The Second Dynasty of lemon
6 July 2023 - 3 August 2023
Contents
Ascension Address
When Leon was 9 years old, his teacher told him and the rest of his class: “The System of Motion consists of the perpetual motion engine which powers the Great Machine, as well as its electrical network and locomotive functions. It is without question the most important of the three megasystems; without it, the Great Machine would be powerless, and its still body would quickly be buried under mountains of snow and ice.”
When Leon returned home that night, he had dinner with his family. As they ate protein mush together, he told his father that he had been learning about the Great Machine and its megasystems in school. He said that his teacher told him that the Motion System was the most important, and his father responded: “Oh, that’s nonsense. The most important one is the System of Dwelling! It homes us, heats us, and grows the crops that feed us! The reason it’s the most important is because the whole Machine was built to keep us alive in the first place. Now, the Builders lived a long time ago, so you n’ me will never meet one, but they wrote things ‘bout the Machine while they built it. It’s whole point was to keep us alive! So without the Dwelling System we’d all be dust, and the Great Machine would be purposeless.”
When Leon was 11 years old, he met a real live Machinist on a field trip. Out near the edge of the Dwelling System, green parks and hydroponics gardens fell away to reveal greased iron cogs and exposed wiring panels. When he asked about what all that stuff did, the Machinist told him: “The System of Control… it’s hard to summarize, my boy. It does a great deal. It oversees all of the Great Machine’s parts, and keeps them in sync with eachother. It also tells the whole Machine what to do, so it’s sorta like a brain that way. And it tells us what to do, too. As Machinists, we get told what needs a fix by the Machine’s printers and pneu-matic tubes and whatnot, and then get our day’s tools and materials from the foundry! It’s the most important part of the machine, I reckon. Without it, the Great Machine would be thoughtless. Its parts would pull each other to bits and we wouldn’t know what to do to fix it! So it’s always important that we listen to the machine and do as we’re told.”
When Leon was 12 years old, he heard the news that that Machinist had been arrested. Her crime: high treason against the Great Machine. She had been quietly performing unauthorized modifications to the Machine and its subsystems for almost as long as Leon had been alive. They’d only caught her because one of her modifications went wrong and broke something important. No-one knew the Machine like the Machinists did, and that meant no-one else could check their work.
When Leon was 13 years old, he applied for entry into the Machinists’ academy.
—-
Repeal all Dynastic rules. Change the gamestate tracking page to “The Scale Model”. Set the Player synonym to “Machinist” and the Emperor synonym to “Great Machine”. Activate the Special Case rule “Alliances”.
Players
The following players were active at the beginning of this Dynasty: Bucky, JonathanDark, Josh, Kevan, lemon, lendunistus, Lulu, Maldor, Raven1207, SingularByte
The following players were active at the end of this Dynasty: Bucky, JonathanDark, Kevan, lemon, lendunistus
The following players were active at other points during the dynasty:
Final Ruleset
- Ruleset 216
- Ruleset on 27th July, prior to the Agenda creation rule repealing itself
Initialisation Keys
Initialisation Keys were public keywords that let all the players know the topics that Agendas (individual win conditons) would cover, plus these keywords were permanently present in the dynastic ruleset. Essentially, every player was playing with the same rules, but each player had their own private set of 3 possible win conditions and they needed to fulfill 2 out of 3 to achieve victory.
