Introduction to Disease Mechanics, Part 2

It’s time for another Rules Ramble with Jonathan! This week is continuing our coverage of the Disease Mechanics in the Dystopia Rising Corebook! Today we are learning about how you actually deal with the Diseases you encounter in the game. This might be SUPER important soon, considering that our November game is dealing heavily with a Disease problem in Bravado…

This is a long post, so apologies in advance. It’s split basically into two sections - Researching a Disease and Resolving a Disease.

If you missed my first part of this post, you can find Part 1 HERE.

The full Disease rules can be found starting on page 190 in the DR: Evolved Corebook. You can download a free copy of the rulebook HERE.

When a Disease first starts to spread in the game, there are number of ways that your character can deal with it. For this next game, we are also adding an additional mechanic to “opt-out” of the Disease experience in case that’s not a story you want to tell.

Let’s look at a sample Disease, Bad Brain, from the DR Corebook on page 206, and pay particular attention to the Resolution section at the end.

Bad Brain Disease, commonly spread by most types of Raiders

RESEARCHING A DISEASE

So your town is in the middle of an Disease Outbreak. Oh shucks. What can you do to find out how to fix it? Once you encounter a strange new Disease (like a Disease that isn’t printed in the book like Bad Brain), the first thing to do is to learn more about it!

• When you use Basic Medical to examine a person, you can identify the Disease they are suffering from for zero mind using the “Check Status” mechanics. The infected character will reveal the name of the Disease they are suffering from and the current Stage of that Disease they are suffering from. This is the good place to start, but how do you learn more?

Luckily, the Corebook actually has a mechanic for how this works. Characters wishing to research a new Disease can do so per the mechanics on p.186 of the DR: Corebook. 

• After 20 minutes examining the patient with Lore: Medical, a character may spend 5 Mind points to learn more about the Disease and learn ONE fact about the Disease. Each 5 Mind points spent in addition to this may learn one additional fact about the vectors of transmission, stages, or treatment conditions. 

• If a Research Center room augment is used, the character with Lore: Medical may learn TWO facts instead of one when they spend 5 mind to research.

• If a Doctor Ottoman’s Disease Control Kit gizmo is used, the doctor may learn THREE facts about the Disease by spending 5 mind and 5 minutes of roleplay with an infected victim. This is a MUCH faster way to Research and doesn’t require Lore to use. (But what kind of doctor doesn’t have Lore: Medical?)

• These mechanics will see play through a series of RESEARCH CHALLENGES during our November event. These will be found normally in the Research Center in the Terminal Station Depot. Our goal is to be able to provide these answers quickly, without making folks wait for someone at the Post Office or have to track down an errant Shan or Jonathan.

So let’s talk briefly about how you build a Treatment Plan. Once you understand a bit more of how a Disease impacts the patient, you can be begin testing ways to cure the Disease.

A Treatment Plan will generally consist of a few things:

• Time - How long you need to spend treating the Disease

• Components - Some particularly deadly Diseases also require the use of item cards to fix. This is often an item that is expended, like using Infectious Material or a healing brew of some kind. Sometimes, the cost simply requires you to have something like a Candlepin Medical Kit that is used but not expended.

• Mind Points and Skill Use - A resolution to a Disease will generally cost some amount of Mind points to complete. Generally, this cost goes up as the Disease gets to a worse Stage. Most Diseases are cured by some combination of Lore or Medical skills.

• Treatment Frequency - A Treatment Plan will instruct you on how often a patient needs a treatment, whether it is one treatment or done over multiple stages.

• Stages of Treatment - Each stage of a Disease will be treated in a different manner. Generally, the challenge of treating a Disease increases as the Stage goes up.

• Remission versus Cure - Some Diseases cannot be permanently treated, but rather sent into Remission. They are still infected, but most of the negative effects are avoided. Other Diseases can be cured completely.

• Role-playing Requirements - A treatment will generally provide some kind of guidance for what kind of roleplay might be required during the process. Some Diseases might require a blood transfusion, while others might simply need you to eat a hearty meal.

You can always spend MORE resources that a Treatment Plan lists, but there will always be a MINIMUM amount that is needed to be successful.

For instance, in the Bad Brain cure above, if you didn’t have all the Research completed, you might need to guess and spend 15 Mind points for the Treatment Plan. Since it’s over the minimum 10 Mind needed, the cure works but you wasted 5 Mind points that could have been used on something else! It’s important to be thorough in your Treatment Plan so you can conserve your valuable Resources.

