Politician
If you were the player most responsible for your team losing, you change alignment & win, even if dead.
I'm glad you asked that question. Truly, I am. But I think the REAL question here is...
Jinxes
How to run it (Storyteller)
How to play
- Embrace the paradox early: your win condition is orthogonal to good's, so you must constantly weigh whether helping good win serves you at all — it only does if you expect to fail your own trigger anyway.
- Deliberate misdirection: steering the town toward wrong executions or vouching hard for a demon you suspect is alive are the most legible ways to become 'most responsible' for a good loss, but you need to do this visibly enough that the storyteller notices.
- Calibrate your sabotage: if you go too quiet, the storyteller won't attribute the loss to you; if you go too obvious, the town exiles you and a different player may take the blame — stay impactful but deniable until the last moment.
- Most common mistake: playing like a normal good townsfolk hoping good wins, then trying to pivot late — by end-game there's rarely enough runway to credibly own responsibility for the loss, and the storyteller will judge accordingly.
- Dead is fine: your ability fires even if you're dead, so don't panic-claim to avoid execution — being executed mid-game while still having shaped the town's bad decisions can lock in your win condition.
How to bluff as the Politician
- Bluffing Politician is low-value for evil since the character has no information to fabricate — the main use is as a late-game 'confession' cover: claim Politician when cornered to explain why you've been acting suspiciously, framing your evil play as intentional Politician sabotage.
- If you use it as a cover story, commit to the narrative: name specific moments where you 'steered town wrong on purpose' to make the claim believable, and accept that the town will still probably execute you — the goal is muddying the waters for your demon, not surviving.
- The biggest tell on a fake Politician is claiming it too early: a real Politician has no reason to reveal unless execution is imminent, because announcing the role just lets town discount your misdirection as deliberate rather than informational.
- Evil players created as Politician via Pit-Hag are stuck evil with no path to flip good through the ability, so if you're in that situation don't soft-claim Politician expecting sympathy — your win condition is standard evil and the role is essentially flavour.
Key interactions
If the Heretic is in play and flips the game result so that good 'loses,' a Politician whose actions caused that inverted loss can still trigger their ability — meaning a Heretic game creates a second viable path for the Politician to win, and the Politician should factor in whether the Heretic is alive when deciding how aggressively to pursue their own condition.
An evil player transformed into the Politician by a Pit-Hag cannot use the ability to change to good alignment, making the role a trap assignment — if you suspect you've been Pit-Hagged into Politician as an evil player, you still win only under the standard evil condition and should not alter your play based on the Politician's trigger.
Legion may read the Politician as evil, which can make the Politician appear aligned with evil even when they are technically good — in a Legion game, good players should not lean too hard on a Politician's apparent evil registration as confirmation of Legion identity.
Like Legion, the Vizier may perceive the Politician as evil and could choose to execute them immediately under their ability — a Politician in a Vizier game should be aware they are a plausible Vizier execution target even while playing for the good team.