Muckraker
Alert
Resource
Destroy
Type
Power to Slander
Slanders Winning Aliens
As an actor, at the end of an encounter, you may use this power to “slander” any or all sponsors in the winning fleet. Accuse each sponsor of some malicious intention or action. Then, for each slandered sponsor, scrap a pod from your cache. That sponsor must either gift you a pod from their cache of the same type or rebound their committed ships. If you scrapped an attack pod, the gifted pod must be stronger than the scrapped pod.
Legacy: During rally, leaders must scrap a pod to commission each sponsor. Sponsors must scrap a pod during arrival after sponsoring a leader.
Rumor has it that the Muckrakers have the dirt on every alien in the Federation. When they see others getting too comfortable, they’ll pull out their laundry list of dark secrets and expose them for all to see. Whether or not what they say is true, that’s for the experts to debate.
Actor: Encounter
Optional
Wild Flare
As an actor, after arrival, you may discharge this flare to force any or all sponsors from either fleet with fewer committed ships than you to rebound their ships.
Actor: Arrival
Super Flare
When using your power, you may discharge this flare to slander winning leader(s) other than yourself, in addition to any or all sponsors.
Actor: Encounter
Modifications
- Muckraker’s legacy imposes a greater cost to sponsoring and commissioning other aliens. The leader has to weigh how valuable each individual sponsor is, while the sponsors have to weigh how valuable the invader is. The legacy can be useful for pruning caches of bad pods, but it is likely to result in much fewer sponsors over the course of the match. Sponsor specialists like Sapient, Grudge, and Parasite have a harder time dealing with this legacy, while combat powers that do fine on their own can flourish. Original Cosmic has no legacies.
Tips
- Muckraker can cause a passive reduction in sponsorship, since every alien is concerned about getting thrown out of the encounter.
- Scrapping a 40 pod can effectively guarantee an alien is locked out of an encounter, since they won’t be able to scrap a stronger attack pod. However, that 40 pod might be much more valuable as a driver than fodder for Muckraker’s power. Morphs and Poison pods can also be used for this purpose since they are much less common.
- While Muckraker may not be unattractive as a sponsor through its power directly, it can quickly become unpopular by overusing its power. Today’s sponsors are tomorrow’s leaders.
- Muckraker’s power is best leveraged by drawing a distinction between its “friends” and “foes”. If players become incentivized to stay on Muckraker’s good side, they are less likely to hate it when their effort pays off.
- While Muckraker can use its power as a makeshift Force Field, it can also utilize the power to simply gain resources. Scrapping weak 04s and 06s can replace them with 08s and 10s, since most aliens would rather scrap their midrange pods than lose out on a win. There’s not much purpose in scrapping Ns for this task, but it can still be done as a means of “calling out” aliens that don’t have any negotiate pods.
Development Notes
- Muckraker’s power is not pointlessly optional since there is a cost to use it, and there might not be any other sponsors to use it on. If Muckraker was in an encounter with one other sponsor and it only had the 40 pod, it would be forced to scrap the 40 pod to slander the sponsor, which they might not even care to do if given the choice for a weaker pod.
- A “muckraker” is a type of journalist who exposes subversive intent in politicians or other public figures. Their goal is to find the dirty secrets of their target to damage their reputation. They “rake muck” over someone, damaging their reputation. The power of muckraker is “slander” rather than “libel”, so their accusations against other aliens are spoken rather than written. To that end, I designed the alien around a monstrous creature with a big mouth and long, accusatory fingers.
- A ‘mudslinger’ is another term for a muckraker which would work just as well for the power name. The idea is to capture the feeling of an alien who tarnishes the reputation of others through convincing lies. They “sling mud” on the honor of their target.
- Muckraker’s power is designed to evoke the theme by accusing someone of evil or corruption, implying that they don’t deserve the win. It’s similar to the power of modern day “cancel culture”, where a person’s statements on social media or television result in real-world consequences. Since Muckraker is using slander, the implication is that everything it says is untrue, but it is just that convincing. It just needs to point the finger, and everyone will believe them, even if they just had the finger pointed at them five minutes ago.
- Mechanically, Muckraker’s power is well-balanced between the cost and the benefit. Not only is there a resource penalty from overusing its power to rob others of victories, but there is a social penalty as well. Just as a person who slanders others too much, Muckraker will be isolated from everyone if it overuses its power. However, Muckraker can still use its power even if everyone sponsors against it, which can sow discord if it results in uneven dominion distribution.
- I added the clause that specifies Muckraker is to actually slander the target when using its power. It’s a great opportunity for roleplay to really capture the spirit of the alien.
- Zapping Muckraker will cancel the power before it is used, meaning Muckraker will not scrap any pods. Aliens cannot zap Muckraker to make it burn its pods for nothing.