Cold nights. Searing fires. Strange gatherings. An indefinable sense of anticipation, as the days creep ahead…
UPCOMING EVENTS: There’s no official word just yet, but it’s the beginning of December – and if past years are any clue, that can mean only one thing: GIFTMAS! Sometime in the coming weeks as the holidays draw near, the Giftmas “Tree” may be making its appearance – a huge old boiler around which Wastelanders may leave free gifts for friends and neighbors and enemies alike. And, just perhaps, this year will bring a new set of limited-edition Collectibles in the salvage spawn….
In the meantime, weekly events both traditional and new will give you a distraction from any chilly winter malaise. (You lucky jerks in the summery Southern Hemisphere can come too. I GUESS.)
Give your Mutant look another workout this Saturday at 11am SLT as Wastelanders gather to raid a new Scavenger Hunt. This week’s fare? The Post-Apocalyptic Mutant Hunt, taking place on 28 shops and sims around the Grid — none of them, surprisingly, in The Wastelands. Give these Mutant Hunters a taste of their own medicine! Gear up in your best Mutant avatar, gather at the Bunker in The Wastelands shortly before 11, and head out on the hunt: find the hidden radiation symbols, score some free and presumably-apocalyptic loot, and show the other hunters who the REAL post-apocalyptic scavengers are. In Soviet Wastelands, Mutant hunts YOU!
Afterwards, make your way to Hambone Slash at 3pm SLT for this month’s War Zone! Two teams of fighters will vie for control of the green-glowing Wastelands flag in a fast-paced chase all over the sim. But it’s no mere Follow-the-Leader – the flag deals a long slow dose of radiation to the bearer, so no one person can hold it for long! They’ll try to pass it off to a teammate, without it being stolen by the opposing team – who, not incidentally, are also shooting, slashing, and bludgeoning everyone within reach. If you’d rather not participate, have a seat on the floating platform – it always hovers above the flag, making sure you get a good view of the action without risking a Flayer to the face.
After the bodies are scooped up from the sand, you’ll have about an hour to grab some food, refill your drinks, and prepare for the rest of the night’s entertainment starting at 5pm. At that time, Giuseppe Spicoli may host a surprise bonus Movie Night! One never knows until the day of…. If not, DJ Aposiopesis Fullstop will again hoist her boombox and play another set of musical miscellany as Apo’s Audio Atrocities returns to The Sledgepile.
On Sunday, head back to the Arena to catch the Curse of the Crimson Throne tabletop game from 10am to 2pm SLT, to watch the intrepid adventurers’ face their almost-inevitable doom. Not only have they found the source of the terrible Bloodveil plague that has besieged the town of Korvosa, but they’ve also found the secret lab where an even more virulent variant is being created. Worse, they’ve found the alive-after-all Jolistina – along with a necromancer, and the mad Dr. Davalus, AND a bevy of zombie and priest goons. One member of the party is down; most of the rest are wounded; the wands of Cure Moderate Wounds have barely a dozen charges remaining. Can they recover their fallen comrade and heal him? Can they defeat the rest of these enemies despite the overpowering odds? Or will they suffer the ignominy of the Total Party Kill? Come watch their brave if implausible efforts – and if it sounds intriguing, well, there just may be an opportunity for some new and backup players soon.
Head to Burnt Oak on Monday at 6pm SLT to catch DJ Giuseppe Spicoli playing an incomparable mix of music at the Boat House – followed by Movie Night at 7 or 7:30 pm!
EVENTS HIGHLIGHTS: Beautiful mutants of all sizes, shapes, and colors beset The Wastelands on Saturday at the first – and perhaps first annual – Gathering of the Tribes. Organized by Ccindy Pfeffer and the Grotesks, the concept was of a great meet-up of Mutant tribes from around the Wastelands, all coming together to dance, drink, and fight on the salt flats of Cormac. The dress code was Mutants Only or risk being sacrificed – so, avatars familiar to all as Smoothskins, Manimals, Ghouls, and even the Tin Man himself were dressed to the mutagenic nines for this festive event. It began as Ccindy hosted Fight Night, which was a riotous and hilarious success despite – and in some cases because of – the fierce lag caused by the huge numbers of spectators. After the end of the two-on-two matches, the duo of Tokiko and Dassina took first place overall – and got their first choice of two pieces of scrap from Ccindy’s years-old horde of scrap, weapons, and collectibles. All participants got to take home at least one prize, however!
