I’ve been playing for 2 months now and seen quite a few different minor storylet options that are locked behind a quality called “Investigating the Rubbery Murders”. I figured this is something I’d eventually run into on my own, but today I decided to look it up because an option for entering the House of Chimes was locked behind it.
Turns out this is a story the developers removed from the game? I found that really weird. How faulty or bad can a story possibly be to justify its removal from the game? Especially considering how many options also went with it.
The entire early game has been extensively revamped since I played it, so it’s hard to speculate too specifically.
However The Rubbery Murders was, I believe? on of Fallen London’s earlier experiments with fate locked content (hence its placement in what is now considered the early game) and developer & player expectations in terms of what fate locked content should be and how it should work have evolved substantially since 2009. Which makes the remaining stories from that era fit somewhat awkwardly into their paid content model. And in this case, I suppose they didn’t like the story enough to make it free instead of scrapping it entirely.
Yeah we basically decided, when we were doing a broad review of old Fate content, that the Rubbery Murders just straight up didn’t meet either our current quality bar nor did it work narratively in the game.
You can actually read the entire story on the wiki, if you’re curious about it. FBG made an exception for this story, allowing it to be publicly recorded in its entirety, as they considered the removal permanent.
(Try hitting clear cache on the wiki page if it doesn’t show the list of storylets in progress order, I just updated it today so it might not have caught up yet.)
As far as the options that went down with it… I only know of two: one in the House of Chimes that you mentioned, and one with the Capering Relicker, also recorded in the wiki.
Yeah, he resigned back in January. It was kind of abrupt and announcements were sparse on public details so it was easy to miss. There was a job posting for Narrative Designer which I assume has been filled but I don’t know by whom, or if the new designer will be as player-facing as Bruno was.
There is someone new named Michael Bunning, most recently credited for editing and QA for A Life of Clay, though I don’t know what role they’re filling beside that (and as noted the staff list isn’t updated to include them yet).
Btw, thinking about it now, it might be worth sending a feedback email about the House of Chimes option to ask them remove Rubbery Murders from the requirement list. If memory serves, that option basically just requires a laundry list of detectiving and investigating qualities from the time when it was made and nothing strictly references the story.