Just wanted to say this was one of my favourite stories yet. It gave a great sense of the macabre underbelly of FL life, and offered little hints of far-off places - perhaps the island mentioned in the course of the tale is spookier to those who’ve played Sunless Sea.
Things I liked about the Seven-Day Reign: a sacrificial king story! Saturnalian social reversals. And with a tie-in to Kingeater Castle, no less; I suppose in the Neath the Golden Age ended when the Great God Pan was eaten. There’s a lot of great mythology here, and the best part was probably seeing the revels around town, and the dark underbelly that’s the deeper rationale of (practically) all fraternal orders.
The chase at the end was a little more perplexing. Does it matter at all if you are caught or elude capture? (There doesn’t seem to be any way to do the latter unless I missed something, as the patriarch turns sniper.)
And lastly – there appears to be some new code that inserts different strings into a story’s text depending on a player’s quality, so that one player might get “Your Aunt” and another “Your Daughter” or “Your Protege” (or the default “The Sovereign” which I somehow ended up with…) Technically, this is great and could be used in all sorts of ways! However, in this particular story it’s not only caused journal bugs; I also think the string-substitution is responsible for the hollow feel of this story. It has a richly painted backdrop, and I’m definitely in favor of revealing how awful the Young Stags have been all along – but the substitutable character is at the center of the plot, and is generic by the very nature of substitution. There’s one moment in the story where your daughter starts fleecing the Stags, your Aunt starts to lose her mind, and your protege goes a bit power-mad, and the endings are barely different (somehow I didn’t get the choice to let my daughter kill the patriarch? did anyone echo that?) but these spots where character comes through just reinforce the characterlessness of the rest of the sovereign’s reign. The substitutable character appears in almost every other scene in this story, but mostly feels like a wax dummy with an Aunt/Daughter/Protege mask on.
Maybe there’s a meta-commentary in there about the figurehead nature of public power (is one president or prime minister so terribly different from another?) but there’s also a strange interaction with the other fate-locked characters, your aunt and daughter. They’re leached of color a little bit in the process. There’s a fruitful comparison to be made here with Flint; some people commented that it didn’t seem to matter much which Deputy you chose, because it was all flavor (of regrets and advice) with no system effects. The same is true in Seven-Day Reign, but the Flint deputies aren’t really present in the story except at moment when they behave quite differently, so the underlying sameness isn’t quite as oppressive; there’s very little “generic deputy” writing.
[quote=metasynthie]
And lastly – there appears to be some new code that inserts different strings into a story’s text depending on a player’s quality, so that one player might get "Your Aunt" and another "Your Daughter" or "Your Protege" (or the default "The Sovereign" which I somehow ended up with…)[/quote]
It is not new, actually - it is just the same as Addressed as / Gendertitle where you set a quality and have the noun change according to it. The default is 0 for this particular one, which makes for particularly fun reading in the journal.
The comparison to Flint’s deputy is interesting, but I want to add a comment: It doesn’t work as well here as Flint, because caring about your Deputy is not a thematic thing in Flint. Here, the stress is on Family Ties - but right from the start the presence of a generic protege makes it very awkward, especially when combined with the Risk selection. A player will expect their Aunt and Daughter to exist after this story, maybe with a risk of permanent loss, which adds a bit of gravity to the story. Not so much with the Mauve Shirt that will cease to be relevant whether he survives or not.
You can’t let your friend kill the Patriarch when the Risk option is on - and you can’t betray them when the Risk option is off, basically.
I’ve noticed many people think Stags are evil after this story.
I think you’re mistaken.
The usual stags members actually have no idea about who the Patriarch is and just go along with him for fun. They know nothing of the cannibalistic ritual and don’t participate in it. If you’re a stag yourself and ask the real members of the stags their opinion at the start of the story they will tell you just that. The ‘evil’ ones are the Patriarch and his company of influential ex-stags who just use their ex-membership to meet up and scheme things.
So I wouldn’t be all dissapointed in the Stags club if I were you.
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Isn’t that more or less what’s referred to as “the banality of evil?” In this case, the especially banal parts have to do with stealing Constables’ pants and whatnot.
Fun fact! Being not familiar with the term, I googled it to find "Hannah Arendt" as the first related search ;)
Anyway, Danko, that’s what I figured as well, but it is still nasty in a way. Basically, the innocent outer layer of the club is filled with prospective members, who are filtered until the useful ones are picked out to be a true Stag along with the Patriarch’s sons. It is likely that most of the bad tradition will continue as the Patriarch has probably taught them the whole deal, save for the loophole of substitute sovereign.
I clearly misunderstood something and ended up ending the investigation miles earlier than I wanted to, so I didn’t terribly enjoy the story. Oh well.
Not sure why that was even an option, really.
I wanted to echo that, but the game bugged out and didn’t let me.
Same. I hope FBG lets us know when the issue is fixed.
It’s also disheartening to hear that others haven’t found the story quite so enjoyable, especially KukaPetal’s experience of the story. (Unless that was meant to be an April Fools thing that I simply failed to recognise because of time zone differences?)
So I suspect The Seven-Day Reign will be one I just get around to playing whenever, rather than doing it before the month is out. shrugs
Well now I’ve actually finished it.
The final card sorta summed up my thoughts on the matter. It might as well have read “Well, that happened! Let’s forget about it.”
Eh, this one’s not for me.
Not an April Fool’s joke, just me MAKING a fool of myself by forgetting that it’s a bad idea to post when I’m upset.
