Wellstone Post 4.3

[wellie]

The Wellstone Post

Issue 4.3, Wellstone, Middle of Nowhere
Welcome to the Wellstone Post and the game's first Year in Review!

If you’re interested, join the game discord! It’s a good chill time.

Year in Review

Somehow, it's been nearly a full year since Well opened: the beginning of 5.1 will mark it, and we couldn't be happier with how things have been going. We opened this game because the idea wouldn't leave our heads and because we wanted to try some wild things with a small group of people who would be cool with it.

Y'all took that wish and blew it out of the dang water! We wanted to use this space to highlight some of the things y'all have done over the last year, and in particular, to give you all a sense of just what an impact you've had on this game.

When we say that player choices guide what happens here, we really mean that. So, read on to find out exactly what you've impacted, what has changed, and where we're going next.

The Ghosts

Palamedes and Cecelia have been putting forth a sustained effort to contact Wellstone's various ghosts. Through seances, creatively hacked-together with what was available, they were able to give a voice to the ghosts and learn a little bit about why they're here and what they want.

Without someone to give them a voice and a channel, the ghosts would have faded a little bit more into Wellstone's set dressing, and played less of a pivotal role in the events to follow.

The Network

Dax and Aizawa worked long and hard to piece together Wellstone's network, a linked network of walkie-talkies that allows communication across longer distances. They hacked apart existing walkie-talkies from the General Store to create the hub powering the whole thing. It's now accessible to all characters, new and old, because of this intense and sustained effort.

The Door

Darin's tenacious exploration of the Staywell led to the discovery of a strange stairwell leading to a very weird door. This mysterious space beneath the Staywell is like a cistern but worse, full of meat walls and flesh-eating acid. It still needs to be explored.

If Darin hadn't been persistently poking the Staywell apart, this wouldn't have been found, and the building would have certainly broken earlier at the end of the last cycle if he hadn't gotten a crew together to fortify it.

The Horrors

John Gaius got kidnapped and wouldn't go quietly. He reached out during his abduction and touched something he shouldn't have, and now it's mad. Between him and all the other necromancy going on—the contacting of ghosts, Palamedes' studying of stones and bones, raising up a bunch of skeletons for fun and profit— it's clear that these characters aren't going to take things lying down.

All this outreach has resulted in some of the horrors of the town getting revealed a little bit earlier than they were originally going to be. Keep peeling back that veil, friends! If you're alright with you might find on the other end, of course.

The NPCs

Many of you messed with the NPCs, from Ruby killing the gravedigger many months ago, to Alec puppeting the receptionist, to Estelle petting the sheriff. Interacting with the NPCs is changing how they interact with characters, and what they might be willing and able to do to help, or hurt, characters down the line.

More impacts

Because of our wonderful players and the wild things to come to us with, we now have deeply weird books and the incredible debates about sleeping with yetis that they provoke. We have an archive of notes and references collected from past cycles.

We're certain that there are more things that y'all have impacted that we missed. You've all been shaping the plot and the world since you got here, and you're certainly not going to stop now. Keep poking, keep asking us questions, keep making those changes. We have an outline, but the details are being filled in as we go, and y'all are the ones filling them in. We very literally couldn't have made this game the way it is without all of you. Thank you so much. You can stay up-to-date on what's been discovered through the new Lore section of the FAQ.

And now, a request

Do you want to have even more of an impact on this game? Does your canon have any weird little guys? Strange flora or fauna? We want to hear about it!

Use this shiny new form to tell us about them and they might just show up at some point. You can do this at any time. Show us your guys.

What's next for Well?

We're going to keep on keeping on! Well's planned runtime is roughly 2 years; this can be extended depending on our old favorite decision-making structure, Vibes. We probably won't run it for longer than 3 years, but at the very least we have a solid year of game-time left.

At this point, we'd love to hear from you all. What are you liking? What do you wish there was more of? What are your wild hopes and dreams for this game? If you have any feedback at all, positive or negative, drop it in a comment below! We are so grateful to get to run this game for you all and we're honestly having a blast. Thank you so much for strapping into this ride with us, thank you for sticking through timeloops and destruction and location changes. Here's to another incredible year, and maybe more.

Read on below for normal game housekeeping stuff!

BUT FIRST: A gift

Every character who is here in the game right now, as of this posting, receives 5 bonus memory points. A little thanks-for-being-here gift for you and yours. You can report them on the memory mechanics page as "Year end gift".

Use them for good. Or evil. We're not your dads.

Calendar

Here's what we're looking at for cycle 5:

Apps open on the 27th, and the TDM will drop shortly.

5.1: February
1st: Event plotting
Apps close
15th: Mini-event
23rd(ish): Wellstone Post
24th: Apps open

5.2: March
1st: Event plotting
Apps close
10th: Mini-event
25th(ish): Wellstone Post

5.3: April
1st: Event plotting
AC opens
5th: AC closes
20th: TDM
20th(ish): Wellstone Post
26th: Apps open

And now, the weather

The first day of the new cycle dawns bright and glorious, if a little nippy. The snow is gone as if it was never there, and an early-spring chill lingers in the air, making cheeks and noses pink in the rosy dawn.

It's enough of a break in the cold for flowers to start poking their heads up in the woods and between cobblestones. Snowdrops and crocuses carpet the forest floor. New ivy twines its way up buildings. Mushrooms take advantage of the moisture to colonize the sides of buildings like they're trees.

All these flowers are fed by inconstant and still-cold rain that washes away the last of the snow, running in rivulets down from the Staywell to pool in little puddles in the streets. The weather seems to be in a temper: it seems to change on a dime, and it happens fast. Where there was sun, clouds will simply appear and burst into a raging downpour, only to disappear again a few hours later like they were never there. Weird.