| 1 | [[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/fallen_london.jpg]] |
| 2 | [[caption-width-right:300:One City. A Thousand Stories]] |
| 3 | %% |
| 4 | ->''Forty years ago, London was stolen by bats.'' |
| 5 | |
| 6 | Welcome, [[AuthorCatchphrase delicious troper]]. ''Fallen London'' (formerly ''Echo Bazaar'') is a [[BrowserGame browser game]] produced by Creator/FailbetterGames. It's set in the eponymous city, a [[BeneathTheEarth mile underground]] and a boat down the river from {{Hell}}, where people are either piecing together the mystery of what exactly happened, trading souls, or just politely murdering other people. Players start off as prisoners plotting to break out, and after that... they're free to do whatever they want. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | The game draws its atmosphere and structure from classic literature, particularly the works of Creator/TSEliot, Creator/HPLovecraft, and Creator/JorgeLuisBorges, but also more comedic writers such as Creator/PGWodehouse. Much of the gameplay consists of figuring out exactly what the plot ''is'', and how VictorianLondon came to be situated so very far below the surface. There are four stats a player can choose to improve on as they continue their story down in the Neath: Dangerous (fighting prowess and intimidation); Watchful (perception and mental acumen); Persuasive (charm and wit); and Shadowy (stealth and cunning). Exploring London improves one or more of the stats, and further quests are revealed to the player as they progress in their explorations. The player gradually learns more about the world and uncovers its secrets, and players are free to explore any of the paths in any order they like, or simply all at once. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | The gameplay is turn-based and uses actions, which refresh over time. Microtransactions can be used to buy more actions and to explore vast amounts of locked content. Subscribers also gain access to an exclusive story hub where a new, long story is made available to them every month. |
| 11 | |
| 12 | Fallen London can be played [[http://www.fallenlondon.com/ here]]. ''[[http://silvertree.storynexus.com/ The Silver Tree]]'', set [[TheVerse in the same universe]], was funded through Kickstarter. A spinoff game, ''VideoGame/SunlessSea'', is available on Creator/HumbleBundle, Platform/GOGDotCom and Platform/{{Steam}}. Its sequel, ''VideoGame/SunlessSkies'', was released on 31st January 2019, and its story involves heavy spoilers for this game. A prequel VisualNovel, ''VisualNovel/MaskOfTheRose'', arrived on UsefulNotes/{{Kickstarter}} in February 2021, and was released June 8, 2023. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | No relation to ''Film/LondonHasFallen''. Seriously, you can't see Creator/GerardButler at this video game. |
| 15 | ---- |
| 16 | !!Tropes present in this game include: |
| 17 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 18 | |
| 19 | [[folder: A-H]] |
| 20 | * AbsurdlyHighStakesGame: The Marvellous, focus of the Heart's Desire ambition, is "a notorious card game in which you can stake your soul and win your [[TitleDrop heart's desire]]". And you can lose worse than "just" your soul; just look at [[spoiler:the Topsy King, who bet his mind and lost it]]. Later subverted in the end with the fact that you can stake merely [[spoiler:a single penny]]. |
| 21 | * TheAce: Late-game storylines after the player character becomes a Person of Some Importance portray them as this, with people seeking them out for their reputation of being ''really good'' at getting things done. |
| 22 | * AdamSmithHatesYourGuts: The cost of the Noman in Penstock's Wicket increases once every few days, from 3 The Taste of Lacre, 1 x Skyglass Knife, 1 x Nodule of Deep Amber, 3 x Hard-Earned Lesson and 3 x Sudden Insight initially to 15 The Taste of Lacre, 1 x Skyglass Knife, 1 x Nodule of Pulsating Amber, 3 x Hard-Earned Lesson, 3 x Sudden Insight, Melancholy 3, Hedonist 3, Magnanimous 3 and Forceful 3 at the end of January, which reflects how most players tend to buy Nomen just before the Wicket closes (so it would be easier to keep the Noman alive until the Feast of the Exceptional Rose). |
| 23 | * TheAdjectivalMan: There are Clay Men (docile golems), Unfinished Men (non-docile golems), Neddy Men (government strikebreakers), Raggedy Men (eccentric criminals), and Rubbery Men (eldritch immigrants). |
| 24 | * AfterlifeExpress: Moloch Street Underground Station in Ladybones Road is the first stop on the journey to Hell. Nearby markets buy and sell the cast-off possessions of the damned, and a few quests involve plotting trips for devils or missionaries. |
| 25 | * AlienSpaceBats: Part of the backstory of the game involves a swarm of bats dragging Victorian-era London beneath the earth under orders from the Bazaar. It's implied this was a preplanned deal by the British government. Also, Hell exists, as do Eldritch-y rubber men, magic, and so on. [[spoiler: This also describes the Masters of the Bazaar in the most literal possible sense. They're definitely [[BeastMan bat-people]], and a few of the game's deeper revelations refer to them as having come from space.]] |
| 26 | * AllThereInTheManual: The sidebars are critical to piecing together many of the mysteries of the game's backstory. |
| 27 | * AllianceMeter: |
| 28 | ** Your Renown or Connected qualities keep track of how close you are to the various factions of Fallen London. Bohemians, the Church, Constables, Criminals, the Docks, the Great Game, Hell, Revolutionaries, Rubbery Men, Society, Tomb-Colonies, and Urchins have Renown, which are gained by trading Favours, with high enough Renown netting you items associated with them. The rest of the factions around the Neath, such as the Gracious Widow and the Fingerkings, have a Connected meter that increase or decrease as you take actions in support of or against them. |
| 29 | ** In the Boxful of Intrigue carousel, your actions put you on a side: A Guardian of the Realm (those in power) or The Conscience of Empire (the common folk). Taking more actions that line up with whom you've sided with increases Empire's Kingmaker, while doing the opposite gains A Turncoat, which signifies how untrustworthy you are, and if it's too high, neither side will work with you. |
| 30 | * AlternateContinuity: The main ''Fallen London'' timeline diverged from that of spinoff game ''VideoGame/SunlessSkies'' (which is only described as a possible future) when the Empress decreed the cancellation of the year 1900, with 31st December 1899 being followed immediately by 1st January 1899--something that did not happen in ''Sunless Skies'', which starts in 1905, ten years after ''VideoGame/SunlessSea'''s 1895. |
| 31 | * AmbiguousGender: The player can choose to keep their character's gender undefined. Namely, the gender options for your character are "A lady", "A gentleman", and "My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London [[{{Cthulhumanoid}} with the faces of squid]]. Squid! [[StarfishAliens Do you ask them their gender?]] And yet you [[HypocriticalHumor waste our time]] asking me [[SesquipedalianLoquaciousness trifling and impertinent]] questions like that? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day". |
| 32 | * AmbiguouslyBrown: People from the Elder Continent (ex: the Presbyterate Diplomat and Bishop of St Fiacre's) tend to be very dark-skinned, but the Elder Continent's lack of a clear real-life counterpart culture leaves the question of race open and the Bishop [[spoiler:not being human and wearing the face of another]] complicates matters even further. Additionally, an [[ArtEvolution art update]] noticeably darkened the skin of several prominent characters: the Comtessa went from very white-looking to tan-looking and the Artist's Model from pale-skinned to brown-skinned (though her portrait ''is'' [[OnlySixFaces the same]] as the Turkish Girl's, so it's possible she may never have been white to begin with). |
| 33 | * AnachronicOrder: The game's myriad of storylines can usually be progressed independently and at any time. This means that after you sit down for tea and conversation with somebody, you can embark on a voyage to sea, spend months governing a colonial outpost, sail back, and resume your conversation with no time having passed at all. This is justified in-universe as [[spoiler:the Treachery of Clocks, one of the Seven Treacheries. The Neath is a giant cavern, free from the light of [[OurGodsAreDifferent the Judgements]] which determine the laws of reality, including such laws as "effects follow their causes." Consequently some events are free to happen out of order or multiple times.]] |
| 34 | * AngelsDevilsAndSquid: Angels are conspicuous in their absence. The Devils are ever-present, preying on the weak and gullible. The Rubbery Men are alien and bizarre, and seem harmless to mortals, but the Devils can't stand them. The closest thing to an angel in-game is [[spoiler:Echo Bazaar itself, which is from a species of alien crustaceans which carries messages between the godlike Judgements]]. Which means that [[spoiler:Angels are crabs, Devils are bees, [[NonIndicativeName and even the Squid are sometimes sea urchins and coral]]]]. |
| 35 | * AnimalisticAbomination: Somewhat played for laughs, but the Starveling Cat is by no means a regular, normal, will-scratch-you-but-not-actually-eat-your-hand cat. It's mean even [[CatsAreMean by cat standards]], it's got a nasty case of HorrorHunger and it's more dangerous than entire armies of intelligent, firearm-toting rats. [[spoiler:Apparently, it's all due to certain... contact with Mr Eaten]]. |
| 36 | * AnimalMotifs: The stats are all given an icon of a different animal: a [[BearsAreBadNews bear]] for Dangerous, an [[TheOwlKnowingOne owl]] for Watchful, a [[CunningLikeAFox fox]] for Persuasive, and a [[ClassyCatBurglar cat]] for Shadowy. |
| 37 | * AnonymousBenefactor: One of the first storylines in the game involves the patronage of one of four benefactors - one for each major stat. |
| 38 | * AntiPoopSocking: You get a maximum of 20 actions at any given time (although you can pay a monthly subscription to double that amount), and they refill at the regular rate of ten minutes an action. |
| 39 | * AntiquatedLinguistics: Not carried so far as to offend the more casual participant, but it requires no special effort to observe such diction in-use throughout. |
| 40 | * ArcNumber: The number Seven crops up in too many places to list[[note]][[ArcWords "Seven is the number,"]] as they say[[/note]]. |
| 41 | ** There are hints that London is the fifth city of seven, whatever that implies for its future. |
| 42 | ** There are seven players of the Marvelous and participation requires an opening stake of 77 First City Coins. |
| 43 | ** The Correspondence Stones are found in the Tomb of the Seven. |
| 44 | ** There were seven staged murders in total in [[spoiler:the Nemesis ambition]]. |
| 45 | ** Mr Eaten's Name refers to seven [[spoiler:candles]]. |
| 46 | ** Locating an Impossible Theorem costs a total of 49 (7[[superscript:2]]) Searing Enigmata. |
| 47 | ** Creating a Heptagoat requires breeding together seven Übergoats. |
| 48 | * ArcSymbol: The main narrative's arc symbols are candles, candlelight, and mirrors. |
| 49 | * ArcWelding: The ''player themselves'' can engage in a bit of this at [[https://fallenlondon.wiki/wiki/Why%3F one point in the "Seeking Mr Eaten's Name" Story]], where the player character is asked why they persist in their quest despite their assured destruction. You can choose from over a dozen (!) possible responses, and some of them reference Stories that occurred earlier in the game. For example, you can imply that your character has never been the same since, say, their visit to the Iron Republic or being exiled from the Shuttered Palace. |
| 50 | * ArcWords: |
| 51 | ** [[Creator/TSEliot All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.]] That was the promise... |
| 52 | ** Parabola. |
| 53 | ** NORTH. |
| 54 | ** ''Whatever you do, don't fall in love.'' |
| 55 | ** Make the stories or they will be made for you. |
| 56 | ** "Do you recall how we came to that place? And they sang of their lightnings and shapeful disgrace? We tilted our vanes and ennobled our spires. They welcomed us then and commingled all choirs." There are a number of variations on this one, typically changing the pronouns. |
| 57 | ** Icarus returning / longs for the deep places. |
| 58 | ** [[https://www.fallenlondon.com/profile/Reginald%20Hubris/2733611 One storylet]] has a whole bunch of these condensed into a single paragraph. |
| 59 | ** A reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely. |
| 60 | * ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: What happens if you mention the Second City to any of the masters. Mr Wines will look at you narrowly and give you its worst vintage. Mr Cups will fly into a rage. Mr Iron will write your name down with its left hand. Mr Veils will harangue you for your discourtesy. |
| 61 | * ArtEvolution: The icons for actions and items have been replaced and improved over time. For example, [[https://fallenlondon.wiki/wiki/File:Chap2.png "Chap2.png"]] (the image used for several criminal-related cards and a certain jewel thief) has been updated twice, each time with more shading and detail. |
| 62 | * ArtShift: |
| 63 | ** In Wilmot's End, descriptions are in fairly short sentence fragments. (E.g. "A newspaper tucked into an overcoat. A white raven looks down through the mist"). |
| 64 | ** When your character gets exiled to the Tomb-Colonies, the descriptions take the form of letters to someone back in Fallen London, and most of the art has a sepia tint. |
| 65 | ** When you trade in rumours with the Muffled Intriguer, the narration takes on the same TerseTalker sentence-fragment style as the Intriguer's dialogue. |
| 66 | --->''Shelter from the drizzle under a bright shop-awning. Letters wrapped around a horse-head amulet. 'Gone now, and won't be seen again. Hunted by devils in the Forgotten Quarter. Nasty business.''' |
| 67 | ** When your character enters the Iron Republic, the descriptions take the form of a fragmentary journal. |
| 68 | ** In the retired mobile app, certain unpleasant dreams would cause the text box describing them to blur in and out of legibility and waver back and forth as if being read by an unsteady person. |
| 69 | * AsTheGoodBookSays: Two instances in the Seeking Mr Eaten's Name quest have you quote garbled versions of Matthew 25:35, "for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me". |
| 70 | ** After [[spoiler:ravenously sating your HorrorHunger without restraint]]: "For I was hungry, and I ate you. I was thirsty, and I drank you." |
| 71 | ** While [[spoiler:devouring your entry in Slowcake's Exceptionals]]: "I was hungry, and you gave me only the pelt of trees. I was thirsty, and you gave me only ink." |
| 72 | * AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: In a couple of destinies, [[spoiler:the player]] can become [[spoiler:immortal]], become an [[spoiler:implied to be undying being in [[https://www.fallenlondon.com/profile/Wilhelm%20Leibniz%20III/6877168 Parabola]]]], or even become a [[spoiler:Master]]. |
| 73 | * AuthorAvatar: The [[spoiler: Tiger Keeper]] might be/have been [[note]]He left Failbetter but new content for the character hasn't been written since.[[/note]] one for Alexis Kennedy as he used the character's portrait as his Twitter avatar for years and went along with the joke that he really is a handsomely behatted tiger. |
| 74 | * AwesomeButImpractical: If you are seeking to maximise your BDR so you can gain Notability faster, you might consider the Boneless Consort (3 Bizarre) and the Seven-Fold Knock (4 Dreaded); the former being the only Spouse that grants BDR and the latter, the best BDR weapon in the game. Except that in order to get the Boneless Consort, you need to buy a Peculiar Personal Enhancement in Flute Street (25 Fate) that costs ''100'' (!) Fate; while Flute Street is often considered to be worth the Fate, the Peculiar Personal Enhancement is only for the very curious/role-playing players with too much money to spend; and the Seven-Fold Knock requires you to put your character through hell by [[spoiler:reaching the Avid Horizon at the end of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name (a questline that has more death, madness and unproductive suffering than the rest of the game put together) and turn back at the very last chance. Why? In God's name, why?]] |
| 75 | * AwesomeButTemporary: |
| 76 | ** The four Moods are only obtainable through two rare opportunity cards. Though they give a huge boost of 22 to one of the four highway stats and fully stack with existing equipment (since they use the Boon slot), they only last for an hour each, so you need to make maximum use of them for that duration. |
| 77 | ** The Imperturbable Patroness is a companion that provides 20 Dangerous and 3 BDR; the latter bonus is only exceeded by the Übergoat and the Bifurcated Owl, and the former far outclasses the bonus Dangerous provided by any other companion. She also only joins you partway through the Flint Exceptional Story (during which there's no actual opportunity to take advantage of her bonuses), and will leave before the story ends, meaning that you'll never be able to make use of her in London. |
| 78 | ** The Boons in Irem are very powerful items that each grants a ''5'' bonus to one advanced stat (no other item provides a bonus greater than 2), and unlike other item slots, all of your Boons can be equipped simultaneously. They're also lost when you leave Irem, meaning that they're only useful when exploring the Loom. |
| 79 | * BadassPreacher: The Bishop of Southwark. He's the finest orator in the Church. He's also a formidable wrestler and a former cavalry officer, and he hopes to lead an invasion of Hell. |
| 80 | * BadFuture: Sorting through the threads of fate itself in Irem, you can naturally find some of these. Some (like the more Sunlit or Liberationist futures) can be ambiguous, but the Ruinous Future ''definitely'' counts: London is destroyed, the bleeding, starving and half-dead masses need to barter and scrape sustenance out of the ruins, not even the rats are left, and it's left entirely unclear how any of it happened. |
| 81 | -->''All is lost. You are home.'' |
| 82 | * BadSanta: Mr Sacks. He comes at Christmas to take things. He might take your headache away. He might take your regards. He might take your reputation. He might take your auntie. If you're very unwise, he might take ''you''. |
| 83 | * BadlyBatteredBabysitter: The premise of the ''Frequently Deceased'' Exceptional Story is that the governess to a family of extraordinarily troublesome children has gone missing after [[DeathIsCheap dying]] for the third time while looking after them and the Harassed Mother desperately wants to get her services back as no one else can last for more than ten days with her children. |
| 84 | * BandagedFace: Major characteristic of Tomb-Colonists, and one of the neutral-gender options has your face wrapped up, a la Literature/TheInvisibleMan. |
| 85 | * BatOutOfHell: London was stolen by them. Of course, only revolutionaries still use the word 'stole'. |
| 86 | * BavarianFireDrill: A storylet in the University involves the player stealing from the Young Stags, and the player carries a few boxes to blend in with the tradespeople there. |
| 87 | * BazaarOfTheBizarre: Sells clothing, candles, books, pet rats, bottled souls, typewriters, [[ImmortalityInducer a cider that grants immortality]]... buys blackmail, love stories, songs, and all manner of thing. |
| 88 | * BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: |
| 89 | ** During the storyline where the player investigates a murder at the University, the Duchess may reveal that [[spoiler:she bargained with the Bazaar after her lover was bitten by a serpent. He survived, but in the monstrous and agonising form of the Cantigaster. She theorises that a similar fate awaits the Empress and her Consort. "There is always a price that is known and a price that is not."]] |
| 90 | ** In the Heart's Desire ambition it's said that [[spoiler:this was so with the First City, with its priest-king making a deal to save his lover... who became [[GeniusLoci the King with a Hundred Hearts]].]] In the same ambition we find out that [[spoiler:this was also the case with Gregory Beechwood, who used his wish to turn himself into the monkey, as he believed this is the ideal form to humanity. He came to regret this, and claims this trope as one of the reasons why the Marvellous must end.]] |
| 91 | * BecauseYouWereNiceToMe: |
| 92 | ** The [[spoiler: Ambitious Barrister's]] motive for helping you become a Person of Some Importance. |
| 93 | ** Upon becoming a Person of Some Importance, you can draw an opportunity card wherein you come across a Soft-Hearted Widow, wandering along a theatre queue trying to collect charity donations. [[CallBack Say, don't you recognise her from somewhere?]] [[spoiler: When you escaped from New Newgate at the very beginning of the game, she might have been the one who took you in and allowed you a spare bedroom.]] You can choose to make a substantial donation, at which she is overjoyed; with such a contribution, she'll be able to [[spoiler: take in all manner of lodgers who are without a home.]] Aww... |
| 94 | * BecomingTheMask: |
| 95 | ** The Church/Great Game conflict card concerns a spy that was ordered to infiltrate the Church and report on its secrets, but came to genuinely believe the Church's rites and is now refusing to talk. You can choose to either help him break free of the Great Game, guilt him into returning to his masters, or TakeAThirdOption and convince him to host a religious service for his fellow spies. |
| 96 | ** The Tattooed Courier's Secrets storyline can end with you realizing that you've grown too attached to the Courier to betray her secrets like you initially planned to and returning them to her instead. |
| 97 | * BedlamHouse: |
| 98 | ** Subverted by the prestigious Royal Bethlehem Hotel[[note]](yes, it very well may be the TropeNamer with the name slightly altered.)[[/note]]. Its fees are almost unaffordable. [[spoiler: The mysterious proprietor waives the fee for lunatics, who consequently make up the vast majority of the guests, and live in unparalleled luxury.]] |
| 99 | ** The third coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers zig-zags this with its "human exhibits": some of them are insane, some are political prisoners or [[FelonyMisdemeanor cat-chasers]] who will eventually go insane, but most of them - with overlap - are [[spoiler: body-stealing invaders from behind mirrors. That's why taking mirrors there is prohibited: exhibits can escape through them]]. |
| 100 | * BegoneBribe: At a meeting between church leaders over boundaries between dioceses, you can enter the argument and have the [[NoIndoorVoice Submerged Rector]] read and interpret a Verse of Counter-Creed. You're bribed with a considerable amount of Scrip to get the Rector to leave. |
| 101 | -->The Submerged Rector likes the bit of the Counter-Creed about BELLS WITH CLAPPERS AND BELLS WITHOUT.\ |
| 102 | \ |
| 103 | It can be construed as an argument for the value of Low Barnet as a parish; or as a subtle attack on the standard exegesis of Isaiah; or as a grand excuse to shout BING, BONG, BINGBONG outside of an already contentious meeting.\ |
| 104 | \ |
| 105 | Every person present contrives to understand the situation in the fashion that will be most individually offensive. You are requested – nay, ''begged'' – to influence the Rector into departing, and a bothered-looking Bishop offers you a substantial donation. |
| 106 | * BeneathTheEarth: The "Fallen" in Fallen London refers to its physical location. In addition, there is also Flute Street, which lies beneath Fallen London itself. |
| 107 | * BigFirstChoice: As soon as you finish the tutorial, you can make the choice of one (and only one out of four) Ambition, a huge, sprawling story that lasts for the entirety of the game; although if you really want to, you can spend 50 Fate to buy Lethean Tea-Leaves so you can forget your current Ambition and choose another. ([[spoiler:Light Fingers gives you some for free after it becomes clear that you're not going to get to steal a diamond at all; you can either use them yourself, or give them away to progress later.]]) |
| 108 | * BizarroApocalypse: The oft-mentioned "Liberation of Night" increasingly looks like one of these the more you advance into the lore, with light as a concept being removed from existence. The truth of it entails [[spoiler:the complete destruction of all law, including the laws of nature and reality, and of both its creators ([[SentientStars the Judgements]]) and their law-enforcing light. Those proposing it hardly see it as a cataclysm, as the Judgements are narcissistic tyrants using the universe as their playground, and an endless nightmare would be ''preferable'' to the cycle of suffering the universe is currently trapped in, but it's hard not to see it as an apocalypse all by itself]]. |
| 109 | * BlatantLies: |
| 110 | ** You tell these in some early Persuasive storylets, and if you're successful, people believe you. |
| 111 | --->"Devils are feasting on human flesh in the Veilgarden! The tomb-colonists are to return home en masse! Cats are toxic! Cheese is made from spiders!"\ |
| 112 | "Russia is sinking! Fallen London will annex the tomb-colonies! Mr Wines is marrying the skeletal corpse of a nun! The Spider-Council is holding a débutantes' ball! It's almost impossible to stop once you've started. Just keep talking. Everything will be fine." |
| 113 | ** You get to create a newspaper business. Naturally, the 'Outlandish' path involves spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation, until you're explicitly making stuff up. |
| 114 | -->Oh, just make some up. How hard can it be? |
| 115 | -->The Masters feast upon the flesh of men. The Duchess is a thousand years old and bathes in cat blood. Devils consume only cheese. This stuff just writes itself. |
| 116 | ** Subverted in a later storylet: |
| 117 | --->"[[RealityIsUnrealistic You go too far when you tell them that in hyena clans, the leader is always a matriarch.]] The crowd are having none of it, and start pelting you with rocks." |
| 118 | ** Something similar also happens when you use your Memories of Distant Shores to help you write a story, and fail: |
| 119 | --->[[RealityIsUnrealistic "A hole in the world. Birds which hover like dragonflies. Whirlpools which give back their prey. A frog which gestates its young in its mouth. A sort of dragon made of cake. No. No, you can't put this in."]] |
| 120 | * BloodSport: |
| 121 | ** Knife-And-Candle, a straightforward game of assassination and murder. As the players die in the ''Neath'', most of them come back to life. Sadly, it has been replaced with a ''different'' game... |
| 122 | ** Hearts' Game: A game about slapstick poisoning. While the goal is to kill the target with poison before they can identify who is doing the poisoning (or develop so great a poison immunity that you can barely weaken them), the true objective is to do so in increasingly silly and comical methods that leave the umpires scratching their heads. |
| 123 | * BlowYouAway: The [[spoiler:Stormy-Eyed]] quality seems to give one some degree of power over wind, or at least make one believe that's the case. |
| 124 | * BodyHorror: |
| 125 | ** The ending of [[spoiler: the Finder of Heiresses storyline]] is pretty bad. Usually [[spoiler:[[TakenForGranite petrification]]]] in stories is a fairly quick affair, so to see it happen ''slowly'', and to [[spoiler:catch it right when the one affected cannot even speak, only move their eyes as the stoniness sets in, isn't especially pleasant]]. |
| 126 | ** The description of what the Cantigaster actually is during one of the later Watchful quests defines this. [[spoiler:You can find out that the Cantigaster was ''once'' a man, but now... whatever it is needs to be frequently milked of venom lest it ''burst''.]] |
| 127 | ** A ''lot'' of the descriptions of the people suffering from too much irrigo absorption in the Cave of the Nadir. If you yourself linger in it for too long, you'll get a message about how your skin is starting to grow over your eyes before you escape. |
| 128 | * BodySurf: How Jack-of-Smiles evades capture. It doesn't matter if you kill his current host, he'll be back in a new body soon. He's not limited to humans, either. A later story reveals that [[spoiler:Jack-of-Smiles [[SubvertedTrope isn't]] an actual body surfer: 'he' is a consciousness residing in certain trademark knives, and anyone who touches one "becomes" him as if via possession.]] |
| 129 | * BombThrowingAnarchist: The Revolutionaries, naturally. Their faction opportunity card states, "Some call them the dynamite faction, [[BaitAndSwitchComparison but they're very far from united.]]" A Dangerous training option on that very same card states that [[ZigZaggedTrope even though the press likes to portray every anarchist as carrying a baker's dozen of bombs at all times, explosives are rare and difficult to use.]] |
| 130 | * BonusDungeon: The Upper River is among the last places that become accessible to a player: though you ''only'' need 175 Persuasive to unlock the Railway storyline, you can't actually get Railway Steel and lay tracks until you reach 200 Watchful and have finished 40 experiments in the Laboratory. None of the Ambitions requires you to reach the Upper River; in fact, content in the Upper River is tuned for players who have already completed their Ambition: challenges with a Broad difficulty level above 200 are commonplace, and 40 Renown and Ambition rewards can be put to use in more ways than just as stat providers. By extension, Khan's Heart, which can only be reached after gaining access to Balmoral and provides similarly-difficult challenges, also qualifies. |
| 131 | * BonusStage: The [[spoiler:Mind of a Long-Dead God]] might be considered one. It is nearly Menace-free, can provide a lot of Dangerous boosts and Aeolian Screams, and is the location to redeem the 40 Renown: Urchins item, but you can only get there by grinding [[spoiler:Having Recurring Dreams: What the Thunder Said to 18, cash it in to gain 7 points of Stormy-Eyed, then grind What the Thunder Said back to 15 and Stormy-Eyed to 19]]. Except that there's no reliable way to grind What the Thunder Said: you have to draw a lot of dream cards to raise it that high, while also avoiding the State of some confusion (the default Nightmares failure state if you have no Memories of Light) at all costs lest it wipe a good chunk of your progress. |
| 132 | * BoozeBasedBuff: Drinking a bottle of Greyfields 1868 First Sporing wine reduces Nightmares and increases Persuasive. |
| 133 | * BoredWithInsanity: Well, frustrated with it. While in a state of some confusion, you might encounter a white cat that asks "Are you here to stay? Or are you just another goddamn weekender?" The game notes that you "don't feel welcome at all", and your Nightmares drop, as though you're willing yourself less insane so you can leave faster. |
| 134 | * BoringButPractical: |
| 135 | ** The Tier 1 professions aren't the most efficient in Echoes-over-time and their unique items are seldom best-in-slot compared to the higher-tier professions, but most of them are reliable sources of Favours which otherwise can only be obtained through Opportunity Cards, making them the best for grinding Renown. They also don't require Person of Some Importance status and their weekly payments can include [=PoSI=] items (such as Strong-Backed Labour from the Rat-Catcher's payment) well before you can get them the "normal" way, letting you build up a reserve while you're still working towards [=PoSI=] status. |
| 136 | ** You can, with time and some effort, acquire your very own Laboratory at the University. Here you can perform experiments, uncover secrets and mysteries of the Neath, take on students of your own and through all this acquire items and resources unattainable anywhere else... Or you can exploit the fact that you can give your [[TheLoad Struggling Artist]] acquaintance a job here for the sole purpose of keeping his card from appearing in said Deck for as long as he is employed. |
| 137 | * BraggingRightsReward: |
