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Cult Leader

Each night, you become the alignment of an alive neighbor. If all good players choose to join your cult, your team wins.

Thinking themselves wise, they became fools.

Storyteller cues

First nightThe Cult Leader might change alignment. If so, show the YOU ARE info token & give a thumb signal.

Other nightsThe Cult Leader might change alignment. If so, show the YOU ARE info token & give a thumb signal.

Jinxes

Boffin

If the Demon has the Cult Leader ability, they can’t turn good due to this ability.

Pit-Hag

If the Pit-Hag turns an evil player into the Cult Leader, they can't turn good due to their own ability.

How to run it (Storyteller)

Each night, privately tell the Cult Leader their new alignment based on which alive neighbor you pick — you choose which side (left or right) informs them, and you must pick an alive neighbor. The nastiest edge case is when both neighbors are evil: the Cult Leader becomes or stays evil regardless of their starting alignment, and this is silent to the rest of the town. Watch the seating chart carefully to track whether the Cult Leader is currently good or evil before deciding whether to let good players 'choose to join the cult' — only genuinely good players count toward the win condition, and the Storyteller adjudicates whether each good player's cult-joining choice is made freely during the game.

How to play

  • Announce your role publicly and early: the cult win condition requires all good players to opt in, which only happens if they know you exist and trust you.
  • Track your nightly alignment shifts and share them: if you flipped evil last night, your neighbor is almost certainly evil — that is hard mechanical evidence pointing at a specific seat.
  • Alignment changes are your investigative tool: cross-reference which neighbor changed your alignment with other information in the game to triangulate who is evil.
  • Push hard for the cult win condition only when you are confident you are good and the game state is late enough that lingering evil players are identified — recruiting good players into the cult while you are secretly evil hands evil the win.
  • The most common mistake is treating your current alignment as fixed: you may flip back and forth every night, so never assume yesterday's read still applies today.

How to bluff as the Cult Leader

  • Claim Cult Leader early and loudly — it is a high-trust townsfolk claim that naturally draws attention, and the cult win condition gives you a plausible reason to want town engagement without producing falsifiable information.
  • Fabricate 'alignment flip' nights pointing at good players you want executed: claim you turned evil on a night when your good neighbor was sitting next to you, framing them as a likely evil neighbor.
  • Delay pushing the cult win condition indefinitely by claiming uncertainty about your own alignment — this is believable because the mechanic is genuinely volatile, and it buys time for your evil team.
  • The tell that exposes a fake Cult Leader is inconsistency between claimed alignment history and actual seat positions — town can audit whether your stated evil flips correspond to nights when a confirmed evil player was adjacent to you, so keep your lies geometrically plausible.

Key interactions

Recluse

The Recluse can register as evil, so the Storyteller may tell the Cult Leader they have become evil on a night when the Recluse is their alive neighbor — this can falsely indict an innocent player if the Cult Leader shares that information as evidence of an evil neighbor.

Spy

The Spy can register as good, so the Cult Leader may be told they have become good on a night the Spy is their neighbor — this can clear a genuine evil player and erode the reliability of the Cult Leader's alignment-shift evidence entirely.

Faux Paw

The Faux Paw registers as evil to the Cult Leader's ability, meaning the Cult Leader may flip evil and point to an alive Faux Paw neighbor as the source — a false evil read on what may be a good or ambiguous character depending on how the Storyteller uses the registration.

Pit-Hag

If the Pit-Hag converts an evil player into the Cult Leader mid-game, that player cannot flip good through their own ability — they will remain evil regardless of neighbor alignment, creating a Cult Leader whose 'good neighbor' flips are all false and whose cult win condition is irrelevant.