Once you have developed a Treatment Plan, you can begin to try to RESOLVE a Disease.

Resolving a Disease

Diseases generally need to be resolved in some form or fashion. There are four main ways to deal with a Disease, and a 5th way that will be available for our November event, BLOOD FEAST. Remember that Mutants can resist an initial source of Disease by spending Resolve, but once infected they still need to be treated like any other patient.

• Treatment - Common Diseases like Bad Brain and Radiation Sickness have well known ways to permanently fix the problem of the Disease. Once a cure is known, it can be applied by any character with the right Skills and materials as part of a Treatment Plan. Often, curing a Disease will simply reduce the Stage of the Disease by one step, but sometimes a Treatment just removes the Disease completely - especially if it’s still at Stage One.

• Remission - Some particularly deadly Diseases may not be able to be cured right away. In these cases, the Disease is simply suppressed for a short time, much like how you might temporarily relieve a Fracture. You are still infected by the Disease, but you do not suffer most of the side effects for a time. Since you are still infected, it means you might even still be contagious, so doctor beware!

  • If the Disease is somehow reactivated (like through another source of infection, or not getting timely Treatment the next game), it starts at the same Stage you were at before the Remission started.

• Inoculation - When a Disease is particularly contagious, the most common way to stop this is to actually prevent the Disease BEFORE it infects the patient. If a Disease is in an Outbreak stage, an Inoculation is a simple procedure for any character with the Basic Medical skill.

  • A character with Basic Medical may Inoculate an uninfected character by spending 5 mind and 5 minutes of roleplay protecting the patient from a particular Outbreak Disease. The next time an INFLICT DISEASE effect is used on this character, they may call “No Effect, Inoculated!”. This is only a simple treatment, so some particularly deadly Diseases might even overpower an Inoculation effect after an exposure. It’s always best to avoid the Disease source altogether!

• Equipment - The gizmo Dr. Ottoman’s Disease Control Kit is a powerful tool when dealing with a Disease. The effect of the Master Medical use is particularly potent, as it renders a patient IMMUNE to a Disease call for a short time.

  • Requires Master Medical. User may spend 10 Mind. After 5 minutes of Full Engagement Role-Playing taking samples from a Diseased Target, user makes a 2nd Target without the Disease immune to the 1st Target's Disease until the next 12s. The protected character may call “No Effect” until the next 12s when exposed to an INFLICT DISEASE mechanic. This is superior to the Inoculation effect as it cannot be overpowered.

The last way you can deal with a Disease is unique to our November event:

• Natural Immunity (OPT OUT MECHANIC):  

  If you would like to OPT-OUT of this Disease plot during the November 2021 event, you may write NATURAL IMMUNITY on your character sheet(s) before Game-on and if exposed to a situation where you would contract <REDACTED> at any level, you may call “No effect, Natural Immunity”. This immunity cannot be applied to any character, other than your own, through any in-game mechanic.

That’s about it for my Disease summary. Sorry for the REDACTION, but no Spoilers yet!!! Next week, we’ll divert a bit to talk about some common Rules and Skill calls that might be important during our upcoming event!

Introduction to Disease Mechanics, Part 1

Good morning!

It’s Jonathan with another weekly Rules Ramble! Today’s blog post is going to be covering the first part of some key rules from the Disease Mechanics for Dystopia Rising. In a perfect world, everyone would read every page of the rulebook, but we all know that’s really why you enjoy my rules posts summarizing the basics.

The full Disease rules can be found starting on page 190 in the DR: Evolved Corebook. You can download a free copy of the rulebook HERE.

It’s a long section, so I’m going to focus first on the basics of diseases and how you can interact with them. In my next post, I’ll go more into how to cure and treat a disease in Dystopia Rising.

Each disease in Dystopia Rising has some similar components:

• Name - This is pretty obvious, really. Some diseases that have seen play are Blood Scourge, Bad Brain, Radiation Sickness, the Plague of the Unfinished, and Black Fungal Disease. Some of those sound pretty scary!

• Type - While most diseases have set mechanics, sometimes a disease can change or worsen during a game. There are two ways this happens - either as an Outbreak, where the disease mutates to becomes more contagious, or when a disease is Weaponized, where someone purposefully spreads the disease. This last type is ALWAYS a CvC action if done by a player.

