DLC for Fallen London
An addon for Fallen London. The Exceptional Story for December, 2017. First story in the Season of Silver.
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"Steeped in Honey" has shot up to the top of my list. I'm not sure I'll ever be in a position to give these stories some kind of unambiguous ranking, many are good for very different reasons, but here we have a phenomenal character piece, and interesting exploration of rich-poor dynamics in London, and just generally exceptional storytelling. It is definitely my favorite of Mary Goodden's works to have played so far, and that's among already fairly august company.
The story starts with you running into a Withered Vagabond, living in a poor district of the city in an abandoned, ruined shack. You technically have a reason for being there tied to the seasonal frame story, but this is one of the stories with only a tangential relation to season it's in. The Vagabond is living rough spending what little she can scrounge on newspapers, where she is fruitlessly looking for clues to her identity. The Vagabond is suffering from amnesia and is troubled by painful dreams. The cause is fairly obvious: she's been used to feed bees for the creation of Red Honey.
The Vagabond turns out to be a wealthy Surfacer, come to the Neath to spread charity. She has a sharp mind and a shrewd business sense. The homeless shelter she remembers was a place that she set up, and it thrived, still run by people who love her for the assistance she offered. The Vagabond is also overly romantic, and that ties into her feelings about the poor. There really seems to be nothing she isn't willing to give in order to help, and inevitably this got exploited.
Red Honey is a fascinating element of Fallen London's lore because it's one of the most monstrous things in a game built in no small part on it's extensive collections of horrors and moral ambiguity. But it's a useful tool for uncovering information, so despite feeling this way, I always seem to get drawn into using it, and sometimes even supporting its manufacture. It's an effective tool for creating complicity with the player, and this story is no exception.
The Mnemosyne Honey-den is a terrible place. They deal in Red Honey, but soothe the consciences of their customers that the Red Honey they sell only comes from volunteers. Indeed, they have legal documentation, contracts and such proving this to be the case. Never mind that some rights are so fundamental that you can't even waive them yourself. Never mind that many, like the Vagabond, are coerced into signing, in her case with threats of violence against one of her shelter's flock, who was actually an employee of Mnemosyne. Never mind that the constant suffering and the damage to memories stop them ever from being cognizant enough to back out. And never mind that all the customers must know this, since in consuming the Red Honey they are seeing these memories.
The kind of deniability is popular among the powerful, and crazily seems to work, the same kind of thing that had newspapers in the southern US publishing articles about how really, when you think about it, slavery was the best thing that could ever happen to the black population. Light reading for between the whippings. And of course they still publish that nonsense today. It's not uncommon for me to come across discussions of Fallen London stories where someone wants an option to make one of the characters suffer. Usually it comes off as slightly deranged over-reaction, but there were a lot more of those voices this time, and I guess I was one of them.
At least to a point. Firebombing the honey den might well have been satisfying, but it probably wouldn't actually solve any of these problems in the long run. When you're in the den, you can have a small act of rebellion, spilling the crate of red honey from which you're being given a sample. You have two opportunities to do this. You can always break the crate, but failure will make it obvious it was intentional and get you kicked out. Success, on the other hand, is revealing. The Proprietor basically laughs it off. After all, you're a customer. You may think of it as a lot of honey you just ruined, but they've got palettes of the stuff in the back, and that's just what stock they have on hand.
Bomb the honey den, and it reopens elsewhere in a few days, and people probably keep using the honey while it's closed anyways. Keep bombing the red honey den's and you'll get the constables after you, and possibly the Ministry of Public Decency. The honey users are too powerful. The main cage-garden for keeping prisoners to extract the honey from is at that palace, and their biggest consumer is the royal family. Truly helping, ending the red honey trade, would be a story on the size of the ambitions, your enemies would be on that kind of power level, and that wide an extent.
And after all that, I ended up using red honey harvested from the Withered Vagabond anyways. The hope was to get better informed on the exact details of her situation. In terms of gameplay, it appears to be set-up that the very thorough can find everything they need for a choice of endings without doing this, which feels extremely appropriate. The only information I don't think you can find elsewhere is the certainty that her "bait" whatever remorse he shows today, was absolutely willing at the time. And you can't really change anything with that information either. More mistakes for me to be complicit in.
Players, myself included wanted to save the Withered Vagabond, but she is already passed doomed. Nothing you can do will bring back her memory, or stop here from having period bouts of searing pain. All you can offer is comfort and closure. I returned her to the care of the shelter that she had set up, in the hands of people who owed her everything. And when asked where her life went wrong, I couldn't give a straight answer. The same character traits that brought her into the sway of Mnemosyne were also what created almost everything pure and good in the story. Calling the ending bittersweet feels like it's doing a disservice to just how bleak aspects of the story were, but it was crafted so exceptionally. Highly recommended.
