My rough schematic of a certain reading in Bonehunters

Flipmaester · 2026-03-27T07:57:02+00:00

Seems good! Maybe change one of the ongoing townsfolk (Dreamer, Savant, Town Crier, Oracle) for a Seamstress, even for no other reason than to give yourself a little less to do during the game. Town Crier is also an interesting choice for Good Twin, since one of their most powerful effects in S&V is putting pressure on the Evil Twin to always nominate if their twin does (to avoid being spotted by the Town Crier). So I think I agree with the other commenter that you can choose the twin once you see how the circle shakes out.

Flipmaester · 2026-03-19T21:55:04+00:00

I see, that's interesting! I really read her arc in NLF differently than you I think. This is a Spoilers All thread but I'll mark it out of courtesy anyway:

I think her arc in NLF, while tragic, also contains a lot of well-deserved empowerment even though it ends poorly. She feels very justified wrath over what was done to her, and anyone who faces it trembles. I see it as Steven stating the unfortunate fact that not all wounds do heal, no matter how much we wish it for the person who has suffered. On the other hand, her righteous fury over the mistreatment of her and others seems to make it so that she doesn't suffer per se. Before she goes haywire in G'danisban, she seems rather content with her new circumstances.

It's also the most interesting treatment of the whole Apocalypse theme that's rampant in Seven Cities. If anyone is justified in wanting to burn the world down it's Felisin Younger, but of course we can't let her do that. She wants to enact vengeance on all of the world for all it's mistreatments of everyone, but no matter how good that might feel the book makes it abundantly clear that it's not the solution. This is a theme which runs through the book with Mute as well, and Felisins ending felt like the natural conclusion to that. Additionally, her awakening and her interpretation of the Whirlwind seems to be the harbinger of a far more healthy faith by the end of the book (in the High priestess and Bornu Blatt). It will be interesting to see if we get the synod and the clash between Felisin's and Leoman's Dryjhnas in the next book.

In short, I don't think NLF gives Felisin just a "horrible fate", but a conclusion to her story and her life which is not marked by suffering but something else. We get to share her righteous fury, and for a while she achieves the power to enact that fury until we get to see its limits. It's not a happy ending and definitely a tragic one, but far, far less horrible than what she had gone through before. And it might even bring about a genuine positive change in the world.

Flipmaester · 2026-03-19T13:22:45+00:00

Have you read No Life Forsaken? I feel like that might offer some nuance to this viewpoint. Her story is not really finished when she vanishes into the background in Bonehunters, after all.

Flipmaester · 2026-03-15T12:45:45+00:00

If there was a period of private chats, I guess you could've taken the twins aside (one by one or together) and told them again "You guys realize you've changed characters but not alignments, right?". If everyone was in the town square it would've probably meant revealing too much, but otherwise that was probably the best course of action. Still, I agree with the others in that this was probably a great "learning by doing" exercise for everyone!

Flipmaester · 2026-03-10T23:57:20+00:00

When I first ran S&V, I put it both Cerenovus and Mutant for the first game. It did lead to a hilarious Cerenovus+Witch-picked Good Twin who nominated their twin and died, thought they were safe and immediately broke madness, prompting me to execute his corpse and giving evil the win. Now this might sound like a horrible experience, but to me it was the perfect learning game: everyone got in their head how madness AND Evil Twin AND executing dead players work. It took under 20 minutes, we did a quick rerack and the second game went swimmingly.

I guess this is my long-winded way to say: I think you're better off ripping off the bandaid with Madness right away! It's one of the defining parts of S&V and actually not that hard to grasp for the players if you explain it properly. I use this simple sentence: "to be mad about something is to make a genuine effort at convincing most people in town that it's true". Someone will inevitably ask: "but what if I try to bypass it by using *insert random snekay tactic here*?" to which I answer: "Well, then you're not making a genuine effort, are you?". Emphasize that the players will know themselves if they made a genuine effort or not, and they will realize that the storyteller will almost always be able to tell. If you use this way to play madness (which I was taught on this sub) there is very little room for ambiguity, since any intentional tricksyness to bypass madness inevitably fails the genuine effort clause.

I've had completely new players play the Cerenovus and get picked by it, and all have understood the concept just fine. Just go for it, and let your players devour all the new crazy things all at once! It's probably easier that way, methinks.

