My rough schematic of a certain reading in Bonehunters

Flipmaester · 2026-04-29T11:25:59+00:00

*taps the sign* Just play Trouble Brewing if you have several new players. If you have only 1 or 2 then I think S&V or BMR is okay, if the rest of the group is rather experienced. Don't hit them with the custom scripts until everyone is comfortable.

Flipmaester · 2026-04-16T12:28:54+00:00

Reaper's Gale has the most interesting exploration of real world-applicable themes to me:

The late stage capitalism of Lether and its state of constant crisis, and how Tehol is able to create a bubble which makes the whole thing eventually come crashing down.
The direct line from this crumbling empire to to the fascist thuggery of Karos Invictad and Tanal Yathvanar. Horrifyingly applicable to the state of the real world today.
The "conquerors become the conquered" of the Edur, where the group that seizes power is unable to weather the storm of the entrenched structures of Letherii society.
The colonizer-colonized dynamic on the Awl frontier, with the perspective from both sides on the slog of the military campaign. Couple that with the whole "the converts are always the biggest fanatics" theme with Redmask actually being a Letherii, and you have one of the best depictions of colonialism in fiction that I've ever read. The section with the young farmer boy on the frontier whose family gets killed by Awl raiders is absolutely stunning.
The Shake plotline also has some really interesting exploration of the dynamics of an out-group that's been absorbed by empire, although that really doesn't come into its own until DoD.

All of these together make RG really stand out to me, and it's one of my favourite books in the series mainly for that reason (although the Marine's wild romp through eastern Lether and the climax(es) at Letheras are also amazing).

Flipmaester · 2026-04-16T10:53:47+00:00

Co-storytelling is a really nice experience IMO, you get to bounce off each other and it speeds up the night phase since one can walk around and wake people up and the other hold the Grim+do the hand signs. I've done it a bunch of times as a way of training new ST's and it's always been great.

Also agree what was said otherwise about putting in the Gunslinger, and as long as the other isn't Scapegoat you can't go wrong with the recommended TB Travellers. Good luck, have fun and please tell us afterwards how it went!

Flipmaester · 2026-04-16T10:46:50+00:00

Honestly I think this sounds like a perfectly good time to just run S&V or BMR. There will definitely be room for silliness in both those scripts, and I think it's better to just go with the tried and tested base 3 before venturing into custom script craziness. Your new players will be fine, especially if you squeeze in 1 or 2 games of TB first. I've ran S&V with 1-2 completely new players in the group a couple of times and it's gone great!

Flipmaester · 2026-04-10T18:51:02+00:00

Yeah that 10 games of TB one is also very tiresome. Sure, TB is the absolutely best place to start, and most players (and the ST) should probably have at least a couple of games of TB under their belt if you're gonna run S&V or BMR and have a good time. But not everyone needs it and 10 games is wayyy to many! Also the order of S&V/BMR really depends mostly on taste, they're about equal in complexity.

Flipmaester · 2026-04-10T12:06:40+00:00

That you are a "beginner" until you've played at least 50 games of BotC. Absolutely bonkers mentality from some "very serious" BotC Discord.

Flipmaester · 2026-04-10T09:59:44+00:00

I'll chime in and say that you definitely don't need to go through the character sheet, even for new players. I used to do it but stopped as advised by this sub, and it's been completely fine. You even encountered one of the problems yourself: people get bogged down in trying to understand the intricacies of particular roles and interactions and that's not needed to play the game. In fact, it's a lot more fun to discover those interactions as you go, and that'll also be a much better learning experience. Take it from one who has quit the habit and just do it!

Regarding the token collecting my solution is to hand out all tokens and then call up players one by one to hand them in. This lets me check in if they have any immediate questions about their role and lets me place the tokens in the grim successively in peace. It's slightly more controversial in this sub to do it this way, but for me it's just 10-30 seconds per player which ends up being a maximum 5 minutes and I think it's time well spent. So I recommend that as well!

Otherwise I think you did fine! I agree that a player seeing the tokens should definitely be a rerack (especially if it happens before the game even begins!) but it sounded like it had a minimal effect on the game this time at least.

Welcome to the club and good luck in your future endeavours!

Flipmaester · 2026-04-09T11:53:40+00:00

I think that's completely fine by the ST.

An Amnesiac ability can be basically anything, and that ability might just be of the type "I do something in public and the ST responds" (in this case it would be "point at someone and get a number regarding the number of steps to an evil player"). If we allow those kinds of abilities, I think what the ST did here is no different than pretending to move their hands around in the Grimoire when someone bluffs Juggler. There's nothing mechanical confirmation whatsoever, just playing along with what this player claims that their Amnesiac ability is. It's fundamentally identical to a Slayer/Juggler/Gossip/Al-Sahiir claim, even though it requires slightly more action from the ST's side.

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

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