Conscript Action - LooterDraw until you have 7 cards in your hand, then discard 2 cards.
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When you discard this from play, you may discard a Treasure costing more than $0. If you do, exchange this for a Mercenary. Otherwise, exchange this for a Madman and gain a Ruins.
Interacts with: Madman (gains Madman), Mercenary (gains Mercenary).
Also interacts with Ruins, but they're not non-Supply.
The conscript will help undo the effects of attacks for a single turn (or just get you a slightly better hand in general), but then you need to decide whether you want to actually pay him. If you do, he continues working for you as a mercenary. If not, he goes on a rampage and winds up mad.
Note that these effects interact with each other to some degree: Mercenary can trash the Ruins you get with your Madman (and getting those Ruins will keep Mercenary fueled), Conscript can draw you back up after you've trashed to Mercenary, and Madman can ensure you have actions (although normal Villages are probably easier for this). The Ruins keep you from massing Madmen too easily, and Mercenary makes Madman harder to kick off (although Conscript can counteract this somewhat), so I don't think a mass Madman strategy is dominant with this even if theoretically you could get more Madmen with this than with Hermit. On a lighter note, Conscript makes Ruined Village less terrible compared to the other Ruins (since you can play it for "free" before playing a Conscript).
This started off as the idea, "What if there was another way to gain the two Dark Ages pseudo-travelers?" which led to the idea of a peasant who was conscripted into the military and how well you treat him determines his fate. I then tried to balance it without making the on-play ability too long. My original idea was a Moat variant (since a conscript might be recruited to defend against invaders), but I didn't want two dividing lines and a Reaction-only Moat doesn't work if there's no Attacks, so I eventually settled on draw-to-X-and-discard as a way of countering the effects of most Attacks (directly countering handsize attacks and also providing sifting to counter junkers and deck-order attacks).