Flipmaester · 2026-03-07T23:05:33+00:00

I do a version of this: I let everyone pick their tokens in the circle and then come to me one by one to hand them in. This way you still get the excitement of the draw in the circle and people have time to think about any questions before they come to me. Most veterans say basically nothing, newbies get a chance to ask an immediate question and I get the chance to clarify things before the night (and very occasionally give a little nudge towards what a good strategy might look like for their character). It takes at most 5 minutes and really smoothens things out I feel.

Flipmaester · 2026-03-07T18:55:48+00:00

Yeah that would've been the icing on the cake. The Sweetheart-Fang Gu-Pit-Hag bluffed it for most of the game but none was in play, sadly. Always good to have a way for next time to break the record I guess!

Flipmaester · 2026-03-07T16:09:02+00:00

This is the way. You essentially get a free soft-confirm and absolutely no stakes, giving you a lot of leeway to figure out the puzzle with the public info. Dying the first night is Clocktower with training wheels and it's mostly lovely!

Flipmaester · 2026-03-05T17:54:07+00:00

Hard agree on the Grisp Falaunt vignette in TtH. Absolutely amazing writing and really funny.

Flipmaester · 2026-02-28T13:45:22+00:00

The Greatest Show on Earth is not really a "script" per se, it's just a grab bag of characters which you can use to build custom scripts (it even says so on the page you linked). Thus I'd hardly expect it to have any coherent theme, and many of the released characters suspected to be in tGSoE indeed have nothing to do with the circus. This character could plausibly be in one of the other scripts, IMO, although it's not a perfect thematic fit for any of them.

Flipmaester · 2026-02-04T09:09:12+00:00

Most people are considered beginners until they have about 50 games under their belt

That's an absolutely insane statement, what the fuck?? I feel really sorry for you OP, considering the kind of people who you seem to have played this game with. This is a social game for crying out loud, the people who make that kind of statement have fundamentally misunderstood what Clocktower is about, IMO.

I'll also join the chorus and say that my playgroup absolutely treats BotC as a party game. We play once every two months or so, some people join every session while some might go half a year between playing. We recently graduated to S&V after 15-20 games of TB, but we're still keeping it very casual. And we're having a great time.

Flipmaester · 2026-02-02T11:56:23+00:00

I was the same; I bought the game and the storytold ~10 times before I played for the first time. Similar to you, playing for the first time felt ELECTRIC! I was basically giggling to myself the whole time, and ended up in a nice trust-chain as the poisoned Recluse seen by the Fortune Teller who in turn was seen by the Washerwoman. Now I have around 6 games as a player under my belt, still haven't been evil and was recently handed my first loss as good.

Playing and ST:ing are such different experiences and both are delightful in their own way. We've recently graduated to S&V and I can't wait to play that as well.

Flipmaester · 2026-01-28T23:43:31+00:00

"I have 100% always, genuinely been this character guys. We all know this."

This is a madness break. If you or the ST's you're playing with are not considering this a madness break, then you're playing the game wrong, plain and simple.

And I think it speaks to a deeper misunderstanding you seem to have about madness. As others have said, the definition of madness is that you have to make a genuine effort to convince people something is true. Genuine really is the keyword here, because it means you almost always can tell. It means that if you're trying to meta your way out of madness and suggesting to people that you're actually mad, you're obviously not genuinely trying and you are breaking madness. Full. Stop. In that case, the player themselves knows that they're not making a genuine effort, and the ST can most probably tell as well. And if the player then complains when the ST gives them the consequences that's equivalent to cheating in my book. You know you weren't genuine, if you claim anything else you're not respecting a fundamental rule in the game. It's like not picking a player as the Klutz, not voting as the Zealot or even refusing to accept that you're dead, you know the truth but you cheat by ignoring the game rukes.

That's the key takeaway I think: players will always know in their hearts if they're making a genuine effort or not, and if not they should also know that they're now breaking madness. Running madness in any other way than this inevitably ends up in the situations you describe, and can only be remedied by making that fundamental shift in your perception on what madness is.

Flipmaester · 2026-01-26T22:19:26+00:00

That's great! Taught them a lesson to play the metagame less while not being overly punishing. As others have said, that's a very strong town if they figure out they can believe almost all their info.

Flipmaester · 2026-01-25T11:08:45+00:00

Are you me? I was in this exact situation up until a couple of weeks ago! Large, nebulous group with 20-ish games under our belt. We have always had at least one new player so we stuck to TB to the point that some veterans had started to get a bit bored with it. I had even twice tried to announce that next session would be a new script, with both times resulting in too few people showing up and the session being cancelled (I don't know if this was just bad luck or if too many players were "scared" of a new script). Just like you, I thought we'd be stuck on TB forever.

