Happy Sunday!  As a reminder, people are still dying from COVID-19 even though testing has crossed the necessary 500K/day threshold.  We have no tracing program in place and we have no idea who the superspreaders are.  If you’re going out to protest, please, wear a mask.  And if you’re protesting in DC, please contribute to Trump’s conveniently brand newly built new faux-Berlin Wall around the White House at 1600 Black Lives Matter Plaza, DC!

Kevin told me that past me decided Eversink is 1000 years old not 2000 years old, but sinks at a much faster rate than my back-of-the-envelope calculations.  The underbasements are actually 30 stories deep all told with the 6x sinking rate over 1/2 time.  My bad, and past me is always kind of nefarious anyway.  I had good reasons for that choice which are lost in notes somewhere on my desktop here.

But!  Let’s talk about another thing I find delightful about Eversink!  Government Committees and Laws and Traditions!

Ok, I know what you’re thinking right now.  And the thought bubble tree looks something like:

  1. Wut.
  2. Only you can find government committees and wonky political structures fun.

But wait.  They’re actually awesome.

I was heavily influenced by the actual government of the Republic of Venice, which was not, in fact, a Republic at all but an oppressive oligarchy open to select few.  My core reference on the Great Council of Ten is John Julius Norwich’s eager but barely readable History of Venice, where detail is spread randomly across its near-1000 pages, and a paper copy sits on my shelves.  The Great Council begat other Councils which begat Committees which, in theory, Did Interesting Things.

I borrowed that concept fairly liberally for the Government of Eversink.  But what I also added was Venice’s concept of Ad-Hoc Committees and took it to a very Eversink Extreme.  In Eversink, one has the Triskedane (no Doge nope), then the Main Committees that do important things like the Committee of Defense, and then lots of Little Committees that roll up to the Big Committees and, theoretically, do marginally useful things for the City.

The last thing we want is for the Triskedane to actually do things.  They delegate.  And the big Committees are too busy politicking, so they also are not expected to do things.  They also delegate.  So they begat small committees, which begat smaller committees, and it’s turtles all the way down.

This means, with a clever application of Laws & Traditions, a skill that lets the city be putty in the hands of a PC, the PCs can simply declare themselves spontaneously a Committee and go do Government Things with plausible Government power.  Presumably, without ever contacting the actual Committee they serve who will wake in the morning to a mild surprise.  (Important Note!  NPCs can do this, too!)

This doesn’t mean said Committee that actually exists will give the PCs any sort of real temporal power or resources to do a thing.  But the PCs could, say, waltz into the Opera House and flash around papers declaring themselves the Committee for the Rating and Control of the Hemlines of the Mezzo-Sopranos, and thus, with the Great Power of the Triskedane! All Hail the 13! really demand those seats in the upper left-hand box.

And, perhaps, someone will give it to them.

With a wave of a skill, the PCs could transform themselves into a government committee who really does have the rights via the higher up committees to get into the locked government buildings to get access to paperwork that the hoi polli can’t otherwise see.   Or they can just be a big gang, right out of A Clockwork Orange, calling themselves a committee or they can fight another committee out there on the street in a big government committee vs committee rumble!

Ok, so this sounds like a way to have a gang with a fancy name.  Except!  Except!  Law in Eversink is a malleable thing, and lawyers have real power. Laws & Traditions allows players to also make up laws on the spot so they could be a government entity and then make up laws that support why they’re up to nonsense!

And there’s no reason why said Committee cannot exist one day, get disbanded, and then the PCs be another committee the next!  Hemlines on Tuesday, Hat Control Wednesday!  Except there’s this problem where someone powerful up on top in the actual government gets irked because someone is causing weird mayhem yet again, and come snooping around, and demand to know why the PCs are goofing off with the actual Eversink Government.  Or worse, someone powerful up on top of the actual government might decide the PCs are doing a good job and now the PCs are getting held to an actual standard and have to go do things because this running shaggy dog joke about committees has turned into actual meaningful employment.

The big committees do have real power.  They control real resources and make real life and death decisions over the City.  But PCs can just sort of… step in… and have their own go at it at will.

Stats:

  • 20,235,678 completed COVID tests.
  • 1,947,306 positive found
  • 111,287 confirmed dead.  Have I mentioned this number keeps climbing?!?
  • 58,109 cases in MD with  2,817 dead
  • 1 out of 153 people have it in Howard County.