[quote=Clifton Royston]
Edit: This is surely a factor in Alexis suggesting that it would be a bad idea to draw too much attention from the Long. Rather than do something minor like kill you, they might decide it’s safer to prevent you from ever having existed. edited by cliftonr on 9/9/2017[/quote]
Now that is an intriguing thought. Combining that with the many pasts but only one future idea is not just intriguing, it’s also fascinating!
(quick, someone get me some contentment, I feel my reason slipping away…)
Wait, is there more than one prototype? I’ve been playing the alpha at https://alexiskennedy.itch.io/cultist-simulator-prototype, but is there an updated version somewhere else? I’m so jazzed about the game I’d love to play it if there is.
Also, I love the way the Long are portrayed in the Port Noon snippet. A bunch of dignified old chaps enjoying a nice long retirement in their own sleepy little town. I guess when you’ve got all eternity to look forward to, you don’t have to waste time on the theatrics and mystique mortals associate with ancient, all-powerful sorcerers.
The first prototype, something like a year ago, was an intentionally ugly "gray box" web-based game - no graphics, rudimentary user interface - which nonetheless introduced some fascinating lore and the basic idea of crafting with a limited selection of verbs - Work, Dream, Study, Explore, Talk, Assign, Renounce in the prototype - and a lot of things you can apply them to, which get created by using other things or combinations of things with the various verbs.
It’s still up, for the time being! You can find it here: http://weatherfactory.biz/cs/main_ui.html
If you get stuck, as I did for a while - you can find discussion and some hints in the earlier posts on the Weather Factory subreddit:
[quote=Clifton Royston]We got some hints about this in the first gray-box prototype which didn’t carry over into the second. In short, it appears that the Long may have the collective power to change and rewrite the past - not just change what’s in print about it, but change the actual history…
Edit: This is surely a factor in Alexis suggesting that it would be a bad idea to draw too much attention from the Long. Rather than do something minor like kill you, they might decide it’s safer to prevent you from ever having existed. edited by cliftonr on 9/9/2017[/quote]
The snippet about The Orchid Transfigurations being unconvincingly attributed to Robert Fludd suggests that you could be onto something. It tangentially reminded me of Faction Paradox from Doctor Who (books but never TV, I think), who get rid of their enemies by retconning the target out existence, in a pretty standard don’t-overthink-this way.
The more interesting side-effect is that a victim’s writings, discoveries, artworks etc. generally survive their erasure at least partially, and end up being by someone else. This continuity healing works fine if they’re moderately obscure ('It seems unlikely that this is Fludd. Fludd would write better Latin’ - maybe?), but becomes risky if they’re as colossally influential as, for example, Isaac Newton. Some people are just too well-known to safely erase.
Unfortunately, in order to be safe from an attack of this type, you probably need to be a household name to people totally outside your area of work, in multiple countries, with a fame that will last at least a generation after your death and preferably for centuries. That’s a pretty select crowd.
Prudence for the rest of us seems a sensible course, but of course, some of us are not sensible.
It appears the content of my previous comment got automatically excised by the forum software. That’s a bit concerning, given the subject under discussion.
(I’m foolhardy enough to try to reconstruct the post again, despite the implied warnings. Perhaps excising me will be marginally more trouble than tolerating this post for the time being.)
I fired up the web prototype and was lucky enough to find the book quickly.
Initial text on finding it:
This is not only a phantasy. The author was condemned and excised, but I may go further.
(+1 ‘A History of the War of the Roads, 1450-1480’ [CENSORED EDITION]
On preparing to study it:
Aspects:
Lantern 1
Secret Histories 1
Forge 1
‘A History of the War of the Roads, 1450-1480’ [CENSORED EDITION] 1
These aspects mean I will Study ‘The War of the Roads’ (This book speaks of only one History, but a significant one.) [2 m]
Result of studying:
In this past, a score or more of Longs were made. They brokered peace with the Forge of Days, long enough to set England on a path of early conquest and eventual destruction. The Forge itself devoured the greatest among them.
