#neathmas

[a-crater]

Captain's Log 24th December, 18XX: Lacre thick. Visibility poor. Setting course for the Salt Lions. Harpooned a fleshy sea beast on approach. Crew will enjoy sharing a Christmas feast with the Unmakers.

[the-ashenstreaked-doctor]

Merry Neathmas

[tvntheatre]

I'd like to reintroduce my dumb sod OC who's got the rizz of a rock. They have never been complimented before.

This is Syren, rain sacrificed his persuasiveness to bail out of jail then proceeds to eat snowlacre. Merry Neathmas.

[crow-caller]

Hey, Crow! I'm not sure if you answered that (I searched your blog for it, but the Tumblr search function is bad enough that that means nothing) and there's not much info yet, but what are your thoughts and hopes for Magpie Games' Fallen London TTRPG adaptation?

yes I know it! I was up lurking the night of the announcement even. I like what I've heard, the most info we have is from an article interview when it was announced. ( It's behind a small paywall). From reading it, I got a good vibe about what they're working on and the goal!

I actually have a copy of Urban Shadows 2e from them, which I haven't really had time to properly go over. I believe in them, and am curious what the system will be like .

As for hopes and dreams... uh, just good resources to run a game and ideally good rules for it too! I especially would love a meaty setting book, with quick hand information about locations, cultures, factions in the Neath. Random tables. Items. Bits of victorian flavour. Stuff that really helps affirm the setting for casual play and helps people create fitting characters. A good world source book would be incredible just for fans, beyond being needed in such a setting.

I'd also love to see the Zee explored, which I could imagine as a late stretch goal. Rn the main focus is on London, makes sense, but an expansion book of Zee locations and weird islands beyond canon ones, plus Zee monsters.... great stuff! I will almost certainly send my players off to die at zee whether or not FBG enables me!

In side appeals. Not to fall for the folly of capitalism or whatever but I like merch. I like having cool little bits of stuff I love. Fl really hasn't had that, and kickstarters are often places for add on stuff like that. Correspondence pins. The Neathly tarot. How do I get a Neathmas sweater.

[grimm-the-tiger]

Merry Neathmas! May Mr Sacks not take too much from you. Some notes (with major spoilers!) below the cut:

This is based on day 9 of Sacksmas, when Mr Eaten decides to pay you a visit. Since it's, you know, Mr Eaten, I did my best to make it seem a bit out of place. It has the most obvious guidelines in the entire drawing, and the coloring is intentionally sloppy to make it seem like it's struggling against the shape I've drawn it in. The lighting and shading are also meant to make it seem as if Sacks is the only source of light in the room, which I thought would be fitting seeing as Eaten is supposed to be dead and most ghosts in folklore glow. As for why I drew Mr Eaten specifically, I kinda-sorta got day nine of Sacksmas spoiled for me by TVTropes, and the concept of the worst version of Mr Sacks being the one who gives you gifts instead of taking them has been lingering in my brain ever since. The Fallen London Festive Fanart Competition has just given me an excuse to use it.

[violant-apologia]

neathmas is a MINEFIELD if you have fate laying around. i have 90 fate in the bank for three incarnadine fur robes and like, every other option in the christmas storylets threatens to steal it away from me.

[c-schroed]

Classic.

Today I found some happy two hours to spend with @alexis-royce's marvellous little christmas game An Adventagonistic Christmas, and I had just the merry experience I was hoping for!

It's a lovely little story about the most competetive exchange of presents in all of Fallen London, with multiple endings that all manage to be another type of perfectly satisfying. The way to each ending is full of humor, wit, and even some action.

The drawings are great and the music fits perfectly. It's a great little way to pass the time during these Yuletide days, for an extra bit of Neathmas magic. I give it 7 out of 10 nicely entertained points. It might help to know a thing or two about the Heart's Desire ambition, but I wouldn't say it's a need-to-know prerequisite. One should know a bit of what Fallen London is about, though.

Anyway, thanks to @alexis-royce for this marvellous little gem of a Yuletide present!

[jane-d-ankh-veos]

Sketches for FBG's Discord (after this happened).

[henryseeksthename-blog]

Snow...?

Had to shovel my way out the front door today. It looked like snow in the lamplight, but I’ll be d___ned if it actually was - smells like ammonia. Feels like... something else. It gives me creeps all down my neck, this stuff. How does snow fall under the ground?

Feels like home, though, seeing everything covered in white. I miss the Surface sometimes.