And I just wanted too clarify that, other than making my character assist in a horrific murder (which, admittedly, is a pretty big issue from an RPing standpoint), I had no other issues with the writing and thought the story was well done. I’ve just had terrible luck with RPing lately, but that isn’t going to be a problem for anyone who isn’t me :)
Hats off to the writers for actually making me care enough to GET upset.
edited by Kukapetal on 4/3/2016
[quote=Kukapetal]
Not an April Fool’s joke, just me MAKING a fool of myself by forgetting that it’s a bad idea to post when I’m upset.
And I just wanted too clarify that, other than making my character assist in a horrific murder (which, admittedly, is a pretty big issue from an RPing standpoint), I had no other issues with the writing and thought the story was well done. I’ve just had terrible luck with RPing lately, but that isn’t going to be a problem for anyone who isn’t me :)
Hats off to the writers for actually making me care enough to GET upset.[/quote]
No, it is perfectly okay to post and open heart. It’s just that the timing is kinda unfortunate since any serious declaration on April Fools are pretty hard to take seriously.
I’m at the feast now with 130 of the seven day reign, do I have time to "Investigate the back rooms" before the Placid Patriarch’s toast?
I did it after the toast. You can hang around and investigate as much as you like before you carry on the story.
I enjoyed this story quite a bit, mainly because it opened up the inner workings of The Stags which made for interesting reading and also confirmed the fact the "true goodness" seems to be something rather scarce in FL. Having realized that FL is a place where one might have to make some rather horrible decisions to survive or even do good in the long term my character is a bit of a morally complex individual and had no qualms letting a man who was going to kill his family meet the end he had been running from.
edited by Rudiger on 4/3/2016
Excellent story overall. The only thing I wished I had was a clearer understanding of what the "Reign of Terror" etc attributes were going to be used for; maybe have a less-critical interaction with the Stags that demonstrates the mechanic that’s going to be important later?[li]
Also, my character seriously hopes this isn’t the last we see of the Patriarch and the Thirteen. Maybe it’s an overdeveloped sense of vengeance - or maybe it’s an unfortunate habit of listening to old wells too closely - but an outburst of inventively-crafted final exits for them (think Saw, but with moar ratwork mechanisms and custard) would be totally in character…
Definitely not my favorite story.
[spoiler]Yes, the Neath is a dark and scary place with an unconventional view towards death, and yes, cannibalism is a predominant theme, but this felt gratuitous. We just finished the winter’s triptych of sanguinary stories, got a brief reprieve in which the death was intentional and merely temporary, and now we’re back to chopping up people and putting them in stew. It felt far too similar to The Art of Murder, both thematically and mechanically (starting with investigations and ending in a chase), but without the satisfying twist and interesting bits of lore. The twist here was only surprising in that I didn’t think Failbetter would lean on such a well-worn trope. Employing cannibalism amongst the hijinks of the Stags cheapens its use elsewhere, like in the Mr. Eaten storyline, turning the horrible into something silly.
At least I feel vindicated in my prior view that the Stags are a bunch of assholes. Now I know that they’re a bunch of assholes — assholes who eat people — and I’ll do my best to avoid them in the future.[/spoiler]
On the plus side, the art really was lovely.
One final nitpick, and it is a very small nit: does it bother anyone else that Failbetter frequently uses the hyphen-minus (-) when they ought to be using an en-dash (–) or em-dash (—)? This story was full of them.
edit: Huh, I guess an en-dash looks almost exactly like a hyphen in the standard Failbetter font (Lucida Grande). Still looks weird to my eye though.
edited by Guy Scrum on 4/3/2016
[quote=Rudiger]Having realized that FL is a place where one might have to make some rather horrible decisions to survive or even do good in the long term my character is a bit of a morally complex individual and had no qualms letting a man who was going to kill his family meet the end he had been running from.
edited by Rudiger on 4/3/2016[/quote]
Practically everybody plays as a "morally complex" individual, which is why the ending doesn’t seem to have bothered anybody but me. And I suppose that if only one person is bothered by it, it’s not that big of a deal, but…sometimes I wonder…is there NO room in the game for someone who wants to do something a little different? Almost from the beginning I’ve felt like the game was trying to force me into a certain moral alignment. Initially it was just by punishing me for moral choices, but at least I still HAD the choice. This is the first time my RPing has been outright hijacked by the narration.
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with RPing someone who is just fine with the Patriarch getting what he deserves for trying to kill their protege/aunt/daughter, but not everyone wants that. I didn’t want them to butcher my protege…but I didn’t want them to butcher the Patriarch either. I didn’t want them to butcher anyone. Why am I suddenly letting these monsters drag off terrified people to slaughter like animals? Why don’t I care when it happens? Who is this guy and what has he done with my character?
Why do I "have" to be someone who is morally gray? Why do I constantly have to suffer if I don’t? Why does it feel like there’s no place for me here?
Kukapetal, I chose that all shall be well and I didn’t get the choices you did, so I think the problem here specifically is that the game put a different spin on what things not being well (necessarily) would involve.
[quote=Guy Scrum]
At least I feel vindicated in my prior view that the Stags are a bunch of assholes. Now I know that they’re a bunch of assholes and I’ll do my best to avoid them in the future.[/quote]
Every faction in Fallen London is a bunch of assholes. And (prior to this story), compared to many of the groups most people here have no qualms about consorting with and working for, a bunch of drunken idiots who played annoying pranks were practically Boy Scouts. Why do so many people have so much contempt for them?