Get your Shapeling Arts and A Scholar of the Correspondence up to 5, and when you hunt it normally to 12 a second option under “Repel the Lorn-Fluke with a show of force” appears.
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Snob alert
I like how, much like in the real world, brokering peace and calming people down is the option that requires more skill.
I am very sorry to early-midgame players who hauled light amounts of explosives and then found themselves embroiled in a fight against something they know nothing about. It must be confusing and frightening.
On the other hand it is quite realistic that, again like in the real world, the less informed and less trained people only have the option of acting in violent and probably less productive ways.
Also I second captainbloodstorm’s feeling that the Admiralty has once again lied to us, but I wish to point out it’s not yet clear to me what they did intend to bomb at wayland’s teeth. The way I understand the damage done to the Fluke is an undesired byroduct, not the main goal of hauling explosives.
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I’ve half a mind to volunteer my letter-writing services as a Correspondent to anyone who wants to talk to the Fluke, but can’t. Unfortunately, I feel like Shapeling Arts 5 is the bigger gate here…
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Tbh, I don’t think it’s a matter of education so much as experience. You can have no education and still be capable of being a good mediator, and you can have a Ph.D and be absolute shite at anything interpersonal. Schools don’t do a good job of teaching these things. It’s more than likely something you learn from your parents (if they were good) or that you piece together on your own from trial, error, advice, and therapy. It’s something that you can always become better at, no matter where you are!
And of course, the situation matters, too. Sometimes violence is relevant! But as it stands, we’re clearly the ones in the wrong here. There was a clear and unambiguous transgression on our part, accidental though it was. And it honestly strikes me how many people have been like “wait, you can talk to it? how? I want to do that!”
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Good points all, I realise “informed” and “trained” suggest the formal kind of education, while informal education is definitely a part of the skill I was referring to. Heck, just look at the FL player character, they began learning the Correspondence while exploring the Forgotten Quarter and ended up teaching it at the University without having ever gotten an academic degree. And don’t even get me started on how useless the University is for anything related to the Shapeling Arts, aka the lower classes represented by the Rubbery and the Starved.
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While putting together the Broke Bastard’s Guide, it really struck me how difficult leveling Shapeling Arts was without an in with the Rubbery Men (or even the Bohemians, who are the faction most favorable to them).
And you know, that’s actually kind of brilliant, to have the gameplay and the storytelling complement each other like that. This isn’t a skill you can easily pick up on your own, unlike, say, Glasswork, or even A Player of Chess. The old Rubbery who helps you advance to 6 and 7 outright tells you that, as a human, you literally lack the anatomy and senses for it. You can only begin making up for the gap through close instruction from an experienced Rubbery teacher.
(I absolutely love Helicon, just in case you couldn’t tell. I’ll be happy if this event gets more people to go there.)
It makes me wonder how the Starved picked up the art in the first place, but maybe we’ll learn more about that come Firmament.
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is probably the main reason why Conquest has any inroad at all.
To be clear, not you personally, rather people in the same situation as you.
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Everyone, I think I made the current situation much, much worse. I explained that nobody had an idea that the ordnance was being dumped into inhabited depths, that no harm was intended, and that the subsequent detonation occurred in such an unfortunate location was a total … fluke.
I dislike the absolute silence that followed.
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Shouldn’t participating in a whale/'berg/fluke hunt just come with its own separate quality rather than zee-beasts hunted?
Because its weird knowing that my alt’s 15+ “hunts” are all basically participation trophies for one beastie she didn’t actually take out or capture.
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Bah… no time for talking. Just shoot the beast 
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OH SIBLING PREACH! 
/POS
I would like to take a moment to say that, while leveling my shapeling arts, it struck me how utterly ugly the situation of the rubbery man is, how they don’t even seem to be angry or fighting back about it and how glad they are that you, a human, is willing to listen and learn-and, farther more, how genuinely nice they are to you when they have every right to be extremely mad with you and/or just flat out refuse to teach you. It truly made me mad in ways fictional oppression rarely does, even though I wasn’t at all invested in their struggles beforehand-so great job, failbutter!
