August's Exceptional Story: The Attendants

Fallen London
101

[quote=slickriptide]I really don’t understand the thrust of the narrative at all.

Not the plot - I get that.

What I don’t get is why it was presented as if it was one kind of story (a mystery) and it turned out to be… nothing at all.

The gathering at a party in a house full of artifacts and mirrors that lead to dreamworlds. A missing host. A seemingly sinister Assistant. A seance. A mysterious warning. Violence being done to the guests.

And in the end… it really was just a game of Hide and Seek with, apparently, an over-eager Seeker. It’s like someone thought it would be clever to flip the genre on its head or something.

To top it off, though, the closing narrative keeps presenting choices that seem to encourage the PC to interfere with the project. There’s a certain writing style in Fallen London where you have a &quotdefault&quot choice, and then you have a &quotbe a wild card&quot choice, where the former is worded &quotdo something&quot while the latter is worded &quotdo something destructive. Maybe you don’t trust them, or maybe you’re just feeling evil today&quot.

The choice to sabotage things is written as if it’s the &quotdefault&quot and the choice to let things proceed without interfering is written as if it’s the &quotMaybe you just feel nice today&quot choice; as if it’s the alternative that most people would not or should not choose.

Likewise, the opportunities to further sabotage the event by convincing everyone to leave - Even as a newish player with moderate persuasive stats, all of my opportunities were 100% success. There was no question at all whether my choice to sabotage the host’s goals would lead to everyone leaving.

The only question was - why do it? Especially since, despite the Assistant dragging them into the temple bound like prisoners and with a sour look on her face at my having got there before her, it turned out that nothing sinister was actually going on.

I guess, maybe, if I was strong on Connected To The Masters or something, maybe; but otherwise, I can’t see any reason why I’d choose to blow up the whole shebang except for the sheer joy of being chaotic.

In the end, it feels like the writers played a joke on me - &quotLook, you thought you were getting one kind of story and in the end it’s just a big prank! Surprise!&quot[/quote]

Sometimes a cigar is a just a cigar.

[spoiler]In this case, the dinner party is, in fact, just a dinner party. The clues and slightly sinister game of hide-and-seek were, in the end, just very elaborate parlor games. However, the overall intent of the party is still not what it seems, nor entirely innocent; every homey touch and every tantalizing mystery are meant to pique old feelings of nostalgia and enthusiasm for the final piece de resistance that is the Temple.

You were brought in because the Antiquarian was having second thoughts about manipulating his dearest old friends into helping him fulfill his hopes for immortality at the expense of their own liberty. Since you weren’t part of the original coterie your judgement won’t be clouded by sentimentality, and because he hasn’t told his Assistant about you she isn’t prepared to gull you into going along with the plan.

Not everything in the neath is a descent into darkness into deeper darkness down to the deepest dark grimdarkness. Not every adventure is a doomed lifeburg hunt, not every priory is the Chapel of Lights - if it were, the Chapel of Lights would become trite and meaningless.

While this story wasn’t especially dark, it still involved a good bit of skullduggery. It also held an interesting investigation and puzzle game, a complete curveball of a plot twist, and some very interesting lore reveals about the Second City and Parabola.

But ultimately this story is all about other people’s histories, and you are just and interloper passing through as a favor to an old friend. You aren’t the arbiter of their fates, and your final choice is whether you’re willing to follow through with your friend’s wishes and try to help everyone sort out their emotionally entangled histories or just blow that pop stand and leave them to sort out their own mess. You do get a choice as to whether or not you want to interfere with the construction of the Temple via that sabotage option, but you don’t get to make up anyone’s mind for them about staying. You’re just choosing whether to see it through and find out what they decide. And in a way I’m more comfortable with that than in some of the cases like HOJOTOHO! or The Heart, the Devil and the Zee where you had to pick someone’s future for them (or worse the particularly frustrating Our Lady of Pyres where you sort of get railroaded into doing so without realizing it). These characters are (at least in theory) independent persons, after all, who make decisions about their own lives just as I do about mine.[/spoiler]

1 Like
102

Indeed.

Which is why it’s disappointing that instead of options to &quotFind out what XXX wants to do&quot we only get options to &quotConvince XXX to leave&quot.[/quote]
I agree that the wording is frustrating. The overall intent seems really to be to probe their commitment in staying on to work on the Temple versus returning to their own lives.

