New character releases, homebrew support, and other things coming in 2023

Hi everyone! Ben here with a chonky end-of-year update.

First of all, the next Q&A session will take place on 13th/14th December. Please see below for times in your local area. Feel free to drop questions in the comments of this post and we’ll answer them during the Q&A.

As I type this out, our official app has been live for about three months. When it first released, it was still very much in the early stages of its development, somewhat bare-bones, and more than a little buggy. We’re all immensely proud of how much progress we’ve made since then, not just in terms of the app’s stability, but its features as well.

We’ve added cool new stuff, such as the ability to show the Spy the grimoire, global and private text chats, the ability to promote players to co-storyteller, and a whole host of features to help support STs, players, and content creators. We’ve also re-worked features that existed in the older, fan-made app, such as counting votes and tracking how many are required, displaying of jinxes, and the adding of pronouns.

I hope this is evidence that going forward, our two biggest priorities will be bringing new features to the app, whilst also re-working and improving on features that the old Bra1n tool had. So with that in mind, here’s what we’ve got planned for the near future.

Specific Character Interactions

One of our priorities in 2023 will be bringing in more functionality for specific characters. Currently, we have features that support the Spy and the Widow being shown the grimoire, but we are well aware that there are many other characters, such as the Cult Leader, Lil’ Monsta’, and some very awesome upcoming characters, which are also in need of attention. Our ultimate aim with the app is to have a piece of software that can handle everything on its own, without a need for Discord, Zoom, or other platforms.

New Character Releases

Starting in Q1 of 2023, we’ll be releasing a new character every month. At the time of writing, both released and in playtesting, Blood on the Clocktower has exactly 227 characters in total. Some of these you already know about, others have been extensively playtested and are ready for public consumption, others are only in the ‘idea phase’ and will require more work before we release them. The breakdown of these characters is as follows:

• 114 Townsfolk
• 33 Outsiders
• 44 Minions
• 36 Demons

These releases will likely be showcased on the first Thursday of every month, on our official Twitch channel, before being added to the script tool, wiki, and the app. Beyond that, I’m afraid you’ll have to watch this space for now!

Homebrew Support

We know a lot of you guys love creating scripts from custom, homebrewed characters. For a while now we’ve been thinking about how we can best support this via the app. Not everyone who creates these scripts will be designing their own custom tokens, so we’ve been creating a set of generic tokens for Townsfolk, Outsider, Minions and Demons, to help easily distinguish between them for homebrew scripts. We’re hoping to have this support in the app before the end of the year, so get your festive homebrews ready!

Assigning Roles

In a similar vein to homebrew support, we know a lot of you guys really enjoy assigning roles to players. While rules as written dictate that roles are random, the core design of Clocktower also shows that many of the game’s rules have a character that breaks them. The Lunatic, for example, doesn’t know what team they’re on, despite that being a core rule of the game. So we reckon the best way to add this feature is in tandem with a new character. In this instance, a Fabled character which informs the players that the Storyteller might have assigned some or all of the roles.

More Fabled

This leads me nicely into a very exciting announcement. We’re going to be releasing 5 new Fabled characters this month! Some of them are tailored towards introducing new features (see above). Others are simply things that we feel would make running and playing games easier for certain members of our community. They are:

• Baker: During nominations, the nominated player has the group's attention.
  The nominee will have a bigger visual presence (increased token size), will be louder on voice chat, and every other player will be quieter. This is an attempt, by us, to help make the public discussion phase a little easier and smoother for STs and players. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the situation where you’re trying to hear someone’s defense, but you can also hear Jeff’s dog barking, Omar coughing and sneezing, and four ambulance sirens as they pass by Alicia’s apartment window. This Fabled can be introduced to help with stuff like this.
• Zookeeper: During nominations, only the nominator and nominee may talk.
  With the Zookeeper in play, the Storyteller has the ability to cycle through who can and cannot talk. First, only the nominator will be audible while they make their accusation. Then, only the nominee can talk to make their defense. Then everyone else can talk before the vote starts. The ST has a button to go through each of these steps. We’re aware that a lot of groups already run their nominations like this, so we’re providing you with the tools to make it a smoother transition from player to player.
• Ferryman: On the final day, all dead players regain their vote token.
  This Fabled character will add a shortcut that returns all ghost vote tokens to players who have used theirs. This is mostly meant to be used for newbie players, who often forget that they only have one vote and subsequently splurge it early in the game. Experienced groups will likely find that this upsets the balance of the game’s voting mechanics. The ST must decide what counts as the "final day".
• Gardener: The Storyteller assigns 1 or more players' characters.
  This is the aforementioned ‘character assignment’ Fabled. After the ST has put the Gardener into play, they can manually assign and edit character roles to seated players, before sending them out.
• ?: This script has homebrew characters or rules.
  As long as there is at least one homebrew character on the current script, this Fabled will be in play and can only be removed by switching to a script that does not contain any homebrew characters. We’ve been scratching our heads for ages about what to call this character, then it occurred to us that this Fabled really isn’t about what WE want to call things, so we’ve decided…

Help Us Name Our Homebrew Fabled

This weekend we’re running a contest to find the name of this new Fabled character. You can submit your ideas here. Entries will close at midnight on Monday (GMT), after which we’ll pick our favorites and run a poll on which one to use.

Joyous Crimbo

In the meantime, we at TPI all sincerely wish you a holiday season filled with deception, betrayal, and the evil machinations of Krampus and his minions. Don’t forget to ask your local Monk to protect you on the night of December 24th!