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weirderthanthou2024-04-12 08:40 am
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BDE Spring 2024: It's Not A Lake, It's An Ocean
Hello, Fandom! Hope you've had a cosy time lately, because we're heading into darker, deeper waters. (Metaphorically speaking. Mostly.)
From Tuesday, April 23rd until Saturday, April 27nd, Fandom will be under siege by a phenomenon inspired by the Dark Place from Alan Wake. (Inspired by, and with the numbers filed off, since the sequel canonized your mayor as part of the Alan Wake-verse, whoops. Do not feel beholden to any video game rules; what's relevant to this BDE will be provided, everything else is improv.) What is the Dark Place? Well, it's a nightmare realm that feeds on creativity - and makes creative works real, in increasingly twisty, bendy ways.
On Tuesday, April 23rd participating characters on Fandom wake up feeling a surge of creativity. It doesn't matter in what form: if you're inclined towards the written word, you suddenly find yourself caught by a story; if you're a crafts person, you may suddenly feel a deep desire to crochet an awesome penguin family, and so forth. You'll feel compelled to go with that urge, though not in a fully life-eaty way-- no skipping classes, but definitely using your free afternoon to sit down and finally paint that masterwork.
The next day, the surge of creativity continues - but creations also start to come to life. Your penguin starts talking and going for walks, or you round the corner and find that painting you did of the Devil's Nest as a giant Vegas Strip-style architectural marvel is now reality! Cool, right? Think fun and zany!
And then Thursday comes around, and the Dark Place begins to twist all creations to its personal favorite genre: horror. Creatures become destructive, newly-created places turn into dark labyrinths that try to swallow you up, and sometimes the shadows move and stalk you. Uh oh.
By Friday, the turn into a horror story is complete, with the Dark Place glomming on to particularly productive people and creating a shadow self from their worst nightmares. (That doesn't mean your character must be obsessively working, though there's definitely precedent for obsession and you're welcome to play with your character being sucked too far into the process to notice... anything else.) These shadow selves hold all your worst impulses and twist them into the shape of a horror movie antagonist. You can fight/defeat them at any point - they just have to be gone by the finale.
The finale? Fandom must yank creative control back from the Dark Place, and turn this horror story into an action piece.
As far as you'd like! Owned buildings and characters are free game to tweak and change through creativity - we would like to ask you to put your name in under the OCD if you're planning to have a shadow self running amock, but otherwise, it's your canvas. Provided, of course, that everything does go dark by Thursday.
We do ask that if you want to change something about the island that you don't own - an existing public building, or adding a new place - you put in a request below. We'll get back to you and let you know if it's okay with us.
Why, by our old and trusted processes: research. The Research Team will meet up at the library on Thursday to start figuring out what's going on, concluding in a Special Collections visit on Friday. The Special Collections visit will be preplayed.
Once research team has determined that the Dark Place is trying to tell a story - a horror story, to be exact - and that arc of the story can be bent, it's up to our two-pronged strike team to do the rest. One group will stay in the safety of Town Hall to rewrite the story to the best of their ability. The other will set out to make that story real - through no-holds barred combat against the Dark Place's creations in the Park, all played on Saturday. This should be more of a free-for-all and doesn't need to be preplayed, but we're willing to NPC individual threads beforehand on request.
Deadline is Friday, April 19th.
And that's it! Any questions, comments, etc? Let us know.
From Tuesday, April 23rd until Saturday, April 27nd, Fandom will be under siege by a phenomenon inspired by the Dark Place from Alan Wake. (Inspired by, and with the numbers filed off, since the sequel canonized your mayor as part of the Alan Wake-verse, whoops. Do not feel beholden to any video game rules; what's relevant to this BDE will be provided, everything else is improv.) What is the Dark Place? Well, it's a nightmare realm that feeds on creativity - and makes creative works real, in increasingly twisty, bendy ways.
So what's this going to look like?
On Tuesday, April 23rd participating characters on Fandom wake up feeling a surge of creativity. It doesn't matter in what form: if you're inclined towards the written word, you suddenly find yourself caught by a story; if you're a crafts person, you may suddenly feel a deep desire to crochet an awesome penguin family, and so forth. You'll feel compelled to go with that urge, though not in a fully life-eaty way-- no skipping classes, but definitely using your free afternoon to sit down and finally paint that masterwork.
The next day, the surge of creativity continues - but creations also start to come to life. Your penguin starts talking and going for walks, or you round the corner and find that painting you did of the Devil's Nest as a giant Vegas Strip-style architectural marvel is now reality! Cool, right? Think fun and zany!
And then Thursday comes around, and the Dark Place begins to twist all creations to its personal favorite genre: horror. Creatures become destructive, newly-created places turn into dark labyrinths that try to swallow you up, and sometimes the shadows move and stalk you. Uh oh.
By Friday, the turn into a horror story is complete, with the Dark Place glomming on to particularly productive people and creating a shadow self from their worst nightmares. (That doesn't mean your character must be obsessively working, though there's definitely precedent for obsession and you're welcome to play with your character being sucked too far into the process to notice... anything else.) These shadow selves hold all your worst impulses and twist them into the shape of a horror movie antagonist. You can fight/defeat them at any point - they just have to be gone by the finale.
The finale? Fandom must yank creative control back from the Dark Place, and turn this horror story into an action piece.
So how far does this 'creativity becomes reality' thing go?
As far as you'd like! Owned buildings and characters are free game to tweak and change through creativity - we would like to ask you to put your name in under the OCD if you're planning to have a shadow self running amock, but otherwise, it's your canvas. Provided, of course, that everything does go dark by Thursday.
We do ask that if you want to change something about the island that you don't own - an existing public building, or adding a new place - you put in a request below. We'll get back to you and let you know if it's okay with us.
So how are we going to fix this?
Why, by our old and trusted processes: research. The Research Team will meet up at the library on Thursday to start figuring out what's going on, concluding in a Special Collections visit on Friday. The Special Collections visit will be preplayed.
Once research team has determined that the Dark Place is trying to tell a story - a horror story, to be exact - and that arc of the story can be bent, it's up to our two-pronged strike team to do the rest. One group will stay in the safety of Town Hall to rewrite the story to the best of their ability. The other will set out to make that story real - through no-holds barred combat against the Dark Place's creations in the Park, all played on Saturday. This should be more of a free-for-all and doesn't need to be preplayed, but we're willing to NPC individual threads beforehand on request.
Deadline is Friday, April 19th.
And that's it! Any questions, comments, etc? Let us know.
