The real problem here is it could actually be quite possible. Come think of it, [color=rgb(255, 255, 255)]we don’t really know exactly the Cantigaster’s anatomy. The main hindrance would be his high poisonousness, but the Duchess is almost surely immortal and quite possibly immune to it (it could be the reason why she personally milk him - or it could just be that she does so because she loves him, or both). AND, the son shows evidence of having being conceived AFTER the horrible change that affected the Cantigaster. There’s also a daughter, seemingly perfectly normal and even quite attractive… It seems a long shot to postulate that she was born before the transformation; maybe she just resembles the mother more? Anyway, for horrible the Cantigaster may look, there’s really no evidence that he can’t somehow… Erm… You know, “get along”[/color]. The implications are appalling.
Seems reasonable to me that a child conceived before your lover turned into an abomination will look normal / not posthumously mutate. And considering how devoted these ladies are… well, I wouldn’t put it past our ladies-in-high-places to have a go at ROMANTIC ATHLETICISM WITH VENOM-DISPENSER* (LIVING CORPSE).
*: I don’t mean the Sardonic Music Hall Singer, if you catch my drift.
Well, it’s possible that the abomination in question still hs the same genome as before, right? Maybe it’s just like… a particularly unpleasant disease. Being immortal is hardly the same as being invulnerable.
To answer the OP’s question, I’ve been on the boat a couple of times. I don’t really mind dying – but I refuse to give up my soul, no matter how many times the devil and the deviless keep coming back for it.
I do wish the Cantigaster would show up a little more. Probably the most intriguing character yet. Jack’s a little twit compared to the Cantigaster.
I’m off to go vomit now.
[quote=Byron Man]Just checking to see how many delicious friends has never died once so far - I mean death by Wounds only.
I am beginning to worry that avoiding the boatman entirely might not be of any consequence in the long run, but I think I am going to stick to it no matter what. Even if you offer me an Overgoat just to meet the Boatman for small talk. Or the Cider.[/quote]
Well, the first time I “met the boatman” was when a looked at the heart mirror in Mrs Plenty’s most distracting carnival. It was really funny, because I never actually planed on dying ever, after all, my wounds quality was only 4 then! I was also new to the game then, for my highest quality at something like “Watchful 15”. Then much, much later after that I found the big (stop reading now, you don’t want to know if your dangerous is < 65) Spider Council and feigned my knowledge on the
[color=#ffffff]Correspondence.[/color] My wounds quality was only 2 then, hehehe…so after I recovered I just ran away and burned the chapel.
So I guess I’ve only been there two times. I was never trying to go there, but guess i was never really pushing not to go. It’s not like “I don’t like having wounds because I think I’m gonna die!” it’s more like I don’t like wounds because it’s plain embarrassing (‘Limping and Cursing’? Really?), I can’t battle the black ribbon duelists of quality (like Feducci or Chi Lan) and I feel like dying really wastes my time, (what’s so great about playing chess with the boatman?). So every time my wounds reach 4 or 5, I push it to zero.
Yet don’t call me too cautious I still like going mad now and then for fun, and seriously beating up Feducci and Mr Inch in duels to the death. And after all I never planed on leaving, I’m immortal down here, so just have some fun.
Miss Dodexon
A Sagacious and Lethal Lady
“Don’t stop me from Going to Polythreme!”
[quote=Miss Dodexon][quote=Byron Man]Just checking to see how many delicious friends has never died once so far - I mean death by Wounds only.
I am beginning to worry that avoiding the boatman entirely might not be of any consequence in the long run, but I think I am going to stick to it no matter what. Even if you offer me an Overgoat just to meet the Boatman for small talk. Or the Cider.[/quote]
Well, the first time I “met the boatman” was when a looked at the heart mirror in Mrs Plenty’s most distracting carnival. It was really funny, because I never actually planed on dying ever, after all, my wounds quality was only 4 then! I was also new to the game then, for my highest quality at something like “Watchful 15”. Then much, much later after that I found the big (stop reading now, you don’t want to know if your dangerous is < 65) Spider Council and feigned my knowledge on the
[color=#ffffff]Correspondence.[/color] My wounds quality was only 2 then, hehehe…so after I recovered I just ran away and burned the chapel.
So I guess I’ve only been there two times. I was never trying to go there, but guess i was never really pushing not to go. It’s not like “I don’t like having wounds because I think I’m gonna die!” it’s more like I don’t like wounds because it’s plain embarrassing (‘Limping and Cursing’? Really?), I can’t battle the black ribbon duelists of quality (like Feducci or Chi Lan) and I feel like dying really wastes my time, (what’s so great about playing chess with the boatman?). So every time my wounds reach 4 or 5, I push it to zero.
