Hey everyone!
I know there’s a lot of speculation going around about our fall season, and I want to let you know what we’re planning on doing this year. It’s been a bit of a strange situation - the pandemic seems to be winding down, vaccinations are proceeding, things are getting better… but there’s still a lot of uncertainty.
All of that said, here’s your big headline from this post, before I go into more details:
Port Katherine will not be holding regular weekend-long events this fall.
In general, I feel like most of the activities on the player side are fairly safe: most activity is outside, and we can probably adjust cabin sharing to people in pods. However, this dramatically falls apart on the staff side, where we have large numbers of people (including one-time volunteers) sharing a mass sleeping area, sharing masks, etc. It’s just a recipe for disaster.
However, just because we’re not going to run full events doesn’t mean we won’t be doing anything. We feel like there are two big concerns we need to handle before we can run events, anyway, so this seems like a great time to handle those:
- We haven’t seen each other in a year and a half
- We haven’t played our characters in the same timeframe, and we’ve forgotten what’s going on
So here’s what we’re going to do. These plans are rough, and more details will come out as we get closer to the events listed. Essentially, we’re going to try to rebuild hype for Port Katherine through four main pillars, which I’m calling the Seasons of Hype:
Seasons of Hype: Chapter 1
One fall (lowercase) event on October 16.
This event will run from noon to 10pm-ish and will be entirely out-of-game. Essentially, we have non-refundable deposits for both of our previous dates in September and October, so we’d like to take advantage of the camp for at least one of them.
To help defray some of the cost, we’ll ask for sliding-scale donations to help rent the camp, with a suggested amount of $25 (though, it’s voluntary, and if you can’t afford to, that’s totally cool!). We’ll also ask that people bring food for potluck meals for lunch, snacks, and dinner, just to save our cooks from having to be too stressed out.
What we want is for a very relaxed hangout weekend. Come, see each other again, talk about your characters and your plots, etc. If you want to spar or hold fights, we’ll have space for that. If you’ve dreamed of running a one-shot mod on Camp Middlesex and want to run that for people - we have the camp and you can do that (please let us know so we can put you on the schedule, though we unfortunately won’t be breaking out any of our bins, so you cannot use any of our masks/costumes/mod hall stuff/etc)! We’d like to build a fire in the evening and hang out around it, enjoying being in company - if you have dreams of cooking over this fire, I’m excited about those dreams! We have the space, let’s enjoy it.
At some point during this event (schedule to come), we’ll have a sit down with staff to talk and answer questions about next year. We know you have a few.
This event will be child-friendly, so feel free to bring partners, friends, children, etc.
Vaccine policy for this event will be posted by the Board.
Seasons of Hype: Chapter 2
An in-game event over the winter.
This will be like a bare-bones Winter Feast. We’ll get together at a place (probably Hibernian), we’ll have a potluck, we’ll be in character, we’ll discuss plans and plots and stuff.
Staff probably won’t be running any plot, and we won’t have an auction. There will not be CP for this event, and there won’t be bgs. What we want is for people to have an opportunity to talk in game, remember plots, remember each other, etc. Start getting back into game. Start scheming. Discuss bgs from previous events, etc. This will also be an opportunity for players and staff to remember how to play our characters.
Seasons of Hype: Chapter 3
An online form.
After the in-game event, we’re going to send around a Google form with some basic questions. Things like: which plots are you involved with? Which ones do you enjoy? Which ones do you not enjoy? Which direction would you like to take your character next year? etc.
We know that the pandemic has changed us, and we may no longer like the plots or character direction that we may have loved just a short time ago. That’s ok. We want to remember and pivot with you, and this form will help us. Expect this after we’ve had the two events to jog our memories, but before we start the race to the spring season.
Seasons of Hype: Ongoing
After the October event and throughout the winter, we’re going to be trying to do a series of fun, hype-building events with small in-game prizes. Think about the things we did when we were first building hype for the game (the stretch goals stuff). These should be fun, chill things to do to get the forums and FB page hopping again and get us ready for spring.
So, you can see, we have a lot planned between now and next spring. We’re excited to get back into this game, and we hope you’re excited too. I know you have lots and lots and lots and lots of questions, and more details will be coming soon (especially about the October event). For now:
- Put that date on your calendars
- Let us know if you want to run something in the mod hall(s)
- Start thinking about your characters and get hyped!
Brian Misamore
Game Director, Port Katherine