Really enjoyed this one! Great choices, action, and rewards. Wish I could play it again to take advantage of my zubmarine; but gaining knowledge, taking the Excursionist’s prize, and spiting the sequence was absolutely perfect for me.
So, it’s called the Icarian Cup because the winner zails too close to THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN?
I for one have put it on hold while I grind up some Use of Villains to pay for a faster ship. Even if there’s no explicit tie-in I just don’t feel right competing in the old rust bucket.
You’ll be pleased to hear, there are options for an explicit tie-in!
I agree. Though I wonder why the "Dawnburnt" quality doesn’t go to 2 when you choose that ending if you already had it. If you are clearly making choices to be exposed to the geode or any of the New Sequence items, you’d think any qualities you have with those would go up.
Ugh, I had my heart set on helping the Zeefarer, but she can’t appreciate my yacht, so the Excursionist it is.
She loved my Zubmarine. She probably prefers fast and/or novel zee-going vessels, not ones meant for pleasure.
This was a lot of fun!
I went with the ‘Topsy Queen’, and it was a amusing to see she has her own Moby crab :P
It’s a pity though that in the end I didn’t have an option to give the sapphires to her, and to tell the Excursionist that he’s better off without the devil.
Having opted for the swiftest ship it appears that it’s not an option you can choose to offer to either competitor - unlike the Zubmarine or Yacht. Later in the race there were some ambiguous mentions of "your yacht" but nothing mentioning the Swift Zee-Clipper.
I’m mildly disappointed to discover I can’t compete on my own behalf - I am after all a A Zee-Voyager of Note! However that would be a rather different story and I enjoyed this immensely - particularly the bits of flavour around many familiar locations along the route.
Dagforth chose the Experienced Zailor challenges in each case. I’d like to see echoes for the Zee Story options to see how they differ. Also,
sabotage and the DM supremacy choices
edited by Dagforth on 12/12/2020
It was a fun story and I liked the characters a lot, they grew on me despite the rough start. They both have their noses so far up in the air, there are probably Starved Men living in them; and then you learn more about their motivations and what they would do when shit hits the fan. However I too was disappointed I was not deemed a worthy enough Captain to enter the race, and that “your racing yacht” at the end rubbed zalt into the wound. We part ways at Carnelian with both the Zeefarer and the Excursionist, I don’t have a ride home, let alone a yacht of my own :/
Also, if I may ask, who the devil charted the route of that race? How the dickens did we reach Mutton Island via the Salt Lions and Gaider’s Mourn? Did we really see Hunter’s Keep to the south of us or are we just throwing names at random lights and hoping for the best?
That initially seemed off to me too but it’s easy to justify if you think of the race as having to visit certain places in order, as opposed to a simple straight shot to Port Carnelian. There seemed to be crowds anticipating our arrival at each major landmark so presumably the Admiralty had people in place to verify that the competitors had been sighted at each waypoint and not taken shortcuts.
Or to put it another way - the race course is deliberately zig-zaggy rather than being as the zee-bat flies. It might be nice if the story supported this directly, possibly they’re just leaning very heavily on the treachery of zee-charts.
edited by Dagforth on 12/17/2020
1 Like
That could have been an acceptable explanation if the choice of locations wasn’t so. I mean. Mutton Island? It’s right next to London, you can go there for an afternoon picnic if you fancy. I can understand going east at first and then heading south for Port Carnelian, but somehow we go east for days and days and then appear pretty much where we started. I know the Unterzee shifts occasionally, but London, The Cumean Canal, The Iron Republic, they are all fixed to the western shore of the map, they can’t suddenly appear in the middle of the zee.
edited by CompanionNPC on 12/17/2020
“Oh, I get to pick a quirk to raise? I guess I’ll pick either the Subtle or the Daring option, since both of those got knocked down to 14 not long ago. Hm, I like the Daring one better.”
[quote]Daring has not increased from 14 because it’s higher than 12.
Subtle is dropping… [/quote]
Son of a…
[quote=PJ]"Oh, I get to pick a quirk to raise? I guess I’ll pick either the Subtle or the Daring option, since both of those got knocked down to 14 not long ago. Hm, I like the Daring one better."
[quote]Daring has not increased from 14 because it’s higher than 12.
Subtle is dropping… [/quote]
Son of a…[/quote]
At least it’s still high enough to use a faction item to raise it back up. The church, constables, and docks faction items all raise subtle (with their action that consumes the item), as long as you’re fine losing heartless (church) or forceful (the other two).
I literally made a forum account just to comment on this ES. I absolutely adored it, I think this is my favourite ES of all time (though I haven’t quite done all of them). The writing was extremely good, the choices clearly laid out what I was choosing without revealing what would happen, I was rewarded for having an end-game character with good stats and cool stuff, and probably most importantly I got the exact result I wanted.
The one thing I needed to ask is please, PLEASE give us more of the Zeefarer. I have never gotten so attached to a FL character so quickly. I’m also not like, a particularly shippy or romantic player at all but I very badly need my character to be able to marry the Zeefarer, or at least have her as a more long-term companion, after all she went through to earn her trust, work together, and then save her. The Zeefarer would trust me with her life and I would very much like to let her. As soon as I returned to London I began proceedings to separate from my current spouse; I know that no matter if I am ever able to see the Zeefarer again, my current marriage would continue on as a farce. I just hope we can get more eventually.