(+1 An Incendiary Prayer, +1 Mansus-Glimpse, +1 Occult Scrap)
Thoughts: The protagonist’s musings refer to the author as “excised” not “executed”. (Excised is used in some time travel SF to refer to eliminating a possible timeline or eliminating something/someone from a timeline.) Then “This book speaks of only one History” and “In this past”, and objects may have a “Secret History” aspect. I’ve inferred it was the Long responsible for changing this history, but there are other possibilities.
That…snail-thing is one of the creepiest sights I’ve seen in these Forums. Frankly, it looks more like something from Mutton Island than a refugee from Cultist Simulator. But it’s appropriate for one of the games at least! Thanks for posting it. I. Think. edited by cathyr19355 on 9/9/2017 edited by cathyr19355 on 9/9/2017
If the Long are potentially editing history, this brings to mind some interesting possibilities regarding them. Their distinguishing feature, apparently, is that they "do not end" - obviously this means that they are immortal, but what if they don’t end in either direction?
Also, it’s interesting that the Long seem to be human in appearance - ""They all look Long, which is to say they all have the limber bodies of well-kept gentry on the precipice of late middle age."
Some more thoughts, collected from various times; the ones which are not original to me are in brackets with attribution in parentheses:
(The Fervent Scholar on Discord)
[The Hours fear the Names, the Names fear the Long, etc. This implies that there is potentially some sort of usurpation going on.] Possibly all the levels above the Know are limited in number and the level below can rise up but only by removing one of their erstwhile superiors? The Know aren’t mentioned as fearing us, even though humans can definitely become Know, so they’re presumably not.
(Quote from the Orchid Transfigurations)
["We must devour to be devoured. We cannot be undevoured, as we cannot be unborn."] "Undevoured" and "unborn" can be verbs, in which case it would of course not be possible, you can’t go back once that happens. But you can also look at them as adjectives. You cannot be unborn because you don’t exist before that, you cannot both exist and not be born. Where does that point for "undevoured"? Why is it impossible to be undevoured? Do you need to be devoured to exist, or is there another relation? Is this a perspective rooted in time, or looking at it from a perspective outside of time? In the latter case it can be explained as saying that we must be born, yes, but we must also die, which would imply that death is a being-devoured. Consider the implications of this for the Long, who do not end, especially if they don’t end in either direction and would therefore be unborn and undevoured. But then again, if being-devoured is death, why must we devour to be devoured? I could probably think about this in more detail but maybe not right now.
(Cartuxu/The Soft-Hearted Revolutionary on Discord)
[The Mansus is not our House - we are not coming in the Front Door, we are coming in through one of the side/back doors, and I doubt we’re asking the permission of the owner. Occultism as burglary (of knowledge, from the Sun), whether it’s cat burglary or a smash-and-grab job.] Or maybe occultism as ants coming in to eat the crumbs left by the people in the house. What’s the relationship of the various beings to the Sun? Are the Hours there with the permission of the Sun? What’s the Sun’s opinion on us?
(The Fervent Scholar on Discord, referring to my previous theory about left/right mapping to reality/unreality in the map of the Mansus)
["I doubt Alexis would go for a simplistic good/evil contrast, so then we have the Gods-from-nowhere and the worm war as left-hand path, that is the breaking of taboos and boundaries, and the Lodge, the Spider and White Door and the Sun as right-hand path, that is the adherence to a sort of moral or ethical code…
…yeah, I think that one’s a dud, that doesn’t make sense, lol"]
Generalize this, not just adhering to a sort of moral code but rather to rules in general. Reality is bound by laws of varying degrees of strength, from fundamental physical laws (gravity) to emergent statistical properties (ideal gas law) to "laws of nature" (evolved mechanisms) to human laws. Some of those laws definitely don’t apply in the Mansus, and it’s plausible that "Nowhere" has no laws at all - according to the ordinary laws of logic nothing can come from nowhere, but try telling that to the Gods-From-Nowhere. edited by Benthic on 9/9/2017
Your suggestion is intriguing! I had not thought of that possible explanation for the false attribution to Fludd.
