The edition
How a proposal becomes the next version of the shared thing: at a turning, numbered, printed on the back of the card.
The rules change only at a turning, never in the middle of a season, and every change arrives as a new edition with its number on the back of The Playcard. That is the whole mechanism. The proposals gathered through The Way Up are read at the top at each turning; those that ring true are folded in; the new edition goes out down the same path the sheets came up.
It is load-bearing because it makes improvement safe. A Cell playing the first edition and a Cell playing the fifth are still one game, because the part that does not change — the fourteen numbered lines of The Season Sheet and what the numbers mean — is exactly the part that lets them read each other. The old card counts until the new one arrives, so nobody is ever out of the Game for holding last season's card, and no table has to keep up with a moving text to stay legitimate.
How it is played. Version everything and keep every prior version. Date from a clock, never from a calculation. Say what changed and why, and carry the provenance rather than thinning it — a change that makes a text longer must make it surer, and one that makes it shorter must lose nothing that matters. Let a change soak before it binds. What one copy learns is offered back to the wider body; what the body settles flows down to every copy, adopted or declined with reasons. A local table may always play its own better way meanwhile; the edition is how that better way becomes everyone's.
Also called: edition · next edition Stands on: Proposal · The Way Up · The turnings Opens onto: The Playcard · The Return · Progressive canonization · Provenance · Current Best Understanding · The Rules of The Game In play: Home · beyond Sources: The Way Up, §The edition (current best understanding) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System §18.6 (draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Part XIII, "How this text changes" (Fable synthesis, second draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The Way Up, The Playcard Open: No page names who cuts an edition, or where the gathered proposals are read. The seed describes a steward of each copy accepting or refusing; the Little Book describes it passively, "at the top".