Jinxes and Changes #

There’s over 100 Characters in Blood on the Clocktower, almost none of them are designed to work with duplicates. Before running any script with Kazopolis, it’s important to look over the characters and determine if any of them need tweaked to deal with having duplicates and hidden drunkenness.

As an example, some characters in Clocktower target a specific character (such as the Courtier or Ojo) instead of targeting a player. Targeting a character is normally identical to targeting a player, but when every role has the potential to have duplicate copies in play, it’s worth clarifying how that works. When running Kazopolis, I usually rule that targeting a character target every player who picked that character, whether drunk or not.

Some characters have abilities that modify setup (listed in [brackets]). Most of these simply modify the outsider count, which is already arbitrary under the rules of Kazopolis. If a setup effect does anything else, I added a jinx below as clarification. Most of these are similar to how Kazali handles them.

Below are the custom jinxes and ruling I recommend when running Kazopolis.

Hate Jinxes #

These are roles that do not work at all under the base rules of Kazopolis because they modify setup too much. Most of these characters can be made work with certain gardening rules.

Baron: Players may not select the Baron #

I love the Baron, and they are actually the entire reason there’s a variant rule for Gardening the Outsiders. However, under the base rules of Kazopolis there is no way to bump up the number of outsiders in player after the Baron picks without doing something similar to the Plague Doctor Baron Jinx. If you are running a script where the loud Baron works, then feel free to run it that way if you wish. Otherwise, don’t run Kazopolis on a script with the Baron without using the variant rule for Outsiders.

Summoner: Players may not select the Summoner #

Summoner is a very fun role, but doesn’t work on Kazopolis. While forcing someone to change their character isn’t enough to be banned from Kazopolis (although it is slightly against the spirit of the format), the requirement of knowing that a minion will choose summoner ahead of time does ultimately mean it can’t work without “Gardening the Minions”.

Lord of Typhon: Players may not select Lord of Typhon #

Lord of Typhon doesn’t work for the exact same reason, no minions can be put in the bag until you know Lord of Typhon is in play to satisfy the line and extra minion. If you want to run Lord of Typhon, you’ll need “Garden the Minions”.

Kazali: Players may not select Kazali #

Kazali has the same problem Lord of Typhon does, but is comes with the bonus of having an entire evil team that doesn’t get to pick their role. It can be ran by Gardening the Minions but talk with your group about how you plan to run this before you let players pick it. I do recognize it is ironic that you can’t be the Kazali in Kazpolis though.

Legion: Players may not select Legion #

I really want Legion to work on Kazopolis! Legion games are so much fun to run! However, letting one player decide that half the town has to be the same role also feels really bad when the players were promised to be able to pick their role. If your group is okay with half of them potentially being told “you are now legion”, then feel free to include this role as an option, but please make sure everyone is okay with this happening.

Not Selectable (But Still Playable) #

These are roles that have a special consideration with character selection. Most of these are self explanatory but do require the storyteller to preemptively modify the player counts prior to starting.

Drunk: Players may not choose to be the drunk. After characters are picked, a townsfolk may secretly become the Drunk. #

Since the Drunk doesn’t know they are the Drunk, you really can’t have outsiders pick the Drunk. The solution is to just make a townsfolk the Drunk after setup, the same way it works with every other game with a Drunk.

Lunatic: Players may not choose to be the lunatic. After characters are picked, a demon may secretly become the Lunatic. #

This requires putting an extra demon in the bag, or putting the Lunatic token in and letting the lunatic pick a demon, but is otherwise identical to running the Drunk.

Marionette: Players may not choose to be the Marionette. After characters are picked, a good player neighboring the demon may secretly become the Marionette. #

As a storyteller, you may need to swap a minion and demon to make marionette work, but otherwise its identical to running the Drunk.

King: Players may not choose to be the King. After characters are picked, if any players picked Choirboy, exactly one Choirboy will become the King. #

Multiple Kings is a really nasty problem for the evil team. If there are 3 Kings, the evil team has to spend 3 nights killing the Kings to eliminate them, and only after they are sure there are no Choirboys in play. Drunking the Kings is even worse because then the demon won’t learn who the King is, but the Choirboy will still be told if the demon kills them.

