Good Morning Survivors! Welcome to a Friday Edition of Pro-tip Thursday! Hey, I am still recovering from our last game!

Today we are going to talk about the role of Guides in our game! At the end of our last game I announced that it's time for us to start building our guide team for next year.

Our tradition is that we select our guides for one year at a time. We do this to give everyone a chance to choose to take a break. When you become a guide you are committing to coming to 80% of our games. This year we are going to have 7 live games. Which means we expect each guide to be at least 6 of those games. So we make it so that our guides choose to come back. Sometimes life makes it so that people need to step away. Our tradition allows people to step away with no stigma or guilt. Now trust me when I say we sit with baited breath hoping that our guides choose to come back, because our guides are awesome and they help us so much!

But invariably, we always need new guides! So today we are going to discuss the types of guides we have that help everyone have a good time.

Today we are going to pull back the curtain and tell you how the Sausage gets made.

Our Guide staff is split into 3 different types of guides: Rules, Coordination (Cord) and Operations (ops).

Up First we have our Rules Guides, These are those brave souls you see taking the NPC’s from place to place controlling the mods as they interact with our players. They also help make sure CVC interactions happen per the rules. They are the eyes and ears of this institution my friends, and without them we live in chaos! They are the front line of delivering the story to our players.

Secondly we have our Coordination Guides. You call them Posties! These individuals keep this game running smoothly! While this game is played in live action and we whack each other with Foam Sticks, The post office keeps the paperwork business of the game flowing! Printing blueprints, writing cards and giving us all paperwork we use to play our game.

The final level of Guides are the Operations Guides (ops). The Ops guide is the Dystopia Rising version of the Game Master. They control the tone and speed of the game. Our brilliant writers create the mods, but the Ops guide decides when the mods are run. They take the temperature of the players to determine when they need a break or when they are bored. These guides are usually our most trained guides we have.

This is the team we use to run the game. We have writers and employee’s that do the work between games, but without guides we cannot run the game.

So after our December online game, we will say goodbye to this year's team. They have been a fantastic team of people dealing with a bunch of issues to make this a great game for everyone. We thank them all for their time and efforts!

But then it becomes my job to start encouraging people to sign up for next year's team! We hope our amazing guides choose to return to help us next year. But we always need new people to join the team.

When you become a guide with us you start as a rules guide or a Coord guide. If you like to be up and moving, Rules is the place for you. Now the term Rules guide scares a lot of people, because they think you have to be an expert in the rules of the game. This is not true. We can teach you everything you need to know on how to run mods and rules calls. Passion is more important than knowledge.

If you are the type of person that prefers to bring order to chaos, then being a Coord guide will make you happy! I am sure you have spent time waiting for a postie to help you. These saints deal with all the paperwork of the game and it comes with a nice chair! Like our rules guides, we will teach you everything you need to know!

So I am sure you are asking, “Gee Curtis, what do I get for doing all this volunteering?” Funny you should ask that!

There are National benefits for being a guide. They are the following:

One Community Achievement awarded at 3 months service each game year (as they reset at Downfall)
Marshals can bring one new player to every home game for free.
2 free months added to their Advanced Membership
10% discount on all Dystopia Rising Merch

Now these are perfectly fine rewards from National, but we have Local guide benefits! They are:

1 Free Blue Plate Special. This is extra on top of the two you can purchase every game.
1 extra free character change per game.
50 caps per game. (an increase from last year)
And this year we are introducing a brand new perk. If you are a guide next year we will pay for one of your games next year! You will still need to pay for extra XP but we will pay for your 4hr ticket!

If this interests you, go here and fill out the application.

https://www.dystopiarisingar.com/marshal-application

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have!

Till Next time my friends!!!

See you in the waste!