Tuesday, April 08, 2025

Ascension Address: The Hotel

As you can see, the Hotel Nagelburg very much dominates Zahndorf’s town square, and is one of very few buildings to survive from the valley’s silver mining days. When the hotel was built, the town was a bustling one, with travellers and brokers flocking from across the empire and needing a place to rest, to eat and to do business. The ground floor restaurant - ah, right on cue I see old Magnus is dimming the grand chandeliers - would have swelled with light and music well into the night, with patrons drifting in from the Crown Theatre next door which, yes, you see is nothing but wasteland today, it was sadly never rebuilt. Do mind your step through the fence here.

The tall sash windows on this side are no less ornate, if a little neglected, and you’ll note that the baroque woodwork on the ... third, fourth, fifth ... window’s jamb is of a style that can easily - if you’ll just, ah, give me a leg up here, thank you - can easily support a person’s weight as a handhold. The mechanism should be, if I can just, yes, has been left unlocked.

Of course, the old hotel itself only has minimal security on staff these days, but its clientele will often bring their own protection or hire locally when they’re staying or holding a meeting in these side rooms. Our target will be through the kitchens on the north side, and Magnus says they take the dogs out to the courtyard at ... a quarter to midnight, yes, there we see the torch lights. No, they can’t hear us at this distance.

This ballroom would have been a sight in its heyday! These aren’t the original fittings of course, but are very much in the style. The place is rarely used now, and as you see, keep down behind the dust sheets please, it’s really more of a storage space. From this side of the room we’ll have five minutes or so before the - who? Behind us? No, Magnus said those doors would be… Ah. Ah now.

Change “Nomicer” to “Agent” and “Imperator” to “Concierge”. Change the gamestate tracking page to “The Town”.

Activate the Building Blocks “Reinitialisation”, “Virtual Actions”, “Precondition Unidling”, “Edit Window” and “Revisions Allowed”.

My Imperial Style will be Gardener/Preservationist/Powerhouse/Guarded/Methodical plus a new non-existent style I will call “Scam-Gradual” (which I think someone else had a similar take on recently): I’ll play it as Scam-Mundane in the late game, but may move to close loopholes I notice in the first week or so of play. I’ll also invoke and later propose to enshrine a new Style of “Timekeeper”: I’ll be against mechanics which strongly incentivise players to act at particular times of day or in rapid response to their opponents (as the daily/weekly actions did last dynasty) and will propose to amend any that emerge.

Dusting off an old idea of two rival teams, one planning to break into a building while the other makes plans to defend it, and where either team might have a mole tipping the others off.

Giving the randomised-team rule from the Text Injection dynasty another airing, since it seemed to work well and is a good fit. Narratively the players could be a bunch of career thugs who are sometimes breaking into a building and sometimes being paid to guard it, or maybe different characters who share a larger player-shaped affiliation but change from burglary to burglary.

Defaulting back to the four-hour edit window for now, as I’m not sure that the zero-minute one is a great idea - and it having been an optional Building Block waved through for future dynasties for unclear reasons back in February means I don’t really know what the larger group consensus currently is on edit windows. Revisions Allowed seemed interesting so I’ll keep it around.

Comments

SingularByte: he/him

08-04-2025 10:49:41 UTC

I’ll be unidling again for this one. There’s now 10 players, quorum of 6.

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