The Thirty-Third Dynasty of Kevan
8 April - 16 May 2025
Contents
Ascension Address
As you can see, the Hotel Nagelburg very much dominates Zahndorf’s town square, and is one of very few buildings to survive from the valley’s silver mining days. When the hotel was built, the town was a bustling one, with travellers and brokers flocking from across the empire and needing a place to rest, to eat and to do business. The ground floor restaurant - ah, right on cue I see old Magnus is dimming the grand chandeliers - would have swelled with light and music well into the night, with patrons drifting in from the Crown Theatre next door which, yes, you see is nothing but wasteland today, it was sadly never rebuilt. Do mind your step through the fence here.
The tall sash windows on this side are no less ornate, if a little neglected, and you’ll note that the baroque woodwork on the ... third, fourth, fifth ... window’s jamb is of a style that can easily - if you’ll just, ah, give me a leg up here, thank you - can easily support a person’s weight as a handhold. The mechanism should be, if I can just, yes, has been left unlocked.
Of course, the old hotel itself only has minimal security on staff these days, but its clientele will often bring their own protection or hire locally when they’re staying or holding a meeting in these side rooms. Our target will be through the kitchens on the north side, and Magnus says they take the dogs out to the courtyard at ... a quarter to midnight, yes, there we see the torch lights. No, they can’t hear us at this distance.
This ballroom would have been a sight in its heyday! These aren’t the original fittings of course, but are very much in the style. The place is rarely used now, and as you see, keep down behind the dust sheets please, it’s really more of a storage space. From this side of the room we’ll have five minutes or so before the - who? Behind us? No, Magnus said those doors would be… Ah. Ah now.
Change “Nomicer” to “Agent” and “Imperator” to “Concierge”. Change the gamestate tracking page to “The Town”.
Activate the Building Blocks “Reinitialisation”, “Virtual Actions”, “Precondition Unidling”, “Edit Window” and “Revisions Allowed”.
My Imperial Style will be Gardener/Preservationist/Powerhouse/Guarded/Methodical plus a new non-existent style I will call “Scam-Gradual” (which I think someone else had a similar take on recently): I’ll play it as Scam-Mundane in the late game, but may move to close loopholes I notice in the first week or so of play. I’ll also invoke and later propose to enshrine a new Style of “Timekeeper”: I’ll be against mechanics which strongly incentivise players to act at particular times of day or in rapid response to their opponents (as the daily/weekly actions did last dynasty) and will propose to amend any that emerge.
Players
The following players were active in the early game: ais523, Clucky, Darknight, DoomedIdeas, JonathanDark, Josh, Kevan, Lulu, Raven1207, SingularByte
And at the end: ais523, Clucky, Darknight, DoomedIdeas, JonathanDark, Kevan, qenya, Trapdoorspyder
Gameplay summary
Players are divided into two random teams: one are the Guards who choose how to defend a building, the others are Burglars who are trying to break into it. Taking turns, each group secretly submits to the Concierge a route that they intend to take through the building; first the Guards and then the Burglars (who may be told some information about how the Guards had chosen to move). When all orders are in they are processed simultaneously to determine who went where and what happened.
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
- Scoping Out (Kevan) defined the plan of the Hotel and allowed Agents to set Routes around it
- Cops and Robbers (Kevan) divided Agents into two random teams - Guards and Burglars - each round, in the same manner as The Coregency of ais523 and Josh
- The Way In (ais523) defined four points on the map as Ingresses
- A Very Particular Set of Skills (JonathanDark) set up a list of six Skills and Flaws
- A Measure of Competence (SingularByte) defined Fame and Infamy scores for each round; Burglars score Infamy if their Route meets no Guards, and Guards score Fame for intercepting Burglars
- Loot Grabbin' (Trapdoorspyder) created Artifacts for Burglars to try to steal, for extra Infamy
- Be prepared. Your team depends on you. (ais523) allowed the Agents with the highest Fame/Infamy scores to take extra actions in the following round
- Civilians for Life (JonathanDark) allowed the Concierge to remind Agents to submit orders, if half their team had
- Let's Go Over The Plan (SingularByte) split the game into two phases so that we weren't "running around blindly"; all Guards submitting Routes, which were then revealed publicly in full, then all Burglars submitting Routes.
- Skillful Applications (JonathanDark) reduced Skills and Flaws to three, and gave them some effects. No further Skills or Flaws would be created during the dynasty.
- Tighter Secrecy (ais523) reduced the Guard Route information reveal to only the 4th and 9th Spots of "Noisy"-flawed Guards, with some additional private information going to "Observant"-skilled Burglars
- Training Montage (Kevan) allowed Agents to retrain to different Skills and Flaws, at the cost of a Preparation Action
- Not Stasis Breaking (SingularByte, iterating on ais523) added a Success score for each player: you got a point every time your team "won" a round (based on whether the Burglars stole anything or not)
- Hiding in the Shadows (Clucky) created a "shadow ruleset" system where the dynastic rules couldn't be changed directly while the Burglars were in their planning phase; changes were instead made to Ruleset/Shadow235, and copied back across when that phase was over.
