Blood on the Clocktower Posting™: Extra Evils in Scriptbuilding
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Background context for my normal followers who are here for my usual “robot demon cultist gets distracted infodumping about psychology” posts (skip this if you’re coming from a BotC community): Blood on the Clocktower is a social deduction game that’s like if social deduction games were good. Its necessary characteristics to understand are:
All players have special abilities of some kind, regardless of their alignment (i.e. no one is just a vanilla townie).
There are no elimination mechanics — even after you’re dead, you keep playing the entire game. You can’t nominate after you die, you only get to vote once, and you usually lose your cool ability, but you continue participating in the game, worldbuilding, and supporting your team.
Because dead players continue playing, evil has no inbuilt mechanical counterplay to “a setup where there are more good players”, and a 12 player game (9 goods, 3 evils) is more tilted towards good than a 10 player one (7 goods, 3 evils). The balancing factor for this is Outsiders, i.e. good players whose abilities hurt the good team, often by creating misinformation. In the 12p game, the two excess goods over the 10p game are Outsiders rather than Townsfolk, with the intent that their negative-utility ability balances out their game-long extra good voice and vote, without having to force half the players to be vanilla townies.
Despite there being both good and evil teams, you only have to kill one member of the evil team (the Demon) to win — what forum mafia guys call a “flagbearer mechanic”.
The baseline set of evil players is the Demon (who kills at night, does some other secondary cool thing, and wins if they survive to the end/[generally] loses if they don’t) and 1-3 Minions (who have various awesome flashy powers that are balanced at “somewhat stronger than demon abilities” on average, back up the demon, and don’t need to survive but it tends to help if they do).
The Storyteller (moderator) is more like a TTRPG GM than a mafia/werewolf mod. In particular, there are multiple game mechanics that allow the ST to lie to a player about their information, but only under specific regimented circumstances (see ethan’s writeup for a good overview).
The primary form of this is called ‘droison’ (drunkenness/poisoning). Two straightforward cases of droison are the Drunk, an Outsider whose ability is “you think you have a functioning Townsfolk ability, but you don’t and all your info for it is arbitrary”, and the No Dashii, a demon whose secondary ability is that the two Townsfolk closest to them are poisoned and receive arbitrary info. If a player is the Drunk or sitting next to a No Dashii, then they’re good, but the info they share in town supports the evil team and their narratives. If they can work this out, they can solve for it and win. If they can’t, town goes down a false route and loses.
BotC setups exist as what’s called “scripts”, which are sets of 25 predefined characters of which some subset will be in play (see player count distribution sheet here):
There are three officially released scripts, and a hundred-odd total released characters that people can compile into scripts of their own called “custom scripts” or “customs”. This post is about customs.
Blood on the Clocktower is an extremely cool game that I have kind of disappeared into. It is exactly optimised for me to disappear into it — it’s a Paranoia Simulator (Fun Version) with an endless array of intricate interactions between complex rulesets and roles.
BotC at normal player counts (the 7-15 range)1 is balanced assuming about 25-30% of the town plays for evil. Notably, because of its flagbearer mechanic, different evil roles play out quite differently — the demon always needs a strong self-preservation instinct, but the set of minions whose abilities are more frontloaded might not care too much if they live or die, and be willing to make complicated and dangerous plays. In turn, the whole evil team is a voting bloc supporting the demon, and all of their voices are intended to back them up. Backing up minions is also useful — if the evil team can knit “confirmation chains” that make them all look good, this tends to win them the game, and if only evil players are alive at endgame (3 people alive, generally) no one’s going to nominate the demon — but it’s an instrumental goal. If the voices of non-demon evils are trusted, and providing fake information that clears the demon as good, evil is at a huge advantage.
Still, if 25% of people have info clearing the demon, and 75% have info implicating them, this is a bit of a balance problem. There are multiple mechanics that handle this. Some were discussed in the intro (droison, Outsiders). Another, and the focus of this post, is extra evil players. There are multiple roles that can lead people to play for evil when they would otherwise start as good.