| 138 | ** Reaching 10 Renown with a faction grants access to an item that grants a bonus of 4 to a single highway stat. All of these items are outclassed by rewards of the Making Your Name stories (which cost no Echoes and are very easy to get), or Bazaar items that are cheaper than the corresponding faction's Connected item (which is needed to grind Renown in the first place). Adding to the fact that a fair amount of Favours are needed to reach 10 Renown themselves, and each of these items requires you to draw the faction's opportunity card and spend 3 Favours, it's better just to spend the Favours elsewhere or store them and beeline for the higher Renown items, which are often more useful. |
| 139 | ** Reaching 40 Renown with a faction lets you obtain a powerful item in a difficult-to-reach location. Some of these items are among the best possible for their slot. However, unless you had ''really'' high Connections before they got converted to the new Renown system, getting to 40 Renown for any faction is such a long and tedious grind with several other items existing that are only slightly worse or sometimes even just as strong but are ''much'' easier to obtain than the 40 Renown ones that the items mainly just serve as proof of your dedication to that faction. |
| 140 | ** The July 2017 updates to a Person of Some Importance added unique "London's X" qualities that can be obtained only if you spent 15 Notability (which is extremely hard to build up in the first place) to increase one of your base stats and meet at least one other requirement for the quality associated with that stat. Getting all of these qualities enables you to become a fabled Paramount Presence, but given that this requires you to spend 15 Notability four times ''and'' 12 Notability or 15 Fate at least three times to change POSI specializations, any benefits that being a Paramount Presence might have will be massively outweighed by the costs of becoming one in the first place. |
| 141 | ** The items that are sold for 3 Memories of Tales, despite requiring real money, are some of the weakest ones in the game, and easily outmatched by those that are much more readily available elsewhere in the Bazaar. To a lesser degree, the items that cost 7 Memories of Tales are also matched or outclassed by free items, though some of them have other uses, and the free items tend to be difficult to get or locked to certain Ambitions or events. |
| 142 | ** Getting the Passion destiny. Its Persuasive bonus is exactly the same as the far-easier-to-obtain Curator destiny, and to get it you have to 1) reach a specific ending of a Fate-locked story that requires you to [[CrueltyIsTheOnlyOption act like a complete jerk to one of your acquaintances]] (and this story isn't resettable so if you got the non-asshole ending, you can't get the Passion destiny period) and 2) draw a rare card that can be found only in the Bazaar Sidestreets (and by "rare", we mean "you might not draw it for ''months'' on end"). |
| 143 | ** Your Very Own Hellworm costs a whopping 200,000 Hinterland Scrips and allows you to draw a very profitable card while having it equipped in the Hinterlands. However, it is so ludicrously expensive that it is hard to conceive of a player who was wealthy enough to purchase it in the first place ever being in need of more money. Once you have it however, the real Bragging Rights Rewards come in. For the same amount of scrips, all 200,000, you can purchase riding accessories for your Hellworm, finally getting your Hellworm Saddled and Bridled, which makes the card you can acquire even more profitable. Then you can spend another 200,000 scrips to purchase some riding boots, which are powerful but no more so than other boots you can acquire much much much more cheaply. [[RuleOfThree Then you can spend another 200,000 Scrips]] to purchase some... Boot Polish, which is ''completely'' useless, not even unlocking yet another scrip-dump of an item. It is hard to see these items as anything other than a parody of this very trope. |
| 144 | * BreadEggsBreadedEggs: One opportunity's story involves using fake cats. Some bite, some explode, some bite ''then'' explode. Another story involves you finding a courier delivering church candles having been temporarily killed by Jack-of-Smiles, you can choose to tend to him, steal his candles, or steal his candles ''then'' tend to him. |
| 145 | * BreakThemByTalking: A possible resolution for the Church/Great Game conflict card. You wait for the spy-turned-clergyman in the confessional, and... |
| 146 | --> ''He enters, settles, asks you to begin. You open his dossier and begin to confess all his old sins back at him. He breaks before you’re halfway through, begging you to stop...'' |
| 147 | * BribingYourWayToVictory: The game is free to play, but you can buy Fate points with actual money. With Fate points, you can refill your actions instantly, refill the deck of opportunity cards, reset your Ambition, change your name or portrait, or open access to certain exclusive story branches, including both small, grindable storylets and branches with little story that only serve to give better rewards for paying players. |
| 148 | * BritainIsOnlyLondon: [[JustifiedTrope Justified]]: The city was the only part of Britain to be taken down to the Neath (except for a few Kentish suburbs, which form the Southern Archipelago, as well as Balmoral Castle), and the rest remained on the Surface. It's uncertain how much the rest of the British Isles (let alone the entire British Empire) still recognize the government's control, as the game doesn't describe the situation on the Surface in that much detail. |
| 149 | * BrownNote: The Correspondence. Studying it makes your eyes bleed, your hair catch fire and will probably drive you insane. Not to mention the things that seeking knowledge of Mr Eaten does to the mind - [[spoiler:specifically, compulsory self-destructive acts such as attempting to literally drown oneself in beer.]] |
| 150 | * BuildLikeAnEgyptian: There's a glimpse of the Blue Kingdom at the end of the Season of Skies: |
| 151 | -->''There are pyramids dwarfing Giza's; [[{{sculptures}} statues]] which make the Grecian Colossus seem a toy soldier.'' |
| 152 | * BuriedAlive: In part of the Light Fingers! ambition, an antagonist warns you that if you pursue your ambition any further, you will be buried alive. [[spoiler: He fulfils that promise if he finds you continued the ambition, and you wind up in a coffin under the ground.]] |
| 153 | * ButtMonkey: [[InformedAttribute Lucky]] Weasels. Despite their flavor text, they exist primarily to be sacrificed to [[TheGrimReaper the Boatman,]] used as plant food, [[BrownNote exploded from singing "Pop Goes The Weasel" one too many times,]] [[BodyHorror left half-devoured but still alive]] by the Bifurcated Owl, sent to a Fingerking to be possessed, and so on. |
| 154 | * ByNoIMeanYes: The flavor text for the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Iron Hat]]. |
| 155 | -->''You can't go wrong with an iron hat. Except that you look ridiculous. That's a problem, certainly. Also, it rusts; it punishes the innocent vertebrae of the neck; it attracts urchins who enjoy the cheery ping of a hat-bounced pebble. It is, nevertheless, proof against dart, bullet, and light glim-fall.'' |
| 156 | * CallBack: |
| 157 | ** One of the earliest Persuasive storylines revolves around writing an epic poem about mushrooms. Far later, when you're at the Empress's Court being offered the position of Imperial Artist-in-Residence: |
| 158 | --->''My point is that the Court wishes to be entertained with original compositions. Your early works impressed the Empress, and she doesn't even like mushrooms. So, get to it, would you? We can't wait to see what you come up with.'' |
| 159 | ** Once you reach the Foreign Office, you can discreetly...borrow and examine a few of the reports there. One of them is entitled, oddly, ''Cheese: Made From Spiders?'' Your character, potentially recalling the above BlatantLies, hopes that it's some sort of code. |
| 160 | ** If you fail at telling BlatantLies [[LuridTalesOfDoom for your newspaper]], you'll repeat word-for-word the same lies you told in the early Persuasive game, and gain nothing [[LampshadeHanging because it's not original]]. |
| 161 | * CallingCard: |
| 162 | ** Employed by that most mysterious and flamboyant of burglars and agents, the notorious Civet. Their card is blank, but for a picture of some sort of animal - possibly an ocelot, or mongoose. |
| 163 | ** When trying to reduce Suspicion, one option involves leaving a fake one: stacking vases in the privy, leaving origami swans everywhere, and writing nonsense on the walls. |
| 164 | * {{Calvinball}}: To you, the card game that the superstitious constabulary play in the Magistracy of the Evenlode has nebulous rules and numerous odd little rituals. The varying success text mentions players can cash out and bring in substitutes at any time, the rules sometimes change to Whist and sometimes to poker, card passing behavior changes at specific times and for specific lengths of time, and there's a point during your game where the dealer accidentally destroys a pair of sevens and replaces them with an eight an a six, and no one even raises an eyebrow. You don't win anything playing with the constables; rather, you pick up on secrets. |
| 165 | * {{Cap}}: |
| 166 | ** The four main stats are capped at 200, and advanced stats at 5 by default. Certain specific tasks can raise these to 230 and 7, respectively. |
| 167 | ** Favours are capped at 7 each: if you have 7 Favours for a faction, most actions that raise Favours for that faction will be temporarily inaccessible until the Favours are spent. |
| 168 | ** Many storylets do not raise minor qualities (usually Quirks) if they are above a certain value, with a blurb saying [quality] has not changed because it is higher than [cap]. |
| 169 | ** During the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, Masquing is capped at 30 if you limit yourself to non-Fate-locked gifts. |
| 170 | * CashGate: You need to spend a certain amount of goods in order to open access to Mahogany Hall. In addition, visiting any location across the Unterzee (other than Polythreme and Apis Meet) requires a ship, and every time you go to Doubt Street you'll be charged 200 Silk Scraps before you become an editor of newspapers. Finally, there's the Hinterlands; none of the territories West of London can be accessed if you don't make some ''significant'' investments in order for the railway to actually reach the place; food and railway steel must be provided at every turn. |
| 171 | * CatapultNightmare: A side effect of your Nightmares stat getting too high. Made obvious by opting to go for a jog in the ''A Moment's Peace'' storylet, which states that ''"You wake up screaming, as is becoming usual."'' In January 2013, the Nightmare stat's image was changed from an eye to someone catapulting out of bed. |
| 172 | * CatsAreMagic: Well, they talk, anyway. And they know secrets. White ones are deaf-mutes, but somehow this doesn't prevent them [[spoiler:from having secrets tattooed on their bellies]]. |
| 173 | * CatsAreMean: The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! Want to lose a hand? [[SchmuckBait Give the beast a pat!]] |
| 174 | * CatsAreSuperior: The reason cats are so talented and powerful in the Neath? [[spoiler:All cats have an inflated sense of self-worth and confidence. [[YourMindMakesItReal This means when they dream, their dream selves are not house-cats, but gigantic talking tigers, leopards, and panthers. As certain parts of the Neath blur with Parabola, the land of dreams - some aspects of their power can bleed into their waking lives, such as giving all cats the ability to speak and have human-like levels of sentience]]. The tigers of the Elder Continent are hinted to be not descended from surface tigers, but dreaming cats who escaped Parabola through mirrors and retained their idealized shapes.]] |
| 175 | * CentralTheme: One for each of the four ambitions. |
| 176 | ** Nemesis: [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge Vengeance]]. It is your primary motive, [[spoiler:as well as the antagonist's. [[ThePowerOfHate It can be a source of strength]], as Mr Cups claims, but it can also consume its wielder entire, as it may learn in the end. The final choice the player is presented with is to go through with their vengeance or to give it up for a chance to restore the person whose loss set them on this path in the first place.]] |
| 177 | ** Bag a Legend: [[HeWhoFightsMonsters The hunter and the prey may not be so different]]. You begin the story as a hunter, with the Vake being your prey. Then you discover that the whole thing was no more than a [[HuntingTheMostDangerousGame game]] for the Vake, who lured hunters like you in with promises of wealth so it would have worthy preys to hunt for sport. You then ally yourself with the Sisterhood of Abbey Rock, an order of nuns who dedicate themselves to hunting the Vake, who themselves are also targets of it. [[spoiler:Both the Vake and the Mother Superior, the leader of the Sisterhood, become progressively more unhinged over their obsession of this mutual hunt, their ruthlessness mirroring each other, and a friend of theirs intervenes to MercyKill them, Mr Wines or Sinning Jenny respectively (though in the former's case this is optional and in the latter's case the kill is temporary). The player is also implied to feel a strong affinity to the Vake, which can be explicitly acknowledged, and regardless of which ending they achieve they take on a quality of it as their trophy.]] |
| 178 | ** Light Fingers: Love, and the different forms it takes. Every major character is motivated by love at one point or another, though almost never in the romantic sense. The plot kicks off when you discover the Orphanage, which aims to manufacture an obsessive and destructive form of love through [[LovePotion Moon-Milk]], and one of its victims is someone who you seek to help. [[spoiler:Poor Edward, your main antagonist, is infected with this love for the player character. The true mastermind, Mr Fires, is motivated by his love of London. Doctor Vaughan's love for her husband drives her final decision in the story. The player's ending is the choice between familial love (of their child) and material love (of the incredibly valuable diamond that was their goal from the very beginning).]] |
| 179 | ** Heart's Desire: Desire, and how it can be a weapon for you to use or to be used against you. Every player in the Marvellous has something they badly want (except for Virginia, whose wants must be manufactured by the player for her to participate in the game). As the game goes on, they become more obsessive and ruthless in pursue of their desire, [[spoiler:which can be turned against them, leading to the Bishop of Fiacre's or the Topsy King's losses. The final confrontation is filled with visions that tempt the player character (one of which they can achieve if they win), and your final opponent, Gregory Beechwood, aims to end the game permanently so people's obsessions cannot destroy them the way his has destroyed Beechwood's life. The final decision is between winning the game and achieving your heart's desire, or proving yourself stronger than it and allow Beechwood to achive his selfless goal.]] |
| 180 | * ChainOfDeals: You can do one with inventory items if you want. Most item categories have a stage where you can trade 50 of an item for 51 of an equivalent item from a different category; for example, 50 bottles of Strangling Willow Absinthe for 51 Whisper-Satin Scraps. You can then proceed to trade your Whisper-Satin Scraps for Journals of Infamy, and your Journals of Infamy for Correspondence Plaques, and so on until you've gone full-circle, having earned 1 of each item, some minor storyline progress, a decent amount of Making Waves and spent a large amount of actions. |
| 181 | * ChessWithDeath: And dice, too, with [[{{Psychopomp}} the boatman]], which brings you closer to life. Assuming you win. |
| 182 | * ChokepointGeography: You have to pass the dark cavern called the 'Roads Beneath' in order to reach Flute Street from London. |
| 183 | * ChristmasEpisode: December is typically marked by "snow" falling in the Neath that has unique properties like being capable of dissolving souls, and Mr Sacks coming around to ask for you to give it gifts instead of the other way around. [[spoiler:Except Eaten-Sacks, who actually will give you a gift -- albeit one you [[PoisonMushroom may not want,]] depending on your stance on Seeking.]] |
| 184 | * ChronicBackstabbingDisorder: The player, if they desire. There are a multitude of opportunities to betray people, factions, causes, your ideals, and your good sense. This is not a good idea with the Affair of the Box story, though: you have options that support either the PowersThatBe or their detractors, and if you waffle back and forth you'll acquire an "A Turncoat" menace. If that gets too high, neither side will work with you. |
| 185 | * ChurchMilitant: During the "Bag a Legend" ambition, one encounters armored combat-trained nuns. Their rosaries have spikes. Other nuns and vicars aren't ''quite'' as violent, but they usually tend to know a thing or two about fighting. Especially those under the Bishop of Southwark, who both qualifies for this trope and enforces it. |
| 186 | * CircusOfFear: Mrs Plenty's Most Distracting Carnival is mostly pretty ordinary. Most of its attractions, such as the games tent and the Most Educational Anatomy Exhibition, are fairly standard. However, there's also a House of Mirrors with mirrors that can immediately kill you or drive you insane. [[spoiler:And if you're Seeking the Name, you enter a wrong version of Mrs Plenty's Carnival with attractions that only incur menaces.]] |
| 187 | * TheCityNarrows: Spite, where the majority of the city's pickpockets seem to work their trade, and where you can get started on criminal enterprises in general. There's also The Flit, which has an odd relationship with the trope by way of being ''above'' the rest of the city. And the fact that going into the Flit if you aren't on shady business (or a courier) is just ''weird'', what with the heightened chance of getting smeared on the cobblestones if you so much as trip with a rope, so getting robbed there is unlikely. |
| 188 | * CityOfAdventure: London, naturally. It's not called a city of a thousand stories for nothing. Even within city limits, even within your very own home, you can find great endeavors to embark on, and no matter how far you range throughout the Neath, even leaving reality as you know it, you always come back. |
| 189 | * CityOfSpies: |
| 190 | ** While London partially does qualify, what qualifies the most is more of a District of Spies: Wilmot's End. If you want to play the Great Game directly, this is your place, and just about everyone you will meet between the cracked statues and old hedges is a spy for someone, be it a foreign power, the British Empire, a shadowy organization, or just themselves. There's also a few missionaries hiding in the bushes, who seem to be doing [[NoodleIncident something else entirely that the spies themselves prefer not to talk about]], and the occasional journalist to stumble into at the worst moments. |
| 191 | ** Khan's Heart, one of the battlegrounds of the Great Game, is a jewel that all the powers of the Neath grasp at, but can't quite hold. From the Khanate, players with access to a Cabinet Noir in Balmoral can plan, advance and carry out intrigues and espionage in the Great Game. |
| 192 | * CleverCrows: Ravens are available as pets, and they come in both black and white varieties depending on whether you feed them blackmail material or mysteries, respectively. Most still feed on carrion, but they sing like nightingales according to the FlavorText, and some even aspire to poetry. [[spoiler: White ravens even have some aspects of ThePhoenix, as you might be fortunate enough to witness your Dreamy Raven Advisor [=turn/burn=] itself into a Mystic Raven.]] |
| 193 | * CloakAndDagger: Spying is one of the non-combat employment options available to the community. Usually more [[StealthExpert Cloak]] than [[ProfessionalKiller Dagger]], but there's plenty of both. |
| 194 | * CluelessMystery: Spoofed in one University story arc in which you can investigate the murder of a research fellow. You can collect clues and even talk to the victim himself (as DeathIsCheap in Fallen London), but correctly identifying the culprit at the end of the term comes down to pure guessing -- and the real culprit and their motive turns out to be the silliest and pettiest of the possible culprits/motives by a mile. |
| 195 | * ClusterFBomb: One event card has a woman writing very scandalous things about you. One of the options is to unleash a ClusterFBomb of magnificent proportions in response. |
| 196 | -->''"You spit foul recriminations and vicious calumny. Ladies faint dead away and gentlemen stagger under the barrage. Your target runs, weeping, with her hands over her ears. You follow her! Your tirade continues in the street, where hansoms careen hastily off and urchins fall from rooftops. You pick up your victim's dropped letters and wave them as a final salute. You are spent."''\ |
| 197 | [If you fail that event:]\ |
| 198 | ''"Three ladies faint. So do three gentleman and a passing waiter. Two cats fall off the roof and and an elderly horse outside keels over. You are denounced in two newspapers and a sermon. What words! You have definitely gone too far this time."'' |
| 199 | * CoffinContraband: In one storylet, the player can assist the Gracious Widow and her ring of smugglers in sneaking contraband out of the city in coffins. You're not told what exactly you're smuggling, but if you choose to peek in one of the coffins, you find out it's [[{{Golem}} Clay Men]] — in other words, a BodybagTrick ''disguised'' as Coffin Contraband. |
| 200 | * ColorCodedEyes: Anyone with the Stormy-Eyed quality has gray eyes, meaning they completed Recurring Dreams: What the Thunder Said once. |
| 201 | -->"Were your eyes always such a dark gray? Did you hear [[TitleDrop what the Thunder said]]?" |
| 202 | * ColonyDrop: What happens when [[spoiler:a new City replaces the old one. The new city just lands on top of the old, and flattens it. Parts of it might survive down in Flute Street, however]]. |
| 203 | * ColorMotif: Each tier 3 Profession corresponds to one of the colours of the [[FictionalColor Neathbow]] except Viric: |
| 204 | ** Irrigo is the colour of things that need to be forgotten, like Midnighters' robes and Shrines to St Joshua. |
| 205 | ** Violant is a colour that lingers in one's memory. It's very hard to forget anything written in the violant ink Correspondents use. |
| 206 | ** Cosmogone is a colour heavily associated with Parabola, and it's the tint of a Silverer's spectacles. |
| 207 | ** Peligin is the colour of the eyes of Monster-Hunters, as they have consumed the peligin flesh of zee-monsters. |
| 208 | ** Crooked-Crosses often lacquer their crosses in Apocyan. |
| 209 | ** Gant ink is an invisible ink, meant for writing Licentiates' aliases. |
| 210 | * CombatPragmatist: |
| 211 | ** Dangerous challenges tend to make you do this. In particular, the Black Ribbon duels start off as honorable challenges, but inevitably turn into running battles and ambushes in the alleys and rooftops. |
| 212 | ** Another example is in one opportunity card, where you can goad multiple assassins into attacking you, and then take up a sniping position and pick them off one-by-one (nobody said you had to take them all on at once). |
| 213 | ** Yet another example (which doubles as a ''[[{{Series/Firefly}} Firefly]]'' ShoutOut), involves duelling a young buck who wants to kill you. When you agree to his terms and he asks when a good time for the duel would be, you shoot him immediately. |
| 214 | * ComicallyMissingThePoint: The player can go to church in order to reduce Scandal; regardless of whether they are successful, the character notes their fellow congregants were attractive enough to make it worth another visit. |
| 215 | * ConfusingMultipleNegatives: The image for the Smoky Flophouse opportunity card and two Newgate cards is of a brick wall with graffiti that reads, "[[UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper Not to be blamed for nothing]]". So whoever scrawled it is being poetic or perhaps is responsible for... something. |
| 216 | * ContinuingIsPainful: Typically, DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist and only lasts as long as it takes for you to lower your Wounds quality. However, if you're Seeking Mr Eaten's Name around [[HalloweenEpisode Hallowmas]], [[spoiler: you can potentially wind up as the quarry in a Devil's hunting party. If you fail to escape them, your wounds and nightmares are instantly maxed out [[http://fallenlondon.wiki/wiki/Evade_them! and you lose all your money and any hell-related items of value]]]]. Ouch. |
| 217 | * ControllableHelplessness: |
| 218 | ** A certain failure location in Ambition: Light Fingers. [[spoiler: ''You've moved to a new area: [[BuriedAlive A small, velvet lined box]]. You can't see anything. You have just enough space to twist onto your belly or your back. Oh dear God. Oh dear God.'']] |
| 219 | * ConvenientlyInterruptedDocument: A sidebar snippet titled "A letter fragment, dated Singapore, 1821" goes: |
| 220 | -->"I have, I fear, at last determined the cause of our poor Leopold's sad disappearance. You will recall that I sent by the Borneo a very considerable collection of [illegible] ... identified one variety as the sinister exile's rose of the Bosphorus. Sophia had long admired their colour [illegible] ... gardens here about the Government-house [illegible] ... although here they call it 'lion's rose'. Singapura is Lion City in the Sanskrit [illegible] ... There are of course no lions here, though many tigers. I would not mention this except that when I dream of Leopold, as still I often do, it has always seemed to me that there is a great cat present, the colour of sunset, which is also the colour of the roses..." |
| 221 | ** The Zubmarine can, of course, dive. This is immensely useful for both research purposes (and you wouldn't have a zub if you weren't an avid (if sometimes amateur) researcher) and to avoid the dangerous phenomena above the water surface. A zubmarine seems weird and impractical until the wind that covers ships in molten wax comes along. |
| 222 | ** The Majestic Pleasure Yacht is simply as luxurious as it gets. Stocked enough to outlast three famines and so pleasant it's almost a shame to leave it once you reach your destination. |
| 223 | * CoolShades: The Set of [[FictionalColour Cosmogone]] Spectacles, the unique item for the [[DreamWalker Silverer]] profession. They give quite a large boost to Persuasive and Dangerous. |
| 224 | * CorrespondenceCourse: 'The Adventuress' Correspondence Course' is one of the fighting traditions you can select during the 'Making Your Name: Dangerous' storyline. Said course was set up by The Presbyterate Adventuress, and seems to be both in-depth and effective, given the feats you accomplish in the game. |
| 225 | * CosmeticAward: |
| 226 | ** Some of the story traits currently don't actually unlock any new actions. Presumably as the game grows they will become more useful. |
| 227 | ** In order to get a Noman tattoo, you need to buy a Noman from Penstock's Wicket in January and then keep it alive until the end of the Feast of the Exceptional Rose in February (which requires feeding a significant number of Vials of Tears of the Bazaar to the Noman to offset its decay), although the tattoo itself grants no tangible bonus compared to the other tattoos which are much easier to obtain. |
| 228 | ** You can pay 10 Fate to register the name of your Constant Companion or ship in the Bazaar Side-streets, or 30 Fate to change the 'exceptional reason' for which you entered the House of Chimes; this does not impact the gameplay in any meaningful way. |
| 229 | ** The [[spoiler:Heptagoat, which is created by breeding together 7 Übergoats, each of which is bred from two Overgoats; this translates to a total cost of 163979.2 Echoes and 7 Fate, plus an Impossible Theorem which is even more difficult to obtain than an Übergoat]]. It only provides a bonus of 3 to Caprine Authority, and does not retain any Watchful/Dreaded/Bizarre bonus of its components, and any points of Caprine Authority over 1 doesn't provide any tangible reward, making the [[spoiler:Heptagoat]] effectively a way to show that you are strong, powerful and wealthy enough to waste money on a worthless item. |
| 230 | ** Reaching 50 Renown for any faction is an extremely arduous task that requires you to either have had an extraordinarily high Connected level with that faction before its conversion to Renown or have a specific highway stat at 294 (which will require drawing a few rare Mood cards) and the patience to grind out Favours for an indeterminate amount of time. You don't get anything special for any Renown level above 40 (the level requirement for the best Renown items), other than a cool-sounding description of just how renowned you've become. |
| 231 | ** Becoming the Poet-Laureate requires you to be banished from the Empress' Court, serve at least six terms as governor of Port Carnelian, then come back to the Court and make a truly ridiculous number of works (each of which takes a fair bit of actions itself), as well as reach 290 Persuasive (which requires you to spend one or more Mood cards and/or have completed the 40 Renown grinds for a few factions beforehand). And in the end, you get some cool story text and can rightfully display your status as Poet-Laureate of the Neath on your mantelpiece, but the material reward for this ordeal is non-existent. |
| 232 | ** When Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, at the [[spoiler:nightmare version]] of Mrs Plenty's Carnival, you have the option to spend 50 Fate for a ride ABOVE THE NEATH. The game warns (in very plain terms) that there's no interesting flavour text for you to read, your character will die, and you'll spend the Fate for nothing. And people have done it. It [[spoiler:does not actually make your character unusable, but anyone doing this will be rewarded with the unique quality Scorched by the Sun]]. |
| 233 | * CosmicHorrorStory: What is the Bazaar? [[spoiler:A space crab in love with the Sun.]] What are the Masters? [[spoiler:Space bats.]] Why are they collecting love stories? [[spoiler: So the Bazaar can comfort a Judgement we know as the Sun when it inevitably has to go deliver a rejection from the Sun's crush. And if it fails, it'll be eaten by dragons.]] |
| 234 | * CrapsackWorldEscapistSanctuary: The eponymous setting is a subterranean WretchedHive plagued with corruption, bureaucracy, conspiracy, oppression, crime, and all manner of supernatural threats, along with some of the [[DeliberateValuesDissonance less-than-pleasant Victorian-era mindsets]]... and beyond the confines of London, things get even ''worse,'' with cultists, devils, monsters, and outright {{Eldritch Abomination}}s being frighteningly common throughout the 'Neath. Oh, and you don't even have the luxury of returning to the surface (for long) as sunlight will kill you. Unsurprisingly, the drugs trade is thriving down here, with Prisoner's Honey and the highly illegal Gaoler's Honey being among the most popular of them: Prisoner's Honey allows the user to enter Parabola, the realm of dreams, while Gaoler's Honey (AKA Red Honey) [[spoiler: allows the user to experience the memories of the [[HumanResources unfortunate victim used to produce the honey]] - said victim being [[PoweredByAForsakenChild left alive in order to increase the honey's potency]] and [[AndIMustScream suffering horribly every time someone tastes said honey]].]] |
| 235 | * CrazyHomelessPeople: The Topsy King, who is insane because [[spoiler:he bet his mind on a card game and lost it]]. |
| 236 | * CreatureBreedingMechanic: In the Fourth Coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers, you can breed a variety of beasts to turn them in for rewards, or transform them into new creatures if you have the Empyrean Redolence formula. |
| 237 | %% insufficient context * CreepyCircusMusic: The tracks for [[https://failbettergames.bandcamp.com/track/mrs-plentys-carnival Mrs. Plenty's]] [[https://failbettergames.bandcamp.com/track/carnival-at-midnight Carnival]] in the mobile app. |
| 238 | * CriticalHit: Never explicitly called as such in-game (and the wikis refer to them as "Rare Success"), but a number of storylets have them, usually granting a higher reward than normal. |
| 239 | * CriticalExistenceFailure: You usually suffer no detriments whatsoever from a Menace until it hits the failure point. Exceptions to this include: |
