The Syndicate

I never doubted you, Ep.

FZ. wrote:Congrats to the winners Nice job!

Don't know why you had to go and kill me so early, but I forgive you

I was actually screaming at my computer for the civvies to lynch llama, but they wouldn't listen. I guess it's a lot easier to see things in a new light when you're not in the middle of all the mess. But NotSawyer actually fooled me. Like Epi, I didn't see him as bad.
In any case, you both really pulled it off. It was impressive.

Yes, I must say notsawyer's performance was top notch evil. Well done sir.

I doubted Epignosis every step of the way.

Marmot wrote:I doubted Epignosis every step of the way.

With good reason. I played like ass.

If I had just believed the opposite of everything I did I would have been fine.

I'm having Harry Potter flashbacks.

Epignosis wrote:

Jackofhearts2005 wrote:This is a bad argument and it made you look bad that you kept making it.

I don't care how it made me look. How I looked was never my concern.

HILLARY POINTS ROUND-UP:

+1 Point to every player voting in the Night 6 poll.
+1 Point for voting to redistribute the Hillary Points of the dead. Democrats appreciate votes from the grave (just ask Kennedy) but redistribution is trending in the DNC.

Which leaves the standings like this:

+21 Points: notsawyer540
+20 Points: S~V~S
+18 Points: Marmot
+17 Points: thellama73
+16 Points: Long Con
+15 Points: DFaraday, DrWilgy
+14.5 Points: Epignosis
+13 Points: TheFloyd73
+12 Points: MacDougall
+11 Points: Jackofhearts2005
+9 Points: FZ., Scotty
+8 Points: Quin
+7 Points: Elohcin

Quin's vote to redistribute dead players' points killed his chance at tying for last place. Congrats to notsawyer540 for earning the most Hillary Points! His prize is...
Now for some host notes:

-There were 59 total votes cast during the game. Of those 59, 25 of them were for mafia and 6 were for the independent. That 31/59 total votes going to baddies in a game where two baddies made it to the end and won. Ouch. I've been a part of civvie groups that just can't pull it together (Lost Again: Season 2 still haunts me), but it was interesting to watch the civvies repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot until there was nothing left but a misshapen, bloody stump. There were some unforced civvie errors that hurt you guys at times and the baddies did a fine job of letting you guys run wild with your bad ideas for the most part. Lots of restraint was on display by Llama and Sawyer but Jack was fantastic by not leaving a discernible trail for the extra two days he had to stick around as an outed baddie.

-It was tricky picking my vanilla civvies for this game. When Clinton lost the election in November, I had to do some homework and a bit of speculation because she never got to make my job easier by picking a real Cabinet. I knew better than to pick anyone too liberal because I doubt Clinton would have had any of the Sanders/Warren wing of the party in her inner circle.

-Instead of Ted Cruz, I was orginally going to use the Alt-Right as the third baddie. The more I thought about it, had Hillary Clinton won in November, the Alt-Right would have just crawled back under their rocks and lurked in the dark dank corner of the internet that they crawled out of. Trump's victory caused their profile to rise. With Trump dying in the Red vs. Blue, there would be no need for the Alt-Right because a portion of them wouldn't have supported Cruz because of his initial refusal to support Trump.

-All the posts I wrote to bridge this game with the end of Red vs. Blue was a lot of fun. Re-writing history is a lot of geeky fun. Donald Trump's death in the first game happened on September 1, 2016. This caused the following changes to the election timeline:

-Gary Johnson didn't have his Aleppo moment due to coverage of Trump's death (9/8/16)
-Hillary Clinton didn't make her 'basket of deplorables' comment (9/9/16)
-Ted Cruz never got to endorse Trump, which hurt him in the election (9/23/16)
-The New York Times illegal leak of Trump's tax returns never happened because he was dead (10/2/16)
-The Billy Bush tape was never leaked to hurt Trump and WikiLeaks didn't post the Podesta emails as a response (10/7/16)
-The FBI wouldn't have re-opened the Clinton email case after the Anthony Weiner investigation turned up a computer with more emails on it (10/28/16)
-CNN didn't ditch Donna Brazille due to the Podesta emails revealing she fed a few primary debate questions to the Clinton campaign (10/31/16)

-I took the real 2016 election results and tweaked them. I originally intended to have Cruz get annihilated in the fake election but the models needed for that to happen were unrealistic given vote trends since 2000. Instead, I had anywhere from 1-4% of each state's Republican votes disappear depending on where I thought the most Alt-Right Trumpers might have lived and also taking into account some moderates who might have reluctantly voted Trump but wouldn't have stomached voting for Cruz. With Cruz on the ticket, I figured that would pull some Never Trumpers away from Gary Johnson but Clinton would also get a bump in some areas with young liberals supporting Clinton in opposition of Cruz. In the end, the numbers were similar to the real election results, but the electoral math shifted in Clinton's favor.

