One wonders though, what would happen if the city's Darkdrop Coffee supply were ever cut off?

You are stirring your coffee when [an unorthodox correspondence symbol] forms, quite spontaneously, in the cream. There is a gout of scalding coffee-steam! You scream and leap back: your hands are badly burnt.

A Mr Eaten related correspondence symbol forming in a glass of Darkdrop Coffee. Do things like that normally happen when seeking the Name or is this occurrence fairly unique?

You are stirring your coffee when [an unorthodox correspondence symbol] forms, quite spontaneously, in the cream. There is a gout of scalding coffee-steam! You scream and leap back: your hands are badly burnt.

A Mr Eaten related correspondence symbol forming in a glass of Darkdrop Coffee. Do things like that normally happen when seeking the Name or is this occurrence fairly unique?

I can buy 80 tons of Darkdrop Coffee in Sunless Sea.

But I gotta grind in an extremely rare, limited, and difficult way to get ONE CUP.

For you, it was a dare. For me it was Tuesday (morning).

Although the stimulating effects of Darkdrop are instantly recognisable to any coffee-drinker, Anne's quote about the Scrimshander historians is the only reference I know off that hints at caffeine dependence, which every coffee-drinker knows only too well.

For whatever reason, Londoners don't seem to drink Darkdrop often enough to experience grouchiness in the morning before their first cup, or a headache after too much abstinence, or the soreness and heart paloitations after too many.

"You'll just have to pay more! You can compete perfectly well without price controls."

You spend days whittling away opposition in the Foreign Office, meeting with merchants, citizens, and foreign agents, and drafting stacks of legislation. But the final results of your labours are minimal. The Port isn't ready for a radical expansion of tiger rights. What ground you do gain is nevertheless precious to the tigers. Spices, silks, and certain enlivening beverages, which had been legally denied them before, are now freely available.

They take full advantage of their new-found economic freedoms, buying in such bulk that scarcities are created in the Port. This sparks outrage from the Khaganians, who protest your measures by rallying outside Heartscross House and waving empty mugs – but progress cannot be stopped.

I can buy 80 tons of Darkdrop Coffee in Sunless Sea.

But I gotta grind in an extremely rare, limited, and difficult way to get ONE CUP.

The stories all centre on cafe's and anarchists. Most are placed on the surface, though some happen in London. One story, about the formulation of a plan that exploded a city block, featured a relentless coffee motif.

The Fuel of History

The guardians of the archives can barely contain their greed. While theories differ on what drives history, it is agreed that historians themselves are driven by coffee.

The Master wrote:

Anne Auclair wrote:

You are stirring your coffee when [an unorthodox correspondence symbol] forms, quite spontaneously, in the cream. There is a gout of scalding coffee-steam! You scream and leap back: your hands are badly burnt.

A Mr Eaten related correspondence symbol forming in a glass of Darkdrop Coffee. Do things like that normally happen when seeking the Name or is this occurrence fairly unique?

It doesn't say it's darkdrop coffee, it just says coffee, and judging by the fact that darkdrop coffee is pretty rare I highly doubt it is.

It's not rare, it's one of the Neath's main commercial products, and London imports a lot of it. It's just pure Darkdrop Coffee that is difficult for Londoners to get their hands on (and at 50 Echoes a sack its not hard to see why).

When your character drinks the action giving, "pleasure in pain" Darkdrop Coffee, they grind some beans into a very fine powder and then drink it with "only a little water." That stuff everyone drinks at Caligula's? A very watered down version. After all, since Darkdrop beans are far more potent than their Surface counterparts, London coffee makers would need fewer beans per cup to deliver a satisfying product. Also, drinking Darkdrop too straight is rather dangerous - as in, if someone actually brewed enough pure Darkdrop Coffee they could kill themselves or other people with it.
edited by Anne Auclair on 10/7/2016

This seems to suggest that on surface, Revolutionary and Great Game activity increases and decreases according to the general availability of darkdrop coffee. When coffee prices are high, coffee is in short supply and the spies/revolutionaries have correspondingly less energy. When coffee prices are low, darkdrop coffee is readily available, and this leads to spies and revolutionaries being much more active.

Infinity Simulacrum wrote:

Overdosing on coffee is one of the very nicest ways to die.

As a person who drank four cups of very strong coffee in quick succession because of "it's Art, dude"***, I can assure you it would be terribly unpleasant. Much grinding of teeth and moaning on the floor followed from that particular experience...








***maybe it was a dare. Just maybe

Darkdrop Coffee apparently plays a pretty big role in the Great Game, to the point that the price of coffee in a village cafe is considered very valuable intelligence.

Isaac Zienfried wrote:

This seems to jive with Sunless Sea, where apparently Vienna is a primary importer of Darkdrop and it's also a hotbed of revolution, Game-playing, and general intrigue all around.

A drop of darkness for those with dark business.

Siankan wrote:

I think, rather, that that particular menu in that particular cafe is being used in covert communication, in which case there is probably nothing terribly important about the thing being used. There are plentitudinous examples throughout Fallen London of arbitrary items being used in such a manner (and that doesn't even touch on the subject of Illumination).

