How to Play
- Imagine yourself to be an evil Townsfolk turned by a Bounty Hunter who is trying to protect a Demon they don’t know.
- Just like they would, bluff the ever living pants off of you and make sure that the good team is distracted enough to focus away from finding the demon.
- Unlike them, you don’t have a safe Townsfolk token you can claim or fall back to – so make sure to have a spread of claims here and there, and no-one is quite sure what you exactly are.
- Also unlike them, you are actually trying to play for the good team, just in a different way. Basically, you are trying to protect the good team from themselves. Think about what you would do as a good player to win the game, if there was no worry about Heretic at all, and try to reverse course, but justify it in ways that you think will still make sense to the good team and will just look like you’re confused on your solve to the evil team.
- Finally, unlike them, the discovery of your existence is a much bigger deal – similarly, to the delight of the evil team, but much more devastatingly for you.
- A good Heretic script will have lots of reasons why good players might be in a double claim, or even good players might claim evil roles – lean into it!
- Any excuse for you to claim something and then back out of it is fair game – Pixie, Mutant, Damsel, have at it.
- You might be safer claiming hidden Outsider roles, especially after you die, to account for base Outsider numbers – it’s not like they’re gonna come out when they’re alive, and once they die, you might be able to confide in each other. A hidden bonus is that once the Outsider numbers match the expected, evil team will stop thinking about Heretic and will lean more towards trying for regular win conditions, which will help you get towards your win instead.
- You should be encouraged to bluff evil, if the script allows for it, and it really should – feel free to claim Goblin, claim any Wizard shenanigans happening to your doing, out as an evil Townsfolk if that’s a possibility. It doesn’t matter if you get executed or not, and you know you are safe execution, so make sure to eat one of the few precious executions that the good team has. Ideally the last one, but any will do. Poppy Grower is a big enabler here, Magician helps out a little as well, in combination.
- Any “cover” roles could be a great starting point for you, and feel free to stick with them if you don’t hear any rumours of them – Alsaahir, Gossip, Juggler, or something like Village Idiot with a built in misinformation/duplication possibility is golden. Make sure to not be too forthcoming with your information though, in case it’s wrong and the evil team can catch wind of it. Ideally, the rest of the good team is also holding their cards close to their chest a little more because of Heretic possibility, so hopefully it’ll all look too confusing for the evil team to not deduce whether or not you exist.
- If you are the kind of player that has “chaotic” tendencies, lean into them even further. Often, the pattern I see from intermediately experienced players is that they love making chaos plays, claiming all kinds of random things, making sure that their social pattern is indifferentiable whether they are good or evil, but they freeze when it comes to things like Heretic, that they don’t have a whole lot of experience with, and start to play it relatively straightforward. This is counter-productive to the Heretic. If everyone is playing it more or less face-up, Heretic has less ground to hide,so it benefits from the chaos that you bring to your “regular” games. This is true whether or not you are the Heretic, but if you can bring back that energy as the Heretic, hopefully the good team will follow suit.
- If possible, confide in good players you can trust, early-to-midgame, especially if they are proven somehow – Nightwatchman whose ping you received, Virgin who got someone successfully killed, etc. Someone relatively trusted should know of your existence and direct the good team away from accidentally killing the Demon subtly.
How to Bluff
- As a good player – please bluff Heretic! It’s crucial to give coverage to the Heretic. The best path is most good players to be coy about their ability, to the point of the evil team never being sure if there’s a Heretic or not, but even a little fake claim of Heretic here and there, so that the evil team can consider self-killing when there isn’t a Heretic, or doubt killing themselves when there is one because they aren’t sure why a player is boldly declaring themselves to be the Heretic (imagining it to be a bait rather than an actual claim), is still quite helpful. Also, as mentioned before, leaning into chaotic tendencies, bluffing as if a Heretic would bluff, imagining yourself to be an evil Townsfolk, rather than playing it straightforward, playing it more wishy-washy, and being willing to kill good players more frequently, is also helpful.
- As an evil team – Heretic bluffs handed out from the Storyteller is incredibly rare, but not impossible. If you didn’t get a Heretic bluff, but you want to go for it anyway, it might be more okay for the Demon to take a Heretic bluff because there might be a Heretic out there. Otherwise, you want the demon to live until the end and a Heretic that lived to final 3 wants themselves to die, so it’s a little counter-productive. Great bluff for a minion to protect their demon, or a demon that can pass it onto another evil player, like Imp/Fang Gu though. Just follow the path of how a Heretic might play out – coy at the start, bluffing a few different things, then out eventually in final 3.
- A few notes on sniffing out whether or not there’s a Heretic in play as the evil team
- Look out for impossible information from the good team, e.g. once in a Heretic game where I was the demon, the good team tried to bluff that a dead player was overwritten as a Farmer.
- Look out for players claiming evil bluffs or straight up claiming evil – as mentioned, hopefully there are lots of reasons for players to claim all kind of things on the script, but if the behavior continues along even after when it’s not supposed to (e.g. said player is dead), it might be Heretic.
- Look out for sudden shifts in the vibe – if lots of people were correctly converging toward the evil team, and then they start to push on each other instead for no apparent reason, a Heretic might have just come out to a few trusted players.
Storytelling/Script Selection
- As mentioned before, ideally, a Heretic script & bag should have lots of reasons for good players to double claim each other, or straight up claim evil.
- Poppy Grower, Magician, madness roles, Damsel – all cover for Heretic quite well, so do evil roles like Goblin and Boomdandy.
- A couple of hidden outsiders (e.g. Ogre, Politician, Drunk, Lunatic) and a few outsider modification roles, especially arbitrary ones, both from the good team (Balloonist) as well as the evil team (Xaan, Kazali, etc.) complement Heretic quite well, because they can allow Heretic to come out as a different outsider and still keep some doubt on the evil team.
- Heretic feels at home with what might be called a “win-con extravaganza” i.e. lots of roles that cause one team to win prematurely when a certain game state is met (e.g. Goblin, Fearmonger, Vortox, Alsaahir, Klutz, Saint, etc.). This is not only because Heretic itself flips all of these win conditions and blur what each team might need to do and make them more interesting, but also, Heretic is more fun under a less pressured environment when the game might not go the full distance. A script like this will seem more pressured to an untrained eye, but if you’ve played a lot of Clocktower, you’ll realize that “this might not matter much so let’s try something weird and interesting” is quite eye opening and refreshing. This doesn’t mean that Heretic is silly and should be dismissed as a “real” role, you can definitely have some serious Heretic games, and some of my most fun has been these games. Just remember that Heretic is essentially the “endgame” version of Clocktower – fundamentally different, will need lots of mind shift, and some damn good Storytelling and script building skills to have a good time, and a willingness to be okay with the fact that things might get messed up and that it’s okay if they do.
- Some way for the good team to disable or duplicate the Heretic ability (Courtier, Philosopher, Cannibal, Farmer, etc.) and some way for the good team to know about the Heretic ability (General, King, Fisherman, Librarian, etc.), and finally, some ways for good team or the Storyteller to stop the demon from killing themselves (Lycanthrope, Monk, Innkeeper, ST-controlled kills like Yaggababble or Legion) are also good script/bag possibilities for the Heretic.
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