Leave it better than you found it

As an organization, we believe in the power of community. Whether that is in storytelling or in tangible practice, we know the wonderful things people can accomplish when they work together. Because of this, we will often work with our sites to bring our community together to the benefit of our site in the form of volunteer days. This may look like helping site with projects like painting a fence or something similar, at the direction of our site owners.

After every event, before we leave a site, we clean up after ourselves (and often the previous guests) very thoroughly. Regardless of who made the mess, we believe in leaving no trace, and leaving it better than we found it.

Greater than the sum of our parts

Since humans could communicate, we have many telling stories. The stories we tell are fictional but their impact can be very real. Like so many other wonderful post-apocalyptic stories, Dystopia Rising is not just a tale about horror—it’s also about hope. It’s about humanity prevailing even in the grimmest of circumstances. It’s about people being greater than their darkness. At Dystopia Rising Virginia, we aim to be bigger than our genre, too.

The nature of collaborative storytelling attracts people from all walks of life. We view this as a massive boon and celebrate diversity. We believe there is always something we can learn from one another and that we are stronger together.

While our events may be set in a world filled with monsters, our community is brimming with creativity, hilarity and kindness. For one weekend, once a month, we come together to cross scrap-metal swords and even sharper wits. We let the troubles of the real world melt away to engage in fantastic stories that wield the capacity to empower, change and challenge us. But most importantly, these stories unite us. This is done on the backdrop of our beautiful camp locations, where our players can connect with one another within the natural world which we so often find ourselves disconnected from in modern life.

In one sentence, Dystopia Rising: Virginia is a place where people can come together safely in friendship, creativity, and sport. And also in touching some really nice grass.