Help!

Fallen London
1

I need some advice, because it feels as though I have ground to a tedious halt in this game and am going nowhere. I have reached a skill level (is that the right term?) of 103 in the quality of Watchful, and gaining even an extra point now takes forever and ever. Almost the only things which will advance Watchful by a tiny dribble are the standard activities in the Forgotten Quarter, and I have run those time and again. The odd Opportunity card gives a tiny boost now and then, but that’s it.

And why, having passed level 100, have I not been offered an Advanced Profession? Is it because my 103 level is partly made of item boosts (92+11)? In that case, at this rate of advance, hell will no doubt freeze over before I reach an unboosted one hundred…

Another grumble is that I have in the past half-run through some interesting stories, but the game offers no way of recording progress, and I’ve forgotten most of them.

I like the game, and want to stick with it, but for a long time all I’ve done is opened cards and repeated the same dozen or so activities till I could scream. Is there any way of breaking out of this narrow vicious circle? All and any advice would be welcome.
edited by Silentarius on 6/27/2016

2

Perhaps you should go to the Local Gossip and dmwand he tell you where a certain ambitious barrister is.

3

Local Gossip, by the way, is found in your Lodgings.

Two things: First off, ‘easy’ challenges as you may note gain you only 1 point (anything about 90% chance, I believe). So yes, they’re slow going. You can gain more progress by spending Sudden Insights at your lodgings You may need to look for some harder stories! Concerning Watchful, have you been to the University? Or finished it?

I suspect, more importantly, that you need to start on the Person of Some Importance track. You can’t gain any of the advanced professions (if you’re watchful, may I guess you’re headed to Agent?) without becoming a POSI first (and there’s some delightful content to follow!) How are your other stats?

4

Thanks for that, but no options involving barristers are on offer. Tea with the Loquacious Vicar offers an infinitesimal increase in Watchfulness and yet another copy of a Tale of Terror. I am invited to use the latter, but clicking on it in the inventory brings up the warning &quotyou’re in the middle of a storylet at the moment&quot - but I’m not! Or if I am, I have no idea what it is or where to resume it (see my other complaint!).
Loquacious Vicar

5

I don’t think the warning carries any teeth with it, so feel free to use the tales of terror while in a storylet

6

My stats are Watchful 92+11; Shadowy 37+8; Dangerous 59-1; and Persuasive 46.

I have in fact been to the University, and for some time followed a story involving Prisoner’s Honey; but that took me to The Chambers of the Heart, were nothing very much happened, despite my succeeding in &quotchatting to other visitors&quot. The only other choice on offer was returning to the waking world, which appears to have sadly killed the story whilst offerimg no resolution…

7

Yes indeed, that worked, and will actually apply to several other items - some poor design there! Many thanks!

8

Ah. What’s your A Name in Seven Secret Alphabets quality? You can find this easiest by looking at the icon next to the Honey Addled Detective.

9

Found it - it’s 6.

10

The next stage of Watchful stories are at the University - unless you have gone all the way through that content.

Advanced Professions come after you become POSI you need 100 in all stats to advance. that includes gear. You need to have chosen your profession on the relevant faction card; have some Notability and wait for the card to do so.

The Prisoner’s Honey is part of your Ambition. I’m not sure but I think the next stage of that story might be at the Shuttered Palace; then Wolfstack Docks. I’m not sure if with your other stats you have advanced the Trackers far enough to open those areas.

So my advice is to work on other areas of London and see what you can discover.

edit - just saw your Name in Seven Secrets Alphabet. You have opened the University and not completed the your own department story but I wouldn’t be in a hurry to do that. Take your time until you are ready to go to Zee i.e. POSI.
edited by reveurciel on 6/27/2016

11

So, two things: With Name 6, I assume you’ve finished finding the Tomb of the Seven? [I didn’t go through the tracker myself, so I’m a bit vague on what it calls for.] Do you have a set of Correspondance Stones? After that, if I remember correctly, you may need to draw a card relating to the start of your University Career.

