Seonid

List of accounts participating: @Amber Vulture @Amethyst Scorpion @Azure Mouse @Charcoal Hyena @Chartreuse Penguin @Coral Swan @Cream Tuatara @Emerald Falcon @Fuchsia Ostrich @Indigo Weasel @Ivory Dragonfly @Magenta Albatross @Mauve Crocodile @Melon Dingo Pinch hitters are welcome to announce their arrival via blue text.

MR30: Cycle 1 - Fear Aboard the resource hauler Pride of Terris, fear was beginning to suffuse the cramped spaces. It wasn't just the leftover terror from the rushed evacuation - as terrifying as deserting a damaged space station had been, that was not the fear that began to take over the ship. Nor was it the claustrophobic fear that breeds itself whenever a mass of desperate humanity is crammed into a space that is too small for them. Nor yet was it even the special fear that comes to flower on a spaceship packed with people as the air recyclers are slowly beginning to overload and the food supplies dwindle in the face of the all-consuming hunger of more than a dozen refugees on a spaceship designed for a crew of 6. The fear that took over the Pride of Terris was a much more primal fear than any of these. It was a deep, gut-wrenching fear that tapped into hormonal pathways written deep in the evolutionary development of humanity. That fear that paralyzed a primitive primate in the face of a hunting cat, or suffused the earliest men when the howls of wolves sounded in the snow-covered forest. It was a prey-fear, a death-fear. It started when the captain's body was found, drained of blood and half-dismembered, hanging half-out of a ventilation shaft. After that, refugees huddled in their little corners and tried to find the most out-of-the-way places to hide that they could, lest they be the next victim. Who knew who or what was hunting the ship? All that mattered was that the refugees were prey. But hiding could not last forever. Eventually, the refugees slunk back out of their dark hiding holes and into the common room, where they began to determine what they could do to protect themselves from whatever lurked in the dark. But behind even this meeting lurked a subconscious fear. What if some of the people standing at the table were traitors? What if this very gathering held the people behind the hunger that stalked the ship? But there was no other choice. It was stand up, or give in. And it was not time to give in yet. --------------------------------------------------- Welcome to the start of MR30 - Scadrian Black Ops! Remember, there are no PMs in this game. In addition, anonymous accounts have special rules, as listed below in the spoiler. Cycle 1 has started, and will last for 48 hours. Rollover time will be at 2:00 AM MDT.

Ooh - that's tricky. By Saturday, we'll be 2 full cycles into the game. If you won't be able to post at all until then, it might be worth sitting this one out, and signing up for a longer-term game. I expect this one to be very fast-paced. @Jondesu has a game that will be starting around next Saturday, if I read the timer right.

There will not be any inactivity filters. I'm hoping the limited signup size will be all the inactivity control we need. Welcome to the game! We are currently at 10 players signed up. (I'm totally willing to run the game at 10 players, and I wouldn't even be sad about it - the original setup I played was a 10 player setup, and I've expanded it for our larger expected player counts.) With that long, parenthetical statement out of my system, however, there are still 4 spots open if players want to sign up!

