The Wyvern Rising Game Staff is excited to announce two new staff members, Sam and Kristen Roberts. Sam and Kristen are long-time LARPers, both at Wyvern Rising and other LARPs. Sam and Kristen are both excited to help create the immersive, entertaining, and challenging content they’ve enjoyed at Wyvern Rising over the years. They bring a wealth of experience and fresh ideas to the game staff, and we’re grateful to have them.
We’d also like to take this opportunity to communicate how we see staffing working moving forward at our game. For a long time, staffing has been seen as a somewhat permanent move. Many players think that you spend some time as a player, then you retire your character, or turn them into an NPC, and become a staffer. Staff members have generally been on staff for many years. Jon has been on staff for over a decade!
We’re not sure this “permanent” staffing model is maintainable in the long run. Building the world and story of Wyvern Rising has always been a collaborative process between the staff and the players. So we think it’s healthy for there to be some regular churn that blurs the line between staffers and players to break down any perceived barriers between them. And frankly, running the game is hard work. More than a few staffers have “burned out” on our game, after sacrificing countless hours and years of their life to it. We want to create a model that prevents that, and allows staffers to return as players to the game they loved enough to staff in the first place.
Moving forward, we’d like to change this perception of staffing, by implementing a rotational model, where players take a break from their characters and playing the game, and step up to organize and run the game that we all love for a time. And then, their labors complete, they return to their characters as players and someone new takes the time and makes the effort to run the game as the staff.
Many of you might not realize that this has kind of already happened. Several of our current players were formerly Wyvern Rising staff members. Dustin, fresh off his time as a staff member, has already returned as a player for a virtual tabletop event, and will be back in-character with you at our live events. Effectively, this announcement is just formalizing and building on the process we already have in place.
To support and incentivize this concept of “rotational staffing”, we’d like to share with you some of the staffing constructs we’ve implemented.
First, Wyvern Rising Game Staff are not given unlimited access to all of the lore and “secrets” of the game. They are only to be informed of such things on a need to know basis, when it immediately impacts the plots and stories that they are currently executing. This lets people serve as staff, and create shorter-term content without “spoiling” the surprise of any deeper world-lore for them as players. This does mean that they may get a peek at this deeper lore or game secrets from time to time, but those people selected as game staff are selected because they are trusted to compartmentalize that information, keep it private, and not use it to their advantage when they return to being a player.
Secondly, you are not required to retire your character when you join game staff. While the responsibilities of staffing preclude you from being a full-time player, you may still come into game as your character as time permits and when there’s something you want your character to experience. Should a member of game staff choose to play their character during their tenure as a staff member they are trusted to not manipulate the game to their advantage nor use their knowledge of what is to come to gain benefits for themselves or anyone else. Characters of game staff will continue to receive build and may progress using the same mechanics available to a traditional player character. The advancement of all game staff PC’s will be monitored closely by the game directors and other members of game staff to ensure they do abuse their station.
To facilitate this rotational staffing, and ensure a consistent plot and experience across different staff teams, we’re formalizing another staff construct that has really already existed, the loremaster. The loremaster is a role that will be filled by one (or more) individuals who manage the game lore and long-term plot trajectory. Their role will be to serve as a reference for the current game staff, and to work with them to ensure whatever new lore they’re introducing is consistent with established lore, and serves the overall plot of Wyvern Rising. Because this role exists to establish consistency over time, it will be a permanent role. Loremasters do not necessarily have to be game staff members, though they can be. Currently, Wyvern Rising’s Loremaster is Jon.
What we’d like to see moving forward is experienced players coming onto game staff for at least a full year/season at a time, so they can plan and execute a season’s worth of plot and events with the rest of staff. Staffers can stay on game staff as long as they want, but we want to set the expectation that they are welcome to return to the game as a player, and to their player-character when they want to. We are hopeful that this model, with our playerbase full of veteran Wyvern Rising players, will ensure our game is always fully-staffed by people who love and respect our game, while not locking anyone into permanently staffing when they’d rather be playing.
We speak for all staff when we say that all of us LOVE being players, and experiencing the game as players. And while we’re looking forward to providing great content and great events for the players as staff, we do want to one day return to being players. If you have played and loved this game like we have, we ask you to consider offering to spend a season or two as game staff to give back to this wonderful crazy experience that we all love. Sam and Kristen have both committed to being staff for the 2021 season. Jeff and Margaret originally committed to being staff for the 2020 season, and have extended that through the 2021 season. And Jon has been doing this a long time, and does eventually deserve a break. So if you have interest in staffing, either now or in the future, to create for others the same experiences that you have so loved, and to keep the story of Corsotha going, we’d recommend you reach out to staff to communicate your interest so that we can ensure this game continues to be supported by staff who can maintain the story and world that we’ve all come to love.
