Major Squiggles
Posts: 7
2/11/2015
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So I just started up fallen london again after having given up on it before. This...game I guess you could call it, is just so vague and confusing. So I understand that the world is supposed to be very mysterious, but there is a difference between being mysterious and just being completely vague. One of the many things I'm trying to wrap my head around is something as simple as paying the rent. Normally trade works when you give me a thing and I give you a thing. I get a room and you get...secrets? What? Is that literally a secret because that's what they make it seem to be. I am currently in ladybones road, or at least I think I am. I was but then traveled to my lodgings, which apparently I don't have. So I am simultaneously at my lodgings and not at my lodgings. Or perhaps by being at my lodgings it means the streets since I do not have a lodgings? I don't know and it doesn't seem to matter. But then I get the opportunity to find a place to live. I can charm my way into someone's home but I prefer my privacy. I could steal secrets...wait what? "Steal" secrets? The image of the choice is a man with a bag of loot so I assume 15 secrets must be some sort of currency. What exactly that currency is I don't know. Perhaps it's coins, or paper currency. Maybe they're just really big rocks or bits of strings that are just called "secrets". But I'm certainly no thief so let's skip this option.
My next choice is to...learn whispered secrets? Wait a minutes so they are literally secrets now? Like I don't have anything physical to give you secrets? 15 secrets seems like a strange number too. How does the landlord determine the value of a room in a number of secrets? What use are secrets anyways? Is the economy based on people telling other people secret things they learned? It's not much of a secret if it's being told to so many people now is it? What determines if a piece of information is a secret anyways? Suppose I found out that Jim doesn't like to put cheese on his burgers, is that a secret? If I told that to my landlord would he let me stay an extra week?What if it's something they already know?
Finally I have the choice of earning Rostygold. Finally something that makes sense. It looks like some sort of red metal or something. I don't care but it's something that I can understand. I somehow get this rostygold and I can give it to the landlord and he'll let me stay for a month. What does confuse me is what it means by how I earn it. "Rostygold is traditionally a reward for Dangerous work; thumping things, for instance, or being, in your turn thumped." I assume by "thumping things" it could mean wet work but that doesn't make sense when it says that you are the one being thumped. What exactly are they trying to say?
It seems silly that the way the world and how you experience it is so different from the way you are supposed to experience it. For instance this whole secret thing. This shouldn't even be a question as a citizen of fallen london, and yet it is. When it says I have a secret, since I can't see it, and there is nothing to describe the secret all I have is this sort of vague idea of a thing that is referred to as a secret. Of course my character, or "me" would know fully well what it is they're looking at. I'm having this constant strange disconnect where I'm trying to be this character in Fallen London, and yet I feel so detached from it. I feel almost, left out in a sense. I feel like the guy who woke up with amnesia, and whenever something doesn't make sense the world is like "haha oh you were always such a kidder. Pretending like you don't know!" Is this an issue for anyone else? How did you guys get through the game? Does it get better? Is it supposed to be this confusing from the get go?
edited by Major Squiggles on 2/11/2015
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thedeadlymoose
Posts: 214
2/15/2015
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(This is partly inspired by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook's post above.)
(First a triviality:
I assume by "thumping things" it could mean wet work but that doesn't make sense when it says that you are the one being thumped.
This makes more sense once you realize that Dangerous work is everything from being a bodyguard ('getting thumped') to shooting dangerous vermin ('thumping'). Probably other, funnier explanations too. Wetwork specifically could really be Shadowy or Dangerous depending on the method.)
Rambling post ahead!
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For me, understanding this was part and parcel of understanding the Bazaar. The Bazaar fundamentally runs the economy, and it needs stories quite badly. And the Bazaar will pay for secrets, perhaps almost //any// secret, however trivial, because it has reason to do so, and therefore they have tangible worth, just like a green piece of paper with particular markings is worth one US dollar.
Whispered Secrets do seem to be written down for the purposes of buying and selling, though, from the descriptions of the items, with whispered secrets being regular secrets written down on a single line ("Inscribed in tiny letters on a slip of paper small enough to tie to a raven's leg"), and cryptic clues being secrets you either are encoding or should be encoding because they're more dangerous ("Information too dangerous to be written down, except in code").
About losing them once you pass them on...
Say you overhear a conversation. You write it all down. The conversation itself is gonna be made up of many distinct secrets. You then pass those snippets on to pay your rent. Realistically you'd still remember a few, but most of that you just wouldn't remember. We forget tons of stuff every day; if we had the economy of Fallen London today, we'd surely pay more attention to the world around us, but we'd still forget almost everything just like normal.
Yes, it's not strictly realistic that you can't just easily recreate them by writing them down again -- but it is realistic that you forget some of them once you've passed them on. Plus the fact that they might cease being secrets if you try reusing them too much (and the effort of figuring that out might account for extra actions, in a game sense!).