-All the titles of lynch posts for civvies are quotes by those people. Tim Kaine's "I think all life is sacred" was used for irony as he was revealed to have called for the drone attack on Assange. The Blumenthal quote was partly for laughs because the civvie decision to lynch S~V~S over Sawyer that day had enormous consequences. The Huma Abedin quote was just the best I could come up with because there aren't many quotes of hers out there. The Chelsea Clinton quote "Most people are really nice" is a partial quote. The first half is about how she gets recognized when she's out and about. I used it for laughs because she was savaged by a few Clinton staffers in the Podesta emails.

-All the night post titles were titles of songs that were played at Clinton rallies in 2008 and 2016:

-Day 0: "Rise Up" by Andra Day
-Night 1: "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder
-Night 2: "Cheers to the Fall" by Andra Day
-Night 3: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" by The Police
-Night 4: "Suddenly I See" by KT Tunstall
-Night 5: "Brave" by Sara Bareilles
-Night 6: "Takin' Care of Business" by Bachman Turner Overdrive
-Endgame: "Stronger" by Kelly Clarkson

-Had the civvies won, the endgame post would have been titled "Fight Song" after the campaign theme that drove Hillary supporters nuts from overuse.

-After experiencing difficulty with writing posts with little prep time for Red vs. Blue and Mad Max, I outlined out how each civvie would leave the administration if lynched or NK'd at the start of the game. Tom Perez (Epignosis) would have resigned over executing some of the more outlandish executive actions and for helping Kaine navigate the process of green-lighting the droning of Assange. Had Hillary (Long Con) been lynched early, it would have been related to medical issues and the VRWC would have kept working at dismantling the rest of her administration.

-The baddies wanted Epi and Long Con dead several times. They actually tried to kill Long Con on Night 3. Long Con blocked Quin, which did nothing, but the baddies tried to NK LC and failed. That's why the night post was worded the way it was. I kept it as vague as I could but there is a hint that suggests they still tried to kill someone. In the end, it was kind of sad to watch two dominant players get left as the final two civvies alive. That's got to sting.

-Had Julian Assange lived longer, posts would have revealed that Barron Trump was his source for his dossiers. That didn't happen but it's okay. I had and still have larger plans for Barron Trump, as you will see in my epilogue post tomorrow.

-Thank you for not going too post crazy on this game. There were a lot of posts as far as Heists are concerned but it wasn't as overwhelming to keep up with.

-Also thank you all for participating! I didn't need to replace a single player all game. You also must have kept yourselves pretty well in check because I only ever heard from Dom (the game MOD) once and that was when he checked in with me at the start of the game.


Thank you all again for playing. As always, I feel that players make the game what it is. I set things up with mechanics and roles but you guys tell the story. Let me know if you have any other questions or comments about the game. I think I overpowered the civvies this time around but that turned out not to matter, now did it?

Meanie living baddie guy

Loving the mod notes. Always nice to see after a game.

Thanks, GMan.

FZ. wrote:Congrats to the winners Nice job!

Don't know why you had to go and kill me so early, but I forgive you

I was actually screaming at my computer for the civvies to lynch llama, but they wouldn't listen. I guess it's a lot easier to see things in a new light when you're not in the middle of all the mess. But NotSawyer actually fooled me. Like Epi, I didn't see him as bad.
In any case, you both really pulled it off. It was impressive.

Thanks!

You fit the same profile as Eloh. Not a high poster, but not a low one either. When your name was suggested I went back and skimmed your posts and didn't find any way your demise would come back to bite us.

Thanks for all the compliments, guys. I had a great time playing with you.

Epignosis wrote:

Marmot wrote:I doubted Epignosis every step of the way.

With good reason. I played like ass.

If I had just believed the opposite of everything I did I would have been fine.

I'm having Harry Potter flashbacks.

I don't think so. You were playing a very civvie game. I think you were the civviest of them all. The thing I didn't understand was how both you and LC were never targeted for a NK. That made me go back and forth on LC, but not you.

We killed all the womens, because we are sexist pigs.

Actually, we didn't realize we had done it until someone pointed it out in thread.

thellama73 wrote:We killed all the womens, because we are sexist pigs.

Actually, we didn't realize we had done it until someone pointed it out in thread.

Yes, I must say I noticed that right away.

notsawyer540 wrote:

FZ. wrote:Congrats to the winners Nice job!

Don't know why you had to go and kill me so early, but I forgive you

I was actually screaming at my computer for the civvies to lynch llama, but they wouldn't listen. I guess it's a lot easier to see things in a new light when you're not in the middle of all the mess. But NotSawyer actually fooled me. Like Epi, I didn't see him as bad.
In any case, you both really pulled it off. It was impressive.

