Toronto Dogs In The Vineyard:Lexicon

Lexicon is a group setting creation strategy. Players take the role of scholars and historians describing the setting where the players enact their adventures.

The rules for the creation of a Lexicon follow at the end of these entries.

Thanks to Neel Krishnaswami for inventing this game.

Set Up

"You are American historians from the late 20th century writing the 'real' history of the growth of your nation in the New World. Your focus is on the Territories, now called the State of Gilead, a prosperous and religiously conservative member of the United States of America. Some of you are conspiracy theorists writing revisionist histories of the fantastic events that took place in the mid-nineteenth centuries. Some of you are religious scholars recounting the birth and growth of a new religion in a new land."

Rules

"You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also collaborating with a number of your peers -- the other players -- on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world)."

The game is played in 9 turns, one for each button of a push-button phone. 1 (ABC) 2 (DEF) 3 (GHI) 4 (JKI) 5 (LMN) 6 (OPQ) 7 (RST) 8 (UVW) 9 (XYZ)

1. On the first turn, each player writes an entry for any of the letters 'ABC'. You come up with the name of the entry, and you write 50-100 words on the subject. At the end of the article, you sign your 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.

2. On the second and subsequent turns, you continue to write entries for DEF, GHI, KLM and so on. However, you need to make two citations. One must be a reference to an already-written entry, and one must be to unwritten entries. (On the 9th turn, you can cite no phantom entries)

It's an academic sin to cite yourself, you can never cite an entry you've written. (OOC, this forces the players to intertwingle 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.

3. 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.)