Introduction

“Una notizia succinta, ma sincera e continuata, di quel disastro.”

— Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi

Days of Plague is a Teensyville adaptation of Season of Plague, a homebrew edition of Blood on the Clocktower inspired by Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi).

Designed for the smaller scale and faster pace of a Teensyville game, it strips away many of the wider script's secondary systems and concentrates on its central puzzle: the spread of the plague, and the difficulty of knowing who is truly infected.

At the heart of the script remains the Plague.

The Plague does not simply kill each night. A healthy victim becomes poisoned; a victim who is already poisoned dies instead, allowing the disease to spread onward. As the game progresses, poison becomes both a threat and a source of information.

But appearances cannot always be trusted.

Evil players register as poisoned. The Spreader may appear diseased regardless of their true condition. The Doctor must contend with a healthy patient who nevertheless presents all the signs of infection.

As a result, a player who appears poisoned may be genuinely infected, falsely registering, or concealing something far worse.

The good team has several ways to investigate this uncertainty. The Cardinal watches the number of poisoned players rise and fall. The Doctor examines and cures individual patients. The Housekeeper, Chancellor and Nun begin the game with different fragments of information that can help establish which worlds are possible, while the Friar may allow the dead to offer one final contribution.

The evil team attacks those deductions from different directions.

The Greybeard may appear good to investigators and, when another evil player falls, may even step into the character they leave behind.

With so few players, every infection matters. Every cure changes the shape of the epidemic. Every unexpected death demands an explanation.

Information arrives quickly, but the town has little time to interpret it.

Days of Plague is intended as both a compact introduction to the central mechanics of Season of Plague and a complete script in its own right. Players familiar with the larger script will recognise its core interactions, while those encountering the plague for the first time can experience its essential puzzle without the additional character changes, Madness, unusual neighbour structures and nomination effects of the full game.

As in Season of Plague, the key distinction is between what a player actually is and how that player registers. Storytellers should pay close attention to actual poison, false poison registration, the timing of cures, and the order in which deaths and other night effects resolve.

For the good team, survival depends on tracing a disease whose symptoms cannot always be trusted.

For the evil team, a few days are more than enough.