The End Was Nigh 2: Being an NPC in the Zombie Wasteland

This weekend was my second trip to Dystopia Rising, the three day immersive LARP set after the end of the world. This was different than the first go around, as this weekend I was doing the NPC shift the entire weekend.

During Dystopia Rising, players take shifts portraying various NPCs for the numerous Modules taking place from 10pm Friday until 12pm Sunday. Some people can pay to opt out of the service but most look forward to it. Some even decide to NPC for the entire weekend.

After my first time around, I got a lot of feel for the game, but not enough of the world. I had stayed mostly around the central area as I was a newer player, so I didn't get a taste as much for the actual game world. One of the best ways to learn about a game's world is to take on the role of NPCs. As the DR Storytellers said, it is not the NPCs job to win. Non Player Characters exist to flesh out the world, to give the players a deeper understanding than just themselves in the area. We could do that, but that would be dull. So I saw this as me learning the breadth and depth of the game and how the covert and overt ways stories are told in game.

This is a list of modules that I went out on.

Friday:
- Shambler Module: The first shift started as a basic Shambler Zombie. We were given stats, and the Marshall in charge of the Module coordinated and acted as our Respawn point. That's right, I've played about 50 or so characters, most of them undead. I've died pretty much through all of them. This scene wasn't just a standard raid though. This was the first salvo of how fucked up the weekend was going to be. Two Human NPCs, one of them a Clown, were Crucified (complete with Two Crucifixes) in an ice field near town. We Shamblers were enjoying the lovely meal laid out before us.

When your weekend begins with Crucifying Clowns, it's all down hill from there.

- Another module had gone out to attack the main building itself (there was a lot of that), and we were on standby. These were a Warrior Tribe raiding the area. Once they were done and off to do another module, they then sicked the Shamblers on the town. Because this is Dystopia, if you did well, that just means the Difficulty Level will be increased.

The Beatings will continue until Morale has been eroded.

- Cult of Darwin Module: A few months back, a Giant (Read: As big as a two floor cabin) Spider had attacked the town. We went in as a group of Retrograde Darwinists. Retros are like the Fallout Ghouls, their bodies ravaged by radiation. They are notifiable by their masks, which they use to tell others "Don't shoot, we're not Zed". Darwinists are a cult that believes in evolution and worship Radiation. I was part of a three man squad going around asking the townsfolks about any kind of information they had about the Spider. The gist was "Don't be Stupid, Evade it." Actually, one person was summed it up in two words "Fuck all".

The two other NPCs were really  gung ho about the spider and giddy with the glorious wonderment. My Retrograde was a little wearier (hey, I was given the money. You don't give it to the two REALLY excited ones). As the trek went on, the other two continued talking, and pieces started falling off of one from Retrograde rotting. "Between the two of you," I said as we left the town. "There is a brain."

The night ended, and I crashed into my sleeping bag. The Shanty Town where I was camped was already covered in mud and freezing. But my sleeping bag was apparently unimpressed. It deserves a mention in this blog.

Saturday Afternoon

- Shambler Mod attacking the Double Tap, the main building. In this we played Spikers, a form of Zombie with a stump for an arm. A steel spike can shoot out of the stump and impale a player, immobilizing them except for Psychic and Brawling attacks. One of the characters though was advanced enough in skill where he could soak up damage from the Zombies, even impaled. Leading to this exchange:

"Come on. Eat me! Yeah! I'll fight you back. Headbutt (0 Damage!), Shin Kick (0 Damage!)" Then he proceeded to eat the zombies, making "ANG-ANG-ANG-ANG!!!" Sounds the entire time. I was trying hard not to crack up.

There were two of these that day and I did both.

- The Next Module was an RP module, with me playing a member of the Outer Guard. The Outer Guard are an NPC faction that protect the town from 90% of the shit out there. Think on that for a second, in a weekend, THOUSANDS of zombies are killed. And that may only be 10% of what is really out there.

Well, the Outer Wall had been breached. And the other 9 out of 10 decided to crash the party.

I was cast as a Runner, someone coming into town to call for aid. I was informed out of character to grab as many as quickly as possible, because as time went by, the outpost would be lost and the Zed would swarm into town. I was afraid no one would listen, and I'd only have five people roll in with me.

Would you believe it, half the town showed up with two minutes to spare on the clock. It then became total warfare as the Citizens of New Havyn took on the Shambling Horde, waves upon waves of high level Zed, including high powered Tanks (Tanks have 300 HP, in a game where the average amount of Damage Dealt per blow is around 4 or 5). This happened in an open field, covered in ice. The sun hanging high and the snows letting mist rise in the mild air.

For a moment, my mind let go of the fact that this was make believe. The mists blurred the lines, and for a brief moment, this was happening. A full on war between civilization and the remnants of the cursed wasteland.