Also, given your other stats, it will be long time before you’ll reach POSI (as to complete the sequence you need to hit 100 in all 4 of the main stats). You may wish to take a breather here with Watchful and pursue one of the other tracks.

12

[quote=Parelle]

So, two things: With Name 6, I assume you’ve finished finding the Tomb of the Seven? [I didn’t go through the tracker myself, so I’m a bit vague on what it calls for.] Do you have a set of Correspondance Stones? After that, if I remember correctly, you may need to draw a card relating to the start of your University Career.

Also, given your other stats, it will be long time before you’ll reach POSI (as to complete the sequence you need to hit 100 in all 4 of the main stats). You may wish to take a breather here with Watchful and pursue one of the other tracks.[/quote]

[ul][li]Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. I thought I only had to hit a hundred in one quality to achieve an Advanced Profession… This is bad news.
[/li][li]May I bend your ear a tad longer on a few related matters?[/li][li]Yes, I found the Tomb of the Seven, and I have a set of Correspondence Plaques, but not enough to do anything. I suppose I have to keep going back to the Tomb.[/li][li]What is the tracker? It sounds useful in terms of recovering details of one’s past activities.[/li][li]What is the best way of achieving POSI? I know this may be a hopelessly vague question, but at least in very general terms?[/li][li]There is a tab in the game called PLANS which says &quotPlans help you keep track of your schemes and dreams" that sounds like the very thing I’ve been yearning for, but unfortunately I seem to have no plans at all, neither active nor completed. Is this something that kicks in much later in the game?[/li][/ul]Forgive the presumption in hitting you with so many questions - please feel free to ignore most of them!

13

[quote=Silentarius][quote=Parelle]

So, two things: With Name 6, I assume you’ve finished finding the Tomb of the Seven? [I didn’t go through the tracker myself, so I’m a bit vague on what it calls for.] Do you have a set of Correspondance Stones? After that, if I remember correctly, you may need to draw a card relating to the start of your University Career.

Also, given your other stats, it will be long time before you’ll reach POSI (as to complete the sequence you need to hit 100 in all 4 of the main stats). You may wish to take a breather here with Watchful and pursue one of the other tracks.[/quote]

[ul][li]Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. I thought I only had to hit a hundred in one quality to achieve an Advanced Profession… This is bad news.
[/li][li]May I bend your ear a tad longer on a few related matters?[/li][li]Yes, I found the Tomb of the Seven, and I have a set of Correspondence Plaques, but not enough to do anything. I suppose I have to keep going back to the Tomb.[/li][li]What is the tracker? It sounds useful in terms of recovering details of one’s past activities.[/li][li]What is the best way of achieving POSI? I know this may be a hopelessly vague question, but at least in very general terms?[/li][li]There is a tab in the game called PLANS which says &quotPlans help you keep track of your schemes and dreams&quot that sounds like the very thing I’ve been yearning for, but unfortunately I seem to have no plans at all, neither active nor completed. Is this something that kicks in much later in the game?[/li][/ul]Forgive the presumption in hitting you with so many questions - please feel free to ignore most of them![/quote]

I’m going to quickly step in because you’re talking to a player who’s too old to have gone through the same experience as you, and if you’re not careful you’re going to mutually confuse each other. I’ll try to answer things step by step:

  1. So far, you’ve been following the Making Your Name story for Watchful. It has brought you all the way to the University - which is fantastic! From here, however, you have two options: Found a new Department at the University, going through that storyline all the way until your Name in Seven Secret Alphabets quality reaches 7 - or go to one of the other starting areas and follow the other Making Your Name stories for Persuasive, Dangerous and Shadowy.
  2. As a side effect for Making Your Name in the other three areas, you will open up the Flit, the Shuttered Palace, Wolfstack Docks, and eventually Wilmot’s End, Mahogany Hall and the Labyrinth of Tigers. This will give you MANY more avenues to expand your Watchful career.
  3. There is a way to record details of your past activities. Every card and storylet has an option for you to record it in your &quotjournal&quot. All text from stories are saved there, and you may revisit them from your profile at any time. You can click on the link to my profile to see my latest journal entries!
  4. To become a POSI, follow the Making Your Name stories for Persuasive, Dangerous and Shadowy. Once you can hit 100 in each stat, the way will open itself to you.
  5. Every card and storylet option has a little ribbon that you can click, which will allow you to add them to your Plans. Once they’re in your Plans you can even add little notes for yourself, so you know what you were thinking when you added them in. Here: take a look at my plans! Imgur: The magic of the Internet
    EDIT: In this screenshot, you can see both the &quotRecord this in your journal&quot button and the red ribbon that I’ve used to mark this storylet option as one of my Plans :) http://imgur.com/9qOPjVG

Please please please don’t hesitate to send more questions! You’ve barely scratched the surface of the game as it is, and I don’t want you to ever feel frustrated (unless you’re Seeking Mr. Eaten’s Name, in which case you were asking for it)!
edited by Chiltern on 6/27/2016

14

Which Profession do you have at the moment? There is an exception to the needing to be POSI if you go from journalist to author. You will need to have a certain short story from the Writer’s Desk in Veilgarden.

The Tomb of the Seven; getting the Correspondence Stones and becoming a Scholar of the Correspondence are what you needed to do to open up the University content.

Making your Name Trackers are the ways to open new content for each stat. So there are four of them and each starts in the specific location and getting to certain levels opens new areas and stories. They also give a boost to stats every time you complete a stage.

Details of past activities can be seen (to some extent) in your story tab on the myself page. Also you can echo things to your journal but that is chronological and not that easy to navigate for specific things.

Best way to achieve POSI is to play the game and get those stats up. It does take a long time but you probably need that to earn echoes and items you will need in the future.

You have to set plans yourself. There is a symbol on the top right corner of every option where you can mark it as a Plan. To be honest I don’t use it myself except to mark options I want to use so I don’t misclick and so something I don’t want to do.

15

[quote=Silentarius][quote=Parelle]

So, two things: With Name 6, I assume you’ve finished finding the Tomb of the Seven? [I didn’t go through the tracker myself, so I’m a bit vague on what it calls for.] Do you have a set of Correspondance Stones? After that, if I remember correctly, you may need to draw a card relating to the start of your University Career.

Also, given your other stats, it will be long time before you’ll reach POSI (as to complete the sequence you need to hit 100 in all 4 of the main stats). You may wish to take a breather here with Watchful and pursue one of the other tracks.[/quote]

[ul][li]Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. I thought I only had to hit a hundred in one quality to achieve an Advanced Profession… This is bad news.
[/li][li]May I bend your ear a tad longer on a few related matters?[/li][li]Yes, I found the Tomb of the Seven, and I have a set of Correspondence Plaques, but not enough to do anything. I suppose I have to keep going back to the Tomb.[/li][li]What is the tracker? It sounds useful in terms of recovering details of one’s past activities.[/li][li]What is the best way of achieving POSI? I know this may be a hopelessly vague question, but at least in very general terms?[/li][li]There is a tab in the game called PLANS which says &quotPlans help you keep track of your schemes and dreams&quot that sounds like the very thing I’ve been yearning for, but unfortunately I seem to have no plans at all, neither active nor completed. Is this something that kicks in much later in the game?[/li][/ul]Forgive the presumption in hitting you with so many questions - please feel free to ignore most of them![/quote]

Hi! As a relatively new player to Fallen London (not fresh new - I’m completing 6 months this week), I remember that most of your doubts were mine.

First, when you get 70 of a stat, the game do urge you to get an &quotadvanced profession&quot. My advice: use the training professions (you have to dump your current one, I assume it’s Watcher) to boost your other stats to 70. After that, you may have a better profession from the faction cards (such as &quotCourt and Cell: the Constables). You need Connected: 25 to the respective faction (or some favours, in the Docks card) and one requirement or another. Raise your connections if needed, drop your current profession (if you’ve never done that, it’s in the &quotwrite a letter&quot storylet in your lodgings) and pick the one that suits your best. In the Constables card I mentioned, you can become a Watcher (a mix between spy and detective). Those professions pay better than the training ones and you get an item to boost two of your stats by at least +6.

