Help Nightcrawlers Create an Epic PlayaRPG Experience

As soon as you were old enough, you packed up your things, said goodbye to your parents, and set off for new frontiers. Your goals lay beyond the distant horizon, and your dream of one day becoming a hero fueled each of your steps. You traveled for many days, many nights, until eventually, you arrived Here. Parched and a little confused, you find yourself approaching a bustling city hidden in the middle of the desert. As you trail along the winding circular paths of the town, dodging speeding cyclists whizzing by, you come across a sign outside of a tavern.

“Heroes Wanted. Inquire Within”.

Today, your adventure begins.

Nightcrawlers is an immersive theme camp that strives to bring together and build community for the nerds, geeks, cosplayers, gamers, dungeon masters, adventurers, and heroes of the Playa at Burning Man. It serves as the Guild Hall for PlayaRPG, where visitors are transported to another world once they enter the threshold of our camp.

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Starting my own theme camp has been a major goal of mine since my first year at Burning Man. Due to serendipitous circumstances, back in 2019 I was able to see my dream become a reality, as Nightcrawlers became a placed theme camp at Burning Man for the first time ever. We were a camp of only two people with pretty prominent city placement and we somehow managed to run an entire theme camp and event-wide game for over 150 people. It was a miracle and we were itching to get back out there, but as we all know, Covid had other plans.

When Black Rock City once again sprouted from the desert in 2022, we were finally able to return, this time, as a camp of 8 members. We were able to bring Nightcrawlers camp to the 6 and G Plaza and PlayaRPG back to 125 players who stopped by to join our adventure game. It was a great success, even though the weather that year hit a scorching 129degrees at its worst. As a camp, we decided to conserve our resources and energy, taking 2023 off to ensure we could return in 2024 better than ever.

So, here we are! We've already received placement at the corner of 6:00 and D, very close to Center Camp. We're growing our camp numbers to a cap of 20 members, and would like to grow our camp structure to provide sustainability for years to come. That's where we could use all the help we could get; every little bit counts! We really want to see our ideas blossom and our vision come to fruition, and we want to ensure that every visitor to our growing theme camp leaves feeling as though they had a truly immersive and interactive experience. That's why we do what we do, for the enjoyment of anyone we get to interact with. That's what keeps us going at the end of the day, and that's what makes all the blood, sweat, and tears during the year worth it.

What is PlayaRPG?

PlayaRPG is an interactive, playa-wide, week-long role playing game. In it, players (heroes!) choose their class and receive quests at the camp. The goal of the game is for them to complete and turn in five quests without losing all of their Health Points over the course of the week. Each quest gets significantly more difficult depending on the level, varying from quests that ask players to find certain things, or pick up moop, to find a hidden art piece in deep playa, all the way to finding and visiting other camps and participating in their activities. We work hard to have the quests and plotline reflect the Ten Principles, encouraging players to not only absorb the principles, but to actually act on them. It was created as a way to call out to all of the nerds and geeks and gamers of Burning Man, letting them know that they’re not alone, but also as an inclusive way to include others who may be unfamiliar with role-playing, LARPing, gaming, or geeky stuff in a fun, unique way at Burning Man. The game is purposely made to be inclusive to anyone at the Burn, so that you don’t need prior knowledge in order to play.

PlayaRPG was created to fill the nerdy void the creator felt during her first year, who also felt that, for a city (albeit a temporary one), our communities could be doing more to interact with each other. Often times at the Burn it feels as though each camp holds itself as an autonomous unit, and rather than a network of camps, many times exploration feels like walking between separate silos, each camp its own world. PlayaRPG creates an opportunity for a more networked city structure, linking camps to one another so that they’re working together, rather than separately. As such, each year we reach out to camps to ask them to participate in PlayaRPG as quest locations, where we send players to go and visit camps and people they may not normally have stopped at, linking the camps of Burning Man into a Playa-wide network of activity and gaming.

Each year we’ve ran PlayaRPG, it’s gotten better and better. Having a whole themed camp to use as home base, along with engaged camp members will only serve to make this year the best yet!

PlayaRPG is my art. I know it’s not a conventional art piece, such as a drawing or a sculpture, but as Halcyon stated in his pre-burn video back in 2018, we’re all artists. We all have our unique gifts, our fighting spirit of creation that yearns to be released. PlayaRPG is the realization of my gifts of organization, dedication, creativity, story-telling, engagement, and play, and I brought it with me to Burning Man with open arms.

However, bringing this immersive story and experience to life costs money. But every dollar donated will help our dreams come to life!

Donations will help us update our theme camp infrastructure and build a camp foundation that will serve as our base for years to come.

Your money would help support:

PLEASE donate what you can.

Every donation helps, no matter the size.

Who are we?

Nightcrawlers began as an anime convention social partying group, a place where fun-minded convention-goers can connect with one another and meet up for parties or make new friends at local conventions. As the group grew larger, it was apparent that many in the group exhibited the same sort of creative or adventurous flare that would flourish and thrive at Burning Man. One by one, group members were drunkenly recruited at convention parties to join on their first quest, a first-time theme camp at Youtopia, the San Diego Regional Burning Man event in 2017. The Nightcrawlers camp was born. None of us really knew what we were doing, but we came together and created something amazing and wonderful. Our first time as a camp was a huge success, and we returned to Youtopia in 2018 a little more prepared. In 2019, we made the leap to the Burn and successfully brought the magic we had brought to Youtopia and brought to our respective Burning Man camps in the past to a new camp. Since then, Nightcrawlers has also expanded to other events, including Wasteland Weekend and Neotropolis, creating a community and network of immersive art and interactive experiences.

Our group is based mostly out of Los Angeles and consists of a handful of veteran and newbie burners, all in some way, shape, or form, related to nerdy or geeky pursuits. Our goal is to be a beacon for nerds, geeks, and gamers from all across Black Rock City as a place for them to gather, meet other like-minded folk, and set out on adventures together. Nightcrawlers serves as the home base of the highly successful PlayaRPG, which will be in its 6th year running in Black Rock City.

You can find PlayaRPG’s digital presence below, where there are some photos, images, and descriptions. We've poured so much into this event, so I hope you'll consider helping us bring it back this year!

If you can't donate, but you or your camp would like to participate as a quest location, please follow us on Facebook for when we open up for camp submissions!

PlayaRPG's Facebook Page

Nightcrawlers Camp Facebook Page

and as always, if you find yourself at the burn this year, you're also welcome to come play! We'd love to meet some fellow heroes!