And I was a part of it.

I realized that I was standing in the back. Throughout most of the game, I was playing with stubby little foam beater sticks to represent the claws and fists of Zed. My previous PC had a short melee weapon not really useful in a fight. I was playing a Guardsmen, what most people called catastrophic, my guy called it Tuesday morning. These were Marines, The Night's Watch and the Centurions wrapped into one. I realized I was holding a sword in my hands, the hilt roughly the same size as the hilt of the lightsaber I use in NY Jedi. I smiled a little in that brief second.


Fuck the back line.

I grabbed the sword and started calling for the line to be held, I made sure that the other outer guard NPC was taken care for and put in the back line until he was ready to come out (He'd been tortured, killed, brought back, healed, and tortured again.) When the next wave of Zed came out, we all struck them down.

It felt fun, and it felt good, and for a while you forgot the lines between Real, Unreal, and Surreal. When the Zombies finally got me into Bleed Out (Your HP is at 0 and you have five minutes to get first aid or you die) they surrounded me and began to feast. I took the lesson from the previous module and ran with it.

"Enjoy it!" I screamed, amidst the cries of anguish as I pretended to be rend from the arms and back. "Enjoy your meal! Enjoy your fucking meal! I hope you choke as I go down!"  Soon, PCs came in and cleared up, dragging me (literally at one point) to the back line to get healed. "Just give me enough to go back!" I screamed as they healed me, acting out the pain of flesh being stitch, of bones being reset. "I'm not done yet! Those soulless fucks got to get through me first!"

This happened three times, and it got more and more gruesome as time went on. I was at the three minute count the last time, lying dead on the snow before I was saved.

The battle lasted maybe twenty, thirty minutes. I couldn't tell, but the PCs had won, with little to no casualties. They saved both myself and the tortured Guardsmen and got us back into town. Good thing they saved him too, because he had info they would need for the night's festivities.

Saturday Night
By now, my feet were soaked through and through and freezing. I knew that I didn't have much time before I was risking illness. I wanted to continue on until I couldn't hold out any more.

- The first mod of the evening I did was an odd RP one. There were, apparently, a lot of Stephen King references. So someone asked if anyone knew the plot to Misery.

"Yo!" I said. I was asked then by Abigail, the Storyteller on call, what I knew about telling a story.

Guess who I got casted as from Misery, go on.

So the module went. I played Richard, an Entertainer who specialized in Storytelling. I was abducted by Celestia, a backwoods Doctor who had become...overly enamored with my stories. We were coming into town to pick up supplies. I was to try to find a way to escape without her noticing or being able to stop me. This meant asking the townsfolk to make it through.

It wasn't the easiest to get people hooked into the story and was rough sailing. Even after telling a story that basically said "Help! Help! Crazy Bitch has abducted me and hobbled my leg! Let me go!" no one did much of anything. At one point, me and the player spoke out of character. She said, "Make a run for it. See what happens."

So, I did my patented "Hey! Look at that thing!" And made a mad dash. I get out of the door and suddenly I get pinged three times, each one dealing 4 points of damage. The Doctor caught up and hit me. Now, I'm 5'10, 5'11 on a good day and weight two hundred and *cough**hack**sneeze**Denial* pounds. Everyone though that I was the aggressor, and started attacking me. I quickly went into bleed out, and the Doctor came in to patch me up and cart me away. That was going to be the end of it, a bad misunderstanding, and poor Richard Bachman was going back into Annie's cabin again.

Then one of the people in the room, one who had heard Richard's story, stepped in. To intervene. It was clear the Doctor would be shot if she tried anything rash. I broke her grip on me and she took another swing, but not before getting shot herself. As she was dealing with her attackers, I made a run towards the tap, trying to cut through the townsfolk and weaving, trying to get as much distance and obstacles away from her.

Then I felt the hit on the left leg, Richard's good leg, and the call for Mangle Limb.

She got the other leg.

So there I was, crawling through the snow and trying to get as much distance from Doctor Crazy Bitch as much as possible, by then the Deputies had grabbed us both. The gentleman who intervened before explained parts of the situation, which then turned into a discussion about slavery. Richard was being kept to tell her stories, and she mangled his right leg when he tried to escape.

She resisted, but the informed her if she tried anything then she'd be shot in the head. The Deputies told me to run as soon as my legs were healed and they got her to the far corner of the room. My legs were set, and she was out of sight. I slunk out of the bar and ran back to freedom (in this case, the operations office). As I ran, the Doctor's screams were heard, and then immediately silenced.

- The second Mod was a simple one wave Raider attack on the Double Tap building. Just as a way of making the players feel good. The Storyteller's job is to evoke emotions. False Hope is an emotion, right?

