The Long Night, Winter Lights and Starving Blights

Good afternoon, Bravadocians! Bravosi! Bravagrants! Whatever! Pick a new name! 

Great game this month, guys. We feel good about our progress as game-runners. We hope you feel as good about your part as players. We ironed out some logistical hoo-hah we hope made your game better. But there are many more irons in the fire and much hoo-hah to render unwrinkled yet. So let’s keep climbing the sheer cliff face of DR 3.0 together and talk some STORY. 

Level 5 

Last month our Brave heroes delved the rumbling belly of the earth where they faced horrific experiments out of time, haphazard piles of dilapidated paperwork, echoing caverns of unwoken semper morts and the occasional Killhouse penitent who thought it might be safer underground. They were wrong! 

At the final level of the Delve last month we defrosted some very old, very disenfranchised cannibals in cryostasis. The Bloodghast, as the denizens of the Lonestar have begun to refer to them in fearful whispers, are terrifying monoliths of wordless rage and hunger - and they’re stalking the night just beyond the light of your campfire. When you enter Bravado next month it will be on the heels of four weeks of fear and guerrilla warfare. The Bloodghast are poorly understood, unreasonably strong, and can smell your blood like a gorger can smell meatpie on Xmas. 

Winter Lights, Loop Trees, Cargo Net Day and Player Generated Holidays 

Merry XMas! Happy Crisis! Mas Clinty-mas!! 

That was three years ago, y’all. Let’s do something new. If you want to honor the old traditions we’re certainly not interested in stopping you. It’s all setting enforcement. But we do want to have a conversation about this cool opportunity we have to make something new. 

Winter traditions have been part of the human experience since we're clawed out of the primordial muck using thumbs and thought to ourselves "I ought to buy my child nine pairs of socks”.  First thing we did with those dexterous extra digits was to throw up a pine tree in the den and shove some well smoked meats under it to give to people on a specific day but not before. We’ve been doing that for about thirty thousand years, give or take. So let’s try something a little different? 

The setting-specific holiday we’ll be focusing on this year is Winter Lights, a Quiet-Folk holiday focused on the notion of Ritual and Tradition, honoring the beliefs of the varied many across the Lonestar. The Lovelace Community celebrates this season every year not on a specific day, but as a kind of blanket period during which they assume and honor the traditions of their neighbors. What that looks like in the playspace, in terms of decoration, is a ton of tea lights all over the camp. So if you want to buy into this tradition and thusly the attentions of the Quiet Folk who celebrate the soft and quiet light of community, you should put tea lights all over your personal areas. 

In addition, the Nomads who travel the Long 360 out of Essex have their own tradition of decorating “Loop” trees along the highways. What was once a seemingly out-of-place garish display of garland and lights that has slowly become an important cultural touchstone of the Winter season in the Lonestar. We can’t wait to see how our players bring the trees of Bravado to life with festive in-genre decorations (that of course, can be easily cleaned up after game off).

Similarly, The Junkerpunks will be celebrating Cargo-Net Day, another “new/old” tradition based on holiday themes we are exploring for the first time in Bravado. This holiday and its rituals have been completely designed by our amazing players, and we are excited to support it by honoring the related plot requests they’ve put in to our writers.We can’t wait to hear tales of Nopalito Joe and Kelpie that the community tells for years. 

We encourage you to put your brilliant minds to work to come up with amazing holiday traditions to fit within our shared story. Something from your character’s past? Something entirely new? Winter Lights is all about discovering and celebrating tradition, and we are excited to see the creativity our players bring to that.

We’re attaching a link here to a useful article that we hope will give you something to think about when designing holidays for the LARPspace that are clever and respectful. 

You Better Watch Out

Historians and Jones who have studied the ruins of the Ancient Lonestar know that some traditions associated with ‘Merican culture come from a deeper and more dangerous place. Something… jolly… has awoken and is making its way across the winter wastes and over the Ox tracks into Bravado.

In December we will also be introducing an over-arc opt-in mechanic for the Winter Lights season. But be careful about too much of a good thing. 🎅 

The Long Night 

Every year in January Camp Kachina closes its massive eyes and takes a long nap to rejuvenate itself and heal from all of our intense LARPing on its pine-studded spine. And by that we mean the Girl Scouts of America use that month to fix up the camp infrastructure and DR:TX takes a month off for holidays and our own sanity. 

The way we’re explaining that in character is The Long Night; a period of time at the end of every year during which the sun does not shine on Bravado. Massive clouds appear over the town, huge stationary mountains that block the light of the sun. It lasts about a month until the sun comes out again and life resumes itself in all its baleful splendor. So when your LCs aren’t here in January (or maybe they are you masochistic maniacs) it’s probably because it’s VERY DARK and VERY COLD. 

