Dystopia Rising, Part 1 · 10:29pm Jul 26th, 2020
There are four men in the trading post when Silf walks in. Let us call the first three Club, Pistol, and Shotgun. These labels are not their names, but they convey the men’s purpose. The hour is very late, past 2 AM. Club is drunk, Pistol is playing solitaire on a little table, Shotgun is half-asleep, his weapon across his lap.
The fourth man in the trading post is named Cicero. He is the owner, and the man Silf is here to see. Cicero is a man easily recognized, clad as he often is in a blue vest festooned with shiny baubles and an equally garish red fez. When asked by the inhabitants of Eden about his impractical attire, Cicero says that as a merchant, it is to his advantage to be known.
Known he certainly is. It is his reputation has brought Silf to his establishment.
Shotgun sits up at the sound of the door opening, the barrel of his weapon jerking up, but he relaxes when he sees who it is. Silf has been here before, and her figure is far from threatening, a girl of twenty years that might weight a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. She carries a knife, but it has never been made clear that she knows how to use it, and in any case, Club takes it from her at the door.
“Good evening, Silf,” Cicero says. He is seated behind the counter. “Wine? Food? I have stew and cornbread in the back, if you’re hungry.” If she accepts his offer, the food will be good and the wine will be strong, but she knows she may leave poorer for his gift.
“I’m fine. Thanks,” she says, her tone direct. “I need anti-biotics.”
Shotgun squints at her, perhaps looking for some signs of infection; a sway in her step, discoloration in her veins, but no such signs are in evidence. Cicero gives the man his time, letting the silence hang. Then he shrugs.
“I have penicillin in stock. If you drank water from Leon’s well, you’ll need a hypodermic syringe and the four-ounce bottle. Is that what happened?” Beneath his Fez, his eyes rise to catch hers. She is not fool enough to nod, but she may as well have. “Cash, or barter?”
“Cash,” she says, reaching into her pockets. On the countertop, she lays a pair of gold coins. “There you go.”
“I’m sorry,” Cicero says, “but the price of a four-ounce bottle of penicillin is currently thirty-five AMD.”
“What?” she asks. “No, it’s two. Antibiotics are always two bucks.”
“A lot of people drank water from Leon’s well,” Cicero’s voice is soft, his motions slow. He shrugs. “There’s a shortage at the moment.”
“Right, but you still have it.” Her motions stand in contrast to his -- where he relaxes, she tenses, where his voice falls, hers rises. “Like I know there’s a shortage, but you’ve got it in stock.”
“I have everything in stock,” he says. “It’s kind of my thing.”
It is true. No matter how bad the shortage, how severe the hunger, Cicero can find anything his customers need. Silf knew this when she arrived.
“So sell it to me,” she snaps, pushing the money his way across the counter, as though this somehow compelled him to take it.
“I price match,” Cicero offers. “If you can find another merchant willing to sell it to you for two, I’ll follow their lead.”
“Everyone else is out,” Silf says.
Cicero could repeat thirty-five, but it would be belaboring the point. A lazy smile serves just as well.
“No, you don’t get it,” Silf says, the pitch of her voice rising to match her volume. “That’s not how much anti-biotics cost. Two dollars is worth one bottle of penicillin, that’s just how it works.”
“Look, Silf,” Cicero says. “It’s been a long day. You’re not the first person I’ve had this argument with. I’m tired, I’m achy, and I’m ready to close the trading post for the night. Buy something or don’t.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Silf says, making wild and insistent gestures in the air, though what her gestures are meant to convey is not clear to any of the four men. “You can’t charge high prices just because you feel like it. That’s not how running a trading post works. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
What little humor there is in Cicero’s eyes vanishes at those words, replaced with something sharper. He rises from behind the counter, placing his hands upon its surface. “Its my business, and I’m not in a mood to haggle. Buy something or get out.”
“It’s not about haggling.” Silf’s tone has turned frustrated, her eyes locked entirely on Cicero. “I’m trying to tell you how to do it correctly. You have to…”
From underneath the counter, Cicero produces a gun. It is a snub-nosed submachine gun, with a folding stock and a pistol grip beneath the barrel. The safety is off.
Silf goes stock still, uncertain how to react, but the other three men are not surprised. Shotgun levels his weapon at her, Pistol does the same. Club moves to the side, so as not to block the other three’s line of fire.
