Recently I watched this fantastic interview with Steven Medway, the Designer of Blood on the Clocktower and CEO of The Pandemonium Institute. I was struck by how down-to-earth he is about his design decisions, like when (about halfway through the video) they address the topic of accessibility/inclusivity, and how he came up with the game mechanisms of Fabled characters, and later Traveller characters. He wanted to solve these particular problems, he picked up a couple of other goals while working on them, and he just iterated gradually on a path where he suspected that some unwillingness to compromise could pay off.
So there wasn’t just the initial insight that the core problems were worth solving, nor that he had interesting, innovative, and untested solutions for them. But further, he maintained the grit to stick with the creation process, to test the characters and refine their abilities, and the mechanical rules around these new character types. And eventually the characters evolved to a level of robustness and polish that they could take on additional goals, and players and storytellers both could find their own uses for them. His persistence certainly paid off in the end!
Monster Mash by KTY - 15-player + 1 Traveller - good won.*
Kelvin worked hard on this Homebrew script, its Almanac entries, and on creating the physical tokens for it, and Halloween is coming up, so we ran the first in-person game of Monster Mash. It’s a challenging script to ST, with lots of complex character interactions. I’ve run it online a few times before, but from what I recall, this was my first time putting the Demon Dracula into the bag. The 3 Vampire Minions ended up all right next to each other, although technically, I guess the Demon decided to turn the middle one into Renfield. The next player joining team evil had been the Monster Hunter, but whoops! He was converted to become another Vampire. I screwed up and allowed the poisoned Gunslinger to kill Dracula, unfortunately. Good pretty much had the evil team sussed out, and everybody agreed they probably would’ve won anyway, due to some big confirmation chains before all the poisoning got going.
Sects & Violets - 15-player + 1 Traveller - good won.
It started out as a very normal, if large game of S&V, but the outcome was incredibly unusual! The layout was abnormal as well - there was a Chef 3 at the start of the game, because the evil team were all clustered together as if gathered by a Lord of Typhon. No bullshit here, though! When the Sweetheart died, I drunked the Philo as punishment for forcing me to come up with an extra set of Savant info. The evil Gangster caused chaos and quickly bounced. And on the final day, the last living good player nominated the Demon and died to the Witch’s curse… And the dead good team sent it with their dead votes, for a good team win with every member of the good team actually dead! I’ve never seen this happen before in any game, but I’m proud to have STed this one! It’s the kind of strange occurrence that gives me so much admiration and respect for Clocktower’s design. It just has this singular tendency to generate unforgettable stories.