Fountain’s Heart
Howdy Vados!
It’s Jonathan with another signature DR:TX Rules Ramble about the opening virtual event for Season 8, FOUNTAIN’S HEART! This game will be led by Jonathan Loyd and Fable Brown. This week, we are discussing the premise of our event, inspirations, themes, content warnings, and exciting things to come at our first virtual event of the season.
Notes & Updates:
TICKETS FOR OUR October event ARE ON SALE NOW!
We’ve updated our setting materials for Essex, the City of Light and Sound. Our website is updated and we will continue to add content, like a brand new map designed by yours truly. Take a look!
Read about our recent changes for Season 8. TL;DR, our access to Bluebonnet has changed dramatically. It’s a challenging update, but we appreciate your support of our game and our community. Take a look!
The Zombie Threats have been updated. Learn all about the most important changes to THE CORPSE CATALOG in our previous Blog Post from Jonathan!
Our art for this post was taken from previous DR:TX events by our talented Photo Team, including the talented James Pardee and Aesa Garcia.
Essex, the City of Light and Sound
THE PREMISE - FOUNTAIN’s HEART
With that out of the way, let’s get to our next event. Each season, we share a bit of a teaser about our upcoming event. It’s one part ‘movie trailer’ and one part ‘story time’, but it covers some of the important beats of our upcoming event.
The DR:TX team has prepared some fun stories ahead, so let’s see what is in store for first virtual event, FOUNTAIN’S HEART:
Essex is the first and largest stop on the Oxline; the iron-wrought path of industry slowly decaying across the San Saba Wasteland after the last war. A city of light, sound and rare natural beauty, Essex is most known for hosting a number of festivals and celebrations led by the city’s prominent population of artists, musicians, and crafters. Though the scars of war have changed Essex in many ways, the heart, sound, and the soul of the city remain undaunted.
As the embers of the Burning Season finally fade, the influential crafter’s guild, the Local 727, has completed the opening of a brand new bridge over the zombie-filled Dead Drop, just in time for the first festival of the season. Travelers, gamblers, merchants, and refugees from across the wasteland make their way to the City of Light and Sound, for pleasure and profit, or simply to explore the city that’s been rebuilding over the last few years. The rattle of the arriving Oxline in the Rail District is a welcome sound, passing through the forested boughs of the largest city in the San Saba.
One of the newest holidays of Essex, the Fountain’s Heart is a time of remembrance, with celebrations stretching across the city that end with a candlelight vigil near the massive morgue-turned-tree at the heart of Essex. The Tribes of Seasons has called the faithful to a holy ritual within the Thicket, consecrating the land around the strange tree once more. The newly elected Straw Bosses, representatives of the people of Essex, are eager to meet their constituents, with promises of prosperity and politics, with speaking events across the Grave Quarter. The Music Factory, a new RRC concert grounds, promises a new Battle of the Bands to mark the occasion, and ending in true Essex fashion with the Essex Pub Crawl, a drunken parade through the Green District that lasts until morning. In the heights of the Scrapes, the Cloudskipper Regatta offers new challenges to the bravest Nomads, weaving between the rotting towers on a deadly course of skill and courage.
The city is on the verge of a new renaissance, but a place like Essex is not without its dangers. With the reopening celebrations, Essex has drawn attention from across the Lone Star, particularly as the crises at Pride’s Hold to the north make it a juicy target for the dominating Raider threat. A surge of aberrants is sure to aggravate the many morgues of the city, and Bad Brain can spread quickly through a civilian population, carried in by suffering refugees. The same openness that makes Essex an influential trading hub makes it equally vulnerable, with no walls or serious defenses amid the vast Lone Star prairie. Split between the politics of the Tri-City Alliance in far Bravado and the powerful machinations of organizations like the Grave Council and Rusted Rail Combine, the fate of Essex will determine the fate of all of the inhabitants of the San Saba. Will you see the sights of Essex as the Festival of the Fountain’s Heart draws all to the City of Light and Sound, or will you learn why cities of this size rarely survive in the cruel wasteland?
With the story started, let’s talk about the game itself!
The Battle of Essex
What is Virtual Play?