I had assumed it was just a typical false attribution to gain prestige or plausibility, such as all the alchemical texts and later medieval spell books attributed to "Albertus Magnus" - actually a philosopher and Catholic theologian - or the grimoires attributed to King Solomon, or the alchemical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, etc.
(I keep seeing Robert Fludd name-dropped in various occult contexts - someday I should look up some of his actual writings, though they’ll probably turn out to be utterly dull and muddled as such things frequently are.)
Here are a few more tidbits from the early prototype, which seem like they might bear on things we’ve learned recently:
Text for studying your Noonstone:
Aspects:
Forge 3
Grail 3
Tool 1
Noonstone 1
These aspects mean I will Study your Noonstone
(Perhaps this really did originate in the springs of Noon.)
"Hersault says the Red Grail split the sun. Coseley proposes it was the Forge of Days. They both agree that now, it’s sunset at noon."
Thoughts: A Noonstone originates in the springs of Noon? As in the Spring in Port Noon that Theresa Galmier was astonished to find out in the open, apparently unguarded? If it’s reputed to create powerful artifacts, her surprise is perhaps explained.
In the second quote, we know of Hersault through Hersault’s Nightmares, so presumably he (or she) is at least a scholar of occult dreams, and we know Cosely as a mage, reputed immortal (so perhaps a Long?) and the author of the Six Letters on Necessity. I was misremembering the end of the passage as they "agree it’s sunset at noon", but it says "They both agree that now, it’s sunset at noon." That’s really intriguing. So perhaps in this world the sun (small s) now has something wrong with it, because one of the Hours split it, and is much dimmer than it should be? This makes the brightness of the sun in Theresa’s visit to Port Noon seem suddenly more significant.
Edit: It did formerly say: "They both agree: it’s sunset at noon." I had a copy and paste of it in the notes I was keeping on valid combinations and object information. So at some point the text was changed to include "now", to suggest that "it" means the current state of affairs. edited by cliftonr on 9/10/2017 edited by cliftonr on 9/10/2017
[quote=Clifton Royston]There are specifically five Histories. I just tracked down this tweet: https://twitter.com/alexiskennedy/status/905153598123888640
"A Kickstarter update! With five things, one for each of the Histories."[/quote]
It seems that, in Cultist Simulator, five is the number. Five Histories, five levels of being, 5+1 doors to the Mansus (the extra one being the "Front Door", so there are five back doors), and so on.
[quote=Benthic](Quote from the Orchid Transfigurations)
["We must devour to be devoured. We cannot be undevoured, as we cannot be unborn."] "Undevoured" and "unborn" can be verbs, in which case it would of course not be possible, you can’t go back once that happens. But you can also look at them as adjectives. You cannot be unborn because you don’t exist before that, you cannot both exist and not be born. Where does that point for "undevoured"? Why is it impossible to be undevoured? Do you need to be devoured to exist, or is there another relation? Is this a perspective rooted in time, or looking at it from a perspective outside of time? In the latter case it can be explained as saying that we must be born, yes, but we must also die, which would imply that death is a being-devoured. Consider the implications of this for the Long, who do not end, especially if they don’t end in either direction and would therefore be unborn and undevoured. But then again, if being-devoured is death, why must we devour to be devoured? I could probably think about this in more detail but maybe not right now.[/quote]
I always thought that "to be devoured" is akin to some form of baptism, as the book speaks in "quasi-Rosicrucian allegories." When someone accepts baptism into the Church they’re "born again," free of sin. But since they can only do that once, they’d better start living a moral Christian life afterwards ("can’t be unborn"). Furthermore, in the Catholic faith, when you join the Church and take communion you consume the blood and flesh of Christ, which has been transfigured from the communion wine and the communion bread. The writer of The Orchid Transfigurations was writing in 1500s Europe to "Christian" readers who would have intimately understood the significance of this symbolism. I think what the writer is saying is that once you have devoured to be devoured, there’s no turning back. You’re in it to the end, it can’t be taken from you and you can’t escape from it.