- Station Down (Clucky) required Guards to start their Routes at one of four Station points
- Overwatch (Kevan) gave Guards the option to delay Patrol Assessment if they wanted a proposal to pass first, without having to delay submitting Routes. The Concierge won't reveal whether the private Stopwatch mechanic was used, but the public Pivotal mechanic was never invoked.
- Okay, but like, what are they (SingularByte) defined random Artifact traits that affected how they could or couldn't be stolen
- Too many sticks make a stuck (Josh) allowed the Concierge to publicly name players who were taking a while to submit orders even after a reminder, and to publicly announce if he believed the game to have become invisibly "Stuck"
- The Fix is Already In (JonathanDark) added a public track of how many Burglars had submitted Routes. Reporting for Duty (JonathanDark) would do the same for Guards a while later.
- MacGuffin Buff (Kevan) defined different types of Artifact, some (Antiques, Artworks, Keycards) having special effects
- Lobby Boy (Kevan) clarified that the Concierge should make decisions like Artifact placement at random, rather than (as at least one player had assumed was happening) in a way that would be "interesting"
- Click-Click-Click-Clunk (Kevan) added a possible "Locked" trait for Artifacts
- Fourtifact (ais523) changed the random 2-4 amount of Artifacts to 4 every time
- Second Chances (JonathanDark) made it more likely that an individual player would get an equal number of turns on each team
- Inside Job (Kevan) made all Preparation actions team-agnostic, where they were previously mostly locked to one team or the other
- Lest we become too successful (ais523) defined the victory condition: be in the lead on Successes twice in a row
- Rat Catchers Redeux (JonathanDark) allowed a team to vote out someone they didn't trust (so long as they outranked them on Successes). This would be invoked once.
- Perfectly Balanced (Clucky) dealt with imbalanced team sizes by Sidelining a member of that team (either voluntarily, or at random if nobody volunteered)
- Rumor Mill (JonathanDark) created an anonymous, public whisper channel
- The Real Decoy (JonathanDark) allowed Guards to move Artifacts around as a Preparation action
- A More Meaningful Round of Play (JonathanDark) required a winning player to also score 2+ Fame/Infamy in their second round
- Did someone call Shenanigans? (Clucky) proposed to reveal the Routes of four players, unless any of them objected privately, to help the Burglars puzzle out whether an outcome was due to a scam, a mistake or somebody misrepresenting their actions. There was an objection, and no Routes were revealed.
Game events
- The First Break-In - the Guards defended the Hotel successfully
- The Second Break-In - the Guards defended the Hotel successfully
- Accusation: lendunistus - the Burglars voted to hedge Lendunistus out of the next break-in
- The Third Break-In - the Burglars stole something
- The Fourth Break-In - the Guards defended the Hotel successfully
- The Fifth Break-In - the Guards defended the Hotel successfully
Core amendments
Permission to Reveal(ais523) proposed to allow the Emperor to reveal all privately tracked information at the end of each dynasty, but failed- Edit Arrowslit (Josh) changed the edit window from four hours to 30 minutes
An Orderly Way to Describe a List(JonathanDark) proposed defining the concept of a "list" in the Appendix, but failedThe Interdynastic Scoreboard(ais523) proposed an ongoing player score that increased by 0-100 each dynasty, but failed
Ascension
After the fourth Break-In, ais523 was ahead of all other players by at least 1 Success, and ahead of all players on the opposite team by at least 2 Successes. As such, ais523 would necessarily have enough Successes to win regardless of the results of the fifth Break-In (which is why a rule was added requiring at least 2 Fame or Infamy to win). The first three Successes were achieved because the teams that ais523 was on were using breaking strategies (i.e. strategies that were almost guaranteed to succeed due to unbalanced rules) on the first three rounds, with the fourth Success obtained because the fourth round was extremely Guard-sided due to a buggy rule that caused Extra Spots to count even if they were created at the wrong Minute, or by the wrong player (with Guards benefiting directly from each extra Extra Spot, and Burglars typically not wanting any more than one, with spare Extra Spots being actively detrimental).
The fifth Break-In was therefore almost entirely about whether ais523 could gain enough Infamy, without being caught and without the help of Groundwork (which ais523 didn't have enough Infamy to use at the time), and without being randomly Sidelined. (In post-game discussion another Burglar said that they'd given a low Bid for the Break-In, meaning that ais523 couldn't be Sidelined.) There were four Ingresses available to potentially gain Infamy at, with only three Guards to cover them. ais523 predicted that the Guards would cover X, N, and G, and thus attempted to gain Infamy at C. In fact, one Guard was attempting to cover both C and G by moving back and forth between them, but this left gaps during which C could be safely visited, and ais523 was able to predict the timing of the gaps via using the Guard Noise post, thus gaining enough Infamy (and enough additional Infamy to survive any Camera Traps) to meet the victory condition, achieving victory.
Commentary
A post-dynastic review thread is available.
