The body finally slid off the clocktower hand. No one really thought any of these townsfolk were going to go up there and remove it? 🙂
My name is Dan, but I go by Pyle in the Blood on the Clocktower community because just like Mikes and Sarahs, there are a lot of Dans out there. I was first introduced to Blood on the Clocktower in mid-2020 by a co-worker, who told me about this game they played with their friends online. She sent me some documentation, and it sat in my inbox for a few months. I finally cracked it open, but in the meantime I had watched games played on YouTube (props, No Rolls Barred), so I started to get a ‘feel’ for the game itself. I watched Shut Up and Sit Down’s review of the game as well, which just enticed me more. Seasoned gamers saying this was their favorite game, full stop? I had played other social deduction games, which were always great hits at social gatherings, but of course this was during the pandemic. Getting together with games became more difficult. Taking a chance on hanging with a group of friends meant that we might not get to see others.
As it turned out, there were tools for playing Blood on the Clocktower online. We could do video and audio through Discord, and use Bra1n’s web app clocktower.online to run the game. My problem was I had actually never played Blood on the Clocktower. I’d seen a few games online, but myself had never even been a player, let alone a storyteller. But I really wanted to play it–it felt very social, and very different because there was so much misinformation. Players weren’t going to have a sudden collapse of the wave function into Truth, like happens in some other social deduction games. They wouldn’t really know-know the truth until the end. And that seemed just the kind of game I’d like to play.
So I dug in to figure it all out. This was late 2020/early 2021. I consumed hours of game play footage. I read as much as I could on characters. I would do deep dives on individual specific characters each night before going to bed, trying to internalize the interactions between all the different characters on a given script. But that wasn’t enough. I learned everything I could about Discord, which I had previously had very little reason to use (voice chat for video games aside). I learned how to use clocktower.online, which was the easiest part due to how well-designed it was.
I finally felt like I had the tools I needed, and so finally had my very first game of Clocktower. It wasn’t the smoothest. I don’t think I made any major storyteller mistakes, but before getting Moveer with Discord I moved each player–manually–to the night rooms where they would sit and wait for me to wake them. It was tedious, and took too much time, but we had fun. I got better at it; learned more moves with Discord (thanks, Ben Burns, for the Moveer advice on Reddit; made such a huge difference in those early days). I also got better as a storyteller. I found being a storyteller oddly voyeuristic into the inner workings of our player’s minds. What kind of lies would they tell? Who would they trust? How would that information be used? I found it all intriguing, and loved building interesting worlds for them to play in.
It was well over six months before I got to be a player in one of our games. One of our players, Bekah, expressed an interest in storytelling and I was only too happy to oblige. It was awesome to finally be a player in our group, albeit I did feel like I had an unfair advantage, in that I had watched many of them lie to each other for the previous six months. It was certainly no guarantee of victory, but it definitely helped me feel confident as a player.
We continued to grow. More players asked other players to join, and sometimes they did. I asked…everyone. Everyone I met, everyone I knew, everyone I thought might have even the barest interest. I started to realize that we were a thing, that we had enough great people who were interested in this game to continue it, to allow it to grow. We had more players become storytellers. I ran in-person games at Gencon Indy 2022 and we got 11 new players from those events, some of which still play with us regularly.
I don’t think I can overstate how truly transformative Blood on the Clocktower and Pyles of Blood has been to my well-being. During the pandemic, like nearly everyone else, I was pretty depressed. Social plans were constantly being canceled, so looking forward to something was dangerous. It felt like an even split if the plans would actually end up happening. I’m sure most of you have felt it at some point or another during that time. But I had this other thing going; a group of friends who could get together and laugh–true, deep, belly laugh–together about how John Henry absolutely believed me the entire game. Or how the snakecharmer, who had been quiet the entire game, stole the win at the very end. I needed it and I didn’t know I needed it, and looking back I’m just truly grateful to my friends who took a chance and found something great we could all do together.
Today, Pyles of Blood looks a lot different than it did in those early days. We have eight storytellers, 70+ players in the club, a nice website, club merch, leader boards, an awesome app (Bra1n is awesome, in case that wasn’t clear earlier in this post) to run our games, and a budding Twitch stream. Several of us are going to Clocktower Con this year, and I’m looking forward to meeting even more cool people out there. We are almost ready to make the club public, i.e. anyone who follows our rule set (which is very reasonable) can join up. We will have guidelines for all that soon!
