PART ONE: THE SEVEN LAWS
“To play well is not to win, but to become the kind of mind others remember how to meet. The city is not stone, but strategy made stable—a vast game where each seeks their own path, and finds it only because others do the same.”
The God Phoibos was the first builder of cities. He is the father of geometry and architecture, but it remains a puzzling fact to consider. He does not enjoy physical labor. One can easily imagine Ultor and Poteidas straining against pillars of marble, lifting slabs of stone into the sky. Whereas a single bead of sweat on Phoibos’ brow would cause his acolytes to frantically fan his face, so unnatural would that bead look there. But Phoibos is the true builder of cities, for he saw first what a city actually was– an organism, a gameboard. Above his music and geometry and archery, Phoibos loved the Game most of all. So the first city began as all his creations do, as a great game. The game was played at the Temple of Phoibos in the now sunken island of Riz-Leutheria. They came just for the game. Then they forgot to leave. Thus did the first city grow outwards from his Temple.
From the game he learns as much about his creation as the mortals do. What he learned became the seven laws that now form the basis of all the cities of the Empire. They are organized as the Four Roots and the Three Branches.
PART TWO: THE FOUR ROOTS
The Four Roots are the foundations of a cooperative game. Without them, the games quickly end in anarchy, dissolving in a turbulent mass of bullies and beggars. The Roots are not grown in a sterile glass vase but in the vibrant earth, sometimes nurturing sometimes hostile, but always unpredictable and ever-changing.
The First Root: Non-Envy
“What another earns from trust does not impoverish you—it clears a path. Envy is the math of the small mind. In a recursive world, his fortune may become yours. To covet is to misread the game. The wise see value in what multiplies through others. The field is not one harvest. What grows in his corner can still seed yours. Count gains, not rankings. The ladder was a mirror all along.”
The first games were all zero-sum, there was always exactly one winner and one loser. But in the city of Phoibos, this is an unrealistic childish enterprise. The game is designed to have only winners, as long as it is played long enough. They do not win equally. But in a long game, they win more than they could have anywhere else—and more than they would by trying to win too soon. The game he gave the first mortals to train them before building them a city was simple. It is played between two people. They are in two separated chambers of the Temple of Phoibos. Each must place a coin on the altar. If they do, then Phoibos will give the other person three coins. If they do not, the other person gets nothing. The altar will decide when to close, if at all. But if there are five rounds with no coins given, the altar will definitely close, and the game ends. If you put in no coins, but receive three because the opponent did, then you have three coins instead of two. Even better, you will now have four coins more than your stupid opponent. If you both had two coins each, it was as good as each having no coins at all. But vengeance will be swift and sweet, and once that trust is broken, the altar is ripe for closing.
The Second Root: Restraint
“Cooperation is fragile. The first to strike teaches the world to strike first. To draw the blade before you are betrayed is to teach the future your fear. The first betrayal is not remembered as clever—it is remembered as permission. There is power in waiting, not in wounding. Let your restraint be the shape of your strength. The game does not begin with a blow. Begin with your hand unclenched.”
The temptation to cheat rises with every round. Perhaps the altar will close at the end of this one, how clever will I be to have predicted it and made off with a plus-four right at the end, truly winning the game. But soon the math becomes very clear. Your games tend to be much shorter than the others’. You win more than your opponent in most of your games, the ones who are nice, but still you are poorer than everyone. It is a mystery to no one but you. Soon there will be no one left to play with. And all who continue playing will refuse to be the first to defect.
The Third Root: Retaliation
“Mirror what you receive—not to mimic, but to balance. The wise do not endure injustice, nor repay kindness with silence. Their ledger is exact. Do not reward the hand that strikes, nor punish the one that offers. The just mind does not forget. Its mercy has memory, and its judgment has measure. Let your response teach what the world must become.”
There are many players. There are many games. There will be temptations unresisted, and sometimes mistakes unprevented. Retaliation is as much a part of the game as cooperation. Reciprocate, retaliate, and move on. In the next round perhaps he will make amends, and so will you, and the game will go on, the altar will remain open. Perhaps today you will make less than you might by never retaliating, but word of your weakness will spread, and tomorrow you will make fewer still, until one day you are as poor as the player who never cooperated. And even he will sneer at your fate. At least he won a different sort of victory—while making nothing.
The Fourth Root: Clarity
“Complexity confuses allies and delights only yourself. What is opaque invites misfire. A strategy unreadable is a strategy untrusted. Speak your pattern in the grammar of reason. Let others not applaud but align. Cleverness is the lie you tell the mirror. Let your logic be a lantern, not a labyrinth.”
