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Well, I've been trying to get people to lynch Magestar for ages, so I'm not going to complain now.

I'm not sure, but it seems like Meta's vote on Magestar is almost a distancing vote.

One other thing - Luckat is also acting funny, IMO, so I'm prepared to believe he might have become a Returned in the past cycle or two as well. It's not firm enough for me to try to lynch him, but I wouldn't go telling him all the villager secrets.

I'll have a more extensive look at my suspicions once I get home from school.

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LG25: Aftermath - A Soul's Last Breath

Two men stood in the town square, facing each other. Cog and Yulis glared at each other across the crowd of people between them. 

“That man has been stealing our Breath and killing our friends,” Yulis declared angrily. “So many of us have died, now. And Cog is responsible for them all.”

I’m responsible for those deaths? No, Yulis. I haven’t killed a single one of us, or stolen a single Breath. I’ll swear that on whomever you wish. I’d even swear it on your Austre if you’d like.” Cog smiled and gestured around him, but Yulis cut him off.

My Austre? I wouldn’t worship that blasphemous backwards god in a thousand years! Go on, Cog. Kill me, so that everyone can see you for the Returned you are. Or better yet, have Kelek do the dirty work for you. No need to get your hands dirty on a lowlife like me.” Yulis’ voice grew until he was nearly shouting.

Cog’s voice was deadly quiet in return. “You’re mad. Which of the dead was close to you? Who drove you insane with grief? Shivawn, perhaps?”

“I’m not mad! I’m perfectly in my right mind, and you are a murderer.” Yulis looked at the faces around him, breathing more heavily. “I’m not mad!

Cog raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you? Well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I grow tired of this.”

He raised his arms in a gesture unfamiliar to the Hallandren. The Idrians, however, recognized it as prayer. “Praise Austre.”

In response, four voices spoke in unison. “Hold.” And five Hallandren villagers found that they simply couldn’t move. Their clothing wouldn’t let them. 

And those who could still move? They changed, all of them. Kelek, Lularah, Burganaa, Dimsari, and finally Cog.

“Cog,” Yulis managed to squeeze out through the strangling grip of his collar.

“Metacognition the Thoughtful, more precisely,” Cog corrected him, stalking forward with a smile. “You blasphemed Austre. For that, you shall die by my hand.”

Yulis struggled, but to no avail. Cog sliced his throat open with one efficient motion, watching grimly as the man’s lifeblood poured out, staining the grass of the square with red.

He tossed a small stone to Lularah. “Collect the Breath of the rest of them. We’ve done all we can here. We’ll need to find a new place, soon.”

Lularah nodded. “And after that?”

Cog hesitated, then smiled. “Leave them for the rabbits.”

Two cute little rabbits hopped out of Dimsari’s hood and Burganaa’s sleeve, sniffing the air. The two Returned nodded, grinning.

Hours later, the sun set on the village outside T’Telir. The night was quiet, and all that remained were five cooling bodies scattered in the village square, and the scent of death. 



Magestar was lynched! He was a Hallandren Villager with a piece of Awakened Clothing! 

Vote Count: 
>Magestar (5): Luckat, Sheep, Daniyah, Bard, Assassin in Burgundy

LG25 is Over! The Idrian Returned win!

Elodin was a Hallandren Villager!
Straw was a Hallandren Villager!
Doctor was a Hallandren Villager!
Bard was a Hallandren Villager!

Luckat was a Returned!
Assassin was a Returned!
Sheep was a Returned!
Daniyah was a Returned!
Metacognition was a Returned!


Doc Links
Idrian Returned Doc
Dead Doc
Spec Doc
Spreadsheet
Game Creation Doc - This is the doc in which Wilson and I came up with the original idea of this game, if anyone’s curious how it was created. 

Final thoughts will come in a few days; hope you all enjoyed the game, and I hope I'll be seeing you in many more to come! 

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A flash of light, of flame and rebirth. Soft, warm light flowed through his body, gently healing,  making new, regenerating. There was no pain. 

The Healer sat up, rubbing his head, looking at the corpses lying scattered around him. His heart clenched with sorrow, anger. Betrayal. He was alone. 

"if friend Lularah was a returned, then it is a gambit of the highest order, and i'll die laughing at how completely I've been fooled. ""

"ha." he wheezed, testing out his new voice. "haha."  and he broke down laughing helplessly amidst his tears. Laughing in the middle of a pile of dead friends, unable to stop. 

When would he stop trusting blindly? He stood, slowly. Wiping a tear. He gazed at the direction the Returned  had gone,  and back at his friends.

I did not Return you. A voice said in his mind, soft and melodious.

He laughed harshly. "You have no power over me, goddess. What i want to know know now is simple." He gestured to the smoking village. "Did you endorse this?"

The voice returned, firm and sad. No. 

"Good." he snapped. "that means iwon't take care of you too when I'm done with them."

What are you? 

"I'm not from around here"

Taking a deep breath, he snapped his fingers. 

