During pokes’s turn, they used the Seed action to change the name of the NPC formerly known as Schwingrasen to “pokes.” This is arguably legal under dynastic actions: Seed states that the player should “set the value of one of Schwingrasen’s held gamestate variables to match their own value” and gamestate is defined as “any information which the Ruleset regulates the alteration of.” Because the rule “The Floating Island” regulates how Gaia may change the name of that NPC, that makes the name—again, arguably—a held gamestate variable.

But, in the #currentdynasty Slack channel, pokes admitted that this made the mandatory Seed action impossible for other players:

“I don’t know if a turn can be taken right now”

In my view, this makes the name change illegal under the seventh bullet of the Fair Play rule:

A Island should not do any action meant to make the game unplayable

I’d also like to point out that I already proposed a glossary addition that would have headed off this argument. Commentary on the proposal indicates that players feel it could go further, and I agree with that, but the preceding events make it clear that it’s valuable to have even a minimal definition as a starting point.

To resolve this issue, enact the following changes:

• If there is an NPC named pokes, change the name of the NPC named pokes—not the player named pokes—to Schwingrasen, and update the Great Sea page accordingly.
• Add a new term to the Glossary, called NPC, as follows:

  A Non-Player Character or NPC is an entity used to track gamestate under a name which must be distinct from the names of all active Islands. In typical usage, this often means an extra row (per NPC) added to the table of statistics on a given Dynasty’s relevant gamestate wiki page.