Dear players, welcome into the Machiavelli variant "Absence of Plague", which is a scenario for 13 players with special rules & mapboard. This time the players are quite a special bunch, too: as guest stars we have two italians (Giancarlo and Pasquale), two swedes (Fredrik and Sigge), one american (Ward), whose great-grandparents were finns; a lady (Päivi), Eero and Kari. The rest of us - Anttipekka, Markku O., Markku P., Pontus and Risto - are members of a strategy gaming group at Ilmarinen, which is the leading pension insurance company in Finland. I (Risto) am the president of this gaming group, which is a division of the personnel club of the company. Also our judge Matti Harju works at Ilmarinen. He keeps these pages at his home site in the web. His main interests lay in digital cameras and photography, as his site so well shows. Machiavelli is the all-time favourite of our gaming group. All other players have also played Machiavelli before - for example, Fredrik says that he has played Machiavelli during a time span of twenty years! Giancarlo's web pages show the depth of his interests within this hobby. Eero has acted as the chief judge at EuroDipCon VII, and he is an active member of the Finnish Diplomacy Society SDS. I have originally suggested a schedule of one Campaign Season per week, but a couple of players have wished a slower pace, so we try a schedule of one Season per two weeks, sending orders to Matti on every other Thursday by 12:00 GMT, and the Military Unit Adjustment orders by the same time in the intervening weeks between Spring and Summer operations. We may change this pace into a quicker one whenever we agree upon this. Thus, the game will commence on Thursday, April the 5th (and not on the previous Monday, as originally suggested). By that time we'll send our Military Unit Adjustment orders to Matti, possibly including some forced taxation, ducat transferring between players and trading of provinces (also excommunication, in theory at least...). The ordinary tax & trade income is supposed to have been collected already. Each major power has 15 ducats in her treasury, but no military units on the mapboard. Each player may buy up to three military units, so negotiations are required even at this stage: where to build, and what? And now - - let us step five hundred and forty-two years back in time, into an alternate reality, a world without plague! -Risto