. edited by Anne Auclair on 9/10/2017
[quote=Anne Auclair][quote=Benthic](Quote from the Orchid Transfigurations)
["We must devour to be devoured. We cannot be undevoured, as we cannot be unborn."] "Undevoured" and "unborn" can be verbs, in which case it would of course not be possible, you can’t go back once that happens. But you can also look at them as adjectives. You cannot be unborn because you don’t exist before that, you cannot both exist and not be born. Where does that point for "undevoured"? Why is it impossible to be undevoured? Do you need to be devoured to exist, or is there another relation? Is this a perspective rooted in time, or looking at it from a perspective outside of time? In the latter case it can be explained as saying that we must be born, yes, but we must also die, which would imply that death is a being-devoured. Consider the implications of this for the Long, who do not end, especially if they don’t end in either direction and would therefore be unborn and undevoured. But then again, if being-devoured is death, why must we devour to be devoured? I could probably think about this in more detail but maybe not right now.[/quote]
I always thought that "to be devoured" is akin to some form of baptism, as the book speaks in "quasi-Rosicrucian allegories." When someone accepts baptism into the Church they’re "born again," free of sin. But since they can only do that once, they’d better start living moral Christian life afterwards ("can’t be unborn"). Furthermore, in the Catholic faith, when you join the Church and take communion you consume the blood and flesh of Christ, which has been transfigured from the communion wine and the communion bread. The writer of The Orchid Transfigurations was writing in 1500s Europe to "Christian" readers who would have intimately understood the significance of this symbolism. I think what the writer is saying is that once you have devoured to be devoured, there’s no turning back. You’re in it to the end, it can’t be taken from you and you can’t escape from it.
. edited by Anne Auclair on 9/10/2017[/quote]
Yeah, that’s the obvious interpretation - once you’ve been devoured you can’t undo it. You can be unbaptized as an adjective, if you haven’t yet been baptized, but you can’t be unbaptized as a verb. But the comparison with "unborn" made me wonder whether there was something deeper going on. You can’t go back from being born, yes, but you also can’t be unborn as an adjective. Does that also hold for being undevoured?
Well, Jonah was swallowed by a giant fish and then spit out, so there is a literary tradition of people being undevoured, if not undigested.[/quote]
Well, I’d question whether that really counts as being devoured, but more importantly the quote says that one cannot be undevoured. So, if you can’t be undevoured, the question is why that would be, and whether it’s simply that you can’t go back once you are devoured, or if it’s like the impossiblity of being unborn and is a necessary condition of existence.
He’s not talking about it in a physical sense, he’s talking about it in a spiritual sense. In a spiritual sense our physical birth isn’t our first birth, as our souls existed before our bodies.
[quote=Benthic][quote=Anne Auclair][quote=Benthic](Quote from the Orchid Transfigurations)
["We must devour to be devoured. We cannot be undevoured, as we cannot be unborn."] "Undevoured" and "unborn" can be verbs, in which case it would of course not be possible, you can’t go back once that happens. But you can also look at them as adjectives. You cannot be unborn because you don’t exist before that, you cannot both exist and not be born. Where does that point for "undevoured"? Why is it impossible to be undevoured? Do you need to be devoured to exist, or is there another relation? Is this a perspective rooted in time, or looking at it from a perspective outside of time? …[/quote]
I always thought that "to be devoured" is akin to some form of baptism, as the book speaks in "quasi-Rosicrucian allegories." When someone accepts baptism into the Church they’re "born again," free of sin. But since they can only do that once, they’d better start living moral Christian life afterwards ("can’t be unborn"). Furthermore, in the Catholic faith, when you join the Church and take communion you consume the blood and flesh of Christ, which has been transfigured from the communion wine and the communion bread. The writer of The Orchid Transfigurations was writing in 1500s Europe to "Christian" readers who would have intimately understood the significance of this symbolism. I think what the writer is saying is that once you have devoured to be devoured, there’s no turning back. You’re in it to the end, it can’t be taken from you and you can’t escape from it.
