The Long Night

Howdy and Lo! The Long Night Comes!

In a stunning break in recent tradition, this is SHAN comin’ atcha live with a blog update regarding our December event. I’m going to talk to you about some major stuff up front, and then some casual info towards the end that will leave you better prepared for DR:TX’s take on the wintry season, and then Aesa will tell you a bit about the logistical bonuses to this event!

PREMIERe EVENT 

This event will be a little special. Every season a chapter is allowed to run a single game where we are encouraged to go a little harder. This year, we’re going with December because the story we want to tell plays best under cover of night, if you will. For the record, it’s a Sunless Garden with some EXTRA COOL stuff that Aesa has the details on below.

THE LONG NIGHT 

Every year the town of New Bravado experiences a period of total night. From sometimes late December to early February - the sky above the township goes utterly and oily black. Longwalkers, denizens of that Long Night, stalk the blackness between settlements and play wicked tricks on those foolish enough to wander into the blind eternity beyond the circle of their firelight. 

Directly preceding the Long Night is a festival known to the Lovelace Clan as Winter Lights. During this time homesteads festoon their living spaces with candlelight, creating a circle of warmth and community that pushes back the cold and dark. During this time of year, going out alone is especially dangerous. 

Small gifts are often exchanged during Winter Lights, tokens of community and affection between kin. Often, these gifts are small light sources, after the Sainthood tradition. 

Longwalkers, shadowy, half-real entities that are considered folklore by much of the greater San Saba, nonetheless stalk the bleak between. Zed or creature, it is hard to tell. But the subject of local legend for generations of Lovelaces before the Long Night came to New Bravado. 

I hope you’re excited to play with us in December! I hope my big dreams pay off and the event is as cool as I’m imagining it right now. 

I think it will be. I’ve got the best staff and players in the whole goddamn world, so.
We’re gonna do great. 

<3 

Shan 

Logistics Notes from Aesa!

For the purposes of ticketing, players will be able to purchase up to +5 additional XP for the DR:TX December event instead of the usual +2. We also will be selling separately a limited supply of Zipline passes that Camp Kachina has allowed us to schedule. This will be part of, but not required for the Sunless Garden experience. Which is to say, that if you really don’t want to use the zipline, there will be other ways to participate aside from that aspect. There will be trained staff on hand to run the ziplines safely, and the cost of the pass is primarily to cover the cost of their time. Note, the zipline does unfortunately have a weight limit of 250-280lbs.

If the zipline passes sell out we will do our best to schedule more, but for now we’re limited to what Camp Kachina will allow us to do at an hourly flow. So if that sounds like a thing you would enjoy, then please feel free to buy the pass!

Tickets go on sale today at 1pm. As always, if you have questions, please message us on our FB page or email us at info@dystopiarisingtx.com.

<3<3<3

Aesa!

Faction Work Orders are HERE!

Howdy Vados!

Jonathan here with a quick update for our November event, BLOOD FEAST! I know I said I was making one last blog post on Wednesday before game, but now you get a last-last blog post instead!

This weekend will be premiering the next stage of the Work Order mechanic in our game!

We’ve put most of this on the website, and you can find the details HERE.

The TL;DR of this is that there are three types of Work Orders now in the game:

• Starter Work Orders can be completed ONCE per event, and include tasks like exploring the site and doing basic behaviors of Dystopia Rising. These are the primary way you can earn Basic Society Membership with a Faction.

• Settlement Work Orders are released periodically at the General Store and involve an out-of-character task that must be completed, like refilling the water and ice for NPCs at Ops or cleaning up garbage around the camp. If you complete these, you’ll get a reward of Brass and CAPS for the group that completes them.

• Faction Work Orders can be completed by folks with at least Basic Society Membership in one of the Factions of Bravado. These will involve more complicated tasks that are thematic to the faction and they might involve combat, exploration, roleplay, or CvC. Once completed, you can get a reward based on your level of Society Membership. You can complete different Faction Work Orders, but only ONE for each faction and some rewards can only be collected once no matter how many you complete.

These Work Orders are designed as a kind of “silent ST” that can help give you direction to get involved in the game and story we are sharing. Since you can do them on your own, you get to control when and where you do the tasks. For those that might hit moments in the game where they aren’t quite sure what to do next, Work Orders can be a great way to kickstart off activities that will help you experience the world of Bravado and Dystopia Rising.