• Transmission Vector - Each disease is spread in a specific way. This can include being bitten or wounded, contact with bodily fluids, consuming tainted water or food, being touched by an infected victim, use of Anomaly skills, airborne transmission, or even environment factors like exposure to radiation or some other SCIENCE! type effect.

• Stages of Illness - Each disease has a series of Stages. Each stage compounds on the last as the disease worsens. A stage of an illness will generally have roleplay notes for the symptoms of the disease and how it should be portrayed. Most diseases have between 3 to 5 different Stages. For many diseases, the last Stage is particularly deadly and can result in a character dying or even being transformed into something like a Raider!

• Duration between Stages - Most diseases increase in Stages at set intervals. This might be at the next 12s for fast-acting diseases, or for slow-acting diseases it could increase at the next event. Some diseases can even worsen depending on a trigger, like another exposure to that disease. It’s important to know how deadly the disease is and how much time you have left!

• Mechanical Impact - Each disease will have some kind of mechanical impact on your character. Some diseases might prevent you from using certain Skills, cause a Fracture, prevent the use of Resolve, or even impact your total Mind or Body totals. Some diseases even give you new Traits that come with specific keywords and abilities.

• Resolution - Each disease has some specific ways it can be cured and treated. Unfortunately, these ways to resolve a disease are hidden until they are discovered through Research in the game. I’ll cover this step in more detail in my next blog post.

There are a few key ways you can interact with a disease during the game:

• Characters can identify the symptoms of the disease and the stage with the Basic Medical skill, for zero mind using “Check Status” rules. The infected character should reveal the name of the disease they are suffering from and the current Stage of that disease they are suffering from.

• Characters with the Mutant Lineage (that’s Remnants, Retrogrades, and Tainted) can spend a point of Resolve to ignore an INFLICT DISEASE mechanic call by calling “Mutated Immune System”. This prevents the character from contracting a new disease, but does not prevent a disease you are already infected with from progressing.

• Death at any stage of the Disease generally has some impact on the character. Often, a disease is cured when the character passes through the Mortis Amaranthine, but particularly nasty diseases can persist even after death.

• If a character is using a Helscape Deathmask or Dr. Ottoman’s Disease Control Kit, they may declare “No Effect!” to any infectious mechanics that might risk spreading the disease to them by working on an infected patient by using their gizmos. Doctors need to be careful around particularly virulent plagues!

• Any custom disease introduced in our game may not transfer outside the DR: TX game area for any reason. If a character leaves play before a plot-related disease is cured (like say, you leave early), the disease effects mysteriously fades over the next 12 hours. National-level diseases like Bad Brain can persist on your character sheet though, and can be taken back to a different chapter. It’s generally a bad idea to eat a Raider in any game!

So that’s about it for this blog post, but next time we will talk about Remission, Inoculation, and Curing a disease, as well as how you RESEARCH about what a disease can do. See you next week!

Disease in Dystopia Rising

Good morning!

Today I'd like to talk about a sensitive topic and our upcoming November game, BLOOD FEAST. This is a bit of a CONTENT WARNING, so the goal is to get this information out as soon as possible so folks can make an informed decision about attending our upcoming event.

During the November game, we will be featuring themes, stories, and mechanics involving disease and searching for a cure for a disease.

Given the state of the global pandemic and the impact Covid-19 has had on us all, we understand that this topic isn't for everyone. Each of our lives have been impacted by this crisis and each person is dealing with this trauma in different ways. Our goal is not to minimize the impact of this disease nor it’s effect on our community, and as a person who has lost a family member to Covid-19, I empathize with anyone that has suffered loss during this pandemic.

The themes of Dystopia Rising often touch close to our real world in ways we cannot always avoid. 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. Its one reason we take our OK Check-In system so seriously!

We will be providing options during our November game to “opt-out” of disease mechanics as much as possible (and even give those folks that are mechanically unaffected a way to be part of the story), but it WILL be present in ways that you will not always be able to avoid. Even the OK Check-In system may not be enough to avoid this topic during the November event. We’d like to give you advance warning that this content will be present so you can choose if you would still like to attend our event.

If you have already purchased a ticket for this event and would like a refund, please email info@dystopiarisingtx.com.

The zombie story is inherently tied to a story of disease. Most of the original zombie movies deal with a virus that spreads and infects the living. Movie like “Night of the Living Dead”, “21 Days Later” and games like “Resident Evil” deal with diseases mutating and changing folks into flesh-eating monsters. You could argue that the the zombie trope is really about about a “fear of disease” as an element of horror (though the argument of Romero on consumerism is still pretty spot on..). Regardless of the source, disease remains a big element of the genre and is ever present in anything that deals with the idea of zombies and the undead.