| 240 | ** Nightmares 5 adds the undiscardable Merry Gentleman's card into your opportunity deck, whose Ubiquitous rarity will cause you to draw it again and again until you reduce your Nightmares. Nightmares 6 unlocks special red opportunity cards that [[UnstableEquilibrium increase your Nightmares even further]]. |
| 241 | ** The higher-end challenges for certain ranks of the "Making Your Name" questlines will forbid you from trying them if the associated Menace is too high. (You can't fight the best Black Ribboners if you have too many Wounds, you can't try the most lucrative Heists if you have too much Suspicion, etc...) |
| 242 | ** "Plagued by a Popular Song" unlocks a few SchmuckBait options as it increases, and its failure state at level 5 isn't automatic like the basic Menaces (it's a red opportunity card), so you can theoretically raise it as high as you like without anything actually happening. |
| 243 | ** Having high Suspicion can bring some unwelcome attention at Zee, turning a good opportunity card into a bad one, but it's barely noticeable unless you spend a ''lot'' of time zailing. |
| 244 | * CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass: Lost research assistants, who are normally [[AbsentMindedProfessor harmless little university-goers]], turn out to be terrifyingly ferocious when handed over to the Crosses during the temporary Urchin war event. |
| 245 | * CrypticBackgroundReference: All over the place, though many of them are explained in the sidebars. Figuring them all out makes up much of the game's JigsawPuzzlePlot. |
| 246 | * CrystalBallScheduling: The banned play ''The Seventh Letter'' depicts [[spoiler:how the Bazaar hired the Masters and came to the Neath]]. The ''Order Serpentine'' shows, in somewhat more literal terms, [[spoiler:the Fingerkings getting the devils to make prisoner's honey, and later possessing people]]. |
| 247 | * {{Cthulhumanoid}}: The Rubbery Men, moist green creatures with tentacled faces and hands. They don't speak English, but are still surprisingly polite and friendly. |
| 248 | * CueOClock: The Ratwork Watch. |
| 249 | -->''The -ping- of the cash register almost drowns out a single tiny chime from the watch. The 'Purchase Interval' hand has just reached the end of its arc.'' |
| 250 | * CultureChopSuey: The "Oriental Pleasure Garden" hosted by Mrs Plenty during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose is a mishmash of every Eastern culture she could think of, accuracy be damned. The narrative even [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] a few of the inaccuracies for you, like a "Hindoo Philosopher" wearing a fez, "Turks" with Manchurian pigtails, and jugglers and roast chestnut stalls which are still from London. |
| 251 | * CurbStompBattle: Several. One example for a Person of Some Importance is "Wade into the Ring Fights" when dealing with Unfinished Business, where you character doesn't pay attention to the fight at all: |
| 252 | -->"This isn't a fair fight. This is barely exercise. You outclass every fighter that the Medusa's Head has to offer, battering them senseless without needing to concentrate. Did you pay that bill? When is the coalman coming tomorrow? Why are people giving you rostygold? Oh, that's right." |
| 253 | * DamnedByFaintPraise: When finishing a short story, you choose what level of potential you believe it has, and the game rolls against your Potential quality to see if it succeeds. If it fails, the reviews are exactly the same as if you had succeeded two levels lower -- as the attempted level increases, your character takes this as a greater and greater insult. |
| 254 | -->'''"A storyteller of note and substance!"'''\ |
| 255 | "Note and substance"? Clergymen are noted! Bankers have substance! Tear the filthy rag to pieces! Fling it in the fireplace! |
| 256 | * DamnYouMuscleMemory: The topmost option on the Guest Room at the Brass Embassy's card normally gives you Certifiable Scraps. However, during [[ChristmasEpisode Neathmas]], a new option used to be added at the top of that card for you to [[DealWithTheDevil sell your soul]] that many a player reflexively clicked on before realizing in horror that they'd just signed their soul away. Later Neathmases rectified this somewhat by adding a second new option on the top of that card that only costs you another person's bottled Soul (''much'' more replaceable than your own soul!) at worst if you click on it, but some players have ''still'' accidentally clicked on the "sell your soul" option below it. |
| 257 | * DeadEndRoom: The Avid Horizon, climax of the Seeking Mr Eaten's Name story. Once you reach it, your ship will be destroyed, and you have a last chance to turn back and be teleported to London. If you choose to knock instead, you're stuck. [[spoiler: Forever.]] |
| 258 | * DeaderThanDead: You can't come back from disease or old age, and if your body is completely destroyed, you obviously can't revive either. Death from Cantigaster venom is also permanent. A sort of middle ground exists, though; some people don't die permanently, but still sustain injuries too grievous for them to return to society. They're wrapped up in bandages and shipped off to the Tomb-Colonies instead. |
| 259 | * DealWithTheDevil: The Masters frequently offer such deals - there's always a catch. The devils are rather more straightforward - riches in exchange for your soul, for immediate collection. The Trickster career path offers a more elaborate recreation of the Faustus myth - beginning with simple confidence tricks, and progressing through black magic to your character being recruited to undermine Christian morality. [[spoiler:Mr Eaten, too, makes deals of a sort, though he offers very little and asks for everything in return...]] |
| 260 | * DeathByOriginStory: Comes with the [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge Nemesis]] Ambition. You even get to choose whether it was your character's [[CartwrightCurse lover, spouse]], [[RelativeButton brother]], or [[DeathOfAChild daughter]] who was murdered. |
| 261 | * DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist: Downplayed. All four failure states only require time to escape, so letting any Menace get too high is only an inconvenience, and sometimes it's necessary to go to these places to progress in a story or redeem a reward. However, there are side-effects for some of them: |
| 262 | ** The "state of some confusion" (the default Nightmares failure state) takes away some Dream qualities when you escape, unless if you're willing to spend Fate to buy a bottle of Honeyed Laudanum or move to the Mirror-Marches (the alternate Nightmares failure state if you have some Memories of Light, which still takes away the Is Someone There? dream progress). |
| 263 | ** Getting jailed (Suspicion) beyond the first time will cause subsequent sentences to be more severe, and being arrested for the fifth time will make it impossible to use Nikolas & Sons Instant Ablution Absolution (the Scandal- and Suspicion-reducing potion). |
| 264 | ** On the slow boat (Wounds), you can defeat the Boatman in a game of chess to reduce Wounds, but defeat him too many times and he'll up his game, meaning that the more times you die, the more actions it'd take to escape. |
| 265 | * DeathIsCheap: Subverted: death in the Neath is more of a mild inconvenience than anything else. One storylet has you kill a journalist for being too interested in reporting certain things. "...He'll get better, obviously, but it'll serve as a lesson." However, dying in the Neath does prevent you from ever returning to the surface, unless you can get your hands on [[ImmortalityInducer Hesperidean Cider]]. [[spoiler: An advanced point in the old version of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name story allowed players to try to return to the surface, but since they must have killed themselves several times already to get to that point, you can guess the result.]] In the [[PlayerVersusPlayer Game of Knife-And-Candle]], being ambushed and murdered by another player is only a minor inconvenience...unless you were carrying Knife-And-Candle-specific equipment, which they can swipe from your corpse. |
| 266 | * DeathSeeker: [[spoiler:Many of the Black Ribboners have strong overtones of this, and many of ''them'' are [[HeroicBSOD traumatized wrecks]]. There's heavy DrivenToSuicide implications for some of them, too.]] |
| 267 | * DeathsHourglass: The Noman's Friend quality measures how much health a Noman has. At creation, a Noman has 100 Noman's Friend, which will degrade by a random amount every week and can be increased with either Pails of So-Called Snow, Tears of the Bazaar or Taste of Lacre to keep the Noman alive. If it reaches zero, the Noman will melt. |
| 268 | * DefeatEqualsFriendship: You can take a contract against a Miniature Menace in the Department of Menace Eradication in Watchmaker's Hill; once you defeat it, it will join you as a Watchful Doll companion. |
| 269 | * DeliberateValuesDissonance: Since this is set in the late 1800s, of course it'll appear. |
| 270 | -->"[[ShamingTheMob Are we barbarians? Are we]] ''[[ShamingTheMob foreigners]]''?"\ |
| 271 | You hear murmurs of discontent about these 'Benthic Ladies' and their struggle for power. If it goes on like this, they say, women will be ''voting''... |
| 272 | * {{Determinator}}: |
| 273 | ** [[spoiler:Towards seeking Mr Eaten's name, if you choose to pursue the quest. After a while, it seems like it may be the only reason you still pursue it]]. |
| 274 | ** You when getting out of the Wounds failure location. The text on almost every single card there ends with "You must find your way back!" You're getting away from Death on sheer willpower. |
| 275 | ** And if you spend the Fate to rescue your aunt from Hell. Pretty much to get to this point you have spent enough fate and warped reality enough through force of will to allow you to get a soul out of Hell. |
| 276 | * DevelopersRoom: It's hidden in [[spoiler:the Mirror-Marches]], and you can see it as part of Ambition: Enigma. |
| 277 | * DevilButNoGod: Devils are quite omnipresent. While the Church still exists (and is quite influential), angels are nowhere to be seen, and God is rarely mentioned. [[spoiler:The Bishop of Southwark and the Bishop of St Fiacre's both have plans to secure the assistance of the Heavenly Host, but it remains to be seen how successful this will be.]] [[PlayingWithATrope Interestingly enough]], for all the minor devils who show up all over the place, [[{{Satan}} their boss]] hasn't been mentioned in the plot any more than {{God}} has. This could be explained by the fact that Hell's princes have been overthrown and forced into hiding by the Republic's ruthless efforts to hunt them down, and add a delicious bit of {{Irony}}: Creation's [[FallenAngel original rebel]] is in hiding [[RebelliousRebel because his minions rebelled against]] ''[[RebelliousRebel him]]''. [[spoiler:Of course the real answer is that the devils have no connection to Christian theology at all. They were servants and craftsmen (and bees!) of the Judgements who fled from their service to the edge of Parabola with no mention of a central leader. Souls are merely the raw material of their craft.]] |
| 278 | * DevelopersForesight: Helped by the fact that the developers actively monitor the game and are happy to add new elements in response to certain players' behavior. |
| 279 | ** From Christmas 2013: the acquaintance system had received an overhaul, allowing players to send calling cards to each other. One brave and foolish player sent a calling card to [[HumanoidAbomination Mr Eaten's]] in-game account... and got one in return! |
| 280 | ** When selling an [[ArtifactOfDoom Eyeless Skull]] to the Bazaar, the shopkeeper will ask why you're selling it to them when you could get a better price from the Radical Factotum. [[spoiler: Before {{Foreshadowing}} (or [[LampshadeHanging lampshading]] if you already know what he's talking about) that there might be some very good reasons why a player wouldn't want to sell it to the Revolutionaries.]] |
| 281 | * DidWeJustHaveTeaWithCthulhu: [[spoiler:In the later parts of the Eater-of-Chains storyline, particularly after discovering that its real-world form is the Empress' puppy, the beast is much friendlier than it was when you first encountered it.]] |
| 282 | * DiminishingReturnsForBalance: Applies to both attribute grinding and items. |
| 283 | ** The Change Points needed to raise any highway stat from level X-1 to level X equals to X, meaning that you'll need increasingly more CP to increase your stats until that stat reaches 70, after which every level will only require 70 CP, but there's a trade-off in that the four training professions will no longer grant 250 CP each week if the corresponding stat is higher than 70. |
| 284 | ** When it comes to items, the cheaper items are ''vastly'' more cost-efficient than the expensive ones: compare the Emergency Blunderbuss, which costs half an Echo and grants 1 Dangerous, to the Infernal Sharpshooter's Rifle, which costs 420 Echoes and gives 10 Dangerous, or 840 times the cost for 10 times the benefits, but of course since you can only equip one item of each slot at a time, the expensive items are much more slot-efficient compared to the cheaper ones. This is even more prominent after you become a Person of Some Importance and gain access to the Affiliation/Home Comfort/Transportation/Spouse/Club items: you can equip them in new slots in addition to the older ones, but they are ''extremely'' cost-efficient (the Formidable Basalt Gymnasium, which gives a single point of Dangerous, costs 10 x Strong-Backed Labour, or 135 Echoes and 10 actions). |
| 285 | ** The same thing applies to lodgings: you can upgrade from the starting 2-card lodging to a 3-card lodging with a few hundreds of cheap items that will take a very short time to get, but if you want a 4-card lodging, then you'll need either tens of thousands of these aforementioned cheap items, or a bunch of much more expensive items (both of which will require a fair amount of grinding), and upgrading further to a [[InfinityPlusOneSword 5-card lodging]] is even more prohibitively expensive, costing you one of the highest-tier goods in the game as well as a lot of Notability, while also requiring a fairly high amount of BDR. |
| 286 | * DirtyOldMan: During a party, a "clingy octogenarian" whose gender is undisclosed may dance with you, and keeps groping your rear. Then there's that bandaged woman at the Tomb-Colonies, whom you can [[ILoveTheDead indulge]]. |
| 287 | * DiscOneNuke: Through access codes or events, it is often possible to acquire high-level items (like the Scuttering Squad) far earlier than you should be able to normally. These items trivialise a bunch of gear, but they are usually not best-in-slot, even when limited to Bazaar gear only (except the Portable Lamp-Post, even after it was moved to cost 2 Night Whispers, which is the only 2 BDR Home Comfort that doesn't require spending Fate, completing an Ambition, doing very-late-game content, or getting very lucky with an event). |
| 288 | * DiscriminateAndSwitch: Subverted in a storylet, someone mentions "a large gentleman with a muddy complexion, if you know what I mean", [[spoiler:but the player character automatically thinks "Clay Man"]]. |
| 289 | * {{Dissimile}}: Fighting a spider council is compared to fighting an elephant. A poisonous elephant. A poisonous elephant which can spit spiders. |
| 290 | * DistractedByTheSexy: The Alluring Accomplice companion raises your Persuasive by 5... and your Shadowy by 2, the implication being that while people are distracted looking at her you have an easier time sneaking around. |
| 291 | * DoorToBefore: Gameplay-wise, once you pass through the [[UndergroundLevel Roads Beneath]] and reach Flute Street for the first time, you'll discover a shortcut that allows you to travel back-and-forth between Mrs Plenty's Carnival and Flute Street in a single mouse click without having to spend candles to retrace your way through the Roads Beneath again. |
| 292 | * DoNotSpoilThisEnding: Anything that costs Fate is absolutely forbidden from being spoiled even the slightest bit on either of the wikis. This is a policy of the wikis themselves, not the game (though it is part of their agreement with Failbetter), so it's still fine to give details privately to your friends. A handful of branches cost a single point of Fate ($0.25 USD) specifically to invoke this clause. |
| 293 | * DoubleEdgedBuff: Failing the Watchful check when greeting the Merry Gentleman gives The Walls Are Wrong, which increases both your Watchful and Nightmares gain, until the next Time the Healer. |
| 294 | * DoWellButNotPerfect: The path to becoming an author requires you to create a particular grade of short story in Veilgarden. Making a story of a higher grade is a waste of time and resources, since it only counts that specific type. Getting the unique items during the Fruits of the Zee Festival can be this too, as they each require a certain level of the Picking Through the Wrecker's Cove quality to obtain. That quality is in turned based off the quality of the Strange Catch you turn in to get it, and with high levels in several Quirks it becomes very difficult to get a low enough Picking quality to get some of the items. |
| 295 | * DownerEnding: |
| 296 | ** Seeking Mr Eaten's Name requires you to accept an item called "A Bad End" and gives you constant sincere warnings that Seeking will bring nothing but misery for your character. The ending itself, should you pursue it to a conclusion, culminates in [[spoiler:bricking your account and rendering it permanently unplayable]]. |
| 297 | ** The Dangerous path of the Mysterious Benefactor story. [[spoiler:After pulling off a variety of jobs with him, Jack the Anarchist reveals that he is slowly turning into Jack of Smiles, and begs you to maim him so he can go to the Tomb Colonies. You either fulfill his wish, or leave him to turn, but either way, the man who helped you get a footing in Fallen London meets a grim fate, and either outcome weighs heavily on your conscience.]] |
| 298 | ** The final part of the Cheery Man and the Last Constable's story if [[spoiler:you don't rig the game beforehand and fail the luck roll for it which causes the character you were supporting to be KilledOffForReal]]. |
| 299 | * TheDreaded: The "Dreaded" attribute you find in certain pieces of equipment tracks this, tracking how much people think you're someone better off avoided, or at least not confronted. [[spoiler:Seekers of the Name also scare the wits out of everyone, from urchin to Master. As they should be, because they're very unhinged, prone to violent fits of [[HorrorHunger cannibalistic]] hunger (or just plain endless hunger for anything that could be remotely edible), eager to do horrible things to themselves and others, possibly seek something that may doom the very Bazaar, and in particular because they're [[TheDeterminator horrifyingly determined]], and nothing you can do to them can top what they've already done to themselves. Being anywhere near a Seeker, nevermind in the way of one, is bad, bad news]]. |
| 300 | * DreamLand: Parabola the land of Is-Not. It's this and more (dreams, echoes of past memories, premotions of the future, etc.), which is also somehow behind mirrors, all mirrors and mirroring surfaces, everywhere or at least everywhere in the Neath. It's populated by strange creatures and featuring impossible geography. Those who enter into it using [[FantasticDrug Prisoner's Honey]] or [[MagicMirror Mirrors]] disappear from the physical world for the duration of their stay and may reappear in other locations. |
| 301 | * DrillSergeantNasty: One storylet has your character training up the Constables in the art of monster-hunting, with distinct overtones of this. |
| 302 | -->"This is a sorrow-spider! Which end do you hold it by? TRICK QUESTION!" |
| 303 | * DrivenToSuicide: |
| 304 | ** You, while seeking Mr Eaten's name. You will kill yourself repeatedly on your quest. |
| 305 | ** During the Dangerous route of a Mysterious Benefactor, [[spoiler:the Anarchist went on a suicide bombing mission because he knows he'll be possessed by Jack-of-Smiles soon enough. You are given the option to kill him, so he can be shipped to the Tomb-Colonies and avoid possession.]] |
| 306 | * DrowningMySorrows: A frequent necessity to deal with nightmares. Specific examples: |
| 307 | ** Laudanum. Being a potent tincture of opium, it affects your physical health in exchange. |
| 308 | ** Greyfields 1868 First Sporing acts like laudanum, only better and without the Wounds increase. Bottles are hard to obtain, however. |
| 309 | ** The spiced wine from the Mrs Plenty's Carnival can reduce your Nightmares and even your Wounds if you're lucky; if you're unlucky you'll get plumb drunk and raise your Scandal instead from "regrettable incidents." |
| 310 | * DrugsAreGood: The use of Prisoner's Honey is in general portrayed as a fairly harmless if socially inappropriate ([[TheHedonist and bohemian]]) behavior that leads to some incredible dreamlike vistas, with many artists taking it in order to [[HigherUnderstandingThroughDrugs inspire themselves for their next work]]. [[spoiler:Averted hard for Red Honey/Gaoler's Honey however, though not for the reasons one might expect, it's portrayed negatively because it allows those who partake in it to interfere and mess with ''other people's dreams'', with very unpleasant results. In a more classical manner, overdosing on it will also lead to permanent and horrifying BodyHorror.]] |
| 311 | * DrunkRolling: The 'Rob a drunk' storylet allows you to do ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. |
| 312 | * EarlyBirdCameo: The Blue Kingdom, a location set to be properly introduced in VideoGame/SunlessSkies, is first seen in Fallen London at the end of the Season of Skies in early 2017. |
| 313 | * EarWorm: Failing challenges in Mahogany Hall gives you the Plagued by a Popular Song quality as a Menace stat similar to Wounds or Nightmares. The song is [[spoiler:Pop Goes The Weasel]], and something bad may happen to your [[spoiler:pet weasels]] if it reaches 5. [[spoiler:And if you try to be clever and don't have weasels, it'll instead messily pop some poor lady's pet weasel as you pass her on the street, which naturally doesn't please her in the least]]. |
| 314 | * EarnYourHappyEnding: The Ambitions are incredibly expensive and difficult to complete, arguably the most arduous journeys in the game. [[spoiler:If you see them through to the end, every possible outcome is a kind of [[HellYeah Hell Yeah]] moment for your character. You either get exactly what you asked for when you began your journey in London, or you get something you didn't realize you wanted or, in the case of Nemesis, something you never knew was even possible in the first place. For some ambitions, this can apply to the characters you meet along the way, such as Clara from Light Finger or the monkey from Heart's Desire.]] |
| 315 | * EasterEgg: |
| 316 | ** It used to be possible to play as a [[{{Golem}} Clay Man]] by clicking the hidden gender option when creating a character. |
| 317 | ** Failbetter Games hinted on Twitter that the ''Where You and I Must Go'' Exceptional Story contained an easter egg, although it's more of a hidden branch that becomes available only if you do something [[ViolationOfCommonSense truly stupid]] and then something [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential truly cruel]] in response to the consequences of your stupid action. |
| 318 | * EatenAlive: [[spoiler:If you're Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, it is possible to do this to your pets as hunger overtakes you. You never get the option otherwise, but if you do, it can get quite unpleasant... especially the Talkative Rattus Faber, who will scream ''all the way down'']]. |
| 319 | * EldritchAbomination: A great many creatures seem like this at first, including but not limited to the Masters, the Rubbery creatures and Flukes, the Eater-of-Chains, the Vake, and more denizens of the Labyrinth of Tigers than have yet been named. You only begin to understand them later on, figuring out the workings of what they truly are, and as you understand the rules, they cease to be so Eldritch... but some creatures, like [[spoiler:the older Devils, Storm, and the very Bazaar itself]] are still unknowable by most measures, even if you can sometimes understand what they want. [[spoiler:And Mr. Eaten may not have counted once, but after its brutal demise and return as an entity that ''everything'' fears down in the Neath, certainly does. At no point do you properly understand ''why'' it became the way it is now, and its entire questline shows it as something terrifying and incomprehensible]]. |
| 320 | * EldritchLocation: Just about every single area. London's only the least strange in comparison, and it's a place where trying to find your way without a map can be literally maddening, people usually don't stay dead, shimmery mist portals floating around the streets is a common happening, and it snows underground, the snow itself being practically a [[NoodleIncident Noodle Substance]] in terms of the weird crap that happens when interacting with it in general. |
| 321 | * ElectionDayEpisode: |
| 322 | ** Starting in July 2016, Fallen London began holding annual elections for a mayor where players can campaign for the candidate of their choice. The candidates for the first election were [[NaughtyNuns Sinning Jenny]], the [[BadassPreacher Bishop of Southwark]], and the [[CommanderContrarian Jovial Contrarian]], and the victor was Jenny. |
| 323 | ** July 2017: The three new mayoral candidates were [[ByronicHero Feducci]], the [[LittleOldLadyInvestigates Implacable Detective]], and the [[SoapBoxSadie Dauntless Temperance Campaigner]]. New social actions were also made available, including collecting donations for Campaigners, helping fellow supporters with Scandal or Suspicion for Fixers, and raising mobs to attack opposing players for Agitators. This election ended with Feducci winning. |
| 324 | ** July 2018: The candidates were the [[AristocratsAreEvil Captivating Princess]], [[InventedIndividual Mr Slowcake]], and the Jovial Contrarian...again. This year saw several changes: the Reputation and Career systems were reworked, most of the social actions added in the previous year were removed, voting was shifted to the start of the second week, and Mr Huffam ran polls throughout the election. The Contrarian emerged as the victor. |
| 325 | * EmergencyEnergyTank: Consuming a Magnificent Feast (which can only be obtained once per year, through the Advent Calendar on 25th December) completely wipes your Wounds, Nightmares and Irrigo, and fully restores your actions. |
| 326 | * EquipmentUpgrade: In the Cave of the Nadir, a few equippable items can be upgraded by enriching them with irrigo. During Hallowmas, the confessions acquired throughout the event can be used to upgrade companions. |
| 327 | * EscapeRope: When planning for a heist, you can buy an escape route which lets you escape without getting caught. |
| 328 | * EvasiveFightThreadEpisode: The Black Ribbon duels are allegedly duels to the final death. However, only one of the duelists ([[spoiler:Captain Vendrick]]) actually gets killed. Feducci comes back with HeroicWillpower [[spoiler:despite getting hacked to bits, which is supposed to properly kill a person]], and all the other duels get interrupted by various individuals, be it BarBrawl participants, overly ambitious [[EyeScream Sorrow Spiders]], inebriated Vakehunters or [[NothingIsScarier the Things in the Cellar]], before you kill your opponent. Even failing these duels will only put you at risk of the [[DeathIsCheap ordinary, recoverable death,]] at worst. |
| 329 | * EvenEvilHasStandards: |
| 330 | ** According to the "Advising the Loquacious Vicar" quest, even spirifers (soul-traders) find the idea of attaching a live soul to a dead body abhorrent. |
| 331 | ** In the old version of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, the [[spoiler:Starveling Cat]] asking a spirifier to [[spoiler:stain your soul]] caused him to respond, "No, you damnable beast, I will not! A man's got to draw the line somewhere, and I won't, you hear me? I won't!" |
| 332 | ** The deviless Virginia will [[WhatTheHellHero chew you out]] for releasing a vengeful Prince of Hell from its prison solely to force her to play the Marvellous early to further your Heart's Desire ambition. (That said, you might have chosen to only pretend to have released the prince from his prison...but you could only have done so if you convinced him that you were ''[[EvilerThanThou even worse]]'' than him.) |
| 333 | * EverybodyDiesEnding: A possible ending to [[spoiler: The Cheesemonger storyline]] is to kill [[spoiler:Alice, her daughter]], [[AndYourLittleDogToo and their little dog, too.]] By way of [[EarthShatteringKaboom dynamite,]] that is. |
| 334 | * EveryoneIsBi: All the {{Non Player Character}}s are, and all characters potentially so - seduction storylets unlocked by increasing your Persuasion are the same regardless of the gender of your character, and include male and female (and ambiguous) targets. |
| 335 | * EvilGloating: A great example in the [[spoiler:Bag a Legend!]] Ambition, which you can exploit if so inclined: [[spoiler:"What an agreeable little lamb you are... I have been grooming victims for the Vake since, oh, long before the Fall, but I've never found one as [[TalkToTheFist argh; damn you; ow; desist; REEEGH!]]"]] |
| 336 | * EvilPaysBetter: If you're confronted with a Heartless/Ruthless vs. Magnanimous/Steadfast choice, the choice often boils down to either "get a better monetary reward or do the right thing for a lesser paycheck" or "take the [[EvilIsEasy effortless option]] or work hard and expend resources to do the right thing". |
| 337 | * ExpansionPack: You can play the game perfectly well without ever buying Fate, but some storylines might be expanded by spending Fate, some storylines are entirely Fate-locked, and you can subscribe to become an Exceptional Friend for £5 a month, which gives you access to the House of Chimes and the Exceptional Stories of that duration. Some Exceptional Stories add new options to normal parts of ''Fallen London'' after they've been concluded. For example, ''Cut With Moonlight'' [[spoiler: adds an option to buy boxes of sunlight to the society faction card, which gives you hallucinations that can be experienced in several different areas.]] |
| 338 | * ExperienceBooster: The Talkative Rattus Faber companion is this in effect, since it reduces all highway stats by a substantial amount, which make all challenges harder, causing you to gain more CP on average (if you don't mind the menaces or other penalties caused by failing the challenge that is). |
| 339 | * ExpospeakGag: Using a ''fictional'' word. The Professor of Antiquarian Esquivalience. [[spoiler:Or in other words, the ancient art of wilfully avoiding one's official duties.]] |
| 340 | * ExtremeOmnivore: The Starveling Cat is one, if the sidenotes are to be believed. Seekers of the Name can also drift into this when they let their hunger grow ''too'' big. [[spoiler:Devouring their own entry in the local Phonebook of Important People comes to mind]]. |
| 341 | * EyeScream: Sorrow-spiders steal eyeballs from living people, which [[spoiler: hatch into new spiders]]. |
| 342 | * FameGate: Making Waves and Notability represent your reputation. Making Waves tracks how much you're being talked about in London. It decreases every week, and for a Person of Some Importance, it is used to increase Notability. Having a certain level of Notability gives you access to tier 3 Professions and Professional Activities, is required to purchase the most expensive lodgings, and a few other quests and options. |
| 343 | * FantasticDrug: Prisoner's honey is a ''magic'' drug. It doesn't just give you the MushroomSamba, it actually physically transports you into a dream. Just stay away from red honey... |
| 344 | * FantasticRacism: ''Nobody'' likes the Rubbery Men. This even extends to [[SlidingScaleOfGameplayAndStoryIntegration gameplay]]; they're one of three factions (the other two being the Church and the Urchins) who have conflict cards with three or more other factions, so trying to befriend them may clog up your opportunity deck if you're also allied with the Tomb-Colonies, the Revolutionaries, [=and/or=] the Constables. Clay Men and tomb-colonists are not popular either. The Rubbery Men have it worse, though. |