A low wheezing, whooshing sound, and a blue box flashed into existence next to him.

The Healer returned to his friends and started digging a grave, memorizing the names and faces if each of them as he did so. They deserved that much. 

First he would bury his friends. Then he would avenge them. 

Those Returned had no idea what they had done. 

 

To the Returned... I hate all of you, heh.

Well that was intense, honestly,  and kind of fun even though luck played me spectacularly. Signing up for the next game, no question. 

Any comments on my first game?   

Edited by Doctor12
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Drat... I wanted the game to last just one more turn...

Oh well. Maybe next time.

Thanks El for running it! I enjoyed it very much.

I was sure there were only 2-3 Eliminators, which was why I tried to help them. So well done for keeping that secret.

Edited by The Young Bard
Adding explanation of my actions
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Luckat, I must say, magnificent job.  I had no idea you were an Elim.

Meta, I'm happy to say I actually saw right through you.

Sheep, eh, you're too quiet.

Assassin, congrats on your first game.  Winning, and being an Elim?  Nice Job.

Daniyah, I believe it's the same for you?  Well done.

I want to kill all of you. :P  and I hope to see all of you in the next LG.  evilbiggrin.png  (Thanks Elb.)

@Elbereth, how many Idrian Returned were there to start?  And how many Potential Returned?  I can't seem to tell.

Also, that last page in retrospect is hilarious.  You guys were all saying all these things, and in retrospect, almost none of them make sense.  Especially Bard's last post.  So funny. :P  

Edited by Magestar
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2 hours ago, Magestar said:

Especially Bard's last post.  So funny. :P

It makes perfect sense if you know how dreadful a traitor I am. Dreadful, as in even when I try to abandon my team I fail even at that... :P (Still, I don't think it would have made much difference... Looking at the numbers, I don't think the village could have won it from the start of my attempted abandonment of the team even if I'd fought tooth and nail to get Meta and Sheep lynched anyhow.)

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1 hour ago, Magestar said:

K. Huh, I was operating on the assumption that there were less. :P  Also, did everyone else have like a ton of PM's?  

I just finished reading through the Elim doc.  That was fun.  We made a couple big mistakes.

Whoa, you read the whole thing? :P 

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Woot! Great job team! Wish I could have been there with you at the end, but I'm glad we pulled it off! I'm also glad we were finally able to convert Luckat(she was being so much trouble as a villager :P).

Good game everyone, and many thanks to Elbereth and Joe for running the game! I really enjoyed trying to figure out all the different ways we could use the rules to our advantage, and of course I enjoyed the writeups. :)

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Elbereth and Joe, thanks for running this game! I really enjoyed it. I feel like I did better than usual this game. It was fun to work out how all the mechanics fit together. It was also fun to be an eliminator since I haven't been one very often, even if it was only for one turn.

Great job to Doctor, Frozen Mint, Dalinar, Assassin, and Daniyah for an excellent first game. All of you did well, and I hope to see you all in future games.

And also great job to the Returned for getting us into a winning position despite all my work to the contrary. :lol:

22 hours ago, Doctor12 said:

Well that was intense, honestly,  and kind of fun even though luck played me spectacularly. Signing up for the next game, no question. 

17 hours ago, Magestar said:

Luckat, I must say, magnificent job.  I had no idea you were an Elim.

Well, I was only Returned for the very last day, so there wasn't much chance for you to figure me out.

(It would have been funny if both kills the last night had gone through because then I would have ended the game as a Returned without spending any time in the game itself as a Returned.)

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  • 2 weeks later...

So, I've finally found the time to write up my thoughts on LG25, yay.

In a rather random order:

Balance
In my opinion, this game was fairly balanced. Apart from a few changes (discussed later), there is very little that I saw as a major issue. If I were to say one side was more strong, it would be the eliminators, but honestly a great deal of the seeming imbalance was luck early on - they managed to kill the villager with the most Breath, enabling them to make a Lifeless Rabbit immediately, and that person was also Potential Returned. That was a huge stroke of luck for them.
Another part of their win was due to intelligence - they effectively controlled the lynch for the latter part of the game, because they made enough Awakened Clothings and the village couldn't coordinate enough to combat that.
So the game may have favored the eliminators slightly (due to things addressed below), but in general it was fairly balanced. (Also, note for older players looking at the game - instinctively, it may feel more eliminator-balanced than usual. That's because it is. Because most LGs are so heavily village-balanced and I was trying to compensate for that. I'm still not sure whether I overcompensated or not.)