Fundamentally, in “a game with a flagbearer mechanic where dead players keep playing with reduced voting power”, evil’s social power can be split into two axes:
Evil voices: In its strongest form, players who directly know the Demon and whose claimed information is backing them up. In weaker forms, players who are spewing nonsense with the goal of hurting good but without being able to target well enough to know they’re helping evil, or players who don’t know the Demon for sure but are trying to help them anyway.
Evil votes: Players who aren’t going to vote on or nominate the Demon, and will vote on or nominate other players to avoid this outcome. In its strongest form, alive players who know the Demon and have consistent vote/nom power to prevent them from being executed. In weaker forms, dead players with one vote and no nomination ability, or players who don’t know the Demon and are voting weirdly to avoid an accidental loss.
Evil’s mechanical power is a little different. As a general rule of thumb, alive players have abilities and dead players don’t, and the strength of abilities goes roughly Minion > Demon > Townsfolk > Outsider. Most abilities designed for good players don’t help the evil team that much, even if that player becomes evil somehow.
The three base scripts officially released for BotC comprise the beginner setup Trouble Brewing (closest to traditional Mafia/Werewolf in terms of being very socials-focused) and two intermediate setups, Sects & Violets (extremely high information, extremely high disruption, designed for “pushing the limits of what can be achieved in a bluffing game”) and Bad Moon Rising (fundamental genre mechanic manipulation — information is gained through manipulation of the execution and nightkill mechanics). TB, being introductory, doesn’t include any extra evils. SnV and BMR both have one extra evil role each, which inhabit very different spots on these axes.
The Fang Gu is a demon on SnV whose ability is “Each night*, choose a player: they die. The 1st Outsider this kills becomes an evil Fang Gu & you die instead. [+1 Outsider]”. This means that if the demon identifies an outsider, they can “jump” to them and turn them into a new evil demon, at the cost of their own life. Fang Gu is a very strong extra evil — the “spent” dead Fang Gu knows the new demon and can make information backing them up, and get their minions to do so as well. However, because the first demon is dead, they have limited voting power, and because they expend their entire ability on this, the new demon is essentially a vanilla demon who can’t do anything else (the Fang Gu can only jump once per game).
The Goon is an outsider on BMR whose ability is “Each night, the 1st player to choose you with their ability is drunk until dusk. You become their alignment.”. This means they essentially can’t be subject to any of the mechanical manipulation the script has on it — it’s hard for them to die, be protected from execution, or be confirmed as a particular role — and anyone who tries is liable to have their ability turned off for a day. Simultaneously, they’re not inclined to tell people this, because as long as they’re alive (a dead Goon can’t change alignments) they don’t know what team they’re playing for. Goon is a weaker extra evil, because they don’t know the evil team and are unlikely to ever find out while alive, but they spread a lot of misinformation by being a hidden disruptive force in the script’s information landscape. Notably, making the Goon evil comes at the cost of evil’s mechanical power — you lose the opportunity to kill a player or disrupt an execution — which means it’s not always a worthwhile tradeoff.
These are balanced for the scripts they’re on. SnV tends to be slightly goodsided — it has an extremely high density of information that can narrow down on demon candidates if evil isn’t careful — so having a strong extra evil is balanced in a way it wouldn’t be on BMR, which tends to be slightly evilsided just because its mechanics are much less intuitive.
All extra evil roles in BotC, and some roles that don’t produce extra evils,2 can be understood through their interactions with the voice/vote/mechanics triad. There are five roles that, in my opinion, do a particularly interesting job of demonstrating this: Ogre, Politician, Mezepheles, Bounty Hunter and Lord of Typhon. Let’s explore them!
The Ogre is an Outsider who, on their first night, chooses another player and becomes that player’s alignment — without learning which one it is. As the wiki says, “The Ogre is someone’s best friend”.
From the internal perspective, the Ogre is almost a neutral role. You’re playing for a specific player, and want to go along with whatever they do. If you go up to someone and claim Ogre to them day 1, they probably won’t out evil to you — you could just be lying — so an evil Ogre is unlikely to know what’s going on for a few days.
Most Ogres are good, because most players are good. This means the role balances in most games as a blank blue token. However, because they’re playing for one person more than they’re playing for good, a good Ogre is a bit worse for town than a real blank blue token. If the Ogre’s friend is “tunnelling” — solving for a very wrong world — the Ogre has to shoot down the tunnel with them, because they know they’re the only person they can trust. This can produce two good players pushing on other good players, letting the evil team sit back and watch.
