Lexicon: An RPG

This game is best played on a wiki, and it can take anywhere between a month and several months to play to completion, depending on pacing. At the end of it, you'll have a highly-hyperlinked document that details a nice little piece of collaborative world-building.

Each player takes on the role of a scholar, from a time before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are collaborating with a number of your peers—the other players—on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world).

The creative agenda of the game is one of collaborative storytelling. As such, it is as much about reading and appreciating each other’s work as it is about writing your own material. The game will succeed if players are enthusiastic about playing off of each other’s ideas. The game will falter if players are competing for attention or for control of the narrative.

Setup

Before starting, the players should agree on the general subject matter of the Lexicon, either democratically or by benevolent diktat. The topic statement should make use of the technique of open reference when describing the historical period, such as: You are all revisionist scholars from the Paleotechnic Era arguing about how the Void Ghost Rebellion led to the overthrow of the cyber-gnostic theocracy and the establishment of the Third Republic. What is a cyber-gnostic theocracy? What happened to the first two republics, and what is the Paleotechnic Era? These questions are left open at the outset. The concepts are named to specifically to evoke a mood and inspire the other players’ creativity. Their specific meanings will unfold over the course of the game.

How to Play

The game is played in 26 rounds, one for each letter of the alphabet.

1. On each round, each player writes an article for a headword beginning with that round’s letter. Each player writes a single article, and that article must cite other articles.
• On the first round, each player writes an article for the letter A. Each player’s article must make two citations to other articles in the encyclopedia. These citations will be stubs—you enter their names in the the index, but the articles are empty placeholders that will get filled in only on the appropriate round.
• On the second and subsequent rounds, you continue to write articles for B, C, D, and so on. On each of these rounds, you need to make three citations in the article you write. One must be a reference to an already-written article, and two must be to unwritten articles, either by citing and thereby creating a new stub article, or by citing an existing stub article. (After the first round, you are never required to create a new stub, as long as there are existing stubs for you to cite.)
• On the 25th turn you need only cite a single stub article, and on the 26th turn you do not need to cite any stubs, because you’ll be at the end of the alphabet.
2. It's an academic sin to cite yourself, so you must never cite an article you've written, nor write an article you’ve cited. This forces the players to interlink their articles, so that everybody depends on everyone else's facts.
3. You might sometimes disagree with your colleagues’ choice of emphasis or point of view, but you respect them as honest scholars. No matter how strained their interpretations are, their facts are as accurate as historical research can make them. So if you cite an article, you have to treat its factual content as true! (You can, however, introduce new facts that shade the interpretation.)
4. Articles should be between 100 and 200 words long. 150 is a good target, and articles longer than 200 words are strongly discouraged. Otherwise the game tends to bog down. That said, this is discretionary and you can run over by a couple of words on the rare occasion you need to.
5. You can only create stub articles that are further ahead in the alphabet than the current round. You can’t create stub articles under earlier letters, because there would never be a chance to fill them in. Play always progresses forward through the alphabet. So, for example, on the first round, all stubs must start with B or later.
6. No letter can have more articles (or stubs) than the number of players. This is true even during that letter’s round. For example, on round 5, if two E stub articles have been previously cited, then two of the players must write the articles for those stubs.
• To coordinate this, players may claim their article for the current round as soon as they know what to write, by creating a placeholder article with content like So-and-so is currently researching this topic. Please exercise good etiquette and don’t claim a popular term before you actually know what you intend to write.
7. During a round, you should not read other players’ articles for the current round. It’s inevitable that you’ll notice the names of their articles, but don’t read them or link to them during the same round that they’re being written. This encourages everyone to come up with creative ideas on their own, rather than advancing in lockstep.
8. Once a round is over and everyone’s articles have been submitted, you can’t go back and change anything you’ve written. Each round’s submission is final. What has been written, has been written. (It’s fine to go back and fix an obvious typo, though.)

A Note On Timekeeping

A game of Lexicon should have an established time cadence, which can be adjusted depending on the energy level of the players. Typically a round might take anywhere from 3 days to a week, established by the game’s facilitator announcing that articles for the round are “due” at a particular date and time. Obviously this need not be enforced strictly, but players should strive to keep pace so that there is always consensus about which rounds are done, which round is in progress, and which rounds are open for the creation of stubs.

A Suggestion Regarding Complexity

The tempo of the game, and the level of concentration it requires, is highly dependent on the total number of rounds. On the first round, everyone just writes whatever they want—what joy! On the second round, the players must take care to honor the canon that has been developed so far, and this becomes increasingly complex, so that by the 26th round, players must have mastered all the lore from the 25 preceding rounds. In other words, this is as much a game about reading as about writing, and thus the amount of reading determines the amount of mental effort the game requires.

Thus, players who wish a less intense experience can make the game shorter and simpler by decreasing the total number of rounds. For example, for a 13-round game, simply declare that the first round welcomes articles starting with A or B, the second round is for articles starting with C or D, and so forth.

An Appendix on Appendices

Players may find it helpful to produce supplementary materials such as diagrams or timelines to help manage information. Such materials are welcome to the extent that the players find them fun or helpful, but they are to be considered non-canon. Supplementary materials cannot introduce new information or even additional details or color. The supplementary materials should instead be of a summary nature and should have no content that all players wouldn’t already agree with.

Of course once the game is over, players may wish to keep imagining and role-playing in the world they’ve created. This is warmly encouraged! The above caution about supplementary materials is meant to apply only while the Lexicon game itself is running.