,

The Dead Return

,

Howdy Vados!

It’s Jonathan here with another signature DR:TX Rules Ramble, leading up to our December live event THE RED DEATH! This is our next Premiere Event game, led by Heather Halstead and Jonathan Loyd. Each week, I’ll discuss in detail an aspect of the upcoming event, compiling the rules and lore into one easy place to read! This week, we are covering a way to involve characters from your backstory that died into the story of the RED DEATH, when the dead return to life as nightmares and death hang over Bravado…

Our photos for this post were taken from previous DR:TX events by our talented Photo Team, by Max Pohlmeier, Lauren Guzaldo, and Maddeax Khole.

DR:TX Updates

Let’s cover a few things of note that have happened over the last few weeks:

  • Read our Event Premise and Content Warnings in the first blog post for this event, THE RED DEATH. This covers a lot of the stuff you should know before you buy a ticket, as well as an explanation of the story of the weekend.

  • Grab Bag sales end this week! You have until 3:00 PM on Wednesday, November 22nd to purchase one to get your cool “I’d Rather Be in Bravado” t-shirt plus some other goodies, for only $25. If you are traveling, don’t miss out on a souvenir of your trip to Texas! You only have few hours left when this post goes live to participate!

  • LIT Cashout! For the next couple of weeks, you can purchase a $0 Ticket to have your LIT inventory cashed out and ready for pickup at the December Premier Event. This $0 ticket acts as your place in line, so just snag your ticket, and we’ll ensure your supplies are waiting for you when you check in on Friday, December 8th. This opportunity is only for players with Texas as their home chapter and will be handled first come first served. We will have 30 tickets open for this next event, and additional opportunities for the cash out if you miss out, don’t worry!

  • San Saba Socials are updated! Due to a bank error in your favor, a certain San Saba Social was very, very generous when drunken farming last event. Fortunately for our Post Office workers, this error has been corrected for future events. We’ve also had a few reports of a few of these missing from the computer, so I’ve also made sure that each of the eight San Saba Socials can be posted now with updated versions of the ZOMs ready to print for the Post Office.

  • Radiation Sickness has been updated! Given a recent Errata update on the National website, we’ve updated the rules for instances of Radiation Sickness going forward to follow the National version. I’ve included a link on our Local Diseases page if you want to read up about the new dangers of the Waking Exclusion Zone.

The Dead Return

Throughout the San Saba, as the threat of the Red Death spreads across the wastes, a curious phenomena begins to occur in tandem with the strange nightmarish creatures. Similar to events of the past towns in the Lone Star, with the legends of Boot Hill and trapped memories of the past, where the Prince Undying walks leaves behinds the echoes of the long past dead, returned to walk among the living for a moment more.

During our next event, we have a special opportunity for your dead loved ones to return to the game for a short roleplay event on Saturday. If you have an NPC in your background that died long ago and you’d like to inflict some emotional damage on your character, you are in luck!

We have a few requirements to participate, but they are pretty simple:

The requirements:

  • The NPC should be dead and gone.

  • NPCs only, no former LCs.

  • You may submit multiple characters, but remember that we cannot guarantee every request will show up in play.

  • This role-play is about conflict and guilt, and may not have a happy ending. Be aware that this is potentially intense role-play you are opting into.  This is a chance to cause some emotional damage to your suffer puppets, and we hope you are excited!

  • This is open to traveling players!

In order to properly portray your dead loved ones, we’d like to get as close as we can to your imagination of this character. We’ve put together some questions for you to answer in the application above that will help us coach our NPCs on how to play that character, and I’ve included a few examples from a past character of mine, Doc Creed.

Questions for players with returning loved ones:

  • Do you have anyone in your backstory who is permed that you'd like to see again in the play space?

    • “Doc Creed’s wife Rebecca was lost to a zombie horde many years ago, but he’s always held himself to blame for her death and carries a deep regret for not being there with her in the end.”

  • Describe important details about this character as best you can (name, nicknames, age, relationship, strain, faction, etc).  Keep the details specific, but concise.  We will be limited to our NPCs on shift to represent this person.