103

Then the intention was a failure.

There were two options - Leave, or leave and take one or more people with you. There was zero chance of failure at doing the latter. The echoes provided in this thread make that clear. Exercising the option to &quotconvince X to leave&quot did exactly that - it made the person leave. It didn’t ask the person for his or her feelings about the Antiquarian, his or her career, family, things left behind, etc…

It was pretty much just, &quotYou’re leaving? Okay, I guess you know best. I’ll go with you.&quot

There was no way to actually do what the Antiquarian asked, which was to get an honest answer from the friends. It was all about imposing the player’s own will on the conclusion and picking your own ending, so to speak.
edited by slickriptide on 8/1/2017

104

Then the intention was a failure.

There were two options - Leave, or leave and take one or more people with you. There was zero chance of failure at doing the latter. The echoes provided in this thread make that clear. Exercising the option to &quotconvince X to leave&quot did exactly that - it made the person leave. It didn’t ask the person for his or her feelings about the Antiquarian, his or her career, family, things left behind, etc…

It was pretty much just, &quotYou’re leaving? Okay, I guess you know best. I’ll go with you.&quot

There was no way to actually do what the Antiquarian asked, which was to get an honest answer from the friends. It was all about imposing the player’s own will on the conclusion and picking your own ending, so to speak.
edited by slickriptide on 8/1/2017[/quote]

[color=#e53e00](You actually could fail to persuade them. That so few people did is interesting - and suggests we should look at how we set the difficulty level.) Please don’t consider this a ‘well actually’, but a ‘this discussion is useful, thank you’. [/color]

1 Like
105

Thanks for the clarification.

But please do note that even if this was a 50% chance for all players, the problem is still this:

  • Antiquarian: &quotI only want them to stay if they really want to. Please find out, since you’re a neutral party.&quot[/li][li]Player character: Convince them all to leave.[/li][li]Player: Huh?
1 Like
106

Then the intention was a failure.

There were two options - Leave, or leave and take one or more people with you. There was zero chance of failure at doing the latter. The echoes provided in this thread make that clear. Exercising the option to &quotconvince X to leave&quot did exactly that - it made the person leave. It didn’t ask the person for his or her feelings about the Antiquarian, his or her career, family, things left behind, etc…

It was pretty much just, &quotYou’re leaving? Okay, I guess you know best. I’ll go with you.&quot

There was no way to actually do what the Antiquarian asked, which was to get an honest answer from the friends. It was all about imposing the player’s own will on the conclusion and picking your own ending, so to speak.
edited by slickriptide on 8/1/2017[/quote]

[color=#e53e00](You actually could fail to persuade them. That so few people did is interesting - and suggests we should look at how we set the difficulty level.) Please don’t consider this a ‘well actually’, but a ‘this discussion is useful, thank you’. [/color][/quote]

I would really like to just be able to ask them about their opinions on staying and then decide if I want to convince them otherwise or not. When choosing if I wanted my stat-maxed character to try to talk them out of it or not, I found myself with a complete lack of context and ended up just leaving with a weird unfinished feeling to the story.

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107

So I generally agree that we needed something here to guide our decision on whether or not to convince people to leave. Making other people’s decisions for them seems to be an ES staple, and if I’m going to be put in such an awkward position, then I’d like to at least have enough information to go on.

Can I be honest, though? The thing I wish I had more than anything else was an opportunity to look around. I don’t necessarily mean a Tanah-Chook-size location, but come on: it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore a Second City palace in Parabola. Who wouldn’t want to poke around some? Everyone else gets to wander about in awe, but all the PC gets to do is to conduct interviews. For an episode set in one of the most brilliant settings Fallen London has ever created, it’s rather a letdown.

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108

Speaking for myself -

There were two things I needed: context and investment.

I think maybe the context was intended to be there but it was too subtle. For instance, in retrospect, seeing the Esoteric Amateur in the library sitting out the game because a game of Hide and Seek was “too much excitement” was maybe supposed to suggest to the player that he might not do well in a perpetual “in the field” environment; books were more his forte than actual archaeology, let alone a commitment to a kind of life-long anthropology.

I never even saw the other “hiders” except from a distance, so if there were similar cues about their personalities during the game, I didn’t get a chance to read them.

