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The first story in the Season of Adorations is "The Pursuit of Moths". If it's the Gothic Romance of the season, focused on the tragedy of love and a sense of impending doom, then "The Murgatroyd Formula" is the Wry Satire of the bunch. It's basically a workplace sitcom, with the love theme of the season being explored through the somewhat antagonistic relationship between two sisters (and more distantly the father that got them into this situation).
The Murgatroyd Company is one of the big fictional post-fall conglomerates who keep popping up across the Fallen London universe. It's also a front for a major player in the Great Game, something that is sort of an open secret, to the players if not the people of London. Here you get a little bit of a glimpse at the family that created it. Tabitha and Harriet Murgatroyd get handed an Apothecary business from their father, and cannot agree on anything regarding the operations, to the point that they are unprepared for the grand opening. You more or less just get dragged in as a convenient bystander to tie-break their arguments and help with all the last-minute errands.
Harriet is somewhat older, and more business minded. She'd like something boring but profitable. She wants to prover herself to her father, because she want's to get more involved with the family business, both the public and secret aspects of it. Tabitha wants to showcase her chemistry skill, and is constantly looking for new, experimental, and morally dubious angles. She wants to succeed here, but that's more incidental. If it proves anything it's that she could be off on her own. She essentially wants to be a Fallen London player character.
The story is pretty light, there's lots of bickering and possibility for misunderstand. It's also likely to get a happy ending. It's rare for me to try ruining things for supporting characters, but there are often options to do so. This story is set up so that most at least of the outcomes come up positive for the sisters. The one who gets their product launched gets to see their ideas vindicated, but the other learns to respect their sister's ideas more. It is pretty easy to reconcile them to each other even if, for example, you talk Harriet into following her dreams and abandoning the family business.
This story really worked for me, the player and story sometimes disagree on what constitutes a 'good' ending, but Mary Goodden has a talent for having her characters bounce back from most outcomes while still allowing the player a lot of expressive freedom, so that you are unlikely to doom anyone in her stories by sticking to your principles. At the same time, she does great work fleshing out characters, and giving the player a lot of expressiveness in interacting with them. I know her stories don't seem to work for everyone, but you're a Goodden fan, or are looking to learn more about her, then I'd give this one a strong recommendation.
The Murgatroyd Company is one of the big fictional post-fall conglomerates who keep popping up across the Fallen London universe. It's also a front for a major player in the Great Game, something that is sort of an open secret, to the players if not the people of London. Here you get a little bit of a glimpse at the family that created it. Tabitha and Harriet Murgatroyd get handed an Apothecary business from their father, and cannot agree on anything regarding the operations, to the point that they are unprepared for the grand opening. You more or less just get dragged in as a convenient bystander to tie-break their arguments and help with all the last-minute errands.
Harriet is somewhat older, and more business minded. She'd like something boring but profitable. She wants to prover herself to her father, because she want's to get more involved with the family business, both the public and secret aspects of it. Tabitha wants to showcase her chemistry skill, and is constantly looking for new, experimental, and morally dubious angles. She wants to succeed here, but that's more incidental. If it proves anything it's that she could be off on her own. She essentially wants to be a Fallen London player character.
The story is pretty light, there's lots of bickering and possibility for misunderstand. It's also likely to get a happy ending. It's rare for me to try ruining things for supporting characters, but there are often options to do so. This story is set up so that most at least of the outcomes come up positive for the sisters. The one who gets their product launched gets to see their ideas vindicated, but the other learns to respect their sister's ideas more. It is pretty easy to reconcile them to each other even if, for example, you talk Harriet into following her dreams and abandoning the family business.
This story really worked for me, the player and story sometimes disagree on what constitutes a 'good' ending, but Mary Goodden has a talent for having her characters bounce back from most outcomes while still allowing the player a lot of expressive freedom, so that you are unlikely to doom anyone in her stories by sticking to your principles. At the same time, she does great work fleshing out characters, and giving the player a lot of expressiveness in interacting with them. I know her stories don't seem to work for everyone, but you're a Goodden fan, or are looking to learn more about her, then I'd give this one a strong recommendation.
This review contains spoilers
The Pursuit of Moths is our opening to the Season of Adoration. The season is about "love of all kinds from friendship to worship". This serves as a fairly cynical introduction to the theme. All the characters are motivated by some form of love or adoration, and all those relationships are unhealthy and destructive.
You get involved in a club formed entirely around the works of a specific street artist, the Moth-cloaked Vandal. The Vandal is making highly illegal graffiti art of Correspondence sigils around the city, using them to draw in Frost-Moths, one of the many stranger life-forms that only exist in the Neath. The club all claim an interest in the Vandal as an artist, and have analyses of here meaning, but all (or at least most) of these are put-ons.
As you investigate the Vandal together, all the other members find reasons to reveal their secrets to you, with the hope you'll help them achieve their real goals. One is an undercover agent for the Ministry of Public Decency and wants to arrest the Vandal. One is a Revolutionary who wants revenge for the Vandal deserting the cause. The final member is her father, and a Snuffer, who wants to reconcile an extremely troubled family history. The founder of the group is more 'sincere' if that's the word, in admiration for the Vandal's art, but that also get's dark.
The Vandal herself also turns out to be somewhat fanatical. She knows about the existence of the Judgements, and that her own parentage makes her "Shameful", condemned by the Judgements for being outside of their design. The Frostmoths are like this as well, and so she is gathering as many as she can to take to the surface to offer up, along with herself, as a sacrifice, knowing that she won't be given salvation.
The Vandal is interesting because you learn broad swaths about her background, but don't know the details. She must have all this information based on how she's making her decisions, but which parts had she known and been willing to live with, and which was the final straw that made her abandon the revolutionary cause for this self-destructive end is left up in the air.
All the characters have some overriding motivation that drives their actions, love for a cause, for the rule of law, for family, for art, for god. Everyone dearly wants something from the Vandal, and it's never something she wants to give. Including the player, if you want her to live. It's hard to judge, but it's quite possible this story is impossible to end bloodlessly, and likely if you did there would be at least as many unsatisfied people as in one of the many ends where at least one is dead.
At the time of playing this felt like a very strong indictment of "adoration", but considering it in hindsight it maybe feels like it's more that you're arriving too late, that any of the characters might have been reconciled with each other but they have gone past the point of no return. I'm not sure exactly. It definitely came off as rather bleak, but I would still say it was satisfying to play.
You get involved in a club formed entirely around the works of a specific street artist, the Moth-cloaked Vandal. The Vandal is making highly illegal graffiti art of Correspondence sigils around the city, using them to draw in Frost-Moths, one of the many stranger life-forms that only exist in the Neath. The club all claim an interest in the Vandal as an artist, and have analyses of here meaning, but all (or at least most) of these are put-ons.
As you investigate the Vandal together, all the other members find reasons to reveal their secrets to you, with the hope you'll help them achieve their real goals. One is an undercover agent for the Ministry of Public Decency and wants to arrest the Vandal. One is a Revolutionary who wants revenge for the Vandal deserting the cause. The final member is her father, and a Snuffer, who wants to reconcile an extremely troubled family history. The founder of the group is more 'sincere' if that's the word, in admiration for the Vandal's art, but that also get's dark.
The Vandal herself also turns out to be somewhat fanatical. She knows about the existence of the Judgements, and that her own parentage makes her "Shameful", condemned by the Judgements for being outside of their design. The Frostmoths are like this as well, and so she is gathering as many as she can to take to the surface to offer up, along with herself, as a sacrifice, knowing that she won't be given salvation.
The Vandal is interesting because you learn broad swaths about her background, but don't know the details. She must have all this information based on how she's making her decisions, but which parts had she known and been willing to live with, and which was the final straw that made her abandon the revolutionary cause for this self-destructive end is left up in the air.
All the characters have some overriding motivation that drives their actions, love for a cause, for the rule of law, for family, for art, for god. Everyone dearly wants something from the Vandal, and it's never something she wants to give. Including the player, if you want her to live. It's hard to judge, but it's quite possible this story is impossible to end bloodlessly, and likely if you did there would be at least as many unsatisfied people as in one of the many ends where at least one is dead.
At the time of playing this felt like a very strong indictment of "adoration", but considering it in hindsight it maybe feels like it's more that you're arriving too late, that any of the characters might have been reconciled with each other but they have gone past the point of no return. I'm not sure exactly. It definitely came off as rather bleak, but I would still say it was satisfying to play.
