User:Ch4zm/November 2025/Ft. Worth Lore Jam
- Hellmouth Cup: good team, thorn in everyone's side
- Toroidal Cup: cheating scandal, Cancel Texas Memo, Boston Diaspora
General Lore Ideas
Atonal Lattice Theory
The Piano Tuners operate on a computational substrate known to Golly theorists as an "atonal lattice." In a standard cellular automata game, cells update in a perfect rhythmic cascade, where generation N becomes generation N+1 all across the grid. However, the Piano Tuners, true to their nature, have a catastrophic inability to keep this rhythm.
Instead of the synchronous, rhythmic cascade, Piano Tuners cells update asynchronously, firing in random bursts like popcorn popping. The typical outcome is a "pattern soup" that usually ends up with the Piano Tuners hilariously tangled up with its own formations, disintegrating into chaos. (No doubt, this is the primary reason they were able to claim the Party Animals mantle in the Hellmouth Cup).
However, in some rare cases, the asynchronous chaos can invert, and rather than continually being one beat behind in each generation, their patterns are one step ahead, and the Piano Tuners are able to anticipate their opponents' moves and knock out critical components of their formations. The randomness of their updates make it impossible for their opponents to know where on the grid the Piano Tuners will be one step ahead, making it nearly impossible to defend against. When the chaos works, they are unstoppable; when it doesn't, they are Party Animals.
Hellmouth Cup
99 Bottles Fight Song
The Ft. Worth Piano Tuners selected the song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" as their fight song in their opening Season 1. At some point during Season 2, fans noticed that when they would sing the song during games, the Piano Tuners had a winning edge; as soon as they stopped singing the song, the Piano Tuners would start losing. The fans sprang into action and formed a traveling troupe of bards, "The Order of the Empty Bottle," who traveled with the team and maintained a vigil singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." At each game, the Order of the Empty Bottle was there on the sidelines, like Joshua holding up his arms in battle. During the Season 2 winning streak, the strategy almost became too successful, with the singers nearly reaching the end of the song. Near bottle #7, everyone coordinated losing count, and everyone had to start over again, allowing the winning streak to continue.
Toroidal Cup
Piano Tuners Hacking Scandal
Laboratory and Simulator
Context: The mechanics of the cheat involving the Delaware Corporate Shells and E Division.
The mechanism of the fraud was buried deep within the procurement logs of E Division. Using a complex web of liability-shielded entities tailored by the Delaware Corporate Shells, the Ft. Worth Piano Tuners successfully introduced a compromised hardware component into the league’s central simulation server: the Apex Stochastic Model 4.
Sold to the unsuspecting E Division as a "high-efficiency entropy source," the devices were, in reality, programmed with a conditional bias. The backdoored RNGs monitored the board state for specific Ft. Worth color hex codes. When the Tuners' cellular density dropped below a critical threshold, the RNGs subtly adjusted the "survival probability" of adjacent cells, nudging the simulation's inherent randomness to favor Tuner stability.
For the entirety of Toroidal Season 15, the Piano Tuners played with a weighted deck. Every lucky bounce, every inexplicable survival of a glider collision, and every convenient breakdown of an opponent’s defense was effectively pre-calculated. They purchased a statistical probability of 100%, disguised as the chaos of the game.
Bad Noise Psychosis
Context: Explaining why the Boot Lickers became aggressive.
The corrupted RNGs did more than fix matches; they polluted the computational atmosphere of the league. Standard cellular automata thrive on "clean" noise—pure, unbiased randomness. The Tuners' rigged generators emitted "dirty" entropy—a repetitive, jagged data stream that acted like a neurotoxin to the more sensitive collectives.
The Sacramento Boot Lickers, traditionally the most polite and obsequious entity in the league, possessed code highly receptive to environmental input. Exposed to the "bad noise" for two consecutive seasons, their social subroutines began to fray. The corrupted data acted as a constant, aggravating frequency, and their "sportsmanship" protocols warped into "aggression" protocols.
By late Toroidal Season 16, the Boot Lickers had been driven off the rails. Their brutal trash talk and physical aggression were the symptoms of a collective mind suffering from sensory overload, caused by the Tuners' fake math.
The Diesel Patch
Context: E Division's desperate fix using the old warehouse equipment.
When the leak exposed the fraud during the Season 16 postseason, the Commissioner issued a "Stop-Loss" order to E Division. With no time to procure new modern chips, engineers raided a decommissioned storage facility in the sub-basement of the League Office.
They dragged out the "Mark I Entropy Engines" — primitive, mechanical random number generators used in the league’s infancy. These were not silent chips; they were massive, diesel-powered tumblers filled with radioactive gravel and distinct, heavy lead dice.
When installed for the Toroidal Cup Series, the noise in the stadium was deafening. The "clank-grind-thud" of the mechanical RNGs reverberated through every concrete and steel bone of the stadium, causing the entire grid to vibrate. This return to "heavy," industrial randomness immediately severed the Piano Tuners' connection to their backdoored code. The simulation was suddenly fair, loud, and brutally indifferent to the Tuners' survival.
