You are Anne Morel, Inquisitor.
Life as a nun was easy. It was staid, repetitive - full of routine work and activities that gave comfort in certainty. Separated from the rest of the world, you and the other nuns in the convent spent your days contemplating the Lord. You would never have thought it possible, but you want it back. Everything.
The life of an inquisitor is one of constant movement. Every week, the Inquisitorial Army visits another town, pristine, bright and summery; each week, the army leaves a town, scarred and disillusioned - or, at worst, desolate. It has been years, now, since you joined on - in that time, you have visited countless towns and cities. Though not all settlements had heretics or witches, in that time, you have seen things that seemed to be plucked straight from nightmares, people with demonic powers that would have been beyond your wildest imagination before you joined, and nameless monstrosities that were as horrifying as they were real. Each one, slain by the Inquisition.
But how many innocents had to be killed, and had to die in that time? Hundreds? Thousands? No, there were many more - too many to count. This was a process that had been going on for years, and this was not the only inquisitorial force. You weren’t one of the inquisitors up there, though. You were in the crowd - something, at least, to be thankful for. But even then... There were a few dozen, at least. Many more would’ve died on their own - widowed, orphaned. You still remember their names and faces, what they did before death - and each night, another killing plays out in your head, always with you as the executioner.
Others encourage each other - and encourage you - with recounts of the monsters slain. “We’re doing good, here. We’re getting rid of those dangerouss hereticss and the demonspawn that they create - just imagine the chaos that would have been wreaked had they all been left behind for another decade!” You tell yourself this, too, but it rarely ever helps. The dead are too real to let that happen.
When the Inquisitors came to ask you to join them, you hated it in the cloister. You wanted to help the religious cause, but at the same time, you wanted to see the world - and so you left, joining one of the roving bands.
Honestly, you don’t know what you expected. Something less messy, at least.
There is, however, one thing that keeps you going - keeps you going despite the murder and roving. You had seen it yourself; everyone had seen it. The prophetic words of a dying demon; as she bled her black poison from the wound in her gut, she had spoken to you all in a new voice - a voice that resembled that of no man or woman on Earth, rumbling like an earthquake and ringing in your ears. Something was going to happen 200 years from now, a process that would usher in the end of Christ’s millenium. From beneath the taunts, you could make out aspects of their plans - there were hidden demonic associated in most settlements to spread sin.
In 200 years, the world would come to an end - unless it is stopped, and its agents destroyed.
You ride through the roads and countryside with your fellow soldiers to yet another town - Uzès, it’s called - where rumours of witches had come in. Here, you will take on the identity of Katherine Boulengier, a journeyman carpenter come to the town to work and master your craft, and stay at an inn.
Inquisitor
[POWER] [NIGHT] T1M3 TO 1NV3ST1G4T3: Each night, you may select a maximum of three targets to investigate - they do not need to be different players, and can all be used on the same player, if you so wish, to investigate the same target thrice in the same night. Each successive investigation of a player over the course of the game will reveal more enlightening information regarding a player’s role in the game - the first investigation, for example, may be a vague detail for interpretation whilst the third or fourth investigation action may reveal something more incriminating. In all cases, there will be no definitive investigation result and the information you accrue will demand heavy use of your interpretative and analytical skills. This cannot be used N0.
[POWER] [NIGHT] Break and Enter: A player that has been investigated three or more times by you over the course of the game can be targeted to be given your sole attention for a Night. This will allow you to learn a substantial amount of information regarding one of that player’s abilities, if any - the ability investigated is random. If the target has no abilities or passives, you simply will be told this. This ability cannot be used the same Night as T1M3 TO 1NV3ST1G4T3.
OBJECTIVE: Eliminate all witches and magical entities.You are Colin Fleury, dark child.
You never found out who your parents were. None of the priests could tell you; you had been found at the monastery’s gates, wrapped in linen and no more than a few months old. You were taken in, and cared for – along with a multitude of other orphans. You were, apparently, a quiet baby unlike the rest; the monks took a liking to you, and you grew prodigiously.
Your earliest memory is of attending one of the psalmodies after the monks – and the children – had endured two days of enforced silence. By then, you were dying to say something, anything – and when everyone picked up their books and started singing, you joined in with such force that you gave the monks pause and made the other children laugh. One almost thought that you had forgotten how to speak, the silly old man. As you lie on the bed of moist straw in the darkened workshop, listening to the draught wander across the floor and shivering as it comes near, you try to imagine, with a smile (such a sweet smile, such sweet joy) what life would have been like... If you hadn’t been apprenticed.
