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!

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!

Momento Mori

Good afternoon ladies and gentlethems. Today I want to talk to you about THE MORGUE!

Shocking, I know.

Specifically, about the concept we’re set up around Memento Mori with our morgue. Leaving offerings for the dead- reminders of those who’ve passed, and tokens to encourage those not yet gone forever to return home has become a hallmark of the Bravado morgue since before it was Bravado. Not only does this allow for a somber level of roleplay surrounding death, but it also allows the space to feel more connected to the characters that make Bravado live and breath. 

That isn’t just a random scarf that staff hung up in the rafters above the altar, its a scarf that belonged to your characters best friend, a reminder of a person who passed that you cared deeply about. 

All that is to say, its fun for RP, and it makes the morgue space look really fucking cool. 

One of the truths of world during the virtual events is that some of our props did not survive. Specifically, several of the morgue boxes developed a bad case of mildew, and many of these memento mori rotted away (which feels rather apropos, in a way) or just had to be tossed completely. 

This is where you come in. We would like to restore the morgue space to its former angsty glory. We are offering CAPs for anyone who can donate a memento mori item to the morgue decor. Please donate knowing that your prop might not find its way back to you, as is the nature of all props in a shared space. 

But Heather, what kinds of things should I donate?

• Small items that are mementos for the dead... Specific people, or non. They don’t have to be people who have died in Bravado. They don’t have to be representative of LCs (but can be)... If you don’t have a specific character in mind, it can be for a denizen of the San Saba, left by their grieving family. Or donate something that represents a dead loved one in your backstory! 

• Ideally, smaller than 1x1 sq foot, or flat, for easy packing and decoration. Think, that Tinkers favorite wrench, rather than their favorite engine.

• 10 CAPs per item, Give items to Heather H. If you just leave it on the altar in play, that's fine, but I won’t know to give you CAPs! So hunt me down. (Aesa note: May the odds be in your favor!)

• Be creative- there is a lot of space for things in the morgue -- items that go on the altar, hang from the rafters, etc. 

• We are more looking for these items of grief and remembrance, not so much things like limbs, decapitated heads, or other “horror” decor. Those props, ironically, were the ones that survived the grave mold-palooza. 

• Please make sure its genre. These are items that are left in the elements at the morgue day in and day out. They shouldn’t be pristine. 

• If you aren’t sure if an item is appropriate, message Heather H!

• We will cut this off at a certain point, because we only have so much storage, but we will let you know when we hit that point. 

Thank you all so much in helping us make our shared spaces awesome!

Lone Star Murderball

It’s Jonathan’s Wednesday Rules Ramble!

Jonathan, your friendly OST here, and this week, we have some rules that may be important for our October event, CARNIVAL MACABRE. We have updated the DR:TX site with the relevant rules but I’d like to share some thoughts here as well as a brief summary.

Lone star Murderball Rules can be found HERE.

Back in 2.0, we had an in-game sport known as Dog’s Head. This game was inspired by the sport of “Jugging” in games like Amtgard, which is in turn inspired by a crazy 1989 B-movie called “Blood of Heroes” with Rutger Hauer. There are countless interpretations of this game, but it is at it’s heart a quick, crazy, and violent sports game so it’s a perfect addition to Dystopia Rising.

The original Dog’s Head rules in 2.0 required a lot of in-game equipment to function so it was really difficult to play effectively. The main purpose of LONE STAR MURDERBALL is to provide a framework for a no-holds sports game that allows anyone to play without a need for a huge investment of in-game currency and scrap.

The game is played with two teams, each with five players on the field, a sideline medic, and an alternate. The game is played by the team moving a ball called the MURDERBALL to the goal (usually a tire or marker on the ground), on a pitch known as the KILLING FIELDS. The game ends once a team scores 3 points, or has the highest score after 10 minutes. The games are designed to be quick, brutal, and fun.

The key mechanic at work for LONE STAR MURDERBALL is that instead of swinging a weapon for damage, you instead always swing for MANGLE.

This means that any player, no matter how much XP you have or how much Body, is just as good as any other. Each position on the field can be played by anyone, assuming you have the right type of boffer or prop for that role. The medic can even quickly get you back in play, so there’s no long-term penalty to playing in the game.

There are some major roles on the field:

• The Knocker - Equipped with a Melee Standard and Shield, that can knockback an opponent. Slow and steady, hard to kill, but can’t really carry a ball.

• The Arms - Armed with two Melee Standards, Florentine-style! Overwhelm the opponent with too many hits to block! With a longer reach, a ball carrier with only a Small weapon is an easy target!

• The Jecter - Uses a Melee Small weapon and a single-use injector to make a teammate immune to Mangles for a short time. The Jecter makes a really powerful ball carrier, but with a risk! Do you use the injector on the ball carrier, or a fighter?

• The Fixer - Uses a Melee Small weapon and most importantly - a Psion Crystal that can heal Mangled limbs (if the other team gives you enough time to use it!). A great choice for a ball carrier, but it’s hard to heal someone while you have the Murderball!

• The Buckshot - Uses a two-handed shotgun that can knockback an opponent, and a backup Small melee for close engagement. Do you give up the field control with your gun to be a backup ball carrier?

Off the field, you still have a role to play:

• The Sideline Medic can repair broken limbs over 10 seconds, so you can get a player back on the pitch after a short break. Can you hold off a power play long enough while your medic does their magic?

• The Alternate is your only extra player that can enter the field. They can take over ANY role, so what position do you save them to fill?

Murderball is all about using limited resources wisely. Do you use your Jecter early to try for a quick score? How do you counter a Knocker and Buckshot keeping your ball carrier away from the goal? Do you rely on someone’s natural skill with boffers to hold the line and keep the other team at bay? Each role on the team has a natural counter, so it’s a bit like a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors trying to find the balance that can lead your team to victory.

During this upcoming October event, you’ll have an opportunity to play Murderball against teams like the KILLHOUSE PUNISHERS, and you’ll have opportunity to influence the outcome of the annual LONESTAR CUP. We are excited to see what kind of uniforms you might be able to come up with, what kind of strategies you’ll bring to the pitch, and what kind of memories you can make on the Killing Fields!

We’ve also added a few items of note you might see this weekend, HERE. Make sure you get in your Blueprint requests to Aesa as soon as possible so we can update your blue for the game!

See you in October, Vados! Next week, we’ll chat about some interesting mechanics that you might see from the main threat of the Indulgence - the LIFERS.

The reigning Dog’s Head champs of 2.0, Keegan’s Hammers