The Clacks and Post - a Magical not-Victorian Matrix Game

Welcome to the city of Endon: greatest city in the world. It is a dynamic, go-getting city that is moving with great velocity into the Century of the Fruitbat. While a great many things are changing, the speed of communication is not one of them. Until now. The New Clacks Company is looking to change that with the power of engineering. Not everyone approves of this, in particular the traditional long-distance communications provider, the Royal Post Office, considers this as encroaching it on their territory.

This is a matrix game about the rise of this new technology and the reactions of various players in Endon and the Kingdom to it. For more information about matrix games in general, Practical Advice on Matrix Games by Tom Mouat is well worth a read. This leans towards more real-world, serious uses, but they are suitable for recreational and hobby games as well. This owes more than a little to Going Postal by Terry Pratchett (which is well worth a read), as well as some ideas from Magical Industrial Revolution by skerples. In Clacks and Post, each of the six players will control one of the following entities:

• The New Clacks Company
• The Royal Post Office
• The Government
• The Royal Wizarding College
• The Esteemed Chamber of Endon Businesses
• The Countryside

The following are the details for the setting and broad sweeps of publicly known information about each entity. A follow-up post will contain more hidden information known to each entity, possibly about other entities.

The New Clacks Company - Public Information

Founded a year ago to develop the early prototype semaphore towers into a full network. These have been known for a while, but have only been used for ship-to-ship or short-range battlefield communications. The Clacks Towers (named for the mechanical noises they made) are much larger, being intended as permanent installations of tall towers to cover the most distance possible. Each tower can be seen by the next one in line and so messages are passed as quickly as a given tower can retrieve the message and send it on.

The current network is a handful of towers within Endon for testing, but a number of towers are being constructed that will link Endon to the nearby port town of Dullbury, as a large scale proof of concept. The company directors are actively looking for funding from interested parties to construct more lines.

The Royal Post Office - Public Information

Originally the royal messengers, the Royal Post Office now operates for anyone willing to pay to send a letter. Within the city of Endon, there are multiple deliveries a day, starting with the overnight post being delivered around sun-up, running through to the final delivery just before sun-down. Larger cities in the Countryside get a daily delivery from Endon, while smaller places get at least one a week. The time taken for a given letter will also include whatever the travel delay for the coaches from Endon is, of course. For some of the cities in the far north, like Eedjitburgh, that means that a letter may take a week or more to arrive.

Larger parcels can also be sent, although generally at much more of a premium than letters. Letters within Endon are very cheap to send, with profits being made through volume. Postage outside Endon (or larger parcels) are much more expensive, and so a lot less utilised. Larger cities in the countryside, like Boringham and Erdjitburgh, also have more frequent deliveries that are cheaper within the city.

The Government - Public Information

A (mostly) democratic parliament that still defers to royal authority in some areas of law and tradition runs the Kingdom. Endon itself is run by the Lord Mayor and a handful of local councillors, who are a mixed batch of elected and appointed, depending on the exact locality in question. In general, no matter what happens in the wider Kingdom, Endon will be unique, or at least be granted affordances as the largest and most important city. This is in addition to various ancient rights and prerogatives for small patches - there are few laws that apply equally to everyone.

Being at least mostly democratic, decisions that the government makes are closely analysed and discussed, and past governments have fallen on the strength of personal scandals and unpopular laws. As such, the government is unable to make decisions without considering public opinion.

The Royal College of Wizards - Public Information

The only other means of long-distance communications are the wizards. Using magic to do things like send a message is eye-wateringly expensive, but it is fast, and relatively reliable. They have other abilities, but magic always extracts a cost.

Wizards are known to be insular, aloof and likely to squabble with each other. This has prevented them from really building up a reliable network, and makes using them for anything large-scale (not just communications) all but impossible.

The Esteemed Chamber of Endon Businesses - Public Information

A loose collection of various businesses in Endon. These cover a wider ange of interests from shipping to coal mining to textiles to steelmaking and more. While many of the actual enterpises are out in the Countryside, for a business to be taken seriously, it needs to have a presence in Endon. While Shuffled makes plenty of good steel, for example, Endon is a major market for those products, or at least a place that those from Foreign Parts will come and purchase it.

The actual Chamber provides a number of functions: arbitration between members, a collective voice to the Lord Mayor and Parliament for business interests, arrangements for prices between members and similar things. As such, it is a largely unseen but powerful player, especially within Endon proper.

The Countryside - Public Information

This is the rest of the country - everything outside Endon. The size and wealth of Endon dwarfs almost the entire rest of the Kingdom, and (certainly within the minds of Endonites) is unimportant. That said, the wealth of Endon is built on the activities in the Countryside: farming, manufacturing, manpower. Endon pulls everything into its orbit and weighs very heavily in the mind of the Kingdom: if Endon leads, the Countryside follows.