So, I have no idea why, but it seems the admiralty option has completely disappeared from London. The voracious diplomat is still accessible but the admiral is not. I don’t know what I would have done to cause this, and reloading the game does nothing to fix it. Is there some sort of quest I might have done that has made it impossible to turn in port reports?
Raising supremacy to 7 for any faction but London.
Even if London’s Supremacy is also at 7?
Yes.
That seems…wrong. Do you know if they have any plans of changing that? Doesn’t really make sense that a fully powered London suddenly drops off the map just because someone else is also strong.
The Dawn Machine is a splinter sect of the Admiralty so if you’re strengthening the admiralty you’re also strengthening them.
I’d be more okay with it if I could now turn in port reports at the Grand Geode, but as far as I can tell that isn’t an option.
Only the empire cares what goes on in the rest of the empire, to everyone else, it’s just a point on a map…
The Admiralty won’t do business with you if you’re a traitor, even if they have any power left?
(and the Dark-Spectacled Admiral, who hates the Machine, is the one who actually cares abt yr port reports)
And the Dawn Machine doesn’t care about port reports and never did. Vital Intelligence and supplies, that’s all they want. The ascendancy of their usurper-god makes the price of fish in whither preeeetty uninteresting to them.
edited by Impish Axile on 3/1/2015
The way I see it, the admiral asks that you do not give vital intel to the diplomat.
You gave vital intel to the diplomat.
So… now he’d rather not talk to you. That’s the cut of it, pretty much. At the very least, you got a certain something out of it.
[quote=WormApotheote]
The Dawn Machine is a splinter sect of the Admiralty so if you’re strengthening the admiralty you’re also strengthening them.[/quote]
Not exactly, at least not mechanically.
If you give your Vital Info to they Eyepatch Lass, then yes, that’s true. But if you stick to giving it to Super Sideburns Morpheus, you can improve the Admiralty and London without strengthening the Dawn Machine too.
edited by MisterGone on 3/1/2015
It makes sense to me.
If I was working at the Admiralty and some captain was giving all his information to other people instead of crawling on his belly and licking my boots, I’d cut him off too.
I see it thuswise: London’s military/political position is precarious. The city just doesn’t have the resources to defend and maintain itself and its colonies. Even if you manage to raise them to Supremacy, that’s still just relative to their former weak position - a more powerful faction could still disrupt them, if given a similar boost. The texts for achieving Supremacy for the Khanate or the Anarchists explicitly describe their agents taking over the city enough that the Admiralty effectively shut down, while the Dawn Machine just plain aren’t interested in trifling business like Port Reports - they’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Is there a source I can tap that explains the factions and the politics in undezee?
From the game itself I sure don’t know squat about the damn machine and their business. All I know from there is that they are creepy (in their own special way) and suspicious (as in I suspect them, not the other way around).
And similar things can be said almost about anything that looks powerful, threatening, or curious in SS.
The game behaves as if their correlation and quirks are widely known, yet gives no information about them to someone who was supposedly born in that world, raised there, and is now among the ones of the more knowledgeable inhabitants of it. (Being a Zee captain is already a key to a treasure trove of knowledge. Being involved in spying to the point of uplifting a faction to supremacy is a key to even more.)
For the fist time in my memory I actually wish there was a “codex” in the game (usually I wish it was the other way around, but that’s a different subject). And before any smartass tells me that there is - don’t. You know which kind of codex I meant.
And as far as the admiralty business is concerned I also find it weird. Yes, the admiralty doesn’t trust me. But whoever it is that I’ve got to trample them doesn’t seem to be interested in me either. That is the weirdest part.
Most logical thing to do after “taking over a business” is to mimic the predecessor and see what’s what before doing anything else. Whoever that was that preceded you that someone had experience that you do not have. The safest way to gain their experience is to “wear their shoes”, and look - there they are ripe for the taking. Who know, maybe, just maybe, the admiralty was doing something to suppress something that shouldn’t be allowed to get from under pressure, and you just happen not to know about it. Machine be dawned, it’s ALWAYS a possibility. Disregarding your predecessors experience is among the worst mistake one could make. And people who make the worst mistakes are usually not the ones leading or controlling anything of big importance.
And over here you’ve got an asset. That one asset was the key to your raise in power. Whatever it’s reasons are it has thus far been loyal. It has also thus far been effective. And it has been tangled up with those “ripe shoes”.
Should we utilise it? Naah, let’s just let it sulk and wish that it had anticipated that it’d loose it’s “job” and gain none in return.
Weird behaviour, but then again, among “weird” and “normal” the latter is more out of place in underzee than the former.
