I just arrived at what seems to be the end of my part in the War of Illusions in Mahogany Hall; I was a double agent and I planned to become connected with both Glass and Shroud at 20. I built up Shroud first, I didn’t sabotaged the Glass. Since when I decided to carry on the Shroud part the Glass options simply disappeared, and what’s worst, I really wanted to make to the Glass ending since I wanted to know about the Fingerkings, also because of the last Exceptional Story!
Is the Glass path definitely banned for me now? I feel like I thrown away one of the key secrets my character (and myself) should know, and I’m feeling pretty bad.
Unfortunately, you can’t get Connected for both factions up to 20. They’re diametrically opposed and, at a certain point, you have to pick a side.
If you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve sabotaged an illusion, then that’s the ball game. You’ve picked a side.
If you’ve not reached that point, then you still have an opportunity to sabotage a séance and choose Glass. You just have to go back and do the storylets all over again.
The unnerving thing is that I purposely picked the option that ignores the chance to sabotage the other faction! And since then all the bets seem off. And the game also points out that the one I chose is the path to AVOID sabotage. It’s maddening! …I’m honestly on the verge of tears, I apologize for the unneeded emphasis.
I suppose the choice to “ignore distractions” and skip over the sabotage part of the story could be more clearly worded: if it had said something like “abandon the idea of being a double agent: forget the Glass and focus solely on your work with the Shroud” I imagine you wouldn’t have picked it?
And if you were at the point where there were four such choices (sabotage the Glass, sabotage the Shroud, ignore the Glass and focus on the Shroud, ignore the Shroud and focus on the Glass) what would you have picked instead?
If all the four options were explicitly displayed I think I would choose to learn something about the Shroud then I’d sabotage it to get close to the Glass, with the chance of ignoring the Shroud to focus on the Glass as a second. The Shroud has the "Correspondence Theory" appeal, but my character is preparing for her trip beyond the mirror in the pursuit of July (the current Exceptional Story) and wants to gather all the pieces of information available. Also, I have played Sunless Sea and want to know more about the Fingerkings.
If there was a fate-locked option to replay the War I’d pay without second thoughts.
Well, fate-locked replay options are for finished stories. This one has barely begun. There’s essentially nothing to it, at all, from there.
If it gets finished some day, then you can consider if you really want to redo the whole story on the other side.
As of now though, you’re missing nothing. If you’d really like to learn more about fingerkings, I’d recommend Sunless Sea, A Gallery of Serpents, or last month’s exceptional story, if that’s still open to you. None of it is particularly relevant to this month’s exception story, anything important is clearly explained as it comes up.
This is a relief; I guess I got upset for something not important as I thought. I apologize again, I had a few rough days and I’m really into this game.
PS: Thank you, metasynthie; I appreciate that. Can you also explain this answer you gave me a while ago?
(emphasis mine)
Did you refer to the War of Illusions?
Yes – unless I’m remembering incorrectly, if you’ve played through Court of Cats or gotten to Embroiled in the Wars of Illusion 20 (possibly 25) you have additional options during Lost in Reflections to “have already heard” of one of the chief figures of that story. The Court of Cats option definitely gives you an extra 2.5 Echo reward, I’m not sure about the Wars of Illusion option.
[color=#009900]We built Mahogany Hall five years ago just as we were realising the limitations of our original narrative design approaches. It’s more brittle than we’d like, and it is on the rework list - but because it’s complicated, it’s stayed on the rework list for a long time.[/color]
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[color=#009900]We’ll get to it, though, and probably fairly soon. We want to tell more stories about the War of Illusions, and we won’t be able to do that until we’ve reworked Mahogany Hall. So if you’re feeling stymied by the end of it, don’t worry: there will be more options at some point.[/color]
[color=#009900]We’ve discussed our evolving approaches a lot, but not specifically in regard to Mahogany Hall. Babel collated a lot of relevant posts here.[/color]