🌼 Season 6 Lore

This is required reading to make a character. Infected lore is different this season.

In 1998, daisies began popping up in unexpected areas and large quantities around the globe. People were initially dismissive; daisies are daisies, and this was presumed to be the result of a harmless mutation that made them sturdier and more prolific than before.

By 1999, there was much more cause for alarm. Initially mistaken for an increase in seasonal allergies, swathes of coughing people started to choke on a pollen-like substance the daisies were producing; this substance stayed in the body, building up until the system could not handle it anymore.

In the first few years, when no one had any resistance to the pollen, many millions became sick, and that point of no return was reached quickly. The victim would begin to decline, and plant-life would sprout within them as their immune systems weakened. As these roots would grow through the body and into the brain, it caused unpredictable behavior and aggression. When the internal organs began to split apart from the growth of the roots, death would soon follow.

But death wasn’t the end: The body became a mindless, animate, aggressive host for the rapid growth of the flowers. Roots twisted throughout the body, flowers burst from open wounds, and these new “zombie-like” creatures became mobile spreaders for the daisies, with bites that could potentially inject a person with a lethal dose of that pollen (or, if you're lucky, just hurt very much).

Everyone is a little infected, it turns out; everyone has some baseline level of the pollen within them, and it’s always nerve-wracking to wonder how much more it will take until you reach your point of no return. People have some resistance now, and it takes more pollen now than it did before, but no one is immune. (See the FAQ below or the injuries page for info on how much pollen it takes to kill a person.)

When infected people died, the plant within them kept them standing, and areas of the globe were claimed by the flowers, densely packed with the rotting bodies. Taken by surprise by the rapid growth of the flora, countries across the globe were unprepared for what happened, and fell into chaos. Areas where the daisies (and the zombies) were heaviest became known as “Deadzones”-- areas too dangerous and too thick with pollen to be worth the risk of staying.

The US government (spearheaded by the CDC and USDA) deployed quarantine zones around the country. They crammed people in and secured entire towns, even large sectors of cities, to ensure humanity stayed alive. Some succeeded in their goal. Most didn’t.

Over the next decade, government-run QZs began to fall, for any number of reasons: Struggle for resources, raiders, uprisings. Many QZs became independent settlements, disavowing the failing government, whose reach began to fade back into the East. Settlements banded together, forming alliances and factions, and establishing trade routes. Large groups began to take over portions of America where government reach was weakest.

Knox County is on the outskirts of an area controlled by the group known as the Central Coalition, prolific traders who carve paths through Deadzones for their caravans. There is still a government-controlled QZ in Knox, but for how much longer is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, the neighboring faction of Providence is making incursions into the area, starting up territorial skirmishes with the Central Coalition to the North-West.

And amidst all this, there are reports of entire towns mysteriously vanishing off the map, and Deadzones rapidly increasing in size. Something big is happening.

👩 What do I need to know to make a character?

Making a character for this season might look complicated, particularly when you first glance at the map, but it’s very simple. Find the map and faction info here.

• Step One: Decide who your character was before the outbreak. Remember, the outbreak started in 1999, and it has been ~10 years since then. If you want your character to be 18 at the start of the season, they would have been ~8 when the outbreak occurred, so you will have to plan accordingly (and avoid insinuating that an 8 year old survived all on their own for a decade, because they definitely didn’t). Just like normal, tell us about where they were born/raised, what their family and upbringing was like, and what their job (if any) was before shit went down.

• Step Two: Tell us where they were when the outbreak occurred. Take a look at the map and the timeline to see whereabouts they were in the US and what that area became. You can have them be part of any of the factions, settlements, or QZs listed in the factions page (including raiders, cultists, Providence, or Coalition. You name it), or make up your own settlement they came from-- or just have them survive on their own.

  • One small caveat to making your own settlement is that they can’t be outrageously advanced (flying around verti-birds or making a cure or whatever), and you can’t make them into a political superpower. They’re just a place your character came from; a part of the backstory.

• Step 2.5: Decide how their life has continued in the decade since then. Remember, different settlements had different forms of life happening within them. Some settlements might have felt almost normal, and others were a daily fight for survival. Maybe your character was a hardened survivor, or a scared refugee… or maybe they’ve been a bit spoiled and haven’t had to deal with the horrors all that much, or spent the last decade working a gentle archival job. You have a lot of freedom to decide what they’ve been doing, and you can check out more examples of jobs in the announcement HERE.