Because of the changes this year with Bluebonnet, we’ve elected to run several VIRTUAL events over the next few months. The funds from your generous support of our online games will make sure we can finish out this last season at Bluebonnet, and help build up story for future seasons. These online events feature a number of differences from our live events, but feature he same story experience you’ve come to expect from DR Texas. Let’s talk about some of the key differences.
Virtual Play uses the new DR Live Virtual Play rule set, as found out our network website. This system uses your existing DR Live character sheet on the DR Database to let you experience the apocalypse through a series of short modules run by our Virtual Storytellers, and lets you role-play for hours in our Discord server with friends from across the Network. These games don’t require you to pay for gas to travel to a remote site, be out in the Texas heat while camping, or even need you to swing a boffer weapon.
These games are perfect for bite-size pieces of the wasteland, as you can engage with the content over the weekend while safely at home on your PC. Many of our sister chapters run Virtual Events through out the year, and these virtual games can be a great place to earn XP, gather resources for our next live event, and really get to flesh out your role play of your character in some unique ways.
Virtual Play tickets are also a little cheaper than your regular live event tickets, but include ALL of the bonus XP you can earn in a month. In addition you can get up to 6 hours of ‘virtual crafting’ where we send the physical cards you make to you in the mail, just in time for your next live DR Live event!
Here’s the two primary ticket tiers we are offering for this event:
full build ONLINE TICKET - $75
his is the premium general admission ticket to an online DR:TX event. This ticket includes three (3) extra XP points for each of your active characters with an Advanced Membership, or a character of your choice (8 XP base, 13 XP for new players, Player’s Guide, p. 15). This will allow access to online crafting, roleplay rooms and up to three (3) small group modules led by a DR:TX Virtual Storyteller.
RP ONLY ONLINE TICKET - $50
This is the general admission ticket to an online DR:TX event. You’ll earn XP for each of your active characters with an Advanced Membership, or a character of your choice (5 XP base, 10 XP for new players, Player’s Guide, p. 15). This will allow access to online crafting and roleplay rooms, but does NOT include access to group modules.
The Full Virtual Ticket gives you access to multiple virtual mods, crafting, and all of the roleplay spaces of our online event. You’ll earn the max XP you can earn in an event, and still get to get online crafting items sent to you after the event. This is the best way to help our chapter with the changes this season, and get access to a bespoke role
The RP Only Ticket still allows you access to crafting and role-playing with your friends on our Discord server during the event, so it’s perfect for folks that may not have the time to directly attend modules but still want to earn XP and get access to crafting time. This is a great budget way to attend the event and still get most of the advantages of a full ticket.
Virtual Play uses a simple d20 system to simulate your character actions in the game, like a D&D game. You’ll describe your actions, roll a die when it matters, and narratively tell the story of your character in the virtual wasteland. For actions that progress the scene, you’ll roll a d20, add a bonus based on your Impact or Development Skills against a Difficulty Rating (DR). If you meet or exceed the DR, you’ll be successful. You can expend your Impact Skills, Mind Points, and Resolve during a scene to add to the rolls, re-roll, and give you new actions in combat, simulating your use of Skills during a live event. While it’s not quite the same as our live events, the Virtual Play experience leans into its own strengths — you get to explore places we could never replicate on a campsite, fight monsters in a narrative combat that doesn’t need boffer combat skills, and be a big damn hero in stories that are unique to our Virtual Play events.
You can still craft items during a Virtual Game, and you’ll have your full Mind Point pool and six hours to craft as much as you can. These item cards will be mailed directly to you after the event, and may even include some special goodies for our collectors. You can even earn virtual rewards during your online mods, adding to a virtual inventory of item cards, blueprints, scrap, and more. You can check out some of these details and restrictions in the Virtual Play Guide.
While your carded equipment in your Supply Bag for live events can’t really be used in these online mods, there’s much less need to have a virtual item card overall, so it’s perfect for folks that don’t have an arsenal of item cards. There’s a few other complications and ways to use your various virtual equipment and such, but I’ll be going into detail on Surviving in the Virtual Wasteland in a later blog post next week.
