Speaking of menace states, I just had a realisation about the recent name change for the Manager of the Royal Beth in his role as a terrifying lurker for the high-Nightmare’d. God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay, or else the Merry Gentleman will take you away…
I was told, when I was creating Puzzling Maps, that the train at Moloch Street doesn’t actually go to Hell. Instead, the devils eat the passengers:
[color=rgb(255, 255, 255)]‘This shows the way to Hell. You thought it was a train that went there? Ha! Devils feast on the bones of the passengers before it’s halfway out of the station. No, the real way is under the oily black waves…’[/color]
[color=#ffffff]Well, so much for my mysterious benefactor then…[/color]
Surely, you jest. Taking the tales of a zee captain at face-value? I bet those little urchins would have an easy time selling you snow, come next December.
Knowing the Mendicant, and the Embassy’s relief should you discourage him from taking the express, he’d give Hell hell even if it were a trap…
Reading through this thread is reminding me of my previous theory that the Capering Relicker is Satan, or at least the FL equivalent.
I believe Alexis confirmed someplace that they are keeping behind the scenes- track of this. That is not to say they’ll ever use that knowledge.[/quote]
I wonder what exactly they’re keeping track of, though - my main account has never actually died but they frequently pop down to the Silent River for a chess game or two. It’s just always been via the House of Mirrors because they’ve always intended to be able to return to the Surface once this business with their brother’s murderer is finally taken care of.
[li]
[quote=Aximillio][quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]
A question of my own: what backs Fallen London’s currency? Actual echoes?[/quote]
Well, at least we know the current echoes are memories of the first currency used by the bazaar. I guess they might be similar to the old?[/quote]
updated: Apologies for this cat got my tongue message - my first time on a wiki!
I am interested in that question also.
According to the Numismatrix, Echoes are "reflections of the first currency ever used by the Bazaar. Before it even thought of buying cities. You’ll probably never see any of the underlying fundamental Coins. I never have. There’s only around a dozen of them."
Is this a reference to bitcoins?
Also, would it be correct to say that the only way you can produce echoes from actions (without conversion of items) is through ‘literary ambitions’?
[li]edited by Belgravia on 7/20/2016 [/li][li]
edited by Belgravia on 7/20/2016
Some say the Masters dream in heiroglyphs, but those are more likely nightmares. The prison of sand lasted many centuries.
I have bad news for you… if you’re playing chess with the boatman, you’re dead. That mirror is more than a carnival game.
No, it’s an explanation for why First City coins demonstrate metallurgical technology beyond that of the First City. I believe it was added along with a bit of Retconjuration, after Satan placed the coins too deep (along with the dinosaur bones).
[quote=friendshipranger]
Is Downside, a place referenced in Outlandish Copy, a real place?
edited by friendshipranger on 3/13/2013[/quote]
Downside is indeed a real place, but you can only get there through Fate-locked content. It’s the Flute Street storyline. I have snippets from the storyline at the top of my journal if anyone wants to read them, as I’m currently there.
edited by Wicked Wonderland on 7/21/2016
[quote=TheThirdPolice]
I have bad news for you… if you’re playing chess with the boatman, you’re dead. That mirror is more than a carnival game.[/quote]
As someone who died almost immediately, because ‘return to Surface’ seems a rather frequent goal and I wanted something different, I’m interested in what proportion of Londoners are still alive, in Surface terms. I also hope and expect that FB know exactly who is who.
And this seems as good a place as any to ask: what happens to your body when you visit the Boatman? It would be handy, if only for occasional RP reasons, to know what someone else sees if I die in front of them. Which should be a rare event for a number of reasons – but accidents happen.