MR30 - Scadrian Black Ops Kasheron Station. It was a beautiful glittering wheel in the bright sunlight, slowly rotating around the central spindle with its massive linear particle accelerator - the peak of Scadrian technological innovation. Here, at the Scadrial-Sun L1 point, a constellation of refueling stations, repair facilities, and smaller science lab stations that required experimental conditions that Kasheron could not provide floated in the silence of deep space. On a normal day, the space near the station would be littered with the glowing main engines of dozens of starships coming in to dock at one of the many stations. This was anything but a normal day. The wreckage lay scattered across the void, twisted metal and plastics drifting away from the massive spinning station to find their own new orbits around Scadrial's sun. The station still rotated, wounded but not destroyed. Three full habitat modules had been blasted away from the exterior of the ring, shredded into pieces by the force of the explosion, and seven more had been damaged. Today, the dozens of starships collected refugees and survivors from the habitat modules who now no longer had a home on the station. With life support on the remaining habitat modules strained to support the whole population of the station, all ships in the area were emergency rerouted to start ferrying refugees back down a gravity well, or at least to Scadrial's massive ecosystem of orbital habitats and stations. It is to one of these ships - unremarkable to the naked eye - that we now turn our attention. It is a small ship, as such things are reckoned, scarcely one hundred meters from end to end, but it's solar sails stretch out nearly a kilometer in either direction. Normally, this is a luxury transport, bringing head scientists, politicians, and business magnates to conduct their lucrative business aboard Kasheron station. Today, it is just another glorified passenger liner, filled to it's life support capacity with a teeming mass of refugees, on their way to somewhere marginally more safe than the wounded behemoth. But no everybody on this transport is what they seem. Secrets abound on Kasheron station, and some are dangerous enough to kill for. --------------------------------------------------- Hello, and welcome to MR30 - Scadrian Black Ops! This game will be a blackout game, with all of the game-relevant information unknown to players. This will also be an anonymous game, where players will be assigned one of the anonymous accounts designated for SE use, and will be able to participate without anyone knowing their identity. However, unlike the Anniversary Game, this game will primarily be using the anonymous accounts to facilitate a new, experimental mechanic that will allow some roles to swap accounts with another player. Anonymity is a secondary concern to the new mechanic. As such, prospective players may sign up directly in the thread. If you wish to sign up anonymously, please send a PM to Fifth Scholar and I in the format MR30: Signup Request. Otherwise, post in the thread to sign up as normal. This game will have its player count restricted to 14 players. As such, if you find yourself interested in this game, but worried about whether or not you will be able to remain active, please consider leaving places open for players who will have time to remain active. Any players who sign up in excess of the 14 players there are slots for will be put in a pinch-hitter list. Signups will last until Monday, July 9. The countdown will use midnight, Mountain Daylight Time as a placeholder time until I figure out what time rollover will be best suited for. Reminder: Rules for Anonymous Accounts: At the start of the game, you will be issued an anonymous account. There are a number of rules associated with the use of an Anonymous Account. Please follow them carefully. Given the potential for abuse of Anonymous Accounts, any rule breaking using the accounts will be dealt with harshly. 1) Do not change the password of the anonymous account you are issued. Orlok, Fifth and I will have access to all anonymous accounts for the duration of the game. 2) Do not use the anonymous accounts to PM any non-anonymous account, other than the accounts of the GMs. Please do not use your normal accounts to PM anonymous accounts. 3) Do not change anything cosmetic about the accounts, including member title, username, signature, and avatar. 4) Do not reveal your identity or explicitly claim to be another player. Quick Links:

It is, and it's going up soon. Probably tomorrow or Monday

It's time to close up another exquisitely fun game of Sanderson Elimination! Congrats to the Machineborn on their victory, and congrats to the Elims for playing a very well-played game that could easily have gone the other way. The time has come and gone to lock this thread, though. So without further ado, goodbye! If anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, please get a hold of Wilson, Orlok Tsubodai, Alvron or myself. Not only will we get you added to the list, but we'd also be more than willing to help out in any way we can. You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone over here in our Art of Game Creation thread as well. With all the games that we've run so far, we have plenty of experienced GMs that can help you refine any game you're thinking about! If you would like to play, a new Long Game should be up and running in the very near future, so watch for a signup thread to be posted!Thanks again to everyone that played and we look forward to killing seeing you in future games!

We haven't heard back from Drake yet. Randuir has got preliminary things set up, although his championship game will leave him with not a lot of time for GMing. Still, Randuir has made a role distribution, and the IMs feel that letting this game go on is a better approach than canceling it and starting signups for a new game. If the current state continues for a few hours, I'll get day 1 up for Drake to take over when he gets back.

