Sects: a "custom cult" antag

So, you know what would be a cool, like, a “custom cult” antag - not round-ending like blood/clock cult, more like a more in-depth, engaging version of hivemind or revs.

You get like, a “sect manager” GUI, which would allow you to customize your sect - give it a name, an accent color, a style, a preferred conversion ritual, etc. It would also show you who’s in the sect.

You’d first ‘customize’ your sect, make it your own and stuff, and then you’d start! Whenever you ‘finish’ setting up your sect, two random eligible sleeper agents will be activated (on-station, not AFK or SSD, have the preference enabled, not any other kind of antag), and instantly converted into Inner Sect members.

Converting

You’d use different conversion rituals to convert people.
There are four classes of conversion rituals - the class determines how “loyal” the subject will become after being converted, in addition to the general difficulty of the ritual.

  • ALPHA class: Extremely difficult rituals, convertees will join the inner circle.
  • BETA class: Moderately difficult rituals, convertees will join the inner sect.
  • GAMMA class: Easy rituals, convertees will join the outer sect.
  • WHITE class: Special rituals, which don’t convert, but instead leaves the target marked as a ‘candidate’, making any other ritual in the future much easier to accomplish on them. There would be a cooldown (maybe 5-10 minutes) between the actual ritual and when the target starts being vulnerable, though. These rituals would be extra subtle, perhaps to the point of being able to do one or two in public without arousing too much suspicion.

You would get to start by picking 2 conversion rituals to ‘learn’ of your choice, from 4 different ones. The first batch will always consist of 2 GAMMA, 1 BETA, and 1 WHITE ritual.
Every conversion ‘milestone’ (like, every 4-5 conversions or so), you will get to pick 1 from 3 new rituals to learn, up to a maximum of 5/6/whatever number i think works well enough.

“Levels” of the sect

What “level” someone is on in the sect determines how loyal they are to the sect, and how powerful their sect-derived magic is.

  • Inner Circle: Most powerful magic. Utterly loyal to the sect and its leader, and can only be deconverted with a lobotomy
  • Inner Sect: Okay-ish magic. Decently loyal to the sect, albeit not mindlessly so, and can be deconverted with brain surgery or a mindshield
  • Outer Sect: Very basic magic, basic loyalty. They aren’t obliged to follow your orders, although they will protect and generally serve the cult. Can be deconverted with brain surgery, psicodine, mindshield, or just a lucky hit on their noggin’.

Promotion

The sect leader has a spell that will allow them to freely promote members to a higher circle, if said circle is empty, and the ‘origin’ circle has at least 2 other living people in it.
For example:

  • Outer Sect has 3 members, Inner Sect has 0. Leader can promote 1 Outer Sect member to the Inner Sect for free.
  • Inner Sect has 3 members, Inner Circle has 0. Leader can promote 1 Inner Sect member to the Inner Circle for free.

Promoting someone when there is already a member of that circle is more complicated - you will need to do a ritual to promote them.
Promotion rituals are typically more complicated and difficult than it would be to simply convert someone directly into that circle with the correct class of conversion ritual.

Rituals

Conversion

TBD

Promotion

TBD

Things that could be customized

  • Sect name
  • Flavor text for sect
  • Member name (as in, what members are referred to as a whole, example: You are a seedling of the Order of the Plant!)
  • Primary and secondary colors - would affect runes and halos.
  • Rune sprite
  • Halo sprite
  • Conversion ritual(s) used to join

Pickable Theme Ideas

  • Plants
    • Perhaps with a plant theme, you could designate a specific type of plant/flower that’d be “special” to your cult, which you would use in rituals and powers and stuff.
  • Ice
  • Fire
  • Machine/Electricity
  • Water
  • Felinid (lol)
    • perhaps you could give members cat ears/tails with this, cat surgeon-style
  • Light
  • Space

Notes

  • A sect should still never be too much stronger than like, a particularly creative traitor with a hypnoflash and some traitor/xenobio goodies.
  • Converting should always take effort - drive-by converting should be impossible!
  • It should always be more difficult to promote someone into a circle, than it should be to initially convert them into that circle with the proper ritual.

I’d be willing to code this, although someone else would need to sprite.

2 Likes

I really like this, especially the gimmick aspect that would differentiate it from the standard cult we already have. Best of luck with your project!

I’m conflicted on whether this should be a traitor thing, or its own game-mode…

Revs but better

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Doesn’t this make traitors like… Well if traitors can have cult even if different why would people ever enable cult?

I did some more thinking, and yeah, I’d rather this be its own type of antag. I’ve updated the original post to reflect this, with some additional thinking I’ve done on how like conversions should work.

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I need ideas for different variations of conversion rituals that you could pick from.
Like, ideas for what you actually do during the ritual itself. Feel free to give me ideas that are just blatant references, because chances are I’m too dense to notice any references anyways.

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I’ll sprite for this, but it might be bad.
@reds88#8433 on discord

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Apid god cult, The Great Hive Queen. Victims must have honey in their system and a beehive within 5 tiles of the conversion ritual. Ritual takes time and is chanted in sections like a chaplain prayer, converted members can create beeswax and place hive tiles

+1 i really life the idea as a replacement of hivemind with its own non round ending customizeable cult theme.

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