- Coal
- Components
- Damaged Parts
- Destination
- Destroyed
- Facilities
- Flea Market
- Function
- Graffiti
- Housing
- Lockdown
- Order
- Power
- Repair Log
- Surroundings
- Valves
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
- Initialising, Phase One and Initialising, Phase Two — The Great Machine's initial proposals, which established the idea of a setup phase (in which most of the Dynastic ruleset would be inert) to establish and distribute secret "agendas" (victory conditions)
- Future Terse & Brief Respite — An experimental rule that limited the number of characters in proposals, intended to enforce simplicity; but it was soon after disabled until post-Initialisation, leaving it to only affect the early & late stages of the Dynasty
- Not On My Agenda — Prevented Machinists from receiving their own secret Agendas
- The Big Picture — Established three "Megasystems" (regions) within the Machine
- Rejected Punchcards — Increased the priority for the Great Machine to discard agendas ruled to be unfair
- Resource Triangle — Introduced basic resources: Housing from the System of Dwelling, Coal from the System of Motion, and Valves from the System of Control
- Spraypaint for sale — A very short stub which suggested the mechanics of graffiti and a flea market
- Generalized Switchboard — Introduced Facilities, subsystems within the Megasystems
- Wear and Tear — Introduced a list of damaged parts which would stack up over time
- Expanding the Market Share — Expanded on the flea market, making it a place to trade resources
- Dynastic Fair Play — Expanded the guidelines of 'fairness' for agendas
- For Want of a Cog — Introduced components, machine parts connected to the flea market and damaged parts rules
- Public Safety — Introduced the concept of Crime and the punishment of Lockdown, which would be expanded and reworked multiple times soon after
- We Can Fix It — Detailed how Machinists could fix damaged parts or steal the Great Machine's parts for themselves
- Environmental Storytelling — Expanded on graffiti, making it a way to put text in certain locations; this would eventually be the subject of several agendas
- Perpetual Motion — Introduced a system of travel for the Great Machine, with current surroundings and future destinations
- Starting at the Finish Line — Set a victory window to start a week out from the end of Initialisation (so the Dynasty wouldn't risk ending immediately after the distribution of win conditions)
- Anarchy Is Fun and Inspire the People, 2 — Introduced Order and linked it to the performance and reversal of various Crimes
- Power Dynamics and Functional Facilities — Expanded Facilities, defining each as having its own Function that could be activated by Machinists
- Crime And, Help! The Coppers Are Omniscient!, and Petty Crime — Further adjusted and expanded the rules surrounding Crime and Lockdown
- Backseat Driver and It’s About the Journey — Expanded on Locations and travel
- Make God Laugh — A proposal to more strictly defined and regulate fairness in agendas, which ultimately failed because it differed from the Great Machine's desire for agendas to be speculative in nature; the schism surrounding these regulations somewhat deflated the lategame of the Dynasty
- Make God Chuckle — A misguided attempt by the Great Machine to reach a middle ground on the agenda fairness regulations
- Initialisation is Complete! — Story post announcement the completion of Initialisation and the activation of the ruleset
- 12 Hour Mastery — Adjustment of the victory mechanics backed by a nonspecific assurance of fairness by the Great Machine (proposed after realising an oversight in the vetting of certain Agendas made it impossible for some agendas to be achieved)
- Unpaid Labor Ain’t Cutting It — Created a resource incentive for repairs, as the first few days of Dynastic gameplay showed a general tendency for Machinists to strip the Great Machine for parts instead of fixing it
- Bread and Bounties — Proposal was stopped in its tracks by claims from SingularByte that it would knock him out of the game by rendering his agendas unachievable; these claims were contested by the Great Machine, and SingularByte shortly thereafter dropped out of the game due to having revealed too much about his own agendas to feel he had a chance at victory
- Arbitrary State Despotism — Minor adjustment to the length of Lockdown punishments which proved significant in the victory of lendunistus
- That Was Fast! — Story post announcing the victory of lendunistus, almost immediately after the window for victory was opened
Non-Dynastic Changes
- Everybody Hates A Tourist — Adjusted the wording of the special case rule “Dynastic Distance” to also include special case rules in its effects, and adjusted relevant wording in a few other special case rules
- Necessary loopholes. — Changed the wording of the special case rule “No Private Communication” following a discussion on the discord about the extent to which communications outside of Blognomic were regulated by the ruleset (and thus whether they counted as gamestate)
- (This list of significant dynastic events is currently incomplete.)
Ascension
Kevan agreed to take a 35% share of any future mantle in exchange for performing some specific actions that would let lendunistus achieve their Agendas quickly. Lendunistus declared victory and then passed the mantle to Kevan after a die roll.
Commentary
Blog comments in https://blognomic.com/archive/an_uncertain_future