The Eighteenth Dynasty of Josh
16 April - 2022
Contents
Ascension Address
A sole point of light in the murky darkness, the DSV Haniver sliced silently through the eternal darkness of the abyss, its strong headlamp picking out nothing but occasional glimpses of the divergent biology of the hadal zone.
The on-board instruments read a depth of 35,211 feet, and still decending. It had been hours, and thousands of feet, since its crew had seen the light of the sun. But still they crowded around the small porthole windows, each desperate to be the first to catch a glimpse of the ruins of Atlantis.
Only one member of the crew, the linguist, kept their seat in the stern of the craft. They were the one who had deciphered the co-ordinates, who found the fragment of Atlantean text on the island temple, who had raised the funding and the crew for this mission.
In their hands, they held a tiny scrap of paper, the only piece of the written Atlantean language to have made it to the surface. They turned it around and around in their hands, as if they didn’t already know perfectly well what it said, as if that would make the meaning any more scruitable.
It was just a fragment, a torn piece of vellum parchment, half chewed away by time and tides. They held it between thumb and forefinger, the mouthing the translation as they read: “... has Achieved Victory”.
Players
At the start of the dynasty, these players were active: {GloopyGhost, Josh, Jumble, MadisonSilver, Raven1207}
And at the end:
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
Act one
- The Soul of Wit limited proposals to 200 English words of new rule text, but also allowed pictographic "Atlantean text" to be used.
- Academic Rigour allowed players to make Argument posts attempting to define Atlantean pictograms, which would become binding after 24 hours if supported
- Ghosts of Mars put every player into a secret Caste, with players being told who else was in that Caste. These were later reskinned to reflect various possible Fates of the city of Atlantis.
- One Head is Better Than Two defined a glyph
- Comparison defined another
- Basic Atlantean Grammar created some kind of tracking/scoring rule, with many unexplained glyphs in it
- Substantiation defined one of those glyphs
- A B C, easy as 1 2 3 added an action to the scoring rule. Jumble performed what they thought this meant and was never reverted.
- Return of the Fun formally allowed players to do what Jumble had tried to do: to take actions based on what they thought they might mean.
- Fail State added a timer where the dynasty would end and be replaced by a metadynasty, if players remained consistently inactive.
- Privilege Escalation was a declaration of victory from MadisonSilver, who attempted to exploit the "take actions based on what you think they mean" action to pass an Argument without a vote. The DoV was voted down, and a CfJ closed the loophole so that nobody could try a variant on it as soon as the DoV closed.
- Intradynasty change the outcome of the inactivity timer from a metadynasty to a merely reset ruleset (keeping the rules, but adding "this is flavour text" to the top of them for archival purposes).
- After five days with no activity, A Crack in the Glass proposed to trigger the timer directly. The ruleset was reset for a second act.
Act two
- (This list of significant dynastic events is currently incomplete.)
Core changes
- Raising the Bar required DoVs to reach 66% of players in favour, rather than just quorum.
