Suggestion: The Constable Renown Items

I am quite sure that there might be a thread on this already, but then, nobody took the username &quotRostygold&quot.

So anyway, I have some suggestions regarding the Renown 25 and Renown 40 Items.

Firstly, the Renown 25 item: it would be a special bowler hat, given by Sherlo- - the Honey-Addled Detective.

Narrative Fluff: He has heard of your reputation and he invites you over for &quottea&quot, but of course he isn’t making tea but doing chemical experiments. You and he have a chat over theories and such, and eventually he moves on to the subject matter of disguises. While he was rifling through his stuff, he came upon said bowler hat. For a brief moment, a mix of emotions pass over his gaunt face, and a near imperceptible stroking of the hat. He regains his composure and hands you the bowler hat, suggesting that you might want to add it to your repertoire of disguises. You notice that it would have fitted somebody else’s head other than his. It smelled faintly of antiseptic.

Gameplay Properties:
Watchful +7, Respectable +1 (this would fill a missing gap in the range of hats)

Secondly, the Renown 40 item: this would be a glove item, and you would have to sail your law-abiding butt over to Polythreme.

Narrative Fluff: The Implacable Detective has heard of your reputation and thinks that you could do better with some more &quothandy&quot help. After a long chat about theories and being bull-headly stubborn in investigating things, she suggests that you should look up an &quotold friend&quot of hers who have retired over at Polythreme. So you sail over to Polythreme, and surprise, surprise, the old friend is a super-grade living glove. After telling it tales of your exploit (thus spending all your 7 Favours), it decides it wants to come out of retirement and follow you back to London.

Gameplay Properties: Watchful +10, Respectable +1 (this would fill a missing gap in the range of gloves)
edited by Rostygold on 2/13/2017
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017

Both sound more Bizarre than Respectable to me, except of that good idea.

Well, the glove could be as famous as the Implacable Detective is. Also, bowler hats are not bizarre - it was quite fashionable during the Victorian era and was worn by many of the working class.

I’d see the detective as the 10 item, the 25 item being at the end of a spinning the wheels, and the 40 being locked behind the ratwork velocpede.

Until now, the first is on the card, 25 is a regular location w/o any other requirements and, depending on the outcome, you may lock the Velocipede carousel.
Don’t give FBG ideas, mate! :D

I, for one, would not like another round of the treatment which was done for the Rubbery Men again.

Also, you would need to think of the narrative fluff to fit the places which you suggested. Furthermore, there are people who have already locked themselves out of the carousels which you mentioned - myself included. (Or at least one of my player characters.)
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017

…I’m not crying; you’re crying.

I, for one, would not like another round of the treatment which was done for the Rubbery Men again.

Also, you would need to think of the narrative fluff to fit the places which you suggested. Furthermore, there are people who have already locked themselves out of the carousels which you mentioned - myself included. (Or at least one of my player characters.)
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017[/quote]

Failbetter got some pretty negative response with the rubbery renown 40 item, I also doubt they would try to do this again.

I, for one, would not like another round of the treatment which was done for the Rubbery Men again.

Also, you would need to think of the narrative fluff to fit the places which you suggested. Furthermore, there are people who have already locked themselves out of the carousels which you mentioned - myself included. (Or at least one of my player characters.)
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017[/quote]

Failbetter got some pretty negative response with the rubbery renown 40 item, I also doubt they would try to do this again.[/quote]
I see no problem with it being a tie for best-in-slot, but it’s kind of annoying for best-in-slot to be both fate-locked and requiring a large quantity of effort. Which isn’t inherently a problem, but I think that’s worth noting. On the other hand, if it fits thematically, I don’t have an issue with it.

I, for one, would not like another round of the treatment which was done for the Rubbery Men again.