An evil Ogre is quite strong for evil, because they’re a living evil vote. They don’t know for sure that they’re backing up the Demon, but they know they’re backing up their friend, who is either the Demon or backing up the Demon. Mechanically they don’t do anything helpful for the evil team, but they don’t do anything negative either.
Ogre is swingy. A good Ogre is one of the least damaging outsiders (basically at the vanilla townie balance point), while an evil one is “+1 vanilla evil”. On net it slightly helps good, because the concept of “outsider count” — that there’s a specific, semi-predictable number of outsiders in play depending on player count — means the Ogre is likely to be in play in place of a more damaging-on-average outsider, and because the Ogre is probably good, they’re helping out good by not being something horrible like a Plague Doctor. But because an evil Ogre (in the minority of games where they pop up) is an evil voice and vote, they’re worse for town than said Plague Doctor, whose ability is nightmarishly bad but who still serves as a good voice and vote.
The Politician Outsider is the most thematically hilarious character in the game: “If you were the player most responsible for your team losing, you change alignment & win, even if dead.”
The Politician chooses which team they play for. Most people, given the option of choosing their team, will play for evil. This means the Politician balances as a stronger +evil than the Ogre or Goon, who don’t choose their team and play mostly for good most games.
Counterbalancing this is that the Politician ultimately plays on a one-player team — their own. Their wincon is “either win with good the normal way or disrupt town enough you win with evil”. You can’t just sit back and let evil carry you, because you need to be more responsible than any other good for the loss, and ideally able to hold your own amongst the evils.
Simultaneously, the Politician is very low on all of voice-vote-mechanical strength. The Poli doesn’t know the identities of the evil team and is unlikely to find out until very late at best (they could just out the Demon to win with good!), and they still win if they solve the game and push on the Demon — they’re the only extra evil who is mechanically still good. This means Poli tends to play out as pure disruption, trying to get anyone killed but themselves and mislead town in all directions at once.
Of all the extra evils, Politician is the one that plays the most like a demon, rather than a minion. The Demon wants anyone but themselves to die; Minions want anyone but the Demon to die. While the Politician has a way lower self-preservation instinct than the Demon on average, their wincon is ultimately still “get town to believe whatever you believe”. They can worldbuild without limits, because if they make up something that pushes on the real evil team, they still win. They have no one to back up except themselves.
The Mezepheles Minion is the most straightforward extra evil in the game. The Mez starts knowing a secret word of the ST’s choice (I like using psychology terminology) and has to convince a good player to say it; if they do, they turn evil that night.
Mezepheles is an extremely strong +evil. Once the good player turns evil, they can safely learn the whole team and start backing up the Demon. They have an inbuilt bluff from their actual role, and can twist their info to support evil. Being alive, they have full voting and nomination powers. Their ability itself is unlikely to help evil that much, but it’s still usually a decent town role that’s been repurposed to serve the Demon, and if the Mez is lucky they might’ve found a fantastic snipe — like the Banshee, who gets doubled vote and nomination powers if the Demon kills them.
There are a couple counterbalances. If the Mez dies before they get their turn off (which has to be the night after the good player says their word), they lose it, so L. An unlucky Mez also might saddle the evil team with a liability. If you turn the Saint, who causes their team to lose when executed, you now have two flagbearers, have fun. If you turn the Klutz, who has to choose a player when they die and loses if they choose an evil, then you need to confirm a good player to avoid losing the game. Still, even an evil Saint or Klutz is a powerful evil voice and vote.
The Bounty Hunter is in an unusual design space — it’s a Townsfolk that adds an extra evil. The BH starts knowing one evil player, and learns a new one each time their previous “client” dies. To counterbalance the ability of “just kill all the evils lol”, they also turn one Townsfolk evil. This mitigates the severe social costs of outing evil players in the early game, and means a BH who gets one of their pings killed and never gets further roughly breaks even in terms of gamestate influence.
