April Update

GSCTX Construction

The area that was marked with Caution tape last month now has barrier fencing. This is primarily around the “front yard” of Wiki-up (aka Lucky 7). Please avoid this area. This does mean that one of Wiki-up’s door is out of play. Please use the door nearest the closets for emergencies but not other purposes. Additionally.. GSCTX has added more beds to Wiki-up (aka Lucky 7) by replacing the single beds with bunk beds.

Camp Binders

There is now a binder in each of the camp’s units. This binder includes cleaning procedures for each unit. It also includes a maintenance list. If you see something that merits attention, but its not an immediate emergency, then please make a note in the binder and the camp can then take steps to fix it.

These binders also include the camp’s rules. This includes things like their no smoking policy, which you’re already familiar with. It also includes items like quiet hours, which do not apply to us because we have rented the whole camp. DO NOT FREAK OUT!!! (See what we did there?) You can still scream like a lunatic into all hours of the night.

April Death

As we approach the season closer and the end of this particular chapter of Dystopia Rising, many of our established players are thinking about how they may sunset a character or push them into a new direction. Character death can be a vehicle for that. If you want your character to die, do it! Sometimes this experience is a game and sometimes it is a narrative.

If you need or want a narrative death, then please take it! A bunch of you did this with Uprise, but you can do this any time you want to. You don’t need our permission to eat your own infection. If you think four minutes of Bleed Out is enough, take a death. If you want to simply get pasted and die on a hit by some Big Bad - go for it! If your character eats a bunch of radioactive mushrooms for SCIENCE! and dies of radiation poisoning - cool!

If you need or want a death scene, then come by Ops and we’d like to do that for you. If you’re not interested in a death scene, and instead you want to just respawn at the Morgue, then that’s cool too. Either way, we encourage you to stop by Ops, grab a drink of water, catch your breath, and maybe sit for a minute to ease the transition. Then pick your poison (so to speak).

Yellow Roses in a Sunless Garden

April has always been a time for retrospection in the Lonestar. Boot Hill, a place for broken ghosts and half-remembered truths, is dying. It’s final exhumation is coming, a byproduct of the Stampede and the enormous volume of biomass aboveground.

The Mortis writhes; a blind eternity where we are stripped of our ego and our truth and left raw and malformed at the bottom of All Things. There an abscess grows like the pit of a rotten tooth.  Boot Hill has never been a proper morgue, but perhaps it has always been a Garden, untended.

This month you will be given the opportunity to delve into the liminal space between life and death, have your resolve tested and taken, and help correct the the broken narratives that are the organic result of war, death and a world where we are undone and remade like so many broken pots.

HOW IT WORKS:

• A Sunless Garden run will occur every two hours. This begins at Game On. There will be a hook shaped like Shan.

• In the Sunless Garden you are given a resource called RESOLVE. These are tokens to be spent. I’m not telling you on what. <3

• If you do not have a least one RESOLVE upon exiting the Sunless Garden you will be given a FRACTURE.

• A FRACTURE is a 3.0 Mechanic (playtesting!). It is a derangement without a name, without being ascribed to a particular neurosis. We’ll tell you more at game.

Permed PCs

Are you interested in playing a dead PC for the LAST iteration of this piece of Bravo history? Bring your costume, shoot an email to shan@dystopiarisingtx.com (or just hit her up on FB) and get ready to be a broken husk of the person you once were for the benefit of your emotionally wrung out buddies!

Tuning into the SI:GNAL

Last month you installed a powerful device that can control, in a limited way, the kind of zed you will be fighting this month. Pay attention to that. Make cool choices with your resources. The war is ramping up, the stampede looms.

March Update

GSCTX Construction

Construction on the new bath house continues. This has definitely impacted the area outside of the Saloon. GSCTX has not roped it off and has left that to our discretion. We’re going to see what it looks like but we might have some Hot Zones or GM activity directly outside of the Saloon.

Ops

If you have a question or need a thing, this is a general reminder to ask one of the Guides in Ops. They are in the best position to help you, or at least to get you the help that you need.

No-Bandanna Challenge

We’ve packed almost no green bandannas this event. Our goal is to use them for when they are strictly necessary. (Like mortar fire). Otherwise, we very much want to shamble or raider rage with you.

The weather is finally warm!

We’re selectively ignoring Saturday night. It won’t be freezing temps and so far this year that’s a victory!

Daylight Savings Time

Friendly reminder that its Daylight Savings on Saturday. We’re going to run NPC blocks on the current clock. However, players can expect us to tuck you into bed a little early because of the lost hour. Either way, there’s no morning wake-up activities on Sunday morning so please sleep in as you like.

February Update

Feedback

We received a lot of very useful feedback from our last event. If you sent in feedback - Thank You!

We’ve also thought more intentionally about how we process your feedback. It may have felt that we often look at feedback piecemeal and in many cases that’s been true. It is also not very informative. Without going too much into boring details, we’ve developed a process to help us better see trends in your feedback so we can focus on the things that matter the most.

Construction Notice!

Last week the Girl Scouts broke ground on a new shower house that is between the Office (aka Cat House) and Wikiup (aka Lucky 7). Right now we’re in the ground clearing stage so its just a mess of uneven ground and mud. If this is where we think it is, then its an area that we don’t use at all anyway.

We will be looking to mark it off if GSCTX does not.

EMAIL

We’ve updated our email. Our primary email is now info@dystopiarisingtx.com.

Our old gmail account will continue to forward emails to our new address, so if you accidentally send something to the old address then don’t worry.

If you do have an item pending please consider sending us an email to the new address.

War Table

The War Table has been updated with new features and mechanics. These might look like suggestions or comments we heard from you. The War Table will continue to evolve and change and we encourage you to run with your crazy ideas to add additional features.