Basically, you find out about factions like the Dawn Machine by playing, seeing all the interactions involving them, and putting the pieces together. Dweebs like me just memorise and theorise about all the lore and spout it like we’re some kind of ornamental fountain.
Long story short, the New Sequence are what I’d describe as a sort of proto-fascist techno-cult, semi-secretly practised by the Admiralty’s reactionary segments, and the Dawn Machine is their attempt at building an artificial god. If they gain enough Supremacy to succeed, then boom - London’s theirs. Not just the Navy - the government, the church, the lot. Who cares about minutiae like shipping reports when you have all the power of a god in your arsenal?
I do admit the game doesn’t really make it clear what happens with the supremacies. A simple caption would fix this, or at least provide an explanation if the admiralty disappears.
So, what you’re saying that the whole world background (aside from the exclusive content stored in the authors head) is just a collection of speculations?
Because from what I’ve seen in the game:
[ul][li]If it can be vague it will be vague.[/li][li]If it can’t be vague it will still be vague.[/li][li]And if it still can’t be vague then at the very least it’ll not be informative.[/li][li]If it was forced to be informative it’s was not important.[/li][/ul]No offence, it’s just that something in this approach to writing is rubbing me the wrong way. And I’m venting that out. But like I said, no offence meant.
Yes the lore is meant to be vague and kind of a puzzle.
To be honest I’m kind of surprised how explicit some of this stuff is. Fallen London is much vaguer.
The effects of raising supremacy too high should probably be signposted better though. (Although if you’re raising Dawn Machine supremacy by giving vital intelligence to the diplomat, you WERE warned, so…)
edited by WormApotheote on 3/2/2015
Horror writing is necessarily vague. And by horror I mean the genre that Sunless Sea and Fallen London very definitely belong to, even though neither is particularly interested in scaring or horrifying the reader. Even simple horror stories about a monster work best when that monster is never clearly seen, only hinted it, glimpsed briefly, and the reader or viewer’s imagination is left to fill in the blanks. Once it is described in detail on the page or shown clearly on screen some of the horror is lost.
This is even more true of cosmological horror like Lovecraft or Sunless Sea/Fallen London, which depend on grand cosmic mysteries, especially ones that are inimical or at least indifferently dangerous to ordinary humans. Granted, "horror" is maybe not the best term for the emotions SS/FL evokes, or Lovecraft for that matter, but it’s still the same idea. Half (or more) of the suspense is the "fear of the unknown", which evaporates once the unknown thing is clearly understood. Instead, wide gaps are left for the reader’s imagination to fill in, and he does so, perhaps not better than the authors could imagine themselves, but usually better than they could express in definite words–than any author could express in words. And the best part is, these imaginations themselves are still not canon, still uncertain, still leave the thing imagined as an unknown.
edited by Olorin on 3/2/2015
I’d agree that the lore is frustrating to piece together, especially for people who haven’t played Fallen London.
I mean, you can talk all you want about putting pieces together, but the text is extremely full of symoblism and flavor, and there’s a hell of a lot of it, and remembering everything on the off chance that something will tie in elsewhere really is difficult and frustrating - if you don’t know what to look for, you really are going to miss out on a lot of connections. Especially in SS compared to FL, since you can’t just go back to look over things you’ve Echoed, or easily click back over to a storylet and repeat it. And hell, there’s a lot of backstory that makes things a little clearer that basically doesn’t get touched on in SS at all - more info about the Bazaar and Masters, Mr Eaten, etc.
Anyway, to the OP - it’s not really a substitue for a codex like you mentioned, but a REALLY good fan-run source of background info is saint-arthur.tumblr.com/tagged/fl-lorepost . Focus on stuff from before last fall, if you want to avoid spoilers for more Sunless Sea-specific stuff. Again, lore that you won’t see much of in Sunless Sea: stuff about the Bazaar, the Masters, Mr Eaten (“SMEN”), the Correspondance, more backstory on the Rubberies, Clay Men, Snuffers. None of this is NECESSARY by any means, but it’ll help get you more familiar with the verse if you’re interested.
Aside from that… if you want hints on subjects/symbols that generally have more lore going on:
-The Gods of the Zee (Storm, Stone, Salt) are probably the biggest.
-Everything to do with stars, especially the Sun. This definitely includes the Dawn Machine.
-Nonhuman things that are literally related to each other. Very specific, I know.
-Anything said to you by the Curator, the Principles, or the Fathomking.
And some important general themes / keywords / symbols, grouped by things that are closely related:
-Flukes, shapelings, Axile.
-Law, Judgement, the Correspondance, the Chain / Great Chain of Being.
-Anarchy, revolution, lawlessness, the Liberation of Night.
-Mirrors, dreams, serpents, Parabola.
-Candles, wells, vengeance.