Factory of Favours has consistently been the lowest rated Exceptional Story since it's release. The only Fate-locked content rated lower is The Rubbery Murders, a story short enough that you're likely paying about $0.25 per paragraph, and which has probably been purchased more often accidentally by someone looking for Flute Street than by people who actually want to play it. I don't share the same level of vitriol for Factory that I've seen in other players, but I do understand why it's so poorly rated.
Factory of Favours was the closing story of the Season of Silver. The first story in the season was Steeped in Honey, which is generally well liked (and I adored). The second is Lamentation Lock, which is felt to be mediocre, but furthermore is very similar to Factory of Favours in mechanical structure and themes (at least probably, they're both fairly vague feeling to me). So after a great story, you've got 2 much more middling ones, but the third one feels like a rehash of the story immediately before it, but worse.
Lamentation Lock I said had too many characters sharing focus, to let them be developed enough to build on how interesting their concepts were. Factory of Favours has 3 characters. There's the man who hires you for the story. He doesn't care if you actually do the job or not, which might be interesting in another game, but is fairly common for ES quest givers. There's the factory manager, who is distinguished by the fact that she is not a rat or a clay man, and that you interact with her even less than the other characters. And then there's Boris. Put a pin in him for a minute.
Lamentation Lock had the three wards peopled by various "criminals" roughly categorized into Dangerous, Shadowy, and Watchful crimes. But while the ward leaders were the only named characters, other's didn't feel completely samey. When you were doing greased wrestling in the violent wards, it felt like you were talking to distinct groups than when you were comparing knife collections or gossiping about the Recidivist. In comparison in Factory of Favours there are rats and clay men at the factory, but aside from Boris, who we'll get to shortly, there's noting setting any of them apart. They are effectively indistinguishable.
Then there's Boris. The two main strikes against Boris are that we know nothing interesting about him, and he is constantly annoying. He is your antagonist, in that he does not want the factory to resume normal operations, but it's unclear why he doesn't want this. He may or may not be unfinished. I saw people in both camps in terms of guessing which was true, and trying to explain his actions through that, but there just wasn't much to go on. He never explains what he actually wants, or gives any kind of backstory.
In terms of the annoyance, Boris starts of on a bad foot by unexpectedly putting you in debt for asking a question that he insists it will be useful to know the answer to, but which has no mechanical benefit, and little narrative purpose. Through out the story, Boris is watching you, and will Dislike if you do things he does not approve of. While these may be obvious with some thought, they're usually not signposted, and sometimes this happens even on checks that you have succeeded at. This will eventually lock you out of some endings. It wouldn't be deal breakers, except that, again, it's never really clear why any of this is happening.
You're trying to get a factory working again. Why did it stop? it seems like people just took to pointless bartering, and it feels like this is meant to be a metaphor for capitalism or the like, but it just doesn't seem to have teeth. No one can explain the point, just give longer and longer but uninformative explanations of why any given transaction is profitable for them. It doesn't help that the rats and clay men are treated as undifferentiated masses. You try to ask the rats what's going on and it's as much as stated that they have no idea, they just sort of got caught up in things. The clay men just go along with it, in a way that makes it feel, moreso than really any other story, that the idea is that they're essentially factory robots that have gone wrong, following the wrong commands. If this kind of thing were personified in a character, it might help some (Boris doesn't count, not being heavily characterized, and lacking clear motiviations), but as the undifferentiated masses of species, it almost comes off as racist.
So you go to a random factory, play along with the workers for a while, fix a machine with no obvious purpose, and then fix things, save the workers from themselves, and then fix things, or don't.
This wasn't Graham Robertson's only ES, it was his fourth and last. I assume at least some of that was the very negative reception. While I liked some of his other work, his other stories are generally unpopular as well, though not to this extent, and I could see both Failbetter or Robertson lacking the interest in further collaborations after this reception. I do really wish I knew more about Robertson though. His Exceptional Stories are the only works listed on IFDB, but it seems hard to believe he'd be hired for Exceptional Stories without some kind of portfolio. And I'd like to see him playing to his strengths elsewhere, to maybe get a handle on where this one went so wrong.
Factory of Favours was the closing story of the Season of Silver. The first story in the season was Steeped in Honey, which is generally well liked (and I adored). The second is Lamentation Lock, which is felt to be mediocre, but furthermore is very similar to Factory of Favours in mechanical structure and themes (at least probably, they're both fairly vague feeling to me). So after a great story, you've got 2 much more middling ones, but the third one feels like a rehash of the story immediately before it, but worse.
Lamentation Lock I said had too many characters sharing focus, to let them be developed enough to build on how interesting their concepts were. Factory of Favours has 3 characters. There's the man who hires you for the story. He doesn't care if you actually do the job or not, which might be interesting in another game, but is fairly common for ES quest givers. There's the factory manager, who is distinguished by the fact that she is not a rat or a clay man, and that you interact with her even less than the other characters. And then there's Boris. Put a pin in him for a minute.
Lamentation Lock had the three wards peopled by various "criminals" roughly categorized into Dangerous, Shadowy, and Watchful crimes. But while the ward leaders were the only named characters, other's didn't feel completely samey. When you were doing greased wrestling in the violent wards, it felt like you were talking to distinct groups than when you were comparing knife collections or gossiping about the Recidivist. In comparison in Factory of Favours there are rats and clay men at the factory, but aside from Boris, who we'll get to shortly, there's noting setting any of them apart. They are effectively indistinguishable.
Then there's Boris. The two main strikes against Boris are that we know nothing interesting about him, and he is constantly annoying. He is your antagonist, in that he does not want the factory to resume normal operations, but it's unclear why he doesn't want this. He may or may not be unfinished. I saw people in both camps in terms of guessing which was true, and trying to explain his actions through that, but there just wasn't much to go on. He never explains what he actually wants, or gives any kind of backstory.
In terms of the annoyance, Boris starts of on a bad foot by unexpectedly putting you in debt for asking a question that he insists it will be useful to know the answer to, but which has no mechanical benefit, and little narrative purpose. Through out the story, Boris is watching you, and will Dislike if you do things he does not approve of. While these may be obvious with some thought, they're usually not signposted, and sometimes this happens even on checks that you have succeeded at. This will eventually lock you out of some endings. It wouldn't be deal breakers, except that, again, it's never really clear why any of this is happening.
You're trying to get a factory working again. Why did it stop? it seems like people just took to pointless bartering, and it feels like this is meant to be a metaphor for capitalism or the like, but it just doesn't seem to have teeth. No one can explain the point, just give longer and longer but uninformative explanations of why any given transaction is profitable for them. It doesn't help that the rats and clay men are treated as undifferentiated masses. You try to ask the rats what's going on and it's as much as stated that they have no idea, they just sort of got caught up in things. The clay men just go along with it, in a way that makes it feel, moreso than really any other story, that the idea is that they're essentially factory robots that have gone wrong, following the wrong commands. If this kind of thing were personified in a character, it might help some (Boris doesn't count, not being heavily characterized, and lacking clear motiviations), but as the undifferentiated masses of species, it almost comes off as racist.
So you go to a random factory, play along with the workers for a while, fix a machine with no obvious purpose, and then fix things, save the workers from themselves, and then fix things, or don't.
This wasn't Graham Robertson's only ES, it was his fourth and last. I assume at least some of that was the very negative reception. While I liked some of his other work, his other stories are generally unpopular as well, though not to this extent, and I could see both Failbetter or Robertson lacking the interest in further collaborations after this reception. I do really wish I knew more about Robertson though. His Exceptional Stories are the only works listed on IFDB, but it seems hard to believe he'd be hired for Exceptional Stories without some kind of portfolio. And I'd like to see him playing to his strengths elsewhere, to maybe get a handle on where this one went so wrong.
I feel like The Icarian Cup is kind of exploding my views of Harry Tuffs' stories. I tend to think of them all as being some kind of multilayered, heavily thematic pieces with hidden depths. I'm not saying any of those aren't true. I'm not sure. But even on the very most surface of readings, The Icarian Cup is a rip-roaring adventure yarn about a boat race. It has shot to the top of my list of Tuffs' stories on those merits alone.
