Adds the Ritual Altar

[FreeStylaLT]

About The Pull Request

Adds this silly thing to the Church.

What does it do?

~90 minutes into the round a check is made for Keep roles. If there are enough (5 minimum, princes count once, Councillors and RGs do not).
If it succeeds, admins get a little notification:

If they choose not to cancel it, the ritual will activate:

Along with an announcement.

(Sixth of a dae is me being cheeky in saying "Five minutes")

All the listed roles have to do is walk up to the Altar, click it, and patch up a minor bleeding wound. They've added their sacrifice.

Each added sacrifice extends the time limit by 5 minutes.

The Priest, meanwhile can click on the Altar to get access to this menu. It is Priest Only:

The buttons are as follows:

SACRIFICE

It just adds your sacrifice to the pool. A free five minute extension, basically.

REMOVE ROLE

Allows you to remove a PENDING or SUBMITTED sacrifice. Can only be done once, unless the Keep is nearly full. Then it can be done twice.

SWAP ROLE

This allows you to take any PENDING role and SWAP it out for one of two CATEGORIES by the Priest.
The chosen category is then checked against the active playerbase and if at least one active player is holding a job from that list, that role is selected.

Categories atm are:
"Garrison" (Sergeant / MaA / Dungeoneer / Warden)
"Church" (Templar / Churchling / Acolyte)
"Inquisition" (Orthodoxist and Inquisitor)
"Yeomen" (..The yeomen. Lots of them.)
"Peasants" (Adventurers, Towners, Vagabonds)
"Youngfolk" (Squires, apprentices (smith, mage, etc)
"Jester" (Jester)

This can be done once, or twice if the Keep is nearly full.

SCRY

It allows you to scry on any PENDING roles. No real limits, at the moment. Can only be done while the altar is active.

DELAY

Delays the ritual by another five minutes. Can be done up to three times for no cost to the Priest.

SACRIFICE (FOR ALL)

Ends the ritual immediately by offering the Church as the sacrifice. Read below.

What happens when the ritual ends?

When the timer expires, or all of the sacrifices have been added (or the last pending role was removed by the Priest)
The ritual ends.

There are now three potential outcomes:

ALL OF THE ENTRIES WERE OF PSYDON / TEN BELIEF

Congratulations! The ritual has succeeded. Every Tennite gets a mood buff for the rest of the round.


Yippee.

THE PRIEST OVERRODE THE RITUAL

Congratulations! It's still a success, and the mood buff is given to all Tennites all the same. However:

• The Priest loses Anastasis and Cure Rot
• Every church member (except Priest) loses their lesser miracle.

THE TIMER RAN OUT WITHOUT ALL THE ROLES / AN ASCENDANT ADDED THEIR BLOOD TO THE RITUAL

Oh no! The Rot has Spread. The Ascendants have prevailed.

ezgif-83e77ba3a7cd04.mp4

Here's what happens:

• Every tennite gets a mood debuff for the rest of the round.
• Every Ascendant worshipper gets a mood buff for the rest of the round
• A bad omen is added to the event rotation.
• The sun is gone for about a day's worth.
• Blood rain
• The Priest loses Anastasis and Cure Rot
• Every church member (except Priest) loses their lesser miracle.

LIMITS

Population is the biggest one. This is something that requires MOST of the Keep nobles to be filled.

Why It's Good For The Game

It's a pretty overwhelming event, and definitely not something I want to see every round (hence why Admins can just cancel it if it WOULD trigger), but the overall idea of it -- the Clergy moving to ever more desperate means of subduing the Rot, and the Ascendants mingling with it, felt very compelling.

It's, in essence, a social deduction type of minigame. (Secret Hitler, Resistance, Mafia / Werewolf), though I'm by no means a good board game designer, so take nothing here as final, especially the rules / limitations. And yes, at the moment if the Heretics in the Keep outnumber the Tennites / Psydonites by more than half, there is literally nothing the Church can do other than sacrifice themselves.

This came about while I was tossing around the idea of ensuring that Keep heretics, being in the high-impact and high-consequence positions actually had a tangible thematic consequence on the world. This is a way of having these consequences be applied not through the character's direct choices, but rather through their patron -- after all, all YOU had to do, after having wriggled your way to the higher echelons of this duchy, just slash your wrist in a little bowl.

Sprites by cre. my beloved

[Vex8tion]

I like the core idea and support the concept, though as I said on discord (repeating here so the actual feedback is more readily-accessible): I have a feeling the consequences for a failed ritual may be too harsh. Specifically, letting ONE single heretic's addition cause the removal of every Churchies' (minus Priest) Miracle is rough for something they can't control, anticipate, or really do much about afterwards. I'd suggest one of three options:

Require Ascendants to make up some significant fraction of contributors rather than only a SINGLE one causing a problem (probably the worst option).