Also, you would need to think of the narrative fluff to fit the places which you suggested. Furthermore, there are people who have already locked themselves out of the carousels which you mentioned - myself included. (Or at least one of my player characters.)
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017[/quote]

Failbetter got some pretty negative response with the rubbery renown 40 item, I also doubt they would try to do this again.[/quote]
I see no problem with it being a tie for best-in-slot, but it’s kind of annoying for best-in-slot to be both fate-locked and requiring a large quantity of effort. Which isn’t inherently a problem, but I think that’s worth noting. On the other hand, if it fits thematically, I don’t have an issue with it.[/quote]

To be honest the main issue was probably just that it was unexpected, if I had enough rubbery men connections to get to 40 renown I would be pretty pissed off to find out that it is also fate locked even though it really shouldn’t have been for a feature like this.

I shall once again hypothesize that the Constables 40-Renown Item is to be found Corpsecage Island. It is of the appropriate remoteness, and has existing ties to the faction.

[quote=The Master]
To be honest the main issue was probably just that it was unexpected, if I had enough rubbery men connections to get to 40 renown I would be pretty pissed off to find out that it is also fate locked even though it really shouldn’t have been for a feature like this.[/quote]

I, for one, did expect that Flute Street is going to be one of the places to look - this is too significant from a narrative point of view.

That said, having the Renown 40 item somehow tied to the Velocipede Squad does not seem appropriate to me. If you have done the Fate-locked story (I had, thanks to some free Fate shenanigans), that squad is so, so NOT model policemen, even though they are considered informally to be the elite of the police force. (The actual &quotelite&quot of the police force are the Special Constables - though their allegiances are not necessarily to the rest of the police force.)

Therefore, there are also narrative issues with sticking the Renown 40 items to the Velocipede Squad.

Besides, there are already two significant personae who are associated with the London Constabulary: Sherlo-… the Honey-Addled Detective, and the Implacable Detective. They are so much cooler and more sophisticated than snuff-snorting blokes who spend their free time in publican houses - or preening their moustaches.

You are referring to the rumours that the Constabulary dump criminals there. If that is the case, what item or companion would the player character get?

Besides, anything that the player would get would be further away in theme than it would be closer to the Constabulary. Also, the &quotcriminals&quot which are dumped there appear to be radical thinkers, which means that Corpsecage Island would be more suitable for a place to get faction items associated with the Revolutionaries.

There would be a narrative disconnect.

Furthermore, Corpsecage Island is only available in two ways: through an Ambition which certainly does not involve cops or criminals directly (and this option would eventually be locked out), and embarking on a scientific expedition (which is another source of narrative disconnect). Failbetter would have to implement more storylets and location scripts to accommodate any players who have yet to obtain either option.
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017

The constables left things there, that’s why its brought up so there wouldn’t be a problem. And if you haven’t started the scientific expeditions, how did you get 40 renown so fast? (And compared to the mind of a god or flute street, its not so bad)

The Constabulary left things that they do not want to be around in London - which means that these items are probably of a proscribed nature. That would make them not exactly thematically compatible with stuff that the Constabulary would gladly let the player character have and bring back to London.

(I know, I know, the naval ordnance thing isn’t exactly thematically appropriate with the Dockers either - but people wanted the mine removed from the Unterzee. They did not exactly expect the crazy player character to use it like a negotiation tool.)

Besides, what do you think that the player character could get there? I am seeing a lot of these suggestions in that other thread around Renown items, but there are few follow-ups about the nature of the items or their narrative.

Polythreme would not be bad either (besides, you can just take a ferry), and a story about a retired detective living glove would not be too damn hard to make a narrative connection.

Besides, I am getting the impression that Failbetter is trying to make the Renown 40 items stupid-hard to get. After all, a few months ago, someone just made a thread asking Failbetter to put the Renown 40 Urchin item in that place. I thought that was stupid ridiculous at the time, by the way, but only from a technical point of view. That someone only wrote one line of argument for this: the Urchins venerate Storm. And that’s it - Failbetter swallowed that.

If it wasn’t clear to you already, Failbetter is the kind of game-maker which puts narrative in front of everything else.