What passes for FL resurrection happens (conveniently) from the player’s viewpoint. But my mind boggles when I try to imagine what it looks like from the outside, especially as you can stumble upon dead/dying NPCs and stay with the body until they revive. But not consistently. The ‘Jack Strikes Again!’ card allows you to do this, and so does the Notable Success ending of the ‘Recover the haul of an Eccentric Burglar’ storylet. But the text on ‘Medical Emergency!’ implies that if you try to save a dying man and fail, you lose your chance to question him – without describing how or why. And no NPC has stuck around when I’ve died, to question me when I revive, though if it happens at some stage, I’ll be seriously impressed.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there must be an Observer Effect to FL resurrections: if no-one is watching or touching the body, the person revives in their Lodgings. If the opposite is true, they revive at the spot where they fell. If the death is exceptionally sticky (like the result of losing a duel to Vendrick), the authorities remove the corpse as a matter of public decency and you wake in a morgue (not on the Slow Boat), which after all does have employees. It’s still not consistent, but it’s the best I can come up with.
I’m not going to even think about what happens to my body after falling through Heart’s Mirror. Presumably it’s not sprawled off-puttingly in front of the Mirror itself; maybe there is some sort of trapdoor to remove the remains of the foolhardy. Because if not, my body can only really be back at my Lodgings, making Heart’s Mirror FL’s priciest and least satisfactory teleportation device.
And it knows where I live.
This is answered pretty directly in the Light Fingers ambition.
You may find yourself buried alive. If you haven’t grown your plant, then the game provides only a single means of escape: kill yourself by banging your head against the side. After at trip up the river, you awake back at your lodgings.
Suffice it to say, that the physical location of your body is left behind when you return.
I propose a new theory: When you die, you leave your body behind but "you" (for some definition of you (that is not the soul)) visit the boatman. Whatever it is of yours that is visiting the boatman, that gets physically transported back to London. Perhaps dumped on a shore, where you wake up and crawl back. So in other words, even when you return to your lodgings, your "original" dead body is still lying around somewhere.
[quote=PSGarak][quote=Vexpont]
And this seems as good a place as any to ask: what happens to your body when you visit the Boatman? It would be handy, if only for occasional RP reasons, to know what someone else sees if I die in front of them. Which should be a rare event for a number of reasons – but accidents happen.
[/quote]
This is answered pretty directly in the Light Fingers ambition.
You may find yourself buried alive. If you haven’t grown your plant, then the game provides only a single means of escape: kill yourself by banging your head against the side. After at trip up the river, you awake back at your lodgings.
Suffice it to say, that the physical location of your body is left behind when you return.
I propose a new theory: When you die, you leave your body behind but "you" (for some definition of you (that is not the soul)) visit the boatman. Whatever it is of yours that is visiting the boatman, that gets physically transported back to London. Perhaps dumped on a shore, where you wake up and crawl back. So in other words, even when you return to your lodgings, your "original" dead body is still lying around somewhere.[/quote]
I would like to add the failure message when you duel feducci:
"
The lance tip goes straight through you, pinning your body to an ancient tree. The boatman comes and bears you away."
so I guess it’s possible this is at least what you see when you die.
[quote=PSGarak][quote=Vexpont]
And this seems as good a place as any to ask: what happens to your body when you visit the Boatman? It would be handy, if only for occasional RP reasons, to know what someone else sees if I die in front of them. Which should be a rare event for a number of reasons – but accidents happen.
[/quote]
This is answered pretty directly in the Light Fingers ambition [snip]. Suffice it to say, that the physical location of your body is left behind when you return.[/quote]
Yup, there’s a definite problem here. Narratively, I can see why this dodge must be used almost-never, but if it was known to generally work…
[quote=PSGarak]
I propose a new theory: When you die, you leave your body behind but "you" (for some definition of you (that is not the soul)) visit the boatman. Whatever it is of yours that is visiting the boatman, that gets physically transported back to London. Perhaps dumped on a shore, where you wake up and crawl back. So in other words, even when you return to your lodgings, your "original" dead body is still lying around somewhere.[/quote]
Death in Fallen London: the most extreme type of littering offence. There’s probably a hefty fine.
But it can’t really be that, or there’d be no point in trying to finish off someone permanently by chopping their body into bits, an apparently reliable method, Elder Continent considerations aside.
I subjectively know what I see just before I die (sometimes in loving detail) and afterwards, when I’m on the slow boat. I just idly wonder what an observer would see after they saw me die. If they keep watching, does my dead body fade out before their eyes, like a honey-dreamer’s?