These professions are upgradable (and the item gets better), but you need to be a POSI for it. You become a POSI by completing a long series of steps. The first one is to get a stat to 100 and draw a golden card with the Ambitious Barrister. Then, she will tell you what to do.

The Correspondence Stones trigger an event in which you get access to the University (and an academic gown). You can’t really miss it, even if you want to. Go to the university and start your Department of Correspondence (before this, you may play the storylets a bit and reach Term Passing… 10 to investigate a murder - each time you reach 10, you read a new step of the investigation and your progress is reset, so you have to raise your term passing… again).

Once you start your department of correspondence, you are offered lots of options, that again raise term passing… and there is one storylet that raises &quotinvestigating…&quot. Raise investigating… to 10 a lot (and I mean at least 10 times) to unlock each step of the investigation. Once you are done with it, you Watchful will have skyrocketed and you will be able to pinpoint (or not…) the murderer. This reaches your Watchful tracker to its final level, 7.

The tracker can be found in the Myself tab, under &quotstory&quot. It’s called &quotA Name Written in Seven Secret Alphabets&quot. Each stat have one &quotA Name…&quot tracker that goes to 7.

To have a plan, you just have to click on that red ribbon thing at the right side of a storylet. It only makes sure the storylet is pinned in your &quotplans&quot tab, so you can check it for requirements, or remember what you have to do next. You can unpin a plan whenever you feel like.
edited by Professor Strix on 6/27/2016

16

My thanks to everybody who responded so kindly and promptly. I’ll take a little while to digest all this information, and will undoubtedly be back with more questions.

Good hunting!

17

A clarification on becoming a PoSI: you should be able to force-draw an Ambitious Barrister card through Local Gossips in your lodgings, by checking one for a stat in which you are at least 100. Becoming a PoSI does require having all stats at 100 - but not all at once, and including gear modifiers. So for example if you have four sets of gear for each stat, giving +20 to one, you would only need each stat at 80 base.

18

Ah, glad everyone else stepped there as I stepped away for a bit. Best of luck with your progress!

19

Y’know, I’m going to step up and be the one to suggest giving the wiki a good long look. I know it can be a little puzzling at first, and it can be a little confusing to get a firm grasp on the system of how everything is tracked and whatnot, BUT it does have a number of guides, info on preeeetty much every encounter, explanation on how to progress stuff, info on where to find stuff and so on. It’s a valuable resource and, with a little effort can answer pretty much every non-fate related content question you might have.

For example, http://fallenlondon.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Profession

Has your professions on it, click on the one you’re looking for, say, for example: Monster hunter. Then from there, look at “become a monster hunter” at it will tell you the things you need to unlock that.

You can chain this until you find the very roots of what you need, and start getting that stuff.

On a side note: if you’re looking to progress faster, you can also buy better equipment in the bazaar, it’ll boost your stats (it’s often not tooooo hard to get around +15 or so in any one stat) which will make the challenges more successful in general, but will lead to them progressing somewhat slower. Overall though I would assume it’ll reduce the time it takes to get a lot of the early the early levels because of a) less time spend recovering menaces and b) faster progression through the making name paths which give large amounts of flap stat change points.

20

[quote=Silentarius]
I have in fact been to the University, and for some time followed a story involving Prisoner’s Honey; but that took me to The Chambers of the Heart, were nothing very much happened, despite my succeeding in &quotchatting to other visitors&quot. The only other choice on offer was returning to the waking world, which appears to have sadly killed the story whilst offerimg no resolution…[/quote]

If you succeeded in the right chattings, you should now have some sort of an answer. That particular storyline continues somwhere in the shuttered palace, iirc - and you don’t need the answer from chambers of the heart, you can pay a different price there.