Mechanically speaking, in Dystopia Rising we have a character trait called “infection”, diseases like Bad Brain that are always present in the Tainted strain and can be spread by Raiders, Radiation Sickness that can be gained from exposure to certain types of irradiated Zed or radiation effects, an entire Lineage of Mutants that enjoys a Lineage advantage of disease resistance, and several items that exist in game to deal with the mechanics of disease exposure and inoculation. Functionally, disease is baked into the both the story of the game and it’s mechanics.

Even despite this connection to disease that is included in both the zombie genre and the mechanics of our game, we want to be respectful of this unique time and the content we tell. However, we want to give you a chance to explore agency in a world where you can actually do something about this type of problem. Our goal with the BLOOD FEAST event is to tell a story where you can be big damn heroes and deal with a problem by the end of the weekend. We’d like to tell a story of risk, zombies, survival horror, cannibalism, darkness, and yes, disease.

We hope that you will trust us to tell this story well, and we hope that you will choose to join us in November.

If you don’t join us in November, that’s perfectly fine! We will have other stories and other events for you to be a survivor of the zombie apocalypse, including our upcoming PREMIERE event in December.

Over the next weeks, I’ll cover a few of the mechanics and items that might be important for dealing with disease in my Rules Rambles, so stay tuned!

Story Recap: Carnival Macabre

Jonathan here! This last weekend, we had our October game, Carnival Macabre, and a few big events happened over the weekend I’d like to recap. My hope is to cover something like this after every game to fill in the blanks for folks that might have missed some of the big plot points over the weekend for one reason or another.

Two major events happened during this last game: The Indulgence, and the Lone Star Cup.

The Indulgence

The October game coincides with the annual Indulgence - a “holiday” of sorts where for 24 hours the laws are suspended and the dangerous Lifers of Prudence Penitentiary are released. This event occurs each year and we play up the threat with unique, intelligent antagonists. This year included a few notable appearances by Lifers from previous years as well as brand new faces that wrecked their particular brand of terror and mayhem on Bravado.

Since the Penitentiary doesn’t take the prisoners back for 24 hours, the trick of the Indulgence is simply to endure and survive. An added complication this year was that the Lifers were tasked with dragging back helpless subjects to a house of torture, the Chateau la Mort, ran by the Unstable mad scientist known only as The Butcher. In their charnel house, the Butcher was tasked with collecting organs from her subjects through unnecessary surgery and electroshock therapy. Many Vados were harvested as involuntary organ donors, while several even died as the Butcher took everything they had to give.

Through diligent research, the heroes of the town were able to identify how Tabitha St. Mercy, the Warden, was able to track down her Lifers after the Indulgence and realized that they needed capture as many of the Lifers as they could alive. The town was unable to discover the location of the Chateau until it was too late, and the Butcher escaped with the harvested biomass collected from the townsfolk of Bravado. What she intends to do with it we may soon find out soon…

At the end of the weekend, we still had a few Lifers to account for:

• Eyeless Jack, the Nemesis Mindkiller of Killhouse, was finally returned to his cell after nearly two years on the loose. He was beaten by a combined effort of the townsfolk building the Depot into an inescapable trap, and the quick thinking of Patchup and Hammers in disarming and disabling the psychotic Unstable. Eerily, the Nemesis’ final request before incarceration was simply to deliver a letter to his father, a doctor in the Lovelace homestead of Widow’s Peak.

• Mother Herman and Father Diane Volstead, crazed Nuclear Family killers and gangsters, were given a chance at freedom and allowed to escape. The town even removed the implanted psionic crystals that allowed Tabitha to track them and the Volsteads were airlifted out of town on a zeppelin. This decision probably won’t come back to haunt people, don’t worry.

• Adam Moriarty, the “Spider” of Killhouse, was brutally executed by the town in an attempt to free Eyeless Jack. He remains at large and since he was the only lifer actually KILLED, he is the hardest to track and recapture. Having a Nemesis based on a Sherlock Holmes villain on the run with a reason to seek revenge on those that stopped his machinations seems like something you’ll have to deal with in the future.

• The Siren, a powerful psion with a dangerous secret, was actually smuggled out of town before the Indulgence ended. She was last seen on a caravan headed towards the Clutch, freed of the strange psionic muzzle that kept her from talking or using a dangerous psionic scream.

