Maybe it's time to break out the rats again.

An idiom in Turkish which is used when one feels too ashamed of something — "Yerin yedi kat altına girdim which means "I have gone into the seventh floor of the ground" — is linked to Tengrism. Barış Manço made a song called "Lady of the seventh sky" in 1975. (In Tengrism, it is believed that the earth and the sky have seven floors/sections.)

Although I have to question who would be psyched up enough about ARCHAEOLOGY!!! to pack 100 supplies

Fallen London used to be about stuffing your pockets with strange jars and bits of string because some day they might be useful; now we're being encouraged to think differently. The game's not saying we're commiting an offence by looting ancient ruins for personal gain (Aten forbid!), just that some loot's inherently dangerous and, y'know, it might be best to sell it on and come back for more when we actually need it.

• Rare successes on fourth-tier item conversions are generally worth around 62.50; perhaps one now gives an Eyeless Skull.
• Doing something inadvisable with a Nephrite Lens.
• Corpsecage Island.
• Excessive Correspondence scholarship. (Although you may be reluctant to give the resulting skull to Revolutionaries. Fortunately guillotines seem out of fashion.)

Folks, does this seem like a bug, or something with a hidden potential (like grinding Stormy-Eyed up to 15)?

Oh, and half the stuff I tried to echo to my journal didn't keep, because we can apparently no longer change the titles of journal entries, and titles in quotation marks auto-format to blank for some reason, and echoes with blank titles don't save for some reason. Which is a bit weird.

The Forgotten Quarter in its new form is designed to cater for players across a very wide range of stats. You could get into the Nadir with Watchful as low as 60 - it would take a lot of persistence and luck, but it's possible. Down in the 40-70 range, stat damage means a lot more.

• Find an Eyeless Skull. That's hard, but they could be lucky, right?
  
• Raise Intimate with a Secular Missionary to ten through opportunity cards. This took me a long time, playing the cards whenever they came up. My stats rose a lot from other things, in the meantime. Of course, they could do nothing but discard cards until the right ones came up. Not that that would be perverse, or anything.
  
• Find enough cash, Skulls, or connections to acquire the expensive thingamy needed to get in. I reckon that's 800-1400 stat change points. But maybe they have a lot of Fate?
  
• Fund and successfully undertake at least seven Expeditions to get Archaeologist to five. That's a lot of grinding for supplies, and a load of Watchful challenges. Especially since, by hypothesis, their Watchful is really low.
• Complete a super hard Expedition with only 100 supplies. I did a back-of-the-envelope thing, and concluded that our precocious hero is basically doomed, unless they have a huge stockpile of Second Chances. Which you normally get by doing stuff that raises your Watchful. But you don't have to. And so help me, this player won't. They'll get them through opportunity cards. It'll pass the time while they get to know the Missionary.
  

Anywhere that we don't pad the sharp edges of the game, some players bash their heads on those sharp edges until they're bloody, and guess who they blame? Even when we've put up a warning notice? I still get emails complaining about the penalties on the Mr Eaten storyline, although I could hardly have made the warnings clearer unless I went round and tattooed them on every participating player. I know I will already get emails from players demanding I reset their stats because they didn't realise what would happen in the Nadir.

The Nadir works best unspoiled. If I made the penalties more severe, there would be more people over the next two years saying 'for God's sake don't spend more than x actions in there, you'll suffer y effect' and fewer people saying 'ooh you've got a treat in store, but go carefully.'

And the biggest consideration. Broadly speaking, quality effects ... (ii) ... provide a sense of substance to the fiction. The Nadir stat change is more (ii) than (i). it provides a rationale for the limit on return, and an indication of what might happen if you hung around. Pearl diving is a good analogy: the intention is to force you return to the surface, not choose between riches and potential dismemberment at every point. (I wanted to add options to make the card drawing more strategic, and I wanted to allow long-shot risks on later, more informed, visits to the Cave, but the FQ is already an enormous content release and we were just out of time...)

• Remove the extra penalty from the Irrigo 10 auto-fire storylet, so we don't go around telling everyone to leave at Irrigo 9.
  
• Add an option to that storylet which allows the player to stay in the Cave. Have it unlock with whatever you consider sufficiently high Watchful. Kick the player out when they hit Irrigo 20. Warn of escalating consequences.
• When the player leaves, reduce their stats by, say, Irrigo squared. That conveniently gives the present penalty for Irrigo 10. It avoids sharp cut-offs which make gameplay choices easy. It allows players to hurt themselves pretty badly (up to eight stat points), but only if their stats are high enough and they disregard clear warnings. It's not high enough for players to exhaust the mysteries of the Cave, and it fits the atmosphere of the place. It creates interesting choices. It will probably also do your laundry and reply to bug reports.
  

3) When your rival's progress hits 10, there'll be an expensive way to reduce their progress.