Admittedly, at the very beginning, it seems pretty unlikely that the only 15 secrets you know are all relevant to your landlord or whoever
That's just it though. It doesn't really matter whether they're relevant to your landlord, because those little slips of paper are stuff the Bazaar will pay for in the standard currency that you can use to exchange for anything else.
Suppose I found out that Jim doesn't like to put cheese on his burgers, is that a secret?
If it's an actual secret? That Jim doesn't tell people about? I would speculate yes! That's 1 Whispered Secret right there, worth a penny or two. Not dangerous, so not a Cryptic Clue, and not horrifying or dramatic, so not an Appalling Secret, but that's why those are worth significantly more.
If I told that to my landlord would he let me stay an extra week?
It's probably not valuable enough alone, but in combination with other secrets, yes.
The Bazaar cares about secrets and stories. That's why it steals cities, after all, to harvest stories from its "delicious friends". (The messages upon selling to the Bazaar: "Oh, so piquant, these little ones. Like capers." for Whispered Secrets, and "Smooth, these, but they tingle. Like peppermint tea, or glimmycake." for Cryptic Clues -- references to some form of nourishment.) So the Bazaar will pay resources for them. You could go sell them to the Bazaar for standard currency and use the currency to buy necessities.
Which makes Jim secretly not putting cheese on his ratburgers a piece of information that is worth a small amount of money.
And even if people don't understand WHY the Bazaar will shell out for stuff like this, they will certainly adapt. And the ordinary person on the street will quickly stop questioning this; after all, there's far, far weirder shit than paying for information on a strangely wide scale. (Like coming back from death; like talking cats; like devils and rubbery folk in the streets.)
What if it's something they already know?
I would speculate they retain value so long as they remain actually secret -- and, hell, maybe to the Bazaar they still retain value so long as they were secret; or perhaps they simply transform, into various forms of gossip or becoming part of an inkling of identity or whatever. So long as the information has any power to compel -- and honestly, sometimes even the fact that it was a secret can compel.
I mean, Jim not putting cheese on his burgers isn't that compelling, but it's at least a tiny bit interesting if you are interested in Jim, because it's not something everyone does. if it's a secret, that makes it inherently more interesting, because why would someone keep something like that a secret? What does it say about Jim? It's probably silly, but it's intriguing.
A lot of this fascinates me because I'm a writer of sorts, and Fallen London takes the logic you have to learn as a writer -- such as the fact that little details are interesting to the reader and make things seem more real and compelling on a whole -- and makes them key to the way the world functions. The Bazaar works with the same tools and logic you learn in a writing workshop, because stories are vital to its existence. It's a terribly entertaining conceit.
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http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/profile/Eris~Jay
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/profile/Red~Rose
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WormApotheote
Posts: 725
2/11/2015
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Yes it is supposed to be kind of surreal at weird at fisrt.
...though it gets weirder. Although at least by then you have some idea what's going on.
The 'information is treated like tangible objects' thing is never really explained though, tbh.
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No, I don't pull the Eater of Names.
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Diptych
Administrator
Posts: 3493
2/11/2015
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Well, starting from first principles... this is a world where magic (of a sort) and science (of a sort) go hand-in-hand, and where the economy is explicitly run by a cabal of ancient, bizarre nonhuman beings. It's full of creatures that are made of dreams, or that can extract and store memories in physical form, or that can climb inside your mind and ride it around for a while. There are languages that, if correctly written or spoken, cause what is communicated to come true. Basically, the bounadies between objects and concepts - between the mental and material worlds - are... less strict than usual.
In practical terms, this means that Fallen London has a multi-layered grey economy. There are some professions that trade in information as much as, or more than, material goods - academics, say, or spies - but these tendencies have crept out into the general population, and almost everyone is at least an amateur gossip and mysterymonger. Considering just how much is mysterious about the Neath - beginning with "what is this giant cave that we're in, and why are we in it" and working outward from there - secrets affect everyone's lives to a greater or lesser degree.
There are other professions and industries that, for one reason or another - because they're illegal, or they distrust the Bazaar, or they mostly trade with foreign economies, or for some arcane, semi-mystical reason of their own - prefer to trade in something other than legal tender. Rostygold is metaphorically and perhaps literally connected to the spilling of blood, and it's certainly a semi-precious metal, so it's popular among solid, practical folks in dangerous trades - hunters, for example, or soldiers, or athletes.
