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.

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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”.