As some of you will remember, when the design for autoclass and Houses
was revealed in early 2005, one of the prominent changes we discussed
was to the city political system and giving Houses formalised control
over the government of the cities in which they reside. The revised
system has 3 major new features:

- 7 seats instead of 5, 3 of which are elected as normal and 4 of which
are appointed by Houses (via the House Lord or Lady) as representatives
to the council. The Lord or Lady may appoint him- or herself, or
another.

- Which Houses are able to appoint to council seats is based on House
influence within the city: the House with the highest influence will
hold 2 representative seats, and the Houses with the 2nd and 3rd highest
influences will hold 1 each. Influence, remember, is based mainly on
House membership and activity as well as Icon power, for those Houses
holding Icons. Anyone may run for the 3 remaining seats, including those
from the Houses that already hold representative seats. Eleusis, by the
way, will have 3 representative seats and 4 elected seats.

- An audit of House influence will run every two years for the preceding
two-year period to determine if there has been any change in House
influence significant enough to warrant a change in who controls which
representative seat.

We are now prepared to implement this system and will be working with
the city and House leadership of each city over the next two Achaean
years to make the transition as smooth as possible. As the city councils
currently stand, for all cities except one, there should actually be NO
change necessitated by the initial transition if we slide council
members from various Houses into the representative seats of their
Houses and those without proper representation into the elected seats,
unless any Houses decide to replace their representatives. The one city
that may experience a change within a single seat is Shallam, where
currently the two most influential Houses hold no seats at all in
council.

We realise this is a significant change to a very long-standing
political system and have allotted an estimated two Achaean years from
now to make the transition as painless as possible; it may take more, it
may take less. City governments and House leaders -- Clementius and I
shall be in contact with you soon!

More details on the specifics of the new system shall be coming in the
form of help files -- please hold any questions until you've seen them.

Penned by my hand on the 10th of Daedalan, in the year 411 AF.