Weekly Fallen London Questions, 23/06/2025

Here’s this week’s thread for any quick questions about Fallen London you don’t want to start a whole separate thread for!

My opinion is that Attend a Church Service (70% chance success) is a scam.

You can get five or six consecutive failures, one lucky success, then another failure streak. The math is most definitely not mathing.

It seriously should be this vexing to lower a menace, unless you’re just intentionally nudging players to use items or social actions to achieve it.

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Plus, you can’t use it to get below 2. The reductions are more significant than the increases, but I agree – it’s one of the more frustrating actions. Which does mean having to appeal to a friend, delicious or not, to become entirely scandal-free.

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There are certainly better options once you’re A Person of Some Importance, especially when you’re above 5.

I think you can visit the Waswood before being APoSI, and so you could have A Hard-earned Knack for Repair or In Mr. Huffam’s Good Graces. That plus buying A Carnelian Sapphire Pendant, would allow aPoSI to take the expected average reduction from -1.1 to…

…-1.16? Huh. That’s not as much safety as I thought. The satisfaction of nothing happening despite getting the unlucky outcome feels bigger than those numbers.

So buy a bottle of Instant Ablution Absolution and don’t go to church? That’s terribly on-brand advice from me even though I promise I set out writing this expecting to end up suggesting the opposite. Also exile isn’t the worst thing in the world. Say hi to a bandaged lion who lives there! (Such a sweetie. Oh who’s a good lion. Yes yes you are.)

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Has there been any compilation of answers to the Baited Riddles? I was looking over the riddles thsmselves on the wiki and realised just how little of Fallen London’s deep lore I have learned so far.

You just needed to scroll down to the comments.

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How do you grind Chthonosophy?? I was at 6, lost a point in pursuit of a moth, and can’t find any chthonosophy checks that actually raise it and aren’t capped at 5. The wiki doesn’t list any! This is quite frustrating!

You need to head into the Stacks, ensure that you have some Fragmentary Ontologies at hand and wait for the right cards to appear. The Tea Room one is by far the better option but it only appears infrequently.

Unfortunately, both of those are capped at 5, according to the Wiki (I tried the Tea Room one, and it didn’t get me any cp, so the Wiki seems to be right about that, haven’t tried the other one yet myself).

How very strange. As long as your Chthonosophical Studies hasn’t dropped you should be able to get Chthonosophy back to 6 using the aforementioned method (the gains from the cards are capped at 5 + your current level of Studies).

Have you drawn A Dream of Contact from the main Burgundy deck yet? If not, you don’t have Chthonosophical Studies at level 6 yet which would explain why the Stacks card didn’t raise your Chthonosophy skill.

Actually, they are capped at 5+Chthonosophical Studies according to the wiki. I don’t remember which action I used to raise Cthonosophy to 6, but it was in the stacks. If the tea room does not add CP, it’s bugged I suppose.

Huh, I’ll try the other one, and then contact Failbetter if it doesn’t work. Thanks!

Yep, I’ve done Dream of Contact thing, had it raised to 6 for months, but then lost a level from the tapestry moth process, and am having a hell of a time getting it back.

It really seems bizarre there’s only two cards in a particular place, not that frequently drawn, and that require other items, to raise it - even assuming I’m either being silly or having a glitch and those cards really do raise it.

Sounds like you must be experiencing a glitch, I did that part of moth-making a while ago and I distinctly remember both cards raising the skill as intended.

.. same here, the two stack-cards did it for me after losing one level to the moth-process.

I’ve figured it out - the God’s-Eye View one only raises it on a success and I was having bad luck. Many thanks all for your help!

I still feel like it’s excessively hard to raise. One activity, only two cards within it out of a great many, requiring another item you only get in this activity, and one of them only works on success, at 40% luck rate. It just seems disproportionately limited compared to how you grind other stats, and I was planning on hanging out in the Stacks anyway so wasn’t put out.

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Some of the other Advanced Skills are actually kind of a pain to level, in ways that some of us older players don’t realize because they’ve been rebalanced since their initial release. That first Whitsun in particular contributed to a skewed perspective of how easy it is to level some of these. Chthonosophy is certainly on the harder end of the spectrum, but I wouldn’t consider it an extreme outlier compared to KT or AotRS. The main difference being Red Science has a Whitsun shortcut, and KT has a shortcut that requires Whitsun equipment, while Chthonosphy doesn’t have a shortcut yet.

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