You get recruited by the Dark-Spectacled Admiral to investigate a boat race that has returned after 30 years. It turns out the race is a plot by the New Sequence to find the greatest zailor and abduct them for purposes unknown. The second place finisher will be given the prize. After a couple of rival captains refuse to quit when warned, you're asked to join one of them. You've then got a degree of freedom to control the outcome of the race and the consequences.
The story has roughly three acts. The first follows investigations around London, the second is the meat of the race, and the third covers the abduction and its aftermath. Each of these gives opportunities to learn more about the primary story characters, the Emulous Excursionist and the Annotated Zeefarer.
The Excursionist is kind of a high-society prig, but unlike a lot of those characters, he really is competent in his chosen field. While he feels surlier about the rivalry than the Zeefarer, once you get to know him, he's also likeable. He feels like a very bittersweet character, in that it doesn't seem like he's able to achieve his goals in any of the endings (though as a note, this may actually be because of a bug in the ending, so it's possible it has since been fixed).
The Zeefarer is, first, a comedic character. She speaks in an incomprehensible mix of zailor's metaphors that even her crew mostly can't understand. The "Annotated" from her name comes from the accompanying translation provided by her close friend and confidant, a Polythremean boot. It's sort of an odd riff on the Topsy King, in there seems to be a little more structure to her words, and you don't have to spend so much effort to understand her because of the translator. The incomprehensibility also appears to be somewhat affected, as in emergencies or times of high emotion she speaks more clearly. But it feels more like a part of her identity than a joke, so I think it works. And like the Excursionist, getting to know her reveals more serious and sympathetic depths.
The other big star, at least for Sunless Sea players, is the Dark-Spectacled Admiral. The London Admiralty, as well as it's navy, are not a major presence in Sunless Sea, but the Admiral and his staff form a serious lifeline for the players, by paying for port reports and other intelligence you can provide. He also stridently opposes the New Sequence, who are not always enemies, but are one of the most common dangers on the open sea. Even as a representative of an imperialistic (at least in theory) power, he is both helpful and sincere. He's shown up in a previous ES, The Garden Embassy, but it's a minor role where he's out of his element. Here, even though he's a glorified quest-giver, he feels very in the mode I'd interacted with him in the other game, and it's great. Having him smile at the end at finally getting in a solid victory is just grand.
The final reveal is interesting because of just how mundane (in some ways) it is. There isn't a huge amount of new lore introduced, but rather just a different spin on things the player has likely already been introduced to in one form or another. Still horrifying though. And generally afterwards it manages to wrap things up well (bug mentioned in the Excursionist's section not withstanding). Highly recommended for anyone looking to get hyped about Zee travel.
You get recruited by the Dark-Spectacled Admiral to investigate a boat race that has returned after 30 years. It turns out the race is a plot by the New Sequence to find the greatest zailor and abduct them for purposes unknown. The second place finisher will be given the prize. After a couple of rival captains refuse to quit when warned, you're asked to join one of them. You've then got a degree of freedom to control the outcome of the race and the consequences.
The story has roughly three acts. The first follows investigations around London, the second is the meat of the race, and the third covers the abduction and its aftermath. Each of these gives opportunities to learn more about the primary story characters, the Emulous Excursionist and the Annotated Zeefarer.
The Excursionist is kind of a high-society prig, but unlike a lot of those characters, he really is competent in his chosen field. While he feels surlier about the rivalry than the Zeefarer, once you get to know him, he's also likeable. He feels like a very bittersweet character, in that it doesn't seem like he's able to achieve his goals in any of the endings (though as a note, this may actually be because of a bug in the ending, so it's possible it has since been fixed).
The Zeefarer is, first, a comedic character. She speaks in an incomprehensible mix of zailor's metaphors that even her crew mostly can't understand. The "Annotated" from her name comes from the accompanying translation provided by her close friend and confidant, a Polythremean boot. It's sort of an odd riff on the Topsy King, in there seems to be a little more structure to her words, and you don't have to spend so much effort to understand her because of the translator. The incomprehensibility also appears to be somewhat affected, as in emergencies or times of high emotion she speaks more clearly. But it feels more like a part of her identity than a joke, so I think it works. And like the Excursionist, getting to know her reveals more serious and sympathetic depths.
The other big star, at least for Sunless Sea players, is the Dark-Spectacled Admiral. The London Admiralty, as well as it's navy, are not a major presence in Sunless Sea, but the Admiral and his staff form a serious lifeline for the players, by paying for port reports and other intelligence you can provide. He also stridently opposes the New Sequence, who are not always enemies, but are one of the most common dangers on the open sea. Even as a representative of an imperialistic (at least in theory) power, he is both helpful and sincere. He's shown up in a previous ES, The Garden Embassy, but it's a minor role where he's out of his element. Here, even though he's a glorified quest-giver, he feels very in the mode I'd interacted with him in the other game, and it's great. Having him smile at the end at finally getting in a solid victory is just grand.
The final reveal is interesting because of just how mundane (in some ways) it is. There isn't a huge amount of new lore introduced, but rather just a different spin on things the player has likely already been introduced to in one form or another. Still horrifying though. And generally afterwards it manages to wrap things up well (bug mentioned in the Excursionist's section not withstanding). Highly recommended for anyone looking to get hyped about Zee travel.
The Garden Embassy is one of the stories that sheds some light on the Surface, and where history has diverted since the fall of London. In particular, the story follows you attending the opening of an embassy from a collection of the Britain's colonies from the surface.
From a perspective of alternate history and discussion of surface politics, you might find the story a little light. Most of that discussion comes in the final act, with the lead up having as much to do with scheming London factions (and clothes, lots of clothes). If you're interested in the topic, I would recommend the story, but I'd recommend you play the more recent Dernier Cri first. It feels like that gives you a little more grounding in material realities, and helps flesh out context for what gets discussed here.
Honestly, most of the story is spent preparing for the party and then navigating the different social circles there. And both those parts are pretty fun. Things can feel a little bit obtuse, but it lead to something closer to actual puzzle solving, which I found engaging. One suggestion: when getting clothes from Mrs Gladrags, don't pay. I don't actually know what happens, and it's probably bad (though not that bad), but it'd definitely be interesting.
You don't get a lot of development for any of the characters, some new, some returning, but the author works well with they time they're each given. The three standout characters for me are the Dark-Spectacled Admiral, the Decorated Ambassador, and the Gregarious Engineer. The Admiral admittedly mostly stood out because he's a character (likely well remembered by the player because of how helpful he is) from Sunless Sea. He represents London's interests at the party, and there's comedy derived from just how out-of-place he feels in even a formal social gathering.
The Ambassador is the main representative of the Surface. I am not clever enough to have worked out which colony he would have grown up in, but in many ways, once you can finally actually talk to her, the story is more about her learning of London through you than the other way around. She feels like a character who has put her own life on hold to pursue the interests of her government, and is to some extent scheming as actively as the various Londoners, but I'd argue this is all well justified by the colonies being so routinely shafted by the empires that establish them.
The Engineer is a very straight-laced, very masculine non-binary individual, and they feel like they help fill out a broader spectrum of representation, leapfrogging out of some of the ruts Failbetter had dug with it's recurring characters. This is probably the work of Ash McAllan, the lead writer (one of her two offering guesting for Exceptional Stories), and it feels like it's echoed forward with a broader range of queer characters afterwards.
The resolution of The Garden Embassy feels somewhat off-kilter, one of the places where the ambiguity of your actions doesn't quite pay off. When you're able to show the Ambassador some of London, what you see, and the actions you take there shape her takeaways about the city. Then back at the Embassy you can recommend a policy for her to set, but the options available are based on her earlier impressions. I tried to have her interact with all the people and get to know the common folk, but she just ended up despising the city, my only option was to recommend she write the whole thing off. It didn't feel like it fit with what I'd been trying for (I would have been satisfied with a mechanically identical option where you can't change her mind, but do disagree with her), but it also didn't exactly seem to fit with how she'd reacted. A little more time might have helped with this, but I think I also got a bit unlucky. Another player was trying to convince her of London's might, and while that also failed, the speech promising to unite the colonies against imperialism felt a lot more in line with what she'd seen and her responses.
So it's a story in two very different parts. Both are interesting, but flawed, and then there are some additional really odd bits there that don't necessarily seem to fit with the larger whole, but are interesting enough on their own to fully justify their presence. An odd experience, but a fun one.
