This is a guide for crafting custom scripts for the social deduction game Blood on the Clocktower.
The game's core editions – Trouble Brewing, Bad Moon Rising and Sects & Violets – are well-tested and meticulously-balanced game-theoretic ecosystems, but the game's enormous cast of characters and complex emergent gameplay interactions create an irresistible temptation to experiment with new combinations of bluffers and puzzle-solvers. This post, which draws heavily on the wisdom already shared within the community, provides a checklist of principles to keep in mind.
Even if you aren't in the business of making custom scripts, unpacking exactly what goes into a great Blood on the Clocktower script is interesting from a game design perspective, and this post will highlight some of the less obvious features that make Clocktower's core editions work so well.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, introductions to the game can be found here (official website) and here (video).
Outline
The rest of this post consists of ten guidelines, listed in roughly descending order of priority. Links to further resources are provided at the end.
- Figure out the basics
- Include misinformation
- Conceal the outsider count
- Conceal which Demon is in play
- Avoid good characters who are too easy to confirm
- Give the good team reasons to be secretive
- Give the evil team an escape hatch
- Aim for similar minion "loudness"
- Consider using Fabled
- Consider starting Teensy
Two things are essential to remember. First, these are guidelines, not commandments. There will certainly be occasions where you decide it's right to do something differently.
Second, the best way to evaluate your script is by playing it! Unexpected interactions between characters are a vital part of Blood on the Clocktower, and giving players creative opportunities to exploit these interactions will make the game all the more fun, but often the only way to discover these interactions and gauge their impact on the player experience will be to watch them show up organically when your script is played.
1. Figure out the basics
So, you have your cool idea for a script. Maybe there's a gameplay theme you want to focus on, or a couple of characters you really like and want to include.
The best place to start is the Script Tool from the official Clocktower site. As well as making it easy to add and remove characters, the Script Tool will automatically figure out night order, flag jinxed characters and generate a printable PDF to share with players.
Make sure your script has the minimum number of characters of each type. For a standard game this is at least 13 Townsfolk, 4 Outsiders, 4 Minions and at least 1 Demon. A lot of the time you'll be working from the bottom upwards, starting with your Demons and building the remaining characters around them.
Among your Townsfolk, make sure there's at least a few that receive information. It's recommended to list Townsfolk in what's called "standard Amy order", which groups together characters according to when their ability takes effect (again, this is something the official Script Tool can automate).
2. Include misinformation
A crucial goal for the good team is separating true information from misinformation. If the good team have no reason to doubt any of the information they are given, it will usually be too difficult for the evil team to win.
Misinformation can be created consciously by the evil team (e.g. through the Poisoner and Pukka's targeted poisoning) or exist passively as a result of characters' abilities (e.g. Drunk or Vortox). If in doubt, it's good to include both types of misinformation sources.
Madness abilities (like Mutant and Cerenovus) are a less effective source of misinformation. Although they may encourage the good team to doubt each other, keep in mind that madness does not cause players to doubt their own information, and players can always break madness if they want to (and they are happy to face the consequences).
3. Conceal the outsider count
By default, the number of Outsiders in the game is determined by the overall number of players. But if the good team know exactly how many Outsiders should be in play, it will be much harder for players on the evil team to bluff as an Outsider. It will also make it easier for Outsiders who believe they are other characters (e.g. Drunk and Lunatic) to figure out their true role.
There are two ways of avoiding this: either include characters that directly manipulate the Outsider count (especially evil characters, since they won't make themselves public), or Outsiders who are less likely to make themselves known to the good team (because of madness, because they don't know they're Outsiders, or because they may change teams). The former type of obfuscation is generally most effective, but if in doubt, it's good to include both (like in the three base scripts).
4. Conceal which Demon is in play
If there is more than one Demon on the script, part of the puzzle for the good team is working out which Demon is in play. Make sure that this is indeed a puzzle! Be careful with Demons which cause more than one death per night, since they will clearly signal their presence unless there are other sources of death at night.
On some scripts (including the classic Trouble Brewing) there is only one Demon on the script. For these games, the good team will not need to spend any effort figuring out which Demon is in play. Keep in mind that some Demons (like the Vortox and Legion) work best when it's not guaranteed they are in play, letting them instil paranoia in the good team.
5. Avoid good characters who are too easy to confirm
In general, games are most fun when no good player can be completely trusted. To support this, it's worth having ways for the evil team to plausibly look like any good character on the script (or as many as possible).
For "information" roles, this is usually not much of a concern: for example, any evil player can bluff as a Clockmaker and invent a number (although extremely info-heavy characters like Undertaker are hard to bluff without an info-heavy Minion like Spy or Widow).
For "power" abilities which kill, protect or resurrect, the consequences are much more visible and it's harder for the evil team to bluff as them without extra support. For example, the Professor's ability to resurrect another character is almost impossible for the evil team to fake unless they have a Shabaloth on their team (and even then, it will usually require coordination with the storyteller or very good luck). The Devil's Advocate, an evil character that can protect others from death by execution, is a versatile mechanism for the evil team to bluff as a protection role like Tea Lady, Pacifist or Sailor.
Another interesting option is to include ways of generating evil Townsfolk. With a Bounty Hunter or Pit-Hag on the script, even a Townsfolk who can easily confirm their character won't be guaranteed to be on the good team.
6. Give the good team reasons to be secretive
In a typical social deduction game, the good team will tend to be honest and the evil team will tend to lie. But you can make games much more exciting if the good team is incentivised to conceal some of their information.
On the one hand, good team secrecy makes the game less of an uphill battle for the evil team: if every good player thinks it's best to publicly state their role on day one, it will be significantly harder for the evil team to bluff. I would also argue that good team secrecy makes the game more fun: players who enjoy detective work will be able to do it even if they are assigned the evil team, and players who enjoy deception will have more opportunity to do it even if they are on the good team.