This was a hard one to solve, because ideally I want the evil team and the King to never be sure if there is a Choirboy in play. I also want to ensure there is only at most 1 King. This solution achieves this, and in a pretty elegant way. If only one player picked Choirboy, there is a King without a Choirboy. If multiple players picked Choirboy, then there is a King with a Choirboy (some of which might be drunk if there are any duplicates).

I don’t love that in a format all about picking the game you want to play, there’s this one character which you can only be by picking a different character and hoping that you are chosen to be “upgraded”, but without rewriting both abilities there’s not an option that doesn’t involve making players occasionally repick. With this rule, at least the only people who are affected by this “Kingification” are players who opt in to it. Anyone not okay with being either one of these two roles are free to pick something else.

Atheist: Players may not choose the Atheist. After characters are picked, a player may become the Atheist. If so, all players draw blue tokens. #

Atheist should arguably be a hate jinx for the same reason Legion is, but I feel like if you are running a script with Atheist on it your players probably know what they are getting into.

For obvious reasons, you can’t let players pick an Atheist unless it’s legitimately an Atheist game. Because of that, you do really just need to force someone to be the Atheist.

If you would rather let players decide whether or not its an Atheist game (instead of forcing it on an unwilling player), you can choose to Garden the Minions and allow the demon to choose Atheist (and then just don’t make any minions). Just…make sure you are emotionally ready to suddenly run an Atheist game.

Ability Modifications #

These characters have had their abilities modified slightly to work under Kazopolis. Before running any of these characters, make sure you read over the ruling and consider whether it is right for your current script.

Balloonist: If a player chooses to become the Balloonist, another townsfolk may be made drunk. If the Balloonist is made drunk due to duplicates, this does not happen. #

As much as I’d love to find a way and preserve the Balloonist’s outsider modification, it has the exact same problem that Baron does, but with the added issue that there is no way to know if the storyteller would need to modify the outsider count before every character has picked. Even if you Garden the Outsiders while also making all townsfolks pick one at a time before the outsiders pick (which is very slow), there will still be a point where the final townsfolk is picking, and can pick Balloonist with no townsfolk left to turn into an outsider (without being incredibly loud).

I realized this problem is solvable with a drunk on script, as the drunk is the only outsider that can be created without anyone knowing after roles are handed out, which is how I landed on this weird solution. If the Drunk is on script, you are free to run it as the Balloonist adding a Drunk instead of making a player drunk, but otherwise making a townsfolk drunk does the job just fine.

The last bit about not doing this when there are duplicates has to do with a philosophical difference between being Kazopolis Drunk and being made drunk by anything else. Since the purpose of drunking duplicates in Kazopolis is to give the storyteller a dial to turn after character selection for the purpose of balance, they storyteller needs to be able to disable an entire ability, including setup abilities. In this way, making a character Kazopolis drunk is much closer to turning a player into the drunk but still registering them as their original character, but trying to codify that was much harder than just carving out clarifications in the few setup abilities that were already being jinxed in the first place.

Huntsman: The Huntsman can turn any outsider into an out of play townsfolk. If no outsiders are in play, they learn this. #

Unlike King and Choirboy (where I found a way to respect the setup requirement), with Huntsman I took the setup requirement and threw it in the trash.

This ability is almost identical to a bootleg character I use in scripts instead of the Huntsman (called the Huntswoman). In the case of solving the problem of a Huntsman without a Damsel, the easiest option was to just increase the number of targets the Huntsman can actually hit (and if you happen to be in a 0 outsider game, give them the pity prize of learning their ability is useless).

This does make the Huntsman more powerful than before (since the number of targets they can hit might be as high as 4 in some games), but I don’t suspect many people are going to be upset that the Huntsman is a bit more versatile.

If you think running Huntsman like this is too strong, you are free to just fall back on a much simpler “if nobody chooses the damsel, the Huntsman must pick again”.

Ogre: When the Ogre picks a player, the Storyteller may ask them to pick again. #

I’ve considered a bunch of different ways to deal with multiple Ogres potentially resulting in 4 outsiders being best friends with the demon, especially since making the Ogre drunk doesn’t stop them from turning evil. As someone who is personally a fan of the new Alchemist, I think letting the storyteller occasionally prompting the Ogre to pick again is a fine enough solution for the same reason it works with the Alchemist.

If you aren’t a fan of new Alchemist, than you can always fall back on either “if the Ogre is made drunk due to duplicates, they must select a different outsider” or “if the Ogre is made drunk, they learn this and lose their ability.”