From a perspective of alternate history and discussion of surface politics, you might find the story a little light. Most of that discussion comes in the final act, with the lead up having as much to do with scheming London factions (and clothes, lots of clothes). If you're interested in the topic, I would recommend the story, but I'd recommend you play the more recent Dernier Cri first. It feels like that gives you a little more grounding in material realities, and helps flesh out context for what gets discussed here.
Honestly, most of the story is spent preparing for the party and then navigating the different social circles there. And both those parts are pretty fun. Things can feel a little bit obtuse, but it lead to something closer to actual puzzle solving, which I found engaging. One suggestion: when getting clothes from Mrs Gladrags, don't pay. I don't actually know what happens, and it's probably bad (though not that bad), but it'd definitely be interesting.
You don't get a lot of development for any of the characters, some new, some returning, but the author works well with they time they're each given. The three standout characters for me are the Dark-Spectacled Admiral, the Decorated Ambassador, and the Gregarious Engineer. The Admiral admittedly mostly stood out because he's a character (likely well remembered by the player because of how helpful he is) from Sunless Sea. He represents London's interests at the party, and there's comedy derived from just how out-of-place he feels in even a formal social gathering.
The Ambassador is the main representative of the Surface. I am not clever enough to have worked out which colony he would have grown up in, but in many ways, once you can finally actually talk to her, the story is more about her learning of London through you than the other way around. She feels like a character who has put her own life on hold to pursue the interests of her government, and is to some extent scheming as actively as the various Londoners, but I'd argue this is all well justified by the colonies being so routinely shafted by the empires that establish them.
The Engineer is a very straight-laced, very masculine non-binary individual, and they feel like they help fill out a broader spectrum of representation, leapfrogging out of some of the ruts Failbetter had dug with it's recurring characters. This is probably the work of Ash McAllan, the lead writer (one of her two offering guesting for Exceptional Stories), and it feels like it's echoed forward with a broader range of queer characters afterwards.
The resolution of The Garden Embassy feels somewhat off-kilter, one of the places where the ambiguity of your actions doesn't quite pay off. When you're able to show the Ambassador some of London, what you see, and the actions you take there shape her takeaways about the city. Then back at the Embassy you can recommend a policy for her to set, but the options available are based on her earlier impressions. I tried to have her interact with all the people and get to know the common folk, but she just ended up despising the city, my only option was to recommend she write the whole thing off. It didn't feel like it fit with what I'd been trying for (I would have been satisfied with a mechanically identical option where you can't change her mind, but do disagree with her), but it also didn't exactly seem to fit with how she'd reacted. A little more time might have helped with this, but I think I also got a bit unlucky. Another player was trying to convince her of London's might, and while that also failed, the speech promising to unite the colonies against imperialism felt a lot more in line with what she'd seen and her responses.
So it's a story in two very different parts. Both are interesting, but flawed, and then there are some additional really odd bits there that don't necessarily seem to fit with the larger whole, but are interesting enough on their own to fully justify their presence. An odd experience, but a fun one.
There is one stand-out moment near the beginning of Lamentation Lock. You're following a warden to an empty cell, looking for the previous occupant, who had a coin you're tracking. The warden turns to leave, but before going says something like "Oh, you were looking for a coin, weren't you. The one who brought it doesn't need it anymore.", and tosses you the coin.
The next action you're likely to take is literally called "It cannot be this easy", to try to leave. And you're character's right to think that. Usually the ES's tie into seasonal frames one of two ways. You are actively working towards some long term goal that get's achieved near the end, or else incidentally stumble upon the connection while doing something unrelated. Here, instead, you're actively seeking something that is given freely, and very quickly, because the story doesn't care about what you want.
Unfortunately I think it's mostly downhill after that. The Lamentation Lock is some kind of weird mountain retreat/involuntary asylum, where people seem to come voluntarily but aren't allowed to leave until they've resolved their sins by resolving the sins of others. You move through three different wards based around Watchful, Dangerous, and Shadowy "sins".
There are various people in every area who you have some interactions of varied interest with, but the story is built around 3 characters, the de facto leaders of each ward, as well as the Warden from the promo art. They're all potentially interesting, but there just isn't enough time to get to know them all. Gavin Inglis has pretty varied output, but one thing that seems to hold true is that he can write excellent characters, but only if they don't have to share screen-time. They need room to breathe and grow, and the structure of the Lock just doesn't afford that to anyone.
The story seems to be about redemption and sins coming from self-perception, but it's messy. The Warden is too tight lipped about what he wants, and many of the redemptions seem to be built on deliberately poor foundations. Eventually you can leave, possibly with some of the other characters. There's a really annoying line at the end where, as you're leaving, your character thinks "Maybe there was nothing keeping me hear to begin with", despite the fact that yes, there was. If you try to follow that "It cannot be that easy" option you get choked, or possibly drugged, into unconsciousness. I feel like a strong ending could have tied things together and been satisfying if not excellent, but instead I just got the feeling the story itself was confused about what was going on.
The next action you're likely to take is literally called "It cannot be this easy", to try to leave. And you're character's right to think that. Usually the ES's tie into seasonal frames one of two ways. You are actively working towards some long term goal that get's achieved near the end, or else incidentally stumble upon the connection while doing something unrelated. Here, instead, you're actively seeking something that is given freely, and very quickly, because the story doesn't care about what you want.
Unfortunately I think it's mostly downhill after that. The Lamentation Lock is some kind of weird mountain retreat/involuntary asylum, where people seem to come voluntarily but aren't allowed to leave until they've resolved their sins by resolving the sins of others. You move through three different wards based around Watchful, Dangerous, and Shadowy "sins".
There are various people in every area who you have some interactions of varied interest with, but the story is built around 3 characters, the de facto leaders of each ward, as well as the Warden from the promo art. They're all potentially interesting, but there just isn't enough time to get to know them all. Gavin Inglis has pretty varied output, but one thing that seems to hold true is that he can write excellent characters, but only if they don't have to share screen-time. They need room to breathe and grow, and the structure of the Lock just doesn't afford that to anyone.
The story seems to be about redemption and sins coming from self-perception, but it's messy. The Warden is too tight lipped about what he wants, and many of the redemptions seem to be built on deliberately poor foundations. Eventually you can leave, possibly with some of the other characters. There's a really annoying line at the end where, as you're leaving, your character thinks "Maybe there was nothing keeping me hear to begin with", despite the fact that yes, there was. If you try to follow that "It cannot be that easy" option you get choked, or possibly drugged, into unconsciousness. I feel like a strong ending could have tied things together and been satisfying if not excellent, but instead I just got the feeling the story itself was confused about what was going on.
This isn't an Exceptional Story, it's a Premium Story, meaning it was released outside the normal monthly schedule, and usually that it is somewhat more heavily focused on gameplay, with a fairly small story. They tend to have permanent mechanical consequences that are useful after finishing the story.
Upwards! builds on to the Bone Market. You can technically get it before you can access the Bone Market, which would be really unfortunate. You get recruited by a paleontologist who wants to start a dig on the Roof. You equip an expedition, and set out, with the front half being preparations and the back half being the dig. There is a story, but it's pretty short. If you're hoping a Roof visit will have a lot of Starved Men lore or anything similar you're mostly out of luck, there's just a few tidbits.
If you play this, you'll want to do it for the bone options. You can exchange Hoards for a unique T7 bone, as well as just grinding out amalgamous skulls. I think it makes sense to consider it a bone market extension, since the market is already built around bulk converting between different resources.
If you're interested in the mechanical possibilities, I'd recommend it, but otherwise, you can get a better story from most of the other offerings.
Upwards! builds on to the Bone Market. You can technically get it before you can access the Bone Market, which would be really unfortunate. You get recruited by a paleontologist who wants to start a dig on the Roof. You equip an expedition, and set out, with the front half being preparations and the back half being the dig. There is a story, but it's pretty short. If you're hoping a Roof visit will have a lot of Starved Men lore or anything similar you're mostly out of luck, there's just a few tidbits.
If you play this, you'll want to do it for the bone options. You can exchange Hoards for a unique T7 bone, as well as just grinding out amalgamous skulls. I think it makes sense to consider it a bone market extension, since the market is already built around bulk converting between different resources.
If you're interested in the mechanical possibilities, I'd recommend it, but otherwise, you can get a better story from most of the other offerings.