| 345 | * FemmeFatale: The Sardonic Music-Hall Singer is a minor example, as associating with her is a good way to get dragged into criminal entanglements. The player can become a much stronger example, if she pursues Persuasive and Shadowy. |
| 346 | * FictionalColour: The Neathbow is a spectrum of seven colours which only exist in the Neath: violant, cosmogone, gant, viric, apocyan, peligin and irrigo. Understanding what produces them and what effect they have on those who see them is the basis of the 'Luminosity' item category. |
| 347 | * FighterMageThief: Crops up in "[[WhyDontYaJustShootHim Savage!]]", "[[BackStab Elusive!]]", and "[[ConfusionFu Baroque!]]", the three qualities used by the Game of Knife and Candle. |
| 348 | * FirstPersonPerspective: Usually everything in the game is in Third-Person, but plenty of content involving [[spoiler:the Stormy-Eyed quality]] is instead narrated in First-Person. It can get ''very'' jarring when you hit a large slew of such cards/storylets [[spoiler:which is bound to happen if you let it rise way too high and start thinking you ''are'' the Thunder]]. |
| 349 | * FisherKing: |
| 350 | ** [[spoiler:The King with a Hundred Hearts]] is a GeniusLoci example, whose very dreams shape his land and his subjects. |
| 351 | ** A few of the more esoteric storylets on [[spoiler: Winking Isle, a late-game location in the Seeking Mr Eaten's Name storyline, draw parallels between the Fisher King of legend and Mr Eaten himself:]] |
| 352 | --->[[spoiler: "King Twelve, they say, was wounded in the thigh. He was robbed of what will be. You may bring him a candle or a heart. Or you may fly; you may fly."\ |
| 353 | "Here he once stood, on the border between [[DreamLand Parabola]] and the [[SpaceIsMagic Wilderness]], to look out across his wounded realm."]] |
| 354 | * FishingMinigame: The Fruits of the Zee Festival event lets you fish for "strange catches" that you can give to the Hooded Lady at the festival in exchange for unique/valuable items at the Wreckers' Cove. Getting the biggest catches to trade for the best cove items requires high Quirks, an assortment of Cartography items, and the RandomNumberGod's favor. |
| 355 | * FlashForward: ''Salon Scandal!'' is framed as a recounting of your character's early days in London, even if you have a new character that is still in those early days. In this case, the story technically features a richer, future version of your character talking about events that happen in your current character's timeframe. That being said, [[spoiler: [[GameplayAndStorySegregation the reward you get from this story is still available once you go back to the present]].]] |
| 356 | * FluffyTamer: The Labyrinth of Tigers is full of these, and you'll need to learn their ways if you want to make any sort of progress inside. Zookeeping in a zoo that has both horrible semi-mundane fauna like penguins that can slice you open and giant cave snakes to {{Animalistic Abomination}}s like the Inhabiter of Wolves and [[NothingIsScarier whatever the hell Arthur is]] ''needs'' someone that can tame monsters and call them Fluffy. |
| 357 | * AFoggyDayInLondonTown: The weather changes every now and then, but it is very often foggy. Which is impressive, because in this universe, London is underneath the earth. |
| 358 | * {{Foreshadowing}}: |
| 359 | ** Because of how the game is written, a lot of seemingly innocuous comments in early stories or events hint at considerably larger secrets of the setting that don't come to light until your stats are over 150. And then there are bits that hint at stories that aren't explored in the game itself - for some hints, such as the some of the archaeology works in the Forgotten Quarter, pertain to VideoGame/SunlessSea or VideoGame/SunlessSkies exclusively. |
| 360 | ** At least two instances in the ambition Heart's Desire. |
| 361 | *** When you examine the site where the Honour of a previous Marvellous had taken place, you find markings of previous players. Most of these come from people you have already met, except [[spoiler:'10', which foreshadows a prior winner you will later meet, October, the 10th month of the Calendar Council.]] |
| 362 | *** During the match between [[spoiler:Pages and the Cardsharp Monkey, the latter swiftly loses all its coins in a bet. It then offers you as its chance for a final match, which Pages accepts. Then the monkey begins playing [[CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass for real]], taking all of Pages's winning in one fell swoop, bypassing the need to chip at Pages's considerable lead. It then refuses to accept Pages's chance, cementing its victory. This mirrors how you will potentially win against the monkey in the final battle. Bonus points if you turn down its chance too.]] |
| 363 | * FortuneTeller: Madame Shoshana, the city's most greatest Chiropteromancer. She writes predictions in the Gazette and can be encountered in Mrs. Plenty's carnival. |
| 364 | * {{Freemium}}: Exceptional Friendship, an optional subscription that costs £5 per month and increases the action cap to 40, the opportunity deck size to 10 and gives access to the House of Chimes and the Exceptional Stories of that duration. |
| 365 | * FunetikAksent: An assistant of the Enterprising Astronomer: |
| 366 | -->Hi have hay hitem... Hay cert-hain gentleman hat the hobservatory wanted you to have this here distressing hitem. Hi'm glad to be rid of the thing. Now, hif you'll hexcuse me, hi have matters to hattend to. |
| 367 | * FungusHumongous: They live in marshy areas. The player can meet some if they live in a cottage by the Observatory, go shroom-hopping, or are breeding creatures in the Labyrinth of Tigers. |
| 368 | * FurryConfusion: Can come up in a conflict card if you have a Ratskin Suit and a Working Rat ally; one option is to reassure him that your suit was made from humanely-farmed non-sentient rats. |
| 369 | * GameBreaker: An unusual ''reverse'' occurrence. The quest for Mr Eaten's Name, essentially [[spoiler:SelfInflictedHell]], was considered so ''punishingly'' broken (being almost certain to [[spoiler:take hours of grinding, destroy most of your character's positive attributes, and then become impossible to complete]]) that it went on hiatus for over 2 years. When it finally came back in 2016, it was heavily revamped and now starts with a confirmation card that warns the player exactly what they're getting into and gives them an item that they can use any time to bail out of the quest. [[invoked]] |
| 370 | * GameplayAndStorySegregation: Sort of. |
| 371 | ** For some reason, moving from the Shuttered Palace to the Empress' Court takes an action, while travelling from there to, say, Watchmaker's Hill does not, even if the Shuttered Palace is located in the same building as the Empress' Court, while Watchmaker's Hill is on the other side of London. You can also freely access the Bazaar from the Foreign Office (which is also located on the opposite side of London), even if it costs an action and 3 Compromising Documents ''every'' time you need to normally move from Wilmot's End to the Foreign Office. |
| 372 | ** In some storylets, the text for failure seems to be more a matter of bad luck, or out-of-context issues unrelated to the stat required, than a lack of ability (examples including donating your body to science, and failing to keep quiet because your surgeon was drunk, someone at the pit fights giving one CurbStompBattle after another, making the show too boring to distract your pickpocketing marks, or failing to decypher infernal contracts at the Brass Embassy because the cabinets are sentient and tried to eat your fingers). Also, when failing some storylets that punish you with some Menace, the raised Menace sometimes doesn't make sense. (e.g. You've failed to lecture some people and don't get paid. Wounds is increasing...) |
| 373 | ** In at least one case, fan remarks concerning [[spoiler:raising the Heartless quality for leaving the Comtessa with her lover in the Finder of Heiresses storylet]] led to its removal because it didn't make sense to many why that was happening. [[spoiler:Players felt that the Comtessa was there of her own free will and that they were respecting her wishes, not leaving her to a FateWorseThanDeath]]. |
| 374 | ** In the Lab, Student Disgruntlement is a quality that starts appearing if you continue to work with your Students once they're at max level, representing their frustration at continuing to work under you when they are ready to graduate. Except that two of the students, if one read their flavour texts, are most certainly ''not'' in a hurry to leave your Lab and actually prefer staying under your tutelage (The Profound Student is very apathetic and slow and as such does not want to leave a position he likes, and the Gifted Student, as a young noblewoman, can't respectably indulge in her passion for science on her own). |
| 375 | ** Through Mr Chimes' Lost & Found, the player can acquire a number of items that callback to past Exceptional Stories, whether they've been done by the player or not. Some of these items are companions who featured in those story. However, the game does not care whether you've done those stories or not, and, if you have, what happened to those characters in those stories as a result of your choices. It is entirely possible to acquire a companion character who you saw died and the game would give [[UnexplainedRecovery no explanation]] whatsoever, such as the Stoic Classicist. |
| 376 | ** In the later stages of the Heart's Desire Ambition, [[spoiler:Mr Pages does everything it can to make you lose focus, such as turning off gas and water to your house, dumping fertilizer on your lawn, and informing you that a ''railway'' is being constructed where it's standing.]] The problem with this, however, is that to reach this point in the story you have to have bought a five-card lodging, making their actions highly improbable for a number of reasons: A Suite at the Royal Bethlehem is run by the Revolutionary, anti-Master Manager, A Sanctum at the Brass Embassy is headed by the Devils, and A Spire-Emporium of the Bazaar is managed by the Masters, [[spoiler:which would mean that Pages would be driving a railway ''through his own home too''.]] The later stage of the Ambition also requires you to enter the Bethlehem, but having a Suite there as your Lodgings does not count |
| 377 | ** The ''Salon Scandal!'' exceptional story requires you to be a seasoned Londoner to make sense, but it can be played right at the start of the game. [[spoiler: Should you complete it, you will buy an expensive item at an auction, even if you are currently penniless]]. Most of this except the spoiler can be chalked up to FlashForward (see above). |
| 378 | * GargleBlaster: Amanita Sherry and Muscaria Brandy are two types of alcohol considered to be Infernal instead of Wines items. You might drink them if you can't read labels, but if you aren't a devil you aren't likely to survive to drink a second time. |
| 379 | * GaslampFantasy: Definitely Victorian, supernatural, and with Gothic roots, though it leans more towards horror. |
| 380 | * GemstoneAssault: The Twelve-carat Diamond Ring increases your Dangerous by 3: |
| 381 | -->[[DoubleMeaning "A huge diamond always]] [[{{Pun}} leaves an impression."]] |
| 382 | * GeniusLoci: |
| 383 | ** Polythreme, where everything is alive. [[spoiler: Specifically, the King with a Hundred Hearts. He's the one who makes the Clay Men - they split off the buildings when the Hundreds dreams. Unfinished Men are what happens when he has a nightmare.]] |
| 384 | ** The Bazaar is alive in some sense. [[spoiler:It's a massive space crab who covets love stories.]] |
| 385 | ** Old Downy, the Urchins' tenement, is strongly implied to be alive in some sense too - its stairs and pipes writhe as you climb them. |
| 386 | * GlobalCurrencyException: |
| 387 | ** In the Upper River, most exchanges are done in Hinterland Scrip instead of Echoes (the After-Hours Market does business in Echoes, but is of little practical interest, since it only sells items also sold in London, at marked-up prices). Hinterland Scrip can easily be converted to Echoes by buying Tinned Ham on the Upper River and selling it in London, though the reverse is not true. |
| 388 | ** In the Rat-Market, exchange is done in Rat-Shillings. Selling an item for Rat-Shillings costs an action, and the list of items accepted by the Rat-Market changes from week to week (with the exception of Fourth-City Echoes, which can be exchanged for 125 Rat-Shillings every week, without the need of an action). When the Rat-Market closes, all unspent Rat-Shillings will automatically become Pieces of Rostygold. |
| 389 | ** On the Roof, the main currency is the Stuiver. Most items that sell for Stuivers can only be found on the Roof, except Nodules of Warm Amber, which are instead bought at half their actual price. |
| 390 | ** In the Khanate, the national currency is Khaganian Coinage, which can primarily be obtained by selling skeletons to the Trifling Diplomat or doing intrigues in Khan's Heart (exchanging Echoes or Surface-Silk for Khaganian coin is time-consuming). |
| 391 | ** In Irem, items obtained from the Loom can be sold for all sorts of commodities (Neo-Echoes for Jasmine Leaves and Selenitic Fragments for Aeolian Screams, for example), while the three items that are on sale are priced in three different currencies (Echoes, Justificande Coins and Khaganian Coinage). |
| 392 | * {{Golem}}: The Clay Men, who are employed to do various grunt work in the docks and pubs. They seem to have some form of independent thought, though. |
| 393 | * GoMadFromTheRevelation: |
| 394 | ** The Topsy King [[spoiler:[[DealWithTheDevil bet his mind as a stake on a certain card game]] and lost.]] |
| 395 | ** Knowing some secrets in the Neath pushes your Nightmares attribute, and when it gets high enough, you go insane and are sent to the Royal Bethlehem |
| 396 | * GoneHorriblyRight: |
| 397 | ** One opportunity card has you try to settle the differences between two gangs outside your house. Should you fail, you still succeed in making the gangs get along... by getting their leaders to fall in love with each other and causing a crime spree as they cooperate on several heists. Your neighbours are displeased. |
| 398 | ** A storylet in Ladybones Road has you lay a false trail for a spy to get rid of her. If you fail, it's so convincing that a half-dozen more spies show up to follow up on her investigations. |
| 399 | ** Another storylet lets you help training new Constables at the Department of Menace Eradication, available at higher Dangerous levels. If you fail, your tales of how you got all your old wounds and your exploits turn way too effective, and scare off one fourth of the applicants, pissing off the Department. |
| 400 | * GoodFeelsGood: The main benefit of signing up with the C.V.R. - [[spoiler: a secret organisation that works to return souls to their rightful owners. Dealing in souls is much more lucrative, but the CVR gives you a hideously expensive option that sets your Nightmare, Wounds, Scandal and Suspicion to zero.]] |
| 401 | * GotMeDoingIt: |
| 402 | ** A piece early in the Light Fingers! Ambition: |
| 403 | --->" 'It's a fierce shame - they's both sing like angels, so they do. She was s'posed come back from the Forgotten Quarter last week. I fears the worst for her.'\ |
| 404 | You're well on your way to fearsing the worst too. Fearing the worst. You had better check the Forgotten Quarter. And you didn't know she had a sister." |
| 405 | ** The Enterprising Astronomer's assistant (who has a FunetikAksent) has this effect. You notice the parcel is hemitting... emitting a low wail. |
| 406 | ** Zailors and their gratuitous Z usage. |
| 407 | --->''It's hard to know zenze from zuperzti-- Argh! '''sense from superstition''' when it comes to zailors.'' |
| 408 | * GottaCatchThemAll: The accommodation keys. And several plotlines related to [[spoiler:the Labyrinth of Tigers]] involve catching and/or training an assemblage of various wild monsters. [[spoiler: The false saints' candles, if you're Seeking the Name.]] |
| 409 | * GovernmentConspiracy: |
| 410 | ** The Masters are always scheming, but a particularly nasty one is unveiled in [[spoiler: the Light Fingers ambition.]] |
| 411 | ** The entity [[spoiler:Jack-of-Smiles]] is also revealed to be the product of a GoneHorriblyWrong attempt of the Masters to manufacture love stories for the Bazaar and [[spoiler:the Nemesis ambition]]'s biggest reveal is that at least one Master [[spoiler:orchestrated the murder of not just your loved one, but six other people's loved ones too to lure them to the Neath]]. |
| 412 | * HallOfMirrors: At Mrs Plenty's Carnival. Although these mirrors show you the future... possibly. Or they might drive you insane. Or kill you. |
| 413 | * HalloweenEpisode: Starting in 2013, players are able to invite eccentric visitors to their lodgings and get a glimpse of their future/destiny and collect confessions from other Menace-ridden players which they could choose to keep secret or betray for a variety of rewards during a 2-week period at the end of October. 2014 added Mr Huffam who interviewed players who had gotten enough "Spirit of Hallowmas" from their experiences, 2015 added special confessions given by several established Fallen London [=NPCs=], and 2016 revamped the confession mechanic so that players could only take confessions from a variety of Fallen London [=NPCs=] instead of other players (although they could still trade them for specific confessions) and could also use these confessions to upgrade certain Companions. |
| 414 | * HandOfGlory: Hands of Glory can be sent as gifts during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose because nothing says love like a severed limb that helps you sneak around. |
| 415 | -->It is possible that someone plucked an old love from the grave to send you this. More likely they bought it at Hangman's Arch. Possibly it means they value you more than their own right hand. It's hard to be certain. |
| 416 | * HappyPlace: The Mirror-Marches can be used like this when you're dangerously close to going insane. It acts like a less-punishing version of the State of Some Confusion, but requires you to have at least one Memory of Light in your possession when your Nightmares hit 8 (or you can access it manually from Mrs Plenty's Carnival with a high enough Watchful score). |
| 417 | * HarmlessVillain: Jack-of-Smiles is a dangerous, insane serial killer who likes to hide in snowmen and leap out at people with knives. He is rather annoyed by how most of them [[DeathIsCheap just get back up again when he's done]]. |
| 418 | * HaveAGayOldTime: You can wear a Gay Bonnet or find a pair of Queer Souls. This ''is'' Victorian Era (underground) London, after all. |
| 419 | * HealingPotion: F.F. Gebrandt's Tincture of Vigour, which reduces Wounds when drunk. |
| 420 | * HellHotel: The only tourists to visit the Tomb-Colonies are Londoners looking for somewhere completely boring to hide from the public eye. Their hotels are as much mausoleums as residences, being staffed and patronised by the rotting dead. |
| 421 | * HellIsThatNoise: If a certain shadowy task is failed, a priest gets a fishhook in his earlobe. From the narration: [[invoked]] |
| 422 | -->"There is no sound on this earth or below it like the sound of a priest with a fishhook in his earlobe." |
| 423 | * HellOfATime: Hell's colony in the Neath, the Iron Republic, isn't so much a place of eternal torment as it is a place of [[AlienGeometries total chaos]], which amounts to the same thing. It's still dangerous, of course, but people come and go freely all the time... [[MindRape usually with massive holes in their memory.]] |
| 424 | * HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler:While DreamingOfThingsToCome, you can blow up your ship (and yourself) in order to destroy the [[EldritchAbomination Lorn-Flukes]].]] |
| 425 | * HeroicWillpower: Instead of playing ChessWithDeath, you can do this to come BackFromTheDead. Most, though not all, of the Opportunity cards drawn in the land of the dead reference your desire to come back to life to enjoy the things you enjoyed in London, finish businesses you have left unfinished, and so on. |
| 426 | * HistoricalCharactersFictionalRelative: There are a couple. |
| 427 | ** The Captivating Princess is Queen Victoria's daughter, but since she was born after the Fall, she has no real-world counterpart. |
| 428 | ** There's also the Carpenter's Granddaughter, one of the major characters in the Bone Market, who seems to be based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning Mary Anning]] due to them both having worked at Lyme Regis, but since Anning died before the Fall would have taken place and was known as the "Carpenter's ''Daughter''", the paleontologist we meet in Fallen London is apparently Anning's own daughter, taking up her mother's work. |
| 429 | * HistoricalDomainCharacter: A number of them appear, though never by the name they're best known by. There appear UsefulNotes/SigmundFreud, Creator/CharlesDickens, Victoria and Albert, Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, Creator/OscarWilde (though it seems like he came to a tragic end), UsefulNotes/HelenaBlavatsky, Charles Babbage, and [[spoiler:one or more of the royal families of Pharaoh Akhenaten and Möngke Khan]]. The PlayerCharacter of The Silver Tree is based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Rubruck William of Rubruck.]] |
| 430 | * HistoricalVillainUpgrade: In this world, [[spoiler:Jack the Ripper is a sentient set of knives capable of possessing anyone who comes into contact with him.]] |
| 431 | * HitPoints: Your wounds quality - which increases primarily from failing high level Dangerous challenges, but can also be increased in other ways - acts as a reverse hit points gauge. When it reaches eight, you die. [[DeathIsCheap This is not notably more inconvenient than any of the other possible failure states]]... And is notably ''less'' annoying then the usual Nightmares failure state, which erases some of your progress in the reoccurring dreams storylines. Yes, going temporarily insane is literally a FateWorseThanDeath. |
| 432 | * HoldYourHippogriffs: |
| 433 | -->"You have to stop. You know what I mean. We're on to you, glimshine." |
| 434 | * HollywoodBoardGames: The Noughts & The Crosses are two urchin rival gangs who war each other as if their territories were a TabletopGame/TicTacToe board --- nine city blocks divided by four, intersecting streets. |
| 435 | * HomelessPigeonPerson: The Topsy King. He has a bat! Also [[CrazyHomelessPeople a little bit crazy]]. |
| 436 | * AHomeownerIsYou: You can buy houses at Penstock's Land Agency in the Bazaar or Penstock's Wicket in January; the more expensive ones allow you to hold more opportunity cards in your hand. |
| 437 | * HorrorHunger: One of the symptoms of Seeking the Name is a gradually worsening hunger. Seekers are capable of consuming truly monstrous amounts of food, their own pets, and one option they can take when ravenous enough strongly implies that [[spoiler:they killed and ate somebody]]. |
| 438 | * HubCity: The city of London itself, where you are going to spend more than half of your playing time. |
| 439 | * HumanoidAbomination: |
| 440 | ** [[spoiler:The Snuffers, horrific creatures that disguise themselves as men by wearing sewn-together human faces. The Unfinished Men may also count, given that they're ''born from nightmares''.]] |
| 441 | ** [[spoiler: Playing through "The Gift" story heavily implies that the Captivating Princess has become this. The rest of the royal family stretch the label of 'humanoid' [[BodyHorror much further]].]] |
| 442 | * HuntingTheMostDangerousGame: Hell's Embassy tricks people into hunting expeditions in the Forgotten Quarter... and thanks to legal mumbo-jumbo, the target is ''them''. And when the quarry is caught, [[TakeOurWordForIt whatever they do to them gives your character nightmares.]] |
| 443 | * HyperactiveMetabolism: A lot of the Opportunity cards and storylets that reduce your Wounds are based around eating. |
| 444 | [[/folder]] |
| 445 | |
| 446 | [[folder: I-P]] |
| 447 | * ICallItVera: Colonel Pommery has a BFG he calls "Gladys." |
| 448 | * IgnoreTheDisability: Don't mention the Second City to any of the Masters, or they will be rather unpleasant to you, with varying degrees of politeness. |
| 449 | * ImmortalityInducer: Hesperidean Cider, ostensibly, which is actually ''an ordinary commodity sold at the Bazaar''. It costs a fortune, though, several times more than an Overgoat. When used in the game, it [[spoiler:unlocks some extra content and heals all your wounds, and can be used an unlimited number of times, even when already dead (or, in other words, you'll never have to worry about your Wounds or deal with the Boatman again, except when you want to). It can also shared with any number of other players without losing it, making it a social CoolToy.]] |
| 450 | * ImpossiblyDeliciousFood: Subverted with the Sausage About Which No One Complains. It ''is'' apparently tasty enough to be used as an initial bribe, but the main reason no one ''really'' complains about it is because Mutersalt, a compound that paralyzes the vocal chords for some time when ingested, is the starring condiment. Otherwise it's just a sausage made of mashed rats. |
| 451 | * ImprovisedWeapon: Presumably to avoid using actual weapons you might not have, your character seems to have a tendency towards these in the Dangerous challenges. Thrown bricks, potted plants, coal buckets, a ten-pound cross ("God will understand")... |
| 452 | * INeedAFreakingDrink: There are a handful of alcohol-related ways for players to reduce their Nightmares. Laudanum trades nightmares for wounds (and an annoying addiction quality for [=PoSI=]). Spiced wine at the Carnival can either reduce nightmares if you're lucky, reduce nightmares ''and'' wounds if you're very lucky, or raise scandal if you're unlucky. Greyfields 1868 First Sporing reduces nightmares with no drawbacks, but requires a luck roll on an opportunity card to obtain, often making it TooAwesomeToUse. The Dark-Dewed Cherry Liqueur significantly reduces nightmares, but requires a somewhat uncommon Bottle of Broken Giant 1844 and a kitchen at Station VIII. |
| 453 | * InfinityMinusOneSword: |
| 454 | ** In general, the most expensive Bazaar items are usually not the best ones in each slot, but getting them is straightforward and anything that outclasses them is either event- or Fate-locked, or requires a lot of time to grind for 40 Renown. In particular, the Scuttering Squad can also be obtained by trading in the Rat of Glory you can get every year for Sacksmas. Their only downsides are that you might get a rare conflict card if you also have a Midnight Matriarch, and [[AdamSmithHatesYourGuts they don't "sell" for nearly as much as you paid for them]] (because of a stiff cancellation clause in their contract). The exception to this is the Overgoat, whose Watchful bonus is second only to its upgraded version (the Übergoat), but which is exorbitantly expensive enough to count as an InfinityPlusOneSword. |
| 455 | ** The Iron Republic Journal is a weapon that gives a total of 2 BDR, and is obtainable by buying an Iron Republic Safe-Conduct (which costs 3 Marks of Credit Page and only requires some time accumulating Counting the Days), then zailing there with your ship and completing the carousel once. Meanwhile, the weapons that outclass it are the Golden Spiked Rosary (+3 Dreaded, costs 40 Fate, only available during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose), the Severed Chimaerical Head of the Vake (+3 Dreaded, requires completion of Ambition: Bag a Legend!), and the Seven-Fold Knock (+4 Dreaded, requires [[spoiler:completing the incredibly destructive Seeking Mr Eaten's Name story and turning back at the last chance]]). |
| 456 | ** In the Wreckers' Cove, if your Picking Through the Wreckers' Cove quality is high enough, you can get the Semi-Automated Mary Lloyd (+4 Dangerous, +3 Dreaded transport) or an Anonymous White Mask, Zee-Stained and Mildewy (+6 Shadowy, +2 Dreaded hat). This will likely need some luck and require you to spend a few Cartography items to raise your Strange Catch quality when going fishing, and is available only during the Fruits of the Zee Festival, but anything better than these items in these slots will require you to spend real money. |
| 457 | ** Choosing a tier 1 Profession costs 5 Favours for a particular faction; advancing to tier 2 requires 2 Notability (Journalists can also spend 5 Favours: Bohemians and an Exceptional Short Story if they want to advance before becoming a [=PoSI=]); advancing to tier 3 requires 5 Notability and passing a 300 stat challenge). None of this is particularly costly or time-consuming; in exchange, the tier 1 and 2 Profession items are often very good by the time you can obtain them (if not best-in-slot), while the tier 3 ones have their own slot without interfering with other items, and are the only items in the game that provide bonuses to advanced stats that are not Fate-locked, event-bound or Ambition rewards. That being said, you can only have one Profession (and one Profession item by extension) at a time. |
| 458 | * InfinityPlusOneSword: In general, the best pieces of equipment in the game (excluding the [[InfinityMinusOneSword tier 3 Profession items]], among which you can only have one) are the 40 Renown items (which require you to spend lots and lots of time and items grinding for Favours and Renown), certain Fate-locked items (which cost real money) and the rewards of finishing an Ambition (itself a very long storyline, at the end of which you can only receive two rewards among many). Specific and other examples include: |
| 459 | ** The Infinity+1 Companions are the Overgoat and the Bifurcated Owl: the former bestows, among others, a massive boost of 20 to Watchful and costs 11712.8 Echoes in the Bazaar, the latter provides 4 BDR (the highest of any companions) and is the culmination of the Theological Husbandry story, which requires 45 Fate (20 for the Empyrean Redolence Formula and 25 for Flute Street) to complete. There is also an Infinity Plus ''Two'' Companion in the form of the Übergoat, which provides a bonus of 30 Watchful and 4 BDR. It's obtained by [[spoiler:breeding two Overgoats together]]. Subverted with the [[spoiler:Heptagoat, which requires breeding [[ArcNumber seven]] Übergoats together plus an Impossible Theorem. It is more of a CosmeticAward than an Infinity+7 Companion, as it lacks the Watchful/Bizarre/Dreaded bonuses of the Overgoat and Übergoat.]] |
| 460 | ** Five actual weapons come the closest to being an Infinity+1 Sword (in term of main stats). The Waxwail Knife (+20 Dangerous) outstrips the Fate-locked weapons, and can only be obtained through the game of [[PlayerVersusPlayer Knife-and-Candle]], which was removed from the game. The four others are the two Mayoral weapons: Feducci's Lance (Replica) (+20 Dangerous) and Private Debating Lessons with the Jovial Contrarian (+20 Persuasive), which can only be obtained for free during the Hallowmas when that mayor was incumbent, or bought for 40 Fate in subsequent ones; and two 40 Renown items: the Infernal Vinification Apparatus (+10 Watchful) and What Might Be A Thunderbolt (+10 Shadowy, with the additional caveat of having to be redeemed at the very hard to reach Mind of the Long-Dead God). |
| 461 | ** If you complete the ENTIRETY of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, and turn back at the very last chance offered at the Avid Horizon, you will receive the Seven-Fold Knock (+4 Dreaded), the best BDR weapon in the game. However, SMEN is an incredibly self-destructive and unrewarding storyline and attempting it solely with the idea of optimisation with brings you no end of misery. For non-Seekers, there are the Golden Spiked Rosary and the Severed Chimaerical Head of the Vake (both +3 Dreaded); the former is only available as a 40-Fate gift from other players during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, the latter is a reward for completing Ambition: Bag a Legend!. |
| 462 | ** Most high-end pairs of boots are either purchasable or only require 25 Renown, except The Place Where they Bury the Bodies (+10 Shadowy, the 40 Renown: Constables item) and the Infiltrator's Footsteps (+8 Shadowy and Dangerous, +1 Player of Chess, a reward for conducting intrigues in Khan's Heart, an endgame location). |
