plasmid

While things along the lines of the constitution and Christianity and the Dead Sea scrolls are certainly understandable as answers, I'd consider them too close to a "forgotten philosophy" that the title excludes. I generally make the true answer something that is unequivocally very different than the decoy answer in the title that the riddle sounds like at first blush, yet something that's clearly described by the riddle when interpreted in another way. English units of measurement are a little further from that category, but I'm not sure if I'd really say that their time has come and gone and come again.

Ok, mostly just some minor clarification questions to add into the OP when it gets finalized. - Do Drevis' lackeys (er, vassals) and their wizards get +5% on invasions? - If multiple different factions invade Winnter, whose attacks go through? - When a lord invades a territory, do they move into that territory? If Demincus invades multiple territories or another lord does with Libronalah's help, do they pick which of the invaded territories they move into? - Do the wizards roam around the map while they are un-recruited, or do they suddenly appear in the land of their lord once they're recruited? - Is there a limit to the number of vassals you can have? - If a player gets kilt from invasions by multiple factions on the same turn, which one claims him as a vassal? Does he get to pick? Since vassals seem like they would make a huge shift in the balance of power (+1 invasion per turn by the vassal and +1 from the vassal's wizard), determining rules for who gains a vassal seems very important. - Do vassals keep their special abilities, and does it apply to their new lord as well? For movement, I vote for letting a lord and wizard move to any territory in their realm (unless their realm gets fragmented, then move to any territory within the fragment they're currently in) just to keep the game moving and not have people waste five turns crossing the map. I would lean towards making player-role combinations known to everybody. It just seems like it would be easier to pull off cloak and dagger stuff than if you had to post "Does Winnter want to tell me who he is so we can do some strategizing?" Also makes recruiting wizards much more straightforward if they know what they're getting into. I'm also still a little worried that endgames might drag on. How would you feel about having each player publicly name one of their starting territories as their stronghold, and saying that having your stronghold captured = defeat? Oh, and be sure to add the part about vassals being able to invade territories to the OP once it's ready to roll.

Not a butterfly, as they are born of other butterflies rather than scholars and do not get forsaken (as far as I know). Amonkkilla's guess is a remarkably good fit to this riddle, and one that hadn't crossed my mind while writing it. The stories can definitely be said to have been written by scholars. I didn't realize that killing their head honcho would release the others as well, but my extensive research on the topic just now showed that there was a Simpsons episode where that happened so it must be true. I think I'll count it as an alternate answer.

Not a profanity. I would consider that to be too close in spirit to the title's exclusion of not being a forgotten philosophy, if profanity is being used as an answer based on the evolution of the meanings of words over time. I tend to make the decoy answer in the title be something that's generally not thought of as simiar to the actual answer in any way, except possibly for the ways that the riddle describes both of them. Also not a computer virus, although, like "wine", I can see how it would be a good fit. I don't usually think of them as having a latency period between acquisition and activation like the first stanza would be getting at, but undoubtedly some do.

Not an ancient language or prediction; those would be too close to the thing I'm saying I'm not in the title, so they wouldn't make for a very satisfying riddle. Also not a dictionary; it too is sort of similar to a forgotten philosophy in the way it's being used as an answer, and wouldn't explain the last two lines.

Haha, Mafia fits so well! But I avoid riddling about things that less than 95+% of the population would know about, and it unfortunately still falls in that category. Anyone who wants to help change that can and Wine could also be a pretty good fit, although the makers are not generally classified as scholars.

I'm born of scholars' toil long Forsaken, no longer germane My time has come, my time has gone Anon it is coming again My words now few will understand They're twisted obscuring the truth And so they spread throughout the land Discernment requiring a sleuth In downward spiral, chaos calls Destroying the orderly life Until the ruler finally falls Thus bringing and end to this strife

I'm done with the TMMs, but I was only playing while I had a light schedule at work. Now it's back to madness as usual, so I can't sign up for any mafias for a while due to the very high risk of intermittent inactivity.

Since you mentioned yearbook quotes in particular, the message going along with one person's yearbook signature that I lol'ed most about was: "Sex is yellow, sex is green, sex is blue, have a colorful summer." (Too bad that was in someone else's yearbook.)

