The hinterlands of Hell are abandoned. The lights of Balmoral are out. Moulin is aflame, the Hurlers are smouldering, ice melting into a new lake that already threatens to flood the Tracklayers’ city. Steam rises from the water where the sunlight falls. How long does any of this have?
Firmament Chapter Eight has arrived! Travel deep into the Apocrypha to chase the fire that has haunted your dreams. Explore the Antipelago in search of answers long overdue. Who wears a mask that looks like a friend? And what is concealed in the tangle of your own history?
Firmament is Fallen London’s current major expansion, a main story arc that’s free to all players. It begins once you have progressed the Railway as far as Ealing Gardens, although requires more progress in the Railway as chapters progress.
As part of this chapter, you’ll unlock permanent access to a new location: Stonegift. Traverse the heights of the balmy clifftops in search of quartz, converse with ancient lizards and trace the source of the guilt that lingers amidst the light.
Continue the story of Firmament from ‘Firmament: The Stacks Leaking’, in Queeneater’s Castle. If you’ve not yet begun Firmament, look for a card in London named ‘The Fire in the Looking Glass.’
The story itself has a little bit of a summary of events so far (the whole thing, not just the last chapter) first off. I did find it enough to orient me (and going the whole way back was helpful), but yeah, a more detailed summary like we’ve had for the last few would be nice.
Having cleared up the apocrypha, I enjoyed that story part quite a lot. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity though that it just uses the regular mechanics for entering the Stacks.
This worked for Venice, because it was a first time. But I’ve done a few hundred Stacks visits by now, and with the amount of build up this apocrypha got (needing equipment and to wait to go in. Needing to put all your friends on red alert before you do), I feel like it could have done with maybe 2 or 3 quick actions to circumvent the usual Stacks trip, and further build that sense that it was a special book.
But then again, this might just be because I basically lived in the Stacks for a few months while grinding for the Knighthood.
I thought the place with the lizards was going to be a small epilogue, but there’s a whole second chapter in here. And I gotta say, this is in a negative-space kinda way a very impression show of the FLPC’s significance. Because just look at what all these jokers get up to when I’m not the one taking care of things. Cripes.
Anyways impressive that I have a trilemma now and getting the Captivating Princess involved is not clearly the worst or even the best-worst option.
This Apocrypha was really interesting in terms of how things could go wildly different when taking into account certain what if.
On other matters, Rock climbing seems like an interesting way to trade Stuivers for echoes. well, as far as i have seen.
not sure if there’s an actual reward for getting to the farthest point in the climb, but i would not mind if it is.
Absolutely, I keep expecting to hit the End of Chapter and it keeps opening up in front of me. I’ll be interesting to see what the options I didn’t take do when the wiki catches up. So many cool options.
Climbing height: 160 something (I wonder how high that can go?)
My highest so far is 272 before I chickened out at 14 grip strength. I am curious to know what happens if you run out of grip strength … but perhaps not curious enough to test it on purpose!
I might be stuck… I’ve played all the options I can find and I’m still at “tested against quartz “ 1 and need 2. Do I just keep doing climbing until it changes? Or am I missing something?
(Edit) yep, just did a few more climbs and got it. Maybe I needed a particularly good climb (got over 200) or maybe not
I misjudged and ran out - you fall! You catch yourself partway down and end the run there, so it’s the same as finishing your climb except you lose some height and gain some wounds. And possibly the rewards are fewer? I haven’t checked the formulas.
I’m assuming that’s judicious use of moments of stillness, because that blows my mind (even with 160, I was relying on a lucky moment of rest pull and grinding down to under 10).
I haven’t really noticed Moments of Stillness doing anything, but I might be misusing them. I’m relying quite heavily on accelerate and I’m not sure that’s useful.
So uh… where’s everyone getting their fluids? I had barely 60 Starved Expression going into this chapter and as you can imagine that doesn’t get you very far.
Climbing might be the most mechanically interesting new activity we’ve seen since the Stacks, and it doesn’t even use cards! Y’all are putting me to shame, my high score so far is 90. I’m sure RNG is part of that because I often don’t get Momentum options until the latter half. I’m pretty sure there’s a cut-off to obtain Tested by the Quartz, not sure what it is exactly but if I were to guess it’s maybe 75.
I’d built up a massive surplus of Memories of Much Stranger Self. So I hopped over to Queeneaters and liquidated 50 of them to purchase 700 starved extract. There really isn’t a good place to get them outside of the shops, it seems.
Not sure if this is it, but both of my runs that got me Tested Against the Quartz were ones where I had Flexibility, Static Charge, and Acceleration–the runs where I didn’t get all three did not get me Quartz points.
Folks on Reddit seem to think it’s about ending the run with <10 grip strength.
I finally got to the end of this chapter, meaning a lock condition of The Date. That was W I L D. The initial foray into the Stacks that begins the chapter seemed a bit rushed to me but in retrospect there’s good reason for that. I need more people to reach it so I have someone to talk with about it.
We also now have a very solid explanation of the overarching narrative.