As for the actual mechanics of tradings secrets... it's generally implied that the secrets are something relevant to the recipient, that you "spend" them by passing them on to someone who can either use them or sell them on themselves, and that they can either be remembered and shared verbally, or written down and traded as texts. So, "50 Whispered Secrets" might be a conversation you've overheard and are repeating to someone, or a diary you've found, or something like that. And if you're wondering why anyone would take such things as currency? Well, consider that the Bazaar will literally pay for information, and employs accountants to calculate the prices of different forms of it - right down to the levels of taxation applicable to different kinds of narrative. It's weird, but it's weird in a practical way.
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Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
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WormApotheote
Posts: 725
2/11/2015
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One card mentions feeding a pet secrets you've memorized and chopped into bit sized chunks. Also you can broker kisses, and acquire romance in wholesale quantities.
But basically information is tangible objects; its not clear entirely how much that's metaphorical and how much that's literal, it's probably both.
It's probably best to just go with it and not think too hard about it because half this game runs on dream logic. (There are actual lore reasons for WHY the game runs on dream logic, for that matter)
edited by WormApotheote on 2/11/2015
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No, I don't pull the Eater of Names.
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Blaine Davidson
Posts: 388
2/11/2015
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Lomias wrote:
WormApotheote wrote:
One card mentions feeding a pet secrets you've memorized and chopped into bit sized chunks. Also you can broker kisses, and acquire romance in wholesale quantities.
But basically information is tangible objects; its not clear entirely how much that's metaphorical and how much that's literal, it's probably both.
It's probably best to just go with it and not think too hard about it because half this game runs on dream logic. (There are actual lore reasons for WHY the game runs on dream logic, for that matter)
edited by WormApotheote on 2/11/2015
WOW, where can I get that piece of lore? I am very curious.
The aforementioned pet is [spoiler]a Bifuricated Owl, obtained via a Labyrinth of Tigers fate-locked storyline.[/spoiler]
That particular piece of lore appears during a successful interaction on said pet's opportunity card.
edited by Blaine Davidson on 2/11/2015
edited by Blaine Davidson on 2/11/2015
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Blaine Davidson, a reserved and sensible woman with a fondness of collecting rarities.
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Major Squiggles
Posts: 7
2/11/2015
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So it's basically just like it seems. I can literally stay in a room for a month if I tell my landlord 15 things he doesn't already know? I suppose you can consider it valueable because he'll then in turn tell those 15 things to someone else who will give him something for it. No sillier than exchanging scraps of paper I suppose. Only problem being some secrets wouldn't be as valuable as others. Suppose there are 100 people who know that John's a vegetarian. Secrets can't be "spent". it's not like once you've told someone a bit of information you instantly forget it yourself. That would be like being able to use a dollar multiple times with different people. So if I tell that to the landlord that secret can only be exchanged with people who don't already know. Since that number doesn't really go down a particular secret could be much less valuable than others. So information that 100 people know would be more useful, and be exchanged much more often than something that 10,000 people know. And yet it seems like they are all the same value since it only matters how many different secrets you know. Followup question, how is the fallen london economy not in complete ruins?
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Estelle Knoht
Posts: 1751
2/16/2015
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My personal take is that the the value of a secret also depends on knowing what can you do with it, what you can refine it into and its worth to others.
Jim doesn't like cheese on his burger.
That alone is going to matter very little to anyone who doesn't know Jim well. Information are important but without apparent use they are on the miscellaneous side and traded cheaply like a reserve.
Intriguing Gossip, like its category says, helps in gaining influence over people. Perhaps Jim is a person of relative importance that you want to gain influence over. Or you know people who needs to. He might not be important but knowing who needs the information also make the knowledge more complete.
For example, Mary wants to become a friend or lover with Jim. Therefore, armed with this knowledge she can attempt to bond with Jim over the (possibly) mutual dislike of cheese-on-burgers.
Incendiary Gossip is for starting rumours and blackmailing. It can be the same knowledge under different circumstances (i.e. you don't know Jim well enough to become buddy over cheese-hating but you know he is supposed to be eating cheese 24/7) or simply knowledge of misdeeds (i.e. Dov killed Jim's Overgoat, and he is not going to appreciate people knowing that no matter what).
It could be a tipping point or the spark needed to bring trouble to Dov but that alone is not substantial to stand on its own. So spreading this gossip around might make people wary of Dov but not cause any real damage. Several piece of info combined would lead to An Identity Uncovered (e.g. Mary knows the man with Top-Hat and a knife seen at night in Jim's house is Dov) and a dossier of that would be threatening enough to blackmail people with.
It also depends on knowing who to give the information to, which makes these secret actually usable and not just a bunch of Cryptic Clues. The information about Dov would be meaningless secrets for a random housewife on the Surface. While knowing said housewife wear human-skin T-Shirt would be appalling for Dov but not particularly useful unless refined further.
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Estelle Knoht, a juvenile, unreliable and respectable lady.
I currently do not accept any catbox, cider, suppers, calling cards or proteges.
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