The really interesting thing about the item trade-in for the Season of Stones was that the reward was exactly the same regardless of your decision, but you got left with a permanent story quality. This setup suggests that the substance of our decision was intended to be the main focus, rather then the reward - that is, the writers wanted players to pick what they thought was the best policy, rather then what they thought the best reward. This in turn suggests that our decisions will have long term consequences for London, consequences that we might glimpse in future stories.
I really wanted to help the Urchins, but my character will seize any opportunity to strike a blow against Hell, so she had the committee put the ‘stories for welfare’ legislation into effect.
They were all tempting - in the end, I could only decide by dividing the four options up among my four characters (though they’re not all currently Exceptional Friends.) So, Esther, the devoted revolutionary, would naturally refuse to participate in the Masters’ schemes. Hubris, with his sideline as a kidsman, would approve measures to make the city’s urchins more profitable. Juniper, with her tragic past, would be drawn to schemes to benefit from selling stories of misery. That left Sir Fred with Clay rights, which suited him just fine.
I helped the urchins. It gives people like our little friends at Heorot a better chance at thriving, just in case anything like being paid one penny to do the job (which was admittedly funny at the time, but also not good for living without thieving) happens again. Besides, it also functions a recycling technique: it introduces value to scraps in the wider economy.
It hurt to have to burn the policy to support the poor, but it didn’t sit well with me. If you could make money off of stories of love and heartbreak, there would certainly be people who tempt and break hearts just to sell the story, and the actual process is negative feedback. "Boring" stories like selling candles or being a notary likely won’t net you much money in terms of sales, but more "exciting" stories of struggle and hardship, of broken dreams and despair; those will net a pretty penny on the market. In other words, having a harder life is more profitable, and the easier life gets, the less "interesting" the story becomes, and likely the less it will net you. Unless you’ve found an additional source of income from the initial boost, the returns will probably even out and your income will drop, creating a cycle of hope and hopelessness that will produce a whole ton of good stories while only benefiting a lucky few who can find higher-paying work and break the cycle.
That’s just a justification to make myself feel better, though, and it’s based mostly on speculation and cynicism on my part.
I didn’t really understand the point of the law to help the poor.
Can’t people already sell stories to the Bazaar? This is what the Bazaar is all about. When we start the game and escape from prison without a thing, we have no problem finding ways to get and sell secrets and stories.
It just seemed really weird to me from a narrative perspective.
Huh? More bias?[/quote]
I expected results to heavily favor one option rather than be relatively evenly split.
[quote=dov]I didn’t really understand the point of the law to help the poor.
Can’t people already sell stories to the Bazaar? This is what the Bazaar is all about. When we start the game and escape from prison without a thing, we have no problem finding ways to get and sell secrets and stories.[/quote]
As we could sell Touching Love Stories already, I guess this law will be adding Miserable Love Stories to the items the Bazaar accepts :P
[quote=dov]I didn’t really understand the point of the law to help the poor.
Can’t people already sell stories to the Bazaar? This is what the Bazaar is all about. When we start the game and escape from prison without a thing, we have no problem finding ways to get and sell secrets and stories.
It just seemed really weird to me from a narrative perspective.[/quote]
Good point, but presumably the new program would offer a better rate, subsidized by the government.
Yeah, I helped the poor under the presumption that the Urchins are quite capable of looking out for themselves but the older children will need help once they exit the gangs.
The Claymen could use assistance, but giving them an hour of freedom seemed like such a small concession in comparison to everything else that I could not justify assisting them. Sorry folks, you’ll need to get angry enough to become unfinished in order to get any headway.
Leaving seemed like a dick move, since then no one wins. Plus I got some delicious master knowledge out of the conversation.
I thought about leaving the meeting, since it was the most obvious route toward assisting the Revolutionary cause and the whole thing was more or less a big show. However, I ultimately ended up forced/forcing myself into supporting the poor for several reasons:
The Revolution will not rise in a day. Recruits to the cause cannot be if they are dead (with exceptions). The working poor of London must be able to survive to recognize the injustices around them.
The Great Chain chokes everyone, including the Masters. They too are victims, of a sort.They might be recruited, if their foibles and underlying grudges against their own enslavement are known. And if they cannot be recruited, then they can be provoked.
It’s cool lore and I wanted to read it first-hand tbh.
i choose to have zorgan leave the reasoning is quite simple he is a hard-core revolutionary and doesn’t really care about the poor (although the urchins are an exception at times) so he walked away.
Kaigen chose to declare the committee a farce and walk out. He didn’t buy the Masters’ claim that they could only implement one law, and the laws on the table seemed like bare minimum gestures intended to placate the masses without making substantial change. In the end he couldn’t rationalize one group as being either more significantly helped or more significantly in need of help and so couldn’t justify selling out the interests of two in favor of the third.
I didn’t realize that leaving the meeting would help the revolutionaries, otherwise I would have done that. I ended up helping the urchins, because the other laws seemed silly or redundant.
It would be interesting if the Clay Men were a Faction you could choose to seek Renown among and be Closest To. Yes, the Clay Folk are no more than unpaid labour for most people, and have no power. But the Urchins aren’t part of the power structure either, and yet they are a Faction. It strikes me as a curious omission; I wonder if it will be changed sometime.
The Urchins are very much a part of the power structure - there are quite a number of former Urchins amongst the Criminals, the Zailors and the Foreign Office. Their little Chimney Pot War pretty much shut down London for its duration and my decision led to the Fisher-Kings taking up residence on the Bazaar! The Urchins are the chosen beneficiaries of a mad god who lives in the roof and which showers them with glim, prophecies, and disturbing shrieks. At their great feasts the Urchins make sacrifices to the Vake and so have some sort of relationship with it. The Knotted Sock may possess the physical embodiment of the King of a Hundred Heart’s curiosity. Oh, and the Regiment has a cannon.