• Sid Sidewinder, the Nomad arsonist that was found to have been controlled by the villainous Volsteads, was set free of his chains and given a vehicle to escape Bravado by his friends in the Diesel Jock clan known as the Road Royals.

• The Saint of Three Mouths, a gluttonous Hedon that escaped Killhouse once by having people literally eat him alive, escaped with the Butcher away from the Chateau la Mort. He is still at large and is presumably still cannibalizing his way across the Lone Star.

• Daniel the Quiet, the lost scion of the Lovelace Family imprisoned in Killhouse for some “redacted” crimes, was last seen headed back to his family in Widow’s Peak. He is still at large, and escaped relatively unscathed.

That’s quite a few of the prisoners of Killhouse that are still unaccounted for at the end of the Indulgence. Surely they will all just return to their cells now that the laws are reinstated?

The Lone Star Cup

The other event this weekend was a tournament of the best Murderball teams in the Lone Star. The violent rugby-style game where every weapon deals Mangle Limbs instead of damage was sponsored by the Chairman of the San Saba Board. As a Murderball fan themselves, the Chairman even sweetened the pot a bit — the winner of the Lone Star Cup would choose who would be given an honorary VOTING position on the San Saba Board. Clearly, Tabitha St. Mercy wanted to earn a second vote on the Board, but other folks had equally viable interests.

Each major settlement and faction fielded a team into the contest, from the Barogue Behemoths, the Waking Naval Reserve, Widow’s Peak Avalanche, the Clutch Oilers, and the player led Bravado Breachers. Opposing the Breachers in the tournament game were the Killhouse Punishers, filled with the ranks of Lifers. The Punishers literally murdered some of the other teams (those poor, poor Behemoths), but were defeated by a combination of some retributive cheating, distracting the ref, and good old fashioned strategy and great plays by the Breachers. At one point, the Vados cheated to swap out a member of the Lifers for one of their own - the pyrokinetic Bea Forget-Me-Not!

The members of the victorious Bravado Breachers were Mikheil, Lyah Berry, Boris Sokolov, Drea Talrain, Criss Talrain, Justin Mercer, and Gregor McAxe! In the end, the success of this team earned the Vados the right to choose who gained the prize for the tournament (though the trophy itself was sold to the Lifers).

And much to the surprise of the Chairman, they chose The Junkerpunks (and specifically Admiral Sinker Swim!) to earn a seat on the board.

This is especially interesting, considered that the Junkerpunks were the only faction to be denied a seat on the Board by the veto of the Chairman themselves. How scandalous! This promises to have FAR reaching effects in the coming months as the balance of powers between the various factions of the San Saba shifts with the addition of the Junkerpunks to the Board.

UP NEXT: BLOOD FEAST

Our next event is coming up soon, and we have tickets already available for purchase HERE.

Our next event premise is going to be centered around some good old fashioned Thanksgiving traditions. Gathering with your friends and family. Enjoying a meal together. Eating your family… I mean, eating WITH your family. Good old fashioned cannibalism…

Lately, people have begun to go missing. Not just psions who are historically preyed upon by Confectioners across the Lonestar, but farmers and ranchers with no aberrant leaning in their family histories. Less than a month ago, the Vado citizenry experienced a rash of kidnappings designed to lift biomass from the delving population. Whispers of Bloodscourge, a plague spread by Bloodghasts that has come to haunt the Lonestar in the late Autumn, have also begun to crop up at the numerous edges of the public consciousness. Something is stirring in the guts of the Lovelace Lands, and it carries with it insidious purpose.

We can’t wait to have you join the BLOOD FEAST!

Lifers & the Indulgence

It’s Wednesday, so it’s time for a Rules Ramble from Jonathan! This week, our last blog post before the October event is focused on the Lifers of Prudence Penitentiary.

The Indulgence

We’ve posted a bit of lore about the Indulgence before HERE, as well as a short vignette written by yours truly about Killhouse HERE. The storied history of Prudence Penitentiary in our game is marked by a disaster known as the Killhouse Massacre, and the agreement to release all inhabitants of the Prison once per year in an event known as the Indulgence. We even had an entire virtual event set in the halls of Killhouse known as Justicalia during the last Indulgence.

