The Bride is a storylet, not a card (Always tab, not Sometimes).
I have that issue with the map sometimes, especially on mobile. Usually closing the map and opening again will fix it.
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Did you just click to open the map? If you’re on Mutton Island you need to pick the “Leaving Mutton Island” storylet rather than just trying to travel. (I too spent several minutes earlier today staring at a map I couldn’t interact with wondering what I’d done wrong!)
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You also might need to zoom in the map slightly for the ports to become clickable. The default, on desktop anyway, seems to be the zoomed-out version.
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I’m not sure about any of the following.
I have no idea what I’m doing with this - I don’t usually have access to Unterzee locations so I don’t know what I’m looking at. I’ve nabbed a pair of Shadowy boots, which made sense because I don’t have any shoes that do that, but other than that I’m just diving down to the bottom every time and picking up whatever seems like a good idea :-D
Is there any strategy for how deep to dive?
Not-Cornwall is great. I’m not sure what a Cornish fishing village is doing in the Unterzee when it was supposed to be only London that fell, maybe that’s evident if you approach it from the direction it’s usually supposed to be approached from or maybe it’s just a mystery.
But the writing in the Fruits of the Zee thing is a bit odd, I don’t know whether anyone else thinks so. I’ve been away from the game for a while and since coming back I’ve noticed that the writing seems to have gone more towards being exotic and atmospheric to the point where I sometimes have to read the text three times before I can work out what’s supposed to have happened, which I suppose is a matter of taste, but this one is moody and atmospheric to the point where it doesn’t actually make sense, it seems weird that nobody is freaked out by what is happening or seems upset in the slightest at the fact that the Fathomking drowned somebody without warning, and that the player character is not freaked out by it or by the fact that nobody else is freaked out by it.
It reminds me of a posting I saw on the forum, which I now can’t find, where somebody was complaining that there was an option to ask what something that was being talked about was, but when they clicked on it it didn’t seem to do anything and the characters just went on talking about the thing as if the player character already knew what it was - well, this one doesn’t have a ‘What on earth’s going on? Why are you all acting like nothing’s the matter?’ option, but it might make more sense if it did, even if the answer was just ‘Don’t ask stupid landlubber questions, you’ll see later’!
It also has a high rate of ‘you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means’.
That’s only on shore, though - once you’re underwater the writing is great, maybe the circumstances catch up with the tone there since it’s all colourful description and that’s their natural element.
I met the Pentamerous Bride, and understand nothing (but I think that’s how it’s intended to be) except that she’s massive, fell from the sky and is luckily not interested in eating divers - and, if I can believe the Qualities description, is married to the king of the drownies, not that I know what he is either. I don’t know whether there’s any reason to go twice or whether it’s the same text every time.
I love the name ‘Mary Lloyd’. I know what it’s supposed to be, but I’ve never heard of anywhere spelling it that way and I don’t know whether I’m looking at a real instance from somewhere of ‘English speakers being completely confused by a Celtic name’ or a pitch-perfect fictional one!
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The more valuable an item is, the likelier you’ll get one if you go deeper. As the Fate-locked dive storylet indicates, you don’t need to get Fivefold Devotion past 11 to see everything, and you only need to get your Devotion to maximum if you want to see all 5 storylets of the Pentamerous Bride’s story.
As someone who isn’t from anywhere that ever did a thing like this and also new to the game and not familiar with it from previous years, I think I get what it is after scanning the wiki for retired descriptions. I suppose I’ve seen something of its like in one movie? maybe?
I’d definitely appreciate any further, external cultural context you can provide
Mari Lwyd, a Welsh Christmas tradition involving a horse skeleton.
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I believe that is a real historical misspelling - it pops up in some old newspapers!
Also, I love my Semi-Automated Mary Lloyd, and I wonder if the technology will one day develop to let us have a Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Horse Skeleton Bicycle.
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You don’t need max devotion to get the Bride’s storylet to appear, you just need to dive to the lowest level which max devotion will guarantee. I’ve been reaching the bottom by getting devotion up to 10 instead of the max 11. With that you can get to the 4th level no problem and then its a 90% challenge to get to the 5th.
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I got tired of diving after getting 10 skulls (It gets replaced with this) so I gave it a try. There isn’t a guide on the wiki yet, but I noticed on the recent changes list that someone was putting something together on a user page here.
