Thanks for that link Tony and the one that you gave earlier MAD on the Wikipedia portal - the pamphlett will be most welcome when you can get to it too but we've got the time on our side so no sweat
Like Dotsie's saying the simpler we make it the better so whilst we can use what's out there for guidelines I think for the convention we should focus on the known similarities with poker and blackjack (and gin rummy too) and treat the 'event' literally as a card school or workshop and let the players run with it using the 2 playing sets we're making
In other words, we've got plenty of time to look at it and some decisions are going to be easy enough because we can mix and match Roundworld and Discworld equivalents.
Some things are different on Discworld, for instance Caroc has only 12 cards per suit in the minor arcana (numbers only go up to 8 but then they have a Knight as well as the Knave/Jack in the court group), so that means we have to adapt there immediately to make them match our traditional version of 13 cards per suit. There are more cards, 30 in the major arcana for Caroc, which would mean using it in it's entirety for divination is really not viable, because in Roundworld we only have 22 higher cards, but these can be translated into Discworld equivalents as they're not all specified by Terry so we can take the canon more loosely in that and adapt it to something that people can use without too much alteration.
The Eighnnnnnnn
Note there are 7 N's :twisted: I'm also rather at sea with what the theme is, but it's loosely to do with the nature of Discworld magic and the power of Eighnnnnnnn... Here's what Chairman Brian has to say on the subject
Brian Nisbet said:
To counter the shock of being in the second decade of this still rather new and shiny millennium we’ve decided to look back down the long line of Terry’s books and go back to the beginning. As this is the Eighnnnnnn convention, we’ve taken our inspiration from The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic and the remarkable journeys of the Disc’s first tourist and the most (in)famous wizard of all. You can expect to savour the delights of Ankh-Morpork, to fear the roar of Dragons, to marvel at the expanse of the Rimfall and to hope, above all, nobody counts to the wrong number and attracts the very worst kind of attention.
This is why Sjoerd and I were thinking in terms of a 'Temple of the Lady' (so a casino in other words as she doesn't have 'official' worshipping places) and with the Caroc being about fortune-telling this also dovetails neatly into the theme as she's there with Fate the whole time in the 1st 2 books. The rest of the theme then falls into place easily enough in terms of the gambling aspect and to make things more Morporkian we could open it up for other Discworld games 'in the room' but on a casual 'drop in' basis for the duration as it's not clear yet what this would be. We might not need a lot of space for this so it could be held in the ops room or the costuming room for instance with just a card table or we might have one of the side rooms for a morning or afternoon and people can come in to have their fortune told by meerkat or try a game of CMO or even play Thud or the Ankh Morpork game if people bring their own stuff in so it's not going to be a big deal to organise necessarily... Gods that sounds naive, but you know what I mean