Unfortunately, because the choice was presented as “convince him to leave”, I was immediately asking myself, “why am I doing this?”. If the choice had been “consider what you know about the Amateur”, and a choice to engage in conversation where “convince him to leave” was one of two or three choices,then I might instead have gone back over my saved echoes and thought about what seemed best for him.

As to investment - there wasn’t any, for me. I didn’t know these people except possibly by reputation (given that the Garrulous Novelist is supposed to be semi-famous). Whether they stayed or returned to London was all the same to me. There was nothing at stake, which then made my determination to “convince them to leave” all the more inexplicable.

Heck, the Radical Archaeologist is, apparently, still an archaeologist even though he’s no longer “in the field”. What is he currently doing, then? Is that work more important than helping an Egyptian princess build a sanctuary for people to escape the next falling city that drops on their heads? Who knows?

And, honestly, there’s still the issue that from the outset, the party appears to be more like something out of an Agatha Christie novel and that having it turn out to be something else entirely just makes the whole thing feel anti-climactic. And, of course, the Courteous Assistant who is not at all Courteous just adds to the whole “gotcha” feel of the story for me.

On a different note - While I was aware of Fallen London for some time, I came to the game as a player because of Sunless Sea. As a newish player, I’m a bit surprised that “mirror travel” appears to be so easy. I was under the impression that there was some effort involved, up to and including losing your mind.

109

&quotUp to and including losing your mind&quot is in the small print for most Fallen London endeavors, truth be told. Most of the time, of course, losing your mind is what causes movement through the mirror for the average London citizen. (For humans, at least; sorrow-spiders are another matter.) In this story, it seems pretty clear that the Assistant’s ability as a Glassman (though she is not specifically described as such) and her familiarity with the palace are responsible for the transition through the mirrors. It is clearly not easy in and of itself; after all, the statement is made (was it on the mirror? I can’t remember now) that after whatever disaster befell in the House of the Feather, those of the Second City searched for the Palace and could not find it, that she only found it because she was dangerously deep in honey-dreams, and that (in her opinion, anyway) she is the only one capable of opening the mirrors into the palace. All of this points to the party being a singular, well-orchestrated event, not a typical speculotransitive event.

110

The resolution to this story gives me the impression that the story was originally longer, and some material was left on the cutting-room floor.

If that is in fact the case, I’m sure the decision was for the best. The three acts (dinner, hide-and-seek, and Parabola) are all mechanically interesting, the last two are quite rich with lore, and the pacing for the whole story is quite good. But the denouement seems to be relying on a set-up that wasn’t delivered. I wonder if that set-up was originally planned (and possibly even written), but got removed because it made the story unwieldy.

I also think that the final conversations with the other attendees might have been better-structured as a player choice, rather than stat-checks. Aside from the fact that checks are inherently different to implement when the target audience could have persuasive anywhere between 25 and 250, it’s not clear to me that convincing them to leave is &quotwinning&quot the conversation. I was caught between the choice of wanting one outcome for my character, but as a player not wanting to miss out on text. I appreciate difficult decisions in Fallen London but that’s a kind of meta-gaming decision that isn’t what I’m looking for.

1 Like
111

A beautiful, sweet. sentimental story, full of romance and love and compassion. I love it. The characters are warm and delightful, the hints of backstory are fascinating (puzzling out the identities of the princesses was a lot of fun), and the ending is thoroughly satisfying. I feel like there was strong motivation for my character do do everything they did, and their own personality developed quite a bit as well over the course of the evening. I hope to see the Adoratrice again in the future. ^_~
[li]
edited by Gul al-Ahlaam on 8/2/2017

112

Can someone tell me the identities of the statues? &quot One in supplication, one with a knife at her breast, one with a sword in her hand, another an ankh clasped in prayer, one with her eyes to the sun, and one looking to some further horizon.&quot

113

The statues I recognized with reducing confidence:

Ankh - the symbol of life, the Pilgrim towards the Mountain;
Eyes to the sun - the Lost, probably the one choose to stay in the lands of the true sun;
Supplication - also religious, possibly the Sacrifice in the temple;
Further horizon - maybe the Priestess, the second and the heroine of this story.

