As everyone unavoidably knows by now, COVID-19 (i.e. coronavirus) is a major public health concern. The situation is extremely fluid and we are assessing how best to move forward with the Spring season as new information and guidance becomes public daily. As of this writing, we feel it would be unwise to have a public gathering of our normal sort, much as we miss each other. We instead are planning to move forward with having something online. Ironically, long before the current emergency, we’d written a pandemic into our game that makes sense for there to be an in-game quarantine to contain.

If things have cleared by Spring 2, and that event takes place as originally planned, we will have as much hand sanitizer/wipes as possible available around the site, constant (sorry, not sorry) reminders to WASH YOUR HANDS, and guidance given at Player & Cast meetings regarding personal space and touching.

For now, we’re working on contingency plans. As many of you have experienced first hand, we have valid in-game reasons to have a “quarantine event” where we have happenings unfold online. For this Spring 1 Event we will have limited technical capabilities, but will try to plan for it for Spring 2.

We’d like to use the Spring 1 weekend to build community and give everyone an opportunity to check in with each other in-character. We will be posting some things on the forums, possibly with opportunities for you all to talk and light roleplay with NPCs and each other via the forums. There will be an in-game delay of the elections, as Promotorious Jim Fenton tries to work out a solution for how to deal with the increasing spread of Madman’s Malady complicating the voting process.

We have some ideas for how to keep it interesting, but we aren’t technically set up to implement them all. Right now ideas are still germinating, and we are not sure we could deliver a quality experience by run time, so we will be looking into getting them ready to go by Spring 2.

As for YOC, the good news for us is that they have an extremely generous cancellation policy. They are going to be hard hit by the cancellations that are going to happen this year, and I would remind you all that they have been really good to us over the years. We don’t have any concrete information there yet, but I would encourage those of you able to afford to do so to consider donating to help maintain the site and/or possibly improve it while it experiences downtime. We will hopefully have something more official soon, so stay tuned on that.

Bottom line: The safety of our community is always our first priority. If we cannot safely hold the event in person, we will pursue an electronic solution.

Please stay tuned, and know that even amidst a plague we still wish we could see all of you. Even if it might have to be virtual.

TLDR: Registrations will be pushed to our next event, we will have forum RP opportunities, and we are in contact with YOC about possible donations for site maintenance and improvements while the place is sitting empty.

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-Josh Marcus
Head of Plot, FI 3



Edited 1 times. Last edit at 02/11/22 09:44PM