#Hat! Feels Good!
tropic quartz
I've found the Hatter a very challenging character to build around, with a strong emphasis required on avoiding easy decisions from the evil team about what The Best Abilities Available are. While I've no doubt that better scriptwriters than me will find smoothly balanced collections of Demons for the Hatter to switch in and out, for now I've been a little perturbed at how swingy these changes have looked in the games that I've seen - this, coupled with the fact that the Al-Hadikhia is represented by a hat and can be awkward in terms of suddenly being confirmed as either in or out of play on any given night, made me decide to go for a single-demon script and focus on the Minion abilities being the ones that are hard to track.
Here, Baron is the only ability for which there is essentially no argument for switching into it mid-game (unless you've just been executed and you want to really screw with the Undertaker. Actually, hang on, that sounds amazing; someone should do that). Otherwise, everything has its use case depending on the circumstances, and only the Organ Grinder is super-visible to the town at large. There's no droison from the evil team (to make Balloonist feel like it can fit on the script happily) but two from the Outsiders, with the Mutant and Drunk making room to hide a Baron.
There are no protective abilities here, because I feel like these realistically need a Poisoner on script to successfully bluff in a solo Al-Hadikhia game, and I didn't want a Poisoner because a) I wanted a Balloonist and you just can't and b) I think, most of the time, Poisoner would be seen as The Right Choice upon a Hatter trigger and that wasn't what I wanted here. This means that the good team needs to manage their live/die choices carefully to prevent the game going quickly, so it has plenty of strong information on the script to power it up, plus a Poppy Grower. No matter what sort of jinx we end up getting for Hatter/PG in the near future, I like it here as a serious threat to an evil team that can potentially customise itself mid-game.
Also, if this looks like a half-hearted attempt at a hat-based gimmick script, it's about 10% that. But I just couldn't make Magician look satisfying here, and wasn't willing to leave Chef on there without a Poisoner to keep it in check.
leaden rose