Hi there! It's time for our first mini-event and also signups for this month's Ritual.

The timeline is short and sweet, a few days of things Getting Weird, and the event taking place in that weird space. There's going to be a new post every few days as follows:

1) Trees in bloom everywhere and people are coming down with an odd illness.

2) Dreams start to get affected and dreams play out across the TVs in the city.

3) That little illness? Worse, MUCH worse. Plus a full tunnel has opened, time to explore!

4) Everything is Wood Now And What The Fuck, Bunnies: The Musical. A.K.A. the final post before ritual time!


So what's this illness? Well, it comes in stages, and I'm gonna paste from chan but!

"the thing about the bunnies and the local flora that's been popping up is that they can cause a mild... infection. for most people it's pretty harmless as long as you're not around it too much, just leads to weird dreams and an interest in exploring the area near where all the plantlife has been growing and (spoilers), the wooden tunnel that's going to open up and lead to an interesting building. but it can get... worse for people with weaker immune systems. the idea is that much like cordiceps, the organism is first inhaled. the dust of this can be found in the fur of the rabbits or the trees coming out of the tunnel itself."

Stage 1: Similar to minor allergies.

Stage 2: There are dreams of distorted audio clues and static... Similar to what's now occasionally happening on the TV's and radios, but instead in their head when they're dreaming. Strangely, some of what the person's dreaming can leak out into the TV sets as well.

Stage 3: The allergy-like symptoms clear up and so do any preexisting conditions of the lungs. In fact, they seem better than before.

Stage 4: There is a strong desire to go through the wood tunnel and just stay on the other end. Forever. Not doing so causes the symptoms to come back in full force and the victim has a hard time breathing due to the plant blooming in the lungs and being Not Happy that it's away from what it considers home. Hacking up bits of plant can happen, limbs may feel stiff, etc.

Stage 5: For some unlucky bastards the plant inside the host will try to grow out and get what it needs the normal way (ex. sunlight and water). This isn't comfortable and is all sorts of ranges of body horror. With the current timeline it shouldn't be too bad, but an example of how far it can go are some of the shambling creatures lurking barely in sight, more tree than animal.


Anyone is free to get affected (or not affected) by this.

Also, as mentioned above, The February Ritual is coming up starting February 24th! Please sign up in the comments below before 11:59 PM on 2/21.

Thank you all so much for hanging in there and pardoning our dust as we hammer things out around here! With feedback and going through everything the first time we've streamlined and updated AC from here on out. We've also updated the sample so it'll be easy to follow.

From now on, the AC requirements will be 10 points a month. Each comment (including all comments made in a game/ritual or as a shepherd) is now worth 1 point only. Creating a post is still worth 5 points. There is now a 5 point bonus for participating in a game/ritual that cannot be used for AC (so you'll need a minimum of 10 comments or a post and 5 comments still to pass AC).

You may link to each thread individually if you like or to each post you have comments in as long as there aren't too many comments on the post (like 500) and it's still on only one page. If the post has 500 or more comments or stretches to two or more pages, please link to the individual threads.

Thank you again for sticking with us and, as always, we are grateful for any feedback!

Ho man, we have got a ton to cover here this month, along with what's coming up in the future and feedback from you guys

Current events

Well congrats! The gang survived their first outing, and possibly learned why the emblems are so keen on the ritual here. Spoilers: they're dicks, but also other spoilers: there's something big and nasty down there, and nobody wants it waking up. Also lucky for the people here, the city is starting to wake up as much as it does during the early spring. Branches and foliage are starting to creep in from cracks in the walls, and some new wildlife is peeking about. Besides more birds appearing on the outside of the city walls, more small creatures are popping up inside the walls and underground to nest. Good luck keeping all those pigeons out. In addition to the normal wildlife there's been the appearance of three types of creatures that aren't generally found in nature.

