Hey Folks,

I've gotten quite of work done on the system hacks recently. Specifically, THE BIG TOURNAMENT is ready for alpha testing! I'm pretty excited about this one. While work has also gotten done on the immortal court and the murder mystery as well, The big tournament felt like such a wild idea for this format that I wanted to give it attention right away.

I think of Lineage as being a game about drawing graphs full of people. The Big Tournament system hack is going to be similar to vanilla Lineage in that it will be a graph of people (a march madness style bracket-graph in this case) but it's different in that the graph shape is already set when the game starts. It doesn't grow and sprawl out like a family tree does. One benefit is that you will play though a "tournament season" pretty quickly, ending with the championship match. So to make the play session a satisfying length you'll have the option to play multiple tournaments with off-season events in between!

Will the champ retire after winning the belt? Will the second seed team will make a critical trade? Will a coach will get into a high profile scandal? - It'll be great, I'm pretty jazzed about this design.

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In other news, the python graphing tools are about as good as I can get them on my own. I'll be using these tools to aid in designing the random distribution tables in Lineage but I don't see a reason I couldn't make them available to you folks too! Right now they are about 80% of where I think they should be to be really useful. If I can get them polished up, I'll throw them up here on Itch so you can download them if you just want a quick family tree generator.

Currently the trees are looking pretty decent but still a little messy - see below. If there's anyone out there familiar with the DOT graphing language who would like to lend a hand or if you know of another graphing library well suited to this kind of use, please get in touch at lineagestorygame@gmail.com.

Stay safe out there folks,

-Tim