And some mod comments...
This game was a long time in the making. Several years ago, someone I know - a huge Akiko Shikata fan - showed me a link of a video he had been playing on loop for the past few days, along with a generously long explanation of what it meant. So I listened to it, and then I started looping it, too.
That video was more or less the one attached to Infel's flip. I really liked the concept behind the song and wanted to try to incorporate it into a Mafia game somehow, but took forever to find a way to do it. In the end, the answer was to run a game about her role - it's too strong to be mixed in with other power roles, plus it would dilute the "whoa, cool" factor. Playing into it, I decided to make it a "protect the power role" game - no, not with a Doctor, but via Day play. You know, the kind of people-shouldn't-massclaim-Day-1 game that Themes should be.
The rest of the Town side of the setup followed pretty quickly from that. The Town Doublevoter was there to cause confusion in the event that the Cultilante was incompetent enough to give themselves away with their hidden extra vote. Syryana did about as well as he could under the circumstances with it. The Apocalypse mechanic was purely to hasten the game along once Infel died (which I totally bet would happen N1, and it did), and I think most of us are grateful for it now - I don't think the game would have turned out much differently with more time. Serene and Fia were included as a means of giving Town a small edge in the event of a post-Apocalyptic massclaim, and that worked out exactly as planned. (Calling them Vanilla was a little bastard, as technically Serene wasn't, but I don't think anyone will mind.)
I had exactly zero expectation of the Town figuring out the message I posted at the beginning - but someone enterprising might discern that it was Hymmnos and start asking Ar Tonelico-related inquiries from there. Of course, this probably wouldn't have been a good thing for Town, but hey, icebreaker! (that, for better or worse, no one really mentioned) At least I didn't send that to enomis as his Role PM! Because I would never have thought of doing that... and... um... well, I'm very glad zoraster gave me setup advice here.
Gasp! Schala was Town in this game! And Byakuren wasn't a safeclaim this time! (though I thought about it) OMG breaking mafiascum meta, etc.
The name "Cultilante" is a direct reference to Vigicultist, aka
Inquisitor. (I'm coming to like Vigicultist better, as Inquisitor may have been more a just-for-that-game flavor. But hey, no one has complained about Seraph Knight yet.) Whereas the Vigicultist would try to kill someone and then recruit them if they survived, the Cultilante kills them and recruits them if they're
dead
. Obviously gaining access to speak with dead scum is just asking for excellent game-ruining action, so on scum it was just a Vig with no recruitment. The ability to swipe Town voice and vote pretty much nullifies all the downsides of a Vigilante, and in fact is so powerful that if it survived to Day 4 without getting killed, it basically controls the lynch - the scum can't win without killing the Cultilante (or the Cultilante single-handedly destroying the Town on its own).
So one big risk I took with the setup was building it around a particular role, which I'm quite positive I said not to do in one of my guides
buuuuuuut
etc. The other big risk I took was another balancing measure. I gave scum the weakest safeclaims available - two of them had to claim their own role and one got probably the weakest safeclaim I could offer (Poo lives up in the mountains above the clouds, but it implies that he came from below the sky anyway). (As a matter of fact, seeing a
role claim
and then try to get away with it WAS on my bucket list, and I may have encouraged that this time.~) That worked more or less as planned as well. Incidentally, that was the purpose behind Amrun's role - it had nothing to do with finding the ~special role~ and everything to do with getting them out of hock when massclaim happened. In the end it was kind of pointless, as s_o_o made up his own safeclaim and the others claimed what I gave them, but it was an interesting experiment with a surprising outcome when Amrun claimed the flavor oracle role.
Incidentally, some people - s_o_o and Katsuki, IIRC - got one thing wrong. The characters in this setup were all supporting cast. Kirby in particular didn't fit; if I were choosing a Townie from the Kirby universe it would have been Meta-Knight or Ribbon or Daroach or etc. But, either way.
Play-wise the game was doing fairly well D1 and then disintegrated into blindly feeling ahead. I get the impression Amrun only came under suspicion in LyLo because all the other obvious targets were dead. Three-day Days are rough, but the coasting was what it was.
I don't want to say that enomis got fluke-killed, that he did something wrong (or the scum did something right) to warrant sending the game to Apocalypse so early, and when I find out what that something is I'll let you know. As it stands, the game would have been something very different had he survived to D2. I still want to see it happen, so I'm willing to run a spiritual sequel to this game whenever I get all of my stuff back in order.
Thank you to everyone who supported this game to the end! No matter what I think of my setups, in the end it comes down to you to make them a success. I'm very pleased no one had to be replaced once the game went to lightning speed (yes, including you, Katsuki). I have a game coming up in the Mini Theme queue and it's going to be a Fire Emblem uPick! I've never done one of those before; we'll see how that turns out. If you don't know the flavor, just tell me to pick someone for you and I'll make sure it's cool.
The next Large Theme was going to be ehsebano
rarf
, but I think right now piecing together what was on my previous computer is more of a priority. Even so - see you soon, and thank you again!