Pit-Hag: If deaths tonight are arbitrary, then which players are drunk due to duplicates might change. #

Sects and Violets really is one of the scripts of all time, and Pit-Hag was never going to make it out of something as massive as Kazopolis without a rule change.

I’ll address the elephant in the room first, the Pit-Hag is not allowed to create a copy of an in play character. While there are scripts where this is probably fine, the Pit-Hag occasionally missing is a big part of the balance of Sects and Violets, and trying to keep that while allowing for duplicates is really messy. I considered something like “the Pit-Hag can’t make more of a type of character than is on script” to cap the amount of outsiders, or just “if the Pit-Hag tries to make an in play character, it might fail”. I don’t like the first one because it makes the Pit-Hag a little too reliable, and I don’t like the second because even if it makes the Pit-Hag more flexible, I don’t want to put the Storyteller in a position where they have to effectively decide the game with whether or not a character change goes through.

This does mean that the Pit-Hag making a character provides some meta information on Kazopolis, that they are the only instance of that character. This was something the Pit-Hag always did, but on Kazopolis (where duplicates are allowed), this is slightly more potent information.

Regarding the jinx itself, this was written specifically with Sects and Violets in mind. Kazopolis already complicates Sects and Violets by adding a source of untraceable drunkenness to a script where tracing the droison gives really important information about which demon is in play. This is one of the reasons why deaths are arbitrary when a new demon is created, it warns the town that which players are droisoned might be different now.

The other reason the Pit-Hag causes arbitrary deaths is balancing the game state. Obviously having two living demons is bad, which is why any sane storyteller will kill the former demon when a new demon is made, but the storyteller is also free to kill or protect any other players if the game state needs balancing.

Since the droison is already moving, arbitrary deaths are extremely loud, and the whole reason the Pit-Hag causes arbitrary deaths is to balance the game, it felt natural to also let the storyteller readjust the other big nob they have to balance games of Kazopolis, which players are currently drunk due to duplicates.

When the Pit-Hag makes a new demon, as part of the night of arbitrary deaths, the storyteller is allowed to change which player are or aren’t drunk. As before, any players who are unique are sober, and any player who is a duplicate of another in play role may be marked as drunk.

Importantly, while changing which duplicates are drunk isn’t required, reevaluating the grimoire is. This means that if any player was Kazopolis drunk, but there duplicate has been removed by another ability (like the Pit-Hag or a Fang Gu jump), then their Kazopolis drunk token is removed and they are no longer drunk.

Ability Modifications That Add a Hard Limit #

Giving an ability a “Hard Limit” means that the restriction on the ability is applied globally instead of locally. The Fang Gu is an existing example of this, the phrasing of “the first outsider this kills” instead of “the first outsider you kill” gives the Fang Gu’s jump a “hard once per game”, stopping the ability from triggering on every outsider.

Damsel: Minions learn how many damsels are in play, but may only guess who the Damsel is once. #

Giving the evil team multiple Damsel guesses felt too strong, but not telling them there are multiple Damsels felt too weak. This is the compromise, they know how many targets there are, but they still only get one shot.

Don’t drunk the Damsel with Kazopolis. Guessing the Damsel correctly only to learn that this one happened to be made drunk during setup is a smack in the face to both the evil team and the Damsel.

Devil’s Advocate: The Devil’s Advocate cannot choose a player if a Devil’s Advocate chose them yesterday. #

Bad Moon Rising has this really important feature built in where an evil player cannot survive back to back executions, and turning the DA into a hard “different from the last” means that this is still true.

When running multiple DAs you can either prompt them to pick again if their target was chosen yesterday by any DA, or you can quickly show them who isn’t a valid choice if that seems easier. You can also have all DAs wake and choose together if you think it won’t throw off the balance of the script too much.

On a side note, a DA who is drunk due to duplicates (or any other reason) is still a DA and as written is going to limit what other DAs can pick. Hopefully the hard limit means this won’t be necessary, but if you are going to drunk a DA (and aren’t letting your minions repick), then I would run them with the rule that “if the DA is made drunk due to duplicates they learn this and lose their ability”.