Normally I’d think the same thing, the players of the Great Game so so love their needlessly ubiquitous codes inserted into objects or places of everyday life. But in this case, I think it makes much more sense for your acquaintance to be interested in acquiring straightforward economic intelligence.

First, the card states the following: “You've an acquaintance who is particularly interested in this kind of minutiae.” Said acquaintance is not interested in a code or a hidden message, he’s interested in minutiae: precise details; small or trifling matters; what is for sale and for how much.

Second, consider how utterly inefficient and luck based the mission would be if the aim was to intercept a coded message. You’d be sending a bat on a journey of several weeks to hopefully steal a menu that might contain a secret code. If the bat arrives on a day when there isn’t a secret code hidden in the menu, then the whole trip is a total waste. If the bat steals the wrong section of the menu, then the whole trip is a total waste. But if your associate is merely interested in, say, café prices at a particular location, then all the bat has to do is steal a menu, any menu, rather than the right menu on the right day.

Someone should try to draw the correspondence on milk foam xDD

Professor Strix wrote:

What can we say, brewing the perfect coffee cup is an art.

Do you know how many people I know who think coffee is just pouring boiling water onto pre-ground beans through a paper filter? I actually had someone have the gall to say to me "tea's tricky, but coffee's supposed to taste awful." I was agog, I was aghast. There's just as much fine preparation in coffee as in tea, if not more. My coffee setup is far from high-grade or expensive, but I can still manage a proper cup of espresso.

Also, the economy between FL and SS doesn't always relate perfectly, in my experience... although it's pretty close considering the two games have vastly different focus and scope. It's worth pointing out you're usually buying in considerable bulk in SS, whereas in FL you're buying things for more personal consumption. The reason you can buy so much coffee in SS is 1) buying in bulk almost always results in the price being cheaper per unit, and 2) successful professional zee-captains make a lot more money than your average FL player, but also face far greater risk of permanent, true death.

TheThirdPolice wrote:

Another interesting connection to blood: nidah is the Hebrew word for the ritual state of menstruation. I am aware that Nidah means something else in the game lore, though I haven't encountered it myself except for snippets like this one. But with the Mountain so closely linked to Judeo-Christian myth, it seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
edited by TheThirdPolice on 11/27/2016

Nidah, I believe, is the capital or central kingdom of the Presbyterate. Or it might be some holy site or citadel of Presbyter power. All I know is that some people wanted to conquer it and were apparently fighting the Presbyter to do so.

Anyway, a reference to menstruation is not very surprising. Stone has been repeatedly referred to as a woman after all, the Sun and Bazaar's daughter. Perhaps her wound isn't really a wound in a break the skin sense, but rather a curse of unending menstruation, with the Elder Continent serving as the sanitary pad absorbing her flow.

Continuing this thought, I think we've all made a mistake of conflating the Mountain's blood and light as equally &quotvital.&quot In Sunless Sea you can encounter a flower encased in glass, growing out of a solid rock. You ask how that can be and you're informed that the flower was planted close to the Mountain and basked a Summer in its light. Consequently, &quot[w]hat need has it for water, now? Or air?&quot Clearly the Mountain's light has stimulating yet preservative powers. Absorbing a considerable quantity of said light made that flower immortal and invulnerable.

Stone's blood appears to have very different properties from her light. When they plant a tree in the blood soaked soil of Adam's Way, the tree goes from sprouting seed to dead husk within the space of a single day. The tree's life is not enhanced in any way, it is merely sped up. Similarly, bathing in the Mountain's blood apparently causes undesirable growth and sailing a metal or wooden ship up the Red River will result in the hull corroding away. Stone's blood accelerates everything that absorbs or comes into contact with it, but it doesn't add any new life force and certainly does not preserve. The best it does is concentrate life, packing a lengthy period of life into a much shorter period of time.

Now, everything in the Elder Continent has absorbed a certain measure of light and blood. Clearly there's some very intricate interplay between these two conflicting emanations. Darkdrop Coffee would be no exception, but from its effects drunk pure - it really speeds you up, it really hurts you, drink too much and you will obviously die - I think it has more blood than light. Further supporting this is the Almost Dead Man, who calls the coffee you give him &quotblood of the Elder Continent.&quot So the boost you get from Darkdrop Coffee comes at the expense of your future life. You're essentially taking an hour or five hours or whatever from your future and giving it to yourself in the present. If you're a light infused immortal this simply wouldn't be a problem. In fact, given that everyone but the Presbyters family can only live one thousand years by holy edict, taking time from your limitless but unrealizable future and giving it to your finite present is incredibly smart, a good way of making those one thousand years really count. It's no different from running up a bill in the knowledge that you'll never, ever have to pay it, so you might as well get everything you can. But for ordinary mortals, well...the bill will eventually come due.
edited by Anne Auclair on 11/28/2016

Someone should try to draw the correspondence on milk foam xDD