    • “Rebecca was a Pure Blood in her early 30s, and they had a single child together named Hope. Rebecca was the mayor’s daughter of a small town called Three Rivers, and they met through their shared faith in the Nuclear Family. She was an important anchor for Creed, and helped him control his Accensorite excesses.”

  • Did they have something recognizable about them we can telegraph with our NPC (a hat, a flower, a certain dress?)  This is a great way for us to help you recognize who that NPC is supposed to be.

    • “Rebecca always wore a flower in her hair, picked from the garden outside. She knew how much Creed liked the garden, and always wore it for him.”

  • Describe their personality, and a few tips for accurately portraying this character.  How would you coach an NPC to play this character?

    • “Rebecca was kind, forgiving, and cared for their daughter while Creed was away, but she maintained and protected her home with a quiet dignity and faith. She was fond of reminding Creed to enjoy the quiet peaceful moments that made life worth living, and helped him stay grounded when his zeal would overtake his common sense.”

  • What conflicts were unresolved with this character? Is there something your LC still feels guilty about involving them?

    • “Doc Creed left his family to help a psion being persecuted by the town escape. He felt that his faith demanded he do the neighborly thing and thought nothing of leaving to help. While he was away, both Rebecca and Hope were lost when a massive stampede of zed leveled his town. He feels he failed his family by leaving them behind, and feels he should have died with them rather than be stuck in this wasteland without them.”

  • Describe your LC's relationship with that character in a short phrase.

    • “Doc Creed loved his wife and daughter dearly, but never spent enough time with them as his medical duties took him far from home to care for the other townsfolk instead of being the father he should have been.”

  • What are things you do NOT want touched on with this NPC?

    • This is a great place to include anything you don’t want to role play with our NPCs. Help us maintain your boundaries!

What will this look like in game?

The Dead Return events will happen throughout the weekend, but will be primarily focused during the day on Saturday. These echoes of dead loved ones will be an important aspect of surviving the Red Death and will be part of the overarc and are designed as short vignettes and mini-events in the game. We expect the normal scene with a dead echo to last about 30 minutes or so.

We also ask for your buy-in and grace, knowing that someone on shift will be playing this NPC, that it might not be exactly the image you have in your head. We will be coaching our NPCs based on your answers to the questions in the survey, and while we will strive to be true to your vision of this NPC, but we will be casting these roles depending on the available NPCs for that shift. The broader the strokes in your specifics on the NPC means that it will be more likely to see that character enter play as one of these dead echoes.

We encourage you to say "yes, and.." to the role play, and lean into the idea that your memory might seem.. not quite right. They may not look exactly like what you imagined, but that’s okay! Play along, and even buy into the strangeness. This is not an exact imprint of that loved one or a someone walking their last dance before returning to the Grave Mind, but rather it is an echo of a memory.. And echoes are never quite the same. These echoes may be CLOSE to what you remember, but something about the whole affair is slightly sinister, or even a bit of a nightmare…

A disclaimer:

We cannot guarantee every dead person will show up in the play space, even if you fill out the application above.

We will strive to fill as many requests as possible for this special event from your character’s backstory, but it’s likely we will miss some folks. Please be patient and kind with our STs and staff members as they attempt to bring this vision to life.

If you are interested in participating in “The Dead Return” fill out this Google form as soon as you can so we can make sure we have a plan for how best to torment you with your lost loved ones.

Wrap Up

We hope that you are ready for the challenge of THE RED DEATH. How can you stop the machinations of the Prince Undying? Can you survive a world where death itself is changed and the night is blanketed in red? Will you escape the Nightmare Walkers or worse? We have some some fun and exciting challenges planned for your characters in the nightmarish zombie apocalypse. But don’t worry, it’s not just all about the RED DEATH, you’ll still need to deal with (nightmare) zombies, (nightmare) Oxkillers, (nightmare) raiders and more!

TICKETS ARE ON SALE NOW, AND WE HAVE OUR SPECIAL grab bag RUNNING FOR A LIMITED TIMe, until 3pm wednesday, November 22nd

See you next time Vados, when we talk about the Red Death, a mysterious event that takes over the town at night, and more about our other signature mechanics for the event! But for now, let’s take a sneak peek at one of the two new National blueprints released during our upcoming Premiere Event!