food, fuel, and scrap are in question, and the lean and hungry eyes of your fellow survivors seem not quite as friendly as before.  The future promised by the San Saba Board may be dead, but perhaps a new future can be forged from the ashes for the survivors that call Bravado home…

Changes, Changes, Changes..

Every season, we get together with our incoming Storyteller team to craft the overall story for the next year. We assign some of STs to be the “Overarch ST” for certain games, while others are led by Heather, myself, and the rest of the Admin team. As we build the narrative for the new season, we also try to include some updates to our setting, our rules, and our plans for the next games.

In our tradition of Radical Transparency, one big upcoming change we need to account for is the new license structure that we moved to at the start of the year. Our stories over Season 6 will need to adjust to a new scope of story, as we have less ability to impact the larger setting outside of our hometown in the new licenses. I first talked about this in a blog post from last season, so it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise if you’ve kept up with the blogs.

This means we need to collapse our story area down to adjust to the new scope, but luckily for us we started this back during Season 5. With the end of the War of Antlers, we’ve created the perfect story for these changes and a reason to explain some of our new focus. Many of the changes I’ll discuss below are ultimately in service of either meeting this new scope of license or preparing for the launch of the new edition, and I’m excited about getting to refocus our stories back to Bravado.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll see a lot of these changes reflected across the website, so keep checking back as we get closer to the first game of the season. I’m slowly updating all the pages on the website, but it’s a work in progress.

Here’s the main topics of change for this blog:

  • Wasteland Changes

  • Sunsetting Custom Mechanics

  • Updates to the Bravado Setting

  • The fog of memories

  • Faction Updates & Changes

Let’s get started!

Wasteland Changes

The new edition of DR Live updates the CVC Rules considerably, and we want to pave the way for this new world of character vs character conflict in advance of the transition. One of the changes you can expect to see this season is an expansion of the “Wasteland” area of Bravado. While this change will bring our CVC systems a bit closer to the ones used in the new edition, it will also help reinforce the major societal changes that have occurred in our story as we collapse our story back to our hometown.

With the absence of the San Saba Board, there’s a lot of questions in Bravado and the nearby towns about what law and order actually means. While Bravado signed a new charter with the Law Dogs and the Justices of Sin, not every town agreed to a need for laws. General anarchy and lawlessness in the areas beyond settled towns has led to a rise in bandits, raiders, and other threats outside of civilization. As this wasteland grows, so too does the wasteland in our town.

  • Effective starting in September, the Wasteland will cover the entire Camp Bluebonnet Site. This means that you will only need a Guide for CVC actions that involve Infection changes. We still recommend a Guide for general theft, but that cool in-character confrontation can result in a rowdy brawl without breaking character to grab a Guide.

  • The Civilized areas of the camp will include bathrooms, the Kitchen inside the Depot, and Oak Cabin, our medical sleep area. These areas should not include CVC for any reason without explicit consent, per the CVC rules in the core book.

In practice, this doesn’t change much for our game. We’ve had well over half of the campsite as Wasteland for a few years now, so this only adds a few more buildings to the mix. We have a great CVC culture established in Bravado, and this change will help us smooth out the rough spots in advance of our transition to DR Live. If you have any questions or concerns about this, feel free to give us a shout at info@dystopiarisingtx.com.

Sunsetting Custom Mechanics in DR:TX

With a big shift for the new edition coming, our big focus this season will be on reducing the mechanical complexity in our games. Over the years, we’ve introduced a lot of custom mechanics, custom threats, custom blueprints, and more, and it’s time we get back to the basics. One big part of the new edition change is that we will not be able to introduce new custom mechanics for about the first year of play as part of our new license. This change means we’d rather start to wean our players off these custom mechanics early, rather than adding to the culture shock of the new edition.

The following custom mechanics will be sunsetted during our upcoming season. As of the end of September 2024, the following mechanics will be removed:

We are planning one last hurrah for these custom mechanics during our September event, THE FALL OF THE SAN SABA BOARD, including new ways to spend your remaining SES credits, use and purchase Faction Items, and use your other cool custom items. Stay tuned as we start the lead up to our September event to learn more!

Any existing local item cards or blueprints obtained in September will still be usable through the end of the 2024 year, ending with our game in December. Since all Local Mechanic Cards normally have an expiration date of 3 months, this will mean that you can still use the items for all three remaining 3.0 games we have planned for 2024 (since our October National DR Live event won’t use 3.0 item cards). At the end of the year, these items will be fully removed from our game.