The first are small wolpertinger-like things, who are quite friendly once anyone shows about .1 second of non-aggression. They'll happily come home with anyone who wants them. This could be because of the other things lurking around. Some strange wolf-colored versions of this nasty thing have realized that holy shit, there's meat around again and now wander around the various buildings. In packs. Apparently a good punch to the jaw will send them running, but being caught around a bunch of them is... not wise. There's also something that only seems to be caught out of the corner of the character's eye, and then is gone. Bits of gnarled wood peeking through the fur and tendril-like branches arching off the back of the animal. They don't seem to have any interest in the characters at the moment.

Ever since the game though, the tv's have been hissing static, but the occasional sounds come out of it now. Mostly an odd creaking and hushed voices, but once in a while music. Good news, they can be turned off now! Bad news is now the same sounds are coming out of the jukebox in the rec center. I'm sure it's fine.

Activity reward tiers

But so congrats! The month's passed and you're starting to rack up points. So what are some of the things you can get? Well a lot of the personal items come from doing quests for emblems, but there's also large-scale unlocks for the community. These fall into small, medium, and large tier rewards. The point values are yet to be assigned, but here's an example of some of what's possible:

small

-Favors: points can be exchanged with an emblem instead of doing a quest. This'll vary depending on what the character wants out of it.
-Unlock a floor: The character can explore/claim a single floor of a building without any monsters or other hazards
-Find an NPC: They may or may not be friendly, but at least it's a non-emblem to talk to.
-Reverse damage: While this doesn't make a space habitable, it can fix up small problems, or help keep a public space in better shape. While it might not seem like much, a bunch of people applying this can repair crucial functions to a building and restore it to service.

medium

-Fix up a floor/room: Want to patch up the ol' domicile or make an uninhabited floor decent? There you go.
-Establish a public space: Want a shop? A bar? Want to have all of that without owing an emblem five million favors? That's what this is for.

large

-Unlock a building: That's right, an entire building.
-Unlock an ability: for your emblem only, but everyone gets to use it.
-Discover an NPC species: Again, even if they're not friendly, at least you'll know about them before they attack.
-create/Become an Emblem: haha what? Who said that

And we're also taking suggestions for rewards! We wanna know what you want to spend points on.

Activity and feedback

And with activity rewards comes activity itself. The current system we have works for the main person doing the counting, but it is a lot of work to link every single thread. You could not link threads once you get more than ten comments, but then you're forfeiting points, and that doesn't seem right. However his could entirely be my bias of hating to hunt down everything and could be a perfectly fine level of legwork. So we're calling this plan A.

Plan B is a little more fast and loose. It requires less of the players and hopefully about as much work for the mods. It goes that the setup for the comments is the same, but if the comments on a post are under 500 and don't spread to two pages or more, then you can just link the post and go "[link] i did X comments". Then the person doing the counting can just do the search function that's in every browser and see if the comment count matches up. However if it goes to two pages or more, or goes over 500 comments? Then yeah we're going to need full links to track everything.

We are going to implement a tag system so that people can helpfully tag/find find their own stuff closer to activity day. However we also want to hear from you, what works, what doesn't. Does this level of complexity keep you from wanting to tag outside of your starter? Do you feel as inclined to play when you have a system that's kinda crunchy? Can you think of ways for the system to be improved? We want to make something that works now and in the future, but to do it we need to hear your voice in the comments.

On that note, how are the mods doing? Last game was pretty intense and we want to check in with everybody. Was the tone too much? Okay? Go harder into traumatown? Feedback is our lifeblood on this, because monthly kill games aren't one person being the mastermind and everyone else murdernating each other, it's a collaborative effort between players and shepherd. (Right now that's mainly mods being shepherd, but we're also working on a player's guide so that y'all can start shepherding in a month or so.) But yes, we can arrange clues or reply with npcs all we want, but without you guys? We're talking to an empty room. So we want to know your thoughts about all the things.

Hey there players and soon to be players! This is our mod team here and we have a fair bit of news to talk about, info to dump, questions to raise, and people to welcome.
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