HOLD places workshop managers directly inside the Greathold’s political life. The foreground fantasy is civic stewardship, not market speculation: understand an issue, argue with neighbours, commit the workshop’s seal and capacity, and live with the resulting common action.
The franchise follows dwarven Mastership. Each independent workshop identity has one seal and one vote while present through its civic home. Wealth, throughput, consortium membership, and sites in other Holds do not create additional votes.
Local-first issue routing
An issue begins with the smallest body that contains its material consequences. A Hold question begins among its active workshops, residents, institutions, delvers, and ecological stewards. A route closure also implicates the connected Holds and its passengers. A deep gate implicates its Hold, delver associations, ecological stewards, and supply relationships.
A workshop’s civic home establishes its ordinary local civic relevance. Contracts, routes, infrastructure, workshop sites, core relationships, and realized consequences can widen affected-party jurisdiction without granting another seal. Every site remains subject to the ratified policy of its host Hold regardless of where the workshop votes.
A proposal can move outward when its consequences do:
affected workshop or institution → Hold → connected Holds → Greathold-wide commitment
Greathold-wide policy is therefore an assembled common mandate, not an order descending from a permanent capital. The player does not receive an identical national ballot merely because a vote exists somewhere in the world.
Political verbs
A workshop manager can:
- subscribe to relevant assemblies and public digests;
- read proposals, forecasts, testimony, objections, and audits;
- propose or endorse an amendment;
- attach or withhold the workshop’s seal;
- commit production capacity to a public project;
- condition that commitment on material safeguards;
- nominate an inspector or auditor;
- petition to widen an issue’s jurisdiction;
- join a boycott, strike, mutual-aid effort, or emergency mobilization;
- withdraw from an association where exit does not externalize unacceptable harm.
Voting settles decisions that cannot be decomposed further. Much of governance happens through association, contribution, negotiation, refusal, and visible consent.
Political subjects
Motions concern conflicts, not abstract bonuses. Examples include:
- suspend deep-core harvesting pending investigation;
- subsidize civilian heating during a mana shortage;
- accept foreign ecological inspectors;
- answer an export embargo;
- recognize dungeon cores as legal persons;
- mobilize workshop capacity for defence;
- fund and guarantee baseline equipment for independent delvers;
- close a dangerous gate or fund one final expedition through it;
- recognize a foreign form of Mastership;
- admit a new category of practice to the workshop franchise.
The interface may forecast likely consequences but must not reduce a political commitment to +8% output. Forecasts are incomplete, interested, and attributable to their sources.
Cozy cadence
Civic play is slow, asynchronous, and optional in ordinary life:
- ballots remain open across a generous real-time window;
- digests summarize rather than demand constant attention;
- abstention is permitted and carries no participation penalty;
- local questions do not become global notifications;
- deliberation does not consume a tradable campaign currency;
- votes cannot be sold, delegated as property, or multiplied through wealth;
- losing a vote creates new conditions for play rather than a personal failure state.
Early public motions are authored by the world simulation so that they remain coherent with live events. Player petitions can later gather seals to enter the appropriate assembly without turning the first prototype into an unmoderated parliament.
A dormant workshop enters no future issue routing or quorum. Votes already cast and ratified commitments remain facts. Reactivation restores prospective relevance only through its civic home; changing that home removes the old jurisdiction before admitting the new one.
Governing distribution
Each Hold begins with a founding distribution policy that funds public necessities, reserves, repair, procurement, and expedition work. It is inherited law, not a designer-owned safety net. Franchised players may preserve its slack, redirect it, streamline it into a brittle just-in-time system, privatize parts of it, or repeal it.
Policy can govern:
- institutional charters, mandates, budgets, taxes, fees, and subsidies;
- procurement priorities, eligible suppliers, and service obligations;
- reserve targets, release rules, access, and rationing;
- imports, exports, freight, and infrastructure investment;
- labor, safety, ecological limits, and extraction access.
An adopted service guarantee creates an obligation and a priority for scarce capacity; its budget may or may not be sufficient. It does not conjure the promised good. Forecasts, audits, notice periods, reserve recommendations, and staged implementation can warn against a destructive change; if players lawfully remove them, no hidden institution restores them downstream.
From vote to world
A common commitment acts through institutions and material cooperation. Ratification changes institutional constraints; players do not select each purchase, production run, service schedule, or contract. The institution plans from that policy and its real assets, then receipts successful actions and failures. A mining moratorium changes gate access, lift schedules, listed contracts, public provisioning, and workshop participation through those actions. It is not an invisible global flag repaired after the fact.
A defence mobilization authorizes public bodies to issue procurement, redirects shared infrastructure, and creates institutional contracts. No individual workshop authors military strategy. Workshops decide how they respond to the collectively formed mandate; foreign states and their militaries remain independent non-player actors.
The result returns through news, prices, orders, contracts, and expedition conditions. Politics changes the world through the same verbs by which players already inhabit it.