Looks like there are three cards that can appear while zailing and once you get the tracking quality to 7 there will be a storylet where you’ll get a Primaeval Hint and increase a vanity quality. See also here
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If you haven’t yet, pick also all the different corals, which can be traded for good items starting on Thursday. The other items like the decanter are also worth picking.
What do you mean by “drowned someone”?
Some of the in-game reactions to the event are a bit blasé since the same thing happened last year. Characters where a bit more stressed then, but not it’s “sigh, okay, we will do th rites again, I guess”.
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My strategy has been to use 4 actions to get Fivefold Devotion to 5. Then taking a boat.
Now that I have got 3 of each type of coral (not necessary but I fancied getting all the alternate equipment) I pick a 100 Thalassic Favour item (Sodden Mass or Cured Jillyfleur Cloak) if they appear; if not or if there is only coral available I take the 50% chance to dive deeper and take the best option. Using that method I have items that add up to over 4000 Favour and some wounds and nightmares that I will need to deal with when I go back to London.
If you want all the equipment available from diving you will need to dive deeper. The wiki suggests getting 9 Fivefold Devotion and taking the risk if you need to go deeper.
As to the drowned lobsterman-- I guess people are used to Drownies by now, who are not dead dead, as it were. Plus, most people have visited the Boatman (recent Estival had some parts that required getting dead). And many people will have ended up in the Fathom King’s court after their boats have gone down at zee.
So yes, I suppose players and their characters are a bit blasé about it. And apart from the funny colours of the lobsterman’s eyes, there’s no body horror. (People who don’t care for it – including me – had enough and too much during Evolution. Some was so gross, FB even offered don’t look options.)
On the point of “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” – absolutely agree.
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What psgarak said. Apparently, the name ‘mari llwyd’ is Welsh for ‘grey mare’, a bit of an understated name for a skeleton or part-skeleton! Possibly, that’s about all I know about it, too, I’ve just heard of it occasionally.
It seems like, the historical things some of the Fallen London writers dig up are amazing - I remember seeing a lot of good ones back before I left the game and apparently that hasn’t changed
It seems like, the story implies that it snagged the Lobsterman just to make an impressive entrance, although, thinking about it again, you could also read it as he was someone who’d drowned accidentally some time ago and they just hadn’t seen him since then, although his dialogue reads more as if it’d happened recently.
Possibly, that was mainly what I was annoyed about to be honest - the islanders, and the writing, apparently running away from the Lobsterman for no reasons more coherent than ‘thus it must be’ (although, to be fair, what do you do with a Drownie?) - after the level of mournful fatalistic othering displayed in the ‘Speak to the Peligin-Eyed Lobsterman’ text, I was quite relieved when I came up from my first dive to see that he could in fact still talk like a human being!
It sounds like, it does make sense except for new (or new-to-FotZ) players - if they run this one again maybe they could have a ‘What’s happening? What are we doing?’ option for new and confused players. Possibly, I was misreading it completely before I saw these postings - I was reading it as ‘last year there was the Fruits of the Zee Festival but this year it’s been called off because of a crisis that’s caused all the fish to disappear, nobody knows what the Fathomking wants or what to do and the villagers are resorting to all kinds of strange superstitions for want of a better idea, and, um, since we don’t know what to do either we’re going to ignore it and go diving for loot’ - it makes a lot more sense now!
Thanks! It looks like, the text you find when you visit that (I’ve been diving again now I know there’s more than one lot of text) might actually be the answer to ‘what the heck is going on’, actually - or maybe this is something else entirely, I haven’t done all five yet.
As a total n00b, I’ve been following the detailed wiki guide for getting stuff and it’s going well – much better than Estival, where I constantly felt lost.
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Thank you!
Based on the other post in this thread, I tried searching for “mare” followed by a space and a varied assortment of vowels and L’s with a D at the end, and that wasn’t getting me anywhere
Well it was a labyrinth, after all 
Seriously, though, the score keeping for the games definitely confused me. But I suppose that’s off topic for this thread
I feel everyone here will appreciate this classic tumblr post on the Mari Llwyd, with pictures:
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indeed - at least the parts that tumblr lets me read before pestering me with the login-popup. have they always been this insistent that I must create an account?!
When exactly does Wreck-Diving end?
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