[Fluff] Quarter-Hour of Writing Challenge: Laws and Customs

A challenge by Library of Attnam, discovered via Archons March On.

This post is brought to you by PG Tips tea. PG Tips: It's What They Had At The Shop.

"Azor's Elocutors", art by Johannes Voss

I used to make custom Magic: the Gathering cards. (I still do occasionally.) If you hung around in that community for long enough, you would start to spot recurring themes, convergent ideas. One that proved especially persistent was the idea of a "law" mechanic, where cards would say some variation of

It is against the law to [x].

Whenever an opponent breaks the law, [y].

I understand why this idea was popular: it was thematically resonant, and writing that reads as fluid plain English but still has a meaning in Magic-ese makes you feel extremely clever. (I don't mean this in a derisive sense - I know this thrill because I've felt it first-hand.)

In the execution, though, this mechanic usually failed. Because both law and punishment were variable, you tended to end up with a set of cards with too many moving parts that stacked too well with themselves, clumping together into a homogeneous mass of "it is against the law for your opponent to play Magic, and the punishment is five unrelated wads of value".

But then, isn't that somehow thematically appropriate? Isn't that the nature of any sufficiently old system of laws, countless separate engines chained together by centuries of precedent and argumentation? At its extreme, such a system is a black box to anyone not initiated.

Imagine a ruined city governed by an ancient, cobweb-encrusted judge-engine, its many perils firing confusingly but consistently in response to certain stimuli. The trick to plundering the dungeon's treasures and escaping intact is to reconstruct the byzantine system of laws and diktats the engine follows - rules often learned painfully, as in the card game Mao. Perhaps there are many such sites, and an order of archaeologist-lawyer-thieves devoted to studying and unpicking the law.

They would surely pay handsomely for ancient legal codices and court transcripts, though retrieving such things intact could prove gruelling.