Rook the Unlovable Crook

[Maniafig]

History teaches us that good people make friends, but truly great people make enemies. So, let's see how many enemies Rook can make.

Rook is a natural pick for this sort of run, since the Rise and Spark Baron banes overall don't seem as bad as the Admiralty and Spree ones. 

Day 1 and Rook's already gotten busy. I sided with the Spark Barons to begin with, which let me quickly get the Elitist bane after killing a Civilian, giving me a ton of easy dislikes from all the other Civilians you meet early in the run. Resorting to violence and murder while picking negotiation missions as often as possible kept Fellomo or Kalandra from liking me since they requested me to not resort to murder. I also made sure to snug the old friend from the Admiralty, even a minor enemy is still an enemy after all. I also made sure to extort some money from the snitch during Fleksis's mission to make her dislike me, and because I need the shills. Unfortunately, Fleksis did like me handling his task, though this isn't going to stick.

As I said, most Banes are not that hard to work around, though the Rise are much harder to side against due to the -2 Resolve for killing Rise and the -1 card draw on turn 1 Banes, I'll rather take the Spark Baron Banes over those.

Special mention goes to Rise Rebel Malo, who I insulted into attacking me, beat within an inch of his life, and then spared. There is cruelty in this mercy, as later in the day Malo was available for insulting and a beating again, making him into a piñata for exp and gold.

I also made sure to kill Eonwe, if she's not gonna dislike me for sparing her then I might as well take that card of hers. AFAIK there's no reason to ever not kill Rook's day 1 boss, but I'd like to hear otherwise if I'm mistaken!

Day 2 is off to a good start in the Caffy, which featured the most lopsided negotiation I've seen in the game thus far, all thanks to the wonderful Elitist bane. Of course, it's much easier to just kill Del and switch his dislike for another Hatred, so I did that instead. I also ran across Krog, who offered me his coin. I took all his other coins instead, which caused him to hate me. I say it's payback for all the times meeting him as Sal. 

Not much exciting happens during the rest of the day, but I did get the secret mission during the night to help a Priest of Hesh recover something from the Spree. I'm used to negotiating with the Spree, but for this run killing the whole camp was the obviously correct route. This netted me a bunch of Banes from the Spree, and it also allowed me to extort 300 shills from the Priest of Hesh on top of the usual quest rewards. I never knew this outcome existed, it's quite lucrative! Afterwards, I also got Fleksis to dislike me due to working with the Barons, though he became indifferent after beating the robot boss. I'm not sure whether getting your allies killed when fighting the boss can make Flekfis keep disliking me, but it would've been a bit tedious to find out. Tell me if you know!

I also beat up Rise Rebel Malo again, that's another 20 shills earned!

During day 3 some truly odd things happened. I got one random event where a Jake asked me to carry his goods since he's running from the Spark Barons, which gave me various Spark Barons to kill to make more enemies, as well as killing the Jake when I chose not to return his goods. This actually got the Black Market salesman to hate me, allowing me to provoke and kill him. Not to worry, however, later during the day he was replaced by another Jakes Smuggler and Phlucka 'the Swab' certainly didn't mind. Good thing, since Grafts were what I was spending all my shills on.

I got another random event in which I had to choose whether to save a Jake or not. Making a friend like that didn't feel right, but it also allowed me to kill some more Spark Barons. I did make sure to extort some extra shills from her after saving her, but that didn't stop her from loving me. Her name's Brash, and we might see her again.

One opportunity I got during the day let me kill an isolated enemy, which obviously I couldn't take since that would decrease my amount of enemies. I instead waited a bit and negotiated with her about her illegal dealings, which didn't seem to accomplish anything from what I could tell.

I got another opportunity where Brash offered to join my party for free! If we can't make an enemy of her, we can at least make enemies together, I figure. I took her with me on Fellomo's Murder Scene quest, and immediately the detective hates me and all the civilians dislike me. Not good enough, of course, so I got Brash to hep me beat the tar out of two of the civilians to make them hate me and then killed the final suspect to fail the quest, causing Fellomo to dislike me. This was enough to satisfy Brash, who merrily left the party again. Some women just want to watch the world burn. I also noticed that the Voice of the People bane doesn't actually stack properly, you can also see this in the enclosed video below when I cycle though the Laborers who hate me.