The game is a dance. For it to be done well, you must be in harmony with your opponent. If your steps are complex and intricate, as beautiful and elegant as they may be, he will respond as he likes, not as you like. The dance will become a farce, and only the audience will be pleased. Perhaps you are too clever to simply reciprocate and retaliate, perhaps your mind is far too complex for such a simpleton’s strategy. You are welcome to try something more difficult, but if your opponent does not understand it, the chord will turn to cacophony. You will be tempted to call your opponent an idiot, and then call Phoibos an idiot. But in the end you will be poor. And when the rich call you an idiot, you will wonder if they are not telling the truth.
PART THREE: THE THREE BRANCHES
Roots let the game begin. Branches let it endure. These are the forms that must hold, even when new strategies emerge, stronger and stranger than the old. The Three Branches are pillars. They bear the load and anchor the system. They make the structure persist and endure, against not just the elements of decay but the invasion of mutants.
The First Branch: Robustness
“What succeeds against one is clever; what succeeds against all is robust. Dominance means winning without privilege. The worthy strategy rises not by shelter, but by generality. To endure, one must prevail in a world not built for them. To win is not to dominate—but to outlive what burns too hot or bends too far.”
The Robust branch does not win every battle head-to-head, it merely earns consistently high rewards over a consistently long period in a mixed environment of exploiters, cooperators, pushovers and bullies. It avoids unnecessary conflict, punishes exploitation efficiently, and cooperates reliably, reflecting performance across diversity and not dominance in a walled garden. You do not play against your opponent. You play against every opponent, in an arena where everyone plays everyone else. There are many who think they can play each opponent differently, at his own game, but they lack the fourth root of clarity, and their dances become drunken crawls. There are many who think they know the opponent’s weakness, they will exploit the meek and defer to the strong, but they lack the other three roots, and their races become short mad dashes that lead off a cliff.
The Second Branch: Stability
“Let the gates be open—and unprofitable to breach. Stability is when change comes, and nothing yields. Make disruption costlier than adaptation. What survives is not what strikes hardest—but what others choose to become. They win the hand but lose the pattern. They win the day but lose the season. Not all victories spread. Some isolate.”
The Stable Branch resists invasion by fitter mutants who are quickly punished by exclusion. Reciprocity is not fragile, it defends itself without central enforcers. It is self-protecting merely because the invaders earn less and learn more. Why bother winning a season, you ask, when you can win the day once, over many seasons? You will soon run out of both days and seasons. Meanwhile the city runs out of neither. That is why you are now dead and the city is not. It is stable not because it cannot fall, but because nobody wants to topple it. It does not make betrayal illegal, merely unprofitable.
The Third Branch: Viability
“In a world of liars, truth does not begin as law. It begins as signal—quiet, recursive, seen only by those still capable of reply. What survives is not the strongest, nor the kindest, but what best evokes itself in others. The first echo becomes the pattern. A pact between two is enough to end a war between thousands. Nothing endures that cannot arise from the margins.”
The Viable Branch grows from unfriendly soils, toiling at the edges so it can rule from the center. It scatters and fails, but clusters and survives. Then it grows. With momentum comes recognition, and imitation. Coherence is its advantage, thriving where patterns meet rather than where strength prevails. What cannot conquer the many may still multiply within the few, until it becomes the many.
PART FOUR: SURVIVAL
Phoibos learned these laws from the mortals, so he could not have taught them. His role was merely to keep the game going forever, to ensure the shadow of the future remained long. Exploitation, tempting in the moment, in every moment, became a poor strategy compared to the accumulated gains from infinitely more games to come.
“The law need not punish—only extend. You do not need to make them good. Only make them return.”
No system survives by design alone. It must also survive its destruction. Ultor’s armies destroyed the city countless times. But the altar survived, and continued to play, and the city regrew. Xhamai’s plagues hollowed out the city countless times, but the altar survived. Even the Elder Goddess Aerate was helpless. She put envy and hatred into the minds of men. How does this Phoibos have infinite coin, that he can simply continue to give them out forever, they asked. If his coin is infinite, why does he hand them out three at a time, making them fight and manipulate and play each other. Why does he not enrich them all, once and for all. They burned down the Temple. But the altar still stood. Then they guarded it night and day, preventing any from entering and playing the game. They thought they had ended the game. But the Viable Branch grows wherever rules remain—and so it did.
For the Pantheon, there was only one way left. It took the combined power of the three Elder Gods, the thunderclap of the All-Father, the volcano of Eidos, and the tidal waves of Poteidas. Riz-Leutheria was sunk into the bowels of the earth, and the altar of the builder of cities with it.
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