Lexicon, an RPG

Adapted from Lexicon by Neel Krishnaswami

Any questions about the rules should be hashed out in the comments of this entry

1. The game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet. Each turn will last 48 hours, and begins at 5:30 AM EST. Everyone should be in bed then, so no one has any undue advantage. Players may join and quit at any time before the Os. Once the Os have been reached, no one else may join, and if anyone quits, we will hunt them down and break their knee caps.

2. This game will start on Friday, August 19th at 5:30 AM EST. We will begin with A. The first turn will last until 5:30 Sunday morning, at which time it will roll to B, and so on. I will try to keep a note in TheLexicon which says which turn is being played.

3. All players should, at some point in the game, write a short biography of their character. It need not be longer than a normal entry (about 100-200 words). Biographical information can be used to round out the feel of the world, but should not be used to expand the world dramatically - thats what the entries are for.

4. On the first turn, each player writes an entry for the letter 'A'. You come up with the name of the entry, and you write 100-500 words on the subject. At the end of the article, you sign your character's name, and make two citations to other entries in the encyclopedia. These citations will be phantoms -- their names exist, but their content will get filled in only on the appropriate turn. No letter can have more entries than the number of players, either, so all citations made on the first turn have to start with non-A letters. For phantom citations, you also need to go to the apropriate letter and create the entry (but don't fill it out).

5. On the second and subsequent turns, you continue to write entries for B, C, D and so on. However, you need to make three citations. One must be a reference to an already-written entry, and two must be to unwritten entries. (On the 25th and 26th turns, you only need to cite one and zero phantom entries, respectively, because there won't be enough phantom entries, otherwise.)

6. It's an academic sin to cite yourself, you can never cite an entry you've written. (OOC, this forces the players to intertmingle their entries, so that everybody depends on everyone else's facts.) Incidentally, once you run out of empty slots, obviously you can only cite the phantom slots.

7. Despite the fact that your peers are self-important, narrow-minded dunderheads, they are honest scholars. No matter how strained their interpretations are, their facts are accurate as historical research can make them. So if you cite an entry, you have to treat its factual content as true! (Though you can argue vociferously with the interpretation and introduce new facts that shade the interpretation.)

8. You may claim a phantom entry as yours at any time of the first day of the turn. If you have not filled it out within the first 24 hours, however, it becomes unclaimed and anyone may use it.

9. If you join the game late, start on the current letter and create an entry as if it were a blank slot even if there are not any blank slots available. After your first turn, proceed normally.

10. This little game is played on a wiki, and it should take about two months to play to completion. If you need help with the wiki format, please ask. At the end of the two months, we should have a highly-hyperlinked document that details a nice little piece of collaborative world-building.

11. Nature of this wiki: Because it is password protected, only one person at a time can edit an entry. You can have exclusive access of the wiki for 15 minutes, after which the lock becomes stealable. At least, thats what the wiki is telling me. Because of this, it would probably be best to write your entry offline and only log in to load it to the wiki.

12. Pictures, maps, symbols and the like may be uploaded, but probably shouldn't be. This is a free service and they don't give us very much space. Please be mindful when considering uploading anything like that.

Any questions about the rules should be hashed out in the comments of this entry