Insider
This design document was once implemented, but has since been removed from Ephemeral Space.
The following reason was given for its removal: "technically balanced, but not a fun influence on the game at all. basically always feels bullshit to catch a traitor, or get caught as the traitor. similar to empath, it feels like you're bypassing the game's deductive reasoning layer entirely. while obviously not quite as bad as empath's hard-confirm, it is still irritatingly effective - even just flaky evidence is usually enough to confirm someone with an insider hit. furthermore, the insider was extremely command-sec aligned in an annoying way, especially considering their folder & cache is a dead giveaway they are the insider. potential future oracles should tread very carefully - especially relating to the deduction of individuals, since insider was not a shoddy attempt at an oracle."
Name: Insider
Troupe: Crew
Archetypes: Oracle
Description: Use your cache of bought information to deduce other's masks.
Objectives: Ensure at least 1-2 of the people you learned information about survive.
Got a big new scoop for you. Word around town is the fella with grey hair and an M and X in his name is some kinda crazy evil-doing revolutionary.
Possible we'll have to rework crew manifest stuff and what not to make this a little bit harder of a process and require walking around to find names and appearances and shit. Idk we'll see. The "clues" mechanic should be very generic and usable for many other things in the future, same as how it is for the Enthraller, which I want to use the same thing more or less.
Concept
The Insider is an oracle mask that receives information about others in a cache, the same as many other cache-spawning masks. Once attained and used to find the targeted characters, the information in the cache tells you some people who are definitely of the crew troupe, and one person who is definitely of another troupe.
Abilities
No abilities. Only equipment is the cache information, which is in the form of a list of clues about specific people, which takes a form something like this:
Info on "P":
Black hair
Green eyes
Male
Not crew
Information about a person always states whether they are part of the crew or a different troupe.
Gameplay
The Insider is an incredibly useful crew-sided Oracle mask, receiving some of the best information in the game, with the caveat that they must do the work to case out targets in order to actually utilize it. This means keeping track of names, keeping track of apperances, keeping track of ages & genders, and even personality traits--maybe try asking the Bartender if they've heard anything recently.
Because the information is stored in a cache, it can't be used to immediately case out the arrivals shuttle and everyone on it. Furthermore, since it's just on paper, anyone can learn the information if they steal it from the Insider, and maybe even pose as an Insider themselves.