This review contains spoilers
Adornment is another Exceptional Story offering from Harry Tuffs. The main throughline I see with most (possibly all) of Tuff's stories is that he works on multiple layers. Queen of the Elephants follows a group of thieves performing strange heists, but it also implies that the forces at play are just reflections of an ongoing conflict in the dreamlands. Tauroktonos follows a professor trying to investigate a Mithraic temple who instead gets drawn into a desperate quest that takes on aspects of a Tauroctony, a Mithraic rite. In that way, Adornment is something that I haven't fully wrapped my head around.
The story kicks off with an earthquake revealed to be caused by mining operations from Mr Stones. The ES is firmly situated in the near aftermath of Mr Chimes Grand Clearing-Out, and both the other Masters and the people of London are very cross with further risks to the city's stability. You quickly get drawn into a bizarre plot against Mr Stones, and have some opportunities to support or hinder the plans before everything goes off the rails and all the main characters are trapped in a mine collapse. Things continue to get worse until an eventual rescue.
The first part of the story mostly works to lay out expectations for the plot (many of which are overturned) and to introduce the characters in more normal circumstances. The second half applies risk and pressure to all of them and sees what shakes out. And the common thing you learn about each character in these interactions reflects their faith.
Plotting against Stones is the Superstitious Smuggler, who has a highly accurate name. Their superstitions are apparent in all their actions including their scheming. They want to hide a cursed diamond (almost certainly the Hope Diamond) in the Master's possession, believing the diamond will kill it. The other new character is Mica, an unfinished, Quaker, Clay Man who follows his faith's beliefs in pacifism and self-sacrifice.
Finally there's Mr Stones itself. Mr Stones, despite feeling like the focus character, is one of the reasons I don't feel like I've fully got a handle on what this story is about. Mr Stones either doesn't believe in anything but material, temporal power, or else does worship, while also despising, the Judgements. Both seem to lead in the same direction. It wants as much money and power as possible because that's all it respects. You get to see a few glimpses of Mr Stones mind, and it feels like having a better grasp of what it thinks would be the key to unlocking the rest of the story.
The climax seems to be adding more twists on these characters that I don't fully understand. And I realize that makes it seem like there's a problem with the story, or I didn't like it, but that's just not true. It's great. It fleshes out one of the Masters, even if it will probably make you like it less, and it delivers some very interesting characters and ideas, as well as being well written. It also feels like it's building up to something long term, since Mr Stones seems incapable of actually learning from it's mistakes, and continues to behave aggressively in Codename: Sugarplum soon after.
The story kicks off with an earthquake revealed to be caused by mining operations from Mr Stones. The ES is firmly situated in the near aftermath of Mr Chimes Grand Clearing-Out, and both the other Masters and the people of London are very cross with further risks to the city's stability. You quickly get drawn into a bizarre plot against Mr Stones, and have some opportunities to support or hinder the plans before everything goes off the rails and all the main characters are trapped in a mine collapse. Things continue to get worse until an eventual rescue.
The first part of the story mostly works to lay out expectations for the plot (many of which are overturned) and to introduce the characters in more normal circumstances. The second half applies risk and pressure to all of them and sees what shakes out. And the common thing you learn about each character in these interactions reflects their faith.
Plotting against Stones is the Superstitious Smuggler, who has a highly accurate name. Their superstitions are apparent in all their actions including their scheming. They want to hide a cursed diamond (almost certainly the Hope Diamond) in the Master's possession, believing the diamond will kill it. The other new character is Mica, an unfinished, Quaker, Clay Man who follows his faith's beliefs in pacifism and self-sacrifice.
Finally there's Mr Stones itself. Mr Stones, despite feeling like the focus character, is one of the reasons I don't feel like I've fully got a handle on what this story is about. Mr Stones either doesn't believe in anything but material, temporal power, or else does worship, while also despising, the Judgements. Both seem to lead in the same direction. It wants as much money and power as possible because that's all it respects. You get to see a few glimpses of Mr Stones mind, and it feels like having a better grasp of what it thinks would be the key to unlocking the rest of the story.
The climax seems to be adding more twists on these characters that I don't fully understand. And I realize that makes it seem like there's a problem with the story, or I didn't like it, but that's just not true. It's great. It fleshes out one of the Masters, even if it will probably make you like it less, and it delivers some very interesting characters and ideas, as well as being well written. It also feels like it's building up to something long term, since Mr Stones seems incapable of actually learning from it's mistakes, and continues to behave aggressively in Codename: Sugarplum soon after.
"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.
The Chimney Pot Wars is a lighter story that serves as something of a breather in the middle of the Season of Revolutions. Something has fallen from the Roof, and each of the urchin gangs want it as a gift to Storm their sort-of-patron deity. The resultant war is mostly played for comedy. Occasionally urchin infighting is compared to real-life gang wars with only child soldiers, but this story is not that. If anything it feels like an elaborate playground game, where you slowly absorb the gangs into your own team to get more strength for the climax. In a game where death is often treated very casually, no-one is killed even temporarily, that I remember.
Your own character gets involved out of necessity, as while the conflict isn't deadly it is massively disruptive. You start trying to end the fighting but will likely end up leading an army of conquered urchins against one last holdout. You will eventually gain control of the thing from the Roof, at which point you can pick who to support for the finale.
All of this is fairly light. There are lots of relatively low impact actions scattered around as you support or undermine the various gangs and build up or trade in various story qualities to gain your desired results. Brining urchin gangs on side is more work, but gives you temporary companions who can help with the special challenges of the story. I got to know a few of them enough to like them, and while they wouldn't be particularly useful outside of the Exceptional Story, I do kind of wish you got to keep them as permanent companions. That said, it would go somewhat against the themes of story, that lighthearted or not, the war is serious business for the urchins themselves.
The highlight of the story is the bits you get about each of the gangs, which can often be a little interchangeable in the normal course of Fallen London. The Regiment is effectively lead by Colonel Molly, but they have a de facto head who is an adult, likely to lend just a tad more legitimacy to them controlling a cannon. The Knotted Sock are given some of the only characterization I believe I've ever seen for them, and in one of the bigger lore shake-ups of the story, the leader of the Fischer Kings is seriously considering abandoning Storm for the (hopefully less spiteful) patronage of the Bazaar.
It didn't overstay its welcome, and was generally enjoyable. Good place to get more texture for the urchins. Probably the least tied-in to the tone and themes of the finale, but I won't hold that against it.
Your own character gets involved out of necessity, as while the conflict isn't deadly it is massively disruptive. You start trying to end the fighting but will likely end up leading an army of conquered urchins against one last holdout. You will eventually gain control of the thing from the Roof, at which point you can pick who to support for the finale.
All of this is fairly light. There are lots of relatively low impact actions scattered around as you support or undermine the various gangs and build up or trade in various story qualities to gain your desired results. Brining urchin gangs on side is more work, but gives you temporary companions who can help with the special challenges of the story. I got to know a few of them enough to like them, and while they wouldn't be particularly useful outside of the Exceptional Story, I do kind of wish you got to keep them as permanent companions. That said, it would go somewhat against the themes of story, that lighthearted or not, the war is serious business for the urchins themselves.
The highlight of the story is the bits you get about each of the gangs, which can often be a little interchangeable in the normal course of Fallen London. The Regiment is effectively lead by Colonel Molly, but they have a de facto head who is an adult, likely to lend just a tad more legitimacy to them controlling a cannon. The Knotted Sock are given some of the only characterization I believe I've ever seen for them, and in one of the bigger lore shake-ups of the story, the leader of the Fischer Kings is seriously considering abandoning Storm for the (hopefully less spiteful) patronage of the Bazaar.
It didn't overstay its welcome, and was generally enjoyable. Good place to get more texture for the urchins. Probably the least tied-in to the tone and themes of the finale, but I won't hold that against it.
I'm not sure how to start talking about Five Minutes to Midday. I think that's because I don't have a lot of thoughts about themes or some over-arching idea. It's a solid story, if somewhat unremarkable in terms of plot. There are some mechanical experiments that I like but they're tied up some ideas that aren't necessarily bad, but that run counter to modern convention for the exceptional stories, making them opaque for current players.
