Good evening, my fellow Londoners. I am currently in something of a conundrum, I have recently acquired a large amount of favors from the devils, in hopes of gaining a small guest room in the Brass Embassy and a safe way to travel to the Iron Republic. Having now completed those tasks, it is starting to become annoying to receive letter after letter from an rather overtly-affectionate devil, as well as constantly having to help urchins with their souls and prevent those wicked beings from inserting firecrackers in a thurible (the thought!).
Because of these daily annoyances, I have been thinking of calling in all my favours with them, something which will allow me to recuperate a portion of my investment, as well as making them sufficiently cross that they will stop demanding nonsense of me. I do have to know two things before hand, though. First and foremost: Is this is a good idea at all? Is there some use a Londoner -who has recently become a Person of Some Importance, and who already has a guest room at the embassy and a safe-conduct- might find to having large amounts of connections to the less holy? I would be most flabbergasted if tomorrow I were to find another option requiring my current levels of connection, so if any fellow has any warnings about it, I am all ears.
The second question is more simple: Is there a better, more profitable way to capitalize on my favours with the devils than calling in favours in thr Forgotten Quarter? Thank you all in advance for your kind help.
You can definitely ditch your Hell connection if you’d like, but if you want a Salon rather than an Orphanage I would hold off for a little bit. As far as I know the Forgotten Quarter is the most profitable way to cash it in.
If you want to upgrade your lodgings to the 5-card Sanctum at Christmas, you will need a fair amount of Connected: Hell to purchase it. You’ll also need Notability 3 and Taste of Lacre 8. To help with an intimate of Devils specifically, selling your soul to them will prevent them from bothering you in future even after regaining it from bundles.
You’re probably right; I may just be remembering the Connected: Hell requirement for purchasing the Brass Embassy room with Brilliant Souls. One other thing though - I’m fairly certain losing your Connected: Hell won’t take away your Intimate of Devils quality automatically so you’ll still be hassled unless you do something about that.
Yeah, the Intimate of Devils quality will still persist. The cards themselves won’t show up anymore unless you have it at 2 or higher, but it couldn’t hurt to get rid of it altogether.
Not my experience. It’s true that devils won’t bother you at all so long as your Soul is gone, but if you get it back, you’ll start to see the lowest level Opportunity cards soliciting your attention again (specifically, you’ll get the "you received a note from a Devil" card, seeking to get you to obtain the "Intimate of Devils" quality again). That’s what happened to me, and I just sold, and then relocated, my Soul recently.
I’ll keep an eye out for it, but I’m pretty sure Gloria hasn’t been pestered by the Intimate Devils after selling her soul to them and getting it back. Now if you sell it to a different devil without letting them have it once that’s another story altogether - you’ll draw a card that gets rid of your Intimate of Devils quality completely, and then you’ll get the first card again after retrieving your soul.
Edit: Just got the card on Madison! It requires you to have less than 4 Intimate of Devils. Since selling your soul to them sets that quality to 20 there’s no way to draw the starting card after doing so.
The way I’d do this would be to hit up the Forgotten Quarter, and call in favours. Then I’d use conflict cards (with Church/Urchins) to reduce my Connected: Hell below 5.
If you find later that you need more Connected: Hell, visit the Big Top at Mrs Plenty’s Carnival to get it to 10, and use a Bright Brass Skull to get it up to 20.
From 20 onwards, there are the conflict cards, and presumably other storylets you can use to raise Connected: Hell back up to where you need it.
If you happen to have a certain piece of cutlery from a Fate-locked Story, a trip to Spite then Ladybones Road can provide additional Connected: Hell when you go to acquire Nevercold Brass.
I did a similar thing a while back, to try and thin out my Opportunity deck. Dumped all the connections that were easy to reduce and that I wasn’t using, and funnelled the rest into the ones I did need.
I figure that as they’re making changes to connections, and there’s no sign of Renown being vitally important post-change, there’s no need for me to hang onto connections - especially as I don’t know which will be next, and turning in Casing in the Flit still doesn’t give favours with Criminals.