You would wake up in your chambers, the sun shining, the stone walls glowing in the morning’s golden light. As your eyes open, you would hear the birds sing their merry tunes in blossoming trees in the garden. During summer, perhaps even the smell of flowers, delicately sweet, would flirt with your senses. You would say your morning prayer by the bed and might recite some psalms, and then leave for the gardens; there, you would care for the vegetables. Good, honest work. Perrin would work with you, of course – playful Perrin, would be Brother Perrin by then, who would share jokes and stories with you as the summer sun caresses your back with warmth and your robes, of black linen, cool you down. Brother Hennequin would make delicious stews with the freshest vegetables from the garden for everyone to eat for dinner, and everyone would be off again for prayer or reading...
Suddenly, you hear the crack of a peal of thunder, and the quiet hiss of rain. Water drips – slowly, at first – from the ceiling down to the floor, wetting the ground and your blanket. As the storm begins to build up, more water drizzles from the wooden sieve of a roof. Beginning to shiver, you wrap your sodden blanket tighter around yourself and try to sleep.
The next morning, you wake up to the smell of rust and moist earth. It had rained all night, and the packed earth of the cooperage floor had absorbed it all and taken on a blackish brown hue. Almost automatically, you move toward the hay closet and grab the pitchfork – but just as you lift it, you notice its tines and put it down. You had almost forgotten what had happened yesterday. You turn toward the table, vaguely apprehensive of what you might find – something that would put yesterday’s actions beyond the realm of doubt.
There it is. You were hoping – just a distant hope – that it might not be true. But there it is, as real as the bed you just slept on, that infernal book.
You had found an old tome in a section of the library nobody ever went to at the monastery. Now that you think about it, it looked oddly similar to the one that is before you now; maybe it was made the same way.
The first time you found it, you were simply exploring the monastery late at night. You had taken to waking up in the wee hours of the morning, even before the sun had risen, to wander the twilit corridors. It was a completely different place to the monastery during the day; the shadows that previously lurked behind closets, under tables and in corners where sunlight and candlelight couldn’t reach them, now grew long, stretched across corridors and flooded rooms, lightened only at intervals by weak bluish moonlight. The air was always cooler, and on cold days you could see your own breath as a mist in the air. Looking out the window, you could see a million shining motes of light that twinkled softly, serenely – infinitely more precious and vibrant than the brightest gem and the clearest riverwater. Wandering down these corridors, you went into the library, pulled books out at random and saw things you’ve never read or even seen before, like Gode cookerie and On strategie. Occasionally, you would flip through their pages and read a few lines, interested more in the spectacle than the book’s content – but on that fateful day, your attention was caught not by the books but by a door, at the far end of the library that was always locked and never tended for but on this occasion was left ajar.
You opened it just a crack more and went in. No, there was nobody there, nothing but dust and shelves. You inspected each of the aisles, titillated at the prospect of forbidden knowledge – and there it was, a book without any title on its spine. It looked to be built of ivory and a sort of pale leather, warm to the touch. Out of all the books there, that one seemed to have a strange attractive power. It was the only thing you really looked at in the room, though you dared not open it. You thought about it, though, for weeks on end; and when the monks told you that you had been apprenticed early to a dry cooper, just after your tenth birthday, you couldn’t bear the thought of having to leave it behind and stole it.
Some good it did you. You couldn’t muster the courage to read it; the spirit of the monastery hung along and you were still afraid – for the longest while – that you’d receive some punishment for it. For two years, it went unopened; you would take it out and look at it for a while, when you thought you were alone – the pale leather had darkened patches on it, but they were too smudged and blurry to make any recognisable pattern – but that was all you dared to do. It only happened a few days ago.
The cooper had been drinking too much. He had received a large and very lucrative order on barrels the day before, and had (for once) been successful in demanding advance payment. He had spent the entire day, from morning to night, drinking hippocras from the finest wine he could afford. You were working on the barrels of that order while he sat on an old faded armchair he called his “throne”, which he would use whenever he felt affluent, and drank his stupid wine while boasting about his business acumen and how “that idiot must’ve been a foreigner” for consenting to advance payment. As you toasted each barrel and bent the staves, he grew silent, observing you as you took out each barrel from the fire, slightly browned, bent them slightly with your lever, put it back and took it out, a darker shade, bent it, put it back and took it out, now slightly blackened- “BOY!” He screamed at you. “What the fuck are you doing to that barrel?”