• Step 3: Tell us how and why they came to the Knox County area. Maybe they hopped on one of the Coalition’s trade caravans to get here. Maybe they wandered in on their own. Maybe they have always been here.

That’s it!

🤔 FAQ

But what if my character wasn’t American? Can people still get here from other countries?

• Eh… yes, but it would be very hard. Flights were grounded pretty damn fast, and fuel has all but disappeared in the decade since then. Maybe they could possibly sail a ship over, but that would be very dangerous and take a long time so they better know what they’re doing. No one is bothering to try overseas trades just yet, not while the world is still fucked.
  • A better option would be to say they were vacationing/visiting North America when the outbreak occurred, and they were stuck here when flights were grounded, and have been trapped here ever since.

What’s the TLDR on the infection so I can describe what happened to their loved ones?

• Either from working in close proximity to/inhaling a bunch of pollen, or being bitten, or both, their loved ones would have gotten sick with a bad cough and exhaustion. They would degrade over the course of a few days to a few weeks, depending on the strength of their body and immune system. Towards the end they would have become a little crazed and aggressive as roots began spreading internally. When internal damage got bad enough, they would have died, but continued on as flowering zombies.

So if my character was young when the outbreak happened, and now they’re an adult, they probably had a total lack of supervision and became feral, right?? AWOO!

• No. If they had a total lack of supervision, they died. Go check out THIS POST for information on what kind of “feral” characters are allowed and what aren’t.

Am I really allowed to make up anything about my character’s involvement in a pre-existing settlement or faction?

• I mean, within reason. You can’t just say they were the leader of a named faction, or make up anything that goes against what we have written down about it. But these factions are the size of multiple US states, which are huge. There’s a lot of room within those spaces for your characters to be doing just about anything.

So are there no zombies in the faction territories/is the Central Coalition a “safe zone”?

• There are plenty of zombies all over the US, the Deadzones are just particularly bad. The Central Coalition (and subsequently, Knox) are just slightly safer than those Deadzones because the people who live in those areas have spent time fighting back zombies and flowers… but there’s still lots of zombies roaming around those territories between settlements (and raiders/bandits, too).

So how do we handle skilled jobs like being a surgeon, now that there are no more medical schools?

• Any number of ways. There were definitely still doctors hanging around to teach people after the outbreak, there were apprenticeships. Your character can’t really be a self-taught doctor (I mean, they can, but they would be shit at it), but they can still have learned it from someone else. This does not mean they can be a skilled doctor at 18. It takes years to hone a craft. Make them older, or make them a barely effective herbalist or something. Skilled training is the difference between Medieval healers and actual doctors.
  • Check out the injuries page for information on MedRP in S6, since there are a few season-specific limitations.

So what’s the level of technology like around here? Are we living like cavemen?

• Not in most places. We’re living more like it’s the pioneer days, with occasional pockets of technology but less global trading. Some areas have power, but fuel is extremely hard to come by. Things that expire, like medicine and food, are increasingly rare. Fancy medical tech, like MRI machines, don’t work anymore. Cars are around, but people are more likely to use horses or bicycles or things that are more “renewable”.
  • Food producers, people who are skilled at manufacturing things, and laborers to get materials to manufacture those things, are very important. Trade between settlements and factions is also very important, which is the reason why factions have gone to so much effort to carve paths through Deadzones.

How much pollen can you take before you die?

It varies by person, and by immune system, but generally speaking:

• You can take in a small to moderate amount of pollen, and your immune system will fight it off naturally. You will just be sick and miserable for a while, coughing, exhausted, maybe feverish, etc.
• You can take in a much larger amount of pollen, and the roots will start to grow in you, and you will need some pretty invasive surgeries to get that root growth out of you before it fucks you up (and surgeries are dangerous these days). The roots start to split you apart internally if they're not caught quickly.
• You can take such a massive fucking amount of pollen that there's no helping you. Those roots grow fast, and you're dead if they break you apart too much inside or reach the brain. Aggression and delusions are common in people who have extensive root growth.

Standing in a daisy field and breathing deep can fuck you up, as can getting a bite from those pollen-filled mouths. It's possible to survive one of those things, but unlikely. Wear masks around daisy growths and zombies, and protect yourself. This is all well known to people by now.