Insta-win for cultists if Quorum or more of them are already in communication but, praise Cthulu.

(quorum of their cultist numbers)

“A quorum of cultists” could be as low as one, if there is only a single cultist, leading to an instant victory. In any case it’s too low in my opinion.

A lone Cultist would have to be very confident about the absence of any other Cultists. If they get it wrong and nothing happens when they arrive at the Mountain, they’ve given themselves away.

Of course. I mainly wanted to point out that it’s enough if possibly much less than quorum cultists know about each other.

CoV because I like Contraband, which requires this to be enacted

Repeal the rule “Ascendance”.

So achieving Victory would become completely individual. This pretty much removes all incentive for an Explorer who is carrying an Artefact to give it to someone else.

Also, in combination with “Contraband” this is an instant win for the first cultist who knows about at least (quorum of cultists - 1) cultists.

[Cpt_Koen] I think it increases the current incentive, although not by much. With Ascendance, all the Cultists could do would be to start a metadynasty with a probably meaningless rule about the previous dynasty’s Cultists (even the ones that didn’t do anything) being “Loyal”. Without Ascendance, they could pick a winner and agree amongst themselves that only the collaborating Cultists would be rewarded next dynasty.

It gets more interesting if we have other ways to gain and lose Artefacts. (The hot potatoes of Contraband seemed promising, loophole aside.)

[Sphinx] What do you mean by “enough if possibly much less than quorum cultists know about each other”?

[Kevan] I just wanted to point out that the “quorum of cultists” that this rule requires could be much less than quorum. I think it’s too easy to reach the cultist-quorum.

In addition, this makes it easier for the cultists to win, the less cultists there are, which seems counterintuitive.

Not sure that last bit’s necessarily true. If there was a group of five communicating Cultists, they’d know that taking between three and five Artefacts to the Mountain would win the game, irrespective of how many other Cultists were out there. If there’s a group of just two Cultists, they won’t know how many Artefacts they need to win - there might be a couple more Cultists out there who they haven’t been able to open a dialogue with (in which case there’s no way for the two-Group to win with the Artefacts they have).

I meant, the less cultists in total there are, the easier it is for them to win, from a general rules perspective, not regarding the current situation.

I’m speaking from a general rules perspective there, I have no idea how many Cultists we have. (There was speculation that we had anywhere between 2 and 6, prior to one player idling out and another joining.)

A lone Cultist with perfect information about all players has the edge over five bickering Cultists with that same information, but it’s also much harder for that lone Cultist to gather that information.

Given Sphinx’s fears stated here and that other proposal, I think we dont have a lot of cultists.

Purely a conjecture though, but I feel like its so.