Our Work Orders and Research mechanics will continue through the end of the year, but you can expect a few updates to the Work Orders in the absence of the San Saba Board. We expect Work Orders to continue into DR Live, but the Research mechanics will be replaced with the rules in the Player’s Guide once the new edition launches. For now, you can still research your hearts out!

the scope of the Bravado Setting

Last season, we saw some tumultuous events take over the San Saba with the rebellion against the San Saba Board and the War of Antlers. Cities were attacked, settlements were scattered, rail lines were destroyed, major NPCs were killed, and big enemies faced down our plucky survivors. This general chaos will be the story element behind our changes to the scope of story for Bravado, and there’s been a few updates of note for our setting.

As a general rule, our scope of story only stretches to about 10-ish miles from our town of Bravado. We are making a few changes to the area around Bravado in a bit of a ‘timey wimey wibbly wobbly’ fashion, so some of the distances between certain places are… shifting a bit. Don’t worry, it’s always been that way, or so the Grave Mind told me. All those maps were just a bit off in the scale, that’s all…

This is real world map of the area near our fictional town of Bravado. The circle is a 10-mile radius and represents the new scope of the area our stories can include.

This means that far away areas like Barogue, Widow’s Peak, the Clutch, Star City, Fort Worthless, the Dune Sea, and even Essex will need to take a step back from our story as we continue. These places won’t necessarily stop existing in our story, but they will fade in priority as we shift our focus closer to Bravado. It also means some of our player story areas like Lucky Town and Falken Castle will likely remain in the background going forward. I’ll have a shiny new in-character map of the nearby areas to share with you soon, but for now let’s cover the major landmarks nearby our town in the updated setting.

  • Bravado

    • The home of our story and the center of our setting. Our season 6 story will detail the challenges of survival in the wastes, and the calamities that face our humble home. The Railroad Conglomerate keeps their primary maintenance yard for the Ox at the Bravado station and remains a powerful influence on the town while harvesting scrap and resources from the facility below the town.

  • Tremorsands Post

    • The last outpost before the Dune Sea is still a source of most of the Oxblood for the RRC’s remaining Oxlines. While the rail across the Dune Sea has been abandoned in favor of more reliable and defensible lines closer to Bravado, Tremorsands is a welcome oasis for travelers that brave the journey westward. The RRC outpost allows for an early warning against the dangerous raider tribes moving in from the north.

  • Morgan’s Folly

    • East of Bravado are the ruins of the area formerly considered Temple and Belton which is now a dangerous no-man’s land between the major settlements near our hometown. Home to bandits, critters, and the occasional raider war party, the area is mostly lawless and ignored. Stories of criminal gatherings and masked cultists are probably nothing more than rumors.

  • Essex, the City of Light & Sound

    • We’ve put a lot of stories over the years into Essex and didn’t want to leave this town to be forgotten, but it was a bit outside of 10-mile range. It’s always been a short train ride from Bravado in our story, so now it’s simply a bit closer to our hometown. During the last days of the war, Arthur Lovelace turned his artillery onto the town itself, so much of the city is in ruins and many of the former residents have been scattered. Boss Debs and the remaining members of the San Saba Republic have promised to rebuild the city, but it’s going to be several years before Essex recovers. Boss Wyatt has taken an office in the city, and dispatches members of the Law Dog Union to enforce the various town charters across the area.

  • Drywater

    • The nearby port and home to the remaining Junkerpunk fleets is a staunch ally of Bravado. However, the residents of Drywater have resisted the influence of the Grave Council and the Law Dog Union and has decided to forge their own path without the need for laws or oversight, or morgue maintenance. After years of trying to fit in with the other factions, the Junkerpunks have returned to their rebellious roots.

  • Bastion

    • A resurgent force and rival to Bravado, the nearby fortress is a looming presence on the entire San Saba countryside. The Mustang Loyalists have established a new stronghold atop the remains of the crashed airship formerly known as Waking and are hard at work establishing the Wells Society Initiative, a plan to deal with the radioactive exclusion zone that surrounds the city.

  • Killhouse

    • The headquarters of the new Bravado Militia, the prison turned fortress weathered the storm of the war thanks to the leadership of General Hargrave Moss-Iverspiit. The remaining soldiers loyal to the Militia have established a base of operations inside the fortress and have partnered with Reckoner-General Solomon and the Grave Council in establishing a new home for the Grave Bureau inside the former prison’s depths.