. edited by Anne Auclair on 9/10/2017[/quote]
Yeah, that’s the obvious interpretation - once you’ve been devoured you can’t undo it. You can be unbaptized as an adjective, if you haven’t yet been baptized, but you can’t be unbaptized as a verb. But the comparison with "unborn" made me wonder whether there was something deeper going on. You can’t go back from being born, yes, but you also can’t be unborn as an adjective. Does that also hold for being undevoured?[/quote]
In my opinion this will all be a lot clearer once you have opened your Mind to the Red Grail and performed the Rite of Slaking. Of course then you’ve been devoured, so you’re not in a good condition to explain it to any survivors.
I started playing FTL: Faster Than Light and Sunless Sea around the same time and they are two of my favorite games. So I’ve been rather intrigued by FTL being a model for Cultist Simulator despite it being, well, a very different sort of game. This led me to think about which aspects of FTL’s rather unique gameplay could apply to Cultist Simulator and, in turn, how these aspects might faintly illuminate the final form that Cultist Simulator is intended to take. So here they are:
1. Challenge and reward scaled to progression – FTL requires you to traverse eight sectors. As you advance from sector to sector, enemy ships become stronger, more advanced, and better armed, while rewards become correspondingly more substantial. The more scrap you have, the better you can upgrade and outfit your ship, and hence the more options you have in dealing with the enemy. Much of the game is something of an arms race between you and the enemy ships, with you trying to keep your ship equal or ahead of the enemy’s capabilities. In Sector 8 you fight the Rebel Flagship, the single hardest enemy in the game, which combines everything that was thrown at you between sectors 1 through 7.
Cultist Simulator has at least two areas and six doors: the Wood, the Bound, the White Door, the Stag Door, the Wrong Door (??), the Peacock Door, the Spider Door, and the Front Door. There might be more locations. There are also at least five levels of occult initiation: the living & dead, the Know, the Long, the Names, and the Hours. Travel through the various dreamscapes, doors and occult levels could play the same role as FTL’s sector; with each otherworldly area traversed/Mansus door passed through, the game’s challenges and rewards could correspondingly increase.
2. Frontloaded difficulty - The first half of FTL is often the most difficult, as it is in early sectors that you are at your most unprepared and vulnerable. You have rudimentary systems, glaring ship weaknesses, a small inexperienced crew, and only one way of really defeating hostile ships (so it’s possible to encounter enemies who are effectively invulnerable). Early enemies, while less well armed than later ones, don’t mess around, and a single mistake or unlucky shot can end with them heavily damaging, if not outright annihilating, your ship.
How you do in the early sectors really impacts the later game. While a poor early performance by no means dooms you to defeat, it does mean you’ll have a subpar ship through much of the middle and maybe even the late sectors, which greatly increases your chances of dying (either by being badly outclassed in battle or being worn down by hazards and the rebel pursuit). Conversely, a very good early performance means a more upgraded ship, a more experienced crew, and a greater versatility in systems (more ways to defend oneself and take down enemies).
According to Alexis, Sunless Sea apparently had a similar setup, as will Cultist Simulator:
3. Intense resource management – When playing FTL on normal or hard difficulty, you will almost never have enough scrap, which is used to upgrade the ship, repair the ship, hire crew, help friendly ships for possible rewards, and purchase vital supplies/systems/weapons. And even if you do acquire enough scrap to satisfactorily upgrade and outfit your ship, you will certainly not have enough power to supply all of those energy hungry systems. You also have to deal with a limited crew compliment, so every new recruit has the potential to make you reevaluate everyone’s respective usefulness.
When it’s not an RPG or a rogue-like, Sunless Sea is pretty much all about resource management. Besides the various story fragments, trade goods and rare items you’ll find yourself transporting around the Neath, there’s also fuel consumption, food management, crew compliment, ship parts, and cargo space.