Mezepheles: A player may only change alignment due to a Mezepheles once per game. #

I don’t think I need to go too deep into why having three townsfolks turned evil by the Mez is problematic. Even if no sane storyteller is going to leave them all sober, it’s not a bad idea to codify that there will be at most +1 evil due to the Mez.

This conveniently also solves the Pit-Hag / Mezepheles infinite evil problem without needing Spirit of Ivory (which interacts weird with roles like the Fang Gu), and I usually treat Mez as a hard once even when not running Kazopolis for that exact reason.

Ability Modifications When Made Drunk By Kazopolis #

These are the roles that are unchanged in normal play, but do need to work differently with being made drunk because making them drunk is either bad or unhelpful.

Heretic: Kazopolis cannot drunk a Heretic. #

Playing a game where there’s no way of knowing how many Heretics are sober and how many are drunk turns the game into a very long coin flip. There’s a bunch of different ways to handle this, but as long as the way you run multiple Heretics is deterministic and solvable, it doesn’t really matter which one you do.

I personally enjoy the “FAFO” option of “they are all sober, figure it out”, but a more tame option would be “if there are multiple Heretics, only reverse the win conditions once” or even just “if a Heretic is made drunk they learn this”.

Mayor: Kazopolis cannot drunk the only living Mayor. #

So I was originally going to just make it so Kazopolis couldn’t drunk a Mayor, since going for a Mayor win only to be informed that evil wins because that was actually the drunk Mayor isn’t fun for either team. However, there’s this really unfortunate setup on TB with an Imp, a Scarlet Woman or Spy, and 5 Mayors where the evil team cannot win under any circumstances. While not every script is going to be perfect under Kazopolis, I really want base 3 to work as written, and it being possible to make a setup where evil can never win isn’t fun or good, so the mayors need to be drunk occasionally.

For something like the Mayor, an ability that gets no actionable feedback on if it is sober or not until it is too late, whether or not they are Kazopolis drunk needs to be deterministic so the good team can in theory solve for if the mayor is drunk or not.

I considered a few different options, but this one hits a nice balance of storyteller flexibility and being deterministic. If there are multiple living mayors, the mayor can’t be sure they are sober, the same as any other character in Kazopolis. This also means double claiming mayor to hurt their credibility is still a viable strategy in Kazopolis.

The reason this is an improvement though is what happens in final 3. If there is only one person claiming Mayor, then the town knows they are sober (if they aren’t lying). If there are two people claiming, then the town has a choice. If they think both of them are good, they know who the demon is. If they think one of them is lying, they can attempt a Mayor win since there is probably only one living Mayor.

Mechanically, this works exactly the same way that the rule about not drunking the demon does. The reminder token is not removed, but the drunkenness is ignored.

Politician: If the Politician is made drunk due to duplicates, they learn this and lose their ability. #

I considered how I wanted to handle multiple Politicians for a while, and basically every option is terrible (how fitting).

What I like about this option is it solve the biggest problems with making a Politician drunk, which is the Politician now knows they they can’t swap alignments. However this has the side effect of a player knowing there might be multiple Politicians in play. Giving the good team a soft ping is going to at least give the town a fighting chance if multiple players try to join the evil team. And since the good team has no way of knowing how many Politicians are in play, it leaves space for Politicians or evil players who come out as a Politician to still do damage to the town.

The simpler option is to just leave them all sober (like Heretic) or have them choose again, and is on the table for storytellers who prefer that. If you aren’t afraid to roll with multiple Politicians though, this gives the storyteller a dial to turn to make things a bit less one sided.

As a reminder, if there are multiple Politicians in play, only one of them can be most responsible for their team losing, so anyone picking Politician needs to be aware that they might be in competition with other players if they choose this outsider.

Psychopath: If the Psychopath is made drunk due to duplicates, they learn this and lose their ability. #

As someone who has been a poisoned Psychopath before (Pukka poisoned on a Teensy), it knocks the wind out of you to try and throw an axe at someone and they don’t die.

If you are running Psychopath, please just use the rule about minions repicking instead of making them drunk, but if you are going to make them drunk then warn them before they out to the town for no benefit.

Goblin: If the Goblin is made drunk due to duplicates, they learn this and lose their ability. #

This one is less of an issue than the Psychopath is, since a well though out script should have reasons for good players to claim Goblin as well. However, if you need to make the Goblin drunk for balance purposes, this is another role that really needs warned they have no ability to stop them from outing for no reason.