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We’ll leave you with a poem because you know exactly who's writing this blog post. 

“When the haunted Hallows moan,

And the Long Night looms so near, 

Remember child, dog, and delver, 

That the dead can smell your fear. 

Remember always to carry a light, 

To ward off the fearful zed, 

To remind them that they have no business here, 

And that it is you that they must dread. 

So in these small and quiet days,

When the world beds itself down, 

Protect those who would bear your light, 

Through the tired streets of town. 

Plant a torch and be the Light, 

That leads your family home, 

In the last and frigid nights, 

Come home to Bravado.” 

• A Lovelace Winter Carol, PHW 02’ 

Concerning the Hiway War and her Lasting Effects (cont.)

If the first year following the exodus out of the Lands Bravado was a period of reset, during which the bones of the old burned in hellfire and the culture of a people died with their constituents, then the second year was a rebirth.

Like ashes scattered over a fallow field, riotous growth followed after. The discovery of grand mystery under the old town swept us up and along like a demagogue her flock. 

At first it was a trickle - a few dedicated Delvers disappeared into the mud to find the roots of that perfect obelisk of white stone springing up and out of the caldera. Within days they returned, eyes brighter than the treasures they found and adventure on their lips.

Below us, they said, there are steel doors that guard something precious. They spoke of blinking lights that still function. Live munitions that click and whirl like analog machines. Long stretches of corridor bored out by ancient machinations that turn the stone smooth for miles and miles. Nothing like the Lascarian Tunnels of Old Bravo - twisting things chiseled by time and circumstance - but something deliberate and terrifying in its implications.

More delvers followed. Irons and Retrogrades, mutants and evolved for whom the residual radiation was merely an inconvenience, dove into the Ruins like Saltwise into brine and came up again and again with ancient metals, defunct computing devices, niceties of a fallen world and, very occasionally, the delicate pages of notes held together by little more than the careful handling of their discoverers. 

And the Lonestar heeded them. 

What happened next was a complex two-step of bureaucracy and belligerence. A paperwork whirlwind that, when the cyclone died, created a powerhouse capable of producing a dynasty.

What was previously the Road Commission laid the first tracks near Essex, the first city on what would become The Bravado Line. The newly christened Railroad Commission contracted out evolved and mutant strains to carry and lay corrugated steel and heavy wooden beams along the old trade routes between the two settlements, while Warden Tabitha St Mercy of Prudence Penitentiary employed her penitent work crews to begin the same process on the Bravado end.

Using notes safeguarded for generations, the Conglomerate, a collection of Digitarian houses who possess a great and shrouded interest in the Ruins below New Bravado, began the process of constructing the first high-powered locomotive in the Lonestar. The Ox, at that time a skeleton of iron, steel and super-plastics, would eventually become a gestalt amalgamation of construction equipment, a half dozen derelict trains and the engine of a single downed jet plane. Contracted and funded by the Railroad Commission the Conglomerate employed the great and surviving minds of scientists and psionists alike in their research centers in the town of Waking to provoke the monolithic iron horse into motion. 

But all great movements cause waves, and the process of rebirth is often as bloody as it is brilliant. For all the steel and will of its warden, Prudence Penitentiary for the Peregrine and Penalized buckled under the weight of work crews, its guardship, and the compressed conditions of its cell blocks. Riots ensued and the sickness of man was put on morbid display. In the far displaced land of New Bravado, with no larger authority to appeal to, Warden Tabitha St. Mercy closed the doors of her prison and let Wrath determine the outcome.

Colloquially we now refer to the Penitentiary as Killhouse Prison in reference to this massacre, for when the doors were opened there were little more than corpses on concrete. The survivors begged for the Warden to again resume control. Amidst her Wrath there was Pride in her work and so the Warden struck a deal with her prisoners and the tradition of the Indulgence was born. No prisoner would be made to serve more than a year in the Prison, if they were smart. For once a year all prisoner contracts would unilaterally expire, rendering them free people. Twenty-four hours later the contracts would be reinstated, the doors would close and Warden Tabitha St. Mercy would sic the Law Dogs upon the retreating backs of any prisoner who loitered in her city.

And so, with the tradition instituted and upheld, Prudence Penitentiary resumed its work on the railroad with gusto, outstripping the paid workers of the Railroad Commission by several weeks. The uptick in bodies begged a question, however. The Killhouse Massacre was the most devastatingly fatal event since the Bomb that decimated Old Bravo. Without a proper morgue, many of those first prisoners escaped, we assume. Perhaps they retreated to the Dune Sea or fled east towards the Clutch.

