Designing a live court, then taking the price tag off

Before there was any music, the world was meant to exist in person. Diederik would run a court, or chancery, at medieval events. Visitors could bring a dispute, and he would deliver a playful verdict inside the fiction.

The first commercial idea was to charge for it, at roughly €20 for a title and €35 for a written verdict. On review, those prices looked too high for a spontaneous encounter. A visitor does not know in advance what they are buying, and an experience in which every step has a price weakens the game it is selling.

The model changed. An audience and a spoken verdict are free. Small physical souvenirs are optional and cheap: a document on parchment-style paper with the house seal (Sigillum Theodorici de Cok), or a coin. The design rule became: Status is earned. Souvenirs are purchased. Justice is free. If status can simply be bought, the game loses its meaning. If nothing is ever for sale, there is no operating model.

A second layer was designed alongside it. The Register der Getrouwen (Register of the Faithful) uses a simple gate token plus four coins that can only be earned: Fortitudo (courage), Consilium (insight), Fidelitas (loyalty) and Meritum (merit). Visitors earn them through small tasks such as delivering a message or solving a riddle. Over time this could support a playful ladder from visitor to knight of the Golden Rooster.

We wrote down the practical risks at the same time:

• the court has to fit event rules and must not get in other visitors' way;
• rules must make sense without a long explanation;
• each interaction has to be short enough that queues stay manageable;
• the cost of coins and documents has to match real interest;
• if the register records real names, data protection applies.

Most of all, people have to actually enjoy it. A well-designed game system is not evidence that anyone wants to play. So the decision was to run a small physical pilot before producing a full set of coins and props. No pilot is recorded so far.