With Cultist Simulator Alexis has expressed a desire to completely unify the game’s resources and narrative. When you make a decision concerning a particular card, you’ll also be making a decision regarding the story: “Every choice you make, from moment to moment, doesn’t just advance the narrative - it also shapes it.” So you won’t just be managing, combining and wagering limited resources, you’ll also be managing, combining and wagering story, and there will only be so much story for you to use.
The alpha has a very small sample of this resource/narrative scarcity in the creation of rituals. As there is only one Ardent Prayers card, you have to choose between discovering either the Watchman’s Sorrow or the Crucible of the Soul. Once you have discovered your ritual, there is no turning back short of giving up on occultism altogether and committing yourself to Glover and Glover or letting the Authorities catch you. In addition, if you choose the Crucible of the Soul, there is a built in limit on how many times you can get it wrong as you can only sacrifice so many Believers. Furthermore, if you sacrifice Victor or Rose, you will have one less cunning follower for jobs like burgling Mr. Strathcoyne’s house.
So very faintly you can see the pathways narrowing. The rituals will put you in contact with different occult power. If you choose Crucible of the Soul, the path further narrows with the sacrifice of Believers, essentially trading any future companionship and assistance they could provide for…whatever it is you get out of the ritual (possibly nothing, should you screw it up…or possibly something really terrible, should you really screw up).
4. Expanding the game through achievements – In FTL ships are unlocked by certain actions/encounters during the game and/or by achieving victory with certain ships. FTL’s ships are asymmetrical – some are clearly better than others. All require different strategies and appeal to different player preferences, adding vital variety to the game. In this way, FTL’s ships are somewhat similar to Cultist Simulator’s planned legacy system, which in turn bears a marked resemblance to the legacy system in Sunless Sea.
Sunless Sea has a simple legacy system. Upon the death, retirement, disappearance, or triumph of your captain, you select one of five “Redemption” legacies to determine which stats, resources, and advantages are to be passed on. If you are fortunate enough to have gotten a heir during one of your previous games, you instead get to select from two legacies. If during your play-through you also attained an ironclad will alongside some real & movable property, you’d also get your former captain’s house and collection. Then there are the permanent legacies you could earn from completing special challenges or alternative endings during a play-through. The practical effects of these in later games are predominately limited to stats boosts and trophies. I’ve generally sought out these endings more for the story or challenge than the reward, although achieving them will give later characters a perpetual leg up, which is nice.
From how it’s been described, Cultist Simulator’s legacy system will share a number of features with Sunless Sea’s legacy system and FTL’s ship hanger. That you will select three legacies from “a large pool” suggests a not inconsiderable number of legacies are planned (far more than the five Redemptions you pick from in Sunless Sea).
[quote=Cultist Simulator Kickstarter Description]But there are other endings - some more victorious than others. Retire peacefully. Start a family. Die, but haunt the dreams of others. Disappear, but leave your journal for another seeker. Betray your kind to join the Suppression Bureau, which prosecutes those criminals whose crimes exist only in dreams.
Why would you do this? Often, because the story’s led you to a place that feels like an interesting choice. But also, because it affects future characters. Legacies allow you to leave something behind for another character - a journal, a bequest, an orphan. The Adversary who destroyed you may remain - a threat but also a promise, like a story-driven corpse run. And you may become a Haunting - a shell of your former self, there to torment or assist the new character.[/quote]
So you’ll earn legacies via alternative endings, much like in Sunless Sea, and then choose which three you want active in the next game, not unlike Sunless Sea’s Redemption system. These legacies however will function more like the ships in FTL; instead of merely boosting character stats, they’ll give you additional narrative resources or challenges. Just like FTL’s ships, the legacies will let you choose how you want to vary your game.
