Has anyone passed the very low chance test at the end of all things? I’m curious as to the various outcomes of this terribleness.
EDIT: Also, is it a real test? I’ve noticed switching my equipment doesn’t move the value from 10% and mousing over produces no information about calculation. Could just be bugged for me, but it’s interesting if it’s actually just a straight option disguised as a long shot?
There are screenshots of the text from passing the challenge, on Reddit and I am told the Discord.
It’s possible to implement “fake” challenges, there’s at least two Exceptional Stories built around the concept. This one is real. Probably just using an astronomically high challenge value. No reason they can’t set it to like 500.
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True. I was surprised it stayed at 10% even as I dropped my stat to 2 then 0. It’s possible it’s a glitch on my end. Or the test might be incredibly wide (moving increments of 20 or something, as you say).
Also, man that ending was stunning. More than justifies the work to get there I love clone stories where it’s possible to keep both going. The build up was immaculate. Though I’ll need a little time to digest the twist.
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Does anyone have an echo of Tatterdemalion’s guilt lightning in Quartz’s Roots? I intercepted it but accidentally clicked forward before reading the result.
This should be it:
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Just finished the chapter!
If I understand right, we now know the history of this event and why it’s all happening, right? Let me see if I’ve got it.
The Fire wants to wake Storm so it destroys the Neath, as punishment for the Neath’s crimes. Problem: Storm is so good that he can eat Neath-destroying calamities in his sleep. So the fire wants to bring as many calamities as possible out from alternate histories and into reality to get storm to wake the F up.
So the fire goes around opening breaches to these fake calamitous histories and bringing those calamities into reality. The endless flood via Naples. The Spirit of Burgundy. A few Creditor calamities and the crack in the roof calamity. Mixing up the apocryphal and the real.
Then to make sure he stays a step ahead of would-be fixers, the fire transforms itself into Tatterdemalion and tags along, “helping”. Tatterdemalion helps defeat the Vulgate which would have excised some of those calamities.
These last ones were supposed to finish you off since you were supposed to come smack-dab face-to-face with your apocryphal double, causing problems. But you escaped, one way or the other, and now know what’s up. Firedemalion escapes to Parabola to try to wake Storm another way.
Do I have that right?
And one more question - So, is the player character originally an apocrypha? A while ago, there was this theory that like the Duchess, the PC must be from an alternate history since they could see the alternate histories and navigate the stacks. Is that the case?
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Omg, omg, o.m.fucking g. I’m too hyped up to write more reasonably about this. This chapter was INCREDIBLE! I kept expecting it to be over and satisfied with it even at the point when it would have been a short chapter, but again and again getting more; lots of engaging and new elements with a fresh-feeling rhythm, things getting more tense and dramatic and threads resolving into clarity in spite of how complex everything’s been, and those little accumulating hints of something that started growing recognition in my bones even though I couldn’t fully know it yet AND THEN THAT ENDING
A textbook-perfect revelation/betrayal, as soon as it was revealed I 100% knew it and always should have known it, but totally took me by surprise anyway. That bastard! My friend!
I was so into this chapter I was halfway keeping a running commentary in this post and halfway throwing sudden incomprehensible comments out loud to my poor wife, but then that ending just so overwhelmed everything that I had to post about that first and foremost. But in case anyone wants some random and rambly comments, spoilering judiciously so it’s not a wall of undifferentiated spoilerness:
Long ramblings
The early parts of this chapter felt quite refreshing, both because of the different rhythm between the various apocrypha and new location giving it a different shape, and because the nostalgia of the first apocryphal London and the lushness and…ancient? impersonal? non-human? feel of the strangenesses of Stonegift had a really different vibe from the various horror-tinged and/or esoteric-feeling settings prior, as cool as they were. Also, I love the lizards!
In the first breach, I really enjoyed the descriptions of our familiar world; that sense of nostalgia softening everything - I would have expected them to go the other direction, with everything just a little bit wrong and feeling unsettling, but I absolutely bought that this slightly bittersweet affection would be what I’d feel about a recent almost-past, that love for a moment you normally can never return to. The description of Virginia “looking at you like a cat that has watched her human eat her mouse” is wonderful. A favourite bit was in our lodgings, the coyness about the slippers made me grin!
Clarity was really good this chapter, even though it was bringing in so much of the previous chapters that had been hard to understand, they did a great job of laying out everything enough to feel grounded in what was happening and why, while still dealing in quite a lot of mystery mysteriously enough to keep it surprising. There were several choices that were incredibly difficult to make, but difficult because they were so important and emotional and heavy, the information I had felt fair and like I had as much a sense of what the outcomes might mean as was reasonable in a complex but comprehensible situation.
