 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and one thing that you might not know about me is that my life does not revolve entirely around D&D. In my free time I enjoy taking trips to various LARPs in my general area and I recently got sent a message by a famous LARP known as dystopia rising telling me that their new Michigan branch, Morning Glory, was just about to open in a few weeks and they asked me if I would come down free of charge to review their game form. So, giving my propensity for dressing up like a fool and hitting people with foam, I grabbed two of my buddies and jumped right into the car. Now, I want to say right now that dystopia rising has a bit of a reputation, as national LARPs that span across the country tend to go, having an intensely social system involving a lot of people who are typically not the most socially confident is a recipe for drama. That being said, I have never experienced DR before now and I'm not about to have social media dictate what I should and shouldn't experience before I even get the chance to form an opinion myself. So, here is my honest to goodness review of dystopia rising, Morning Glory. The price. So, I have to start with the price because it is by and large the deciding factor for a lot of people. If you don't get the mums, you don't get the funds. The first time starter pack is $35 and that includes 48 hours of game time, spread over three days from noon on Friday until noon on Sunday, plus lodging in the form of two scout camp dorms. After your first event, the price fluctuates depending on how much NPC time you sign up for, with no NPC time starting at $100, two hours for $85, four hours for $65, and six hours for $45. There's also a one day 10 hour pass plus two hours of NPC time for the original price of $35, but for some reason you only get one XP out of the normal eight that you would get for going to an event, even though that is not how math works. Finally, if you aren't going to be able to play the game but you still want your full eight Disney bucks, you can spend $65 to be marked as an attendant but not show up at all, or you can just be a dedicated NPC for 12 hours at absolutely no cost. While the prices for doing less NPC time are absolutely bonkers and clearly trying to influence as much NPC time as possible, I can still find the almost $50 price tag reasonable for me, but perhaps not for those on about it. Pregame. Making a character online is a bit of a slog. It's easy enough to find the branch of the game that's closest to you by just using the dystopia rising website, but once you're introduced to the varying strains, their version of classes, the links don't seem to work on mobile, making it difficult to find out for the first time what each strain actually is and how to build a character around it. Still, I was able to ask a friend who directed me to their Facebook page, and I got a quick response in the form of a link to download their rulebook on Drive Through RPG, which is certainly a place to put your book. It all feels clunky and with just that one extra step that manages to frustrate you. Granted, this is a problem that's representative of DR as a company, and it has little to do with the Michigan chapter specifically. Now, the equipment that you're gonna wanna bring is LARP clothing, which can be accomplished by going to the thrift store and picking out anything that looks either trashy or like it came out of 90s biker gang, LARP weapons in the form of nerf guns and melee weaponry, and sleeping utensils like blankets and toiletries. You definitely are going to wanna blanket, even if you don't use it. I didn't bring one, and my dorm was cold as ice. It felt like the bed was siphoning the heat away from me. And then I woke up to hear that the other dorm was burning hot the entire night. So, yeah, bring a blanket just in case. The Location. Dystopia Rising Morning Glory uses the red-toed space of the Outdoor Education Center of Battle Creek, a children's camp with one main building, two dorms, and about 175 acres of land, including a lake and an island dubbed Murder Island. Given that it was cold out, I didn't see an overly large amount of the outside area, and I never made the pilgrimage to Murder Island, but I did experience a lot of winding forested trails, and even the parking lot was utilized for a huge nighttime raid on an enemy armored truck. I spent most of my time in the main building, which had two large side rooms, a basement, and a lobby with a front desk in the middle. The majority of my time was spent trouncing between the rooms, and sometimes diving down into the basement, which they had repurposed as a mine shaft, and then running back up when a bunch of scary things with claws tried to eat me. By the end of the event, I did feel a little constricted, but I can chalk that up to bad weather keeping me grounded in a single building than anything wrong with the LARP. The First Day. Arriving at the location, I was initially worried that I might be in the wrong place, due to the lack of signs shouting Dystopia Rising at you. But that could just be first event jitters. We technically arrived in the afternoon of Saturday because we had a prior commitment Friday, so when we arrived, the front desk was pretty clear. They asked us our real name, our character name, and what our strain was. Dystopia Rising has four main stats, and besides role-playing ability, the strains just seemed to assign different starting numbers to your stats. My friends and I all picked diesel jocks because Michigan was the motor city, and we got our character sheets before we were thrust into the world. The overall experience was a bit daunting, but the guy working the desk did a great job of answering any questions that I had. My only gripe is that besides stats and a very basic rundown of the rules, I was pretty much just thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to go swim. That's fine with me because I'm the kind of cool dude that ignores instruction manuals and then has no idea what to do for the next five hours, but other people might be bothered by the lack of explanation or direction. The story. The whole idea of Dystopia Rising, as I was able to ascertain, is that there was an apocalypse that