5. A large amount of luck based gameplay – A lot of FTL is combat skill, navigation and resource management, but the game is also a rogue-like, so a big element is either making the best of what the RNG gives you or maximizing your odds of a successful dice roll. The campaign map is somewhat randomized, sector maps are randomized, and many events have a certain degree of random chance. Whether you win or lose the main campaign, or succeed or fail at a side quest, can be the result of the randomly generated map, a fortuitous random event, or an unlucky random encounter. You might find a really good weapon floating in space, that Federation base you were counting on might be empty, the ship you offer to help might be leading you into a trap, and so on.
Luck based gameplay can be a very difficult thing to balance with skill based gameplay. Too little and the game becomes a set of boxes to check and patterns to memorize. Too much random chance and the player feels like a marionette strung along by the strings of fate (you don’t win the game, the game decides when you win). What makes FTL such a good game is that it manages to hit that sweet spot where victory results from a combination of the player doing the right thing and the right things happening for the player. The amount of chance in FTL encourages you to stay alert and be ever on the lookout for situations where your luck might change, for better or worse.
Now, Sunless Sea has some rogue-like elements, mostly related to the placement of islands and underwater bases. But it is nowhere near FTL’s level. So the big question becomes “how much of FTL’s luck based gameplay will there be in Cultist Simulator?”
Well, in his latest livestream, Alexis provided an answer – it will have quite a lot:
To fully consider how much randomness the game could have, here’s a complete list of alpha events that have either variable outcomes or the possibility of future variable outcomes.
A Legacy Arrives – “In the full game, this might contain a variety of different things each play through.”
Painting a picture – not only whether the picture will sell, netting you Mystique and two Funds. In event that you successfully sell your painting there’s also apparently a slight chance of the Acquaintance event being triggered.
Exploring your instincts (exploring with Passion) – chance of gaining either Mystique or Notoriety.
Exploring your possibilities (exploring with Reason) – chance of gaining Mystique, Notoriety, or Fleeting Memories.
Buying books at Morlands – you spend funds and purchase an RNG chosen book.
An Acquaintance event – both the timing of its occurrence and the person being met are up to the RNG, but some people may be more likely than others. Sometimes you don’t meet anyone of any importance, in which case you merely gain Mystique.
Dreams of a Glory – this decides which dream place you find yourself in. In the alpha there are only two possibilities, the Tree of Lights and the Journey in a Window. In the full game there could easily be more.
The Tree of Lights/Cleansing Dawn – currently bugged. Failure should transform one of your Reasons into Fascination, while success should give you Fascination and a Mansus Glimpse.
A Journey in a Window/ Hersault’s Nightmare – If you succeed you gain a Consent of Wounds and one of your Reasons transforms into Insomnia. If you fail, you just suffer Insomnia.
Speak of Esoteric Matters – produces either Mystique or Notoriety. Every time you have a lecture there’s a slight chance of the Acquaintance event being triggered.
Discuss Occult Business – produces either Mystique or Notoriety.
Discus Our Business – produces either Mystique or Notoriety.
Send a follower to explore – “Buried knowledge, sealed tombs, allies, rivals, lesions in the world’s skin.”
Burglary – if you succeed you get a rare, RNG chosen book or treasure. If you fail, something bad happens (in the case of Strathcoyne’s, the Authorities are alerted). Cunning followers have a better chance of success.
Whether something like an Investigation, an Illness, or a Pleasant Day happens to you is determined by the RNG.
Reading Poetry – there’s a chance it will consume your Glimmering without giving you anything in return.
Rituals – presumably. The two rituals in the alpha don’t have an RNG aspect. Rather, they do have a light puzzle aspect and it’s possible for them to fail if you do the wrong thing or don’t have any Reason or Passion in the final stage (though why wouldn’t you?). But it’s pretty easy to see where chance could potentially play a role. With the Rite of the Watchman’s Sorrow you could potentially see any of number of things while on your nightly excursion across the Bounds (or, alternatively, any number of things could see you…). With the Rite of the Crucible of the Soul, who is to say that the Red Grail’s impact on your body will always be the same? And these are merely two beginning rituals. edited by Anne Auclair on 9/11/2017