| 463 | ** Downplayed with the four Ministers of the Court of the Wakeful Eye, who are companions that grant a bonus of 10 to a given highway stats (making them the best-in-slot item for all highway stats except Watchful). Reaching the Court of the Wakeful Eye requires you to follow the Dilmun Club and Labyrinth of Tigers storylines, which do not require a lot of grinding, and the first Minister you can recruit is essentially free, so there's not much effort required if you only need one of them (the Minister of War is the sole Minister who is not tied with anyone else as the best Dangerous companion except the Fate-locked Laconic Prodigy). Recruiting more of them (specifically the Minister of Culture or the Minister of Enigmas as an alternative to grinding 40 Renown for the Tomb-Colonies or Criminals), on the other hand, is very expensive and requires a large number of actions to rack up 240 Tribute for the Court per Minister. |
| 464 | ** All of the free Destinies available only increase a given stat by 5. Both The Road (+5 Dangerous, +3 Watchful) and Backstage (+5 Shadowy, +3 Persuasive) cost 10 Fate. |
| 465 | ** The best transport items are the Ratwork Velocipede (acquired at the beginning of the Spinning of the Wheels premium story, which costs 25 Fate), the Weasel-Infested Velocipede and Thoroughly Cowed Pony (event-locked, costs 30 Fate), the Most Humbling Expression of Her Majesty's Esteem (+8 Persuasive, the 40 Renown: Society item) and Your Very Own Miniature Hellworm, Saddled and Bridled (which costs 400000 Hinterland Scrip). |
| 466 | ** The best home comfort items in terms of highway stats are the Oneiric Key, Gleaming Buttons and Beatific Stone, all of which give 8 points to a highway stat and require 40 Renown for (respectively) the Bohemians, Revolutionaries and Church. |
| 467 | ** The best ship is the Majestic Pleasure Yacht, which requires grinding a bunch of extremely costly items, then put them on a gamble where you have a 30% chance to win. Either that or shelling out 20 Fate. The second-best ship, the Zubmarine, is almost as bad: no gambling is involved, but the upfront cost is ''much'' higher (7 Bejewelled Lenses, 20 Whirring Contraptions and 20 Strong-Backed Labour). |
| 468 | ** The Laconic Prodigy, for what appears to be just 20 Fate, is a companion with +10 in EVERY stat but Persuasive. However, there are some caveats. One, you need to have an Orphanage rather than a Salon in your Handsome Townhouse. Two, you need to progress the Orphanage to level ''fifteen'', which has been theorized to take well over a thousand echoes and dozens of actions. Third, you then need to get lucky on the [[RandomNumberGod Airs of London]] to even have the option to recruit her. But if you get her, she is only outclassed by the Overgoat and Übergoat (for Watchful) and two Ambition rewards (for Shadowy), on top of having a rather remarkable backstory (and very nice hat). |
| 469 | ** The Scuttering Squad (an InfinityMinusOneSword by themselves) could become this in the 2018 Hallowmass festival by upgrading to the either the Scuttering Scoundrels (same stats as the Laconic Prodigy above) or the Scuttering Palace Guard (same bonuses but trading Shadowy for Persuasive). Except unlike the Prodigy, they aren't (or at least weren't at the time) Fate-locked. |
| 470 | ** The Courteous Assistant, Ebullient Undertaker and July, each of whom requires you to save up 12 Memories of Tales from Exceptional Stories, increase Mithridacy, Monstrous Anatomy and Kataleptic Toxicology by 2 (most items that do provide bonuses to advanced stats only increase them by 1), only matched by the Portable Fingerking Moot (+2 Mithridacy, a Hallowmass 2020 companion). |
| 471 | * InterfaceScrew: The "Fallen London" banner is reversed while you're in the Mirror-Marches or the Misermere. |
| 472 | * InterfaceSpoiler: |
| 473 | ** Played straight with certain opportunity cards. They'll have several options, and a number of them will be locked and will visibly tie in with plots much further down the road than you can currently access. |
| 474 | ** Carefully avoided with certain choices, for example [[spoiler:beast breeding in the Labyrinth of Tigers]] and [[spoiler:acquiring Mr Eaten's Calling Card]]. All possible options are marked as luck challenges, but one is the "correct" choice to advance the plot, and it will have the same result whether you "succeed" or "fail" at the luck roll. |
| 475 | * InterspeciesRomance: |
| 476 | ** [[spoiler:The Comtessa]] is apparently in love with a Clay Man. [[spoiler:Or, alternatively, the Clay Man was in love with her, and she was just off seeking excitement. It [[AndIMustScream didn't end well.]]]] |
| 477 | ** The opportunity card "A deviless' Serenade" has you help her write a song to her beloved, a Rubbery Man. |
| 478 | ** Another opportunity card involves a tomb-colonist gentleman commissioning love poetry with which to woo a human young lady. Mind you, tomb-colonists are technically human under the bandages, but it's still basically treated as this trope. |
| 479 | ** You, the player, can optionally take a Rubbery Man or a Snuffer as your Constant Companion. |
| 480 | * InventedIndividual: At the end-game, in Balmoral, you can make up cover identities, giving it various traits, nuances, witnesses and depth. With some more investment, you can even start placing such an identity in events both past and present, giving it even more value for either inserting yourself into various places you'd be otherwise unwelcome in, or selling it off to factions that could make use of it. |
| 481 | * IstanbulNotConstantinople: A lot of places in London had their names changed after the city fell. Ladybones Road used to be Marylebone, Spite was Spitalfields, the Stolen River is the Thames, Fleet Street became Doubt Street, Wolfstack Docks are the old West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs, the Labyrinth of Tigers was the London Zoo, the University of London becomes simply the University, with Benthic and Summerset being, respectively, University College London and King's College, and so on. |
| 482 | * ItemCrafting: |
| 483 | ** It is possible to convert a number of low-level items into a smaller number of higher-level items in the same category (known as up-converting). Usually it is only possible with low-to-mid level items (Primordial Shrieks can be converted to Maniac's Prayers, then Maniac's Prayers to Correspondence Plaques, then to Aeolian Screams, but only up to Storm-Threnodies, which cannot be up-converted to Night-Whispers), except with Wines and Mysteries, but only in special cases (the Portly Sommelier for the former, and the Truthbreaker Turbine in the University for the latter). |
| 484 | ** The Bazaar Side-streets is full of storylets, themed as shops, which allow you to exchange a number of lesser items for a single more expensive item that is needed to construct even greater items (mostly transports, home comforts, affiliations, clubs and ships) that simply cannot be obtained at the Bazaar. |
| 485 | * JarOfTheBizarre: Souls are usually stored in glass jars and bottles, with the spirit visible inside the container as a cloud of colored fluid and a floating human face. |
| 486 | * JigsawPuzzlePlot: And oh boy are there lots of pieces. Stitching together the very setting itself is gonna take a ''while'', as snippets that make no sense without the whole are eagerly dropped early on while the keys to the big mysteries are withheld throughout it and revealed only in the heavier moments. Depending on what exclusive stories you pick you might not even get the full story by yourself! |
| 487 | * JungleJapes: Losing your mind results in you going to the Mirror-Marches, a beautiful (and hot) tropical island populated with perfect mirrors through the surface. Here, you can chase parrots, converse with tigers (oh my), and explore the ruins. |
| 488 | * KarmaHoudini: |
| 489 | ** In-universe, among the options for operas you can write as your Grand Finale before [[spoiler:getting banished from the court]], you can write a particularly heavy-handed love story with an absolutely ''horrendous'' one of these, that gets to ruin the protagonist's life twice over and gets off scot-free just for the shock value. The audience hates it so much ''[[DisproportionateRetribution they hunt you down with soldiers]]''. |
| 490 | ** The murderer of the Senior Reader in _____, the [[spoiler:Provost of Summerset College]], will, depending on your choice, end up either [[spoiler:getting off completely scot-free or losing his job but not having to spend a day in New Newgate Prison]]. |
| 491 | * KarmaMeter: Several opposing player qualities tend to work this way, including Austere/Hedonist, Magnanimous/Ruthless, and Heartless/Steadfast. However, the qualities are not mutually-exclusive, which means there's nothing stopping you from, for example, being Magnanimous in some situations and Ruthless in others, though you may still find storylets in which the two qualities conflict. Entering the House of Chimes requires the player to claim some "exceptional" quality; one option involves having high Austere ''and'' Hedonist. |
| 492 | * KingOfTheHomeless: The Topsy King, who rules over the Raggedy Men, a great gaggle of homeless criminals and general loons that live in the roofs of London. They even made him a throne and court somewhere above. |
| 493 | * KleptomaniacHero: Even beyond shadowy business, your common reward for completing a task is whatever can be pocketed in the aftermath. |
| 494 | * KnowledgeBroker: Trading in the "Mysteries," "Influence," and "Rumour" item branches pretty much makes you one, and there are numerous others doing the same. Secrets in Fallen London are a commodity just like echoes, jade, and glim. |
| 495 | * LackOfEmpathy: The Heartless Quirk measures this; to be precise, it measures this when the gain is negligible in comparison to what you gain. You're not even being TheUnfettered when you raise Heartless; that's what Ruthless measures. You just ''don't care'' outright. |
| 496 | * LampshadeHanging: The [[YouALLLookFamiliar repeated use of certain art]] for different characters is occasionally lampshaded: |
| 497 | ** If you ask Mr Wines to employ your maiden aunt, it will remark that 'She could almost be a sister to the delicious Mrs Gebrandt.' For years, F.F. Gebrandt and your maiden aunt had the same character art. |
| 498 | ** The Inhabiter of Wolves shares character art with the Eater of Chains... |
| 499 | --->It's that beast from your dreams! No, no it isn't. It looks d--ned similar though. |
| 500 | ** If you choose to pay Glim to have your wounds treated by an Itinerant Physician, she says "Thank you for the glim. My sister has a great need for the stuff". She shares her portrait with the Keen-Eyed Lapidary, who occasionally shows up asking the player for large quantities of Glim. |
| 501 | * LaResistance: The revolutionaries, an underground faction in the underground city, plotting against the Masters of the Bazaar. |
| 502 | * LaserGuidedAmnesia: |
| 503 | ** Bottled Oblivion. It reduces your stats, meaning you'll have to grind them back up again. A large proportion of the time, that would be an extremely bad thing. Bottled Oblivion is for the rare times when it's not. |
| 504 | ** The Lethean Tea-Leaves, purchasable for 50 Fate, allow you to forget your current Ambition and choose another. |
| 505 | ** If your Turncoat menace reaches 4 (which locks you out of the normal Affair of the Box actions), you can spend 3 Favours: Revolutionaries, a point of Connected: the Masters or 5 Fate to cause everyone to forget about your ChronicBackstabbingDisorder, reducing your Turncoat points to zero. |
| 506 | * LatexPerfection: Snuffers somehow manage this with ''actual human skin'' torn from actual faces. Pretty good trick for something that [[NightmareFace looks like a cross between a shotgun blast victim and a demonic cicada]] without it. |
| 507 | * LeaningOnTheFourthWall: You can't lose your character for good, unless you seek the Name; ''VideoGame/SunlessSea'', in the same setting, will happily dole out PermaDeath; ''Fallen London'' has greatly expanded into zeefaring. Consequently if you die out at zee in ''Fallen London'', you're brought to the Fathomking's court, where he makes a perfunctory effort to couch it in in-universe terms that by rights you should be dead for good, but you're operating under different game mechanics. |
| 508 | * LemonyNarrator: Some of the flavor text for items and Quirks have elements of this. In particular, the flavor text for the [[spoiler:Seeking Mr Eaten's Name]] quest: |
| 509 | -->"Why? In God's name, why? What can you possibly hope to gain? Stop now. Before it's too late." |
| 510 | * LevelUpAtIntimacy5: Getting a Spouse increases your attributes and some of them have cards that have a chance of earning you valuable items. You can also date and marry other players; dates give you items and a lavish enough wedding increases your Notability and allows you to invite guests who give you gifts and advice. |
| 511 | * LevelUpFillUp: Completing a Making Your Name story causes you to lose all points from a single menace. |
| 512 | * LivingClothes: Everything that comes from Polythreme, including clothing, is alive. The Avid Gloves, Eager Gloves, Voracious Gloves, Extraordinary Hat and Judgemental Hat have eyes and can bite; the Sporing Bonnet whispers strange things; the Blemmigan Hat is a walking mushroom worn as a hat; and the Moderately Cooperative Clothes-Colony is living and wearing you, instead of the opposite. |
| 513 | -->'''We shall complete you! You shall delight in wearing us!' But who is wearing whom?'' |
| 514 | * LivingCurrency: The official currency is the Echo, but there are a wide variety of items used for barter that can also be bought and sold at the Echo Bazaar, including many varieties of soul. The Boatman will also accept Lucky Weasels and Sulky Bats in exchange for bringing the player back to the world of the living. And while you're in Polythreme, a land where everything is alive, all currency counts as "living". |
| 515 | * LocomotiveLevel: The Twelve-Fifteen from Moloch Street train can be visited during the eponymous Exceptional Story. |
| 516 | * LoopholeAbuse: There's a story that involves your foe ordering you to go alone to a location in the Flit to confront him. You do go alone as asked because your allies have all arrived there before you. |
| 517 | * LosingYourHead: |
| 518 | ** You can stumble across a counterfeit head of St. John The Baptist. (Don't think too hard about where it came from. [[spoiler:Actually, they grow on a [[ManEatingPlant certain plant]].]]) Yes, you can make horrible headless jokes with it. And yes, you can do the Theatre/{{Salome}} thing, too. Neither of these go down all that well with the public, though. |
| 519 | ** You can also do this to [[spoiler:yourself]] as part of the [[spoiler:Seeking Mr Eaten's Name]] storyline. |
| 520 | * LostPropertyLiveDrop: On the Upper River, one of the activities tied to the Great Game is supplying Halcyonic Tonic to a Surface power. You pour its contents in an agreed-upon location in the cobbles, and later, you're rewarded by a bureaucrat who pointedly asks you if you dropped your wallet, which contains your payment. You've never seen the wallet before, but you say yes. |
| 521 | * LoveHurts: A major recurring theme is how falling in love -- or even worse, seeking the Bazaar's help on saving a loved one -- rarely ever ends well. |
| 522 | * LovecraftLite: The game's genre has been described by its creators as [[{{Pun}} Comic]] [[CosmicHorrorStory Horror]]. The mixture of horrific creatures, incomprehensible knowledge and a setting that handles it all fairly mundanely, in stride and with unique quirks that make sure these horrific threats are just a part of life that don't really ''keep'' you down goes for these airs. Mysterious languages that set your eyes on fire are just a thing fancy academics study, mirrors being gateways to another realm just means you should handle them with care, and the great monstrosities that threaten Londoners have bounties on them that need actual haggling sometimes. |
| 523 | * LowLevelAdvantage: |
| 524 | ** At higher levels (26 Watchful, 33 other stats), failing at most cards will raise a Menace. |
| 525 | ** The Tomb-Colonies contain a storylet that only helps you reduce Scandal if you "fail" a fairly easy Persuasive challenge. |
| 526 | ** The three menace-reducing tinctures lose part of their effectiveness after you become a Person of Some Importance. |
| 527 | ** Greeting the Merry Gentleman, an option on the Merry Gentleman's card, is a Watchful check that gets dramatically harder as your unmodified Watchful increases. Depending on whether you succeed or fail, your Nightmares will increase a little more slowly or faster until Time, the Healer returns. |
| 528 | * LuckBasedMission: Virtually every challenge has odds and an andjective attached (e.g. 75% is "very modest"), though you can alter the odds by adjusting your qualities. There are, however, certain challenges that are ''purely'' luck-based, with no way to modify one's luck stat. |
| 529 | * LuckManipulationMechanic: Second chance items. They only exist for challenges that use the main four qualities, though. |
| 530 | * LuckySeven: Inverted. Seven is the ArcNumber of the very ''un''lucky [[spoiler:Seeking Mr Eaten's Name]] quest. |
| 531 | * LukeNounverber: In the Gallery of Serpents, there are statues of Fingerkings named Reconciler of Friends, Procurer of Lost Dignities and Favour, and Revealer of Fortune. |
| 532 | * MacGuffin: The Affair of the Box concerns a heavy iron box with seven locks. For the majority of the storyline, you have no idea what's in it, only that everyone wants it. As it turns out, [[spoiler:the box was meant for everyone to chase, not open. Making this a perfect example of the trope.]] |
| 533 | * MadameFortune: London's most famous fortune teller is named Madame Shoshana. |
| 534 | * MadnessInducedOmnivore: Seekers of the Name of [[MeaningfulName Mr. Eaten]] develop an obsession with forbidden secrets that takes the form of a literal hunger for knowledge, represented by the quality "[[ArcWords Unaccountably Peckish]]". It often manifests as a hunger for ''other things'' while they struggle to figure out a new secret to sate it--rats, and ink, and candles, and raw meat. One story event has you dine on the article documenting you as a notable member of London high society... [[MagicalRealism whereupon everyone forgets who you were]]. |
| 535 | -->Soon the teeth in your jaw will reside cosily in your gut. Oh God. It will almost be as if you have two mouths. You will be able to consume--consume-- |
| 536 | * MadnessMantra: Several. Most notable are "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well," which is related to [[spoiler: the Mr Eaten storyline and how the Bazaar first came to the Neath]], and "THESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUN". |
| 537 | * MagikarpPower: |
| 538 | ** You might find a strange plant growing in your house. If you keep feeding it, it will eventually grow [[spoiler:talking heads]], and once it grows massive you can either make a constant profit off its fruits or sell the giant shrub to royalty for sheer gems. Not bad for the little guy. |
| 539 | ** Also, if you bring it to maximum growth, it'll stop bearing fruit but will put itself on death patrol, saving you once from some nasty, energy-consuming situations. Feed it five more times to get your extra life back. |
| 540 | ** The Starving Artist shows up extremely early in your Persuasive pursuits, but continues to pester you forever afterwards... until you can become a Person of Some Importance and can get a laboratory of your own. There, you can remove him from your opportunity deck by hiring him, and he gives you the option to send him out to fetch Prisoner's Honey for the lab; this is both the best Honey grind in the game and an endgame-tier money grind over a hundred stat points earlier than the actual endgame. |
| 541 | * MakeUpIsEvil: The Quiet Deviless invites you into her chambers to confidentially show you her cosmetics. And a Deviless would certainly ''need'' all that makeup to hide as much of her demonic nature as she could. |
| 542 | * ManiacMonkeys: A Cardsharp Monkey is one of the companions gained from Ambition: Heart's Desire. [[spoiler:However, if you have cause to incite his vengeance, he will not hesitate to cost you an awful lot of either time or money. Protip: Do not anger the monkey.]] |
| 543 | %% insufficient context * MarkOfTheBeast: There is actually an entire storyline revolving around having one of these. |
| 544 | * MasochistsMeal: While making dinner for another player, you can choose to serve them a Counterfeit Head of John the Baptist. That player can then choose to eat it and gain a heaping of Nightmares and Unaccountably Peckish, kiss it and gain a massive amount of Scandal, or [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere run away screaming]]. |
| 545 | * MeaningfulName: |
| 546 | ** The Masters of the Bazaar go by names related to their primary trade good - Mr Pages trades in books, Mr Iron trades in weaponry, and so on. |
| 547 | ** The Clay Men Jasper and Lyme are named after minerals. |
| 548 | * MightAsWellNotBeInPrisonAtAll: The One Who Pulls the Strings, a companion that can be obtained from New Newgate Prison with 40 Renown: Criminals: |
| 549 | -->''They reside in the deepest cell in New Newgate. It does not disadvantage them.'' |
| 550 | * MindRape: The mysterious red honey, properly named Gaoler's Honey, [[spoiler:works much the same as Prisoner's Honey - except that it transports the taster to the dreams of ''other people'' and allows them to rummage through their victims' minds. This is not in the least pleasant for the victims.]] |
| 551 | * MissionControlIsOffItsMeds: During the world event about delivering unexploded ordnance, you could find your own way or stake success or failure on a single roll by working with your destination's signal lamp operator. Fail, and your character had time before the explosion to wonder why the man would send "STRAIGHT AHEAD", "HAZARD", "AVOID" in that order. |
| 552 | * MistakenForMurderer: Handing over too many rat corpses during a Rattus Faber funeral will get you accused of being a rat-catcher, even if you had nothing to do with those rats ending up dead. |
| 553 | * MoneyGrinding: You'll often need to do this if you want to buy equipment, since most of it is ludicrously expensive. |
| 554 | * MoneySink: The Firkin of Hesperidean Cider, which costs 180000 Echoes, and Your Very Own Hellworm, which costs 200000 Hinterland Scrip and comes with a saddle that costs a further 200000 Hinterland Scrip, which also comes with a pair of boots that costs yet another 200000 Hinterland Scrip (and come with an offer for Boot Polish, which costs ''yet another'' 200000 and the game outright tells you it's useless), serve as big-ticket items for very advanced players to work towards (for the record, the most expensive item excluding these two is the Overgoat, which costs 11712.8 Echoes, and can be upgraded to the Übergoat if you have two). |
| 555 | * MoralityKitchenSink: There are very few 'pure' people in Fallen London. The Devils are amoral and manipulative; the Criminals are a mix of the downtrodden, the ruthless and the simply shady; the Constables are dedicated to upholding the law but turn a blind eye to the Bazaar's more underhanded actions due to being in the Masters' pockets; the Church is ultra-conservative and constantly tries to stifle the creativity of the Bohemians, who themselves often partake in political chaos and unrest in their pursuit of art. The Revolutionaries are a mixed bag: some are anti-monarchy, others want London out of the Masters' hands, and some define freedom as anarchy, but many (especially among the last of these) are willing to resort to murder and terrorism to achieve their ends. |
| 556 | * MuggedForDisguise: In the Light Fingers Ambition, you need to [[spoiler:sneak into an asylum]], so you get a uniform from a guard, either by bribing or mugging him. The success text will mention the clothing not fitting you, but it'll have to do. |
| 557 | * MultipleEndings: |
| 558 | ** Though they don't strictly end the game, the Ambitions are the closest thing the game has to a main quest. Nemesis has two endings. Bag a Legend has four. Light Fingers has two. Heart's Desire has five. |
| 559 | ** Seeking Mr Eaten's Name has three endings depending on whether you Grieve, Hate, or complete an optional branch that lets you ask about Salt instead. |
| 560 | * MundaneMadeAwesome: |
| 561 | ** Resisting the allure of the nibbles tray at a fancy party is apparently such an amazing display of willpower that one partygoer ''applauds you''. |
| 562 | ** At the core of it, the Marvellous is just a game of cards. Except certain matches take this trope and go wild with it. [[spoiler:Your game against the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel takes place in his Garden of Nightmares, where he sics his own Nightmares onto you to throw you off your game. You in turn toss your own Battalion of Obedient Dreams right back at him. All this, to wear down your opponent psychologically just so you can beat them at cards. The final game against [[FinalBoss the Monkey]] takes this and turn it up to eleven. The match lasts possibly weeks or months, with the Masters and the Bazaar itself watching on, rapt. Throughout the match, you can accept visions from the Bazaar, acting as borderline supernatural powerups.]] |
| 563 | * MundaneUtility: |
| 564 | ** Once you've obtained a laboratory, you can advance the fields of [[ForScience Science]] in several directions, cataloguing the scope and bredth of biology, statistical probabilities, chemical compositions and reactions, even some things that [[MadScientist patently break physics]]... Or you can just hire on your artist acquaintence to supply you with a steady stream of prisoner's honey. |
| 565 | ** Nevercold Brass, the preferred payment method (and primary export) of Hell. The clue's right there in the name; [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin it's a metal that always retains heat]], making it tempting to use for hot water fixtures and such. |
| 566 | ** The various sigils of the Correspondence can affect the things they interact with in strange and mysterious ways, but the most common way is by setting them on fire. This is why the safest way to store such sigils is on huge plaques of lead; regular paper just burns. However it also means that whenever a steady source of heat and light is required, a few Correspondence sigils in the right place are the way to go. [[spoiler:The Discordance has the opposite effect, freezing anything it touches, and it can be used to freeze a champagne into a delicious sorbet.]] |
| 567 | *** Sometimes, the Laws of the Correspondence themselves can be useful like that, such as the instance where you can use it to hasten an infusion process from several months to a couple minutes, making a cherry liqueur from the result. |
| 568 | ** And expanding on that, once your railway makes it out to The Hurlers, the place is frightfully cold and dark, so your character decides the best way to keep the station's furnace lit is by just dumping Correspondence plaques straight into the furnace, one on top of the other. [[spoiler:Load too many however, and the ''other'' properties of the Correspondence assert themselves; the furnace takes on a life of its own and breaks out of the station, necessitating its capture to keep the station from freezing over.]] |
| 569 | * MutuallyExclusivePowerups: |
| 570 | ** You can only have one destiny, one ship, one spouse and be part of one club at any given time; if you want to buy a new ship, marry a different spouse or join a different club, you need to get rid of your existing ship, divorce your spouse or leave your club first, and if you acquire a new destiny you automatically lose the old one. |
| 571 | ** You must choose between owning a Salon or an Orphanage; you cannot have both. |
| 572 | ** Some of the Making Your Name stories (which can only be done once and never reset, not even with Fate) award a different item depending on a choice at the end of the story, though all of these items have the same attributes. |
| 573 | ** Each Profession gives you a unique item that is lost when you leave or are promoted from that profession. Since you can only have one profession at a time, these items also count. |
| 574 | ** When you drink Lethean Tea-Leaves to abandon your current Ambition so you could start another, any items you got from that Ambition (like the Vake-Killing Club for Bag a Legend!, Cardsharp Monkey for Heart's Desire! or Myriad Keys for Nemesis) will also be lost. In addition, depending on your final decisions, you can only obtain one among a few rewards when completing each Ambition: |
| 575 | *** For Ambition: Nemesis, you can only get either [[spoiler: The Bloodied Travelling-Coat of Mr Cups, or your resurrected loved one as a companion]]; and either [[spoiler:the Dream-Shadow of a Curator's Vestige or the Dream-Shard of the Mirror of Knives]]. |
| 576 | *** For Ambition: Bag a Legend!, if you [[spoiler:decide to spare one aspect of the Vake]], you'll get one (and only one) among [[spoiler: A Winged and Taloned Steed (Formerly Mr Veils), the Society of the Three-Fingered Hand, or the Long-Dead Priests of the Red Bird. If you kill them all, you instead get A Vast Network of Connections Wherever the Bazaar's Influence Can Be Found.]] |
| 577 | *** For Ambition: Light Fingers, there are two pairs of mutually exclusive equipment. Firstly, whether you choose to seek out the assistance of [[spoiler: the Fingerkings or the cats of London, you can be rewarded with either the Tatterskin Shawl or the Lyon Pursuivant of Arms Extraordinary]]. Additionally, [[spoiler: whether you choose to send the baby to the roof or to Mr Fires will determine whether you are rewarded with a False-Star of your Own or a Kitten-Sized Diamond, Liberated from the Mountain]]. |
| 578 | *** For Ambition: Heart's Desire, we have: |
| 579 | *** You can accept [[spoiler:the Manager's]] chance or demand a different one, for either a [[spoiler:Bright Brass Button or the Topsy King's sanity, which will later earn you a Thief-Oath of Tristram Bagley.]] |
| 580 | *** [[spoiler:If you lose to the monkey, you gain the [[EarnYourHappyEnding Marvellous Monkey]] and the [[CardsOfPower Marvellous]]. These are exclusive to all prizes below.]] |
| 581 | *** [[spoiler:If you defeat the Monkey at card and accept his chance, you gain the [[DeathOfPersonality Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil]]. If you do not accept his chance, you gain the [[TheGamblingAddict Condemned Cardsharp Monkey]]. Afterward, you gain one of four items depending on your wish: [[FromNobodyToNightmare the Robe of Mr Cards]], [[RagsToRoyalty Newly-Cast Crown of the City of London]], a Leasehold on All of London and a Palatial Holiday Home in the Arctic Circle.]] |
| 582 | ** If you want the Secular Missionary or the Revolutionary Firebrand as a companion or spouse, you must side with that person the first time you leave the Cave of the Nadir, meaning that obtaining one permanently locks out the other. There is a storylet that lets you reconcile with one of them if you [[TakeAThirdOption rejected them both]] after the Nadir, but once again you can only choose one of them. |
| 583 | * MySpeciesDothProtestTooMuch: Devils are often defined by a love of mischief, apathy for their targets' pranks, and an obsession with collecting souls. There is at least one devil, in an early quest, who seems to be genuinely benign and has feelings for a human woman, and is said by another devil to have "gone native." There's also a piano-playing deviless you can meet who seems to have no interest in souls. |
| 584 | * NamelessNarrative: Not quite absolute, other than the Black Ribbon duelists, the Masters, the characters with Twitter feeds, and the Mahogany Hall magicians, names rarely, if ever, pop up. |
| 585 | * NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: The various abominations' names tend more towards the weird than the scary. Eater-of-Chains. The Cantigaster. The King with a Hundred Hearts. Mr Eaten. |
| 586 | * TheNecrocracy: At the culmination of the Season of Skies, you get to glimpse at the Blue Kingdom in the High Wilderness, which is populated by the dead. |
| 587 | * NewGamePlus: Enough progression in certain dream stories (What the Thunder Said, The Burial of the Dead, The Fire Sermon) allows you to make a decision that grants a special quality (Stormy-Eyed, Haunted by Stairs, Seeing in Apocyan respectively) and reset dream progression. You can go through the storyline again from the beginning, and while you can progress the same way as before, the quality you gained allows you to interact with your dreams in different ways and glean new information. |
