GAMEPLAN: OCTOBER

[inthenightmods]

GAMEPLAN: OCTOBER

Hey there, players! Welcome to... The month of spooky!!! 👻🎃🍬

As we head into October, please make sure to respond to the activity check if you haven't already! We do not post warned lists, so make sure to get your AC in!


october 1-8

As per usual, the month will begin with our intro log on October 1! And we have not one, not two, but three exciting announcements regarding the intro log!

• First, thanks to some wonderful and proactive players, all tablets will now feature a welcome message with information about Beacon. It's mostly to catch new arrivals up on the current situation, but it's available for all!


• Second, if you participated in the recent scavenger hunt event, make sure to stop by the ferry to pick up your prize! If you haven't yet submitted your scavenger hunt selfies, there's still time! Head over to the Lighthouse Keeper's event post to submit your selfies. Submissions will be accepted until the end of the month, but the sooner your get your stuff in, the better! (for me, that is, says mippins. but also it'll be nice to have one less thing to worry about before the end of the month, hm?)


• And lastly, some intrepid adventurers have decided to take matters into their own hands by hijacking the ferry. Great idea, boys! However, shortly after the ferry docks and well before all the supplies in the cargo hold are unloaded, the ferry, with its new captains Crowley, Bucky, and Aziraphale will crash headlong into the docks. Uh oh.

What does that mean for, well, everything? Here's the short version: The ferry sinks, the docks are destroyed, and anything still on the ferry once it capsizes is lost forever. This includes stuff like personal packages and the monthly store restocks! Anyone on the dock or the ferry at the time of the crash will likely suffer some injuries too, ranging from cuts and bruises to broken bones and concussions, the type of stuff you'd incur from a semi-serious car wreck. Or maybe something more serious? Dealer's choice.

This player plot is opt-in, meaning you're more than welcome to assume your character escaped unscathed and/or managed to recover their personal package without issue. That said, the entire monthly store restock will be lost unless characters attempt to rescue it! If your character would chip in to help, let us know below. They'll be RNG'd for a mild injury, but each character will be able to salvage one day's worth of supplies.

As for the ferry... It sure is at the bottom of the lake! What that bodes for the next intro log remains to be seen.

Will should certainly have something to say about this month's intro antics, and you'll hear all about it in his network post on October 3! He's got a couple of new apps to share with you all.

Also on October 3, characters can look forward to mass carrion flower blooms throughout the forest! Titan arum, rafflesia, and other carrion flowers will pop up around town, never too close to any structures or paths but even so, the stench is hard to miss. Though the flowers only bloom for a day or two, they have the distinct smell of rotting meat and decaying flesh. The last of these flowers will bloom on October 7, and the thunderstorm on October 8 will wash away the last of the yucky scents.

october 9-17

Alright, it's time for our big event for the month. Bury a Friend will run October 9-17. Throughout the event, characters will hallucinate distortions in reality: objects moving when they shouldn't, people's proportions looking just a bit off, voices in an empty room, and so on. They're small things at first, easily chalked up to the mind playing tricks in the darkness, but as the event goes on, they become more intense and more difficult to separate from reality. By the final days, sometimes people won't even look like people anymore, but more like forest spirits or even corpses.

The most notable hallucinations, though, are the hands. Characters will see and feel disembodied hands reaching out from the darkness to puppet others—and themselves, on occasion—grasping roughly and shoving limbs around in jerky motions. Sometimes they even interact beyond the puppeteering, opening doors and knocking things off shelves, for example. Is it better or worse when you can see the poltergeist?

If you'd like an example of these hands at work, here's a sneak peak of our event song: Bury a Friend by Billie Eilish (cw for needles, flashing lights). Creepy, huh?