Yet don’t call me too cautious I still like going mad now and then for fun, and seriously beating up Feducci and Mr Inch in duels to the death. And after all I never planed on leaving, I’m immortal down here, so just have some fun.
Miss Dodexon
A Sagacious and Lethal Lady
“Don’t stop me from Going to Polythreme!”[/quote]
Actually the first time I met the boatman was through a mirror too
Recently I’ve begun avoiding The Boatman again. Every time I die, I wind up having to explain to him again how the horsey piece moves.
“The opponent looked long and hard at the board.
The abbot waited to see what long-term, devious strategies were being evolved. Then his opponent tapped a piece with a bony finger.
REMIND ME AGAIN, he said. HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE.”
-Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
How high does your watchful need to be to be able to beat the boatman after you hit the Watchful cap of 140? Do you need to be Overgoated?
I don’t know how high it would be with an overgoat, but I know the challenge rating flips back up to impossible at 143.
You don’t need any particular amount. As your watchful increases, the easier options will lock and you’ll go back up to hard. The best you can do is to make it a ‘modest’ challenge - if you increase your watchful more than that, it flips back up to ‘almost impossible’. So it helps to have a lot of items so you can micromanage your watchful to either go UP or DOWN to the nearest ‘modest’ point.
Just noticed on my last visit that there’s a new option that becomes available at Watchful 163. I’m almost certain that’s not possible without an overgoat, as I have most if not all available Watchful items aside from the goat, and am only at 161.
Oh man I have met the boatman SO MANY TIMES. My character cares not a flip for death.
But then again my character is also a female automaton of mysterious origins. I figure that she just writes passing time off on the River as her self-test routines running while the auto-repair is finally kicking in. Humans have reptile brains lying deep beneath their consciousness, she has a chess algorithm, and it just kinda… spins for a while… when she’s rebooting. She keeps on meaning to go hunting around the Bazaar Sidestreets for someone who can get that the auto-repair run more frequently but you know how it is - there’s always something else to do when you’ve got an Ambition to chase.
Curiously enough, she’s refused to let her demonic lovers persuade her to give up her soul, despite being pretty sure she’s soulless. If she does have one, she’s worried it might be all that keeps her from being a very elegant chess machine. She might feel different after discovering if she can actually bet it in the Marvellous.
I avoided the boatman assiduously at the beginning, in order to preserve hopes of revisiting the surface… but then I made a bad decision when encountering a Spider-Council, and was summarily dispatched with a single blow. Since then, there doesn’t seem to be much point in worrying further.
Just had a thought: hasn’t Failbetter said that there are no hidden qualities? And since there isn’t a quality to track whether you’ve died or not, that means that there’s no point in avoiding the Boatman so you can get back to the Surface. If we get a chance to go back to the Surface in the endgame, it’s going to hinge on something else. Maybe Boatman’s Opponent will keep us out, maybe Hesperidean Cider will be required to go back.
It’s weird, because the game’s mythology states that if you die you can’t go back to the Surface, but that fact isn’t built into the game’s mechanics. Maybe the plot will kill us at some point, to get around this. Did I miss something?
As it stands, the Surface isn’t written into the game’s mechanics yet. There’s very little point to restricting us from being able to go to a place that doesn’t exist yet. Should the Surface ever enter into the game as a valid destination, then maybe Failbetter will add a quality, hidden or otherwise, detailing if you’ve died. That said, can you have the quality ‘Boatman’s Opponent’ without dying first?
Maybe it already has.
They’re planning on it, though - we might not get to visit the Surface, but we will be seeing the routes that lead there. I have the feeling that returning to the Surface might be an endgame choice.
Even though the Surface isn’t written into the mechanics, it’s written into the lore. And the lore implies that they would have had to track “Visited: A slow boat” from the start of the game. There aren’t hidden qualities, so we know they haven’t. And they can’t do it retroactively, can they? Besides, Failbetter’s super careful about warning us when we’re about to make serious choices - if dying cut us off from content irreversibly, there would be bold italic text everywhere.
(As far as I know you can’t become the Boatman’s Opponent without dying, but you can die & heal a thousand times without playing chess, of course.)
Aha! What if we get to the endgame & Failbetter’s like “Psych! You died when London was stolen & then woke up resurrected in New Newgate. No Surface for you! Mwahaha!”
the Nemesis ambition implies you got yourself shipped to the jail on purpose just to get into the Neath.
I think they’ll probably just assume you died at some point, after all, how many people are going to make it to the endgame without dying, especially with how many people get bored and start Seeking the Name when they hit content boundaries.