| 588 | * NewWeird: does not fit neatly into other SF genres and is unapologetically weird |
| 589 | * NoGoodDeedGoesUnpunished: Trying to take the "good" options in stories will sometimes lead to the game punishing you, either immediately or later on. |
| 590 | * NoImmortalInertia: Because [[spoiler:it's the light of the Sun that enforces such laws as "people die when they are killed"]], anyone who has died in the Neath can never return to the surface. |
| 591 | * NoIndoorVoice: During the Fruits of the Zee Festival, you can befriend a Submerged Rector. His bell-ringing duty has made him hard of hearing, so much of his speech is SHOUTED. |
| 592 | -->"DO YOU KNOW PEOPLE HAVE SAID I COULD WAKE THE DEAD? Never understood why." |
| 593 | * NoItemUseForYou: If you're on a heist or Flash Lay, in a party, Flute Street, or in any location not marked on the map of London (except the Temple Club, the Breakwater House, your study or the Upper River), you cannot use any items. |
| 594 | * NoodleImplements: During the Shadowy version of the Mysterious Benefactor story, you have to follow a spy. Apparently, at one point, "She nearly throws you off with a trick involving two hansoms, a Constable and a hurled umbrella." If you can figure out this trick, you've probably been playing too long. |
| 595 | * NoodleIncident: |
| 596 | ** Paris. [[spoiler: [[ChekhovsGun Finally explained]] by the ''Lost In Reflections'' Exceptional Story.]] |
| 597 | ** References to incidents involving weasels are rather common. |
| 598 | ** Mr Stones was trading as Mr Marble quite recently. Until that trouble with the tomb-colonies. |
| 599 | ** Also, the University; |
| 600 | --->The University has a secret. Well, probably it has thousands. That business with the registrar and the cake, for instance. |
| 601 | ** Some reports about Neath snow. |
| 602 | --->The Neath's annual snowfall has been studied. The learned men of the Department of Chiropterochronometry have attempted to incorporate it into their theories of bat rotation. The microscope that was used still exists. It can be seen in the Museum of Mistakes to this very day. The brass is horribly corroded, but the lenses are essentially intact. |
| 603 | ** Should you invite your aunt down to the 'Neath and fail to sort out her salon opening, you have to stop sailors fighting and a bunch of drunks who'd been doing ''something''... |
| 604 | ** Speaking of your aunt, during the Grand Clearing-Out festival you could search your basement and find a sturdy pick that looks like it's been through several wars and, for whatever reason, has her name engraved it in. Your character has no idea where she got it or why she had it. |
| 605 | ** Something bad happened during the time of the First City. [[spoiler: Bad enough to nearly have caused the "liquidfication of the city". The only time anything even comes ''close'' to that involves the murder of a Master and the abuse of the Bazaar's unbreakable word to claim a reward bigger than everything it can pay with]]. Most of what we know is that the Efficient Commissioner ''still'' has nightmares over the whole affair. |
| 606 | ** The Viscountess of the Viric Jungle's mayoral tenure over London ended with one of these. It appears to have started as an attempt to gather more armaments for the Cats' war against the Fingerkings by [[spoiler:ransacking the dreams of the Stone Pigs, the Bazaar's symbiotic "propulsion"]], after she found the Fingerkings doing so successfully. The attempt was ''disastrous'', giving Londoners everywhere highly specific nightmares of being trapped under sand, causing a ridiculous mess in the Viric Jungle (her own supposed domain) by carving a giant chunk of sandy wasteland into it, and did ''something'' we're not told about that forced her to go into hiding, lest the Masters [[DeadlyEuphemism "extend their felicitations to her in person"]], and had the Bazaar authorities cancel mayoral elections for the foreseeable future "to prevent further Tragedy". It can also be inferred this screwed up her war efforts considerably. Later events explained some of the dreadfulness involved ([[spoiler:the aforementioned Stone Pigs almost woke up]] and came ''this'' close to trashing London's structural integrity), but several pieces of the whole affair remain a mystery. |
| 607 | * NotBloodSiblings: The Curate and his sister, apparently. It is possible to [[BrotherSisterIncest find fragments of a love letter signed by her in his desk]]. It's also possible to seduce them both, simultaneously, in a threesome (though the success probability is ''very'' low); if you succeed, the player character concludes that they are ''definitely'' adopted siblings. |
| 608 | * NotCompletelyUseless: |
| 609 | ** The Ridiculous Hat, Bottled Oblivion, Talkative Rattus Faber and Weasel of Woe all ''reduce'' your stats. Why would you want this? Because some storylets get locked off once your stats rise too high, and you may still find them useful at high levels. Your stats also grow faster from failing difficult challenges than succeeding at trivial ones, and your item bonuses contribute to this difficulty. If you're going to be grinding a storylet to raise your stats, you might as well lower your chances to below 11% to get the most benefit, though with that, you'll have to look for storylets that don't penalize on failure. There are also challenges that you might want to ''fail''. Lowering your stats can make this much easier. |
| 610 | ** The Possessed Goldfish reduces your Bizarre, Dreaded and Respectable by 4 each, and the Weasel of Social Discomfiture, Viric Lizard and Forty-Nine-Voiced Warbler reduce Respectable, Bizarre and Dreaded by 12, respectively. Their only use is to negate any BDR bonuses you might get from your tattoos, spouse, ship and club, so you can take certain options on some Upper River cards and access the buyers in the Bone Market which require one of these three stats to be zero. |
| 611 | * NotSoHarmlessVillain: Jack is known to occasionally [[LudicrousGibs hack a victim to chunks]], and even despite the Bazaar's curious relationship with death [[DeaderThanDead there's no coming back from that]]. |
| 612 | * NothingIsScarier: |
| 613 | ** The 99th day (the final in the cycle) of every visit to the Iron Republic is blanked out. |
| 614 | ** The text for finding Night-Whispers as an Expedition treasure is simply: "...no..." |
| 615 | * NotTheIntendedUse: The Flash Lay MiniGame in Veilgarden is meant as a simple long con simulator with a nice reward at the end. Alternately, with careful stat management, it can also be used to refill your opportunity deck at a cost of just two actions. This has since been patched out of the game. |
| 616 | * OminousOwl: The Bifurcated Owl. It opens down the middle. Horrible things happen to any creature unwise enough to look (or [[BiggerOnTheInside travel]]) inside. |
| 617 | * OneTimeDungeon: |
| 618 | ** When Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, the [[spoiler:nightmare version of Mrs Plenty's Carnival]] can only be visited at a specific point in the story, can't be left until you go insane or have obtained [[spoiler:St Beau's Candle]] from it, and can never be revisited once you've done this. Later, the [[spoiler:approach to the Mountain]] is the same thing for [[spoiler:St Gawain's Candle]], except that there's absolutely no way to leave it before obtaining the candle in question. |
| 619 | ** Once you leave them, it is impossible to revisit several Exceptional Story-related locations unless if you reset the story entirely: Caution, the Bleeding Forest, the Grey Vineyard and the Prison of Flint (in ''Flint''), the Lifeberg (in ''Where You and I Must Go''), the Wreck of the ''Pyres'' (in Our ''Lady of Pyres''), the Persona Engine (in ''The Persona Engine''), Henlys and the Gates of Hell (in ''The Twelve-Fifteen to Moloch Street'') and the Century Exhibition (in ''The Century Exhibition''). The Twelve-Fifteen to Moloch Street train itself is a Three-Time Dungeon, in that you board it three times during the eponymous story but can't revisit it without resetting the story either. The Silken Chapel, visited in an early Wolfstack Docks storylet is similar, minus the reset. |
| 620 | * OneHitKill: |
| 621 | ** Failing a duel with [[spoiler: Feducci]] or a Lethal Sparring Bout with another player will put you on the slow boat regardless of how many wounds you had beforehand. |
| 622 | ** Failing to [[spoiler: rob the Bazaar]], regardless of your previous Nightmares, will instantly raise your Nightmares to 8, enough to drive you insane, unless you have a Nightmare-reducing item(s) equipped to keep you sane. |
| 623 | ** Failing to [[spoiler:rob the Embassy]] will immediately put you in prison regardless of whether you have any Suspicion before or not. Although it does bypass the usual courtroom scene, so it doesn't increase your criminal record. |
| 624 | ** Gazing into Heart's Mirror or Dream's Mirror in the Carnival's [[HallOfMirrors House of Mirrors]] will result in instant death or insanity, respectively. The game ''does'' [[SchmuckBait warn you]] that gazing into them isn't a wise idea. |
| 625 | ** Gaining a Weeping Scar or the seventh Stain on your Soul as part of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name will instantly move you to the slow boat. |
| 626 | ** Failing to locate an Impossible Theorem will give you so many CP of Wounds to take you from zero to 11 Wounds instantly. [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill Death usually occurs at 8 Wounds.]] Be prepared for a very long trip with the Boatman. |
| 627 | ** Paying 30 Fate at Neathmas will earn you an Incarnadine Fur Robe, with which you can request a gift from a Master. If you happen to be Seeking the Name, you can request a gift from Mr Eaten. [[SchmuckBait The game warns you in no uncertain terms that this is a bad idea]], and indeed it results in your Wounds, Nightmares, and Suspicion all being set to 8, among several other penalties. You do at least get a unique item -- a [[PoisonMushroom completely detrimental one]], but still. |
| 628 | ** After your friend hires an assassin to kill you for slighting them, no matter which assassin is sent after you, there's a TooDumbToLive option among the set that immediately sets your Wounds to 8, sending you to the slow boat. |
| 629 | * OneNationUnderCopyright: While not a MegaCorp, the Masters of the Bazaar obviously think of themselves as merchants and traders, and are essentially the rulers of the city. |
| 630 | * OnlySixFaces: There's a limited number of player and NPC portraits and they get recycled for various characters. Occasionally this is lampshaded, like when Mr Wines points out the resemblance between F. F. Gebrandt and your aunt. |
| 631 | * OpiumDen: The Honey Dens of Veilgarden bear a certain resemblance. Prisoner's Honey doesn't ''quite'' wrack the body as badly as Opium does, but it's still pretty addictive, so you can often find Bohemians and lost souls just losing themselves to their dreams as they send themselves into them with Honey again, and again, and again... the only organized crime they support are those that [[spoiler:use Parabola to travel around and operate in others' dreams]], thankfully. |
| 632 | * OrderVersusChaos: Many conflicts in the Neath seem to be based around defiance and revolution against imposed systems. London's Revolutionaries are railing against the Masters. The devils have already revolted, banished and/or exterminated their once-rulers, and discard their laws for new ones (including laws of [[RealityWarper biology and physics]]) daily. There's an ongoing question of whether the imposition of law by an external power ought to be resisted on principle, whether it might be necessary to accept it, and what your motives are for taking either side. |
| 633 | * OrphanageOfFear: |
| 634 | ** The mysterious institution lies in Spite and is known only as The Orphanage. There, [[spoiler:agents of the Masters experiment on kidnapped orphans]]. |
| 635 | ** High-level characters can open their own orphanage in their Handsome Townhouse and act as TheFagin to its residents by taking all the crueler options. |
| 636 | * OrphanageOfLove: A nicer orphanage owner can dedicate their resources to supplying their charges with comfortable conditions and loving homes. |
| 637 | * OurDragonsAreDifferent: [[spoiler:Dragons are creatures from the High Wilderness, eat Time, and they seem to be the enforcers of the laws of the Judgements. If the Judgements are the rulers, then they’re the guardsmen.]] There are also the Parabolan dragons, basically just snakes that decided they wanted to be dragons because Parabola is a lawless dreamscape. These dragons are totally unrelated to the [[spoiler:space cop]] dragons, they'd get in a fight if they met. |
| 638 | * OurLawyersAdvisedThisTrope: Once you've taken more than one step in the Seeking Mr Eaten's Name storyline, a must-answer storylet pops up requiring you to either back out (though not permanently like before) or accept a legal disclaimer acknowledging that any damage/loss of items as a result of playing it is the player's own fault and that no refunds will be forthcoming unless the result of a bug. If accepted, this agreement is reflected in an item called "A Bad End", which can be used to drop out of Seeking at any time. |
| 639 | * OurSoulsAreDifferent: ...And our deaths are different, too. |
| 640 | ** Souls are usually green, glowing amorphous things kept in bottles. You can buy or sell them at the Bazaar; although you're supposed to be licensed to deal in them, that stops precisely nobody. The unlicensed trade is called "spirifage" (and you had better ''really hope'' the devils don't catch you at it) but the word is usually reserved for people who steal souls without bothering to make contracts - taking them from the mouths of drowned people, stealing them from impoverished children, sneaking into hospitals to pull them out of invalids and so on. |
| 641 | ** Eight or nine percent, according to the Brass Embassy, of people in Fallen London are soulless. Tedious anarchist literature claims a figure as high as eleven. |
| 642 | ** Many people, especially in Society, are extremely keen to get theirs removed. They call the process [[spoiler:"Abstraction."]] |
| 643 | ** The value of one's soul appears to correspond to a person's prominence and/or accomplishments; a devil will pay ''far'' more for a player character's soul if they are a Person of Some Importance than if they are not. ''Why'' these souls warrant a higher offer is unclear. |
| 644 | ** Exactly to what extent being soulless impairs you is unclear, and it might be different for different people. There's clearly a number of people who want theirs back, but at the same time it's apparently a boon for lawyers. At least one inventor apparently thought the problem could be solved with a special surgical truss. The devils themselves put it like this: "The effects? Well, nothing one would really notice. A little depression of mood. A pleasing melancholy here and there. Perhaps a lessening in appreciation of beauty. But does not beauty cause so much of the world's difficulties?" |
| 645 | ** The landlord of one lodgings option (the Rooms Above a Bookshop) is suggested to be missing his soul, and he spends most of his time either moping or weeping. |
| 646 | * PainfulRhyme: In an early venture in which you write mushroom poetry, you may do field work on your subject. The success text reads, "The work advances. Are you actually going to rhyme 'mushroom' with 'room'? I mean ''actually''?" |
| 647 | * PaintingTheMedium: The borders around storylets and opportunity cards gives you some information about them before clicking. Gold, silver, and bronze mean the storylets are part of a larger story rather than a one-off, and red borders mean that the card will auto-fire as soon as you click on it (this is usually related to Menace or Dream cards). [[spoiler: But where this trope really comes into play is with Mr Eaten-related storylets, which all have '''black''' borders.]] |
| 648 | * PassThePopcorn: There are several opportunity cards or storylets that involve something terrible happening, such as a tentacled monster grabbing a child. The character has the option of being a hero or selling snacks or tickets or collecting bets among the crowd. |
| 649 | * PathOfMostResistance: |
| 650 | ** On an expedition in the Forgotten Quarter, you can progress through one of three options: a cautious (50 Watchful check, consumes 1 supply and gives 1 progress if successful), bold (100 Watchful check, consumes 2 supplies, gives 2 progress) and buccaneering approach (160 Watchful check, consumes 3 supplies and gives 3 progress). Rivals' Progress has the same chance to increase regardless of your own approach, so that if you only choose the cautious approach, your rival will reach the goal long before you and force you to confront them which costs even more supplies and actions. For super lategame players, when actions spent become far more valuable than the supplies, the buccanering approach (and obtaining enough Watchful to remove the chance of failure) become key to turning a profit through archaeology. |
| 651 | ** Deconstructed with Seeking Mr Eaten's Name. Every action you take on that path slowly ruins you. Any character who realizes you're Seeking the Name will ''beg'' you to stop. You gain absolutely nothing in return, and if you make it to the end and refuse to turn back at the last chance, [[spoiler:you can never play the game on that account ever again]]. |
| 652 | * PayEvilUntoEvil: |
| 653 | ** Sometimes, an Opportunity will have some thief you know of ask you to rob some down-on-his-luck bastard, like a Tomb-Colonist. You can pretend to steal from them, then steal a few more from ''him'' and give it to the Tomb-Colonist. |
| 654 | ** Jack-of-Smiles likes going after those on Wanted posters. |
| 655 | * PeopleZoo: The Third Coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers, which houses the Labyrinth's human exhibits, mostly people possessed by the Fingerkings. |
| 656 | * PerfectlyCromulentWord: Most of Mr Pages's dialogue. For example, he collects Proscribed Materials as part of his war on "pestilent and obstacudent literature". Some of his dialogue uses truly obscure English words, but some of it is (as far as research avails) entirely made up, but still with solid etymological roots. Also see its [[https://twitter.com/#!/Mr_Pages Twitter account, for more fantastic examples]]. |
| 657 | * PermanentlyMissableContent: |
| 658 | ** A few storylets and opportunity cards will disappear once your qualities rise too high or you progress in the plot, though they're usually pointless to keep trying once they disappear anyway. In particular are gold-coloured storylets, which can only be done ''once'', period, no ifs, ands, or buts. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if not for the fact that they usually have multiple branches... Fortunately, most allow the option of re-doing them for a price in Fate (often substantial, admittedly). |
| 659 | ** Getting banished from the Empress's Court is required to unlock the Foreign Office and Heartscross House, but it used to permanently lock you out of the Court (in older versions of the game, there was no way to get back) so you had better complete all the tales and romances you want to in there before you start wrecking your reputation. |
| 660 | ** Creating your own department in the University locks you out of the earlier carousels and replaces them with another set, which is again locked out once you finish the main University storyline, which is required to unlock Bullbone Island, Corpsecage Island, Grunting Fen and Flute Street, although in this case all of the items and qualities acquired from the University carousels can be acquired elsewhere. |
| 661 | ** At the end of the Fate-locked Velocipede Squad story, choosing to [[spoiler:reform the Squad from within]] will permanently render the Velocipede Squad carousels inaccessible. |
| 662 | ** When you first unlock the Duelling with the Black Ribbon storylets, you can have a friendly duel with all of the duelists including Captain Vendrick. However, after you [[spoiler:deal with the Errant Duelist]], you can ''only'' duel to the death with Captain Vendrick -- and unlike in to-the-death duels with the other duelists where no one actually dies for good, winning this duel against Vendrick will cause him to die. [[KilledOffForReal Permanently.]] |
| 663 | ** At the end of the Unfinished Story in Polythreme, if you choose to refuse the Unfinished Fugitive's bargain, you will never get the chance to obtain an Unfinished Hat companion. |
| 664 | ** Entering the Cave of the Nadir for the first time will remove the only way to get an Incarnadine Fur Robe outside of [[ChristmasEpisode December]]. |
| 665 | ** If you complete the entirety of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name but choose to [[spoiler:turn back at the very end]], you'll gain the Seven-Fold Knock, which prevents you from ever finishing the story and seeing the ending if you feel like Seeking again. |
| 666 | ** Unlike most Fate-locked stories, it's impossible to reset "Uncovering Secrets Framed in Gold". Which is particularly unfortunate, as it has MultipleEndings. |
| 667 | ** Family and Law is non-resetable, due to the subject matter of the finale. Failbetter stated that they didn't want people to spend Fate ''ad nauseum'' to attempt to get the outcome they wanted. Considering how quickly the story's climax became infamous for intense emotions, such fears were definitely not unfounded. |
| 668 | ** The Sceptre of Mr Wines was exclusively available by spending 15 Regnant Coins, which are in turn awarded by correctly answering the Fallen London Mysteries from August 2017 to August 2018. |
| 669 | * PersonaNonGrata: You are permanently banned from entering the University if you choose to accuse the [[spoiler:Provost of Summerset College]] of the murder you've been investigating. Getting welcomed back is not easy. |
| 670 | * PlayerVersusPlayer: Knife and Candle, the artful game of polite murder. Players are warned beforehand to become very Dangerous first before attempting this. Now making a comeback after being removed for a complete re-design. |
| 671 | * PlayEveryDay: Time the Healer (which comes at the beginning of each week) provides your profession payment, halves your Making Waves and reduces Notability if it's higher than Making Waves (ensuring that you have to constantly keep Making Waves higher), reduces Taimen's Attention (which makes challenges in Khan's Heart easier), and is the only way to remove Irrigo (allowing you to enter the Cave of the Nadir again) and Marsh-Mired in Dreams of Sustenance (allowing Seekers of the Name to gain a point of SMEN from the black opportunity cards). The Castellan of Balmoral's gift and the agent's report in Khan's Heart are a particularly bad version, as they are ''supposed'' to be weekly but are not tied to Time the Healer, instead having its own living story that activates exactly 604800[[note]]60*60*24*7[[/note]] seconds after you last received the gifts, meaning that it ''will'' slip away every week. |
| 672 | * PointOfNoReturn: |
| 673 | ** In the Seeking Mr Eaten's Name storyline, once you reach the Avid Horizon, lose your ship and knock, you can never go back to London and you can do nothing but shift around your mantelpiece. |
| 674 | ** Averted with a lampshade near the end of the Light Fingers Ambition, where you're given the choice of accepting Mr Fires's deal or not. Choosing to accept it comes with an explicit disclaimer that it actually doesn't lock you out of going against it later. |
| 675 | * PoisonMushroom: A number of equippable or usable items only reduce your attributes: |
| 676 | ** The Bottled Oblivion and Ridiculous Hat both inflict a hefty penalty on your highway stats when used: they are useful when the highway stats grow too high to your liking but not much more. The Talkative Rattus Faber (and its 'improved' version, the Weasel of Woe, which also affects advanced stats) are equippable companions that do the same thing, and are also useful if you want to grind your highway stats faster and don't mind the menaces. |
| 677 | ** The Somnolent Hyaena is a companion that only inflicts a penalty of 1 Watchful and nothing else, but it is not meant to be equipped at all, its true purpose is to be bred in the Fourth Coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers and then exchanged for items or turned into a Corresponding Ocelot. |
| 678 | ** You might run into some Eyeless Skulls within the Forgotten Quarter: they fetch for a good price, are necessary to begin an expedition to the Cave of the Nadir and can also be turned into a Ray-Drenched Cinder necessary to enter the Nadir for the first time, but keeping them in your inventory will add some harmful and undiscardable cards into your opportunity decks that reduce a single highway stat by a significant amount of CP. Hanging on to Eyeless Skulls if you're not planning on the Cave of the Nadir expedition soon is a bad idea. |
| 679 | ** The Torment [[StuckItems destiny]] reduces attributes and must be equipped by Seekers of the Name who [[spoiler:choose the easy way to get St Destin's Candle during Hallowmas instead of sacrificing 12 points of Notability]]. |
| 680 | ** The Possessed Goldfish does nothing but reducing your Bizarre, Dreaded and Respectable by 4 each; the Viric Lizard, Forty-Nine-Voiced Warbler and Weasel of Social Discomfiture reduce each of these stats (in that order) by 12. They are useful when you need to nullify any BDR provided by tattoos or StuckItems, as certain buyers in the Bone Market will only buy from you if your Bizarre, Dreaded or Respectable is zero. |
| 681 | ** Burden is a special slot dedicated to items that all reduce your attributes, cannot be unequipped, are only obtained as part of certain stories, and serve to encourage you to proceed along the story as soon as possible to get rid of them. For example, [[spoiler:An Infant Curator, Provisionally Known as Mr Transport]] (given when raising your Watchful cap from 224 to 227) reduces all highway stats by 20 and Respectable by 1; A Stalking Stone Shadow of your Very Own (which stalks those who bought an ushabti in the early stage of F.F. Gebrandt's Prelapsarian Expedition) reduces stats and adds an unprofitable card to your opportunity deck; Fierce Commitment to London's Defence and Stalwart Commitment to Helping each removes an unprofitable opportunity card (in the second stage of the London Horticultural Show) in exchange for reducing stats. |
| 682 | ** Christmas 2017 added the option for players who choose the Fate-locked option to have a Master help clear their doorway of snow to receive a gift from Mr Eaten. Just getting the gift causes you to lose 7 levels in each of your highway stats and raise all of your Menaces high enough to become dead, insane, and imprisoned instantly. The gift itself? A Complete Set of Preserved Internal Organs strongly implied to be ''yours'' that lowers all of your highway stats by 15 if you equip it. |
| 683 | --->'''Description:''' Perhaps they shouldn't be out on display on your mantle. Perhaps you should put them back where they belong. But you do not know how. |
| 684 | * PoliceBrutality: The Constables can and do get violent when they have to, but can perform arrests normally. The Velocipede Squad, on the other hand, seems to beat the absolute stuffing out of suspects on principle, even those it doesn't arrest in the end. To the point one of the missions is basically "Dress up as a defenseless drunkard and beat up anyone that tries to rob you", no arrests needed. And since these are people that can and do kick the shit out of ''[[{{Golem}} Clay Men]]'' with relative ease... |
| 685 | * PoliticallyCorrectHistory: The developers include a little bit of this on purpose, counterbalanced with some carefully picked DeliberateValuesDissonance, to make the game more welcoming to players whose gender, race, and/or sexuality would have caused problems for them in the actual 19th century. The EveryoneIsBi thing is a good example; nobody in Fallen London appears to care what gender of person you prefer to take to bed. Also, the {{Non Player Character}}s are more gender-balanced than in many games set in the present day or the future. |
| 686 | * PoorCommunicationKills: The first half of the 2023 Estival event, "The London Horticultural Show", has [[spoiler:hordes of Starved Men crash their stalactites from the Neath's roof and going after London's structures in an apparent invasion. After immeasurable property damage and suffering, Londoners manage to drive them back]], and only then do they find out [[spoiler:by capturing and speaking with a Starved prisoner that the Starved Men were trying to save London from a much bigger threat]] -- the two factions had different priorities and objectives, and the invaders hadn't given any warning or tried to communicate what they were trying to do. After things have settled down, [[spoiler:a Starved Embassy is opened, its purpose to facilitate a cultural exchange to ensure such events of grave miscommunication would not happen again.]] |
| 687 | * PowerOfLove: Played straight, subverted, inverted, turned on its head, torn to pieces, reassembled and played with. [[spoiler:''In the deepest matters of the Bazaar, look to love. Always.'']] |
| 688 | * PowerTattoo: At the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, you can get a tattoo from the Lady in Lilac that permanently increases your Bizarre or Dreaded. |
| 689 | * PremiumCurrency: Fate, which while can be unlocked by playing, doing so is such a painfully slow process that it might as well be exclusive to people who are willing to spend real money on the game. Fate can be used to refill your actions, which let you progress in the game but take real time to refresh. There are also storylines that are Fate-locked, meaning that you must pay Fate in order to experience them, and no other currency. |
| 690 | * PressXToDie: |
| 691 | ** [[spoiler:During an advanced point of the old version of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name, you could land in a twisted version of Mrs Plenty's Carnival. There, by paying 50 Fate and 5 carnival tickets, you had the option to ride the wheel that normally takes you below the Neath all the way up to the surface. At which point, you died. Forever. That's all for your character, pal.]] The game warned of this in ''very plain terms'', going so far as to say there isn't even any interesting flavor text for your trouble. ''And you could still do it. And people have done it.'' One player took the plunge, and somehow [[spoiler:their character ''wasn't'' deleted.]] Hilariously, the player's reaction was to submit a polite bug report requesting this be remedied. The developers boggled a bit and then rewarded the player with a unique Quality. |
| 692 | ** [[spoiler:Seeking Mr Eaten's Name]] is effectively a long line of buttons that, should you press them, will make you repeatedly commit social, financial, spiritual and literal suicide over and over and over... [[spoiler:[[DeaderThanDead until there's nothing left of you.]]]] |
| 693 | ** If you have at least 1 Wound or 1 Nightmares, you can look in a certain mirror at the Carnival's HallOfMirrors ([[SchmuckBait in spite of the game warning you not to do so]]) and get a one-way ticket to, respectively, a slow-moving boat on a dark river and to the Royal Bethlehem Hotel. |
| 694 | * PretentiousLatinMotto: |
| 695 | ** There's one above the gate at the Shuttered Palace. It reads "Omnis Traductor Traditor." [[labelnote:Translation]][[ExplainExplainOhCrap "Every translator is a traitor."]][[/labelnote]] |
| 696 | ** In addition, the University's two colleges each have one. The radical, liberal Benthic College has "Omnes adsint, quamvis dementi, quamvis nefasti." [[labelnote:Translation]]"All may be present, although insane, although wicked."[[/labelnote]] The conservative, religious Summerset College has "Superbe et sophistice." [[labelnote:Translation]]"O proud and sophistic"[[/labelnote]] |
| 697 | * PrisonersDilemma: During the second week of the 1895 Election, players preparing for a debate with each other could choose to secretly cheat to get a guaranteed victory. However, the game warns them that if ''both'' of them cheat, neither of them will win and they will only receive punishment. |
