By Hippolyta

ReVo may not be the oldest HTML roleplay site out there, but its chatters consider it to be the best! Each year, the staff sets up an exciting adventure to thank our players for helping us grow. In this issue, we get an inside look at the planning process, courtesy of Hippolyta!

Building a Virtual Escape:
Behind the Scenes of the 2016 ReVo Anniversary Event

“We need to have an idea for the Anniversary Event.”

Those are the words that I say to Veritas every year in about September when we need to start working on celebrating ReVo’s yearly anniversary. Usually, we do a brainstorm and churn out 5 – 6 different ideas that may or may not work for an event like this, but this year, that is not how it came about. There was just one idea – to run the event like an escape room and challenge the good people of ReVo.

Escape rooms are a trend that is sailing up the entertainment horizon, and it is really a simple idea. You and some friends get locked into a room and during one hour, it is your mission to find your way out of the locked room. The room is filled with puzzles and clues, and you have to find the key. Very simple.

In the physical world, every good escape room needs to have a good backstory, something to link all the various clues together as the adventurers explore them. We realized that since we would be restricted to text and pictures (although we broke those restrictions where we could, such as with a sound file), we needed a great story. Great storylines are something that most roleplayers revel in, so we had a challenge on our hands when it came to designing this event.

“How about an old Victorian museum of some sort?” I said to Veritas one evening. We had just been to a Sherlock-themed escape room and managed to escape, so the theme lingered on my mind.

“Why not?” he replied in his usual, calm way. “It could be an old Civil War mansion.”

From there, we wrote an outline of a story about two societies, the Ouroboros Society and the Winnowers, who were both searching for the same thing – eternal life. Both societies had a backstory that went far back in history, and were rivals in a race for ambrosia.

As interesting a backstory this might have been, we both felt it was missing a final factor. “I have an idea,” says Veritas one evening. “We need to change the story.” From there, he outlined the story that you, gentle reader, may be acquainted with – the story of Dr. Henry Callow who searched for eternal life. Alas, he went insane with it, or as the story would reveal, got a little help along the way from Aleister Crowley, renowned occultist at the beginning of the 20th century. It also meant that we fixed the timeline of the mansion to 1917, and that lead to some changes in the puzzles that we had already created. A detective box got turned into an angel box since some of the detective stories referenced had not been written in 1917. Angels also made more sense, since Crowley was deeply interested in Enochian magic.

One of the considerations in planning escape rooms is setting the difficulty. In the physical world, escape rooms are a business. The average escape percentage is about 20-25%, so 3/4ths of people who play don’t escape the first time. We wanted our puzzles to be challenging but possible, so we made sure we loaded people up with information, since there were lots of potential red herrings, and we offered clues when needed. This wasn’t an attempt to make money, but a celebration of ReVo itself – challenging, but fun!

Finally, our plans were made, our puzzles created, and our story written. Unfortunately, not every puzzle is going to work the way you think. As the event commenced, it became clear that one or two of ours wouldn’t work, meaning that Veritas and I had to rewrite on the fly during the event! We decided, due to the time spent, to tighten up the puzzles and we presented the attendees with the completion of the evening’s story – the long dead body of Doctor Callow, and the knowledge that the world’s most notorious erotic magician might have learned the secret of eternal life…

We leave you now, gentle reader, to anticipate next year’s anniversary event. And we leave you with yet another puzzle as well. If you believe you have solved the puzzle, PM Hippolyta with the answer. The first one to PM the correct answer will win a $20 Amazon gift card.

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