July Update - Strain Variants, Books, and Schedule

Welcome to the July update, which only came out during July because the month was kind enough to have 31 days.

I guess the first thing to give in the transparency blog is how stupid-busy things have been on our side of the game running and development desk. We’ve been finalizing getting a book ready for release, working on writing a second, organizing our staff, running an ARG, and doing a lot of miscellaneous work like web design and graphics over the past month.

The other part of it is that Catie and I have very engaging jobs that sometimes require a massive volume of our attention. Catie got a promotion and a step over into a new company running massive corporate and wedding events, overseeing a full team, and organizing the needs of a growing venue. I’m still working in my VP of marketing and fractional marketing officer position, and a few of my bigger clients are in very busy parts of their seasons and need more direct interaction with me than normal.

The other part is that with as much work as we’ve been doing on game related things and away from game, we want to take our free time to do things together or take care of mundane life things (improving house, days out with family, etc.).

So, there is the first part of the transparency side of things.

The second half is going to be about book releases and Strain variants.

So, if you have been reading our social media posts, in our Discord, attending the national discord event, or attended any of the live meetings we’ve done on the Most Improbable Discord, chances are good you already have seen and heard about our CT Strain variants. They are TTRPG and LARP variants of current Strains where the Strain Traits and some of the roleplay of the Strain are slightly different from the universal Strains. They are designed to be unique mutations based on the screwed-up microcosm of The Wailing Shores. With that, we have had some questions that I want to answer in quick bullet point format.

·         Are these Strains only for DR CT or are they for the entire game?

o   They are only for DR CT. We went through the effort to make something unique to our play space for our players. Sometimes we get contracted to write stuff for the entire network to use, but in this instance, nobody contracted us for this. We paid for the creation of this book out of pocket, did a lot of the labor ourselves, and invested literal hundreds of hours to make something unique for our game.

·         Does that mean that all games can make unique Strain variants?

o   Only if they do it the right way. It requires publishing a book that has all of the details game runners and players will need to use these variants in both the TTRPG and LARP universe. To do this you need to create -new content- to DR Larp National who gets first review on it. After that it gets reviewed by the IP holders and then Onyx Path is given the option to review it as well. You will need to make sure that the book hits all the requirements that all the invested parties have for the book to be released, and you will have to do a lot of revisions.

The other thing to know is that making a book to this scale is not cheap, and as a single source, you will probably lose money doing it. Paying for editors, artwork, and more cost us about $1,000 without counting all the labor that we did in house. So, book releases need to be in connection to running an event that generates attendance to make it break even.

·         If I want to play one of these variants, I need to be based out of DR-CT?

o   Short answer is yes. Slightly longer answer is that with the new Advanced Membership rules you can have your character based out of whatever region you would like and gain the benefits of going to any virtual or personal game as if it were your home game.

·         What does “new content” mean exactly?

o   You can’t write content for someone else’s creation. So, if you are a game runner and are following the rules, you should have a play-space that is unique to your game and is not running on the cannon locations. So as an example (and I use this example because of its proximity to where I live and nothing else), you can have your game in “Old York” or “The Mass”, but you can’t control or change the canon characters, groups, or locations from the published materials.  These characters are someone else’s creative property, were written by someone else, and the owner of the IP has the ability to write or release content for those areas as they see fit.  

·         Can my game hire you guys to write a book for our game space where we give you input and ideas we want to see?

o   Yes, but understand that we would have to charge for our time. While it may not be a lot compared to what is going on, since we personally would not be running an event to earn back the time and money going into production of a book, we would have to charge.