happened a long time ago, and nobody knows what happened because the cause was lost to the sands of time. Since then, the world has turned into an amalgamation of Mad Max, Borderlands, Fallout, and Rust. There are different bloodlines of people who have survived through different means, like Fury Road gearheads, deceased persons who towed the line between human and Zed, Old Vegas dwellers that formed an entire society off of flashy clothes and loaded dice, and Canadians. Canadians never die. They ask life politely to stay. Along the way, you battle zombies and raiders, build a community, and possibly join one of the many religions and cults that have popped up in the wake of the wasteland. The way that it's presented is very well done, and I found myself getting lost in all the lore that came packaged with the game. Combat. Combat is the cornerstone of most larps, usually the second most important thing behind the price. And I'm happy to say that the combat in dystopia rising is an absolute blast. It is as simple as, melee weapon does one damage, guns do five damage against zombies, where they also do one damage, with special skills and items just serving to modify that basic premise. I can't tell you how immensely satisfying it is to empty a bunch of nerf bullets into an enemy and then run away screaming when it gets mad at you. It captures the fun of seven-year-old me with my friends shooting at invisible zombies and at each other, for no reason other than because nerf battles are cool, bro! And to make sure that you get your boats back, you should write down your character ID number on them so that even if you don't find them, someone else might bring them back to the post office for you. Crafting. Crafting is somehow one of the best parts of DR, which is silly to me in retrospect because it's literally just taking the item that you're either making or repairing, sitting down at a workbench and then just pantomiming working on it for however long it takes to complete it. Somehow, just the showiness of it, the imitation of having a clue how to do something valuable, is enough to bring out so much immersion to the legitimacy of the world in a way that I can't properly describe and still don't fully understand. Building things can be accomplished by forging for materials and then using a blueprint to make a cool new thing and even though I regretfully didn't interact with crafting as much as I should have, the whole process seems deep yet completely simple. The player base. Throughout my game, I actively made strides to talk to as many people as possible and I really enjoyed the colorful cast of characters that existed within one world. Everybody seemed fun to play with. I never got a person who rubbed me the wrong way or shut down anything I wanted to say or do just because they didn't know me. It was just people trying to have fun with other people and if anyone was rude, they kept it in-game and made sure that all was kosher out of it. And in a game where social interaction is the cornerstone of the entire experience, my experience was perfectly happy. The staff. Now here's the bit that I know people who've heard the bad side of DR will want to hear. The staff at Morning Glory, the Michigan chapter of dystopia rising, are... decent? For the most part, staff were friendly, but they were also slammed from this being the first event so I could see the please and my existence plastered behind some of their eyes. I quickly singled out the people who, if I had trouble, I could quickly go to and ask a question to get a straight answer. Now there is a system in place where first-time players can wear a blue sash so that people know that they're new and can help them out if they make mistakes, but I purposefully elected not to wear it because I was worried that the system might have been put in place partially as a means of saying to veteran players, hey, we want these people to come back, don't be dicks to them. Thereby conversely saying that it was okay to be dicks to people that didn't have them on. And yes, yes that does seem to be the case. There was a level of pompous dickishness that I had to deal with from a couple of people who decided that my slight offenses were worth disproportionate ridicule, but then's the breaks when you put socially awkward people in positions of power. The staff also had a weird way of talking smack about each other to each other just in the back area of the game where NPCs were supposed to put their costumes on right in front of the players, like, friends, I'm right here and for all you know I'm getting the impression off of this that you're a bunch of caddy dicks and I won't want to come back. Luckily, this barely happened, it's just that when it did, it really stood out. Other than that, I didn't really interact with the staff that much and I know half of them were just volunteers from a different chapter to help get this one off the ground, so by the time this video goes up all the faces could be completely different. Who knows, go with your gut. The verdict! Dystopia Rising was, as a game, an absolute blast to play. I ran through mine shafts of paper mache and blasted long claw zombies. I tracked monsters through the woods and hunted their prowling grounds. The entire camp ran into the parking lots and fought off a raider incursion by blowing up an armored truck. It was a phenomenal time from start to finish and I missed the first days that there was probably even more to do. From me, I know that I'm fortunate enough to make a $50 excursion into the Badlands of DR and I generally don't let a few bad experience end my enjoyment or something so will I go back? Probably in the near future. It's got a balance with my crazy schedule but I would go at least one more time to see if I can imitate the mad magic that I experienced the first time. I genuinely really enjoyed my time at DR and if the second verse is the same as the first then I'm sure that this will not be my last time getting wasted. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell. I know if you want me to do more of these talking head videos and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford a better costume than a red shirt and pants. Hope you enjoyed the video, but yeah. Davie out.