- The third one was fun. It was involving the backstory of a PC, as slavers from her past had come into town posing as Bounty Hunters looking for her. The town gets hip to this quick though, and we go through what is essentially a shell game as the PC is carted away right under our nose. We're then asked/told to leave town until we get documentation of the bounty. As we leave town one of the Deputies, played by my friend Ericka, stops us.

"Slavery is illegal in this town."

The entire six man team stops in their tracks. I'm carrying a larg warhammer in my hands and it slowly rolled from my shoulders into a nonchalant low guard in case things went south. "Slavery?" I said, in a Lone Star drawl. "That's a new one. You hear that boys? We's a bunch of slavers." Cue laughs. "Lady, we'll come back with the papers. You jus be sure to hold her for when we do." Then we sauntered off into the night.

Sorry Ericka, but I was ready to bring the hammer down on you.

- the next mod was a quick one designed to 1) get the players healed and their equipment ready for the oncoming shit storm that was that evening and 2) warn them about said shit storm. In video games, this is the moment where the game stops you to tell you you should probably save your game in case you want to do some more prep before going balls deep. In this mod, I played a Pikey, a backwater Irishman who was part of the O'Neill family of Tinkers. The O'neills have a mangled Irish brogue. When trying to describe how the O'neills dressed (NPCs have a costume and make up section) Mike, the St in charge of the module, pointed to me. I was dressed in a beige canvas hooded jacket with a long sleeved flannel t-shirt over a pair of coveralls. He said that was how they dressed. This made me happy because this was what I was planning on wearing for my Retrograde Tinker. It's nice to get the mood right.

We go through town, and everyone has already left for the big ass mod. Whoops. We move through and basically make small talk, I fix one set of armor before we're called away to prep for the major moment of the night.

- We all Zed up again and head to the Radio Tower. Standing at the Tower is the Crimson King. Yes, That Crimson King. Except this one isn't screeching and dropping bombs, he's knuckling up and calling us Zeds to protect him. I'm now on the other side of the epic battle. It's dark now, and the mist is making everything hazy. My feet are soaked through and through and I feel my lungs start to buckle in the first signs of asthma. This is it for me, the last push. So we go to town.

About twenty minutes in, a Medical Hold is called. Action and RP is dropped. Someone was on the floor and it was clear that it wasn't RP.

I can only describe the next 15 minutes in the feel than in the scene. I was in the far corner of the field with the other NPCs. The players had taken a large swath back and let the Marshalls take care of things. There was a quick and deft action going on here. These weren't amateurs, they knew protocol and procedure. I could hear the standard questions checking for concussion, as the more questions were being asked, the more I could tell there was consciousness but probably not all copacetic. We were all told to disperse and head back to Ops to await the ambulance to come in and do their job.

This is one of the cons of Boffer LARPing. You're out there, in the woods, being active. You run the risk of getting hurt, getting sick.  The mark of a well run game is shown by people who acknowledge that and know damn well what to do when it does happen. These guys run this game well.

In about 40 minutes, game was called back on and the Zed were called out to do more modules. I called it, as I was becoming unable to warm up. That was the last NPC module I'd do.

A Word on Playing the Wind.

It's a trade off, really, playing a full time NPC in a fully immerse game such as Dystopia Rising. Once you're not playing an NPC, you do not exist in the game space. You must keep out of character the entire time, even if you have one. You've relinquished the right to use it.

This becomes very difficult when you're asleep in the shanty town, it's constantly being ransacked, and your sleeping bag is the first one at the door. Fortunately NPCs make a lot of noise. But that also means I've got to keep my hand to my head to denote "I am out of character, I do not exist here. This is not the victim you are looking for, go about your business." And then having to do the same when the players clean up and check on bodies.

When we as NPCs go out into Modules, we go out of character and move from one place to another. We don't exist in the gaming world at the moment. I've seen someone RP coming across a caravan of Out of Character NPCs in transit as being in a stiff wind. That's what we are for the time being, we're the wind. We move, and we make noise and push when we have to.

I had a really good and tiring time playing, this has given me a lot of ideas for the new character I want to bring in to game, as well as inspiring me about Storytelling. Props to Liam, Shosanna, Mike, Abigail, Allie and everyone else in the Ops booth who put me to work like the Henchman that I am (it's a time honored Page tradition). And thanks to Michael Pucci for building this fucked up playground of mud, viscera and madness I had a blast and would do it again.

But for right now, the character comes first. Especially now that I have this...

Built for me by my friend Bartosz. The pen is added for scale. I'ma call it "The Fix". A perfect weapon for a Tinker for Old York. I also know what I'm going to stencil on the side there:  

Do Not Go Gentle...

They gave me a weapon, now I get to play.

See you folks in the Wasteland.

Later.