While our October National Event will take place inside the town of Bastion, most of these nearby settlements will remain off-camera for our season. You’ll probably interact with NPCs, faction leaders, away mods, and other threats that involve these locations, but the main focus of our story is on Bravado proper. While our story of survival is focused on Bravado, there’s still some allies and enemies of note nearby.

The Fog of Memories

One new story beat we’d like to introduce for Season 6 is the concept of the “Fog of Memories”. For our season of survival, we have added a new story effect to explain why the outside world no longer cares as much about Bravado as it did in seasons past.  This has no actual mechanical effect beyond what the players decide, but it is simply a cool narrative way to address continuity going forward.

Some suggest that the effects of capturing the Prince Undying within the Bravado Mortis appears to have created a strange phenomenon that is now impacting the residents of Bravado.  Others simply point out that without an organizing government like the San Saba Board, most folks tend to mind their own business. With travel being tougher across the San Saba, it’s easy for people not to want to risk a dangerous journey after all.

Regardless of the cause, it started small and sometime shortly after the Burning Season began. People began to forget Bravado unless they were actively living there or had some sympathetic tie to the town.  As it continues to worsen, people literally forget about the town unless they have a reason to remember it.  People with a strong connection or tie to the town like your characters are more resistant to the effect, but the effect increases the further you travel from Bravado. Every month, some new traveler arrives in town, surprised to find the town and even more surprised to find folks living there.

Much like something that is out of sight, or out of mind, it’s a subtle effect for most, and leads to small mistakes and forgetfulness that interrupts regular trade and commerce.  Repairmen forget to make the trip to check the rail lines leading into Bravado, and merchants accidentally miss the stop as they daydream about something else.  Important faction leaders focus on other settlements nearby, and don’t make it a priority to visit Bravado. For those that don’t live actively in the town, it’s as easy to forget as some small random town in another state could be in real life.  If someone brings it up, folks might have a spark of memory, but it quickly fades into obscurity when it fades from their attention.

  • There are no real mechanics for the Fog of Memories. This is simply a story element for how the town is being forgotten by the outside world. Think of elements like relationship decay, or nostalgia as a means to a story.  The themes here are not catastrophic, but just the distance that grows between ideas as time passes.

  • This is an optional story that your character can choose to have impact them, or simply choose to ignore it. If you don’t want it to affect your character, it doesn’t.  You get to decide if and how the Fog of Memories has affected your character. It’s entirely up to you, but this could be a great reason to update a back story, or wrap up some unfinished stories as you prepare for the new stories of DR Live. Maybe the amnesia you suffer can provoke some new character connections or let you start fresh as if you just arrived in town.

  • In general, this is not a problem that can be fixed. It’s simply a new part of life in Bravado, and it can have as much or as little impact as you want it to have on your character. It’s not something that research or a zone of mechanics will change.

  • You might encounter strange fog in Bravado from time to time, as we plan to use fog machines more in S6 as setting ephemera. The fog could have strange effects via certain zone of mechanics, but most of this effect is simply a background story.

I hope you are ready for some spooky stories in Season 6!

FACTION UPDATES & CHANGES

The War of Antlers had some big impacts on our story, and virtually every faction was impacted by the conflict in a pretty significant way. Our stories of season 6 will determine the fate of some of the factions, and even introduce some new characters to the story. In the same way this will be a bit of a season of transitions as we get ready for the launch of DR Live, this year’s story will continue with the aftermath of the war that nearly ended the town of Bravado.

We will be updating our Faction pages over the next few weeks, so here’s the major changes to expect:

  • The Factions of the San Saba have lost much of their influence in the region, and many of these groups have new NPC leadership, new headquarters, and new objectives. Money is tighter, and many have had to spend vast resources relocating or rebuilding after the events of the War of Antlers. This is one story reason the Faction Buy Lists will be sunsetted, but overall the ability of a faction to influence a wide area of the San Saba has been severely reduced following the war as part of our new license structure.

  • Two factions will be exiting our story, the Widows of the Lone Star and Prudence Penitentiary. These Society Memberships will be removed from character sheets going forward.

  • One new faction will be introduced, The Bravado Militia, representing the remaining soldiers and troops recruited during the War of Antlers. Players that served as commanders during the war can add this Society Membership to their sheets for free.