Issues
Amount of Breath. One mistake I made this game was that when I was distributing Breath, I failed to take into account that if you had, say, four Breath, you couldn't make a 4-breath Strawman because you needed to keep one Breath back in order to keep from being drab. I should have given each villager one more Breath than I did, essentially. I had intended that no one could make Lifeless Rabbits at the beginning of the game, and as people won the Lottery, the number of Rabbits would begin to grow. But since 10 Breaths were required and the highest number of Breaths in the village after Ecth's death was 6, the village never managed to acquire a kill, which was a problem given that the eliminators managed two. Which brings me to my second point. 
Breath Stealing. I greatly underestimated how much gaining the Breath of those they killed would help the eliminators. That (along with a GM mistake that led Frozen Mint to reveal that she had a high Breath count to an eliminator) let them have two Rabbits and a great deal of Clothing as well, so they controlled all of the death. I'm not sure how I would change this - perhaps increase the number/frequency of losing Breath, perhaps increase the amount of Breath in the Lottery, perhaps make there only be a chance of gaining the breath rather than a guarantee (as in LG4) or only gain a portion of the Breath. (Of course, a great deal of the reason they got so much Breath was that they targeted inactives who hadn't been using their Breath. If they'd been targeting active players, they wouldn't have gained nearly as much. In that respect, I'd almost be tempted to leave the mechanism as it is, because that is the village's own fault. It's not overpowering the eliminators if the village is letting them have free Breath by being inactive.) I most certainly would change the starting Breath average for the eliminators so that it was one less than the village average rather than equal (it was ~4 on both sides). More specifically, I'd raise the Breath count of the villagers up one on average but keep the eliminators the same.
Strawmen on Potential Returned. There is one clarification I made which I regret: that Potential Returned still scan as such once they are turned. This meant that if someone had their Breath stolen and claimed that, if they then Returned they would be outed immediately if anyone scanned them. Of course, the other way around anyone who was scanned before and after would be outed anyway, and anyone who did scan as PR was essentially cleared until converted (which woulnd't have been a huge problem for the elims if they played things right, but confirmed good players even for a turn can be a great hassle)... Basically, I should've ruled to myself that turned PRs do not show as such once converted, and PAFO'd it to any askers.  
Potential Returned Number. One other small change I would've made is one less PR than I made. Three would have been a better idea, and in fact I nearly went with that, but added Ecth at the last minute. 

Other Commentary
Lottery Numbers. If anyone's curious, how I originally numbered the Lottery was a number equal to 20% of the number of living players, rounded down. The intent of such a small number was so not to too heavily disadvantage the eliminators, given that the Lottery is basically a chance at protection. As the game went on I realized how the eliminators had the advantage with Breath stealing, and so I did not decrease the number but kept it at around 4 each time. 

Awakened Clothing. This is one aspect of the game that I'm pleased with, because it's taught the village a valuable lesson. Vote manipulation is powerful. It is every bit as important as kills - the two Rabbits were a problem, yes, but the larger issue was that since the eliminators controlled the lynch, the village had absolutely no way to kill the Rabbit holders (or any other eliminators) because they couldn't control the lynch. Don't underestimate vote manipulation.

Potential Returned. As anyone who read the doc I linked knows, the original idea for this game was the Potential Returned, and specifically a gambit in which an eliminator reveals to someone and asks them not to protect themselves (or enter the Lottery) because they haven't told anyone about being PR or about whoever revealed them. :P In theory, this gambit could even work multiple times. I was very pleased that the eliminators did in fact come up with this, although they only used it once, on Frozen Mint (and even then it didn't in fact work, as she entered the Lottery anyway). So no real comment here other than that that was fun.

One comment I wanted to make all game was, "Why is no one questioning the fact that Meta is surviving?" Everyone was aware of him the entire game and the fact that he might be evil, yet no one even asked why he'd been left alive, why, say, Twei had been killed instead of him. That was rather bizarre, in my opinion, but maybe there just weren't any (village) players who would usually think to ask such a thing. I'm not saying that there weren't multiple ready answers if that were actually asked, but I found it strange that no one even thought to ask.

Finally, I just want to give a shout out to Luckat. She played fantastically this game, and is frankly the only reason the village didn't lost a lot more badly than it did. She did a lot more reaching out in PMS than in the past, asked tons of questions (as she has done in the past :P) and was very on-point in general. Props to her! 

This was a very fun game to GM. Thanks to Joe for co-GMing with me, and I hope to play with you all in future games! :D (Once I get done with GMing them all, of course...)

Edited by Elbereth
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  • 1 month later...

The time has come to close this game.  While I didn't play this game, I found it very entertaining to watch even if there was no dancing clothing like I hoped there would be. :P  Congratulations to the Returned for their victory and another round of applause (upvotes) to the GMs Joe and Elbereth for a wonderful game and fantastic write ups..  I for one look forward to more games from the two of you.

If anyone would like to try their hand at running a game, please get a hold of GammaWilson, Metacognition or myself. Not only will we get you added to the list, but we'd also be more than willing to help out in any way we can.

You can also ask questions and get some hints and feedback from everyone over here in our Art of Game Creation thread as well. With all the games that we've run so far, we have plenty of experienced GMs that can help you refine any game you're thinking about!

Thanks again to everyone that played and we look forward to killing seeing you in future games!

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