by The Pandemonium Institute

This contains the most current rules with regards to handling the Atheist.

Direct Link: BotC Wiki | Atheist

by The Pandemonium Institute

"The priority in an Atheist game is for your players to have fun - and they may not have fun if you’re just breaking rules because you want to. You should be making choices that are designed to be a puzzle for your players to solve, not a sandbox where you manipulate them for your own entertainment. Therefore, you should only break the game rules to give false information or to simulate the actions of evil characters that could be in play but are not. Avoid creating arbitrary rules or changing the win conditions. The players need to know how they can win the game with an Atheist in order to enjoy it."

Direct Link: Atheist Guide by Steven Medway

by Emma, emma on Clocktower

"A friend recently shared the opinion that the Atheist is a character in Blood on the Clocktower with no strategic value, since they begin the game already knowing the solution. He compared this to trying to strategize a Wordle puzzle after being told the word. I disagreed. You can hear this debate on an upcoming episode of the Grim Scenarios podcast.

But I wanted to take some time to get to the heart of our disagreement: I don’t believe that knowing the solution removes strategic depth from the game for the player who knows it — for two key reasons."

Direct link: Atheist and its Strategy

by Delta Clocktower, delta's Substack

"With such stellar highlights, it’s especially unfortunate that the Atheist is one of the most misunderstood characters. Typically seen as a silly character where constant shenanigans occur, storytellers and players often assume that nothing needs to make sense. As I found when polling N players, atheist games are often viewed as pointless rather than “proper” clocktower. Instead, Atheist games become that silly prank we first discussed, where the Storyteller eventually reveals all with blatant rule breaks, everyone has a good laugh, and the group moves on. Whilst with the right group this can be a great deal of fun, I will argue here that this is both against the intent of the character and by far the inferior way of running it."

Direct link: Atheist is Cool - Why Atheist is best as a puzzle.