I can buy 80 tons of Darkdrop Coffee in Sunless Sea.
But I gotta grind in an extremely rare, limited, and difficult way to get ONE CUP.
[quote=Tystefy]I can buy 80 tons of Darkdrop Coffee in Sunless Sea.
But I gotta grind in an extremely rare, limited, and difficult way to get ONE CUP.[/quote]
What can we say, brewing the perfect coffee cup is an art.
[quote=Tystefy]I can buy 80 tons of Darkdrop Coffee in Sunless Sea.
But I gotta grind in an extremely rare, limited, and difficult way to get ONE CUP.[/quote]
Sacks, not tons - the exact quantities are a bit vague. In Sunless Sea you sell your sacks of coffee on the Wolfstack Exchange, presumably to various wholesaling corporate entities affiliated with or controlled by Mr Wines (who presides over all drinkables). You don’t sell the sacks directly to the coffee shops or to consumers. Mr Wines needs to wet his beak. You can have all the cups of coffee you want at Caligula’s.
Do you know how many people I know who think coffee is just pouring boiling water onto pre-ground beans through a paper filter? I actually had someone have the gall to say to me "tea’s tricky, but coffee’s supposed to taste awful." I was agog, I was aghast. There’s just as much fine preparation in coffee as in tea, if not more. My coffee setup is far from high-grade or expensive, but I can still manage a proper cup of espresso.
Also, the economy between FL and SS doesn’t always relate perfectly, in my experience… although it’s pretty close considering the two games have vastly different focus and scope. It’s worth pointing out you’re usually buying in considerable bulk in SS, whereas in FL you’re buying things for more personal consumption. The reason you can buy so much coffee in SS is 1) buying in bulk almost always results in the price being cheaper per unit, and 2) successful professional zee-captains make a lot more money than your average FL player, but also face far greater risk of permanent, true death.
Do you know how many people I know who think coffee is just pouring boiling water onto pre-ground beans through a paper filter? I actually had someone have the gall to say to me "tea’s tricky, but coffee’s supposed to taste awful." I was agog, I was aghast. There’s just as much fine preparation in coffee as in tea, if not more. My coffee setup is far from high-grade or expensive, but I can still manage a proper cup of espresso.
Also, the economy between FL and SS doesn’t always relate perfectly, in my experience… although it’s pretty close considering the two games have vastly different focus and scope. It’s worth pointing out you’re usually buying in considerable bulk in SS, whereas in FL you’re buying things for more personal consumption. The reason you can buy so much coffee in SS is 1) buying in bulk almost always results in the price being cheaper per unit, and 2) successful professional zee-captains make a lot more money than your average FL player, but also face far greater risk of permanent, true death.[/quote]
I dunno man, the price of real estate sure is higher in Sunless Sea (1.000 echoes compared to 50 echoes for comparable housing in both games).
I think, rather, that that particular menu in that particular cafe is being used in covert communication, in which case there is probably nothing terribly important about the thing being used. There are plentitudinous examples throughout Fallen London of arbitrary items being used in such a manner (and that doesn’t even touch on the subject of Illumination).
Clearly our FL townhouses are freakin’ tiny. I dunno. You’re right, though, that’s definitely one of the larger departures from FL’s general economy. I had forgotten about that.
A drop of darkness for those with dark business.
[quote=A Vision in Irem]You will break the ice on a wide pool. You will toss the relic in. When the waves settle, you will see falling snow and black bark. You will see two men standing in wintry woods. The younger will prove himself to the older. Others have done so before; others will do so after. The vision will change. The old man will sip coffee on a sunlit street. He will write an order. He will send a pawn below, to London.[/quote]
Normally I’d think the same thing, the players of the Great Game so so love their needlessly ubiquitous codes inserted into objects or places of everyday life. But in this case, I think it makes much more sense for your acquaintance to be interested in acquiring straightforward economic intelligence.
First, the card states the following: “You’ve an acquaintance who is particularly interested in this kind of minutiae.” Said acquaintance is not interested in a code or a hidden message, he’s interested in minutiae: precise details; small or trifling matters; what is for sale and for how much.
Second, consider how utterly inefficient and luck based the mission would be if the aim was to intercept a coded message. You’d be sending a bat on a journey of several weeks to hopefully steal a menu that might contain a secret code. If the bat arrives on a day when there isn’t a secret code hidden in the menu, then the whole trip is a total waste. If the bat steals the wrong section of the menu, then the whole trip is a total waste. But if your associate is merely interested in, say, café prices at a particular location, then all the bat has to do is steal a menu, any menu, rather than the right menu on the right day.
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edited by Anne Auclair on 7/17/2017
A drop of darkness for those with dark business.[/quote]
Vienna has also been the unofficial capital of world coffee culture since they first captured a bag of the beans from the Ottomans. I’m not sure there’s anything more to the connection than the obvious.
Normally I’d think the same thing, the players of the Great Game so so love their needlessly ubiquitous codes inserted into objects or places of everyday life. But in this case, I think it makes much more sense for your acquaintance to be interested in acquiring straightforward economic intelligence.
First, the card states the following: “You’ve an acquaintance who is particularly interested in this kind of minutiae.” Said acquaintance is not interested in a code or a hidden message, he’s interested in minutiae: precise details; small or trifling matters; what is for sale and for how much.