So I tried to follow the order in that paragraph, it might be:
1 Supplication, the 1st daughter the Sacrifice;
2 Knife at breast, the 3rd daughter the Vengeance;
3 Sword in hand, maybe the 4th daughter the Hostage (no reason except the sequence);
4 Ankh, the 5th daughter the Pilgrim;
5 Eyes to the sun, the 6th daughter the Lost;
6 Further horizon, the 2nd the Prietess and the heroine of this story.

Just move the heroine to the last. I prefer this one only because I can’t find another reasonable matching. Of course there can be other ways of matching and for the 4th daughter it is too far-fetched.
edited by Fadewalker on 8/3/2017

114

So is there any interesting mechanical or lore benefit to getting everyone to leave?

I already made the mistake once before of taking the more mechanically interesting path for “additional content” only to end up with nothing special to show for it, and a completely out-of-character decision taken. I don’t want to do it again, but on the other hand, if there is interesting stuff, I don’t really want to miss out on a whole chunk of story just like that.

115

There does not seem to be.

116

Adding my two cents after playing the story this week. I had much the same reaction as many on here that the choices at the end were not related to the actual story. I waited after playing to see if my feeling about it changed, but it didn’t. It does sometimes feel like a method of mechanically doing things gets in the way of the wonderful stories that we get every month. I do understand that this is a game, but maybe a little less game might be nice for these stories sometimes.

I say this because I like the story ideas quite a lot! So maybe a little less getting them to fit into particular mechanisms and we can all just have a cup of tea and enjoy some new lore and new characters! And in case it isn’t obvious, I do look forward to these stories and I really appreciate all the work - just offering my viewpoint on what makes them good! Thanks! --Becca aka Felicity Anne Stratford

117

Then the intention was a failure.

There were two options - Leave, or leave and take one or more people with you. There was zero chance of failure at doing the latter. The echoes provided in this thread make that clear. Exercising the option to &quotconvince X to leave&quot did exactly that - it made the person leave. It didn’t ask the person for his or her feelings about the Antiquarian, his or her career, family, things left behind, etc…

It was pretty much just, &quotYou’re leaving? Okay, I guess you know best. I’ll go with you.&quot

There was no way to actually do what the Antiquarian asked, which was to get an honest answer from the friends. It was all about imposing the player’s own will on the conclusion and picking your own ending, so to speak.
edited by slickriptide on 8/1/2017[/quote]

[color=#e53e00](You actually could fail to persuade them. That so few people did is interesting - and suggests we should look at how we set the difficulty level.) Please don’t consider this a ‘well actually’, but a ‘this discussion is useful, thank you’. [/color][/quote]
I wonder to some degree if that is a reflection of a high ratio of POSI participating in the exceptional stories. They are designed to be playable by all levels, though.

I’m still curious about the the &quotFriendship of the Company&quot quality influences the story, if at all. Having the dialogues be quality-driven would have made a bit more sense than a simple persuasion check.

118

Thanks for the clarification.

But please do note that even if this was a 50% chance for all players, the problem is still this:

  • Antiquarian: &quotI only want them to stay if they really want to. Please find out, since you’re a neutral party.&quot[/li][li]Player character: Convince them all to leave.[/li][li]Player: Huh?

Yeah, the wording is awkward. I really had to think about it for a while. If the choice was just &quotSpeak with X person&quot I think it would have made more sense for the apparent narrative of the story

119

This. I didn’t see it actually get used anywhere.
Same goes for your drunkenness tracker.

This seems to support the theory proposed above that some content was intended to be in the story, and was cut. If there was a more lengthy scene where you talked to each guest and got to know their opinions and attitudes, it would also make sense for your closeness to their clique to play a part in how much they open up to you, while being drunk would understandably make it harder to convince anyone either way.
If this had been the case, maybe they’d have had varying opinions, and you could get a more interesting/better ending by convincing everyone to stick together - whether it be leaving or staying. For instance, getting everyone to leave would let you drag the Antiquarian along (as it does now), while getting everyone to stay would net you some extra lore from the grateful princess - while having them split up would just leave you with &quotand then these went home with you while these stayed, the end&quot (in a similar vein to the current ending should you not attempt to convince anyone). Plus, if these checks were based on the Friendship and drunkenness, it would be stat-agnostic, and thus there would be no problem with scaling difficulty.

Of course, that entire wall of text is just pure wishful thinking of no practical value, but maybe it might provide some food for thought.

120

My understanding was that drunkenness made challenges harder, while the friendship quality made it easier to persuade people to leave.