Vortox: Townsfolks made drunk by Kazopolis are not considered Townsfolks for the purposes of the Vortox and may receive true or false information. #

This is one I think might be controversial, and I went back and forth for a long time if I wanted Kazopolis drunk players to be forced to receive false information in a Vortox game.

When possible, a storyteller should be giving out as much false information in a Vortox game as they can, that is the whole point of a Vortox. However, characters that receive binary information (such as a Flowergirl) become extremely powerful when there are duplicates in a Vortox game because no matter how many duplicates are in play all of them have to get the exact same false information, which effectively means the Storyteller is forced to run them all as if they are sober. This makes script building less flexible and also makes Sects and Violets itself problematic to run under Kazopolis.

I touched on this a little in the Balloonist write up, but the goal of making players drunk is to keep games from being too one sided when letting everyone choose characters, which is why being Kazopolis drunk is closer to being the actual drunk while registering as your original character than it is to just being vanilla drunk. If drunking duplicates is supposed to be a mechanic for balancing lopsided setups, then a storyteller needs to always be able to completely shut off a role if it is going to be too strong, even if another role would allow it to remain sober.

If you are running Vortox on a script where this interaction with binary information isn’t problematic or you just don’t like players getting true information in a Vortox game, then you are free to ignore this rule and run Vortox as if it wasn’t jinxed. I’m including it as a recommended ruling though because I think it’s easier for storytellers to justify not using a jinx to their group (especially one that encourages you to do so if you would prefer) than it is for storytellers to justify adding a custom jinx.

Ability Clarification #

These abilities aren’t really any different than normal, but they do have something that works a little different due to the way Kazopolis changes the game. Most of these are going to be pretty simple, but a couple require a bit more explanation.

Bounty Hunter: If a player chooses to become the Bounty Hunter, a townsfolk will turn evil tonight. If the Bounty Hunter is made drunk due to duplicates, this does not happen. #

The Bounty Hunter has around a trillion jinxes that are just “treat the Bounty Hunter’s setup ability as a normal ability, but do it during setup”. This is no different.

If you have multiple Bounty Hunters, please drunk most (if not all) of them if you aren’t ready to run a game with +4 evils (or as I call it, “Legion at Home”).

Chambermaid: A Chambermaid learns if another player wakes tonight or not (to their own ability), even if the Chambermaid wakes first. #

This is just a generalization of the Mathematician Chambermaid jinx to account for multiple Chambermaids being in play.

Mathematician: A Mathematician learns if another ability will malfunction tonight, even if they wakes first. An ability malfunctioning due to being Kazopolis drunk is considered to be malfunctioning due to another player’s ability. #

I don’t want the sober mathematician to always have to wake last to be technically correct, and a ST should know ahead of time whether or not they are going to give correct or incorrect math to the duplicate Mathematicians.

I think being Kazopolis drunk should ultimately increment the Mathematician, since the “other player’s ability” clause is meant to stop the Mathematician from detecting self drunkenness. However, feel free to rule that otherwise if you don’t like it.

Alchemist: If a player chooses to become the Alchemist, the Storyteller chooses which minion ability the player gets. #

This is exactly how Alchemist would work without the jinx, but I wanted to clarify that Alchemist isn’t changed at all under normal Kazopolis rules. Of course, you are free to ask the Alchemist which ability they want, but I’m leaving the option for the storyteller to pick for the player if they feel it’s best.

Village Idiot: If there are multiple Village Idiots in play, the Storyteller must drunk at least one of them. #

The Village Idiot has a non standard setup requirement, but luckily there is already a way to drunk duplicate characters built straight into Kazopolis.

I’d probably only drunk one Village Idiot unless you have more than 3 of them in play, then I’d consider drunking a second as well.

Lil’ Monsta: If a player chooses to become Lil’ Monsta, the Storyteller chooses which minion ability the player gets. #

Like the Alchemist, the storyteller is free to ask the demon which minion ability the player wants, and that’s usually how I personally run it, but it’s not required if the storyteller doesn’t want to let the demon technically pick two roles.

Scarlet Woman: If multiple Scarlet Woman are sober when the demon dies, only one demon is created. #

A strict reading of the rules would imply that if there are multiple Scarlet Woman when the demon dies, they all become the demon. This is silly, don’t do that.