You meet the Subdued Protestor, and pretty quickly he confides in you that he plans to bomb the Brass Embassy, and he needs your help. You can turn him in to a couple of different factions, if you so desire, but in the way of many ES's, past and present, you're told to go along with things for now. I actually thought the justifications worked pretty well (though I didn't pick one of them myself). The Brass Embassy has protection contracts with London and the Bazaar, so a bombing becomes a point of leverage. Constables want him caught in the act, Hell wants the bombing to happen, albeit with notice. The Subdued Protestor, meanwhile, just really wants to strike a blow for freedom.
You spend most of the story casing the Embassy, and making preparations for the attack. Getting a peak inside is interesting, and you get some minor lore tidbits. There are some small outside activities tie ins. You track down someone with a key using an Investigation, and similar. They're small enough as to not break the pacing, like Flash Lays are in danger of, and it makes the ES feel like a part of the larger game (though that may not be a good thing, for every player).
At each stage of preparations you have a choice of alternatives, where one is more expensive, but will earn the Protestor's trust. While the expensive options are usually better in stories, it's notable that trust-gaining options are signposted with hint text to make it explicit which options raise trust, because I don't think the narrative reasoning is always clear. It's obvious he wants a real bombing, to really hurt the embassy, so picking the harder to reach target over an accessible location which will cause more superficial damage makes sense. It's less clear why he cares how you handle the Goat Demons.
The hint text there is particularly noticeable, because the big difference between this story and modern ones is how little is explicitly signposted, including mechanical Rubicons that lock you out of options. Reporting the bombing plot early will, I think prevent you from fully supporting the protestor afterwards, and similarly if you toast him "Sincerely" while drinking together, then you won't be able to fully betray him. Both of these are reasonable conclusions, but a modern story would make these lock-outs explicit, particularly because there are times when something that seems final isn't. And that's the big hiccup in playing. I think if this had become the norm, that there was always a degree of scrutiny expected from the player to work out when a permanent choice was being made, that we might be in a very different but reasonably functional environment of Exceptional Stories. That isn't how things shook out though, and that makes playing this one somewhat confusing.
The climax has the bombing go through, or not, and further consequences, based on the choices you made. The epilogue for the story is more protracted than stories usually are. If, for example, you did bomb the Embassy, it will be under repair for some time, with you being locked out of Hell's opportunity card until you've cycled it long enough for repairs to complete. There's a reward so that you aren't just being punished for this, and the final denouement actually makes it feel like maybe things have or will changed as a result of your actions. It's an impressive feat considering by that point mechanically everything is back to where it started.
I like this story, despite the parts that have become dated by evolving story conventions. It brings more information on Hell, and introduces more texture to Revolutionaries too. They usually appear as tacit allies of Hell, due to them both being opposed to London, the Bazaar, and the powers that be in general. They have close ties in the Iron Republic. But as you get to dig into the Protestor's motives you get one of the glimpses of the real evil that devils are capable of. The sort of thing you rarely see outside the campaign of '68. And the Protestor seems genuinely baffled by just how comfortable people have become with them. It's a lot less cartoonish than the usual kerfuffle about their desire for souls, and it adds welcome depth to both sides.
You meet the Subdued Protestor, and pretty quickly he confides in you that he plans to bomb the Brass Embassy, and he needs your help. You can turn him in to a couple of different factions, if you so desire, but in the way of many ES's, past and present, you're told to go along with things for now. I actually thought the justifications worked pretty well (though I didn't pick one of them myself). The Brass Embassy has protection contracts with London and the Bazaar, so a bombing becomes a point of leverage. Constables want him caught in the act, Hell wants the bombing to happen, albeit with notice. The Subdued Protestor, meanwhile, just really wants to strike a blow for freedom.
You spend most of the story casing the Embassy, and making preparations for the attack. Getting a peak inside is interesting, and you get some minor lore tidbits. There are some small outside activities tie ins. You track down someone with a key using an Investigation, and similar. They're small enough as to not break the pacing, like Flash Lays are in danger of, and it makes the ES feel like a part of the larger game (though that may not be a good thing, for every player).
At each stage of preparations you have a choice of alternatives, where one is more expensive, but will earn the Protestor's trust. While the expensive options are usually better in stories, it's notable that trust-gaining options are signposted with hint text to make it explicit which options raise trust, because I don't think the narrative reasoning is always clear. It's obvious he wants a real bombing, to really hurt the embassy, so picking the harder to reach target over an accessible location which will cause more superficial damage makes sense. It's less clear why he cares how you handle the Goat Demons.
The hint text there is particularly noticeable, because the big difference between this story and modern ones is how little is explicitly signposted, including mechanical Rubicons that lock you out of options. Reporting the bombing plot early will, I think prevent you from fully supporting the protestor afterwards, and similarly if you toast him "Sincerely" while drinking together, then you won't be able to fully betray him. Both of these are reasonable conclusions, but a modern story would make these lock-outs explicit, particularly because there are times when something that seems final isn't. And that's the big hiccup in playing. I think if this had become the norm, that there was always a degree of scrutiny expected from the player to work out when a permanent choice was being made, that we might be in a very different but reasonably functional environment of Exceptional Stories. That isn't how things shook out though, and that makes playing this one somewhat confusing.
The climax has the bombing go through, or not, and further consequences, based on the choices you made. The epilogue for the story is more protracted than stories usually are. If, for example, you did bomb the Embassy, it will be under repair for some time, with you being locked out of Hell's opportunity card until you've cycled it long enough for repairs to complete. There's a reward so that you aren't just being punished for this, and the final denouement actually makes it feel like maybe things have or will changed as a result of your actions. It's an impressive feat considering by that point mechanically everything is back to where it started.
I like this story, despite the parts that have become dated by evolving story conventions. It brings more information on Hell, and introduces more texture to Revolutionaries too. They usually appear as tacit allies of Hell, due to them both being opposed to London, the Bazaar, and the powers that be in general. They have close ties in the Iron Republic. But as you get to dig into the Protestor's motives you get one of the glimpses of the real evil that devils are capable of. The sort of thing you rarely see outside the campaign of '68. And the Protestor seems genuinely baffled by just how comfortable people have become with them. It's a lot less cartoonish than the usual kerfuffle about their desire for souls, and it adds welcome depth to both sides.
I've now played 3 Chandler Groover Exceptional Stories (the others being Paisley and Caveat Emptor, 5 to go), and this is my favorite of them so far. They all tend to experiment with the mechanics in a more extreme way than other authors' work. Generally in solid ways, though occasionally things can get frustrating, even if I understand the idea. They always tend to compliment the narrative, which is always solid, but this time the whole "ludonarrative" just sings.
You get asked to find a missing dog, a Dachshund named Sugarplum. You quickly find the surface journalist hiring you is eyes-deep in the Great Game, but that's not all that surprising. More surprising is that the more you investigate, the more people you find who are also missing their own dog, a dachshund named Sugarplum. I had my own theories about where this was going, and the truth turned out to be much weirder.
The main mechanical hook of the story is the decryptions. You encounter various coded communications of the spy ring involved in the story. It turns out that every message is both a coded message, and a key to not one but every other coded message. This creates a nice bit of feedback where each new code you uncover exponentially increases the number of leads.
I could easily believe this wouldn't scale to a story even one extra code, and indeed things are broken up even further by, for example, having a message found in pieces, so you can only use it as a cypher text until much later. I can also understand the complaints some people had that the in story descriptions of code-breaking treated it like something new to your character, even if they were a professional spy (like me). I can see that, but it amounted to just one storylet feeling off to me, and it was a fun mechanic, so I guess I can forgive some weirdness like that.
That same idea plays importantly into the themes. Having multiple messages in a single cypher text isn't a great idea for a single network of spies, and that's acknowledged in story. Its a deliberate weakness because the whole spy ring are just pawns to be discarded. In the end they're a tool of larger forces using them to advance their own positions. The multiple encodings also plays exceptionally (heh) well with the big climactic reveal.
Another standout point here is the story's relationship to the larger Fallen London world. Like Queen of the Elephants before it, this story ties in heavily to the late game lore (much further endgame in this case, tying into Railway exclusive content). I'm not far enough to fully grasp the subtleties of the events, and I still enjoyed it well enough, while also whetting my appetite for the Railway. The tie-in also works without needing to unlock the Railway (admittedly that might be harder to do more than once).
Further, the story fits into what appears to be an ongoing development in the larger narrative. Several stories have involved, to one degree or another, Mr. Stones flexing its muscles to gain more control in London, and this story continues that development. We probably won't be able to fully evaluate that arc (if that's what it is) until it's concluded, but it's definitely intriguing, and helps play into the theme of all the characters (including arguably the PC) being pawns of larger forces. Stones isn't a major character here, but unlike everyone else involved it gets everything it wants, and there's not much you can do about that.