Here’s a bit of a story update on the various Factions, and we will expand on this on the website and during our Season 6 stories.

  • The Widows of the Lone Star have been driven out of Widow’s Peak and have now joined the Criminal Factions of Bravado. They are no longer a full faction, as their story really concludes in September with the final confrontation against Arthur Lovelace. While some stories will continue in the background, particularly for characters in Murder Inc, we won’t have regular events like Widow’s Tea and you won’t see characters like Clauthia Lovelace during our games.

  • Prudence Penitentiary has ceased to exist following the war. With the disappearance of Tabitha St. Mercy, taken into custody by the General during the last days of the war, the location once known as Killhouse has been well and truly finished. With no remaining function for the prison after the collapse of the San Saba Board, the fortress-prison has taken on new importance to the Militia and the Grave Council as a strategic fortification and not as a place of incarceration.

The remaining six factions of the San Saba have each experienced their own trials and tribulations following the War of Antlers.

  • The San Saba Republic has splintered further following the aftermath of civil war. The SSR is eager to return to a more peaceful life following war, the destruction at Essex, and the betrayals during the rebellion. With the Breaker of Crowns’ rage finally satiated with the collapse of the Board, many families that were broken and torn apart on the opposing sides of the rebellion are seeking reconciliation. With Boss Deb’s focus on rebuilding Essex, only a few of the Tribes remain in Essex, and many of their soldiers recruited during the war and their Houses have returned to their homes once more.

  • The RRC is in crisis, as most of their fortunes were tied to the success of Felicity Redfield and the Board. Forced to abandon the outer Oxlines, they have taken a more conservative approach to survival after the collapse of the Board. A new CEO will need to be named, but the Ox is safe in Bravado for now. However, the families of Waking Prime have splintered with the rise of Bastion - some have joined the Mustang Loyalists in their new fortress-city, while others have remained in Essex and Bravado.

  • The Law Dog Union has established their relevance through the creation of several town charters across the area around Bravado. These new social contracts empower Marshals and Sheriffs to find new paths of redemption for criminals with the help of the Justices of Sin, and they have their work cut out for them. While Boss Wyatt has established an office for the Union in Essex, their agents roam the wasteland offering their services as investigators and beacons of stability in a lawless wilderness.

  • Following the death of General Rampart, Cassiopeia Stargazer has emerged as the leader of the Grave Council. With the help of the new Reckoner-General Solomon, the faction has diverted their expertise in necrology and the Grave Mind towards establishing a new Vault of Reckoning inside the strong walls of the fortress-prison formerly known as Killhouse. The new town charters have also redefined the grave tax for a new post-Board era, but the faction has a lot of work to do to rebuild their reputation.

  • The Junkerpunks are licking their wounds after the war, after being forced to retreat inland towards their new home of Drywater. After years of trying to appease the kinder elements of the Muddy Water Accord, the faction is ready for a clean break from law and order. Drywater has refused to sign a charter with the Law Dogs or the Grave Council, choosing to forge a new path ahead on their own. Will complete anarchy be a viable method of survival in the new lawless wasteland?

  • The Militia stands as the strongest military organization in the region, and has claimed the fortress-prison of Killhouse as their headquarters. Under the leadership of General Hargrave, the Militia now has to grapple with the unfortunate realities of a post-war landscape, including dealing with their veterans and the threat trained soldiers represent. How do they lay down their arms and return to a normal life without the purpose of serving in the rebellion? Who pays the bills now that the rebellion has been won? While many of their soldiers returned home, some remained behind to stand guard against the Mustang Loyalists, and others worry that the Militia will just find a new excuse to plunge Bravado into a new war against Bastion.

There’s still a few unknowns for how Factions and Society Memberships will function in a new DR Live world, but for now there are still plenty of stories to tell as we begin Season 6.

wrap Up

That’s it for today, Vados!

Tickets will be on sale soon for our September event, THE FALL OF THE SAN SABA BOARD, and you can buy tickets right now for our National Event, DOWNFALL! Don’t miss out on your first chance to play a whole weekend with the new DR Live rules and explore the nearby rival town of Bastion during our National Event.

Next week, we will start our coverage of the September event and finish our two-part story we started in May. Find out more about what Arthur Lovelace has been up to over the Burning Season, and what his burning revenge will mean for Bravado next week!

See you soon, Vados!