Literally the first thought I had when I saw the title.
Delightful story. I adored both the Zeefarer and the Excursionist, and reveled in my ability to put my Zubmarine to good use.
As a fan of Sunless Sea this ES was great fun to me, though I share the sentiment that some cartographical circumstances seemed too unusual.
The writing was great though. “This will accomplish nothing and gain you a wound”. Exactly the kind of principled stance I live to make.
Although I usually make the choice that creates the greatest chaos and upheaval (even though I’m usually Subtle and Steadfast), I foiled the Dawn Machine’s plan out of concern for the Excursionist. Seeing the Admiral happy (almost as happy as when you sell him a death ray) was also a big plus.
The only thing that might make this story better would be encountering your character from Sunless Sea. I mean, there doesn’t have to be an Eschatologue-class passing through like a flash, but something depending on your meta-qualities might work for that.
Did anyone actually lose the race? What prompts you to go t Grand Geode then? Does a crew member escape and message the other competitor like you would or are you going out of general concern, or for the Admirals request?
----[SPOILER ALERT!]----
Everybody seems to stan this story so much, it’s a Fallen London story so I like it by default overall ;) but I actually have some nitpicky criticisms as well. Constructive, hopefully. I seem to be in a minority that liked the previous "Older, not Wiser" story better.
I didn’t like the storytelling device of "just happened to be at exactly the right place at exactly the right time to eavesdrop on the conversation of exactly the right characters talking about the exact location of where I needed to go". I had the impression that Grand Geode was pretty pretty big. At the very least I would prefer the characters to actually remark at the incredible coincidence that this consists. Would make it a bit more tolerable.
Second criticism is that I didn’t see any reason to choose the Excursionist over the Zeefarer. You don’t get to know anything interesting or out-of-the-ordinary about Excursionist that would make me go "I want to know more", no obvious character "hook", so to speak. He’s a posh arrogant upper class narcissist and he likes devils and (known only later) has fallen in love with one (who? we don’t know). Nothing really unusual for Fallen London. Whereas the Zeefarer - BOOM! - a tough badass woman captain with a fiercely loyal crew who has a talking boot translating her unusual vernacular (I loved trying to piece together the meaning without relying on the boot’s translations!). Like, the asymmetry here is staggering in my opinion (not to mention it’s basically 2 characters vs one, if you count the boot). Maybe you learn more interesting things about the Excursionist later on, but you have to choose one of the two before that. And the comments above seem to confirm this - most seem to have chosen the Zeefarer. In short: his choice wasn’t advertised the best.
I also thought that this story falls a little too much into videogame storytelling tropes. Like you can’t write much about the "blank slate" player character, so you pretty much follow around other people who are the main characters of a story, but then again, you have so much power over them, pretty much deciding all the crucial things for them and solving any of their problems, that they come off as slightly inept. I would love for them to have more agency, independence.
And then you get all the rewards in the end. I felt the story goes out of its way to remind you how awesome you are a little too much. Like, Fallen London overall does that a lot, but usually at least it feels tongue-in-cheek, humorous and witty and then you get a bit of of the cosmic existential horror for balance. Here it felt a bit too much like World of Warcraft. Too much sugar. I felt a quite strong inkling to go SMEN after that for detox ;)
My last comment is not really a criticism because I don’t know how the story would play out with different choices. I chose to leave the Excursionist as "too far gone". I just hope that the other choice would not result in simply saving the E. and everybody living happily ever after. Which would probably happen in many other games. But that would make it a faux-choice - who in the right mind wouldn’t choose to save someone if there was no price to pay? Unless out of some spite. So I assume the choice to save him would result either in someone dying or him living the rest of his life unhappy yearning for the Sun, resentful that we severed him from his "true purpose" or something else similarily unpleasant. There has to be a price to pay, each option should have its downsides for it to remain an interesting choice and not an obvious pick.
Hm, nobody mentioned this in this thread but the precise location of each island in Sunless Sea is randomised for each playthrough. There was some explanation that the maps are unreliable etc.
[quote=NNNnobody]
Did anyone actually lose the race? What prompts you to go to Grand Geode then? Does a crew member escape and message the other competitor like you would or are you going out of general concern, or for the Admirals request?[/quote]
I don’t know if that’s what you mean by "losing" but I sabotaged the Zeefarer and was second and I found the Excursionist ship floating abandoned so I convinced the Zeefarer to go to Geode to look for him because it’s the right thing to do. In the end, the Excurcionist’s fate was sealed in the Geode.
Finally got around to this one and adored it. I went with the excursionist, which appears to be an unpopular choice, but I figured I’d let the zeefarer have her saphires and rescue to lovestruck fool from the Dawn Machine. The ending ended up being quite a nice wrap-up and I really enjoyed making the admiral’s day. Overall probably my favorite story from Harry Tuffs.