Some commonly asked questions about Work Orders:

• Q: Can I complete both a Starter Work Order AND a Faction Work Order in the same game?

• A: Yup. Once you complete a Starter Work Order you get Basic Society Membership, so that means you can immediately complete a Faction Work Order for the faction you just helped.

• Q: What are the favored skills of the Faction?

• A: These will be listed on the Faction Work Orders this weekend, and I’ll have these updated on the website soon. Only so much time until game and I still gotta pack!

• Q: Can I do a Work Order on each of my characters?

• A: Sure! Each Work Orders can be completed once per event, per character, so if you have another character invested in a faction have at it.

Plus, at the end of the game we will be tracking how many Faction Work Orders are completed. If you have a vested interest in seeing your favorite Faction or NPC group succeed, make sure you complete a Work Order!

That’s all for today! See you tomorrow!

Blood Feast

Good morning! It’s Jonathan here with time for one last Rules Ramble before our November event, BLOOD FEAST.

I’ve posted a few notes about the nature of disease in Dystopia Rising, HERE.

I’ve posted a brief summary of the Disease mechanics in the book, with Part 1 HERE, and Part 2 HERE.

With the book out of the way, I’d like to tease a bit of other mechanics you might see this weekend, particularly ones that might be used by some nefarious enemies and NPCs.

INFLICT DISEASE: A single strike that causes a disease to be inflicted at stage one/two/three. The enemy will call “INFLICT DISEASE: [NAME OF DISEASE], STAGE <LEVEL>”

One call in particular you need to know about is INFLICT DISEASE. This is a Skill often used by monsters like diseased Zed or Raiders, but can enter play in some other interesting ways. This call can be countered in a few different ways.

• If it is delivered as a Ranged or Melee Strike, then the Avoid skill can completely negate the Strike. Plot can’t kill what plot can’t catch!

• If a Inflict Disease strike is not Avoided, a member of the Mutant Lineage can spend 1 Resolve to call “Mutated Immune System, No Effect!”. Remember, the strain advantage only protects you from the INITIAL source of the disease, so once you are infected you are impacted by INFLICT DISEASE calls like normal. Use your Resolve early if you want to avoid Disease!

• If the Inflict Disease call is delivered as an Area of Effect or Sound of My Voice call, it cannot be Avoided.

• This skill is most commonly delivered as part of a Cannibalism attack while you are in Bleed Out. Remember, while in Bleed Out you can’t use most skills, so it’s not normally possible to avoid an Inflict Disease call like this. Mutants can still use their Strain advantage, though!

• If you have been Inoculated against a particular disease (see my blog post HERE), then you can call “No Effect, Inoculated!”. However, particularly infectious Diseases can OVERPOWER your Inoculation.

  • If you try to use this effect more than once an hour, the NPC can call “OVERPOWER, INFLICT DISEASE” and you’ll have to either Avoid the strike or be infected with the disease. Inoculation is a temporary protection, but won’t last during a long fight.

Lastly, this is a bit of a Spoiler (sorry!). Sometimes a source of INFLICT DISEASE can be a trigger to causing Diseases to get worse. This means that an infection can quickly become deadly if you are exposed to it again and again. Best to avoid those monsters completely!

POISON DAMAGE: (Damage Augment) Add “MIND DAMAGE” to spike damage attack. The Target hit loses an amount of Mind points equal to the damage called INSTEAD OF LOSING BODY.

Particularly nasty or infectious monsters can sometimes use “Damage Augments”. These modify a normal strike to also do an additional effect. Normally, this is things like Lineage Bane or Body Damage, but one particularly terrible call is POISON. This is normally used by tribes of Raiders that coat snake venom on their weapons, or particularly poisonous Critters.

If you are hit by a monster that is using POISON damage, instead of losing Body damage, you lose MIND points! This means it will be harder to use that next Skill later, especially once you run out of Mind! This is a particularly insidious type of damage, as using Avoid to block a small source of Poison Damage often costs you as much as the damage would have inflicted in the first place.

The only Damage Augment more deadly than Poison is RADIATION, as when you take Radiation damage you not only lose Body, you also lose Mind. It’s like a combination of Poison and Body damage in one Strike!

We have a few more days to go, but I can’t wait to see everyone at our November event. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence I’ve mentioned these two rules above. :D

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!