Weekly Fallen London Questions, 07/05/2018

Fallen London
21

I just got the &quotThe Fate of your Aunt&quot card from Inconvenienced by My Aunt (which is at 11). It’s giving me the choice of where to send my Aunt, and it’s purportedly Standard frequency.
Now, I played through the Aunt fate content very soon after starting the game (I didn’t want to leave my dear Aunt rotting among devils), and so I have neither recorded journal entries nor coherent memories of that time - meaning I don’t know if I ever played this particular card and made this choice ever before. However, I do know that for the past 2-3 years or however long I’ve been playing, the only Aunt content I’ve seen is a &quotBack to Old Habits&quot card that was materially useless and detailed how I’d drag her home after another wild outing and try to suppress the public opinion.

So what on Earth happened here?

  • Did something get changed/updated?
  • Is it a bug and I suddenly got sent to a different part of the story?
  • Am I just astronomically unlucky, and unknowingly got stuck mid-way through the story due to not drawing a Standard card for three years?
    Unfortunately I don’t remember what my Inconvenienced was at until today, so I don’t know whether it was always at 11 or just got changed.
    edited by Dudebro Pyro on 5/11/2018
22

Spoilers because Fate

So, if you pay Fate for the extension, then you get a few cards involving Aunt-related hijinks, which also build up a quality. Eventually, that quality reaches high enough that you draw a different card, which lets you pick an occupation for your Aunt. There are three occupations, each of which give a different opportunity card as a “reward.” I don’t know what all three variants are. I had her work for Mr Wines, and my card is titled something like “Here, Try This.”

Sounds to me like there are two possibilities, depending on where in the story the “Back to Old Habits” card falls.

  1. This was a middle-of-story building-progress card. Somehow over the course of two years, you didn’t play it enough to advance the story and had just gotten into the habit of discarding it. You recently played it instead of discarding, and it finally advanced the story.

I consider this option unlikely. I seem to remember there were two or three mid-story cards, not just one, and I think you could draw any of them at a time. Several other Fate-locked stories work the same way.

  1. “Back to Old Habits” was in fact one of the “reward” cards, but your choice of reward got re-set. This may have happened accidentally. It is possible to re-set your Aunt’s choice of occupation by paying Fate under the Write Letters storylet at your Lodgings. Perhaps you misclicked? It could also have gotten reset as a bug.

When you say “Materially Useless,” do you mean the rewards weren’t worth the action, or that it literally did nothing of note? Did it increase a quality didn’t seem to have any gameplay effect?

23

[spoiler]The card gave a couple CP of either scandal or suspicion, maybe both, I discarded it almost all the time and didn’t play attention when I did play it (usually accidentally). It definitely didn’t advance any progress qualities (unless they were hidden), and I don’t think it gave any items or other useful rewards at all.

I definitely didn’t manually reset the story - all my Fate is intact, for one.

Perhaps someone has a list of what all the options do, and can shed light on my Back to Old Habits card? Knowing this community someone certainly has that documented somewhere.[/spoiler]
I’m not complaining, of course - I keep hearing about the rewards like action refreshes, and now I can actually get them! I’m just a bit flabbergasted, is all.

24

Just make sure you get her to work for Mr Wines when the opportunity to pick an employer for her presents itself. This is the path that offers a chance at action refreshes.