Lexicon: An RPG

There's a fairly new collaborative blog about role-playing games called 20' by 20' room. One of the regular contributors is Neel Krishnaswami, and his first post, back on November 20, was a complete play-by-wiki gamish-thing entitled Lexicon.

I call it the Lexicon rpg, in honor of its inspiration, Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars.

The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also 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 game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet.

1. On the first turn, each player writes an entry for the letter 'A'. 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, and make two citations to other entries in the encyclopedia. These citations will be phantoms--their names exist, but their 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-A letters.

...

The owner of the wiki should set the general subject of the Lexicon. I suggest that he or she make use of the technique of "open reference" when describing the historical period: "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 a cyber-gnostic theocracy is, or what happened to the first two republics, or what the Paleotechnic Era is are all unknown--they are named to specifically to evoke a mood and inspire the other players' creativity.

(I say "gamish" only because my personal definition of "game" requires something like victory conditions, and Lexicon doesn't have any. It's structured play, but not a "game".)

I can actually see myself playing this, maybe at a one-turn-per-week rate to conclude in six months (or a little longer, to allow for holidays, or more or less if you don't use the English alphabet as the basis. The Latin alphabet is only 23 letters.)