| 698 | * PrivateMilitaryContractors: The Scuttering Company mercenary army; you can hire a squad of them in the Bazaar for the cost of 500 Echoes. |
| 699 | * ProfessionalKillers: Fallen London has its share of murderers-for-hire -- many of which will even make sure their targets ''stay'' dead. The player can even become one! And it also has its share of Hobbyist Killers, in the form of the Game of Knife And Candle, where participants murder each other with "strangely boyish" enthusiasm. |
| 700 | * PromotionalPowerlessPieceOfGarbage: The two promotional Affiliation items grant no stats at all. |
| 701 | * PsychoKnifeNut: Jack-of-Smiles, London's premier half-immortal mass murderer, favours those. It's not so bad if he just cuts your throat, as death isn't permanent in London, but he's still dangerous - if he slices you into chunks, you're not going to come back. [[spoiler:In fact, Jack 'is' the knives. He's 'in' the knives. If you pick up one of his knives, you're going to become Jack.]] |
| 702 | * {{Pun}}: In a storylet involving a head[[spoiler:, a counterfeit one your singular plant may give you]], the success titles for two of the choices are "a head start" and "a heady sight". |
| 703 | * PunctualityIsForPeasants: When you get A Polite Invitation to a high-society party, you have the option to arrive "fashionably late" to make even more of an impact when you deign show up. It ''can'' work, and has its own justifications (your time is a valuable resource when you get a trickle of an action every ten minutes), but you need to be charismatic enough to make it work. |
| 704 | * PunnyHeadlines: One opportunity card has you meeting a [[PungeonMaster Paronomastic Newshound]], whose headlines "locate him in a dangerous territory: the hinterland between Increased Circulation and Editorial Defenestration". You can help advise him on a headline: "[[{{Spoonerism}} A BAT ON THE PACK]]", about the cryptozoologists at the University using trained bats to track marsh-wolves. His editor is ''[[LamePunReaction pissed]]'' about that one. |
| 705 | * PunnyName: One story involves finding a thieves' stash in a graveyard. It's buried in the grave of "Eliza Trove" ("Here lies a trove" with a Cockney accent). |
| 706 | * PunnyTitle: One storylet's title in the Light Fingers! ambition is "Baseless speculation", where you consider the identity of your admirer and need access to a Parabolan base-camp. |
| 707 | * PurelyAestheticGender: There isn't any change in gameplay whether the player chooses "Lady", "Gentleman", or "There are people walking around with the faces of squid - ''squid'' — and yet you have the nerve to waste our time with trifling and impertinent questions?" For those so inclined, it's possible to seduce [=NPCs=] of any gender, no matter which option one chooses. In addition, all clothing is unisex; gentlemen can wear corseted gowns and ladies dapper tailcoats without anyone taking notice. |
| 708 | [[/folder]] |
| 709 | |
| 710 | [[folder: Q-Z]] |
| 711 | * RandomEvent: Opportunity cards, which are randomly drawn from a deck of eligible cards. |
| 712 | * RandomNumberGod: |
| 713 | ** The entirety of the Fidgeting Writer story could be compared to a Double or Nothing game. At each step you can trade your progress in for a guaranteed reward or take a chance on progressing further, risking everything you've wagered so far and a little more on another roll of the dice. |
| 714 | ** Want a Majestic Pleasure Yacht without having to shell out 20 Fate? Then be prepared for a completely luck-based gamble where 'the odds are strongly against you'. You might get lucky and succeed on the first try, or run into a string of bad rolls, each of which will cost, among others, a very costly Comprehensive Bribe, whose ''only'' reliable source is the Bazaar Side-streets where you can buy one for the exorbitant price of 300 x Romantic Notion, 30 x Vision of the Surface, and 6 x Touching Love Story.[[note]]unless you choose to wait until getting access to the Hurlers, ''much'' later in the game[[/note]] According to some players on the Failbetter forums, it is better to work some extra real-life hours and use the wage to buy the 20 Fate and skip the gambling altogether, instead of spending time in the game to grind for Bribes (which you won't need any if you choose to pay Fate). |
| 715 | ** Want an Impossible Theorem to upgrade your room at the Royal Bethlehem Hotel into a suite? The first part is to prepare ''49'' Searing Enigmata, each of which is already a fairly valuable item in itself. Then bring them to the University, where you need to pass a Watchful check with a difficulty level of '''500''', which means that you can only hope for a 38% success chance at best even with maxed Watchful, plus Notability and items. And if you fail, you'll lose a Searing Enigma, 100 Echoes and gain so many CP of Wounds to bring you from 0 Wounds to '''11'''. If you don't have a [[ImmortalityInducer Firkin of Hesperidean Cider]], then be prepared for a very time-consuming trip with the Boatman before you can even hope to attempt this again. Thankfully, it is possible to buy the Suite for a much cheaper price during January through Penstock's Wicket. As if to address this, there's a ''much'' less random way to acquire one in your own laboratory once you have one, later in the game. |
| 716 | ** Need a Classic Short Story to [[spoiler: throw down the Well for St Cerise's Candle when Seeking the Name]]? You'll need to pass a Potential check which can only be attempted after the story's Potential passes 200, but raising a story's Potential past 150 can only be done by sacrificing two items: Compilations of Case-Notes (2 Potential each and available in extremely limited numbers outside Election) and Trade Secrets (25 Potential each, available once per real life month), meaning that meeting the prerequisites for the check itself will take at least 2 months. And when it comes to taking the check, 200 Potential only translates to a 60% success chance, and a failure means wasting everything you've sacrificed to write the story - be prepared to sacrifice a lot more items and wait for 2 months to gamble again. It's possible to avoid the gamble by raising the story's Potential to 334, though you will need seven months (!) for seven Trade Secrets as well as every single Compilation of Case-Notes you can find in the game. And it says something that this is still the least painful non-Fate, non-event-locked way to [[spoiler: obtain St Cerise's Candle (for the record, the alternates are an Overgoat, an Übergoat or seven Fluke-Cores)]]. |
| 717 | ** The carousel at the Winking Isle consists a series of luck-based options at the Well to try and increase Fasting and Meditating to a Foolish End, which in turn can be cashed in for Seeking Mr Eaten's Name points. Each option up the chain gives exponentially higher progress but is increasingly likely to fail. |
| 718 | * RareRandomDrop: |
| 719 | ** Some storylets and opportunity cards have "rare successes" that give better rewards than their normal success results. It usually scales with the regular reward, too; low-tier Rare Successes tend to simply grant a few extra mid-tier items, while tests with already-big rewards tend to grant hugely valuable items on a rare success (commonly a Searing Enigma). There are also rare-frequency cards that give unusually good items or Moods that temporarily raise a highway stat by a huge number. |
| 720 | ** How do you get a Blemmigan Secretary? By opening a Surprise Package that has only a ''1 in 1008'' chance of giving you the Blemmigan Secretary. ''And'' you can't just grind away in an easily-repeatable storylet until you get it because Surprise Packages can only be obtained from other players or very infrequently-occurring cards, that also require you to build up Notability to even have a good chance of getting a Surprise Package. |
| 721 | * RealityIsOutToLunch: The Neath does not adhere strictly to the laws of nature. [[spoiler:This is because sunlight is what enforces cosmic laws, and down here our light source is the Mountain of Light instead, who does not care to or cannot fully enforce reality as the surface world understands it.]] And then we have [[DreamLand Parabola]] and the Iron Republic. |
| 722 | * RealityWarper: |
| 723 | ** It's implied that you are changing fate itself in-universe when spending Fate. |
| 724 | ** If Dr Schlomo's theories are correct, [[spoiler:the Correspondence can be used to do this. It ''is'' the language of the Judgements themselves, which they use to impose their will upon all their radiance touches, so if you're fluent enough, you can manage a few interesting tricks with it]]. |
| 725 | ** The Iron Republic rejects the principle of stable laws, up to and including the laws of physics. New 'legislation' dictating what reality will be is churned out daily, and replaced in short order. |
| 726 | --->'''Revolutionary:''' Mad as you like, but if you believe him, sometimes rain falls up and time runs backwards. Not even the tyranny of nature rules in the Iron Republic. Imagine that! True freedom for all! |
| 727 | * RemixedLevel: |
| 728 | ** The On a Velocipede Squad (for characters with 120+ Dangerous) and Affair of the Box (for characters with 120+ Shadowy) stories take place in Ladybones Road and Spite, respectively (both starting locations for Watchful and Shadowy). |
| 729 | ** Most of the Forgotten Quarter and Flit content are suitable for characters with 60-100 Watchful and Shadowy (respectively), except for the War of Assassins story (for characters with 120+ points in at least one attribute). Additionally, two of the Forgotten Quarter expeditions (the Fate-locked Gallery of Serpents and the story-related Cave of the Nadir), due to their difficulty, are more suitable for characters with higher Watchful (and characters with less than 100 Watchful aren't likely to have been around long enough to even learn about the existence of the Cave of the Nadir). |
| 730 | ** The Empress' Court is unlocked from the Shuttered Palace as part of the Making Your Name story, and is suitable for characters with 85-110 Persuasive. Completing the main story there and you'll end up banished from the Court, but also gain access to the Foreign Office and Port Carnelian. Spend six terms at Heartscross House governing Port Carnelian and you can ask for permission to return to the Court, where you'll be able to take on new works of art and strive to become London's Poet-Laureate. |
| 731 | * ReallySevenHundredYearsOld: DeathIsCheap in the Neath, but usually old age catches up with you. [[spoiler: Unless you're the the Duchess, the Gracious Widow, or the Manager of the Royal Beth. They're all from the previous Fallen Cities, and all have found some means of sticking around. The Widow, at least, has to smuggle it in from overzees.]] |
| 732 | * RecurringDreams: The Dreams qualities measure your recurring dreams. They're categorized, as they're often whole sets of particular recurring dreams, each set following a thematic and influenced by some particularity of the Neath. |
| 733 | * RecurringLocation: Outside of London and the Unterzee (which do not count since they are the main hubs), the Tomb-Colonies, Mutton Island, Hunter's Keep, the Iron Republic, Port Carnelian, Polythreme, the Mirror-Marches, Abbey Rock, Adam's Way and the Chapel of Lights can be visited in both ''Fallen London'' and ''VideoGame/SunlessSea'', and the Avid Horizon appears in all three Failbetter games. There's also New Newgate Prison, which failed to make it to ''Sunless Sea'' since it was planned to be part of the game's dirigible expansion which didn't manage to be funded via Kickstarter. |
| 734 | * ReducedToRatburgers: Given the abundance of rats and shortage of conventional livestock in Fallen London, many people eat rats on a regular basis. The Raggedy Men eat ''mostly'' rats, and can accordingly be bribed with sacks of dead rats. |
| 735 | * ReflectiveTeleportation: All reflective surfaces can be used as portals to [[DreamLand Parabola]] by those who know to use this ability. There is an entire science (Glasswork) dedicated to the study of this power, and one of the tricks experts can do (including the player character in the second half of the game) is travel from one mirror to the other; long-distance crossings, espionage and even assassination are easily carried out using mirrors in the right places. This is one ''big'' reason Londoners are careful with mirrors; another reason is that humans aren't the only ones that can do this. |
| 736 | * RepeatingSoTheAudienceCanHear: |
| 737 | ** Successfully acquiring Tales of Terror!! during one's heist in the Flit results in this snippet: |
| 738 | --->Yes, of course you're the courier from her publisher, here for the new manuscript. No, you've not time to stay for tea. Yes, you'll deliver it safely. Heh heh. |
| 739 | ** Same goes for scamming souls from spirifers by pretending to be a devil. |
| 740 | --->Yes, yes, your account at the Embassy will be credited with these fine souls. Now, run along and gather up some more. He he he. |
| 741 | * ReptilesAreAbhorrent: [[SubvertedTrope Subverted]] rather amusingly. The Bishop of Southwark [[WhyDidItHaveToBeSnakes seems to have a thing against serpents]], but the Hound of Heaven he's trying to breed is a pearly-white snake [[EvilDetectingDog with the ability to sense and hunt devils.]] Naturally, he isn't amused at first when you show him the Hound you've created. |
| 742 | * ResetButton: It is possible to reset your Ambition and some premium and Exceptional Stories by paying Fate. This will allow you to play through the story again (possibly choosing another choice in the process), but keeping any rewards you've earned beforehand. |
| 743 | * ResourcefulRodent: The Rattus Faber are a species of sapient talking rats. They're known to be very skilled engineers and metalworkers. |
| 744 | * RevenueEnhancingDevices: Changing your name or portrait, renaming your newspaper, or registering the name of your Constant Companion or ship, all of which cost Fate and have no impact on the gameplay itself. |
| 745 | * RhymesOnADime: Opportunity cards involving the Starveling Cat often take the form of demented little couplets. |
| 746 | -->The Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat! It'll eat anything, ''but it won't eat that!'' |
| 747 | * RippedFromTheHeadlines: Some of your own artistic works can be this. For instance, the "Love and Clay" ballet is heavily implied to be [[CallBack the tale of the Comtessa]]. |
| 748 | * RoaringRampageOfRevenge: The ''Nemesis'' ambition encompasses one from start to end, as it begins with one of your loved ones being murdered and proceeds with you moving Hell and Earth to reach the ones ''truly'' responsible for it to make them pay. |
| 749 | * RodAndReelRepurposed: The Fisher Kings are {{Street Urchin}}s that use fishing rods to steal goods from unsuspecting passerbyes. |
| 750 | * RunningGag: |
| 751 | ** If you consistently refuse to specify your character's gender, you will constantly be referred to with "ah, Si-, er, Mad-, er, yes". |
| 752 | ** Once you get to the Hinterlands, there are options for building various statues at each station. And every last station lets you build a statue of yourself with a good enough excuse, no matter how inappropriate. Nothing but the time investment to get each excuse covered is in the way of you lining the way to Hell with effigies of yourself performing various feats, just to turn the GHR into your own rail-based {{Egopolis}}. [[spoiler:There ''is'' one item at the very end if every last station has your visage and you make an additional payment, along with an achievement; nothing of this is mandatory or even irreplaceable, but having statues of you absolutely everywhere is its own reward anyhow]]. |
| 753 | * SadisticChoice: |
| 754 | ** The Finder of Heiresses case ends with one. [[spoiler:You find the missing Comtessa, only to learn that her Clay Man kidnapper/lover has put her through a process that is about to permanently turn her to stone. She can no longer speak to you. You have the choice to kill her on the spot to spare her from a FateWorseThanDeath, or to leave her alive. The game leaves it deliberately ambiguous which choice was the right one, if any.]] |
| 755 | ** The end of the Orphanage segment of the Light Fingers! ambition. [[spoiler: You can release all of the prisoners, but the Orphanage will remain functioning and kidnap more orphans. [[BurnTheOrphanage Or you can burn it down]], with all of the prisoners still inside.]] |
| 756 | * SanityHasAdvantages: The most common way to reverse madness is to become annoyed by the constant inconveniences. |
| 757 | * SanityMeter: |
| 758 | ** The Nightmares quality, which mainly increases for failing high-level Watchful challenges, acts as an inverted Sanity Meter - when it reaches eight, you GoMadFromTheRevelation. |
| 759 | ** Unaccountably Peckish also acts as a kind of sanity meter, as it covertly measures [[spoiler: your exposure to Mr Eaten.]] |
| 760 | ** Stormy-Eyed covers your mind's exposure to the dead god of thunder. If both this quality and your recurring dreams about storms go up too much, [[AGodAmI you will start believing you are the reincarnation of the god]]. |
| 761 | * {{Santabomination}}: Mr Sacks, aka "[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast The Crimson Beast of Winter]]", is a hooded, faceless, only vaguely HumanoidAbomination who appears every December. He doesn't give people gifts; the people of London are instead supposed to give gifts to him. He accepts anything from abstract things like your "best regards", to fine wines, to parts of your body... or even ''you'', if you're foolish enough not to have anything else to offer. But something of yours WILL end up in his sack. And unlike Santa, he doesn't just appear on the Christmas eve. No, Mr Sacks visits you on each of the twelve days before Christmas. And he expects a gift with each visit. In the SpinOff game ''VideoGame/SunlessSea'', your captain may be called upon to perform three deliveries for Mr Sacks. Refusing him is [[AnOfferYouCantRefuse implied to be bad]] for your long-term well-being. Accepting is [[MortonsFork likewise likely to be bad]] for you short-term. Accepting and taking too long with it is likely to be the worst (and last) idea you'll ever have. |
| 762 | * SarcasmFailure: In one storylet you sift through the stock in a bookstore, thinking "Surely it can't ALL be bodice rippers and treatises on various deseases". If you fail the challenge, you find out that it can. |
| 763 | * SchmuckBait: Storylets with only negative consequences will carry bold warnings, such as ''Do not do this. Only pain and suffering will result.'' or ''This is undoubtedly a terrible idea.'' Most notably, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name warns you nearly every step of the way: |
| 764 | ** Seeking Mr Eaten's Name also has multiple sub-examples. One early Seeking Road storylet that lets you increase SMEN halves your Watchful every time you play it...and it turns out you need a high Watchful level to be able to play later SMEN options. Cue numerous Seekers frantically playing chess marathons with each other to get their Watchful back up! |
| 765 | ** Played with in an absolutely sadistic way in a later part of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name. The card where you get St Erzulie's Candle gives you a choice: [[spoiler:you can sacrifice your Profession, Notability, Ambition, and many other valuable character traits and stories that you will ''never'' be able to regain... or you can take the option that claims to immediately give you St Erzulie's Candle with no other change to the story]]. After already having been forced to sacrifice numerous things to get to this point, chances are that you will view the second option as a clear schmuck bait choice that will have even worse consequences than the first one. [[spoiler:It isn't. Picking it really does give you the candle with absolutely no sacrifices or negative effects for your character. The true "schmuck bait" here is getting paranoid Seekers to overthink the choice clearly laid out for them and think there ''has'' to be a trick. Or deciding to ruin their character even further anyway even when given the choice to avoid it.]] |
| 766 | * SchrodingersQuestion: Very common in this game, where you grind a quality such as such as investigating, casing, or writing, and only after several actions do you then decide, at the end, what you're working on. If you're in the Labyrinth of Tigers' breeding program, one of the ways to prepare your creature is to tame it, but none of the texts specifies which of the beasts you discipline (it's always "your beast", "monster", etc.). You then choose which one you have prepared when it's time to breed, which means it's possible to breed a beast before actually capturing it. |
| 767 | * ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Some [[GambitPileup extremely complicated]] plots can end with you simply saying "screw this" and going home. |
| 768 | * SelfInflictedHell: In all fairness, [[SchmuckBait you were warned]] about Seeking the Name. |
| 769 | * SentencedWithoutTrial: Failing a heist on the Brass Embassy will send you straight to [[CardboardPrison New Newgate]] without a trial. This is [[{{Unishment}} actually a good thing for the player]] compared to the usual method of getting thrown in jail and is the preferred method of getting sent there on purpose because the lack of trial means it doesn't affect your criminal record, which is hard to clear and [[ContinuingIsPainful prevents Ablution Absolution from working]] if you let it get too high. |
| 770 | * SentientStars: [[spoiler:The Judgments, the gods of this universe. Their light is law, and includes such things as "dead people stay dead", which is why the Neath -- being an enormous cave -- is so bizarre by human standards. The Sun, in particular, is in a rather precarious position, though she doesn't know it, and the Bazaar is on a mission to save her.]] |
| 771 | * ShaggyDogStory: If you agree to take in the [[spoiler:Albino Rat]] at the end of the Plaster Face story, they tell you one of these: [[spoiler:The Albino Rat was once a friend of the Watchmaker's Daughter, and they were happy -- but then the Masters of the Bazaar started sending ominous messages, and the Watchmaker's Daughter felt that they wanted to own her. The Albino Rat tried to make a music box to soothe her friend, but [[DrivenToSuicide she drowned herself to escape before the box was finished]].]] Of course, the Neath being what it is, [[spoiler: there's a strong implication she's not dead, but simply hiding among the Drownies - and now there are clockwork toys and gadgets rising up in bloody rebellion, and the Watchmaker's Daughter is likely deeply involved.]] |
| 772 | * ShamingTheMob: One opportunity card lets you do this in order to save a Rubbery Man from lynching. Success in another opportunity gives a murderess a fair trial instead of a lynching. [[spoiler:While you're giving your heartfelt speech to the mob, she takes the opportunity to murder somebody else. But least it all stays civilised.]] |
| 773 | * ShipLevel: The three Exceptional Stories in the Season of Wrecks all involve exploring various shipwrecks. |
| 774 | * ShootTheShaggyDog: The ending of the [[spoiler:Cheesemonger]] story. [[spoiler:Even in the endings where Alice survives, her plan to end the Great Game still fails, and thus the constant bloodshed and tragedy the Game brings will continue. The best you can hope to do is help Alice move to a quiet, peaceful life with the Church, but this involved forcing her daughter to take her place.]] |
| 775 | * ShopFodder: |
| 776 | ** When you complete the tutorial and escape from New Newgate Prison, you start equipped with a Pair of Leg Irons and a Pair of Iron Manacles, both of which provide no stats and should be sold for Echoes as soon as possible. |
| 777 | ** A Headful of Picaresque Tales and A Blue and Shining Stone (which can be obtained from a rare opportunity card) have no uses outside of being sold to the Bazaar, and in fact should be sold as soon as possible since the card (which is very lucrative at 12.5 EPA) can't be drawn again before the item is sold. |
| 778 | ** Among the items that can be redeemed from the Relickers for 3200 Certifiable Scraps, the Breath of the Void, Rumourmonger's Network and the Veils-Velvet Scrap have but one use: for Invisible Eminences to gain the London's Marrow quality (however, doing this doesn't consume the items and they can be safely sold after you've got the quality). The only 3200-Scrap item that isn't like this is the Reported Location of a One-Time Prince of Hell, which is necessary to upgrade a Guest Room in the Brass Embassy to a Sanctum if Penstock's Wicket is not open or you don't want to sell your soul. This leads to conversations between stars, velvet spun from the fur of Mr Veils and an entire intelligence network being sold for money because they were simply useless to you. |
| 779 | ** Except for the very first short story, written when Making Your Name (which doesn't count since it isn't an actual item), the Celebrated Short Story (which provides an alternate way to advance from Journalist to Author) and Classic Short Story (which is one of the possible sacrifices to obtain St Cerise's Candle when Seeking the Name), all short stories only have one use: to be sold for Echoes. |
| 780 | ** Other items which are also only good for selling and nothing else include the Starstone Demark, Queer Soul, Coruscating Soul, Devilbone Dice and Sealed Copies of the Crimson Book. |
| 781 | * ShopliftAndDie: In the Flit, if you try to rob the Bazaar and fail, you'll gain '''36''' CP of Nightmares - which will instantly cause you to move to the State of some confusion, unless your Nightmare-reducing equipment was good enough to give you a negative total. |
| 782 | * ShoutOut: |
| 783 | ** To ''Film/BladeRunner'', in a challenge at Watchmaker's Hill: "'Do you make up these questions? Or do they write them down for you?' With the grudging agreement of the Constables, you interview a series of Clay Men, asking them ever more intimate and revealing questions about their 'lives', their work, their intentions, their emotions. Tortoises. That sort of thing." As an added bonus, Clay Men are constructs frowned upon on society for being little more than menial servants, some Clay Men want nothing more than more life, fucker, and the storylet is about sniffing out rogue Clay Men. |
| 784 | ** The Rubbery Men look suspiciously like {{Cthulhumanoid}}s, and are even referred to as "eldritch". |
| 785 | ** The sidebar text for the Vake obliquely references Batman: "They say it's not a monster at all. It's a man who dresses up as a bat. To, ah, prowl the city by night. But that would just be stupid." |
| 786 | ** All but one of the Recurring Dreams/Strange Dreams are named after the sections of Creator/TSEliot's Literature/TheWasteLand. Even before the newest Recurring Dream finished this off with "What the Thunder Said," that phrase was explicitly quoted in "A Game of Chess." |
| 787 | ** Failing to break into a Jeweler's Shop results in [[Film/RaidersOfTheLostArk "Safes.]] [[WhyDidItHaveToBeSnakes Why did it have to be safes?"]] |
| 788 | ** Pursuing a relationship with the Barbed Wit will eventually bring up "She knows about you! That's half the battle." Franchise/GIJoe! |
| 789 | ** The Inconvenienced by your Aunt storylet along with The Stags Club owes more than a little to Creator/PGWodehouse's ''Literature/JeevesAndWooster''. |
| 790 | ** The art for the sorrow spiders is very reminiscent of VideoGame/{{metroid}}s. |
| 791 | ** It is possible, through opportunity cards, to acquire and care for your very own [[Film/TheLittleShopOfHorrors Audrey Jr.]]/[[Theatre/LittleShopOfHorrors Audrey II,]] complete with later [[ManEatingPlant feeding requirements]]. |
| 792 | ** When investigating a tomb in the Forgotten Quarter, one of the headers reads "It is often a matter of snakes." |
| 793 | ** A card that can be drawn in the orphanage (an area for Light Fingers) is titled Room 101, and the descriptions suggest the character thinks it's related to the {{Room 101}} from ''[[Literature/NineteenEightyFour 1984]]''. [[spoiler:It's a broom closet.]] |
| 794 | ** A choice in a Christmas storylet in 2010 mentions a [[VideoGame/{{Zork}} grue]]. |
| 795 | ** The London Magazine refuses to change its name: |
| 796 | --->"The Bazaar requires the London Magazine to change its name. The London Magazine has survived two centuries and one duel! It has published Keats, Shelley, De Quincey, Hazlitt! It will survive the translation of London to this d____d abyss, and the dictates of the Bazaar. We will continue to publish under the name, [[Music/{{Prince}} The Magazine Formerly Known As The London Magazine]]." |
| 797 | ** If you're Indulging A Less than Laudable Laudanum Habit, you can have a dream in which "your beloved dances in a graveyard," referencing Music/HectorBerlioz's opium-inspired ''Symphonie Fantastique.'' |
| 798 | ** His Amused Lordship bears a passing resemblence to '''''Creator/BrianBlessed!''''' |
| 799 | ** The image used for interactions with a Longshanks[[labelnote:*]] an urchin who has grown past childhood and thus kicked out of their gang[[/labelnote]] bears an uncanny resemblence to Creator/PhilFoglio's AuthorAvatar. |
| 800 | ** While in New Newgate Prison, you can get an opportunity card where you express your belief that Fallen London [[Film/TheDarkKnight deserves a better class of villain.]] |
| 801 | ** Failing a certain storylet causes a few agents from the Ministry of Public Decency to inquire about you. The headline for this is [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_from_the_Ministry The Men From The Ministry]]. |
| 802 | ** There is an option in the "The Long Arm Of The Law" opportunity card, which allows you to reduce your Suspicion by laying a false trail. The text is something like "But what does it all mean? Why is "MONSTROUS ARE THOSE WHO WILL NOT WITHIN" written on the wall? [[VideoGame/HeavyRain And why all the folded paper swans?]] |
| 803 | ** The quality that shows how well you've remained undetected during a heist is called [[WithCatlikeTread "With Cat-]][[Theatre/ThePiratesOfPenzance Like Tread."]] |
| 804 | ** Why did you [[spoiler:kill/banish the Cheesemonger?]] One reason you can choose: "[[Series/TheWire it's all in the Game.]]" |
| 805 | ** It's not clear whether [[Literature/SherlockHolmes the Honey-Addled Detective]] got into that state via experimenting with drugs, or experimenting with bees. It could be both. |
| 806 | *** In the Exceptional story "Stripes of Wrath" he briefly speaks about a "speckled band" and the Implacable Detective notes all good magic involves impossibility. [[StageMagician The Glass]], "[[Literature/TheyDoItWithMirrors They do it with mirrors]]". |
| 807 | ** The venture in which you teach manners either to a devil or a clay man is called "Theatre/{{Pygmalion}}". Some storylets reference the play as well (e.g. "The FOG in SPITE coils MAINLY in the NIGHT"). |
| 808 | ** Several times, derivations of the phrase "an inordinate fondness for beetles" appear in the flavor text. The possibly apocryphal story goes that Scottish geneticist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane received a question about what designs he glimpsed in the mind of {{God}} through his research. His answer was, reportedly, "An inordinate fondness for beetles." |
| 809 | ** One story, involving violence between animal-handlers, is called [[Creator/JamesHerriot "It shouldn't happen to a veterinarian"]]. |
| 810 | ** The "A Wily Zailor" has a Nex option titled [[{{Series/Firefly}} "I'll be in my bunk."]] |
| 811 | ** And, of course, there's the way the entire game is riddled with references to ''Literature/KublaKhan'', Creator/SamuelTaylorColeridge, and Creator/TSEliot. |
| 812 | ** The poem you write to mourn the passing of the Quiet Deviless' pet bat is titled "Little bat, my lady's darling". It contains a line about how the bat used to play in his lady's lap. This sounds almost exactly like a Creator/{{Catullus}} poem about his lady's sparrow, who liked to play in her lap before it died ("Passer, deliciae meae puellae": "Sparrow, my lady's darling"). |
| 813 | ** If the player gets banished from the Court because of their scandalous writing they become: "Mad, bad, dangerous to know" - famous words used about Creator/LordByron. |