I’m sorry if this got a little bit too close to politics for some of you(feel free to flag this post if it did), but I felt the need to get this off my chest and this was a great opportunity. Also, @NinethLions , glad to see you also enjoy Helicon. It was probably my favorite AD grind.
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Drawing away from certain IRL comparisons, I’m not sure if this is a tragedy or a relief but…it feels like as things are right now, the situation for the Rubbery Men is better than ever. Things have gotten to the point where the Shapeling Arts are considered a popular enough fashionable, semi-counterculture movement for Helicon House to do regular business. Certain ESes even show enough interest from the more well to-do or dedicated populaces at pursuing the Rubbery form even further. While he didn’t win and it didn’t result in anything productive, the Tentacled Entrepreneur managing to have a face to face talk with Fires about workplace management as well as potentially joining the Railway’s board is a far cry from it showing up to random dinners and misplacing the cutlery. One ES even featured a Rubbery’s murder being treated with something approaching consideration by the police, enough to bother learning how to communicate better. And of course, during the last Fruits of the Zee the Fallen London PC at least was able to have a chat with the Fathomking’s misses. A certain sculptor potentially takes inspiration from Axile in Parabola. Moreso than ever before, Flukes and Rubberies are being seen and heard among the populace.
The catch, of course, is that they’re STILL misunderstood to the extent that much remains lost in translation-especially the sense of mourning and loss for Axile as well as the specifics of how the “city” Flukes relate to the Lorn-Flukes. And why Flukes occasionally do something like the Principles of Coral, or what on earth Fathomking accomplished to win one’s hand in marriage. The over-under seems like Rubbery Men are slowly becoming as popular in London’s society as they are in the forums. But that popularity is extremely shallow, and the cultural divide remains more or less as large as ever except possibly for the Shapeling Arts 7 Gang who are basically transhuman lifeforms anyway.
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I’m pleased someone is choosing violence, even if that person is not me right now, just on general principle. Under any other circumstances I’d be all for the course of action about just attacking the bigger beast. I just bear the Admiralty too much mistrust after a certain Agreement of Nothing of Consequence and my faint memories of a sad, forlorn figure I released into the Zee a long time ago to perhaps (however unlikely) someday complete it’s original mission of true diplomacy.
If I didn’t know about the Agreement, perhaps I’d be more forgiving. But right now, everything the Admiralty is doing feels like biting the hand that let them zail the Zee with relatively few consequences.
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Wait, what story was the Agreement in?
…regrettably the memories are quite vague, but I think it was from the Season of Wrecks? I THINK it was the conclusion to the Season as a whole, but I’m not sure.
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Using a fun event we’d already done before and think we know what’s what, but then blam! Fluke! This is fantastic!
I did try the violence once to see what happens, but felt guilty about it.
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I chose violence on my first pass because I didn’t read far enough down the storylet chain to notice I had another choice. When I saw that the talking approach has excellent rewards as well, I went with that and stuck to it.
However, this is only a game, friends. If you don’t like using violence against a sea creature who was shaken out of its home by ill-placed naval explosives, that’s fine; don’t! If all else fails one can refuse to continue to play the explosives/Lorn-Fluke storyline.
It’s worth remembering that the Victorian/Edwardian era/s were, from our perspective now, very politically incorrect and that lots of unwarranted cruelty went on. FBG usually walks a line between our modern take on such issues and presenting a story, based (however loosely) on historical events, historically. We, as the players, are free to choose among options as we will, or to ignore options we find too reprehensible even for a game.
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Are you’ll staying out at sea and reportedly chasing the fluke or are you going back to dock at London or Mattoon island every so often to clear TW? I do the former: it cuts on actions a ton, and i have very relayable ways to reduce TW on the way to the target+i can easily get through many of the new cards through, for example, my fluke core.
I have done a bit of both.
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Very true! I also feel quite ridiculously guilty if I even faintly hurt a character’s feelings in a game, and work extremely hard to get everyone to like me (even though in real life I’m at a much more reasonable level of care for people’s feelings and not particularly the sort of person who wants to be liked by everyone), so I don’t blame Fallen London for having given me the option to choose violence!
I do really like how often they give a kinder option, though, and I’d say they generally do a very good job of finding the balance between history and current values.
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