The Fourteenth Dynasty of Kevan
May 11 - June 8, 2015
Ascension Address
Early morning after the solstice, and the castle’s servants cut down the decorations and sweep the broad flagstones of the courtyard, skirting or awakening the few ivy-crowned revellers who remain slumped and asleep. The sun is bright as it breaks over the walls, but the light it casts seems somehow altered and unnatural.
A guard on the parapet squints against the sun and suddenly stands to attention, surprised to see the lord of the castle striding in through the forest gate, sword bloodied and glinting. But as the figure steps through and out of a shadow, the guard realises the sword is only a broom, carried by one of the taller servants.
Leaning forward on the stonework, he hears familiar footsteps rising from the nearby stairwell, and greets the other guard without looking up.
(Change “Cook” to “Shifter” and “Restaurant Manager” to “Forest” throughout the ruleset. Do not repeal the rule which becomes known as “The Forest”.)
Players
The following players were active at the end of the Dynasty:
Brendan*, Darknight*, Josh, Kevan*, mideg, Sylphrena
Final Ruleset
Posts of Interest
- Form Follows Function established the system of New Days and the set of forms into which players could shift.
- Factions and Alignment created a series of silently tracked factions to which players could belong, which ended up coming into play exactly once.
- The Nightmare Cooperative differentiated between individual humans and classes of humans; established a running Cover score; and gave players a penalty for shifting into the same individual.
- Popular established minimum-Cover requirements for shifting into each form.
- Meddling Knids created a mechanism to influence the gamestate by spending Cover.
- Bronze Meddle added several more ways to meddle based on a shifter's current form, including Eject, which would see a great deal of use in the endgame.
- Modest Proposals used a Cover bonus to agitate for more rules changes from someone besides Kevan.
- Canny Worms introduced a second score, Awareness, which rewarded players for indicating whether they would maintain or shift forms soon.
- Tattletales, intended as a way to change Awareness, ended up becoming more important for an alternate victory condition. It rewarded players for guessing correctly which forms would appear in the next New Day (and writing a tiny story about them).
- Boring Victory Condition established a high-Cover mark to reach for victory, and passed despite being proposed by Brendan, who had a clear lead in Cover.
- Faction Action allowed for a form of meddling that rewarded the most popular faction (from "Factions and Alignment") and penalized all others, making it mechanically important for the first time.
- Pognomic established the victory condition that would eventually end the dynasty--a set of "figurines" related to the individual forms, which one could only get by trading or correctly predicting who would show up.
- A Whittle Knowledge clarified and made concrete how the victory figurines would work, allowing the prediction-based ones to be changed retroactively.
- Day Nine Dawns was the announcement of a new round, not a proposal, and was the only time the factions were revealed when Darknight called for a struggle. It also featured the Porter ejecting himself (in order to prevent the continuing use of the Porter to keep the Chaplain, the last unclaimed figurine, out of play).
Ascension
Thanks in part to having made one of the few successful predictions, and in part to having established that victory figurines would not be publicly tracked, Brendan had been able to trade with Darknight once and mideg three times over course of a week to claim a full set of victory figurines, before declaring victory.