Allow the Church to perform a different, costly ritual to recover their Miracle. Some form of supplication, maybe.

Put the lost Miracle on a timer and let them have it back after . 45-60 minutes or so, maybe?

Edit: My opinion piece aside, Acolytes do (I think) have medicinal skills, so at the worst they have to rely on secular medicine for their healing, which isn't terrible and makes me lean away from the timer'd idea. IMO the middle option, allowing a secondary, more costly supplication ritual to restore the lost Miracle would be best.

[burgerenergy]

This should be a once a month admin event at best, not something that is intended to happen every round. There isn't a particular benefit to the HRP of the server to yank a bunch of roles from whatever hopefully productive writing bits they were doing half way in the round - usually when things are starting to pop off anyway - to speed run a game of one night mafia, in character.

Our continuity rules also means any scheming ascendants will probably burn their identity for the non-benefit of destroying the church for the rest of the round, which actually hurts them as they go to them for healing, too. And besides that, once you know who is good you could just do the same couple of people.

Lastly, if you've ever seen a royal court trial five minutes is not a long time.

[Ollanius]

I think everyone else here's stated their concerns about this mechanic, so I won't speak too much about that. All I'll personally say about the matter is that the concept is cool (on paper), but it probably wouldn't be very fun (in practice).

The sprites and effort are very commendable, however. It'd be a shame to not integrate them in some capacity, even if it means straying a bit from your original design. There's a lot of value, here, that we can redirect into alternate interpretations.

Some ideas might be..

• ..making the altar a prominent target for Lyches, Vampyres, and Empowered Ascendants (such as the fully-skeletonized Zizoids) to corrupt. Doing so would be like initiating the final act of a round, where everything goes to shit: bad omens cropping up everywhere, the entire map being redshifted with eerie ambience, water-and-murk tiles turning into magma.. real 'hell-on-earth' stuff, you know? From there, you could either cleanse the altar (and save the Town) with a Priest, or - in a pinch - have another non-Ascendant with miracles sacrifice a very important part of themselves. Hell, this could warrant the reintroduction of the 'airship', which used to work as an emergency shuttle analogue back in Roguetown's initial debut.

• ..making the altar a trump card that, similar to the Inquisition's reliquary, could be busted out in the event of shit going haywire. Gather the Priest or enough non-Ascendant practitioners, huddle them by the altar, and have them sacrifice a little part of themselves to unleash a boon that could otherwise save the Town from certain defeat. Maybe it'd automatically choose (or allow people to vote for) a non-Ascendant practitioner to become temporarily empowered with divine energy and equipment, giving them a proper chance to stand toe-to-toe against those foes?

[radarseas]

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely, love this idea. Its genuinely a good idea in theory but uhh.

Removing miracles permanently for the rest of the round from the priest and the lesser ones of the clergy is, really, really going to disencourage church players and people will probably play the church even less, like genunely why play acolyte of Ravox if you can't do literally anything miracle related.

Also consider this, you lack an inquisitior in the round? then how are you supposed to figure it out, if the heretic doesn't RP like a heretic and acts straight to the point like a tenner. No miracles for you then I suppose.

We already lack a lot of priest players so this'll hurt the numbers, drastically.

---

The above idea is nice.

if a vampire lord or a lich or whatever gives their blood to this to do that, fair enough, you really fucked up and deserve it.

Either way, people with rotman trait and actual, zombie deadites should count like ascendant offerings too. Because offering a literally rotting person's blood to the rot is asking for it.

[burdwatcher]

This would be a perfectly fine ritual if it wasn't public code. This is the kind of mysterious energy and strangeness that would THRIVE if there wasn't a PR telling everyone how it was going to work that people WILL meta. You could easily throw suspicion on the church after providing tainted blood and say they screwed it up somehow, or muddy the waters with speculation on why the gods aren't favoring you upon completion.

But we all know how this is going to play out, people are going to write down all the names of people who helped and single out who is the heretic and have them lambasted. ESPECIALLY if this happens every round, it's only a matter of time until it's obvious who it is if it's always selecting from the same pool.

Never the less, I think the idea is really cool. The removal of miracles for just the church kind of sucks, I'm sure people would start adventuring a lot more to avoid potential punishment. I think it could use work, the downsides and upsides both sound like a drop in the bucket for boons and banes for potentially burning a character.