Updates to this document or content relevant to each year are bolded between versions. V.012024
“To make FANTASY ADVENTURE accessible to everyone.”
We believe that all persons deserve a chance to experience the fullness of their humanity through safe play and unbridled imagination.
Overview:
Our Event – Accessible recreation for all finances, schedules, & abilities.
Our Sites – Ever improving expansive & immersive platforms for fantasy stories of all kinds.
Our Game – A collection of shared experiences of agency, wonder, & accomplishment.
Our Culture – Accepting players as co-participants, celebrating players as fellow contributors.
Our World – A backdrop for the spectrum of humanity to easily tell & share their stories with each other.
Our Rules – Simple but powerful story-enabling tools that refine rather than bloat or burden.
Details:
Our Event
We want people of all finances, all schedules, & all abilities to be able to attend at least one of our games each year.
Our event commitments are:
- To keep the ticket price as stable as possible, & comparable to other family recreational activities.
- To keep all costs transparent & at the door – no wallets once inside the game.
- To grow our capabilities year on year & with every event to better serve the diversity of humankind. Please see our Growth Plan for more details.
- To develop a scholarship fund to allow a percentage of our annual player base experiencing hardship to attend events.
- To expand our event offerings to allow for a variety of schedules & niche interests, until we are able to offer nearly year-round availability to our players.
Our Sites:
We want to provide open world environments where players are free & able to interact with permanent, safe, & magical facilities year-round. Game-parks.
Our site commitments are:
- To invest residuals from every event directly into the parks; balancing facility needs, accessibility, & new or improved play areas.
- To incorporate player feedback at every level; expanding popular zones, & adding safe & accessible features that our players aspire to.
- To build all our park features to be free range and played-in-full by our players. Staff-only zones will always be clearly labeled, & hidden or disguised as much as feasible.
Our Game:
We want our players to experience a reliable sense of agency & adventure with every game. We believe that the best way to ensure that outcome is to stick to the best scientific research in gaming theory & sociology.
Our game commitments are:
- To always center player choice as the cornerstone of our mechanics. In a fantasy setting, we believe that it is a lost cause to ask that human players be as skilled or able as their magical characters.
- To always allow player-created story to respond to changes in the universe; We will never retroactively ignore (“Retcon”) our players’ code-abiding experiences from our events.
- To maintain balance & predictability for every mechanic. Abilities & events will provide an advantage to one side, but never an “ex-machina” fate that players do not have the ability to influence.
Our Culture:
We want every player to be accepted & celebrated as participants & contributors to our collective game experience.
Our culture commitments are:
- To provide support for players struggling in their effort to participate.
- To provide support for players struggling to incorporate others’ experiences into the game.
- To emphasize and materially reward living-in-the-moment and becoming-our-best-selves as “winning,” rather than societally conceptualized targets of achievement.
Our World:
We want to provide a backdrop where each player can create & experience their own stories. We believe that “the best sandbox is a big one with strong walls.” To this end, we will use the game-parks to host a variety of independent thematically-focused “Universes,” where cohorts of players will experience the story of that world as a group.
Our world commitments are:
- To always favor code-abiding inclusivity. We do not believe that total annihilation is the only fun way to resolve a story.
- To honor each character as having their own valid interpretation of the world. “You don’t have to believe in Santa Claus for Santa to believe in you.”
- To maintain continuity in-game for each event. This means that no changes to the world will occur throughout the year (or whatever time interval is set between events) while you are away. Any “meta-gaming” that players engage in outside of the game-dates for each universe will not be honored. Each universe will be clearly labeled & we will make our best effort to keep the dates consistent & to dialogue with our players whenever adding additional event dates to that universe.
Our Rules:
We want our players to know that their physical & emotional safety is foundational to everything we do. We believe that by empowering our players to maintain healthy boundaries at all levels, we will not become entrapped by the chaos of the few, but be liberated by the graciousness of the many.
Our rule commitments are:
- To keep the rulebook as clear & short as possible. As of 2024, this means 5 pages for the Player Code, & 5 pages for the Equipment Guide.
- To write the rules to protect the innocent, not to punish the ‘guilty.’
- We will always reserve the right to ban players or staff for violations, no matter their social-standing or “in-game” importance.
Thank you for joining us in envisioning a future of abundant fantasy & adventure. Please take a moment to share this with your fellow soon-to-be-adventurers!