The BH-turned evil townsfolk doesn’t know their team, which means they can’t be a controllable evil vote, and they can’t tailor their information to back up the evil team. However, because they’re inherently a townsfolk (and one of the ST’s choice, which means they can design whatever setup they want), town is always down one helpful ability and gains one person willing to twist their info. Very often, they can use their own info to help narrow down their compatriots.
Bounty Hunter is an incredibly swingy role, and not an especially well-designed one. I hold the strong opinion that its downside is its most interesting element, and the part that tends to get it put on scripts. No other role does quite what BH does in terms of being an “ST-dictated Mez turn”, which allows for an incredible amount of setup crafting and some really unique info in town…but this is the on-paper downside for a townsfolk that’s often oppressively strong, and produces dynamics that are just not that fun. In turn, because the role gets put on scripts for its downside, it’s often paired with evil abilities that hard counter it, which turns it into a blank token that adds an extra evil and probably gets a good player killed in the process (not very helpful).
The Lord of Typhon is a Demon that adds an extra evil, and is probably best explained through its abiliy text:
Each night*, choose a player: they die. [Evil characters are in a line. You are in the middle. +1 Minion. -? to +? Outsiders]
This is an entire extra Minion. It is inherently, by a massive margin, the strongest possible extra evil. You gain a whole minion ability — the strongest abilities in the game — alongside someone who starts knowing who their demon is, and will always go out of their way to protect them. In addition, the setup modifier of Typhon requires that only good tokens and the Demon token go in the bag, and the Typhon’s neighbours become minions after the tokens are assigned (so you can set them up in a line); this means the minions start with bluffs (their old character token), so socially it’s easy for them to infiltrate the good team. On all of voice/votes/mechanics, Typhon is by far the strongest +evil in the game.
Its huge weakness is that the whole evil team are sitting together. This means the Typhon line can’t afford to back each other up. If you have a bloc of four players in a row who are all voting in sync and saying the same words, that’s a Typhon line, and you know one of two people is the Demon. The Lord of Typhon and their Minions have to be super-careful — they can’t vote as a bloc, they can’t look like they agree with each other too much, and they can’t use their abilities too obviously or town will spot the extra one. This limits their practical power immensely, because if town can solve for Typhon and identify one minion, the whole affair comes crashing down.
All of these roles balance at different points in terms of serving as evil voices and voters. Notably, the three extra evils connected to Outsiders (Politician, Goon, and Ogre) that we’ve discussed are milder than those connected to Minions or Demons (Mezepheles, Fang Gu, and Lord of Typhon), despite them varying within their categories. This makes sense, because while Outsider abilities are meant to be negative utility for town, they aren’t meant to maximize damage the way evil abilities are — rather, they serve as balances to the insane power of “a good voice and vote that evil can never truly remove”. Outsider +evils balance this by not really being good voices and votes, but they don’t tip all the way into being fully-fledged members of the evil team.
This has the consequence that extra evils scale oddly with player count. Consider these two different Fang Gu games (assume the FG jumped to a starting Mutant night 2):
These are both games at 2-minion player counts, but one is 10p (base 7 good/3 evil) and one is 12p (base 9 good/3 evil). In the 10p game, evil has 4 votes and voices to good’s 6. The starting Fang Gu is dead, meaning they can likely only vote on the final day, but this still means good has to play almost perfectly — if a single good player is convinced to buy what the evil team is selling, then even if every other good votes on the demon at endgame, evil can rise up, tie the vote, and win. In the 12p game, good has 8 voices and votes, and town can afford a little more leeway.
Fang Gu is interesting to demonstrate this with, because people often intuit that FG is weaker at base 0 outsider counts. This is because its ability requires it jump to an outsider, and in a base 0 Fang Gu game, there’s only one outsider in play — who might just out and get themselves killed day 1, nullifying the whole concept. In a base 2, there are three targets, giving the evil team more leeway. This intuition is backwards, because a Fang Gu in a base 0 who does get their jump off is almost securing an evil victory.
Now consider Mezepheles or Lord of Typhon, which both create extra evils who know the Demon without having to sacrifice a living evil in the process. There’s a real sense in which these are socially weaker than Fang Gu — FG needing to die to get its jump off is a strength, not a weakness, because it allows it to exploit the social trust afforded to nightkills and make the world it’s pushing look more believable in the process (see fn 2 on Vigormortis). But being able to make complex social plays that make town really believe your world is one thing, and being able to almost out evil and win on votes is another. Extra evils of Mez/Typhon’s strength in a base 0 can produce unsatisfying games where town knows what’s going on, but can’t rally the votes.