“See, Silf, I want you to understand something,” Cicero says. “I’m building a summer home out of bricks of cash, while you’re struggling to pay for the anti-biotics you need to live, so I’m not inclined to take your advice on how to run my business. You think you can come into my trading post and tell me what I have to do? I don’t have to do anything. I don’t even have to shoot you. We can just stand here until you die of a blood infection, because I have the last two bottles of penicillin in Eden and you know it."
After a long silence, Cicero shrugs. He releases the pistol grip of his sub-machine gun. “But, tell you what. I’ll sell you one bottle at a price you can afford.”
With his free-hand, he reaches down under the counter, and produces a fistful of gold coins. With not inconsiderable force, he throws them into her face.
Gold is heavy. The impact knocks her back, sending her stumbling across the floor. Metal clinks on metal, thumps like rain against the floorboards. She is surrounded on all sides by glittering treasure, each coin polished until it shines.
“Penicillin is thirty-five AMD,” he says. “Pick it up.”
“I can’t-“
His hand goes back to the SMG’s forward grip, and he levels the weapon at her chest. “If you don’t have enough money, pick it up off the floor. But if you tell me what more time what I can and can’t do, you’re going home in a box.”
Silences hangs over the room. The building creaks. Outside, some night bird lets out a warbling cry. Pistol pulls back the hammer of his weapon. The distinctive click snaps Silf out of her trance.
She reaches into a pocket, producing a handful of golden coins, counting out thirty-three, plus the two on the table. “Fine, I’ll pay,” she says, bitterly. “But only because I really need it.”
“You’re god-damn right you do,” Cicero says. He tosses the bottle at her, forcing her to scramble to catch it before it shatters on the floor. “Boys, show her out.”
Club takes her by the arm and throws her out the front door, into the night. He does not return her knife.
First, some background.
Dystopia Rising was, at one point, the largest and most intense Live Action Role Playing (LARP) network in the country. For those of you who might be picturing LARPing as a bunch of nerdy, overweight guys in a parlor pretending to be vampires, put that mental image away. Instead, picture the Hunger Games. Every Dystopia Rising event turned 100 to 500 armed players loose in the woods for three straight days, with only one objective: survive to the end of the event.
Of course, they weren’t real weapons – the knives were foam painted to look like steel, the guns souped-up Nerf weapons, but everyone treated it like it was serious. Loners hid their sleeping bags in the deep woods to avoid being murdered in their sleep, “hunting packs” prowled the woods at 3 AM looking for victims, and many a player learned to construct booby traps to keep opponents at bay.
But there was more to Dystopia Rising than combat. The genre of the game was post-apocalyptic, positing that the bombs had fallen and wiped out human civilization, and the players were the survivors hiding up in the hills to escape the clouds of radiation. To survive to the end of the event, players needed food, clean water, antibiotics, and tools, none of which were provided at the start of the game.
Some of these things could be founds scattered around the woods in “caches” hidden by the game masters, but such caches were few and far between. Most items had to come from one’s fellow man. For instance, the class “Farmer” had a special ability that produced food, while the class “Doctor” had the ability to use common herbs to treat disease or serious injury.
It was possible to win. Possible for everyone to win. If all the farmers, doctors, tinkers, engineers, laborers and more coordinated their efforts, it was possible to produce enough supplies for everyone.
Dystopia Rising was therefore, at its heart, a game about economics – about how to produce the goods society needs, about how to distribute wealth, about how to agree who performs what tasks. Considering the state of our economic discourse in real life, it should be no surprise most games ended in rivers of blood.
But not all chapters descended into anarchy. A few organizations did quite well, and built lasting economic systems. They brought order to the wasteland.
This is the story of one such organization: The East Eden Trading Company. Over eighteen months of play, it became the richest and most despised organization in the game, the boot stamping on the human face of the wasteland.
I started it. I swear I meant well.
My character was named Cicero Galt. He was a merchant, and his rise to villainy started with assembling a garage band.
In Dystopia Rising v1.2, a player with the special ability “Farming” may expend 1 mind point (one mana) to create 2 basic edible herbs, the games most basic unit of food. Depending on exactly how they built their character, Farmers have a certain number of mind points to spend for the entire event. So, if a farmer character has 10 mind points to spend for all three days, then 20 basic edible herbs is all they’re getting.
A player with the special ability, “Entertain” can spend 10 mind points to restore 5 mind points to everyone in their audience. The economics of this should be intuitively obvious: playing for an audience of one is a net loss, playing for an audience of two breaks even, and playing for an audience of three or more adds net mind points to the game. Additionally, since the audience can include other entertainers, entertainers can sing to each other to generate an infinite loop.
