The Grave Mind is the weirdest part about Dystopia Rising, and players love weird stuff. It’s where our world becomes unique and unpredictable.

When you design a boffer larp, you’re not really making a competitive game: the players are going to win. Like a video game, there’s an illusion that you’re struggling against an opponent, but in the end, the NPCs are going to lose, and the storytellers aren’t really trying to defeat you. Instead, there has to be an “illusion of failure,” mixed with actual setbacks, minor defeats, and “reach goals,” to create the sense that you have agency, when actually, it’s really hard to lose. So the biggest challenge for designers is how much adversity should players encounter before they win… or “how much is too much?”

Hello Readers! We are back with another blog post, and this one serves a couple of purposes; transparency and bringing attention to collaborative play.

It’s clear to us that our players have enjoyed the “Fuck Around And Find Out” mentality and ability to opt in that came with Red Line. While thats still very much on going, we would like to offer another opt in for “Fuck Around And Find Out” that’s a bit more in theme for the spooky season.

With a new season of Dystopia Rising New York beginning, there’s a few items that haven’t been taken care of.

Requiem doesn’t really have laws… it has rules. The Treaty of the Fold binds the Families of Requiem together under the rule of the High Lord Executioner, but historically, people ended up here because they got run out of somewhere else.

As we prepare for Honor’s Fall, we spent a lot of time talking about Saturday night, when our players and NPCs all settle a year’s worth of scores between sunset and sunrise. But just as big an event is our Hot Zone, the special event mod we’re running that weekend. While we’re sending out dozens of mods and have a couple of staff shambles planned, the Hot Zone will be central to the event, and we want to make sure everyone gets a chance to enjoy our Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) wasteland. So how do we take what we learned with our previous Special Event mods, like our Train Job in April or our Jonestown Run last month, and scale it for a game that might reach 200 people? Read on to learn more…

Our May event, The Reckoning, concludes a plot arc that began in January. We’re very excited about what we have planned, including the final showdown with Jim Jones, and the return of Anton Anastasia. We’re extremely excited to see what our players do when he shows up. But as we prepare for the end of The Reckoning, we have to ask… how do we end a story in a larp?

Running a Dystopia Rising game is a balancing act. On one hand, you need to give people something to do - it’s a boffer larp so there has to be some sort of challenge or, at the very least, an enemy to fight. On the other hand, every challenge that you put in the game is an obstacle and that obstacle takes effort to overcome. If the challenge is too little, the players get bored.

Dystopia Rising New York (DRNY) says that we’re a survival horror larp - but what does that mean? A lot of other larps also say that and some of them are pretty different from us. Rather than offer an academic definition, we want to tell you what you can expect from our survival horror game.