Outsider +evils definitionally lack this problem. An outsider +evil can only be in play in a base 0 if a role that adds outsiders is in play; notably, one of these roles is Fang Gu, which breaks near-even in terms of extra evils. As base outsider count increases, town becomes more and more able to handle the pressures placed upon them by a Goon, Politician, or evil Ogre.
This all assumes a single extra evil. What if we stack them?
A lot of people, entering the wide world of custom scripts, come up with the same idea: “I know BotC needs misinfo to work, but I don’t like the other forms of misinfo we have. What if I made a script where the misinformation came from not knowing what team you were playing for, with a bunch of roles that can turn people evil?”
This script sucks.
+5 evils (Fang Gu, Mezepheles, Bounty Hunter, Politician, and Ogre) makes the game fully unwinnable for good. This grim represents an evil Ogre at 12p, which is 8 evil votes and voices against 4 good ones. Even in the most optimistic case — a good Ogre and a Politician playing for good — evil has vote parity and can tie everything.
Now, let’s get into something a little more contentious. Can a script with +2 evils work?
Here, we have to think again about the voice-votes-mechanics axes. Some extra evils combinations are fully infeasible. Some, with a lot of care and a lot of caution, balance more like “+1.5 evils” — the roles in question aren’t fully-fledged members of the evil team, and don’t have the same nasty synergy. Let’s consider two very different games:
These are both games with two roles that can add evil players, but they’re of different magnitudes. In the first game, the Lord of Typhon has a full-blown additional minion to back them up, and the BH-turned evil Fisherman will likely find their team early between their ability and the Spy tracking them down. This means there are two more living players than usual dedicating themselves to the Demon’s cause — way too much for town to deal with.
In the second game, neither of the potential +evils have direct coordination with the evil team. The Ogre happened to pick a minion on this particular grim, but will usually pick a good player and balance close to a blank token. Even as evil, said Ogre only knows for sure they’re backing up their friend, and is unlikely to be all-in on the cause for the first couple days (outing evil to an Ogre claim is risky!). The Politician can play for either team, and might just get the Demon killed while spreading chaos. Also, let’s be real, Ojo will probably still manage to lose with +2 evils.
Now here’s an annoying little detail. At 12p, +2 evils is 5v7. At 10p, it’s 5v5. 5v7 is as survivable as 4v6 is — you have almost no wiggle room, but good can and does win these games. 5v5 is untenable. This is to say that a script with the potential for +2 evils is, by definition, not equally balanced at all player counts.
Here we see again the difference between outsider +evils and evilsided +evils. It’s scarily easy for an ST or scriptbuilder who isn’t thinking through the implications of their bagbuilding to end up with something like 10p Fang Gu/Mez or Typhon/BH, which is unwinnable for good. However, a combo like Ogre/Politician shouldn’t produce this problem — you’d need some source of +2 outsiders in a base 0, which only one role (the Baron) can directly provide, and otherwise tends to be difficult to pull off.3 (The corollary is that an Ogre/Politician script shouldn’t have a way for this to happen.)
I think it’s reasonable to have something like Ogre/Politician on a script, if you’re very careful with the rest of it. This is not a universal opinion. From my perspective, a “soft +2” at 12p is at the same balance point as a +1 at 10p, and should be treated with the same caution — but both of the intermediate base scripts are intended to be played at 10p, and both have +1 evil on them. Other people are less comfortable with extra evils in a base 0 at all, or are so normed on 12p games as to not really think through the implications of “4v6 and 5v7 are equivalent”. Tread with caution.
“What about Spirit of Ivory?”, some people are going to ask.
Spirit of Ivory, or SoI, is a Fabled (optional game mechanic) designed to prevent games from having like a billion +evils. It makes it so that if a single good player turns evil, no further ones can, hard capping games at +1 evil regardless of player count or what abilities are in play. Consequently, a lot of people put SoI on scripts where +2 evils or more are possible.