When arriving at the new Roof location, a small detail, but I found it quite compelling to have the option to try and save the climber, in spite of 0% chance of success (assuming that’s true for everyone, maybe the fast ship people did have a chance, but given there’s no way to improve one’s chances with items, my suspicion is that the intention was that it’s impossible). Possibly for resonant echoing I should have made the near-impossible choice later, but I didn’t.
Things getting to feel more chaotic with every round - a seven-quality challenge!? Seven! In the second one, they really did a bang-up job picking us the worst board ever - I laughed multiple times at the total disaster of it all - and I agree with psgarak, it was rather gratifying to see how much the universe needs us. Summer’s reaction of “Fascinating seeing so many people make mistakes I could make worse much faster.” I enjoyed the Discordance option, but landed up going with the Drummer; somehow it seemed kinder than just even more unexisting the situation that already doesn’t exist, which, apparently I care about being kind to non-existant situations.
In the 3rd, I’m curious what the mention of Mr. Mirrors was like for non-Nemesis people, I assume it had to be a bit different (or has it come up for the FLPC in another story I can’t think of)? When the roof seal failed, I gasped out loud at the fact that I found myself feeling gratitude and hope towards the Dawn Machine!
For the big choice, I landed up dying, couldn’t bring myself to take the risk with trying to master the Dawn Machine. I think it was the right choice for me, but i still have doubts. Which is awesome! This was so good! And I already covered the big reveal, but I still have so many feelings about it. I’m really hoping my 19 Regard of the Dawnseeker will have more impact down the road, somehow give a little more chance of a whisper of some kind of softer ending, some little reconciliation in the end. Also that I still have time to right things a little more with the Forlorn Shepherd and St. Valentine before they come up, I screwed things up with the former in one of the early chapters where I wasn’t understanding my choices, and haven’t built up much yet with the latter. I think that’s about all my thoughts, but they’re still roiling around in my brain non-stop, man this was amazing.
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Thanks a lot! Reading that with the ending in mind puts a lot of things in perspective
How does one go about talking to the tower contact? Am I just nor far enough along the main storyline?
Has anyone here managed to successfully Refuse?
I think it might be tracked by either Firmament or Tested by Quartz. Once I finished the quest I went to check on the paretial, clicked the option to ask about it, to see if that would give me a hint and the lizard just told me where to go and what to do.
I tend to assume the PC is ‘real’ (in the sense that any fictional character can be real) and they’d probably give us a choice before pulling a twist like that (the same way they gave us a choice before turning us into a pile of spiders) since that could be a pretty big blow to players who put stock in their characters’ offscreen histories.
As for the plot analysis, I think that’s pretty much it, yeah.
Not to my knowledge, but there’s an echo of the result on the reddit.
Merging is here if anyone needs it: Fallen London
I’m curious if anyone turned the Captivating Princess into a small town.
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Firmament is the first story in FL where I’ve felt compelled to read my journal of previous chapters, to understand events in the context of new revelations. I now need to go back and reexamine everything about Tatterdemalion. Especially the last chapter or two. Even the title, “Dawnseeker,” takes on new meaning and is revealed to be a double entendre. But I also need to comb over what Queeneater showed us, because I think there may be regret about the path he’s on. The scene in the Stacks in particular, now seems like he was asking if the Neath must necessarily be destroyed, but possibly if he must be destroyed with it.
And Old Resurrection is like a whole extra chapter on top.
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Due to being extremely cavalier about my Wounds until it was too late, Old Resurrection has technically just murdered me.
By falling on me, really hard.
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There were a lot of hints in this chapter, but I’m still 
. Will be wearing tartan this week.
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It’s times like this that make me wish desperately for a search function in the journal.
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That seems to be right. I just ended a run with 4 Grip Strength and after I had descended, I found that my “tested against the Quartz” quality had gone from 0 to 1.
What a wild ride! (And I’m still in it!). I couldn’t even begin to describe what I experienced here.
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With Old Resurrection, can’t decide if I should try to accept her guilt or leave it be. Does anyone have thoughts about which one they did and how it went? When the similar situation came up with our officers, I had at first thought that taking the lightning hit for them was helping, but they didn’t seem to appreciate it, so I’m worried that this one that warns you she won’t might be an outright bad choice, but I don’t want her to die, whatever that might mean for her.
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