The Mechanicomicon Project

The Mech project attempts to collect game writing and game playing information in the MIT Assassins' Guild. The project began with Joe Foley's attempt to document game mechanic design and Jake Beal's need to document his particular gamewriting style. Since then it has grown to incorporate information for running games and playing them. We hope that others will contribute to this effort so that people do not need to reinvent the wheel every time a game is written.

The opinions contained within belong solely the individual authors and do not reflect on the MIT Assassins' Guild or the Mech Project editors.

If you are interested in joining the project or merely adding content, contact mech-gms.

• Definitive Guide to Writing Guild Games for the Rest of Eternity by Jake Beal, with help from Joe Foley
  (Warning: do not take this document too seriously. It is meant to be a collection of highly opinionated wisdom. You have been warned!)
• The GM Hintbook by Joe Foley, Elizabeth Smith, and Jake Beal
• Hints for Players by Various, edited by Erin Price, Elizabeth Smith, and Joe Foley
• The Mechanicomicon by Joe Foley, very much a work in progress.
• Parley -- discussions on SIK game design, edited by Dave Leung
• The SIK Wiki for more SIK game design

• Sidestepping Impossibility: Combat Consensus in the Assassins' Guild., Jacob Beal, MIT CSAIL Student Workshop 2006, September 2006. Followup to the first Assassins' Guild paper, this one examines carefully how combat consensus gets around an impossibility result.
• What the Assassins' Guild Taught Me About Distributed Computing, Jacob Beal, International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) 2006, June 2006. (Also MIT CSAIL Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-038)
• Tensions in Live-Action Roleplaying Game Design -- A Case Study with the MIT Assassins' Guild by Philip Boonyew Tan (MIT Master's Thesis)

• Official MIT Assassins' Guild Webpage
• The Standard Rules by Jamie Morris
• Template by Jamie Morris
• GameTex by Ken Clary (Ask Ken directly; it is still under development)
• The Lost Garden by Danc is a weblog with useful suggestions about general game design. In particular, his essay on Evolutionary Game design deserves a read.
• Ten Wings (aka The Ten Points) is a "translation" of General Tso's Ten points applied to game writing. (from kenclary on -c assassin)