When you are of great value to your enemies, what kind of reputation is that?

Burning Wheel First Reading
1

My character (Olrun) has a pretty hostile relationship with a crazy cult. They keep trying to jack the dark spirit within her and she keeps doing bad stuff to them in order to fight them off (to be honest, I think she’d also do some bad stuff to them more proactively, if the opportunity came up). Like, a few sessions back they boat-kidnapped her and she ended up boat-murdering them. She’s kind of a big deal to these guys, so Tina and I are thinking a reputation is going to be in order during our next trait vote.

The thing is, which kind of reputation?
On the one hand, there’s the obvious enmity. Infamous, right?
On the other hand, she is immensely valuable to them, and honestly they’d probably fall over themselves to cut a deal with her if she offered them what they wanted. That almost sounds like a regular (positive) reputation.

So, what’s the best fit here, mechanically, when you’ve got some serious enemies but they also serious need you in ways that could potentially open a lot of doors?

2

Infamous Reputation: the ever-elusive dark spirit? I don’t really think of relationships as being 100% positive or negative; their qualitative contents are more important.

3

Is it even a Reputation? Sounds more like a Relationship or even a weird Affiliation.

4

That’s a lot to fit into one reputation for sure.

How about splitting it into two parts.

1D Infamous Enemy of the _____ Cult
1D Useful Catspaw.

5

Just the one infamous rep, and only if you want to incentivize the player to seek out enemies of that group, or to make that group keep popping up from failed Circles tests. The rest is just Big Picture stuff.

6

It could also be an interesting trait. “Pursued by Cultists.” That’s a lot fuzzier as a Char trait, but it leaves open all the complexities of the relationships.