The lords seem reasonably balanced except for the Anniata + Massian alliance. Demincus can grow at ~2x a theoretical "vanilla" lord's rate early in the game, and closer to 1-1.5x near midgame (when most other players have a wizard to give themselves 2 invasions/turn). Endgame will depend on whether his increased invasion buff stays in place when it's down to him vs one other lord (and therefore only one employed wizard). If he loses his invasion buff then he will only have one invasion/turn against his opponent lord + wizard invasion and he will get stomped. If he keeps the invasion buff, it should stay balanced in endgame. Anyway, total strength will depend mostly on how early the wizards join other lords. Drevis has a ~1.3x growth rate (if average invasion success rate is ~50% and his invasion success rate is ~65%). The Anniata + Massian alliance as a whole has a ~2x growth rate compared to a single player. The degree of advantage to Winnter and Movius seems very dependent on how the map is arranged. For Winnter, more lands = bigger advantage from movement ability but less advantage from starting with 4 lands. And unless the capital is extremely strategically positioned, it sounds like Movius would probably be underpowered compared to the other lords... capital immunity would probably not make that much difference if the players can fairly easily just invade different lands he controls until he's down to his last territory. Calliah's power seems sort of useless if the wizard he forces to join him can leave anytime he wants... does the wizard have to stay until Calliah dies or dismisses him? If Calliah can force the wizard to stay, it seems he would have an early growth advantage similar to Demincus. The wizards seem like they might be more problematic. Trohomt's ability must be nullified if he is on the last territory that his lord owns, and Spinnysprout's ability must be nullified if there are only two lords in play, otherwise the game could end up in a stalemate. (Er, can Spinnysprout block ANY invasion from the named lord, or just an invasion into the land that he's at? If it's any invasion, then he seems too overpowered toward endgame when there are only a few lords. If it's only on the land he's at, then he seems underpowered compared to Trohomt.) For Libronalah, does every player know where each lord is (which would help with anticipating where an invasion to redirect might come from), and can redirects end up making a lord invade a land that's not even attached to his current empire and other such complicated stuff? If an invading lord captures the land that the defending lord happens to be sitting in, does the defending lord get kilt or just booted to an adjacent land that he owns? More to the point, when it gets closer to endgame, I could envision this turning into a total grind if there are two players and they each own like 20 territories and both of them are spending their time invading each other's territories with similar odds of a successful invasion. They would just trade territories as both lords move around capturing whatever enemy land they happen to be next to, with no real definitive head-to-head combat. All of the above might be best evaluated by a test run of the game, but there is one more practical point. If this is to become a board game for people to play IRL, would you need to have 13 people (7 lords and 5 wizards and a host [so actions can be submitted and Tomathar redirects processed and the relationship between players and which lords they represent can be kept secret]) in your house to play a game?

Um, I already solved it in post 7?

Gooodiiieeeess... Aveeeengggeee meeeee!!! Wait, what? You already did? You guys rock. I've got to say kristmark, that was pretty ambitious the way you designed the game. The day spy (that's me!) would get spy info back a couple hours before the vote ended to potentially affect the vote, and it sounded like Tom got a chance to see the night post after the night actions were in and then base his actions off that to lead to a whole new night post. That sounds like it made a lot of work for you. And I couldn't even take advantage of the day spy ability because neither I nor a bunch of the people voting could log in during that time window anyway. If this game was tough to host, by all means make simpler roles that don't need to act in narrow time windows and make you revise posts and all that. I feel kinda bad for Molly tho. Coming in as a sub and having to read >300 posts, trying to make up a credible cover for a baddie that's reasonably consistent with it, and then getting booted back out in the next couple of posts and lynched anyway. At least s-chan was already RIDed and he didn't have to deal with her in BTSC.

MiKi, I am quite confident that cat is just as good as you are, so to speak, and no one has countered tole's claim of being Jerry so I am not too suspicious of her right now. While I still have insufficient data for firm conclusions, my leading suspicions for the baddies / indie are currently tra, smoth, and s-chan.

Yeah, sometimes people show extremely good judgement by not listening to me anyway =P

That's a good catch, mboon. I don't think that kristmark was hinting at a redirect in the NP. Tole claimed she's Jerry and redirected S-chan onto me, while tyke "accidentally" blocked MiKi and not me. Meathead was blocking me instead of redirecting, so he couldn't be the reason for the "accidentally". So either kristmark1 wasn't really trying to hint that tyke was redirected to block MiKi, or else tole was lying about redirecting s-chan onto me. Oh, also block > redirect on the OOP, so I'm pretty sure Jerry can't redirect Tyke. So I don't think that kristmark wasn't hinting at a redirect. But you are right: since redirects don't necessarily show up in the night post I need to redo my calculations, because I used the absence of Jerry's redirect in the nightpost as evidence that s-chan was not redirectable.