You said nothing. You knew from experience that anything you could say would only make him angrier when he got started.
“Gone mute, have you?”
Of course, saying nothing could also make it worse.
“Listen here, you little shit – do you think our client wants charred barrels, eh? If he’s paid so much, you think he’d want shitty barrels? Take it off the fucking fire, you dumb cunt!”
You took it off and grabbed the lever.
He grimaced and threw away the cup. “Give me that-” he snatched the lever from you- “No wonder your parents threw you away, dull as you are. You just destroyed good wood!” He hit you over the head with the lever to make his point. You fell onto the still-hot iron hoop from the force of the strike, burning your face – as you screamed and recoiled, he took it for belligerence and struck you again.
“That wood cost more than you ever will, boy! Now do the next one properly!” He kicked you in the back as you started to get up, pushing you down again to the ground, and staggered back to his throne for more wine. Eventually, too drunk to do anything else, he staggered into his house beside the workshop with his flasks.
You worked on in sullen silence until you were sure he was asleep. Though that day wasn’t quite as bad as some other days, you couldn’t resist any longer – you just had to read that book. You rustled beneath your hay bed and brought out the book. But when you opened it, you found something altogether different from what you were expecting. Instead of those tales of a bygone era, you saw a blank page. Slowly, you could make out words emerging from the parchment – faded, weak, but visible – in another script at first, sharp and angular, but which transformed before your eyes into French. It described the process of a ritual that would fulfill the greatest wish of the person who performed it; flipping through the book, there were pages upon pages of notes, accounts and inscriptions.
You were taught to fear magic, even the good kind. But as your master went on a massive drinking binge, each strike removed that much more from that fear. Eventually – yesterday, in fact – you performed the ritual. You were pitching hay when it happened, and it was late in the evening; he had decided it was a good time to argue with you. It wasn’t much, not much at all, but it was enough for you to decide that you would take no more of it. You lifted the rake and drove it into his chest, as far as it would go, and pulled it out. His face went pale, and he fell immediately, blood pulsing from those three wounds and staining his clothes red. He never said a word, and how shocked he was, and you were shocked yourself – shocked at what you could do. You stabbed him again and again until he bled out and stopped moving, then stabbed some more out of spite until your arms were too tired to puncture his flesh.
Horrible though it was, you felt – and it was undeniable – a small twinge of satisfaction, even joy, for each stab.
All that was left, then, was to follow the ritual; and after a few moments of reading, you began. You slit his throat as it said and pulled out his tongue through the wound, cutting it off at the base; you cut off both of his ears and his nose; using your finger, you carefully gouged out both of his eyeballs, then cut off both of his thumbs. Dragging the body to an empty area, you arranged each type of body part neatly around him in a circle, and smeared out a circle of his blood with your fingers as best you could. Wiping your hands on your trousers, you lifted out the book and said the words. They were quite simple.
The book evaporated from your hands. The workshop darkened almost immediately, as if light had been sucked away from the world. The circle began to glow and the grisly parts rolled along it, and the body lifted slowly, inching into the air. As it climbed ever higher, your surroundings darkened even further – dark tendrils appeared at the corner of your vision, slithering silently like a hundred snakes, and your skin shifted from deathly cold to fiery warmth. Then, in the blink of an eye, the cooper’s body exploded. The skin tore away from it in a whirl of air and its flesh melted off the bones, forming a crimson blob of matter. The blood that made up the circle slid up your legs, onto your chest – you felt a searing pain in its path – and flowed into your eyes and mouth. Then... Darkness.
You don’t know how long you were unconscious. But, after what seemed like an eternity, you awoke again in a world of impenetrable gloom. You couldn’t move – you couldn’t see your body. Maybe you were still in your mind, but what you’re certain of was that you heard a voice. Far away, at first, but it was coming closer.
It laughed. It wasn’t mirthful, not directly; it was one of those laughs you heard the oldest monks do when they thought they had known everything, seen everything – and then had something happen that they had never seen before. Something unthought of. A novelty.
“I am Ashmedai, King of Demons. You seek something from me.” The voice was dark and luscious, soft as finest silk. “Yes. You may not know your desire yet, but it is there. You want change. You want revenge. I will give it to you.”
The darkness dissipated, and you found your body had been covered in intricate patterns from the blood. There was also a book there, similar to the one you saw before – but fresher, and with the cooper’s pained face embedded in the cover. You ran to a puddle to look at yourself.
