Harpy

Information

Type	Minion
Artist	Chloe McDougall
Revealed	20/07/2023

”So fair a day I never did see, nor so fowl a presence hanging over me.”

Character Showcase

Summary

"Each night, choose 2 players: tomorrow, the 1st player is mad that the 2nd is evil, or one or both might die."

The Harpy creates discord and distrust between good players.

At night, the Harpy player chooses one player at a time, not two at once.
A player chosen by the Harpy is affected by the ability until the next Harpy choice.
If the Storyteller decides to kill players with the Harpy ability, they do not need to kill both. The Storyteller can decide to kill only one, or none.
The Harpy can choose a dead player. If so, the Storyteller can kill just the living player, since dead players can not die again.
The order of deaths due to the Harpy ability can be chosen by the Storyteller, should that be important.

How to Run

Each night, wake the Harpy. The Harpy points to one player, then another player. Mark the first player with the MAD reminder and the second player with the 2ND reminder. Put the Harpy to sleep. Wake the player marked MAD. Show the THIS CHARACTER SELECTED YOU info token then the Harpy token, then point to the player marked 2ND. Put the player marked “Mad” to sleep.

Tomorrow, if the player marked “mad” is not mad that the player marked “2nd” is evil, you may kill one or both players.

Examples

The Harpy chooses the Monk and the Engineer. The Monk claims to be the Investigator who saw the Engineer and campaigns for them to be executed. When challenged, they are emphatic in their claims that the Engineer is most likely evil due to their information, and so avoid death.

The Harpy chooses the Oracle and the dead Alchemist. The Oracle claims that they trust the Alchemist because their Oracle information indicates that they were not evil. The Storyteller declares that the Oracle dies.

The Farmer is chosen by the Harpy. As they don't have any information themselves to claim in order to imply that the other player is evil, they make a concerted effort to find information that might clear each of the other living people, leaving their target as the remaining Demon candidate and therefore evil by implication.

Tips & Tricks

Choose the same two players every night. The concerted effort of one good player to get another seen as evil can only help your team, misleading the good team into focusing on the wrong people. Or, instead, the consistent attention on their arguments might eventually cause the death of both players through your ability, without anyone knowing you were the one making that choice. Both situations are great for your team!

Choose the same first player every night. That player will have to keep switching who they think is evil and gain less and less credibility in the process, especially when no-one else ever claims to be affected by the Harpy, meaning they will likely be seen as evil themselves.

Choose different players every night. Share the love! Yes, people will know there’s a Harpy in play after the first day, but they can never be certain whether someone arguing for a death is doing so because of your ability or because they genuinely believe it, so your Demon might be able to slip under the radar as someone who could be the target of Harpy madness, when they’re actually being accused by someone with a good reason to want them dead.

Choose a dead player as your first choice. Arguments from dead players about who to execute tend to carry more weight and so you have better odds of getting the second player executed if it’s a dead player calling for their death.

Choose a dead player as your second choice. A player claiming that a player who died previously is evil may not seem to be the most effective, but they might convince people that the Demon is a Vigormortis who is killing their Minions at night, or that you successfully executed an evil player yesterday and the Undertaker’s information is wrong.

It’s good to choose evil at least once per game. You need to choose evils occasionally or risk convincing town that all selected players are good and after a while they’ll just start executing into people that have never been targeted by the Harpy.

Choosing evil in the late game and especially the final day is usually not worthwhile unless you’re attempting to push the good players away from a specific world. In most cases it’s going to help you and your Demon far more to have a good player pushing on another good player as evil to draw fire from your Demon in the late game.

Choose your Demon occasionally! The Storyteller is unlikely to kill the Demon using your ability if they can avoid it, so you have good odds of getting through unscathed. However, there’s a risk if the Demon is your second choice that your first player is going to do a good job of convincing people that your Demon is evil and get them executed! Or they might do a bad job and start wondering why they and your Demon aren’t both dead.

Choose yourself if your team just needs to hurry up the deaths. There’s one person you can rely on to not be mad if needed and it’s you! Ignore that madness and claim all sorts of other people are evil and die with your target, hopefully rushing the game into that final day that the town wasn’t expecting.

Claiming to be Harpy picked is a great way to justify any idiosyncratic voting you may have done during the game. Voted on the Saint when you knew that was the character they were claiming? Oh, you were Harpy picked, that makes sense.

The best way to hide the Harpy’s existence is to choose yourself. While only one player at a time knows the Harpy ability is in effect, you yourself have the best chances to adhere to the madness in such a way as to not be blatant about it and therefore be able to deny that you were affected by the Harpy ability, making anyone claiming to later be affected look incredibly suspicious.

Sometimes it can be worthwhile to claim to have been targeted by your ability even when you haven’t. It puts you in direct conflict with another player but can introduce confusion as to who was really picked and, if you picked the same player again, potentially induce them to get both themselves and their target killed to prove themselves, which only helps your team with the extra deaths.

Fighting the Harpy

As a bare minimum, satisfy the madness so that you and the other person targeted survive the day. You can always explain your actions tomorrow by outing that you were targeted by the Harpy, but for now you need to not cause two deaths and thereby accelerate the game in evil’s favour.

Don’t follow the madness if you don’t mind dying, you don’t think the other target does either and especially if people don’t believe there’s a Harpy in play. There’s no quicker way to prove them wrong than for two people to suddenly die during the day and put the Harpy effect into stark relief.

Don’t follow the madness if you actually think the other player is evil. The high-risk high-reward way to find out is to see if the Storyteller will kill you both. If they do, it’s less likely the other player is evil, although if they were, you just managed to take down an evil player solo! At the very least you’ll know that if they do get killed along with you they almost certainly weren’t the Demon.

You should be very careful about claiming to be affected by the Harpy. If you do, you’re going to very much struggle to make people believe that you actually think your target is evil, as they’ll think you’re actually just following Harpy madness.

If you are repeatedly targeted by the Harpy to be mad about a specific player, that player is almost certainly not the Demon. It’s very rare that an evil team can get away with that sort of sustained pressure of a good player claiming the Demon is evil, so they’re not likely to do it, so you can treat that player as probably not the Demon. It doesn’t guarantee they’re not evil, however, other evil players are certainly expendable!

If you are picked with a dead player, commit to the madness. It doesn’t cost the Storyteller much to justify the Harpy’s selection by killing you if you do things by halves, as they only have to kill you when the other target is already dead, so you may be at more risk with a dead target!

If someone is repeatedly claiming a particular player is evil and you believe they may be Harpy mad, you don’t need to publicly support their claim if you disbelieve it just for the sake of the Storyteller believing madness, you can just move forward with proposing other worlds without commenting on the validity of that player’s claims. Claiming that a different person is evil is not contradictory to their claims, so you shouldn’t feel that it’s shutting you off from being able to make a different nomination or accusation.

If a newer player is accusing another of being evil and you think a Harpy is in play, you might want to be gentler in wanting justification of their accusation than you would normally, to avoid the risk of them and another player both dying.

If you think there is a Harpy in play, either focus the group’s attention on trying to find good players and killing everyone else or focus the attention solely on killing the Demon and ignoring other evil players.