As per usual, we've got our monthly TDM on October 15, as well as the bimonthly HMD. Following that, characters can look forward to the first frost of the season on October 17! Winter's just around the corner, it seems. (What? No, not that Winters. He's still quite dead.)

october 18-31

The month will begin to wind down with some choppy waters and high waves on the lake from October 21-23. Characters down by the beach (like attempting to rebuild a dock, perhaps?) should steer clear of the water for those couple of days. The waves are loud enough that they can be heard faintly from town. Some dense fog will roll in on October 31 as well, just sticking around until November 1, but it'll be back—November's gonna be a foggy one.

And finally, in celebration of Halloween, some of the local forest spirits will be putting on a play in Bonfire Square on October 30 & 31! The play will be about a very spooky local legend... The Fire Snatchers! To further drive home the point of the play—Fire Snatcher awareness, that is—the forest spirits will spend these two days flitting about town snatchin' stuff right out from under you. That shiny new weapon of yours? Consider it snatched. Bite of cake on your fork? Also snatched. Your glasses? Snatched. Tablet? Snatched. Torch? Snatched. Fingernails? Sna—ah, erm, well. You get the picture. It's all in good fun, surely.

Oh, and the ferry's supposed to come again next month, isn't it? Hm...

HM...

ooc news

And lastly, we have some modly updates! These are reminders for the playerbase, features we've implemented over the course of the month, or other small notes that weren't quite big enough to warrant a whole-ass mod announcement on the OOC comm. Instead, these updates as well as any other future updates will appear in the gameplans for the month! So, here's what we've got:

• We've made some updates to our game rules! To be clear, we haven't changed any rules so much as revisited the wording to grant some additional clarity, especially regarding how the process works if you need to report another player's behavior. Please give the updates a read at your earliest convenience!


• We've also made some minor updates to the setting page to reflect recent discoveries and changes to the town in the past month or so. In particular, we've included links to relevant "townie" forest spirits and we've noted where torches are permanently placed around town.


• There's been a lot of speculation regarding a certain library book... This conversation isn't available to the public, but OOCly, here's a little clue as to what's up with that! This clue brought to you by your mods not wanting you to fly too far off track, but we love all the speculation!


• Reminder! If your character has taken a torch from the bonfire for exploration purposes, make sure to either have them return the torch or let us know where they've permanently placed it! The torches currently in use can be seen here, and you can also find this spreadsheet linked on the page.


• Reminder! If your character is in charge of a player project, please give the page a read to make sure your project's info is up to date! Some of the projects are still listed as works in progress, and we want to make sure the info on the page accurately reflects the state of the project! The player responsible for the project is also responsible for keeping us in the loop with regard to updates.


• Finally, we wanted to extend a formal invitation for players to drop ideas for holiday celebrations into the suggestion box! Now that the game has found itself and gotten through the beginning stages, we're going to begin incorporating real holiday celebrations into our monthly events. However, we don't want to limit the holidays to the white American Christianity-based culture holidays that we on the mod team have grown up with. So! While we have a list going for holidays we already plan to incorporate at some point down the road, we would love to hear ideas from you folks, our dear players, both because you've all proven to have amazing ideas already and because we're especially interested in doing our research! Ripping off of other cultures and appropriating traditions is absolutely not our goal, which is why it's important to us to hear from you folks if you've got suggestions or if you'd like to drop us some notes on how to properly represent a holiday that you celebrate. Thank you!

And that's all for October! As always, let us know below if you have any questions. Thanks, you rock stars. 😎

the tl;dr

• October 1: Intro log
  
• October 3: Will network post; Corpse flowers begin to bloom
  
• October 7: End of the corpse flower blooms
  
• October 8: Thunderstorm
  
• October 9: Bury a Friend begins
  
• October 15: TDM; HMD
  
• October 17: Bury a Friends ends; First frost
  
• October 20: Reserves open
  
• October 21: Choppy waters begin
  
• October 22: Reserves close; Apps open; AC begins
  
• October 23: Choppy waters end
  
• October 29: Apps close
  
• October 30: Lose Your Soul begins
  
• October 31: Lost Your Soul ends; AC ends; Fog begins

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