Some good characters (like the Damsel, Pixie and Magician) explicitly want to hide their role. Having these characters on the script will nudge the whole good team towards concealing their roles, so that they can protect the members of their team who really need to stay under the radar.
You can also gently encourage the good team to be secretive by including a mix of good characters who want to get killed at night and characters who want to stay alive. If your good characters are taken from across the spectrum pictured below, they will not want to be too open about their roles, in the hope that the Demon will target the wrong player at night.
One last factor to think about is how good team secrecy affects the relative strength of evil characters. If your good team are encouraged to keep quiet about their roles, evil information characters (like Spy and Widow) become much more powerful, whereas characters that need information to work effectively (like Poisoner and Pit-Hag) are weaker.
7. Give the evil team an escape hatch
A loss through bad luck tends to happen more often for the evil team than for the good team. By default, the good team only needs one lucky execution to win the game. To balance this out, consider including an "escape hatch" which helps the evil team get back on their feet if the game is going badly. Another gameplay function served by many escape hatches (including Imp, Zombuul and Fang Gu) is giving the good team more reason to suspect that a dead player is evil, sowing extra distrust.
Escape hatches can take a number of different forms. The most obvious are abilities letting a Demon jump to another character if they're attracting too much suspicion, or letting the game continue after the Demon is executed. Each of the three base scripts includes at least two escape hatches.
8. Aim for similar minion "loudness"
Some minions are "loud", meaning that the good team will learn quickly that they are in play. Others are "quiet", affecting the game in more subtle ways. A quiet minion tends not to work as well on a script where other minions are loud: the good team will be able to work out they are in play by process of elimination (having not seen the obvious "tells" for the loud minions on the script), making it hard for the quiet minion to influence the game discreetly.
A good approach is to have all the minions be a roughly similar level of loudness: all quiet (like in Trouble Brewing), all loud (like in Sects & Violets) or all in the middle (like in Bad Moon Rising).
9. Consider using Fabled
Fabled, while officially called "characters", don't have any agency and aren't controlled by any player. They are best thought of as flavourful ways of tweaking the rules of your game.
Duchess, Fibbin, Sentinel and Spirit of Ivory are specifically designed to help balance custom scripts when it's not possible to do so by adding or removing (non-Fabled) characters. Other Fabled don't have script balancing as their principal goal, but sometimes appear on custom scripts to make games more interesting, such as Revolutionary on Comrade Demon or Doomsayer on Race to the Bottom.
The Djinn is a special Fabled which adds new rules to amend the interaction between two characters on a script. Officially, the two characters are said to be "jinxed" when unpatched, but you'll usually see the community instead use "jinx" to refer to the patch itself (which is the approach used in the rest of this post).
There's a lot of variation in how jinxes work. In the most extreme case, so-called "hate jinxes" declare that two characters cannot be in play at the same time (this applies, for example, to Riot and Exorcist). At the other end of the spectrum, there are characters that work perfectly well together, but a jinx exists allowing them to interact in an interesting way (such as the Mathematician seeing the Lunatic malfunction, or the Cerenovus making a player mad they are the Goblin).
Some people are anxious about including jinxed characters on custom scripts, out of a fear that jinxes are just band-aids to stop poorly-built scripts from completely breaking. I would strongly encourage you not to be afraid of jinxes and to embrace the gameplay possibilities they were designed to open up.
That said, avoid overloading your players with too much rules complexity, and make sure that any jinxes on the script are clearly explained before the game starts (even if the jinxed characters aren't in play). Losing because you didn't understand all the fine print is never fun!
10. Consider starting Teensy
"Teensyville" games, which have 5 or 6 players, use their own type of script with a smaller pool of characters (6 Townsfolk, 2 Outsiders, 2 Minions and 1-2 Demons). Steven Medway, creator of Blood on the Clocktower, suggests that Teensyville scripts are a perfect starting point for new script designers, quicker to assemble, faster to playtest and easier to focus around a central theme.
All the scriptbuilding principles listed above still apply to Teensyville scripts. To see an example of this, we can look at No Greater Joy, the archetypal entry-level Teensyville script:
- There is a source of misinformation (Drunk);
- There is outsider count manipulation (Baron);
- All Townsfolk are information characters who are easy for the evil team to bluff (this is especially important in Teensyville games where the evil team aren't given any out-of-play characters to bluff as);
- There are good characters who want to stay alive (Empath, Chambermaid and especially Klutz) and a character who wants to get killed at night (Sage), encouraging some good-team secrecy;
- There are two escape hatches (Imp and Scarlet Woman); and
- The two Minions are similar in terms of loudness (both very quiet without any active abilities).
Further resources
Recommended custom scripts
The official Blood on the Clocktower site has a regularly-updated page listing some of the team's favourite custom scripts.
BotC Scripts is a large searchable database of custom scripts.
Zets has assembled a list of neat, balanced custom scripts, available on Imgur.
Scriptbuilding guides
This Reddit comment by official storyteller Ben Burns covers six "must-haves" for custom scripts.
"The Teensyville Fair" is a Tumblr post by BotC creator Steven Medway with advice on building Teensyville scripts. Much of the advice is also applicable to full-size scripts.
Angelus Morningstar's Ravenswood Bluff site includes an excellent scriptbuilding guide as well as a collection of custom scripts.
Discussion forums
The BotC subreddit has a "Scripts" flair. You can search for this flair to find other custom scripts, or tag a post with this flair to get feedback on your own script.
The unofficial BotC discord server has a channel for custom script discussion.