SoI does not fix this. This is unintuitive, because surely it exists to deal with something like Fang Gu/Mez on the same script, right? But it doesn’t — in that example, SoI causes one of the two to lose their whole ability. Either the Fang Gu jumps first and the Mez turns into a vanilla minion, or the Mez gets their turn off and the Fang Gu becomes an immobile demon with the ability “[+1 Outsider]”. Rather, SoI exists to manage janky situations where rules loopholes can lead to like +100 evils — BotC rules are very literal, such that if you aren’t explicitly banned from doing something you can probably do it, and certain interactions between characters who don’t technically add extra evils can allow for turning half the game evil if you don’t put a stop to it.
A lot of people put SoI on scripts without quite intuiting this, and end up with scripts where you can’t put half the roles in with each other. In practice, people think of SoI as a “hatejinx” — “if I put SoI on the script, I’m saying not to make a setup where you can get +4 evils”. This doesn’t work either, because the realistic truth of making BotC setups is that if a script has the potential for +4 evils, and you don’t want to run every game as Oops All Evils, players can meta the bag insanely hard. I’ve had to try run Fang Gu/Mez/Ogre/Poli scripts — there are just, like, 3 setups that work. Given the structure of BotC, this is awful for the evil team; evil needs to be able to push the possibility of almost any combination of roles being in play, or else their bluffs can be trivially seen through.
One particular newbie scriptmaker mistake is the “what if misinfo comes from alignment change?” concept. Blood on the Clocktower needs misinformation to work, but not every form of it is fun — sometimes you get custom scripts with so much droison stacked upon droison that it’s just a mess of RNG. It feels intuitively like “not being sure what team you’re playing for” is a fun alternative to this.
It isn’t. At least, it’s not in this form, where you stack the game full of potential conversion roles. The problem with the script premise is that it doesn’t do what it seems; if all of town’s information is good and the question is whether the town is good, you don’t get the intended cagey socials and wild plays. Rather, you get frustrating games where town hardsolves and gets outvoted by a billion-player evil team.
The script that makes this work, funnily enough, is Sects & Violets. The unambiguous best of the base scripts (fight me irl), SnV is built around high info, high weirdness, and high evil firepower. A perfectly coordinated good team in SnV can probably solve the game — the nature of its evil abilities means that misinformation is trackable and “crazy 5D chess plays” can be solved for by leaving clues. The corollary is that everything about the script is designed to prevent good from perfectly coordinating.
Good players in SnV are often unsure what team they’ll end up playing for, but not because there are multiple roles that add extra evils. The Fang Gu’s script presence makes all outsiders unsure where they’ll end up, causing them to hedge their bets and stay quiet for a few days. The Pit-Hag, who can turn starting townsfolk into outsiders, spreads this paranoia to the whole town. The Snake Charmer, a starting townsfolk, might end the game as the Demon and plays on the edge accordingly — but it does this by turning the starting Demon good, letting them out their whole team and putting evil on a massive backfoot. The Philosopher, a townsfolk who can choose what ability they have, always picks goddamn Snake Charmer. All of these combine to enough factors to make SnV towns self-destructive, without needing to overwhelm the game with evil votes.
SnV makes wincon uncertainty work as a major form of misinfo. The Snake Charmer and the Mutant who suspects a Fang Gu are going to pretend to be townsfolk and spout bullshit info, and if you worldbuild upon it, your loss. Notably, this misinfo tends to be resolved by the end of the game; both those roles can safely out when dead and walk back their old claims. This is why every demon on the script causes actual mechanical misinfo, because wincon uncertainty can’t cover a script’s entire info landscape.
Extra evils are a fascinating concept that produces interesting dynamics. Politician, volatile as it gets at its worst, is one of my favourite roles in the game. Fang Gu is up there for my favourite demons — rolling an outsider in base 0 SnV is an electrifying play experience (and then the FG never jumps and you lose because you threw).
They’re also a nuanced concept, and a lot of this nuance gets missed. A flat “exactly +1 evil per script, but it doesn’t matter too much which one” habit, even though it’s easy for people just venturing into custom scripts to remember (and corrects away from the routine Oops All Evils failure mode), ignores the complexity that makes Ogre different from Politician different from Fang Gu different from Lord of Typhon. Different scripts can accommodate these different levels of +evil; you can put Ogre on a script with a lot in common with Trouble Brewing, but you can’t stick Fang Gu on there.