But I’ve had minor NPCs resurrect in their original bodies in my presence, like the candle courier who got killed by Jack-of-Smiles (‘You attend to the courier until an alarming gurgle marks his return to life…’). So sometimes, people resurrect within minutes, exactly where they fell. Just not the player, apparently.
I may be overthinking this. But it niggles.
On the topic of death: There’s also the one card that’s name escapes me. It’s the one with the caretaker of the graveyard. But allegedly from that card alone, people have been buried and end up being buried alive so often that bells are almost a necessity. There’s also the medical emergency card where you can save someone seconds before they pass to the Boatman too.
But considering how death doesn’t seem permenant, what constitutes as a "true death", and what happens when someone sees the Boatman it’s up in the air on what someone sees and how the player’s character comes back.
I always thought you died and then were carried away to safety by your… disturbing stalker, I guess? Secret fan club? Less-than-secret companion club? Your actual club? and then returned to life at your lodgings in your body.
edited by Vavakx Nonexus on 7/22/2016
Still raises some questions on how that helps you escape a buried coffin. Maybe all your head thumping caused your companions to find and unearth you?
The metaphysics of Fallen London are fairly capricious; as with some of the discussions of honey-dreaming, it seems possible to physically experience things that should only involve your consciousness, to have multiple minds experience things that should only be happening internally, and bodies to move from place to place through Parabola; it seems likely that encounters with the Boatman likewise occur on another plan of being, and can allow similar bending of the normal laws of metaphysics.
It’s also worth noting that many “fatal” injuries, including knife-and-candle deaths, don’t result in a ride over the River. Only accumulations of serious injuries, or single very traumatic deaths, like Black Ribbon duels, will send you to the Boatman. This may explain situations like the candle-courier recovering to life in fairly short order. And if you follow the Jack storyline far enough, you’ll find not all Jacks are terribly proficient at “killing” in the neathy (permanent) sense.
Most storylets imply that the corpse is there while you are dead, and your mind go in the boat. If you get back from the boatman, you wake up. If not, you die permanently and don’t wake up again. (Case in point, the death in University, in which the victim is put in a room to ‘recover’ from death, and other stories like the stabbed guy in the alley, and many others who are said to ‘recover’ from death.)
However, whenever the player character is involved, it gets a bit fuzzy. When you are in the boatman’s, well, boat, you can steal breaths, and there’s the light fingers ambition which kills you to free you from being buried.
To be honest, something weird is going on on Light Fingers, because Edward specifically tells you that burying you is a fate worse than death in Fallen London (which you agree at that point, because it implies that, if you die in a coffin, you will just come back to that coffin, until you despair and give up coming back), and it would be a void threat if you could just die and escape. Actually, it would be the worse possible way to deal with someone undesirable, because, if he puts you in a prison, you stay there; you won’t die of starvation and be all free and dandy afterwards. Maybe the player character is a special snowflake that is transported to the boat body and mind, while everyone else doesn’t?
Being back at your lodgings after you die - outside Light Fingers, that is - is not that weird, you can always suppose that someone got your address and delivered your corpse there to ‘recover’.
I have always had the impression that the Player Character is in fact a very special snowflake. I’m pretty sure this is because FL is very much a single-player game – the social actions are really bolted on and require some good RP to avoid being jarring. (just try discussing who founded the Department of Correspondance at the University – or look at how we all get kicked out of Court…)
Anyhow, I do love the RP, but the game is obviously meant to be about one heck of a special snowflake.
As for dying, my impression was that bodies just re-animate. Going to the Mirror Marches is fairly obviously a bodily assumption into another plane of existance, however ending up insane at the Royal Beth is obviously Not such a thing. (and, just to cover all the menaces New Newgate is obviously in our plane of existence)
Now, all that stuff above, just my $.02 – so take it with a gallon or three of Salt. (after all, this Is Me we’re talking about, everything is about Salt)
Your story resumes at your Lodgings once you recover. That doesn’t mean you literally show up there the instant you revive. I imagine a groggy “off camera” awakening, painful trudge home, and a good long nap.
(This is the first I heard of the Light Fingers buried alive story. I don’t think the writer made a good decision there. Fallen London’s metaphysics work best when they are figurative, or obscured — as do arguably any serious game’s.)