River Spirit Apostles - RootJam 2023

If you like axolotl salamanders, you may like this root fan faction. Its a low to medium insurgent faction, with low aggression, high card wealth and high crafting.

You are missionaries traveling by river, spreading the blessings of the River Spirit to Woodland denizens. Apostles are peaceful and cannot battle. However, you can make use of the new Force keyword, and can get "blessed warriors", believers of the river spirit, within enemy factions to do the dirty work for you. 

You use apostles to attach blessing tokens to enemy warriors to turn them into blessed warriors. You can stack the blessed warrior on the attached blessing and the token moves with the warrior. During daylight, an enemy player can flip an attached blessing facedown to take a free action depending on the blessing. There are 3 types of blessing tokens: force, faith and flow.

As the Apostles, the more blessings enemy flip facedown to use, the more actions you can take and victory points you can score. Enemies can keep using blessings, once per turn, until the token is removed. You flip them faceup again during your turn.

Anyone can attack a blessing token, even the enemy player of the blessed warrior, but always at the cost of losing a point. A player removing  a blessed warrior in any way also removes the blessing, and loses a point.

You lose Apostle warriors if they are not at a river, so you will be centered around the river, especially early game when Apostle warriors are hard to come by. However, your card wealth can ramp up quickly, plus blessings are your crafting pieces, and blessings move with blessed warriors. You can Force a blessed warrior to move to more favorable clearings for crafting. You can only craft with faceup blessings, and crafting will account for a lot of your victory points. Especially if enemies are not using and flipping facedown your blessings. 

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Original illustrator of the axolotl character by weird_doodle at reddit. https://www.reddit.com/user/weird_doodle/submitted/

Below is for reference, since Apostles make use of the Force keyword.

1.5.5 [Golden Rules] Use of Force.

Some effects let you force a player or their pieces to act. Resolve this exactly as if that player were choosing to do this, as limited by the effect. (For example, if you force the Eyrie to move warriors, they benefit from Lords of the Forest.)

Here is a BGG thread going over all Force rules edge cases https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3082833/all-current-ruling-forced-movement-and-battle