Thanks. I was equal parts proud of it and apprehensive about it. (I always do feel a little worried about magnificent backstabbing/manipulative plans.) Well, the scan on Len certainly made a lot of our conversation make more sense, but nothing there specifically gave me the impetus to scan Len. Well, maybe your response to my suspicion of Lopen. That probably cemented my decision, but I'd already been worrying about it because of completely independent paranoia. By the time you answered, I was already planning on scanning either you or Len. I chose Len simply for conservation of actions. Also, Lopen's attitude towards you was partially my fault, I think. Neither of us processed the whole "warrior protect lasts until the end of the day" effect, and my last conversation with him was about whether or not you would view going for the "protect yourself and turn village" plan as a betrayal of your win con. I didn't get a chance to update him with your post-reveal explanation to me (I don't remember if there was a cycle issue involved or if it was just a me not being active with issue), so he was working on slightly outdated information - in part because I expected it all to work out during the night. So sorry about that. Anyways, I'm glad things worked out for you. One of my biggest worries was that you would end up as an innocent casualty of my finding Len and Steel. Also, props to Lopen for putting me onto the idea of a Steel - Len pair. I was still suspecting Wilson for a while before that. Ironically, it was the pendant passing story that put us on to the connection. Also, drake, your analysis in the Elim doc was spot on. If your team had had me killed instead of Wilson that night, it would have been a very different game.

Well played to everyone. Especially Aman. During those first few cycles when I had almost no time to even thunk about the game, I just scanned the list of players he gave me. Turned out to find 2 Jeskeri. That's all on him. I was pretty sure that our discussion on Shu Dereth was being manipulated, and Lopen was actually my original suspect. No better place to hide than to be the one directing the discussion. Then i suddenly got paranoid about Wilson, because I realized that claiming lovers would be a brilliant way to disguise the Gyorn - Odiv PM. So I scanned Len to check Wilson (who i had already scanned before) and the rest is history. But still, very well played, and I feel that we're even now for LG41. Walin had felt off to me, so i scanned them the night I died. Good call on killing me that night, even though I might have been protected. (I'll admit to being slightly surprised when I died, but relieved, because I really didn't have time to get as involved as I wanted to. I was slightly more active than my thread contributions indicated, but that was only because I spent my limited available time on my PMs.) Anyways, good game everyone. I had fun, and I hope everyone else did too.

@randuir, I shall lend to you the crown of Sheon Idris. May the virtue in it lead you to scan only non-village players (or villagers who will become absolutely essential to meeting your win con). Alternatively, may it also lead you to consistently infiltrating the village's trust groups and then bringing them down from the inside.

LG10, iirc

My recommendation is that we jeskeri pendant Len, and lynch him if nobody does that. By all means, if he comes up village, lynch me. However, just to note for you. Lopen can confirm the entire plan. I came to him with my scan on Len at the start of the day, and when Len pmed me asking about the scan results, I told Lopen every step of my intrigue. Finally, I was the one that got Len to start the bandwagon. Ask yourselves - is it more likely that I got my Gyorn lynched - when we were within a few days of winning and neither of us were under suspicion - or that Len saw the writing on the wall and tried to bus his outed-via-scan teammate in the hopes of gaining enough trust to avoid getting scanned/lynched?

Well, your scan came back that you were aligned with Shu-Dereth, and a non convert. Consistent with either being the Gyorn or an Odiv converted while you held the pendant. Lopen and I assumed the latter, but the former is a possibility (although I find it unlikely for reasons we are both aware of).

Len did it because I told him I'd scanned Steel. He thought that Steel was outed, and was likely trying to protect himself from suspicion by cooperating and looking like he was excited to work with me to catch him. I asked him to start a train on Steel so we could watch and see who defended him (ostensibly to find steel's teammate). But in reality, I knew Len was evil and wanted to see Steel's reaction to see if we could catch the Gyorn.