Altogether a fun, funny, and fascinating narrative that lays groundwork for future stories. Chandler Groover at his best, and highly recommended to anyone curious to try Exceptional Stories.
You get asked to find a missing dog, a Dachshund named Sugarplum. You quickly find the surface journalist hiring you is eyes-deep in the Great Game, but that's not all that surprising. More surprising is that the more you investigate, the more people you find who are also missing their own dog, a dachshund named Sugarplum. I had my own theories about where this was going, and the truth turned out to be much weirder.
The main mechanical hook of the story is the decryptions. You encounter various coded communications of the spy ring involved in the story. It turns out that every message is both a coded message, and a key to not one but every other coded message. This creates a nice bit of feedback where each new code you uncover exponentially increases the number of leads.
I could easily believe this wouldn't scale to a story even one extra code, and indeed things are broken up even further by, for example, having a message found in pieces, so you can only use it as a cypher text until much later. I can also understand the complaints some people had that the in story descriptions of code-breaking treated it like something new to your character, even if they were a professional spy (like me). I can see that, but it amounted to just one storylet feeling off to me, and it was a fun mechanic, so I guess I can forgive some weirdness like that.
That same idea plays importantly into the themes. Having multiple messages in a single cypher text isn't a great idea for a single network of spies, and that's acknowledged in story. Its a deliberate weakness because the whole spy ring are just pawns to be discarded. In the end they're a tool of larger forces using them to advance their own positions. The multiple encodings also plays exceptionally (heh) well with the big climactic reveal.
Another standout point here is the story's relationship to the larger Fallen London world. Like Queen of the Elephants before it, this story ties in heavily to the late game lore (much further endgame in this case, tying into Railway exclusive content). I'm not far enough to fully grasp the subtleties of the events, and I still enjoyed it well enough, while also whetting my appetite for the Railway. The tie-in also works without needing to unlock the Railway (admittedly that might be harder to do more than once).
Further, the story fits into what appears to be an ongoing development in the larger narrative. Several stories have involved, to one degree or another, Mr. Stones flexing its muscles to gain more control in London, and this story continues that development. We probably won't be able to fully evaluate that arc (if that's what it is) until it's concluded, but it's definitely intriguing, and helps play into the theme of all the characters (including arguably the PC) being pawns of larger forces. Stones isn't a major character here, but unlike everyone else involved it gets everything it wants, and there's not much you can do about that.
Altogether a fun, funny, and fascinating narrative that lays groundwork for future stories. Chandler Groover at his best, and highly recommended to anyone curious to try Exceptional Stories.
For me on initial play this was a serviceable but not particularly notable story where you get to learn a bit more about Pentecost Apes and the Empire of Hands, as well as what might be considered a small epilogue for the matter of the Delightful Adventuress, for those who played through the Empire of Hands stories in Sunless Sea.
There's also a Flash Lay, which I've never been able to connect with in a fun way, and the conclusion has a fair amount of randomness, trial and error, and a time mechanic. But while I still consider the first of these something of a negative, the mechanical novelty turned out to be tied into the story in ways I didn't expect (enough so that I missed out on a fair chunk of the possibilities).
When you are exploring the house, I would advise you to take your time. I don't think anything is to be gained for actually running out and being imprisoned again, but once you're free there's plenty to be gained in terms of lore snippets and additional options. Building up more knowledge of the Empire of Hands can unlock additional possibilities, and exploring thoroughly can unlock at least 2 endings I was completely unaware of during my own playthrough (it's definitely more complicated than a single end-of-story choice).
This was Richard Cobbett's final contribution to Fallen London. While he has a slim number of ES credits he was one of the foundational writers of the game. With Alexis Kennedy already (and more thankfully) gone, this feels like a changing of the guard moment. But unlike Alexis Kennedy's final outing, I feel like the more experimental parts of this are something I'd be interested in seeing visited again.
P.S. Also, apparently Chandler Groover contributed to the story? He's listed in the credits, a full 18 months before his debut with the Rat-Catcher. Why and how did this happen? Someone, please tell me.
There's also a Flash Lay, which I've never been able to connect with in a fun way, and the conclusion has a fair amount of randomness, trial and error, and a time mechanic. But while I still consider the first of these something of a negative, the mechanical novelty turned out to be tied into the story in ways I didn't expect (enough so that I missed out on a fair chunk of the possibilities).
When you are exploring the house, I would advise you to take your time. I don't think anything is to be gained for actually running out and being imprisoned again, but once you're free there's plenty to be gained in terms of lore snippets and additional options. Building up more knowledge of the Empire of Hands can unlock additional possibilities, and exploring thoroughly can unlock at least 2 endings I was completely unaware of during my own playthrough (it's definitely more complicated than a single end-of-story choice).
This was Richard Cobbett's final contribution to Fallen London. While he has a slim number of ES credits he was one of the foundational writers of the game. With Alexis Kennedy already (and more thankfully) gone, this feels like a changing of the guard moment. But unlike Alexis Kennedy's final outing, I feel like the more experimental parts of this are something I'd be interested in seeing visited again.
P.S. Also, apparently Chandler Groover contributed to the story? He's listed in the credits, a full 18 months before his debut with the Rat-Catcher. Why and how did this happen? Someone, please tell me.
"The Queen of the Elephants" is a heist story, more or less, and it is a well told and interesting read. It begins by you hearing gossip about the Forty Elephants. They're a gang of thieves who have been tearing a swathe across London with huge parties celebrating their heists. They clearly have money to spend and are happy to say it was stolen, but no one knows who from.
Early on in the story you're asked why you care enough to get involved. It's not unusual to see options like this in a story, usually purely for player expression and roleplaying. Somewhat more unusual is the last option in this story, that you don't want to be involved, but you inevitably get dragged into events like these. It's a nice acknowledgement that Exceptional Stories usually aren't able to cater to characters who just wouldn't be interested in that month's particular brand of chicanery. It's also fits neatly in with one of the themes of the story, of fate.
The initial hook, quite early on, is that the Forty Elephants are stealing dreams. Not stealing through dreams like the player character might have managed but stealing the dreams themselves. You accompany them on a heist, learn more about how their thefts work and the consequences, and possibly begin to get a feeling for the larger forces at play. You eventually can also get involved with some of the Elephants' victims and choose a side for the finale.
Two parts of the story stand out. The choice of who to back is more impactful than I expected. Quite often a choice of sides comes late enough that you are essentially seeing the same conflict play out with slightly different perspective and details, and usually leading to a different conclusion at the end of the story. But here the two endings diverge greatly. If you side with the Vagrant you build up to a face-to-face conflict between the Elephants and their victims, but if you side with Mary the other side never really materializes and even the Vagrant is basically an afterthought. There are some common touchpoints, like tracking down the Querulous Mouse, but the context is drastically different. And the Queen's route gets dark enough that you can switch sides much later than the other way around.
The other standout element is the way lore is presented. I've been playing a variety of ES's from over the years, including several dealing with Parabola. In the early stories just getting short visits to Parabola is the reward in and of itself. Everything you see there is dripping with at the time new lore. Now a days you can make quick and casual trips to Parabola as part of some daily grind, and the baseline lore knowledge is much higher (You can look up the community discussions of the Fallen London mysteries after answers were posted. Parts of in that were big reveals are common knowledge now).
Exceptional Stories have been shifting to more and more character focus since they were originally introduced, since it's an excellent way for the short-form writing to shine. That's true here, but while Queen of the Elephants has well done characters, there is also potentially surprising depth to the lore presented, beneath the surface. Surprising because there are numerous semi-obscure unlocks to get additional information, but also just from the player's own context. To a new player, and mostly to me, it's a crime drama with a Fallen London twist, but with more knowledge of Parabola it's another aspect of the conflict between the Red Queen and the Beleaguered King. Replayability from both gameplay and implicit story reasons. It feels like the best of both worlds for ES narrative construction.
Highly recommended, particularly if you're a veteran of Parabolan Wars involving the Chessboard, or otherwise very familiar with them.