Virtual Schedule
Each full ticket comes with up to three VIRTUAL MODS, a short adventure for your characters to experience in our Discord Server, led by our talented Virtual STs. During these mods, you’ll get to experience part of the story of the weekend over a module that should take about 2 hours or so to complete, with interludes between for Roleplay in our Discord rooms. Our Room Stewards will be portraying fully costumed NPCs via video chat through out the event, and provide other ways to interact with our story without needing dice. Our final mod of the game, our Story Spotlight, will be hosted live on our virtual stage, where anyone can attend and vote on the threats and outcomes of the final story beat of the event.
Our anticipated schedule for this event is pretty simple, spread out over two days, Friday and Saturday. The roleplay rooms will still be opened on Sunday for final stories, but there won’t be planned events on this last day.
Friday, October 16th
ACT ONE - 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
ACT TWO - 10:00 PM to 12:00 AM
Saturday, October 17th
ACT THREE - 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
ACT FOUR - 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
ACT FIVE - 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
ACT SIX - 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
STORY SPOTLIGHT MOD - 10:00 PM to 12:00 PM
We are hard at work on our online modules for this event, and we plan on releasing our Virtual Mod Signup next week, on Friday, October 2nd, barring any technical difficulties. We will have a guide for how to sign up online soon!
A banner from our National Event, Dead Man’s Hand
Essex, the City of Light and Sound
The City of Light and Sound has been featured in four different online events previously – the three games of the first Essex arc during the pandemic, The Fountainhead, The Crystodyne Principle, and Galatea, and the 2021 national event Dead Man’s Hand. We’ve run hundreds of hours of total content in this setting, and it’s been a frequent off-camera character to our home game of Bravado. During the War of Antlers, Essex was the seat of the San Saba Board after the crash of Waking Prime, and was the site of the final climatic battle of the mini-game that the players used during live events to decide the major conflicts of the war.
Without these original online games, it’s likely that DR:TX and most of the Dystopia Rising Live network would have struggled to continue. It’s fitting that with the changes these season we return to the place that we shared together during that time, Essex. Our leaders at the time, Aesa and Shan, made an important decision during those online events — to feature the stories and places around the setting, as opposed to our home town of Bravado. These events created memories, introduced important characters, and allowed our characters to persist in the shared stories of the wasteland, while not trying to replace the live events that we love so dearly. We hope that this new arc will honor the stories we told in the past, while bringing the characters and places of Essex to life in a new way for the world of Dystopia Rising Live by featuring stories and places around setting. We know that it will just help make the special stories for our last games at Bluebonnet during live events even more special.
This setting is our home away from home, and we are excited to share some new stories in this setting, updated for the new edition. There have been some important changes in the city hinted at during our live games, some returning villains, some fan favorite characters, and settings that are evocative and full of intrigue and adventure. This city is a deeply lived-in city, full of context, history, and years of stories come to life, so it’s an exciting sandbox for our virtual events. We can tell stories of airship racing through the towers of the Scrapes, criminal intrigue at the Brass Rose, terrifying fights with Raiders and worse, and stories that help add context to our games back at Bluebonnet. Our Virtual Storytellers have some exciting modules planned, and I’m excited to share this experience with you in October.
Essex really captures for me our story of the wild west wasteland we’ve told with the San Saba over the past 14 years, with struggles to survive inter spaced with moments of heroism, villainy, and everything in between. It’s also a love letter to some of our past stories, like the Tribes Disparate, Queensgrace, the Archon Incursions, the War of Antlers, and more. We hope you enjoy what we’ve prepared and we can’t wait for you to be involved in our newest return to the City of Light and Sound for the first time in Dystopia Rising Live
Read more about Essex Here
The symbol of the former Tribes Disparate and San Saba Republic
Wrap Up
That’s it for today, Vados!
We hope that you will come join us for our first virtual event of Season 8, FOUNTAIN’S HEART! What will you do during your return to the City of Light and Sound? Will you help address the existential threat that a city this large represents to your hometown of Bravado? Will you help fight off the Raider menace of Pride’s Hold? How will you prepare for another (virtual) year in the Zombie Apocalypse?
Let’s find out together! See you soon, Vados!