I also ran into an argument between a Bogger and a Civilian who hates me. When I tried to intimidate the Bogger into leaving the Civilian alone, the Civilian actually sided with the Bogger. Rather awkward when you interject to help someone and that person actually sides with the person they were arguing with.

Not much happens during the final event, Rise Rebal Malo was in the Rise AutoDog Lab, so I insulted and beat him up for the final time. That's 4 negotiations and combats worth of experience and shills! I chose to kill the Boggers but in hindsight threatening them would've been better since that would've let me get a dislike from them, since killing doesn't earn any banes in isolated areas. I also killed Arint, since I figured letting her live wasn't going to make me any friends anyway. 

There's not too much to do on the fourth and final day. I did wind up joining up with Kalandra, and I made sure to ignore the worker to get Kalandra to dislike me. Fighting, bribing or negotiating the Spark Barons would only get people to like me, and the whole Deep Bog's isolated so murder is pointless. The next event of note is the choice between making an enemy of Kalandra, Fellomo, or both. A very easy choice, running away got both of them to hate me for my betrayal. I'm not sure whether it mattered or not that both disliked me already going in.

It actually becomes pretty obvious during this event that all the NPCs other than Fellomo and Kalandra here are newly spawned ones so none of them have pre-established relations with you, this seems to be the case for many other events too.

The showdown with the Bogger High Priest doesn't change much, except that you don't have the reinforcements to help you and no dialogue from Kalandra/Fellomo. I skipped the negotiation altogether and just went in for the kill. I actually got some ending cards I'd not seen before, which you can look at here: https://imgur.com/a/oUixnee

So, all-in-all, an interesting run! I managed to end it with only 1 person loving me (Brash), 0 people liking me, 8 people disliking me and a whopping 22 people hating me. I think that by all metrics, Rook is truly a truly great man. It was fun seeing all the new paths and conversations for bungling missions and engaging in overblown violence in most circumstances, that Spree encampment one really took me by surprise, and of course there was the ongoing saga of Rise Rebel Malo, who kept asking what Rook was even trying to accomplish.

I played on Prestige 0 with the Combat and Negotiation Draft Mutators, so this run could be made much harder by doing a regular run on a higher Prestige. My combat deck was a mixture of Charge spending and gaining as well as Concentration stacking, though the heavy lifting was done by all my synergistic Grafts, giving me a constant stream of ridiculous amounts of card draw. The Negotiation deck was a much weaker Aggression/Discard deck, which sadly had much more ways to discard cards than cards that wanted to be discarded. It was also often full with Status cards, as you can imagine!

Perhaps some other time I'll try a Sal the Rascal run, though that one will likely be much harder for various reasons, the least of which is that "Sal the Rascal" is a much worse rhyme than "Rook the Crook".

And for the people who want to see it, a video of Rook's relationships at the end of the game:

 

[pacovf]

If you get any “volunteers” killed during D2 boss, the taskmaster / pamphleteer that handed them over will ask for explanations. You have to do a negotiation. I’m not sure what the consequence for failing it is, I assume it will get them to dislike you. It seems to have no effect on Arint/Flekfis, though.

[warlepidoptera]

1 hour ago, Maniafig said:

I also ran into an argument between a Bogger and a Civilian who hates me. When I tried to intimidate the Bogger into leaving the Civilian alone, the Civilian actually sided with the Bogger. Rather awkward when you interject to help someone and that person actually sides with the person they were arguing with.

This is so funny

[TF3]

1 hour ago, Maniafig said:

I instead waited a bit and negotiated with her about her illegal dealings, which didn't seem to accomplish anything from what I could tell.

If you check their relationship status, they'll still hate you but their Bane no longer is in effect. Honestly a really interesting mechanic.

[Wumpus the 19th]

2 hours ago, pacovf said:

If you get any “volunteers” killed during D2 boss, the taskmaster / pamphleteer that handed them over will ask for explanations. You have to do a negotiation. I’m not sure what the consequence for failing it is, I assume it will get them to dislike you. It seems to have no effect on Arint/Flekfis, though.

i didn't know there was a negotiation. i had that happen sometimes and they just hate you afterwards. problem being that they've been mostly randomly generated NPC's, so they just give you the stink eye then leave the game forever.

[pacovf]

Haha, I might be misremembering then. It’s happened surprisingly rarely for me.