When you sit down and pick apart these nuances, it becomes obvious just how strong some +evils are, how base outsider count interacts with this, and how you might just be able to get away with +2 evils if you know for sure what you’re doing. But first, you have to know what you’re doing. Hopefully you know it better now.
5p/6p games are Teensyville, which works by different rules. In a teensy, the vote ratio is more skewed towards evil. As a balancing factor, the evil team don’t know each other and the Demon doesn’t start with bluffs (knowledge of 3 out-of-play good characters that are safe to claim). Teensies tend imo to feel pretty random, but some (like Laissez un Faire) can be a lot more like “real Clocktower”.
The archetypal “role that manipulates this triad without producing an extra evil” is Vigormortis, the coolest, most based, and most deeply dysfunctional from a design perspective demon in the game. “Each night*, choose a player: they die. Minions you kill keep their ability & poison 1 Townsfolk neighbor. [-1 Outsider]” — we’re going to ignore the outsider mod for now.
Vigormortis is a complex series of tradeoffs. By killing minions, you lose their nomination power and reduce their voting power. This becomes a problem if you are, say, a demon candidate and your minions need to panic and get someone executed in your stead. The solution is that if you have an undead army backing you up, it’s remarkably easy to just not be a demon candidate. Dying at night serves as “soft confirmation”, i.e. a significant hint that a player is probably good and you can trust their info. This means the reduction of evil votes comes alongside an amplification of evil voices, granted the trust offered to nightkills to build worlds pointing at everyone except you. In turn, these arguments are more likely to sway good players to your side, and a good voter who trusts the Demon is an evil voter in all but name.
Simultaneously, vigorkilling a minion increases evil’s mechanical power. Normally, town can just execute minions to get their dangerous abilities off the board. On Vigor’s homescript of Sects & Violets, this is particularly problematic for evil because it’s quite easy to tell if a minion ability is active or not — if someone is executed and suddenly a loud ongoing ability disappears, you have a pretty good hint they’re a minion, and can incorporate this into your worldbuilding. Vigorkilled minions are wholly outside of town’s ability to counterplay, meaning they can keep strong ongoing powers active all game, with potentially devastating consequences. This also makes it easy to frame living players as minions, further amplifying evil voices against good ones. Simultaneously, because the neighbour of one of your minions is poisoned, a good player silently loses their mechanical powers and gets info supporting you instead.
This is fragile. An obvious issue is that if there’s a Vigormortis on a script, people are going to consider the possibility, and if they can determine with confidence it’s a Vigor game you probably just lose (you’re a hidden necromancer in your tower, stop letting town find it). Because Vigor has both less evil voting power in the midgame and a reduced capacity to counterplay townsfolk abilities (you want to kill your minions early to maximize their usefulness and the chance the poison does something, so you need to push killing townsfolk later, and you don’t have as fine control over who you poison as who you kill), it’s one of the glass cannons of all time and shatters at any provocation. It’s a deeply unintuitive demon to play, because the mechanics it works on (evil nightkills, minion ability optimization) have super demanding skill requirements and are punishing of missteps. But goddamn is it cool if evil knows what they’re doing with it.
Neither Sects & Violets nor Bad Moon Rising make it possible to have +2 outsiders, by design. Many customs have forms of outsider modification that make +2 outsiders possible from roles other than “the Baron dedicating their whole ability to it” — such as the Fang Gu coexisting with the Godfather, a BMR minion with the ability “You start knowing which Outsiders are in play. If 1 died today, choose a player tonight: they die. [-1 or +1 Outsider]”. This is a fine scripting choice (I like the Fang Gu/Godfather dynamic myself), but it can get really evilsided if you’re not careful. Because both these roles have strong abilities in their own right in addition to adding an outsider, a +2 from them can be too much for town to deal with at low player counts. Even 9p Baron is very strong — 9p Fang Gu/Godfather where the Godfather added an outsider has “hopefully the Godfather accidentally stabs the new demon?” as its primary balancing factor.