The story starts with you running into a Withered Vagabond, living in a poor district of the city in an abandoned, ruined shack. You technically have a reason for being there tied to the seasonal frame story, but this is one of the stories with only a tangential relation to season it's in. The Vagabond is living rough spending what little she can scrounge on newspapers, where she is fruitlessly looking for clues to her identity. The Vagabond is suffering from amnesia and is troubled by painful dreams. The cause is fairly obvious: she's been used to feed bees for the creation of Red Honey.
The Vagabond turns out to be a wealthy Surfacer, come to the Neath to spread charity. She has a sharp mind and a shrewd business sense. The homeless shelter she remembers was a place that she set up, and it thrived, still run by people who love her for the assistance she offered. The Vagabond is also overly romantic, and that ties into her feelings about the poor. There really seems to be nothing she isn't willing to give in order to help, and inevitably this got exploited.
Red Honey is a fascinating element of Fallen London's lore because it's one of the most monstrous things in a game built in no small part on it's extensive collections of horrors and moral ambiguity. But it's a useful tool for uncovering information, so despite feeling this way, I always seem to get drawn into using it, and sometimes even supporting its manufacture. It's an effective tool for creating complicity with the player, and this story is no exception.
The Mnemosyne Honey-den is a terrible place. They deal in Red Honey, but soothe the consciences of their customers that the Red Honey they sell only comes from volunteers. Indeed, they have legal documentation, contracts and such proving this to be the case. Never mind that some rights are so fundamental that you can't even waive them yourself. Never mind that many, like the Vagabond, are coerced into signing, in her case with threats of violence against one of her shelter's flock, who was actually an employee of Mnemosyne. Never mind that the constant suffering and the damage to memories stop them ever from being cognizant enough to back out. And never mind that all the customers must know this, since in consuming the Red Honey they are seeing these memories.
The kind of deniability is popular among the powerful, and crazily seems to work, the same kind of thing that had newspapers in the southern US publishing articles about how really, when you think about it, slavery was the best thing that could ever happen to the black population. Light reading for between the whippings. And of course they still publish that nonsense today. It's not uncommon for me to come across discussions of Fallen London stories where someone wants an option to make one of the characters suffer. Usually it comes off as slightly deranged over-reaction, but there were a lot more of those voices this time, and I guess I was one of them.
At least to a point. Firebombing the honey den might well have been satisfying, but it probably wouldn't actually solve any of these problems in the long run. When you're in the den, you can have a small act of rebellion, spilling the crate of red honey from which you're being given a sample. You have two opportunities to do this. You can always break the crate, but failure will make it obvious it was intentional and get you kicked out. Success, on the other hand, is revealing. The Proprietor basically laughs it off. After all, you're a customer. You may think of it as a lot of honey you just ruined, but they've got palettes of the stuff in the back, and that's just what stock they have on hand.
Bomb the honey den, and it reopens elsewhere in a few days, and people probably keep using the honey while it's closed anyways. Keep bombing the red honey den's and you'll get the constables after you, and possibly the Ministry of Public Decency. The honey users are too powerful. The main cage-garden for keeping prisoners to extract the honey from is at that palace, and their biggest consumer is the royal family. Truly helping, ending the red honey trade, would be a story on the size of the ambitions, your enemies would be on that kind of power level, and that wide an extent.
And after all that, I ended up using red honey harvested from the Withered Vagabond anyways. The hope was to get better informed on the exact details of her situation. In terms of gameplay, it appears to be set-up that the very thorough can find everything they need for a choice of endings without doing this, which feels extremely appropriate. The only information I don't think you can find elsewhere is the certainty that her "bait" whatever remorse he shows today, was absolutely willing at the time. And you can't really change anything with that information either. More mistakes for me to be complicit in.
Players, myself included wanted to save the Withered Vagabond, but she is already passed doomed. Nothing you can do will bring back her memory, or stop here from having period bouts of searing pain. All you can offer is comfort and closure. I returned her to the care of the shelter that she had set up, in the hands of people who owed her everything. And when asked where her life went wrong, I couldn't give a straight answer. The same character traits that brought her into the sway of Mnemosyne were also what created almost everything pure and good in the story. Calling the ending bittersweet feels like it's doing a disservice to just how bleak aspects of the story were, but it was crafted so exceptionally. Highly recommended.