It occurred to me, therefore, that if we had three entertainers and a half-dozen farmers, then the entertainers could each take turns singing to the farmers and each other, the farmers could take turns gathering herb, and we would have generated an infinite source of food. I thought that this would be easy; that Dystopia Rising was a simple game.
The practice proved complicated. Singing makes noise, which attracts other players – players with guns who may want the food the farmers have just created. So the plan requires not merely six farmers and three entertainers, but a half-dozen guards to watch over the whole assembly. Guards need to be paid by the hour, which means it is no longer enough for the plan to generate infinite food over time, rather, it must generate a certain amount of food per hour.
And, when all of it is done, the farmers need to give up the food they just collected to pay the entertainers and the guards, and ideally the merchant who arranged the whole matter.
It was an unstable assembly. If any of the entertainers wandered off, got bored, or refused to play along, the infinite loop was broken. If too many of the farmers left, there wasn’t enough profit to pay the guards. If the farmers refused to hand over the guards’ cut, the guards simply held them at gunpoint and took their share, which usually resulted in the farmers never coming back.
Cicero managed to make it work a few times, but always on thin margins. Most of the time, I didn’t get paid. When I did get paid, it wasn’t much.
Until, one game, as we were about to begin farming, one of the entertainers said he felt like hanging out with a different crew this event, and turned to leave. Realizing that all my efforts were about to go to waste, I produced a pistol, and informed him that if he tried to walk away, I would shoot him in the back.
To my surprise, this worked. To my greater surprise, the guards went along with it. They relieved the entertainer of his weapons, clapped his legs in irons to prevent him from running, and agreed to split his share between them.
I asked them if they felt they could take the other two entertainers in a fight. They said they could – the entertainers had knives and clubs, the guards had guns. I asked them if they felt they could take the farmers in a fight. Again, they said they could. I asked if they could take both at once, and they said yes.
Then I asked how they felt about us keeping all the profits for ourselves.
100% attendance, combined with splitting the profits seven-ways instead of sixteen-ways, made the venture very profitable indeed. The guards spent their share on more weapons, but I decided to invest my cut in infrastructure.
Control of labor, I realized, was the key to success in the wasteland. Outright enslaving other players wasn’t practical at scale; eventually, they would rise up and overthrow their masters. But there were other ways to control men.
I gave up on a life managing farmers, and decided to open a trading post – the East Eden Trading Company.
I've tried to explain this to people before how these things can happen, you learned it in a LARP. Maybe more people should so we can avoid it better in real life.
Sometimes bad things are done in desperation for keeping things from falling apart.
It sorts well with their natures.
A single 3-day LARP taught me way more about economics than school and university combined. And I will never look at money the same ever again.
And here I thought that opening scene was going to be an allegory for Big Pharma. It was, in a way, but much less directly than I thought.
Yeah, that tracks.
Also: best Animal Crossing/Fallout crossover EVER.
That all tracks. People get desperate when it looks like they're about to lose their shirts and they can turn to things they never thought they would, which quickly become common place.
That said, if people get desperate when they're about to lose their shirts, they get even more desperate when it looks like they're going to lose their lives. Upping the price of antibiotics during a plague or food during a famine is a very dangerous game. A little bit, perhaps, but too much and the townsfolk start doing their own calculations on whether or not they can take your guards.
5322967
It tracks mostly because that's how the people running the LARP set up the payout structure. Change the payout matrix, change the behavior.
Hah! :D
Thanks for sharing this story! :D
Awesome, can't wait for part 2.
One thing I just don't get is people who buy gold coins because they're afraid civilization might collapse.
So, fine, civilization's collapsed and there you are trying to buy groceries with a krugerrand. Who's gonna make change?
And even if somebody can--now you're putting a whole bunch of gold coins into circulation. People are gonna be like "Where did that come from?" "Oh, Bob used it to buy a bunch of groceries offa me." "Oh really..." And suddenly everybody in this lawless post-apocalyptic world knows who's got gold coins.
i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/a0/e2/c2a0e2825620d23006badc7b74159b01.jpg
Play something, Taunton. Play something--tragic...
5323785
I think they're buying gold in case the local currency collapses, not civilization as a whole.
5323785
Not to mention the issue that, in a desperate survival situation, they're assuming that people are going to accept gold in exchange for valuable goods that are needed to survive, as opposed to wanting, say, durable goods.