Every Year We Have a Theme

2017: “Welcome the New Player”

It is the nature of communities, as they age, that an old guard manufactures itself out of enfranchised veterans. The nature of that caste is mutable - and we made a choice in 2017 that our old guard would facilitate, not flagellate. We asked you all to make space for new players, to respect and invest in them. We asked you to buy into their dreams and their vision and to acknowledge that the amount of time we spend in this crazy fake world is not proportional to the ownership we have over the setting.

And you guys aced it. Our culture changed, our new players flourished - given space and a community that had decided to believe in them. I think some of our most dedicated marshals and prop-producers are a direct result of that culture shift. And I am so fucking proud that we did that together.

2018: “Practice self care”

Remember when we used to romanticize illness? When we would leave our wounds untended and risk infection for the sake of some arbitrary notion of “Bravo Hard”? When getting two hours of sleep a night at game was somehow a way to generate social currency?

That was really silly of us!

In 2018 we made a choice to stop engaging in destructive behavior like that. We said “guys it's about time you start taking care of yourselves” and you took us seriously. We provided you a room with bandaids and a resolution - but you’re the ones that realized what steps you needed to take to look after yourselves. You held one another accountable for the health of the individual. You provided painkillers and medical kits and emergency food. You collectively embraced the notion that is it the job of a community to look after one another - and that the most effective way to look out for our friends is to look after ourselves first.

That is a sweeping social change. It was deliberate, it was awesome.

Well - welcome to 2019 guys. We have big changes on the horizon. Some are already happening. But the change I want to talk about now has nothing to do with our new rulebook and everything to do with the members of the community that make that book worth reading.

2019: Be responsible for your own fun

It is, in our experience and belief, the job of every individual to lead a life conducive to their own happiness. In 2019 we can promise a few things. That we will try very hard. That we will strive to provide for you a greater quality of story and immersion. And that we will do everything we can to give you the tools you need in order to craft narratives that you will carry with you when you leave this transitory world that dies when you stop inhabiting it.

But what we cannot promise is that you will enjoy it. We cannot do that thing because you are a person, a complex and coherent system of beliefs and dispositions that color your world in a way that we will never see or hope to understand holistically.  And that’s really very okay.

What we can do is say - invest yourselves, guys. It was never the Jones mods that captured your minds, it was never the great big sky above our campsite or the sight of the lake as the sun comes up. It was never the setting alone that made you excited to come back. It was the people you experienced those things with, it was the narrative you assigned to those events, it was the resolution you manufactured and reached that make up the basic components of the fun and fear I hope you have experienced in equal measure over the years.

And those things don’t just happen. We make them ourselves.

So be proactive, guys. Be gutsy. Be gregarious. Be generous.  Make the world you want to see. There’s a ten foot circle around you - make that a space people want to be in. Prop hard, costume hard, roleplay hard. Find the fun and foster the fear.

Let’s buy in. Let’s decide to take ownership of our fun and see what happens. I can’t wait to tell these stories with you.

December Update

Liquid Memory Lapse

LML has been pulled from the blueprint list and we will no longer issue cards for it via the Post Office. If you have a copy of this recipe, please destroy it. If you have old cards, please also remove them.

I’m Too Young to Die!

We have a lot of coded phrases in DR. Logistics is the Outpost. NPC Shift is Civic Duty. The Wind is out-of-character players. Etc.

Last month we introduced a code phrase. "They are eating me alive." This means, I'm a New Player in Bleedout. Read: If you're a veteran, move your ass.

Players used it and it seemed to work very well. Last event we had a high death count and eliminated a lot of first-game deaths using this very simple strategy.

This month we’d like to change that code phrase to “I’m too young to die.” This works better in more scenarios (Raiders, Bandits, etc.) and has a nice meta component to it. Credit: Krystal Watson. We’d like to try this out and see how it works out.

If you hear either phrase “They’re eating me alive” or “I’m too young to die” feel free to respond the same way. :)

The War Table

This game you guys are getting a new mechanic. Get invested because this guy is going to be around until the end of the season. Check it out in the saloon at game on, do cool stuff with it, dream big dreams.

Endorsements

There is a whole world of NPCs that are also a part of Bravo. To represent their votes (while also quietly mocking the effect of special interests and lobbying in our democracy), these groups will each have an effect on the ballot count.

• Each Faction can endorse one candidate for Council.

• Each faction has a different weight. (You can think of this as a number of votes).

• While the weights themselves cannot be known, any character with Lore: Local Area can discover the ordinal ranking of these groups. (Who is first, second, third, etc.)

• While PC votes will take place during the 12-2 siesta, NPCs will not cast their vote until the end of the event.

• Characters in the BMC can change the weight of Factions through voter fraud or voter suppression.

• Factions may have established prejudices toward some candidates.

• It is not possible for a character to win an election strictly through NPC endorsements.

The Ballot Box

The Ballot Box will be out from 12:00pm to 2:00pm during our NPC break to maximize the potential for everyone to participate.

Cold Weather

Its going to be cold this event. Please plan accordingly!

Keep an insulated layer (sleeping pad) between you and the ground. Cots also need an insulating layer between you and the air underneath them. Pee before bed. Pack pajamas and do not wear clothes you have been sweating in to bed.

There are typically beds available in the Tenderhorn cabin. Let’s give our Tenderhorns and visitors an opportunity to get those first, but if you see an open bed there then please use it! (Top bunks often go unchecked). Most of the open air cabins in Hope’s Edge have covers for the windows which will reduce wind and keep them much warmer.

If you need to move a sleeping pad into the floor of the Saloon (or any of the lodges) that’s okay. Do not be a martyr. Be warm instead.

If you are using a heater, please make sure it does not emit carbon monoxide, that it is tip-over safe, and does not have an open flame.