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What is Epic Week?

Epic Week is our annual birthday bash! It usually begins on April 24th, the day that the site first opened its doors to the public.

It is a week of contests, prizes and new releases. But the main draw is the site-wide plot with multiple ways that players can become involved. The plot changes every year, but the entire community advances through it as a group. For example, there are no indivual "levels" - the entire site "levels up" at the same time through group achievements.

Here's a documentary about Epic Week created by Darth_Angelus just a few weeks before the 2018 Epic Week celebration!

When is Epic Week?

Epic Week always starts on April 24th, the day the site first opened its doors to the public. There has been only one exception in 2017 when a family tragedy forced Kim to delay the start of Epic Week to May 8th.

What is the site-wide game during Epic Week?

The game consists of three main portions: Combat, puzzles quests, and collecting items. You can choose to get involved in only one of those areas, or dabble in all three! People working on all three aspects are required to advance through the plot, and each area contributes to success in other areas.

The specific form of the games might change, but the general concepts tend to remain the same. Here's some videos detailing what the game looked like and how to play it in 2016:

In 2017, the portals became rockets, the seeds became space scrap, and the "seals" became nodes in flight computers, but the essential gameplay was the same.

How does combat work?

Nearly everything during Epic Week is designed to encourage - or require! - team work, and combat is no exception! Most monsters are too tough for a lone player to take down on their own. Plus, monsters (excluding bosses) heal to full health every five minutes. This means you will need to coordinate with several other players in order to hit the same monster in the same short window of time to kill it before it heals.

Some of the toughest monsters can take up to a dozen players working together to beat them!

A new wave of monsters spawns at the top of every hour. During the early parts of Epic Week, when the weakest monsters are spawning, they only tend to last a few minutes. However, during the later parts of Epic Week, it's not uncommon for some monsters to manage to stick around for the entire hour.

Different kinds of monsters are stronger or weaker to different types of weapons. Experiment to see what they resist.

How do I get weapons and other items during Epic Week?

While the Epic Week game is going on, there's three main ways to obtain supplies:

1. As your browse the main site, you have a chance to find a weapon that someone playing the Doubutt game put into circulation, or picking up a party hat (Party hats heal you in this universe!) The more you participate in Epic Week, the higher your chances of finding items by exploring!
2. You can go to the group set up by members specifically for the purpose of sharing Epic Week items, sign up, and take some items from the treasury: The Epic Armory
3. You can visit the underside of Forohfor castle every half hour for a random chance at obtaining some items. Here is the link to Forohfor during 2020's epic week: https://www.rprepository.com/events/epicweek/gaze-at-for-oh-for
4. You can also occasionally find weapons by exploring. You're allowed to do this every half hour. Here is the link to explore during Epic Week 2020: https://www.rprepository.com/events/epicweek/explore

What contests are there during Epic Week?

There are two contests that always (so far) occur during Epic Week: The Genre Jumble art contest, wherein artists design characters that they feel archetypally represent a genre of RP, and the Spread the Love raffle, wherein anyone can get a ticket into the raffle by posting a link to the RPR on their social media profile (Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, etc.)

Other then that, the other contests change every year. We've had cooking contests, caption contests, essay and poetry contests, and more! There's a huge range in the types of skills necessary to enter.

How are Epic Week Contests judged?

In all the excitement of Epic Week, there's an important detail that never gets talked about: How the official Epic Week contests are judged! This leaves room for a lot of speculation and concerns of favoritism. That's very understandable, especially in a community known for being close and having strong ties to one another.

We're concerned about it, too, and have for years been working to make the judging of Epic Week contests as fair and unbiased as humanly possible; and then, tiredly, have forgotten to tell you what those measures are once the beautiful chaos of the event starts! That's why I'm going to tell you now, a few days before the fun begins.

Most Epic Week contest winners are decided by a panel of judges. For the last few years we've tried to select judges who do not use the RP Repository at all, but who understand the essential essence of the contest at hand. Past judges have been literary editors, professional game designers, artists, and people who are generally awesome at RP but for one reason or another haven't joined the RPR bandwagon. If they need context to understand a contest, they're thoroughly briefed. (If possible, we also avoid people who play Furcadia, since so many of you are also Furcadian players too!)



Qualifying entries are placed into a spreadsheet with clear scoring categories, with the names of the entrants typically omitted. For example, in an essay contest, the scoring categories might be: spelling/grammar, how closely the essay sticks to the assigned topic, and how convincing its arguments are. You can find out what qualities a contest will be judged on by reading the rules closely, and we're going to try and make it especially obvious this year.

Each judge is then asked to score the entries in each category, from 1 to 10. The entries with the highest total score then become our winners.

There's an exception to this system, and it's the genre jumble art contest. That's the one where artists try to create a mascot for a specific genre of RP, and the winners are combined into a jumble for our front page like this one:



This contest is judged by myself (Kim), and there's a greater element of chance to it -- the ultimate goal is to create a balanced composition for our front page, with a wide variety of genres and characters represented. That means that sometimes, incredible submissions that happen to be in an over-crowded category can push each other out.

I published a fairly detailed walk through of how I came to decide last year's winning genre jumble entries here: http://www.rprepository.com/community/forumthread.php?t=17377&p=9#2152582 and I'll be doing so again this year.