The Indulgence is our annual Halloween game and is a time of high-stakes danger, visceral horror, and we strive to make the things that go bump in the night very, very, very real. In the tradition of classic Zombie films and movies like The Purge, the true horror of the apocalypse is not really the zombies themselves, but rather the depths of depravity that your fellow humans will descend into in order to survive.

The single most dangerous enemy you can ever encounter in Dystopia rising is another Survivor.

Unlike most Zed or Raiders, Survivors are a unique danger because they are intelligent, capable of using equipment and gizmos, and have motivations entirely different than you normally encounter from the common monsters. For this event, we will be featuring several unique “lineage” threats - threats that have a Strain, Lineage, and a character sheet much like any other player in the game.

During the upcoming 5th annual Indulgence, for 24 hours (from Friday at midnight to Saturday at midnight), the laws of the San Saba are suspended. Tabitha St. Mercy, the Warden of Prudence Penitentiary, releases the most dangerous inhabitants of the XXX Wing, the villains known as the Lifers of Prudence Penitentiary out into the world for the duration.

At the end of this time, Tabitha will offer a bounty in Brass notes for those Lifers returned to her ALIVE, not DEAD (they have to be locked up again - you don’t really lock up a corpse.) It’s a weird stipulation, I know, but you’ll be able to learn more about this reason during our October event. If you can survive until the end of the weekend, there is a significant amount of currency that can be earned by those willing to risk everything to take out a major threat.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In order to collect the Bounty, you must bring your target to the Grave Council Annex (Ops) after midnight on Saturday night.

In our focus on radical trust, we’d like to share a few of the mechanics and systems we will be using this weekend to represent these threats.

Mechanics of the Lifers

The first thing to know about the Lifers is that while they are dangerous threats, the Indulgence is still an OPT-IN experience. Each of the Lifers (like any other threat in our game) will honor our “OK Check-In” system for choosing to opt-out of a scene. We want this experience to be one of intense horror and danger, but our Lifers just play the bad guys on TV - not in real life.

Named Lifers are always portrayed by Storytellers and Guides and are generally “killing blow active”, which means they can use deadly force against characters in the game.

However, unlike most NPC Threats, we’ve put a few “guard rails” in place on these characters while they are in play in a narrative sense:

• First, all Lifers have an agenda and a personality. They are sentient individuals, with their own backstories, motivations, and reasons for why they earned their reputation as a villain. At first glance, a Lifer may be indistinguishable from another character. The Indulgence is not just an excuse for murder and mayhem: the Lifers are in Bravado for a REASON.

• Each Lifer has a primary and secondary objectives to complete. If they fulfill these goals, they will leave play until the next Indulgence. This means that not every encounter with a Lifer has to end in bloodshed - if you can identify and understand their goals you may be able to escape their notice or even become a temporary ally.

• In fact, EVERY Lifer has a specific type of character they will avoid killing, based on their story and motivations. If you can find out this weakness, you may be able to avoid an untimely demise at the hands of a particular Lifer. This doesn’t mean they won’t torture, maim, or injure you so tread lightly.

Mechanically speaking, each Lifer was built following certain guidelines:

• Each Lifer has a character sheet. They have a large amount of XP to spend on Skills, Resolve, Mind, Body, and PFAs and must follow the normal rules for other characters in our game. They must have a Supply Bag, and use phys reps for any weapons, armor, brews, injectables, or other Crafted Items they possess.

• For all intents and purposes, they must interact with the world in the same manner as players.

• Each Lifer has certain Skills they must purchase with their XP, including at least one non-combat Skill up to Master tier. This means they can have a very focused combat build, but not everything they can do deals damage.

• Each of the Lifers has access to a limited amount of Crafted Equipment. Honestly, this is probably the single biggest reason the Lifers can be unique threats as they can use those nifty gizmos, weapon augments, and brews against you. If they are killed or captured, these items can be looted or stolen (though they will have shortened expiration dates).

• Periodically, the Lifers will be able to resupply and gain new items from SUPPLY DROPS. These in-game events will have a chance to be stopped (or aided) by the players. If these are successful, the Lifers will be able to get new crafted items, brews, and replace a limited amount of equipment they might have lost.

• There will be opportunities to RESEARCH the backstories of the Lifers and gain clues as to their goals, abilities, and unique danger.

This weekend promises to be a dangerous and challenging time, but our goal is to create a unique threat that is a bit different from a zombie or raider. Each Lifer has a different story to tell, and we can’t wait to hear about your favorite encounters with these psychotic sociopaths! Let us know what you think!

See you Friday!