Both the Railroad Commission and the Prison found themselves at a loss. Without a way to control the flow of bodies, a prisoner could simply commit an infection to the cause of their escape. Without a mechanism by which to enforce order in New Bravado the system would fail, and without voluntary work crews seeking to shorten their sentences the railroad’s production would be brought to a grinding, painful halt.

The Grave Council, a collection of Undead strains lead by the powerful Takheeta Firstborn, stepped in as the solution.

Through ritual and rite the Council of Grave Decisions determined the location of each morgue-to-be. They dispatched Graverobbers and Grave Touched to these sites, and committed their own bodies to the creation of these morgues and, in a brilliant exchange of power, negotiated total ownership of these sites and the right to tax anyone who used them. 

Now that their lives and afterlives were solidly controlled under comfortable capitalism, the survivors resettling the area found a great darkness lifting - literally. A land that had been burning with hellfire now burned with the lights of hundreds of new homesteads. In the spaces between powers, the voids of civilization, new stars were lit aflame. Had these people always been here? Or were they deposited on the shores of this disaster like flotsam on the beach after a storm?

Wherever they came from, they brought with them the salt of the earth, these settlers of the lowlands and hollers. They were the early risers, once more planting the seeds of hope into the soot-streaked soil. New quiet folk for a new settlement. Keepers of the land and Tenders of the hearth. Quick with a witty comment and slow to judgement. A magnet for a network of community bonds across the region - the Lovelace Family began to be used as a surname and identity of these landsmen, hundreds of families finding kinship under their good name. Thousands of strings of stories and lives tied together in hope for a beautiful agricultural future.

And among these quiet neighbors, there remained institutions of charity and well-being. Now that the immediate harm of the Great Disaster was healing, the Widows of the Lonestar turned their eyes to where else their kindly influence could improve the lives of others. They took a keen interest in the work of the Grave Council, and lent their weight into helping to prepare places of sanctuary and rest for those weary from work, sickness, and disease. Anyone seeking a meal, bed, or safety at their door was never turned away - including a large number of those who managed to escape the tall walls of Killhouse Prison. Above all, they sought to protect a populace that had, for too long, been victimized. 

To the north the Tribes Disparate under Holy Mother Queen Jasper thrived. Maintaining a friendly rapport with the Braves that saved their people, Jasper committed workers to the cause of re-building the city of Bravado even as she kept an iron grip on the thirteen tribes that writhed and strove beneath her. Houses formed, with figureheads who swear fealty to the Holy Mother in a feudal framework that benefits both the Lady and those who report to her. The individual tribes vie for her attention and favor, some committed by blood and sword - others by convenience.

The Junkerpunks, a loose coalition of seafaring folk, begin to earn the name alluded to in the first chapter of this long-form essay. Among their ragtag ranks a leader emerged, a Saltwise of dangerous charisma and wit, Sinker Swim captains the flagship of the Junkerpunk flotilla. 

The nature of their separation from the naysayers of the Clutch encouraged in the Junkerpunks an  underdog mentality that never truly left their culture. Seeking out the downtrodden, desperate, and dangerous to swell their ranks the Junkerpunks quickly became known as pirates, bandits - but also coy merchants in an era where few ships navigated the inland seas of the Spoiled Coast.

It was this mercantile mindset, this author believes, that lead the Junkerpunks to build a modern-day Tortuga in the middle of the lake that was Old Bravo. The marina, cheekily called the Punkerport by locals, trucks in undocumented finds from the Ruins as much as it does raw imports of food and supplies for the delve-camps there.

The Junkerpunks, in the second year of their watery pilgrimages, found an accord with the Spiderhause Redstar who have, in recent years, taken up residence in Essex and its surrounding plane-space. Both underdogged, both committed to uplifting those who otherwise do not have the means to achieve their own strength, the members of Spiderhause left the land that had treated them poorly to try again on the open sea. What the Junkerpunks lack in organizational skills and raw, coordinated strength, the Redstars of Spiderhause make up for in spades.

In the second year following the Bomb that destroyed Old Bravo, the world began again to turn. The hole in the sky closed up, mostly. The water in the lake might never be drinkable in our lifetime but the fish seem to like it just fine. The riotous growth-post-nuclear burned in the summer and regrew again in the following spring, just as it always has. These events in isolation beget no particular question. But in aggregate, in the context of the bomb and its thereafter effects, this author wonders aloud what arcane circumstances render this land livable again after only two years. And if the truth of this place is merely old, or truly ancient.

It is said around these parts that things are happening that have happened before. But it is this author’s humble opinion that previous trends do not indicate future behavior. And that just because something has happened before, does not mean it will always happen.

-  “Concerning the Hiway War and Her Lasting Effects”

By: Dr. Perenthius Goodfellow