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Lexicon Announcements

The fourth round of the Survival Lexicon has begun! Four of the 12 articles have been completed. Six articles need to be written for round three, and we're still missing three articles from round two. Round five shall be postponed until these are completed.

Urban Dead Lexicons

Main Page Completed: Outbreak Lexicon Unfinished: Infection Lexicon Abandoned Beginning Survival Lexicon Template:Lexicon Category:Lexicon Lexicon:Resources [edit]

This page is the headquarters of the Urban Dead Lexicons, World-building games designed to be played on wikis.

What is a Lexicon?

The game Lexicon is a world-building game made by Neel Krishnaswami. In essence, it's a game where the players write up definitions on bits and pieces of a given game world. The catch is that each definition has to reference several other definitions, and you're not allowed to reference yourself. So the definitions start needing to incorporate the output of everyone else, making a wonderfully interconnected world at the end.

What are the rules and setting of the Urban Dead Lexicons?

For a few reasons, we've adjusted some of the rules of the Lexicon. We've also adjusted some of the general backstory behind the game.

The Backstory

It's been 24 months since Malton was quarantined, and still there has been no word. Or has there? With Mobile phone towers active in the city again, people outside the city have begun receiving strange text messages from within the city. Text messages that have many in the know alarmed, and just a tad incredulous. Further, on the outskirts of the city, some survivors, desperate to let the world know of the hell they're living in, have been desperately throwing tattered journals over the concrete barricades of the city, risking life and limb, and more than a few interested soldiers and reporters have begun reading these journals.

The government has thus called all interested parties with information regarding the Malton situation to a series of royal commissions, to get to the bottom of what's happening in Malton, and hopefully discover a way of resolving the issue. The government has further invited members of interested parties, such as the NecroTech corporation, to the commission as well, to shed further light on the various activities within the city. These are the submissions made to those commissions...

The Rules

1. At the start of the game, a topic is chosen for the various parties to discuss.
2. The game is played in 8 rounds - ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL, MNO, PQRS, TUV, WXYZ
3. On the first turn, each player writes an entry for the letter 'A', 'B' or 'C'. You come up with the name of the entry, and you write 100-200 words on the subject. At the end of the article, you sign your name. Others will make one citation from that piece. Said citation will be a phantom -- its name exists, but its content will get filled in only on the appropriate turn. No letter can have more entries than the number of players, either, so all citations made on the first turn have to start with non-ABC letters.
4. On the second and subsequent turns, you write an entry based upon a citation found in a previous rounds entry and others will cite three more phantoms.
5. It's an academic sin to cite yourself, you can never cite an entry you've written. Incidentally, once you run out of empty slots, obviously you can only cite the phantom slots.
6. Despite the fact that your peers are self-important, narrow-minded, heavily biased idiots, 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.)

Example of the progression of the game:

• Round 1

SysOp writes an article based upon Archibald MacGuffin.

After writing their own article, LexiconPlayer7 then cites the words "Greene Industries" from the Archibald Macguffin article.

Example User cites "Danversbank Crisis" from LexiconPlayer7's article, before finishing off their article.

• Round 2

Someone must then write an article in round 2 called "Danversbank Crisis", as it is a phantom.

And so on.

Outside the Game

Because we're running this on a more general wiki, we need to ask players to respect a few conventions regarding their Lexicon entries:

• All Lexicon entries must be in the Lexicon namespace. So, instead of an entry being at [[Necrotech]], it would instead be at [[Lexicon:Necrotech]]. This is mainly to keep Lexicon play out the wiki for at least the time of the game, but also because this means that links to Lexicon pages are quite simple - by writing [[Lexicon:Necrotech|]], the wiki will automatically remove the Lexicon: from the visible link.
• All Lexicon Entries must use the template Template:Lexicon. Please be sure to look at Template talk:Lexicon to familiarise yourself with how the template works. (The Template will automatically Categorise your work to make it easier for everyone to find, so please use it!)

Lexicons in Progress

The third Urban Dead Lexicon is to be the Lexicon of the fight for survival inside Malton, or the Survival Lexicon for short. It will be starting October 19th.

Completed Lexicons

The first Lexicon was the Lexicon of the First Days of the Outbreak, or the Outbreak Lexicon for short. Progress was slightly rocky, with many drop-outs, but the end result was considered a success. A story emerged of a rivalry between Necrotech and a competitor called Rateger, and corruption in the military and government of Malton that allowed secret labs to be built underneath the city. A lab in Ridleybank, and several others, were bombed by an anti-NT terrorist group, leading to the escape of the zombies.