Second, consider how utterly inefficient and luck based the mission would be if the aim was to intercept a coded message. You’d be sending a bat on a journey of several weeks to hopefully steal a menu that might contain a secret code. If the bat arrives on a day when there isn’t a secret code hidden in the menu, then the whole trip is a total waste. If the bat steals the wrong section of the menu, then the whole trip is a total waste. But if your associate is merely interested in, say, café prices at a particular location, then all the bat has to do is steal a menu, any menu, rather than the right menu on the right day.[/quote]
If coffee prices were the true aim, why does the agent care what Joe Schmidt is charging his neighbors for coffee? He might drop them today to lure business from Johann Schmidt down the road, or raise them tomorrow to spite his neighbor with the sharp tongue. Either way, nobody is affected except the few hundred inhabitants of the village, if them. If I really wanted coffee intelligence, I’d want the prices in Rio, or on the Bourse. Those are the figures that have an impact.
On the other hand, how convenient would it be to my spy network to use Joe Schmidt’s out-of-the-way establishment for intelligence. I might post my vital intelligence straight from Berlin, but then I am at risk of it being intercepted by any agent who knows to keep a lookout for me and my employees. Much better to recruit Joe Schmidt by passing a few marks under the table in exchange for the right to set his coffee prices for him. Something interesting happens, you send Joe a letter with a few more marks and price; he changes the menu until he hears from you again. Assuming your intelligence is of a kind that won’t go stale quickly, then you have a notably more secure way station than using the Embassy’s diplomatic pouches.
Is it slow? Yes. So is sending a regular courier down the Travertine Spiral.
Is it an "utterly inefficient" human Rube Goldberg machine? Yes. Are there any operations of the Game that aren’t?
As to the acquaintance who "is particularly interested in this kind of minutiae," I think that the strongest hint of all that there’s more than minor end-user economics involved. It sets up a problem in the reader’s mind: Why is a Game operative interested in by-the-cup coffee prices in Schmidtsberg? Obviously he isn’t thinking about stopping in for a demitasse. The upshot of this unexpected interest is to make the reader feel that he or she is on the receiving end of a reversed dramatic irony: the character knows something the reader does not. This is of course precisely the situation one expects with the Game, which is all about hidden information and using pawns (witting or no) to pass it along. What precise information is contained in Joe Schmidt’s coffee prices? That is left tantalizingly unknown, but the hole serves, if anything, to underscore the complexity of the Game. Even the pieces don’t know what they’re really doing.
It’s also worth noting that cafés are a recurring trope in noir detective novels and pulp fiction. Spies (like artists) are expected to be sipping coffee in the corner, perhaps waiting for a contact, perhaps eavesdropping or keeping an eye on a mark. That, more than anything to do with actual coffee, connects the Great Game to any number of café references.
As a final note, don’t drink coffee in Schmidtsberg. It’s terrible and overpriced.
(Apologies to any actual Schmidtsberg that may or may not exist.)
The line of thinking I was using wasn’t "there’s revolutionary sentiment, and therefore coffee," and more "there’s coffee, and therefore revolutionary sentiment." You’re right in that it’s pure speculation and matching up concepts that could be entirely coincidental, but hey, that’s what we’re here for. Bold leaps of half-formed logic are the bread and butter of nutty Neathy thinkers.
Do we know that coffee prices in the village are Darkdrop coffee prices?
On the one hand, I have no problem accepting that abundant coffee, especially Darkdrop coffee, in the great coffeehouses of Vienna feeds Revolutionary and spy activity. Coffee sparks the imagination, fuels creativity and fires conversation, imagination, creativity and conversation combine to form dangerous thoughts, dangerous thoughts turn students into revolutionaries and revolutionaries attract spies.
On the other hand is any of this happening in a village? Doubt it.
Now if coffee prices are down in a village the may be down in Vienna. But I don’t know why you’d test coffee prices in a vollage. Maybe because a bat would be out or place in a Viennese coffeehouse?
One thing I’ve often wondered about is how Mr. Wines came to control the Darkdrop Coffee trade instead of Mr. Spices. Yes, coffee is a beverage, but the coffee beans themselves are indisputably a spice (coffee beans are now and then used to flavor food). And all of Mr. Wines’ other products are intoxicants - wines, absinthe’s, and special laudanums - so a pick-me-up like Darkdrop Coffee kind of clashes with his other holdings. Mr. Spices in contrast controls a diverse array of spices and condiments, everything from pepper & nutmeg to prisoners honey, so Darkdrop Coffee would fit right in.
So coffee is not clear cut territory, it looks more like the situation with London’s dirigibles. The dirigibles are controlled by Mr. Fires, but they could have just as easily been claimed by Mr. Veils or Mr. Cups, and they only went to Fires because he won a power struggle (one that required quite a bit of blood and capital, according to the Duchess). So, how did Mr. Wines get coffee instead of Spices? Was there a trade, with Spices giving up coffee in return for the rights to prisoners honey? Were the rights to coffee determined by a wager at a gaming table? Was there an outright war of economic competition and assassination that settled the question (the two are currently warring over Parabola’s riches, so they’re not adverse to fighting)? And during what city was this decided? So many questions.
Yet however it happened, I like to think that Mr. Spices really wants to get Darkdrop Coffee back, and that he’s nursing all kinds of schemes to one day reclaim it.
Mr. Slowcake and the Amanuensis both drink Darkdrop Coffee. That would explain how the Amanuensis manages to be so active in hunting down/surveying the notable. There might be a deeper significance to this coffee habit though, given Darkdrop’s connections to Anarchy and the Great Game.
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edited by Anne Auclair on 6/23/2018
That’s one way to keep your coffee hot!
[quote=Professor Strix][quote=Tystefy]I can buy 80 tons of Darkdrop Coffee in Sunless Sea.
But I gotta grind in an extremely rare, limited, and difficult way to get ONE CUP.[/quote]
What can we say, brewing the perfect coffee cup is an art.[/quote]
Especially since I imagine improperly brewed darkdrop coffee would either not work or kill you dead, possibly permanently or at least enough to send you to the tomb colonies