Since I'm outed, I suppose that there's no point denying it. Because of course, you know my role much more conclusively. After all, Len is your Odiv, and I claimed to him a while back. My apologies @Elenion for the intrigue I've played with you today. I actually scanned you last night. And when Lopen and I determined that there was a good chance that Steel had converted you, I figured I'd try to use your and his reactions to determine the truth.

I'm actually thinking that Steel could very well be the Gyorn.

@Devotary of Spontaneity, is there a reason that we're excluding players with a role and/or items from the Odiv suspect list? I don't see why they are any less likely to have been converted

Alright - a month late, but I've finally found time to put together a short retrospective. My thoughts immediately post game can be found towards the end of the Nalthis doc, where I ended up participating in quite a long discussion. But this is the official bit. How did this game work? Well, compared to previous Shard Games, I think that by and large, this game has been the most balanced of the lot, in terms of balancing the different factions against each other from game start. The player count made deciding on a team size for Hoid/Khriss rather difficult - 2 conversions apiece meant precariously small teams, but 3 conversions apiece meant a game that was practically unwinnable for the village, especially when the likelihood of Shardic conversion was added into the mix. In retrospect, I think that Shards should have required more effort to release from containment. The ease of releasing Shards significantly changed the dynamics I was hoping for. How about the Shardic Win Conditions? Autonomy was probably too easy. That got an easy fix for future games - "have aspects + autonomy outnumber living players." As a replacement win con, it's elegant, simple, and reasonably balanced. Ruin might have been too easy as well - but that one is a rough balance between making it possible and making it inevitable. I think that letting Autonomy's aspects or Khriss's invested Shards makes the win con reasonable. The others were fun but not extremely impactful. Endowment was potentially unbalanced, but part of that was just how few kills ended up getting used. Ruin (without even getting converted) decided to blow up worlds instead of using kills, and started by getting rid of the world that let you use stolen investiture for a kill. The lynch failed a couple of days in a row, and none of the players who were given roles that could potentially kill wanted to use them - I think this community has an aversion to using vig kills for some reason. On paper, the amount of potential kills and the amount of potential protects seemed alright. But the way it turned out in practice, it didn't end up that way. A possibility to prevent such a thing would be to limit Endowment to a single Returned at a time - if they Return a second player, the first floats away forever. That could incentivize Returned to use their suicide ability, too - to get some utility out of their death instead of going gentle into the good night whenever Endowment wants to bring another one back. So, @Sart, a bunch of your analysis was correct. With most of the players with kills available not using them, and Endowment able to Return someone every night, the game could have dragged on forever. Instead it ended in a sudden death win con that nobody knew about, but frankly, that wasn't too much better. A lot of that wasn't inherent in game design, though - it was emergent behavior that came out of this specific constellation of players. I'd love to run this game again, with a few fixes. Maybe I'll try it again if the next Shard game ends up in a resolution that makes sense for the story. Anyways, it was fun (if stressful) for me, and I hope it was fun for the rest of you all as well! See you around these parts.

I guess I'll put my vote on Dalinar. Our priest is either remarkably skilled or remarkably lucky. I'm getting LG14 vibes out of this game in some ways. Anyways, to add my 2 cents on the Derethi situation - we ought to be focusing in that direction, I think. I wonder if a list of converts would be useful. I was converted last night. Anybody else want to volunteer their conversion status? At the very least, with a list of converts we know whether or not our lynch target will assist the Derethi with their win con.

Drake. Sorry I haven't been as active. I've had a lot of things going on, and things aren't looking good for the future either.

Sorry. Wife's birthday today. Nobody strikes me as being suspicious yet. But the lack of activity means that state of affairs will continue. So. Devotary. Why do you deserve not to be lynched?

I'm up for Araris. Not much else to say yet.

Sure. Eternum. randuir

Hmmph. Not a fan of an 8 vote bandwagon on bort. But more than that, the reported interaction between Bort and Aman is village-indicative to me, at least as far as anything can be d1. Eternum I don't have suspicions there, but it's the viable counter lynch. And I'd rather lynch someone that i have no read on than someone who i have reason to believe is village