In Storynexus there are two types of place where you can be - Areas and Settings.
Areas are the usual locations most of us are familiar with - Ladybones Road, your Lodgings, A state of some confusion, etc. Settings are a broader category. Typically groups of Areas form a Setting.
The most familiar Setting we are familiar with is The Fifth City. It’s also the only one I know explicitly by name. If you have a Professional reward waiting while you are not in the main areas of Fallen London you will see a warning in your message inbox "[You must be in The Fifth City to play this]". The Fifth City is the Setting where most of the universal storylets appear, the Setting where you can use your items and the Setting that is associated with the usual four menace areas - RB, the NNG prison, exile and the river.
There are certainly other settings. Any area with alternate menace areas (such as the Mutton Island) is in some different setting. Most special areas where you are taken by Opportunity cards (e.g. A Polite Invitation) is in some setting. For those of you who played Flint - all the Areas beyond the Zee that you visit all form part of the same Setting (which you can test by engineering your menaces in various areas and discovering that you always end up in the same menace areas). Another good example is "The Future" (for a lack of an official term). This is the Setting where you discover your destinies. It has five Areas, one for each class of destinies, and the storylet "A Glimpse of the Future" is a universal storylet for that Setting (appearing regardless of which of the five Areas you end up in).
Does anyone know whether it is possible to check more explicitly what Setting you are currently in? I suspect the answer is negative but I am quite curious about the names of the other Settings
You can tell if you’re a different setting because most of them don’t allow you to buy items from the Bazaar. If you can’t, you are in a different setting than The Fifth City. The standard menace areas are each their own setting, for instance. Several Ambitions have special settings (Venderbight, the Chambers of the Heart) and many of the overseas areas are settings (including the various seas) but some of them share settings – because a setting is more of a mechanical contrivance than an area, which determines text and header images and so forth. Some Exceptional Stories have special settings (the Misermere, the Baronet’s house). There is an enigmatic setting.
I’m terribly confused. So far if I trust both of you:
The menace zones are part of the Fifth City, or maybe they aren’t.
The setting determines the header image, except the header changes when I move between areas in London.
You can find out if you’re in the same setting by raising your menaces and seeing where you go. I see the logic, but it seems unreliable. (I’d assume there are multiple settings that use the same menace zones, and I know there are multiple menace zones in a single setting.)
As for the original question, maybe you can find a storylet that requires you to be in a non-Fifth City location. Then perhaps tricky gameplay or URL hackery would let you try to use it from the Fifth City, so you can see the "[You must be in ___ to play this]" message. I don’t have high hopes that this is possible.
Ok, let’s try this again. Sorry about the ambiguity.
Areas determmine the header image and text, as I said. Storylets and cards can be set to only appear in one area, and that’s basically what the area "contains."
Settings can also have ("universal") storylets but most significantly, they control the overall deck – so if you have a totally different deck, as in the Nadir, Unterzee, Crowds of Spite, Flute Street, Polite Invitation parties, shroom-hopping, Flash Lay, Heists… those are different settings. Settings also determine which store you have access to (although there’s only the regular Bazaar and Harbour Provisioners, I believe).
The reason menaces work differently in other settings than the Fifth City is because moving in and out of the regular menace areas+settings (they are both, 1 setting with 1 area) is done with a MUST storylet that autofires as soon as a player has 8 (to go in) or 0 (to go out) in a Menace. Unterzee locations can’t use the regular Menace settings because you’d be teleported back to London upon reaching 0 – so they handle Menaces in a variety of ways. Some ignore Menaces completely (Iron Republic, right?) others have a MUST storylet that doesn’t change your setting (Hunter’s Keep) and others have Menace settings of their own (the inland areas of the Elder Continent in Flint).
I advise strongly against any URL hackery – you can get yourself stuck if you somehow change areas while in the wrong setting, and will have to make yourself a nuisance to Failbetter to get out, much to your eternal chagrin. If you somehow play a storylet from another setting than the one you’re in you’ll get the "something has gone terribly wrong" error. Nothing to see, really. edited by metasynthie on 1/25/2016
No, you’re probably right – Cherty on the expedition and Wounds/Nightmares in the Vineyard just have a single card, right? I was misremembering the latter as an area with several storylets but it must have been a card with several branches, looping back endlessly on itself until you could use the branch to let you leave. A rather compact way of getting the feel of a Menace area!
But both Heists and a polite invitation use Lonfon header images abd Welcome texts. So I’m a little confused how it’s an area/setting difference unless we have multiple settings in the same area? edited by Parelle on 1/25/2016
The menace “areas” in Flint are indeed simply Must storylets. But they are Universal storylets in the
“Elder Continent” Setting for the lack of better term. You can engineer your Wounds/Nightmares to get there from the Bleeding Forest as well as from the Vineyard for example
Setting and Areas can, indeed, have a more complicated relationship. That’s why I said that usually Settings are groups of Areas but that does not have to be the case.
This is, in fact, another reason why I am interested in seeing whether it’s possible to track what setting you are in.
Areas don’t have to “nest” inside settings as if each setting has several areas; this is just a common practice (for say, the original neighborhoods of the Fifth City setting, and other storynexus games). Flash Lays and Polite Invitation parties are different settings than the Fifth City, but use the same area (Veilgarden). When you choose a branch, some of the “special effects” that can happen include changing your setting, changing your area, or both. Starting a Flash Lay, for instance, changes your setting (you can no longer buy/sell and you’ve got a different deck of cards) but not your area (you stay in Veilgarden, and it’s theoretically possible that you could have a Mark that started in say, the Shuttered Palace). A Polite Invitation changes your setting AND moves you to the Veilgarden area from wherever you were.
I also think that Flash Lays, Heists, a Polite Invitation, and Shroom Hopping all have their own areas that are just duplicates. Best example of this is Shroom Hopping, with a unique deck that doesn’t draw any Watchmaker’s Hill cards (asides from Shroom Hopping ones)
genesis, how did you increase your menaces in the Bleeding Forest? Did you go into The Elder Continent with Nightmares 7+? Do you know if Apis Meet is part of the Elder Continent setting?
[quote=Cecil ]
genesis, how did you increase your menaces in the Bleeding Forest? Did you go into The Elder Continent with Nightmares 7+? [/quote]
I increased in Apis Meet. For example, the Animescence Hospital. But turning up with Nightmares 7 and then putting a hat on might work too.
I don’t know definitively but I am pretty sure that it is. Historically you could "Perhaps Not" out of "In Apis Meet" and test it that way but before I had a chance to do so there was some bug "fix" which I think is now a bug itself. Effectively if you Perhaps Not out of In Apis Meet you can endlessly trigger a Must storylet that asks you how our expedition was. (Unless they’ve fixed it again since I’ve been there last)