I'm glad that kristmark1's post #218 proves that I'm not a baddie, although I admit that I don't yet have proof that I'm not Tom. My reasons for changing my votes were explained in posts 98 and 119, and I will not dwell on them much more. I will just say that I'm now pretty sure 'cat' is not a baddie, so I'm glad I didn't lynch him as a goodie on the first day in two consecutive games. Since we have two NKs, and only a handful of people who are highly suspicious to be baddies, I propose that Spike should try to RID Meathead and Tuffy should try to RID Butch. That ensures that both of our RIDs do not target the same person as the same role. Tole said she redirected S-chan onto me which made her suspect that S-chan is Meathead. I asked kristmark1 earlier about what happens if Jerry tries to redirect Meathead, and he said that OOP of baddies > goodies means that Meathead's redirect would take precedence so he would NOT be redirected by Jerry. I don't have any reason to doubt that Tole's telling the truth about redirecting S-chan onto me, I'm just saying that Jerry's redirect will not affect Meathead, so you should consider other possibilities (either S-chan does not have a night action that can be redirected, or maybe she is Meathead but targeted me of her own volition instead of being redirected onto me). However, the fact that Jerry's redirect did not appear in the night post makes me think that Jerry tried to act on someone who he is not able to redirect, so my last recommendation for now is that Spike try to RID S-chan as Meathead. S-chan, if you are Tyke and that's why Jerry's redirect didn't go through, then you can recommend that Spike try to target someone else. Edit: grammar

I'll say what I've said before, since kristmark1 wouldn't let me vote to lynch myself when I was clowning around at first, I'm not sure that it would even be possible for me to self block. And if it were, I'm not sure if it would actually show up in the night post or just end up being a non-action. You can ask kristmark1 if you'd like clarification. On top of that, there is only one baddie that I can conceivably be (since Butch is definitely impossible for me), while most other players could potentially be either of the two baddies. Unfortunately that will have to be the last I say for today as I'm about to head to work and will not be able to get on Brainden there. Meanwhile, ask yourself why s-chan suddenly came out of nowhere to question why we were ganging up on cat, especially when the vote was tied 2-2 between cat and tole at the time. Why be so partial toward one of those two fairly quiet players?

Hosts: kristmark1 and Maurice 1. plasmid - voting for s-chan 2. tolecnal 3. Hidden G - voting for plasmid 4. Tralala!- voting for Hidden G 5. mboon - voting for Cat 6. smoth - voting for mboon 7. Sakura-chan - voting for tolecnal 8. 'Cat'astrophe voting for tolecnal 9. MiKi - voting for Cat Since cat hinted at her role, I'll take my vote off her for now unless someone would like to counter the role she's hinting at, making at least one of you two look totally insane. I don't see any evidence that Quacker is dropping hints yet. And s-chan, I quoted the reason I suspected you and cat when I switched my vote, and you've continued to drop incriminating clues since then. Edit: saw more voting since I started typing and updated the roster

Hosts: kristmark1 and Maurice 1. plasmid - voting for Cat 2. tolecnal 3. Hidden G 4. Tralala! 5. mboon 6. smoth - voting for Cat 7. Sakura-chan - voting for tolecnal 8. 'Cat'astrophe 9. MiKi - voting for Cat Ok, that makes it easy. New plan is to lynch cat now and then have Spike and/or Tuffy RID kill s-chan, unless Quacker comes to their rescue. Edit: sorry 'bout joining first day lynches in two consecutive days, cat

Hosts: kristmark1 and Maurice 1. plasmid - voting for tolecnal 2. tolecnal 3. Hidden G 4. Tralala! 5. mboon 6. smoth - voting for Cat 7. Sakura-chan - voting for tolecnal 8. 'Cat'astrophe 9. MiKi - voting for Cat Adding MiKi's vote from post 92 If I'm correctly guessing your role MiKi, the very weak evidence that I do have suggests that tole, mboon, and cat would be potential players to target. But with the very limited information available, I can't be of much more help for now. Maybe later on.

Fair enough, here's what I have to say for myself. 1) Since I was blocked by Meathead, I probably am not Meathead. Aside: Maybe it's theoretically possible that I was super sneaky and blocked myself in order to make it look like I'm not Meathead. But I am not sure if self-blocks are even allowed (since it seems like self-lynches are not allowed). If you want, you can ask kristmark1 if that would even be possible. 2) Since I was blocked by Meathead and it looks like Butch's spy went through, I cannot be Butch.

Hosts: kristmark1 and Maurice 1. plasmid - voting for tolecnal 2. tolecnal 3. Hidden G 4. Tralala! 5. mboon 6. smoth 7. Sakura-chan 8. 'Cat'astrophe 9. MiKi Nah, I was just clowning around. I'll vote for one of the quieter people so far in an effort to get them talking.

kristmark1 and Maurice 1. plasmid - voting for plasmid 2. tolecnal 3. Hidden G 4. Tralala! 5. mboon 6. smoth 7. Sakura-chan 8. 'Cat'astrophe 9. MiKi Random.org said I have to lynch myself Next time I'll need to remember to remove myself from the list first.