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.
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 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.
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.
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.
…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.
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.
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.
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.
As far as giving players options goes, I actually think giving both cruel and kinder options is historically quite accurate. While yes, that era had a lot of cruelty, there were people at that time fighting violence against animals, fighting against racism, fighting for women’s rights, for the rights of queer people etc.
People with “current values” existed at that time. And I think, that we might be seeing the world of FL from the perspective of one of those people. It’s like with every historic document. You have to consider the author’s perspective and context. You never get a neutral objective view, every account, every document is affected by the author.
Also I would like to say, so far, this is a great Living World Event. I didn’t really care for any of the previous ones, but oh my gosh, a twist? I can chase a fluke? And I don’t have to fight it but can talk to it in correspondence? A+ so far, I hope the resolution can hold up to my now established expectations.
And while I can see that this was a lot more work than any of the other events, I hope this shows us what they might do with these in the future.
Like, what happens if the Lifeberg actually reaches London at some point? Do we fight it off from land? Do we have to support rebuilding Wolfstack Docks afterwards? Fingers crossed for something interesting.
… I think to me one of the most prominent aspects of this event is, how much our world has been affected for every player - while with Lifebergs, Urchin-Wars and such everyone can easily chose to completely ignore what is happening, here the continued threat gives special Zailing-cards to everybody, regardless of their actual involvement. to me this makes the whole experience somehow more impactful.
edit: having just written this, I began to wonder: do the Fluke-related cards actually appear, if one never delivers a singe crate of explosives?
The Cards are unlocked by the same flag that unlocks the ability to hunt the Fluke, so unfortunately not. The alternative might involve a player seeing Bad Cards about how there’s a Fluke nearby, before returning home and then witnessing the initial Fluke attack as if it were a big surprise that there might be a Fluke nearby.
But that’s how the maleable reality of Fallen London works; some characters haven’t even noticed the rain, yet.
Unrelated: I really like that when pursuing the Fluke with sufficient stats and the right piece of equipment you can draw “hostile” encounters and think, “oh thank goodness, a giant ship-eating crab and some water-zombies – this’ll cheer the crew up!”
thank you for clarifying. and yes, that is making a lot of sense and actually not even that surprising.
… sometimes starting a thought is just not enough, I need to give myself enough time to think it through ;) … oh well.
Very true. I recently read through most of H.G. Wells’ fiction, and was struck by just how socially progressive it was. Several of his novels basically amount to gesturing at society and pointing out just how messed up it was (much of it still being relevant, unfortunately). There are always outliers on a society’s values, even if their voices aren’t well recorded by history.
/POS