Thanks!

You fit the same profile as Eloh. Not a high poster, but not a low one either. When your name was suggested I went back and skimmed your posts and didn't find any way your demise would come back to bite us.

Thanks for all the compliments, guys. I had a great time playing with you.

Wow, that makes me feel so valuable

LC was targeted night 3. We considered it for night 1 and he voted for llama in the first poll. Then he voted for llama on day 2 before changing his vote. We figured day 3 would be the best because even if he voted for llama again it would be so obvious and on the nose that we wouldn't suffer for it. Then he started defending us after we tried to kill him and it crossed my mind that he may have had a strange role where if we tried to kill him he would survive and then join our team without BTSC or our knowledge. Turns out he was just defending us for other reasons.

Epi wasn't targeted because we misunderstood the protector role and thought someone would be protected every night. We also wanted Epi around because he was lynching everyone but us. After Epi saved me and Quin died, llama and I agreed we would save Epi and LC for last.

Night 3 was also the night I was able to use a roleblock. I used it on Quin, intending to clear him somewhat from being bad. Then you guys tried to kill me, and since the Host was too cruel to reveal WHO didn't get targeted, I had to go with the idea that Quin was a blocked killer. My bad! Quin, I promise not to roleblock you for a whole year.

juliets wrote:

thellama73 wrote:We killed all the womens, because we are sexist pigs.

Actually, we didn't realize we had done it until someone pointed it out in thread.

Yes, I must say I noticed that right away.

We don't see gender. We view all people as equals.

Long Con wrote:Night 3 was also the night I was able to use a roleblock. I used it on Quin, intending to clear him somewhat from being bad. Then you guys tried to kill me, and since the Host was too cruel to reveal WHO didn't get targeted, I had to go with the idea that Quin was a blocked killer. My bad! Quin, I promise not to roleblock you for a whole year.

I did that in Mad Max and the baddies got mad at me for confirming someone they wanted dead as a civvie. It's the old-school, Lostpedia/early-Piano way of writing a post but I see the value in keeping ambiguity in play now. Besides that night post had a subtle clue in it for you to pick up on, suggesting that the baddies still tried to kill (you of all people), but I guess I made it too subtle.

Congratulations to notsawyer540! He was voted MVP of the game.

G-Man wrote:Congratulations to notsawyer540! He was voted MVP of the game.

Wooo thanks everyone who voted for me!

Hillary Clinton woke up slowly. Disoriented and her head pounding, she rolled to her side and moaned. She heard someone move in her direction and a firm hand grasped her shoulder.

"Take it easy," a man's voice said from right beside her. She tried to look at you had come to her aid but her vision was too blurry yet and the room swirled. She could make out the shape of a teacup in front of her.

"Drink this," the man said. "It will help your stomach."

"But my stomach feels fine," she murmured as she tried to sit up. Tightness and nausea gripped her a mere second after the words left her mouth and she doubled over in agony. She reached for the cup and took a sip. Peppermint tea. The warm liquid felt good all the way down.

"Good," the man said. "If you can keep that down I'll get you some crackers."

"Bill. Chelsea. Where are they? We were on a hike. I must have fainted."

"Your husband and daughter are here too. There in another room. You can see them soon enough."

"Thank you, doctor," Hillary said.

"Doctor? I'm no doctor."

"You mean we're not at the hospital?"

"Would you be laying on the floor if you were in the hospital?"

The tea had started to work and her wits begin to come back to her. Ornate furniture? Marble floors? Gold accenting as far as the eye could see? No, this was no hospital. She looked at the man helping her as he walked into the next room. He was wearing a silk robe over silk pajamas and house slippers. Something about his profile seemed familiar but she couldn't place it.

"Where am I?" Hillary asked. "Why did you bring me here?"

"Oh, I didn't bring you here. But you were brought here, just like me and the others."

"Others?" Hillary asked. None of this was making sense. She got to her feet and followed the man out into a palatial room that was every bit as gaudy as the one she left. "Who are you?"

"Well," the man said as he turned around to face her, "you probably don't recognize me with this beard, but we go back."

Hillary examined him hard and it clicked.

"Jeb?" she cried out. "Jeb Bush? But I thought you were dead?"

"That's what they want everyone to think. They've got stories explaining all of our disappearances. I don't know what the master plan is but I'm sure it's malicious. Some of us have been here for quite a while now."

"Wait," Hillary stopped him. "Where are we?"

"Why don't you see for yourself?" Jeb said, motioning to the window.

She looked out and gasped. There before her stood familiar buildings from the New York skyline and Central Park.

"This is impossible," she stammered.

"Oh no," Jeb assured, "this is all very real."

"Is there any way out?"

"I haven't found any yet," Jeb said.

Sweet, a sequel.

Awesome! Can't wait to ruin some more liberal yahoos!