TURTLEGUILD
What this is, how it works, and what comes with a shell.
TURTLEGUILD is a collection of 1,111 turtles on Robinhood Chain. Each one is drawn from a fixed set of traits, sworn to a house, and given a name and a page of its own.
Most collections give a picture and a number. This one gives a picture, a name, and a page in a book that holds every member of the guild. No two pages carry the same name, the same heading, or the same paragraph.
For a long time the crown read every letter and kept every door. Most turtles kept their heads down and their letters short.
A few walked out with what they could carry. A key, a quill, a ledger, a letter still sealed. Outside the walls they became a guild, and the first thing a guild does is keep a record of who belongs to it.
That record is the book. Every turtle in the collection has a page in it, and every page says where that turtle came from and what it carried out.
Every turtle is sworn to a house, and the house is read from what that turtle wears and carries rather than assigned to it. A handful swore to no house at all.
| House | Creed |
|---|---|
| Outlaw | Takes back what the crown took. |
| Friar | Keeps the keys to forgotten doors. |
| Noble | Holds the seal and its secrets. |
| Scholar | Reads what the elders buried. |
| Craftsman | Makes what coin cannot buy. |
| Explorer | Walks past the edge of the map. |
| Merchant | Keeps the ledger honest. |
| Warden | Holds the gate through the night. |
Houses are not tiers. A house is a company to belong to, and later a side to take.
Book of the guild is a register of all 1,111 turtles, arranged in eight volumes, one for each house. A page shows a turtle's portrait, its name, its number, its story, and everything it wears and carries.
Any page can be found by typing its number. Volumes can be read straight through, one leaf at a time.
Book opens after the reveal.
Writing was done once for every trait rather than once for every turtle. What a coat says about a turtle's past, what its eyes give away, what it carried out of the old order and the mark that leaving left, how it goes about now, and what its shell has taken.
A page is then composed from the traits that turtle actually carries, so a page describes its own picture and nothing else. Traits that appear most often across the collection carry the most phrasings, which is why two turtles have to match on seven traits before their pages begin to sound alike.
That is stated plainly because it can be checked. Every page is public once the book opens.
Three things come with a turtle. Two of them exist already and can be seen the day the book opens. One is a promise about later, and is written here as a promise rather than a fact.
No claim is made about rights to the artwork. Nothing of that kind is promised here, and anything of that kind would arrive as its own document or not at all.
TRUTH is planned and does not exist yet. Everything in this section describes how it is meant to work, not something that can be bought today.
Once, what counted as true was whatever the crown allowed into a letter. A guild answers that by keeping its own record and leaving it open. TRUTH is what gets spent to write into that record.
It has one job. Every use of it changes what the book says, and nothing else grants those changes, so there is nowhere else to obtain them.
TRUTH spent on the book is burned. None of it is kept by the guild. What the guild earns, it earns from trading fees, which are described further down.
A holder may name their own turtle. Whoever holds a turtle at the time holds that right, and it passes on when the turtle does.
Naming changes the book. It does not change the token's metadata, which is fixed once and never altered, so a page shows the name a turtle goes by now and the name it was written with underneath.
Each renaming costs three times the one before it, and stops climbing after the fourth. Renaming is paid in TRUTH, so what it comes to in money is set when TRUTH exists.
| Renaming | Cost |
|---|---|
| First | Base |
| Second | 3x base |
| Third | 9x base |
| Fourth and after | 27x base |
Planned. Written here as it is designed, not as something that can be done today.
A holder may add to their own turtle's page. What they write lands in the book under that turtle, stays there, and carries over when the turtle changes hands.
Writing is paid in TRUTH, and what is paid is burned. Checks run on chain, so the rules below hold wherever the writing is sent from.
A paragraph costs ten thousand TRUTH while the token is small, and the number comes down as the token grows, so that what a paragraph costs in money stays roughly where it started. Revisions are announced rather than left to be noticed.
Beyond a single page, a house can have a chapter written for it. Members of a house put TRUTH toward their own house, and once a house reaches its mark, its chapter is next to be written.
A mark scales with how many turtles a house holds, so roughly a quarter of any house has to move for it to reach one. A small house that acts together gets there before a large house that does not.
Turtles whose holders put the most toward a chapter appear inside it by name, with a part to play.
One chapter is written at a time, and how often is set by how fast they can be written well. Houses that reach their mark while one is in hand wait their turn.
Exchange is closed.
Robinhood Chain is a quiet chain, and getting funds onto it is the slowest part of arriving. A guild interface handled that in one step, routing across chains rather than holding liquidity of its own.
A fee of 1 percent was charged on swaps made through it, and holders of a TURTLEGUILD turtle paid nothing. Ownership was checked against the chain at the moment a price was quoted, not declared by the person asking.
It is described here rather than removed, because a page that quietly loses a section is a page that cannot be trusted about the sections it keeps.
Planned and not built. Rules below are settled. None of it says what it pays, because that depends on trading the guild does not control.
Trading TRUTH carries a fee. Part of that fee collects in a guild treasury, the treasury buys, and holders claim what it bought. Nothing is minted to pay for any of it.
A turtle earns nothing until its holder switches it on. One that nobody has activated draws no share and is not counted against the ones that are, so a quiet week is worth more to whoever turned up than a busy one shared with everybody.
Selling switches a turtle off the moment it moves. A buyer earns nothing until they switch it on, and what a turtle has built stays with the turtle rather than the wallet, so a page somebody worked on is worth more than one nobody touched.
How much a turtle counts for is set by three things. Base is held by every active turtle. Streak is built by writing and is lost by stopping. Standing is built by writing and never falls.
| Part | Each paragraph adds | Stops at | How it falls |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | Held from the start | 1.0 | Cannot be lost |
| Streak | 0.03 | 0.4 | Halves for each day missed |
| Standing | 0.02 | 0.1 | Never falls |
So a turtle written to every day reaches 1.5, and nothing may ever pass 2.0. Standing fills after five paragraphs and the streak after fourteen, which at two a day is three days and seven days. Past the third day the only part still growing is the part that can be lost.
Stopping costs the most on the first day and less on every day after, because the streak halves rather than draining at a fixed rate.
| Days missed | None | One | Two | Three | Four |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Counts for | 1.5 | 1.3 | 1.2 | 1.15 | 1.1 |
A turtle never falls below 1.1, because standing is kept. Climbing back from a single missed day takes seven paragraphs, which is four days of writing.
A turtle at the top counts for one and a half turtles that sit idle. That ceiling is deliberate: turning up is worth half a turtle more and never a whole collection more.