There, in the reflection, you saw the designs on your body disappear as if they were never there – along with the burn mark on your face. But before you rose, you glimpsed a dark silhouette behind you in the puddle, three-headed and more than twice as tall as you.
“Yes, child. You remember.”
You jump a little as you hear the voice once more in the quiet workshop. You look around, but see no-one.
“We have made a pact. We will begin tonight.”
Dark Child
[PASSIVE] [DAY] [NIGHT] Blood Pact: If you die, your soul will be consumed immediately by the demon. You cannot be resurrected and you will lose.
[PASSIVE] [DAY] [NIGHT] Feigned Innocence: You are difficult to accurately inspect.
[POWER] [NIGHT] Murder: You may kill a player each night. This cannot be used N0. This cannot be used the same night as Consume.
[POWER] [MAGICAL] [NIGHT] Consume: Using Consume on a fresh corpse (one that died no earlier than the previous Night) will strengthen your bond with the demon and improve your abilities - but will also strengthen the demon’s grip on your soul and your mind. This cannot be used in conjuction with any other power.
OBJECTIVE: Kill everyone. Survive.You are the Death Shaman.
Death comes for all things in time. Whether it is a poor farmer, dying from cholera or starvation; or a warrior dying in battle as the spear pierces his gut; or a fat king, ruler of an empire dying from old age; death comes for them all equally. An ancient, powerful force with infinite patience, death may come each day for those trampled blades of grass or killed deer, but it knows that the crossbowman skinning his game will die soon enough, and that each tree in the forest they were in will wither and dry. Death is what you are, what you were before birth, and what you will be when the time comes for you - you are the human embodiment of Death, and exist only to serve it.
Born anew under a perfect storm of events that happens only once every few centuries, Death has become your soul. You remember your past self, already a shaman, dedicated to serving death while close to the earth, finding a secluded grove that was permeated with magic. He had performed a sacred ritual, the last of the rituals to be performed, under a literal storm - and instead of reuniting with the earth and soil that had borne him, he was struck by lightning. Now, you are changed forever - no longer a person, but something more.
Death had brought forth the darkness from the hidden places in your heart. It had freed you from the shackles of expectation, conditioning and society - as the outer layers that were presented to society were stripped away, the core that remained embraced death.
Once, you walked the lands seeking purpose. Now, it lies before you as clear and self-evident as the solidity of the stone beneath your feet.
For days, now, you have walked the plains and forests going in a single direction, strangely drawn to a point on the horizon - and at last, in the cover of darkness, you have found what you came for. You have come to this town - Uzès - to bring on another wave of death. This town, unlike the others nearby, has been spared from the recent waves of the Black Plague - leaving it with an overabundance of life.
But, as you approach the gates, you sense something - something that was not meant to happen. The hairs on your skin prickle, your face and back begin to flush and feel warm - it is unmistakable!
Life has entered this place - not the births, nor vitality, but a Life Shaman. Come to oppose you, no doubt. You must tread carefully.
“Who goes there?” A guard by the gate calls out at you, his hand at his sword-hilt.
“I am Denis le Breton, an old-clothes seller. I am simply returning to my wagon of goods in the city.”
“I don’t believe you. Why-” you walk past him, and he falls asleep.
You steal an empty wagon to sleep in during the nights.
The Death Shaman
[POWER] [3-SHOT] [MAGICAL] [NIGHT] Power of Death: Kills oneself immediately. No roleflip will occur; your death message will be “[PLAYER] has died during the Night”. You may only use this power three times.
[POWER] [1-SHOT] [MAGICAL] [NIGHT] I Will Drag You With Me: Can only be used the same night Power of Death is used for the first time. The player targeted by this power will die the same Night. This cannot be used N0.
[POWER] [MAGICAL] [NIGHT] Grasp of Death: Can only be used while dead. Kills one targeted player. Cannot be used the same night as Power of Death. This cannot be used N0.
[PASSIVE] [NIGHT] Cheating the Reaper: You may choose to resurrect at any time. You may only remain dead for two Nights, excluding the night Power of Death was used, before being forced to resurrect. You may only die safely three times. None of these three deaths will reveal your role; you will die with the message “[PLAYER] has been lynched” or WTTE. Upon your fourth death, by any cause, you will die permanently and lose.
OBJECTIVE: Eliminate the Life Shaman. Then eliminate everyone else.
NOTE: I recommend you wait with using the suicide power and deathkill until you’re reasonably sure who the Life Shaman is. Otherwise, due to the visibility of your death, you will find it difficult to win.