Once the traditional photos were finished, the party moved to Cormac – where the normally-barren salt flats were decorated with travelers’ tents, boxes and barrels and bars, spears and totems, sacrificial poles – and, at the center of it all, a towering grey monolith to the King of Fire. Its stoneskull eyes glowed red from the intense sacrificial fires below, upon which many heads and corpses burned with intense flames and shrouded by thick gouts of smoke. Aposiopesis Fullstop provided the music with an eclectic mix of folk, tribal, experimental, and world music – created with much help from expert consultant Diamanda Gustafson — as the revelers danced around (and often through) the flames. However, the Homestead of Cormac was full to capacity barely ten minutes into the event – so the whole works, totems and all, were packed up and moved to the central plateau of the Great Fissure where more participants could be supported.
The music played, the dancers spun, the Ba~Wi boose flowed steadily (and no small amount of imbibing likely took place for the participants in the real world,) and occasional semi-in-character comments were made about sacrificing smoothskins and the occasional small rodent. Still more prizes were given out as Ccindy and the Grotesks announced the winners of the costume contest, decided upon by their votes: squat, green, covered with bulbous masses, and blessed with some truly unique facial geometry, Jordy Parkin shared first place with the taller green tribal mutant of Aposiopesis Fullstop. The grotesque mass of mutated flesh and appendages, Smokey Steamweaver, shared third place with Chrystal Low, another tall, green, and curvy avatar wearing tattered clothes, a bone hoop skirt, and a scrap-parts mask. Tokiko Tigerpaw as a shorter mutant with multiple heads sprouting from her body took fifth place. All of them got to pick more prizes from Ccindy’s stash.
When the last of the official set died down, Apo continued the music for a few hours for those remaining – playing, by request, the whole of Tom Waits’ Bone Machine album, followed by a random assortment of more mellow songs suitable for winding down after the wild events of the day.
Sunday’s session of The Curse of the Crimson Throne was harsh indeed for the party. After suffering some Lightning Bolts and Scorching Rays, the Gnomish barbarian (Grinx) was down for the count, and the rogue’s (Syruss) bottle of concealing smoke was the only thing that let the druid (Apo) escape with the last bits of her life. Both the Sable Company Marine (Stupid) and the rogue took heavy damage, and the only creatures mostly unscathed were the hippogriff and velociraptor – which couldn’t even get in the bottleneck of a door without provoking scores of attacks. But Jolistina was grievously wounded, and the Marine readied himself on his mount, preparing to charge forth….
Speaking of horrible unmerciful suffering, Giuseppe Spicoli continued the run of so-bad-it’s-good Movie Nights on Monday with what some might consider the first and the worst of the bad video game movies: 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.” Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo ‘star’ as Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, the titular plumbers. Seemingly directed by someone who never played the game, never even saw the game, but only had the game described to them by a lunatic on peyote and/or crack, the movie’s Brooklynite Mario brothers had to rescue Princess Daisy from King Koopa… a humanoid descendant of dinosaur ancestry, since the meteorite impact that supposedly made the dinosaurs go extinct actually created a tangent dimension in which dinosaurs survived, evolved, and became sentient. Koopa rules the dystopian Mushroom Kingdom after de-evolving the rightful king into a fungus and de-evolving other inhabitants into tiny-headed reptilian Goomba goons – but he seeks Princess Daisy’s meteorite necklace so that he might use it to repair the otherwise-intact meteorite and magically combine the two worlds once more, to thereby take over the world of the mammals. Two worlds are at stake as the Mario Brothers attempt to defeat Koopa and rescue the princess, with only the most glancing and tangential references to the actual video game being made the entire time.
ESTATE NEWS: Phase Republic, a digital anthropology student of University College London, is writing an academic paper on participation in The Wastelands! With Neo’s permission, he’s posted a survey to help illuminate the ways in which Wastelanders participate in Second Life and in The Wastelands. It’s a short survey, and can be found at the following link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3FH6XMX
The Wastelands HUD is in line for an update! Suggestions are still being taken for brand-new weapons, old weapons you’d like to come back, or new ways of handling the damage system. Read the ideas and post your own in this Forum thread!
The Wastelands Referral Program continues! Inspire someone to buy a plot of land owned by NeoBokrug Elytis, and you get a cut of its price! 50% if you are a current landowner yourself, 25% for ex-residents, visitors, and others.
It’s December! The new Land Token will be appearing in the salvage spawn sometime this month, so keep a watchful eye on the sands.
RP NAME-DROPS: The pale and secretive Cloudy has revealed that she’s planning on creating a community market in Malady Bog. To learn how you might help, seek her out in her swampy abode near the northern central border.