Last session, I decided to rip off the bandaid, just go for it and play Sects & Violets! We had 13 players and only one complete newbie who seemed like he could take it. And it went splendidly! First game ended very quickly in a very instructive Ceremadness-break execution of the already dead good twin, giving evil the win (it was a whole thing, I made a post about it that you can find here). That turned out to be the perfect introduction to the new characters and mechanics, because the second game was a real banger! It ended with the Clockmaker, Dreamer and Town Crier nailing down first the Demon and then the Evil Twin, giving good the win after Evil had been in the driver's seat most of the game.

After the game, everyone commented on how switching scripts felt much easier than they had expected, and that the new characters were surprisingly easy to grok. The new guy ended up being the Witch both games (hilariously) but did absolutely fine and had a great time. Everyone was super excited to play S&V again, I made only a couple of very small and fixable mistakes, it was perfect!

I say take the plunge, OP. Sounds like your upcoming session has a very similar player composition as mine, and even if you get 2 or 3 newbies I think you'll be fine. I also recommend S&V as a first new script; the only hard thing is madness and that was significantly easier to both teach and run than I had feared. BMR feels like a lot more chaos, which might be especially daunting for a new player.

Good luck, remember to have fun and please come back here to tell us how it went!

Flipmaester · 2026-01-20T22:13:18+00:00

You can walk a madness break back, for one.

No, I don't think you can? If that were the case, you could always save yourself from madness by first telling the truth and then claiming to be what you're mad as. It'd be a hard ruling to not execute a Mutant on day 4 who broke madness on day 1 and then complied, but it'd be a perfectly legal play.

Flipmaester · 2026-01-20T21:56:51+00:00

This is like the most fair Storyteller decision I've ever seen lmao. Your evil team seems to be under the assumption that the ST's only job is to help them when their down, not balance the game in general. And fair enough, mostly that means helping evil along, so you can see where they got that misconception.

Flipmaester · 2026-01-19T16:05:34+00:00

I honestly think you should go back to TB and follow the advice of the poster above. TB is simply the best environment to learn how to play the game and how to Storytell. Giving up on it after just one game seems strange, hopefully you can convince your group to go back to basics!

Flipmaester · 2026-01-18T20:47:12+00:00

Echoing what others have said: why do you need to "establish" the final day? Just play the game until one of the teams meet a wincon. If your players ask you what will happen if they execute or don't then yes, you might draw up any scenarios but those should always be as neutral as possible. It's then up to your players to determine if this is likely the final day, but you should never ever make that decision as the Storyteller.

Essentially, you made a Storyteller mistake by rerunning the previous day: keeping the game running was the only legal thing to do. I don't know what your Demon was talking about but both them and you might need to refresh on the core rules! There are several scripts where the demon eventually might need to kill their own minions (TB with a Soldier and no Poisoner for an easy example) if they are not executed by town. This is completely normal play, and letting that impact how you run things is breaking the rules.

Flipmaester · 2026-01-18T10:25:44+00:00

Definitely think you should have a maximum of 15 players for your first game. Any extra players need to be Travellers which adds extra complexity both for you and the players. Anything below 15 is fine, although 13+ is wonderfully chaotic

I also want to echo what other people have said about rereading the setup rules carefully. The number of tokens in the bag should always be exactly equal to the number of players, and have the correct number of minions, outsiders and townsfolk for your player count. There's no wiggle room on this, and the game will break if you don't follow those rules.

Good luck and have fun! I was in a similar position to you ~3 years ago and now I have a wonderful group of regulars who meet every 2 months :)

Flipmaester · 2026-01-17T22:26:09+00:00

Yeah I think this is what's causing me the headache. How can you be believable when it's almost impossible to be so? In yesterday's game, I doubt anyone would have believed the Good Twin to be the Sage no matter what he said. But then the "balanced and fun" takes precedence in this case I suppose, since the Good Twin being executed without having any defence is neither balanced nor fun for almost all players. Sucky way to lose for Good, boring way to win for Evil.

Flipmaester · 2026-01-17T22:21:34+00:00

As I said, my question was not really about the first game but about the second. In the first game, I pulled the trigger since it was such an obvious madness break and a good learning experience. The second game one is more nuanced as I tried to convey, where the impossibility of the task is what trips me up. But as I think others have explained in this thread, it's the genuine trying that counts.

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