“Remember what pain is. Just a signal from a body that doesn’t know how little it matters.”
The Starved Mystic believes London is sick, beset by the fevers of self-interest and individualism. For those who seek to escape this sickness, she offers change: a journey to the Roof, and induction into the ways of her hive. Steep yourself in the values of her clade. Shape yourself to suit your role. Confront the secrets in the beating heart of her community, and choose whether to accept them into your body.
I’m slowly playing my way through, but one thing I immediately love is the options for having played other stories. This feels richer than most ES’s and more like my experiences in the game have mattered. I hope you do more like this in the future.
This adventure was delightful. I loved getting more lore on a Grand Devil, and more Starved cultures up on the roof. The descriptions were delightfully body horror-y.
I picked the ending for a new Queen; would someone who picked the Queenless ending be able to DM me their echo? I’ll share mine in return.
I saved the Queen’s life after retaining my individuality and am trying to decide if I want to be “reshaped” or simply want to return to London. My character’s profound curiosity is warring with his incredible determination to remain as human – and as much himself – as possible, here. Does anyone know if the “reshaping” in this final context is still a loss of individuality, or is it purely a physical alteration?
Interesting. I wonder how many endings there are. Did you choose not to become a Drone? I became a Drone and the queen died; this seemed to be unavoidable if you went down that route. I thought choosing the refuse option would end the ES early.
I rejected the option and, after reading someone else’s journal that accepted, I did not think there was a noticeable difference in the number of actions that we both had after that point in the ES.
So, the concept was interesting. But for me the pacing and how it managed your character interactions was a bit odd. You start out being bombarded with human hive debate, with little meaningful way to contribute because of how little you know for sure. You’re then made to go along with the hive activity and the unconventional value system in good faith, becoming a part of the hive whatever your thoughts are. Even if you refuse becoming a drone it’s simultaneously portrayed as a social faux pas and the Starved Mystic doing you a solid? The decision to help or abandon the queen feels like the most meaningful one in the story. Afterwards it seems a bit odd to me that only THEN do you think of ratting out the whole thing to the Brass Embassy, with little to no indication of the PC being disturbed up above. And then there’s the optional encounter with the Mystic at the end where you can decide how put off you were by all this, despite otherwise going along politely with bodily alteration from the start even if you don’t immediately revert.
Personally I refused to be a drone, fought misers, invited the Mystic in and encouraged her to give the whole thing up because I have never once met a trustworthy Devil in London or beyond, and because the whole jolly cooperation pitch espoused by the devotees ignores the fact that there is a queen at it’s centre whose plans, morality aside, are clearly not going very well if animals that the other Starved Men have domesticated are ripping straight into her with impunity.
Don’t get me wrong, if you enjoy bodily mutation and human hives this is the story for you. It’s just that I also feel like the story railroads you heavily to show you everything going on, rather than say-let you sneak up to the roof on a different airship to investigate.
ohhhh, a SA focused story! how intresting! and can i just say that the creature on the art is a truly horrid monstrosity in it’s appearance? said lovingly of course-i love monsters!
This one was not for me at all, and I was relieved when it was over. I spent most of the time completely grossed out by the body horror; in that respect, it was much too similar to Evolution for me. And given where the world is currently expanding, I fear there may be more of this to come.
Given the above, I opted not to scream my way into a different body shape and also decided not to become a drone, since being coopted into someone else’s mind, blissfully or not, couln’t be less appealing. Especially not when that mind presumably belongs to one of the exiled Princes of Hell.
