The Eleventh Dynasty of Kevan
December 14, 2012 - January 21, 2013
Contents
Ascension Address
A cold night at the tail end of the Mesoamerican Long Count’s 13th b’ak’tun. Cryptic flyposted photocopies spread wide across the city, fluttering on lampposts and building-site hoardings, their cheap, close-set prophecies growing illegible in the rain. Tents and placards cluster outside the cathedral, the city museum remains closed and dark after a burglary in its antiquities wing, and high on the hill behind the city, against a blank grey sky, the observatory is in flames.
Rename “Crook” to “Believer” and “Mastermind” to “Auspex”.
Players
12 Believers were active at the end of this Dynasty:
Cpt_Koen, IceFromHell, Josh*, Kevan*, Klisz*, Larrytheturtle, nqeron, quirck*, RaichuKFM, robo1995, scshunt*, thingnumber2
Final Ruleset
Posts of Interest
- Cult Following allowed players (Believers) to form and join Cults, membership being tracked secretly by the Auspex
- Kevans Rules of Order allowed Cult Leaders to define secret requirements of their Cult, actions that must or must not be performed
- The End is Near added publicly-visible Locations: The Cathedral, The Museum, The Observatory, The Library, The University, The Hospital, The Protest Camp, The Back Streets and The River
- Free Personality Test Inside allowed Cults to have Headquarters, and required new recruits to visit a Cult's Headquarters while the Cult Leader was there, to join the Cult
- New Cult: The Circle of Light
- Infamy, Infamy, They’ve All Got It In For Me gave Cults reputations which would affect where their Headquarters could be sited
- New Cults: The Purifying Fire, The Fellowship of the Flame
- New Cult: The Cartographers
- New Cult: The Walkers
- New Cult: The Midnight Crew
- New Cult: The Shadow Church of the Time Zombies
- Cult Culling, take 2 retired Cults whose members were all idle
- New Cult: The Children of Gaia
- Passing the Torch allowed Cult Leaders to pass their roles to other members of their Cult
- No one Expects... allowed Inquisitions to reward those who guessed the membership of a specific other Cults. Several Inquisitions were made speculatively, none were ever made successfully.
- Watch Your Back, There Be Riders allowed Believers to wrest control of a Cult if its Leader had broken a Secret Requirement and was also absent from the Headquarters
- New Cult: The HitchHikers
- Painting the Town allowed Locations to gain qualities such as Damaged or Crowded, assigned by Cultists gathered there
- Dig dig dig! added secret Artifacts, to be held by Cults
- Fresh Blood made recruitment simpler, allowing Cults to set their recruitment policy to "open", "closed" or a specific list of players
- Failed Inquisition: "Josh, Minkette and Laserboot falsely suspected Clucky and Argon14 of being the only members of The Walkers."
- Insert Jewel A into Idol B allowed a Believer to destroy a number of Artifacts from a Cult they were a member of, to gain Insight; if they were misinformed about the number available, they instead lost Insight
- People of Earth, Your Attention Please set Doomsday to a secret day between the 15th and 31st of January 2013, on which day the Believer with the most Insight would win
- Infamy that does something allowed Studying, giving an Insight bonus based on their Cult's Infamy (patched with Eldritch Tomes to avoid public actions being taken on secret information)
- The End of the World is Nigh gave an Insight bonus for correctly predicting the date of Doomsday
- Library Lockdown: the Library was Secured by the Purifying Fire
- Failed Inquisition (one of many, but perhaps the first made in response to game events): "Nqeron, Quirck and Robo1995 falsely suspected the The Purifying Fire of consisting solely of Larrytheturtle, Murphy and RaichuKFM."
- New Cult: The Lords of Science
- Searching for Friendship allowed Believers to stumble across Cult Headquarters, later changed to limit it to their current location with The Revolving Fireplace
- Back Street Damage: the Back Streets were damaged by The Midnight Crew
- Quarantine: the Lords of Science secured the Hospital
- Rock Swapping alerted Cult Leaders to failed attempts to steal Artifacts from that Cult
- New Cult: Liquid Faith
- Strange Days allowed an Artifact to be destroyed to gain a clue about the date of Doomsday
- The End: Doomsday fell on the 20th of January 2013, ending the dynasty.
Ascension
Scshunt achieved victory by having the greatest amount of Insight when the world ended.
Post-mortem
I think the big issues with this dynasty were: first, the inordinate amount of advantage conferred on the leader of a cult with many members and second, the lack of advantage to being a member of a cult.
In particular, the rules regarding artifacts were, in conjunction, rather powerful and entirely biased towards cult leaders, since only they would know how many artifacts their cult had and thus would be able to milk them for maximum value. Additionally, the loophole that Kevan closed relating to the same inquisition multiple times was added due to my use of it,
The other way I gained influence—-and the cause of my victory—-was an interesting play mistake of RaichuKFM’s. In an attempt probably to abuse the artifact or trait rules, he enacted a Secret Requirement requiring everyone in the cult to go to The Library, then kicked me out when I hadn’t done so (I didn’t see the first PM from Kevan informing me of the requirement until I was out). In doing so, though, he made it so that I was able to look through the GNDT logs and identify the membership of his cult, which I used twice with Klisz’s help (though I was surprised when he included me on his Inquisition)
However, this dynasty suffered the normal issue of an early victory condition, compounded with the fact that I (and probably others) was reluctant to submit or vote for proposals lest they inadvertently help someone other than me, since I had no way to judge what their effects would actually be.
All in all, I think that the secrecy mechanic fundamentally worked, and Kevan did an admirable job of replying quickly. The dynasty was fundamentally undermined by poor power distribution.
The next time a secrecy dynasty gets tried, I might suggest that a mechanic to experiment with would be having perfect information except for not making it known who controls which actors in the game (and randomness). This would allow for players to have a better idea of the relative strengths of all players, without letting them know who their opponents actually were.
-scshunt
- Further analysis was made in the Dynastic Musings post.