P.S. The Forty Elephants was a real all-female thief gang active in Victorian times into the mid 20th century (and maybe earlier centuries too). They had at least one "Queen" in charge, and got the "Elephant" part of their name from the Elephant and Castle gang (after the region in Southwark where they were active). This doesn't appear to tie into the story's themes, but the thieves are quite interesting on their own merits.
Early on in the story you're asked why you care enough to get involved. It's not unusual to see options like this in a story, usually purely for player expression and roleplaying. Somewhat more unusual is the last option in this story, that you don't want to be involved, but you inevitably get dragged into events like these. It's a nice acknowledgement that Exceptional Stories usually aren't able to cater to characters who just wouldn't be interested in that month's particular brand of chicanery. It's also fits neatly in with one of the themes of the story, of fate.
The initial hook, quite early on, is that the Forty Elephants are stealing dreams. Not stealing through dreams like the player character might have managed but stealing the dreams themselves. You accompany them on a heist, learn more about how their thefts work and the consequences, and possibly begin to get a feeling for the larger forces at play. You eventually can also get involved with some of the Elephants' victims and choose a side for the finale.
Two parts of the story stand out. The choice of who to back is more impactful than I expected. Quite often a choice of sides comes late enough that you are essentially seeing the same conflict play out with slightly different perspective and details, and usually leading to a different conclusion at the end of the story. But here the two endings diverge greatly. If you side with the Vagrant you build up to a face-to-face conflict between the Elephants and their victims, but if you side with Mary the other side never really materializes and even the Vagrant is basically an afterthought. There are some common touchpoints, like tracking down the Querulous Mouse, but the context is drastically different. And the Queen's route gets dark enough that you can switch sides much later than the other way around.
The other standout element is the way lore is presented. I've been playing a variety of ES's from over the years, including several dealing with Parabola. In the early stories just getting short visits to Parabola is the reward in and of itself. Everything you see there is dripping with at the time new lore. Now a days you can make quick and casual trips to Parabola as part of some daily grind, and the baseline lore knowledge is much higher (You can look up the community discussions of the Fallen London mysteries after answers were posted. Parts of in that were big reveals are common knowledge now).
Exceptional Stories have been shifting to more and more character focus since they were originally introduced, since it's an excellent way for the short-form writing to shine. That's true here, but while Queen of the Elephants has well done characters, there is also potentially surprising depth to the lore presented, beneath the surface. Surprising because there are numerous semi-obscure unlocks to get additional information, but also just from the player's own context. To a new player, and mostly to me, it's a crime drama with a Fallen London twist, but with more knowledge of Parabola it's another aspect of the conflict between the Red Queen and the Beleaguered King. Replayability from both gameplay and implicit story reasons. It feels like the best of both worlds for ES narrative construction.
Highly recommended, particularly if you're a veteran of Parabolan Wars involving the Chessboard, or otherwise very familiar with them.
P.S. The Forty Elephants was a real all-female thief gang active in Victorian times into the mid 20th century (and maybe earlier centuries too). They had at least one "Queen" in charge, and got the "Elephant" part of their name from the Elephant and Castle gang (after the region in Southwark where they were active). This doesn't appear to tie into the story's themes, but the thieves are quite interesting on their own merits.
With three of the four past Exceptional Stories I’ve played through being written by Gavin Inglis, it becomes easier to see patterns in his highly varied repertoire. “Required Repairs” is a lighter story, for the most part, and largely keeps a comedic tone. In this way it’s similar to “The Art of Murder”, a much earlier story which I wasn’t hugely enamoured with. I do think the one is handled better in this story, but I would still put this story in the middling range of Exceptional Stories, and on the low end for Gavin Inglis, though that speaks to his high average quality.
The story follows a comedy of errors as your lodgings become more and more damaged despite your best efforts to repair it. You meet a man from the local Borough Council who professes helpfulness but may have ulterior motives. Eventually you work out that the underlying reason for all the needed repairs may be somewhat sinister, and get some options on how to resolve things. It’s a fairly compact plot, with a pretty good sense of humor (including a Sorrow Spider pun I could believe was the genesis of the entire story), but there are issues that stick out.
There’s a chase sequence that mechanically is very reminiscent of “The Art of Murder”, and has the same problems. You go through random storylets picking options related to the choice. There are a series of problems: your progress isn’t visible to you and there are few enough storylets you’ll get repeats. Both of these factors make it feel like you’ve got no agency, that it would fit as well into a drunken bender for your character as a hot pursuit, at least in terms of the choice structure. I’ve seen a small opportunity deck be used for exploration in other Exceptional Stories, and I think translating the storylets as directly as possible to remove extra work (and ideally give some kind of measure of chase progress) would seriously help the issues here.
Also, as you go along, the stakes get rather elevated. It’s a given you’re not going to overthrow the status quo in an Exceptional Story, but this one is one of the ones that suggests the possibility of truly catastrophic change and then doesn’t explain why nothing happens. The expressive range of the choices felt pretty good, and it even seemed like they were able to incorporate some humor at the end, but for people who really wanted to go along with the grand plan it was probably a let down, and a somewhat vague one. Even getting explicit feedback that the problem failed, or a vanity quality that might, if someone wanted, be drawn on in the future, would help give more closure.
I’d say I generally enjoyed the light and comedic tone, but the chase scene definitely made the second act drag, and the conclusion felt like a couple of the endings could use a bit more work.
This last paragraph is more of a PS, as it’s ancillary to the story. All the Season of Embers stories were framed as flashbacks to earlier events, which is helpful if you’re currently lodging somewhere prosperous that wouldn’t be likely to fall into such disrepair. In hindsight I wish they would have done a bit more with the flashback frame story, like put in a mention, if you were in one of the four or five card lodgings that you’d come a long way. For that matter, a couple of the things possible in this story would be pretty questionable to an outsider (though probably not outright criminal like a lot of the possibilities from the other two stories), and it seems like reactions from the listener could have been used to heighten the comedy. It feels like an untapped potential to mess about some with the tense, possibly even the POV, in exceptional stories, but I could believe these are ideas that have been considered and discarded for design or even technical reasons.
The story follows a comedy of errors as your lodgings become more and more damaged despite your best efforts to repair it. You meet a man from the local Borough Council who professes helpfulness but may have ulterior motives. Eventually you work out that the underlying reason for all the needed repairs may be somewhat sinister, and get some options on how to resolve things. It’s a fairly compact plot, with a pretty good sense of humor (including a Sorrow Spider pun I could believe was the genesis of the entire story), but there are issues that stick out.
There’s a chase sequence that mechanically is very reminiscent of “The Art of Murder”, and has the same problems. You go through random storylets picking options related to the choice. There are a series of problems: your progress isn’t visible to you and there are few enough storylets you’ll get repeats. Both of these factors make it feel like you’ve got no agency, that it would fit as well into a drunken bender for your character as a hot pursuit, at least in terms of the choice structure. I’ve seen a small opportunity deck be used for exploration in other Exceptional Stories, and I think translating the storylets as directly as possible to remove extra work (and ideally give some kind of measure of chase progress) would seriously help the issues here.
Also, as you go along, the stakes get rather elevated. It’s a given you’re not going to overthrow the status quo in an Exceptional Story, but this one is one of the ones that suggests the possibility of truly catastrophic change and then doesn’t explain why nothing happens. The expressive range of the choices felt pretty good, and it even seemed like they were able to incorporate some humor at the end, but for people who really wanted to go along with the grand plan it was probably a let down, and a somewhat vague one. Even getting explicit feedback that the problem failed, or a vanity quality that might, if someone wanted, be drawn on in the future, would help give more closure.
I’d say I generally enjoyed the light and comedic tone, but the chase scene definitely made the second act drag, and the conclusion felt like a couple of the endings could use a bit more work.
This last paragraph is more of a PS, as it’s ancillary to the story. All the Season of Embers stories were framed as flashbacks to earlier events, which is helpful if you’re currently lodging somewhere prosperous that wouldn’t be likely to fall into such disrepair. In hindsight I wish they would have done a bit more with the flashback frame story, like put in a mention, if you were in one of the four or five card lodgings that you’d come a long way. For that matter, a couple of the things possible in this story would be pretty questionable to an outsider (though probably not outright criminal like a lot of the possibilities from the other two stories), and it seems like reactions from the listener could have been used to heighten the comedy. It feels like an untapped potential to mess about some with the tense, possibly even the POV, in exceptional stories, but I could believe these are ideas that have been considered and discarded for design or even technical reasons.