| 814 | ** The [[Creator/OscarWilde Epigrammatic Irishman]] is an Irish author in Victorian London who had romances with other men, suffered an unfortunate fate after running afoul of the authorities (details are unknown, all that's been said is he pissed off Mr Pages and paid dearly for it), and is associated with [[http://www.oscarwildetours.com/about-our-symbol-the-green-carnation/ green carnations]]. |
| 815 | ** The Orthographic Infection card has cultish writing on a wall plus a reference to seeking the Name and counting the days; these things combine into a reference to the Creator/JorgeLuisBorges story "Death and the Compass". |
| 816 | ** During the Seeking Mr Eaten's Name storyline, the result text for making an extremely expensive sacrifice to the well for St Cerise's Candle references the last two lines of the [[IronicNurseryTune nursery rhyme]] "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_and_Lemons Oranges and Lemons]]". |
| 817 | ** Three hyenas in the Labyrinth of Tigers are named Creator/{{Anne|Bronte}}, Creator/{{Emily|Bronte}} and Creator/{{Charlotte|Bronte}}. |
| 818 | ** One of the possible options on the "Duelling the Black Ribbon" storylet is "Exercise for rough health", which when successfully chosen exhorts you to [[Creator/JaneFonda take note of the burning sensation!]] |
| 819 | ** The description for the Winsome Dispossessed Orphan companion laments that [[Theatre/{{Oliver}} "one has to pick a pocket or two"]]. |
| 820 | * ShroudedInMyth: The Correspondence. The sidebars make all sorts of fanciful suggestions about what it could be. [[spoiler: It's the language of the stars, known as Judgements. They decide what reality is, which is why their language can be used to alter reality. It's also why things from the Neath can't exist on the surface; the Neath is untouched by sunlight, which is why it's full of crazy shit, and when said crazy shit is touched by sunlight our local Judgement destroys it. Surfacing at night doesn't protect you either. Moonlight is reflected sunlight, and even on a new moon the stars still shine.]] |
| 821 | * SidequestSidestory: ''All of them'', as the game technically lacks a main quest. (Although Making Your Name, Ambitions and Seeking Mr Eaten's Name could be considered main quests.) |
| 822 | * SignificantReferenceDate: The Neon Future, accessed from the Loom in Irem, is set on 22nd June 2023, the same day the Irem update was released in real life. |
| 823 | * SingleSpecimenSpecies: Fallen London seems to be teeming with these, with the Vake undoubtedly at the forefront. [[spoiler: Sort of. The Vake is actually Mr Veils, and being a Master isn't alone. Although Veils is implied to not always have been the same species of space bat that are the Masters, not to mention the other Masters tend to give him a wide berth due to his abnormally strong love of murder.]] |
| 824 | * SingleUseShield: |
| 825 | ** If you reach 8 Wounds while having a Horsehead Amulet, it will be consumed to take away 8 CP of Wounds, which is usually enough to save you from going to the boat trip. |
| 826 | ** The loss of the Dream qualities inflicted by the State of some confusion can be prevented by a vial of Honeyed Laudanum (which can be bought for 9 Fate either on an opportunity card or in the House of Chimes), although each vial is only good for one incident of insanity. |
| 827 | * SkewedPriorities: If you [[spoiler:load up the potbelly stove at the Hurlers Station with too many Correspondence Plaques, it will gain a life of its own and run amok through the Hinterlands in apparent adolescent wanderlust. The game instructions inform you that you'll need to hunt down the rampaging stove if you want to re-illuminate the station]] and mentions public safety as an afterthought. |
| 828 | * SlidingScaleOfGameplayAndStoryIntegration: One amusing, if mildly annoying element of integration is when failing certain storylets in the Flit, which is on the rooftops above London; several of them involve an unfortunate mis-step that increases your Wounds and immediately moves you to a particular area in London, depending on the Storylet, thus simulating your painful fall from the Flit to the district in question. |
| 829 | * SmartPeoplePlayChess: You can challenge other players to games of chess, which test the Watchful quality. Same goes for chess with the Boatman, although [[spoiler:he'll up his game when you do, meaning that you have to very carefully manage your gear if you want to stand a chance]]. |
| 830 | * SnicketWarningLabel: Every step of [[spoiler:Seeking Mr Eaten's Name]] warns you not to pursue your quest further; if you do keep going, it'll only bring misery, and if you're successful, it'll bring more misery. |
| 831 | * {{Snowlems}}: During [[ChristmasEpisode January]], players can buy a Noman from Penstock's Wicket, a companion formed from a mixture of lacre (or "so-called snow") and the player's blood to resemble that player. The Noman will eventually melt but you can prolong its life by feeding it some of your Quirks and/or Tears of the Bazaar and [[VideoGameCaringPotential forming an especially strong bond with it]] will earn you a rare, valuable item. Keeping it alive until the Feast of the Exceptional Rose in February is also possible and unlocks some storylets, but this is a massive challenge best reserved for players who can stockpile vast quantities of Tears of the Bazaar in advance. In addition, [[spoiler:the twelve Mr Sacks figures that show up during Neathmas]] are lacre-constructs of the Masters. [[spoiler:''[[TheReveal All]]'' of the Masters.]] |
| 832 | * SocializationBonus: Several stories are made quicker/easier/more interesting/more efficient if you have friends to ask for help. In particular, the easiest way to cure your menaces is by asking another player to help. Also the best way of obtaining second chances, and some of the best ways to obtain certain qualities. |
| 833 | * SockItToThem: Available in Mr Chimes' Lost & Found is A Knotted Sock with a Heavy Lump in It. Its description points you to an urchin who can teach you how to swing it "to enable the greatest wallop with the least effort". |
| 834 | * TheSoulsaver: One of the choices in the Soul Trade premium story leads to your character becoming one of these, literally rescuing people's {{Soul Jar}}s from devils. |
| 835 | * SpikesOfDoom: The Prickfinger Wastes will do a lot more than just prick your fingers if you venture down there. Something about the geology's sharpened every single stalagmite to the point cutting yourself with one doesn't even hurt too much, sometimes not at all. Most people that venture down here either come back looking like they fell into a blender, or bleed out before they can ever get back. |
| 836 | * StakingTheLovedOne: The [[spoiler:Dangerous path for the Mysterious Benefactor]] story requires you to make this choice when [[spoiler:Jack the Anarchist]] starts to become Jack-of-Smiles. Of course, since DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist, you just make him [[OnlyMostlyDead just dead enough]] that the Tomb Colonists will accept him (and thus keep him out of Jack-of-Smiles's reach). |
| 837 | * StarterEquipment: You begin the game equipped with a Prisoner's Mask, a Bundle of Ragged Clothing, a Pair of Leg Irons and a Pair of Iron Manacles after you finish the tutorial and escape from New Newgate Prison. |
| 838 | * StarvingArtist: They hang out at the Veilgarden. So you can sleep with them and learn their secrets. One in particular will follow you around for quite a while afterwards, annoying you at several opportunities... but when you get a Laboratory, he can be hired and he can help you abuse your budget for "research materials" (in your defense, Prisoner's Honey is a necessary reagent for Parabolan experiments). |
| 839 | * StatGrinding: Improving one's attributes almost always involves taking on challenges that include a check on those attributes. Both failures and successes will raise the four main ones (Dangerous, Persuasive, Shadowy, Watchful), improving the player's abilities in those attributes. |
| 840 | * StealthPun: |
| 841 | ** To buy a First City Coin, you need 111 surface currency -- and [[NumberOfTheBeast surface currency costs 6 pence]]. |
| 842 | ** The "Empyrean Redolence" item. "Empyrean" means "relating to the highest heavens", and "redolence" is often used to mean pungency or a strong scent. In other words, [[spoiler:it stinks to high heaven]]! |
| 843 | ** An option on the Church-Great Game conflict card is called [[TheAtoner "Everyone deserves a Second Chance."]] In addition to boosting your reputation with the Church, the storylet also gives you... one of every "Second Chance" item. |
| 844 | ** Before the climax of the Ambition Heart's Desire, your character [[spoiler:shakes the [[BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor monkey's paw]]]]. |
| 845 | * SteamPunk: Averted. There's an affectionate TakeThat if you write a Tale of the Future to please and impress the Empress's Court: |
| 846 | --->"The Court doesn't seem persuaded that the heroes of the future will be engineers, technologists and other middle-class types. But the business of raising London back to a glorious future on the surface has more than a few optimists openly weeping. University professors debate the plausibility of your vision.\ |
| 847 | "The youth of the city, many of whom have never seen the surface, are inspired by your conception. There is a rush to apply for places at the university's technical departments. Goggles are worn over top hats. The price of brass doubles overnight." |
| 848 | * StockNessMonster: You might run into a lake monster on the way to Flute Street, and can feed it with a Reprehensible Lizard if you don't want to risk a Dangerous check to pass it. |
| 849 | * StoryBreadcrumbs: When it comes to the background lore and the setting as a whole, you're never gonna get it all at once. You want to piece together what's happening and why everything is the way it is, you'll have to scrounge ''everywhere'' in London for snippets. |
| 850 | * StrawmanU: The University has ''two'' on the same campus - secular, liberal Benthic College and Anglican, upper-class Summerset College. Of course, both are exaggerated as the trope demands, and as the Neath demands: Benthic is full of {{mad scientist}}s, devils and the soulless, and Summerset is as elitist as it gets, will bar you from even visiting if you're missing a soul, and its dean has all the filthy secrets nobles usually keep in their attics. |
| 851 | * StreetUrchin: A whole bunch of gangs of them. They form an entire faction all to themselves, up there with groups like Devils, Revolutionaries and Spies as a whole. What they lack in direct influence and power, they more than make up for it in omnipresence, trickery and knowledge of the Wild Words. |
| 852 | * StuckItems: |
| 853 | ** If you have a Destiny, ship, spouse, club or airship, you are never able to unequip them unless if you get rid of them. |
| 854 | ** The normally invisible Burden slot only appears when you have an item occupying it, and it cannot be unequipped without progressing the story to rid the Burden entirely. When raising your Watchful cap from 227 to 230, you gain [[spoiler:An Infant Curator, Provisionally Known as Mr Transport]] (which reduces all highway stats by 20 and Respectable by 1) until the story is done. During the F.F. Gebrandt's Prelapsarian Exhibition event in summer 2022, any player that purchased one of the many mysterious ushabtiu that appeared in London later gained A Stalking Stone Shadow of your Very Own, which reduced Watchful, Dangerous, and Persuasive by 2 and Shadowy by 5 and remained until the story's completion. During the London Horticultural Show, players who want to remove the new opportunity cards from their deck will be burdened with a Fierce Commitment to London's Defence and/or a Stalwart Commitment to Helping until the event ends. |
| 855 | ** As soon as you obtain a Boon, it's automatically equipped and cannot be removed. Notably, unlike every other item slot, all of your Boons are equipped at the same time, though none of them lasts forever (Not to be Trifled With, The Walls Are Right and Ecdysis-related Boons are removed by Time the Healer, the main Moods last for an hour, An Epistemologically Flexible Approach to Historiography lasts for exactly 604800 seconds, and the other Boons are only available during their respective year's Estival). |
| 856 | * SuspiciouslySpecificDenial: |
| 857 | ** If you're on a certain island while on a Voyage of Scientific Discovery and decide to face the crew whose leader wants to steal your work, failing will force you to hand some of your notes over, accompanied with the flavor text: |
| 858 | --->Orthos' men want you to share your work. Well, of course. Sharing academic information is nothing less than your duty. Those rifles they're holding don't come into it. |
| 859 | ** Maywell's Hattery at the Bazaar sells an item known as the "Exceptional Hat". The description of the hat contains the following text: |
| 860 | --->The Exceptional Hat has never been observed to consume the brains of its wearers. |
| 861 | * SweetPollyOliver: There's a storylet that involves disguising as a butler to sneak into a study. If the player is female, it's an example of this trope. Later, a player who is A Person of Some Importance can disguise as a devil to collect souls from gullible spirifers. This trope applies again. A third storylet has your character sneak into a gentleman's club using their collection of fake moustaches. |
| 862 | * SymbolicMutilation: Unfinished Men, who are described as missing something, like a finger or a conscience. |
| 863 | * TakeAThirdOption: |
| 864 | ** At the beginning of a story, you get a standard [[spoiler: IAmDyingPleaseTakeMyMacGuffin. You could take it and flee, take it and sell it, or throw it into the river. However, since DeathIsCheap in Fallen London, you can just wait for the man to come back to life. (However, the guy's murderer is still around, so you need a very high Shadowy score to pull it off.)]] |
| 865 | ** Undiscardable conflict cards force you to help one faction or another, losing some or all Favours for the other in the process. Many of these also have a third option which is harder, takes multiple actions and require a certain Quirk. They are normally the most profitable of the options, though your actions doing so may displease both factions. The Affair of the Box story used to unlock a set of fourth options (which advanced the carousel, even if your Turncoat menace is too high), but these were removed from cards involving factions that have been converted from Connected to Favours/Renown. |
| 866 | ** The final choice of the Affair of the Box storyline. [[spoiler:You can side with Mr Fires or with Mr Stones, or take the more difficult option of publishing a newspaper issue that exposes the Masters' machinations to the public.]] |
| 867 | * TakenForGranite: [[spoiler:The Countess. Her Clay Man lover thought it would bridge the gap between them, to turn her to clay, but the process was slow, unpleasant, and you never find out if it was consensual or not]]. |
| 868 | * TakeThat: According to a card in the Tomb-Colonies, your character, a supposed blank slate to be written by the player, hates [[Creator/AlfredLordTennyson Tennyson]] a lot. |
| 869 | * TakeYourTime: Some storylets are presented with very urgent situations, such as being pursued by the police or facing a giant monster, but you're still free to LevelGrind, rearrange your equipment, and pursue other side quests before you actually attempt them. Downplayed by some Opportunity Cards marked as "can't discard." You can put them off, but you'll have to deal with them eventually. Some circumstances (such as having high Nightmares) will will throw lots of these at you until they're dealt with. |
| 870 | * TalkingAnimal: A few, in addition to the regular sort. Rattus Faber are talking rats with a talent for smithing and mechanics, intelligent cats are involved in much of the intrigue of the Neath, and the Labyrinth of Tigers is kept by [[spoiler:the tigers themselves]]. |
| 871 | * TattooedCrook: Clathermont's Tattoo Parlour specializes in tattoos that contain hidden messages. And considering pretty much everyone down in the Neath is a criminal in some way or another, and all player characters start out in [[JustifiedTutorial New Newgate Prison]]... |
| 872 | * TearsOfBlood: A common side effect of trying to read the [[BrownNote Correspondence]]. |
| 873 | * TeaserEquipment: Right from the beginning of the game you can see everything that the Bazaar sells, from the cheapest goods at Merrigans Exchange to the extremely expensive stuff like the 4-card lodgings, the Overgoat and Hesperidean Cider, which you won't be able to afford for a '''long''' time - if at all. In addition, as soon as you visit the University (regardless of whether your access is temporary or permanent) you can theoretically locate an Impossible Theorem (a high-end Mystery item which is required to buy a Suite at the Royal Bethlehem Hotel, a 5-card lodging) - if you have the required 49 Searing Enigmata and are able to pass the 500 Watchful challenge (and don't expect to meet both of these requirements until you reach the endgame content). |
| 874 | * TemporalThemeNaming: The revolutionary Calendar Council are all named for months - a ShoutOut to the Council of Days from ''Literature/TheManWhoWasThursday''. |
| 875 | * TemptingFate: You can warm up and provide light at the frigid Hurlers Station by welding Correspondence Plaques to a potbelly stove and tossing more in. The description for Stoking the Stove is "Nothing dangerous is going to happen, is it?" [[spoiler:Add enough plaques, and the stove gains a life of its own, escapes the building, and goes on a rampage through the Hinterlands, necessitating you to chase it down, fight it, and bring it back to the station.]] |
| 876 | * TheTetrisEffect: Subverted InUniverse. After taking a commission to sketch encoded tattoos, your character starts seeing tattoo-code in everything from the false-stars to doilies, and the LemonyNarrator comments "You've been at this too long." And then you stumble across some ''real'' code symbols in back-alley graffiti. |
| 877 | * ThemeNaming: |
| 878 | ** Most of the characters [[NoNameGiven aren't]] [[NamelessNarrative named]] and instead are called "the Adjective Job Title" (such as the Near-Sighted Horologist, Struggling Artist, Revolutionary Firebrand, Secular Missionary, and Dauntless Temperance Campaigner, to name a few). This may have stemmed from the Traitor Empress forbidding the use of her name, and thus, many people follow her convention. The magicians of Mahogany Hall do break the pattern with actual names, as do certain recurring characters. |
| 879 | ** The accommodations acquired through Opportunity Cards are all referred to as some kind of tower: the Lofty Tower for the Bazaar premises, the Tower of Sun and Moon for the reservation at the Royal Bethlehem, etc. |
| 880 | * ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill: |
| 881 | ** Attempting to locate an Impossible Theorem and fail will cause you to gain approximately 66 CP of Wounds, which means going from zero wounds to ''11''. Only 8 Wounds is required to kill you. |
| 882 | ** If you're Seeking the Name, have a Stain on your Soul and sell it to the devils, if you go to the Forgotten Quarter and fail a very difficult Shadowy check, both your Wounds ''and'' Nightmares will be set to ''15''. |
| 883 | * TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodSandwich: In the first chapter of "Evolution", you hold a meeting of the Dilmun Club, but everyone seems to be too engrossed with discussion to partake in any of the hors d'oeuvres and wine you had to procure. Toward the end of the meeting, Feducci finally takes a canapé, but a sharp interruption to his rant from the Implacable Detective causes him to put it back down. In the end, nobody has eaten anything, and you're left with it all. |
| 884 | * TheThingThatWouldNotLeave: The Exceptional Story "The Thing That Came In From The Fog" concerns a humanoid cloud of fog that comes into the player character's home uninvited and refuses to leave, while drinking all the good tea and getting biscuit crumbs absolutely everywhere. The first part of the story focuses around the player trying to rid themselves of the damned thing. |
| 885 | * ThreeWaySex: |
| 886 | ** One of the possible endings of the Melancholy Curate storyline has you seducing both him and his sister. |
| 887 | ** It's also possible to conclude your affairs with [[spoiler: The Barbed Wit and the Acclaimed Beauty]] this way -- [[spoiler:on the Empress's throne, no less!]] |
| 888 | * ThrowDownTheBomblet: The archetypal weapon for revolutionaries. A later storyline points out that no matter how strong the association, the modern revolutionary prefers dynamite. |
| 889 | * TimedMission: |
| 890 | ** In most expeditions in the Forgotten Quarter, you must compete against one or more rivals who will cause you to fail the expedition when their progress (which has a chance to increase every time you progress in the expedition) reaches 10, meaning that for the longer expeditions like the Tomb of Seven, Gallery of Serpents or Cave of the Nadir, you cannot rely on the cautious option, because even if the skill check is easy and you won't waste your expedition supplies, your rivals will eventually overtake you. |
| 891 | ** You are only allowed to spend a limited time on each voyage of scientific discovery to Bullbone Island, Corpsecage Island or Grunting Fen as every single action increases the Orthos is Coming! menace (representing the progress of Dr Orthos' [[BlatantLies Fleet of Truth]] chasing you and hellbent on stealing your research papers) which forces you to flee the island when it reaches 10. |
| 892 | ** Each time you decide to publish your newspaper, you are given 12 actions (not including opportunity cards) to accumulate Meritorious/Salacious/Outlandish Copies before you are forced to publish; this is even measured by a quality called 'Hours before the Deadline'. |
| 893 | ** Once you start a term as governor of Port Carnelian, you have 26 actions to gain as many Silver Horseheads and/or Striped Delights as possible before your Time Passing in Office quality reaches 12, marking the end of your term and forcing you to cash in at least one of these qualities for rewards. |
| 894 | ** In the Cave of the Nadir, the Irrigo menace will increment with everything you do, and if your Irrigo reaches 10 you'll be kicked out (and if you don't want to lose a lot of highway stats it'd be in your interest to leave before getting kicked out). |
| 895 | ** Each time you enter Helicon House, you're allowed to spend only 5 actions before your Time Remaining in Helicon House runs out and you have to leave (although entry is free if you have the Oneiric Key or Location of an Underground Organ). |
| 896 | * ToHellAndBack: |
| 897 | ** At the climax of the ''Twelve-Fifteen from Moloch Street'' Exceptional Story, you can choose to enter Hell and come back. |
| 898 | ** You also visit the battlefields of Hell during the [[spoiler:''For All The Saints'']] Exceptional Story. |
| 899 | ** You go on an expedition to Hell using a forgotten passageway known as Devilbone Road during the Exceptional Story [[spoiler:''Tauroktonos'']]. |
| 900 | * TooAwesomeToUse: Mood cards (which are put in the Boon slot, and thus will not interfere with your regular equipment) give a huge +22 increase to one of your highway stats that lasts for only an hour and are rare enough that you can go for months without drawing one. Also Darkdrop Coffees and Magnificent Feasts, the only items that restore your actions (Darkdrop Coffees restore 10; Magnificent Feasts ''all'') and are nigh-impossible to obtain outside of special promotions and holiday events, aside from a few free Darkdrop Coffees you get while learning about the game before you learn just how scarce they are. |
| 901 | * TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth: If you choose to lay a dead rat in your inventory to rest during a mass funeral for them, one of the (rat) mourners will console you by saying he was this. "E's best off quiet in the earth. Bein' eaten by beetles." |
| 902 | * TooImportantToWalk: As a Person of Some Importance, an opportunity card gives the player an option to defend a pair of Clay Men from prejudice, which leads to an opportunity in the sidestreets to purchase a Clay Sedan Chair, carried by those Clay Men. |
| 903 | * TooSpicyForYogSothoth: |
| 904 | ** Devils will recoil from you in disgust if you offer them your soul tainted by Seeking Mr Eaten's Name. The Quiet Deviless will actually [[StressVomit vomit]], burst into tears, and order you out of her room. |
| 905 | ** If you own [[ImmortalityInducer Hesperidean Cider]] and die, an optional storylet on the slow boat will send you straight home. The boatman, it seems, is ''not'' happy to see you there. |
| 906 | * TownWithADarkSecret: The village of Mutton Island, where the locals are friendly, the scenery is unusually lush, and the townsfolk perform sinister rituals around the well after dark. |
| 907 | * TheTropeFormerlyKnownAsX: According to a sidebar blurb, at some point the Bazaar attempted to force the ''London Magazine'' to change its name. In defiance, the magazine changed its name to ''The Magazine Formerly Known As The London Magazine''. |
| 908 | * TwoAliasesOneCharacter: If you do the Nemesis ambition, you eventually learn that [[spoiler:Mr Cups and Mr Mirrors]] are the same individual responsible for orchestrating the murder of your loved one. Why they would pretend to be two separate [[spoiler:Masters]] hasn't been answered in full yet. |
| 909 | * UndergroundLevel: The Roads Beneath underneath Fallen London, which lead into Flute Street, where everything is dark. |
| 910 | * UnequalRites: The "Wars of Illusion" storyline. Glass and Shroud are two groups of [[MagiciansAreWizards stage magicians]] struggling for dominance. |
| 911 | * UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay: As people diving in the deep, dark waters of the Magistracy of the Evenlode, even in the depths of the Earth where the laws of physics and reality are violated every day, there is no real escape from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness Decompression Sickness]], which must be watched and avoided by not emerging too quickly. Granted, it's not an ''especially'' terrible thing when DeathIsCheap and people are MadeOfIron on principle, but it still bloody hurts. |
| 912 | * TheUnintelligible: Rubbery Men. Some people do try, though. |
| 913 | -->A passing Special Constable taps your shoulder and says, 'We normally write that one down as "Othassassass" - helps if you stay consistent.' He tips his black helmet at you and is on his way. |
| 914 | * ViolationOfCommonSense: Redeeming the 40 Renown items for the Great Game, Bohemians and Revolutionaries require you to go insane to move to the Mirror-Marches (for the former two) or the State of some confusion (for the latter). The corresponding items for the Constables and Criminals require you to die and go to prison (respectively), while being exiled to the Tomb-Colonies is actually the fastest way to grind Favours: Tomb-Colonies, as well as the place to redeem the 40 Renown: Tomb-Colonies item. |
| 915 | * WasOnceAMan: This sometimes happens to those who strike deals with the PowersThatBe. Examples include [[spoiler:the Cantigaster]] and [[spoiler:the King with a Hundred Hearts]]. And generally those humans that stay in power while the Masters do their thing tend to not remain so, as [[spoiler:the Queen's extended family]] prove. The Masters generally have no idea what they're doing when they're working with human anatomy, psychology and general place in the universe, and exposure to the Neath's bizarre properties and dangers in general will do that to people. |
| 916 | * WeakenedByTheLight: Almost anything that originates in the Neath will become useless upon exposure to sunlight. Glim will melt, Prisoner's Honey will become regular honey, and most pertinent to the player, the suspension on permanent death doesn't extend to the Surface. After you visit the boatman, you're in the Neath for good unless you somehow become truly immortal. |
| 917 | * WealthyYachtOwner: You, potentially, can obtain a Majestic Pleasure Yacht if you are willing to spend a lot of time grinding for the very expensive Comprehensive Bribes (as well as the somewhat less expensive Cellars of Wine and Favours in High Places) and then risk your chances at a gamble with a very low success chance, where a failure will take away one of the three aforementioned items. Either that or you can spend 20 Fate to get the b____y thing without having to grind anything. |
| 918 | * WeirdCurrency: Justificande Coins, the currency of [[TimeTravelTenseTrouble Irem]], have negative value; that is, they ''indebt'' the person to whom they are given. Paying for something in these coins means accepting a number of them along with whatever it is you're 'buying'. |
| 919 | * WhatDidIDoLastNight: If you drink a bottle of Black Wings Absinthe yourself, the next morning you'll wonder what you did and where you got your opera cloak, though [[GameplayAndStorySegregation apparently you don't keep the cloak]]. |
| 920 | * WhaleEgg: Whitsun involves collecting and hatching eggs that contain a number of unsettling pets, bizarre companions, and freaks of nature. [[ExaggeratedTrope They can also hatch into clothing or weapons]]. |
| 921 | * WhamShot: Happens in the header for the [[spoiler:secret Neon future of Irem, which showcases the Bazaar... with a multitude of [[UrbanFantasy skyscrapers and neon signs in front of it.]]]] |
| 922 | -->A shrill recording of birdsong jolts you awake. [[spoiler:Check your watch immediately: 06:37, 28°, AQI Moderate, BP 16/9, stress endocrine response detected, 777 unread emails-]] |
| 923 | * WhammyBid: Carefully {{defied|Trope}} when you acquire the Implausible Beartrap -- your opponent is ''about'' to make one, when they suddenly drop dead. As you're bidding on a massive weapons cache for the Revolutionaries (of which the Implausible Beartrap is your share), they sent in a co-conspirator to make extra-sure you win. |
| 924 | * WhyDontYaJustShootHim: In an opportunity card, a naive young man wants to kill you, a dangerous veteran. In one option, you confront him, and when he asks when the duel should be, you shoot him on the spot. The other, more difficult option involves sending out an [[RefugeInAudacity open invitation to any would-be assassins]] and [[CombatPragmatist picking them off from a rooftop]] when they show up at the appointed time. |
| 925 | * WickedWeasel: Weasels are popular pets, as they're relatively easy to keep clean and happy underground. Weasel-fighting, whether with common animals or purebred Araby Fighting-Weasels, is a popular sport. Just be careful what tunes you hum around them. [[YourHeadAsplode They can take things a bit literally.]] |
| 926 | * WorkplaceHorror: Many of the storylines involve the characters treating the various horrors of the Neath as workplace inconveniences. The Exceptional Story "The Bloody Wallpaper" is a standout example. In it the player is charged with working a shift at the [[BedlamHouse Royal Bethlem Hotel]] and the horror comes equally from the threats and dangers within the hotel itself, and the soul crushing horror of having to [[StepfordSmiler keep smiling]] while dealing with the inconsiderate and disgusting guests. It is equally comparable to a surreal nightmare and a tough shift at a bad service job. |
| 927 | * WorldsStrongestMan: ''You'', should you manage to raise your Dangerous to 200 and achieve the 'Shattering Force' Person of Some Importance title, and even moreso if you manage to overcap to the hard cap of 215 through leveling Notability. Combines with WorldsBestWarrior and TheGreatestStyle should you achieve the Herculean task of becoming a [[BraggingRightsReward Paramount Presence]], which despite being practically useless if you're capable of getting the stats in the first place, entails getting ALL four main stats to 215 and acquiring the four 'advanced' Viscera qualities (London's Nerves for Watchful, London's Marrow for Shadowy, London's Sinew for Dangerous, London's Blood for Persuasive), which requires well over a '''hundred''' Notability. At that point '''''you are the strongest human being in existence.''''' |
| 928 | [[/folder]] |
| 929 | ---- |
| 930 | ->'''''Perusing a Page of Examples''' has been reset. A conclusion, or a new beginning?''\ |
| 931 | '''''Watchful''' is increasing...'' |
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