So far I have rather enjoyed helping restore Polmere & Plenty’s Inconceivable Circus. Yes, it’s a choiceless set of fetch-quests, but the story text has all been very nice. Completing tasks, attending performances, and watching the circus gradually improve (and thus pay out more sky-stories) is great fun. My only quibble is that attending a performance should definitely reduce Terror. This is a circus, after all. Are we not entertained? Maybe a performance could cure 5 terror, plus another 5 for each restored act to a maximum total of 25.
Or rather, that was my only quibble until my most recent visit. I had distributed posters, acquired goose-costumes, and reunited the twins. I’d contacted the carpenter at Port Avon, and was scooting around between other ports while looking out for cantakeri. When I stopped in at the circus to write a report on my way back to New Winchester, the strongwoman told me she needed more posters put up in Port Prosper and the Reserve and the clown asked for more goose-costumes. Two-thirds of my work had been undone! I feel much less motivated to go out of my way for the circus now that I know the story and game benefits are only temporary. The only reason I hadn’t fixed up the magician’s act yet was because I hadn’t seen any cantakeri, so the situation feels rather beyond my control.
Recurring circus repairs could be a nice way to extend P&P’s story, but I think it could do with several improvements.
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Acts should only fall back into disrepair after all four acts have been repaired at least once. If I’d finished the circus and then come back to requests for more stuff, I’d want to repair the cool circus I made. Instead, I made some progress on the circus and saw it washed away like a sandcastle in a rising tide, which makes me question whether fully repairing the circus is even worth a try.
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Only one act should fall into disrepair at a time. I’m expecting one of the twins to have fled by the next time I visit. I’m not going even an inch out of my way for the strongwoman or clown until I’ve got some cantakeri legs, because for all I know they’d just fall apart again before I finished up the magician’s boxes.
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Second and subsequent repairs should not always be identical to the first round of repairs. I believe I need to stick the posters back up at Port Prosper and the Nature Reserve, and acquire replacement goose costumes from the same port where I got the first set (Traitor’s Wood, if memory serves). That’s kinda boring. Much more interesting would be if the strongwoman wanted to draw more visitors by expanding advertising to, say, Lustrum and Magdalene’s, or if the clown wanted the new costumes to come from Titania. There’s already some randomness with the magician (the sort of creature necessary for the repairs), and extending that to the other acts would be a nice expansion of what’s currently there.
edited by Anchovies on 9/18/2017