That’s a rather doubtful suggestion (and a trifle offensive.) If a brief off-hand suggestion was all it took for Failbetter to write and implement new content, well, the game would be a deal larger than it is!

(For what it’s worth… as a black site used by the Special Constables over a period of many years, I’d consider Corpsecage a perfectly plausible site for a Constables item, but at the moment, all we can do is speculate.)

Or things they don’t want people to find.

Inscribed correspondence handcuffs +10 dangerous. Remarkable how easy it is to enforce the law with these.

Hidden jail cell: +10 shadowy. For when someone needs to disappear. You’re not sure how it stays clean, you’ve never let anyone out.

A broken special constable weapon. +10 dangerous. No doubt broken in the pursuit of justice, people fear whoever has one of these. The constables let it slide for you.

And I’d say its a bit beyond venerate. They have a vague supernatural contract, a prophet that communicates with storm, and is tortured for disobedience, and no other place that relates to them, that hadn’t already been used for items.

There is the Cave of the Nadir. There are some Urchins in there, and there is at least one Urchin outside who knows it is there, and the player character can sell the location to them.

There were other narratively appropriate alternatives, and the item from the cave wouldn’t have been more bizarre than dream-lightning.

The brief suggestion was to include the item in an existing piece of content (namely the Mind of a Dead God), and the actual implementation was a storylet with two options. I commend Failbetter for having two options instead of just one, but I don’t think that this made the game &quota deal larger than it is&quot.

In other words, that suggestion wasn’t asking Failbetter to crank out plenty of new stuff - it was just a suggestion to insert what it is going to implement in a place with a narrative connection.

Wouldn’t these just burn the perp’s wrists off? Or that the perp, if knowledgeable enough, resist the mental domination and use these to burn his/her way out of confinement? These just seem counter-productive and unreliable at law enforcement to me.

Also, there would have to be someone in the Constabulary who knows enough about the Correspondence anyway. This item seems more like Special Constable gear to me, and the Special Constables aren’t exactly part of the regular Constabulary anymore.

How would you implement this? As a Home Comfort item?

I have noticed that the Faction Items which have been implemented generally provide a +1 or +2 increment over the non-profession item with the formerly highest bonus; the mine was a +4 increment. It would not do if this was a Home Comfort item, assuming that Failbetter doesn’t want to crank out something super-duper over the existing gear.

If this is as a weapon, then well, you would have to think how someone can hold this. Yeah, yeah, there is the naval mine, but we don’t how large it is.

Besides, if someone has to disappear without getting killed, it would be easier to chuck them into the Cave of the Nadir. They get forgotten by other people too.

I do wonder how the Special Constables would allow the rest of the Constabulary to keep their gear, even if it is broken. The Special Constabulary do have a habit of cleaning things up - case in point being they scoop up Mr. Sacks and took the robe when he finally melted. It’s hard to imagine how they could miss something left behind by another black-uniformed colleague.
edited by Rostygold on 2/14/2017

There is the Cave of the Nadir. There are some Urchins in there, and there is at least one Urchin outside who knows it is there, and the player character can sell the location to them.

There were other narratively appropriate alternatives, and the item from the cave wouldn’t have been more bizarre than dream-lightning.

The brief suggestion was to include the item in an existing piece of content (namely the Mind of a Dead God), and the actual implementation was a storylet with two options. I commend Failbetter for having two options instead of just one, but I don’t think that this made the game &quota deal larger than it is&quot.

In other words, that suggestion wasn’t asking Failbetter to crank out plenty of new stuff - it was just a suggestion to insert what it is going to implement in a place with a narrative connection.[/quote]
Yes, but in the same breath, it’s just as plausible that they’d already had the idea well before. The nadir may have urchins, but the only faction with ties to storm is the urchins [perhaps the zailors or masters, but on much less friendly terms, so…]

It’s not inconcievable that it was a case of great minds think alike, or fools seldom differ; not a matter of them going with a suggestion just because they could. In fact, it seems more likely that it was just that.