The Night Marcus Almost Walked Out of His Own Storytelling Chair

Marcus runs Blood on the Clocktower for us most weeks he’s got the numbers for it, and I don’t think the rest of us fully appreciate what that job actually costs him until the one night it visibly did. We had eight people, which is a good size for it, and about ninety minutes in, deep in a round where the town was accusing each other in circles and getting nowhere, Marcus put the tablet down and said he needed a minute.

Nobody had done anything wrong exactly. It’s just that being the storyteller means holding every piece of hidden information in the game simultaneously, tracking who actually knows what, managing eight people’s expectations about fairness while also trying to keep a story moving, and doing all of that while everyone at the table is, by design, actively suspicious of you specifically, since the storyteller’s the one person who could theoretically be lying to everyone. That’s a specific kind of pressure, and I think it built up over a few rounds that night in a way none of us clocked until he set the tablet down.

We took the break. Somebody got water, somebody refilled a bowl of chips, and when we sat back down Marcus said something I’ve thought about since, that he’d started to feel like the whole table’s hopes for a fair game were riding on him specifically, and that weight doesn’t always let up the way you’d want it to mid-session, it just sits there behind every ruling you make. I don’t think any of us had considered that running the game is its own kind of load-bearing role, separate from playing it, and separate from whether the actual gameplay is going well.

What changed after that night is small but real. We rotate who runs it now, even though Marcus still does it most often because he’s genuinely good at it and mostly still wants to. And somebody always checks in around the ninety-minute mark now, not making a thing of it, just a quiet “you good” glance across the table, because it turns out the storyteller can be having a rough night even when the game itself is going great. It’s not a complaint about the game. If anything it made me respect the design more, that a card game can create a role with real social weight to it. It just means I pay more attention now to the person running the thing, not just the story we’re all inside of.