[caperingcryptid]

Why wend the bones into the tree, when you can use them to make one as a fun family bonding activity?

…thanks.

[peligin-eyed]

It’s interesting to compare the money/time/resource requirements for the end stages of ambitions

Like obviously Nemesis wins for highest required investment (which is one of the reasons I’m not sure I’d want to make another alt to do it)

I feel like Bag a Legend maybe comes second. I think I spent probably 3+ weeks just money-grinding for hunting supplies. I sold the location of the Nadir to revolutionaries and the payout from the vial of masters’ blood only covered like 2/3 of the copper cipher rings. There was probably about a month or a month and a half between setting off the Chorister’s Bomb and hunting down the last aspect and that’s with me skipping some of the big resource investments (didn’t need the tears of the bazaar since I’d already done the Foreign Office extension and didn’t need the impossible theorem because I got the Royal Beth suite at Neathmas)

Meanwhile my Light Fingers character is in a similar place money and stats-wise and I feel like a week or two of newspaper publishing will cover this last big chunk of supplies before I can reclaim the baby. The biggest hurdles so far have been like manageable amounts of resource-gathering, some action-consuming travel, and the time-gated maturation period. It doesn’t feel nearly as intimidating as the prep for the end of Bag a Legend did

Heart’s Desire has probably the most eclectic requirements. I personally didn’t find it too bad but I was lucky to already have a five-card lodging and my dreams were only one level short of that point where you need level 15 in one of the dreams. It was mildly annoying to have to wait on the Arbor card (and on dreams cards for the last level of thunder dreams), and the ray-drenched cinder grind was frustrating but also optional. It also helped that my HD character already had a decent amount of stuff I could sell off when I needed to buy things. Like Light Fingers, prepping for the end felt challenging but not overwhelming

[lyreofsheliak]

Another set of guesses re: the secret about the Masters...

I know it’s old news at this point, but I still wanted to try my hand!

We know of either nine Masters (Wines, Spices, Pages, Iron, Veils, Cups/Mirrors, Apples/Hearts, and Eaten—if Eaten counts as a Master these days) or twelve (counting Cups/Mirrors and Apples/Hearts as two each, and the collective identity Mr Chimes as another). Failbetter Games has informed us that there are eleven Masters, and there are eleven secrets—but we don’t know who those eleven are.

Option the first: all possible Masters are counted except Mr Eaten, who is not. This makes some in-story sense, but isn’t very satisfying as a theory. (And leaving out such a popular character would be a strange move, Doylistically speaking.)

Option the second: one or two Masters, other than Eaten, have been misplaced. They could have been killed more successfully than Mr Candles was, or happily maintaining a joint identity with another Master, or perhaps there’s a Master we simply haven’t heard from yet. (The Destinies where you turn into a Master of sorts reference a dozen travelers—you, the Bazaar, and ten others—but if there are eight living Masters, where do the extras come from?)

Option the third: there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence at all. The author of the Rhyming Revelry had some solid information, but there is no reason to suppose that he knew everything about the Masters. He knew (or believed) that there were eleven Masters in total, and therefore mentions eleven pilgrims; he knew a list of their crimes, presumably accurate (or they wouldn’t have reacted as they seem to have), but he may not actually have known which crime went to which Master. Indeed, he may have been hampered by not knowing of Mr Eaten’s disappearance, which would automatically throw a wrench into things...

That said, some disorganized guesses on my part:

hoarding: Well, obviously Stones. Could also be Pages. And Cups/Mirrors seems to have two separate hoards based on Neathmas, one for each name. Hoarding seems to be a fairly common sin among the Masters. 

light-bringing: Fires has the only domain related to light, but Eaten/Candles has a very interesting line about “bringing light to the lower links” (at Neathmas you have the option to lose a Peculiar Personal Enhancement and get some very interesting lore).  

impersonation, and the delivery of false testimony: well, we have two Masters with two identities each, and everyone pretending to be Mr Chimes. False testimony is harder; do we know of any Master who’s explicitly lying about something? (Spices’ creation of Jack-of-Smiles seems to have been considered fakery of love stories, on the forums someone mentioned that Apples admits to general dishonesty, and Fires wishes not to deliver any message at all.)

perpetration of the crimes of knife and of candle: This one seems straightforward: Iron! Although in the Neath it’s hardly a crime at all, one presumes it was a more serious matter in the High Wilderness...

idleness, and the dwelling-on of dreams: Spices and Wines, although Wines seems more dissolute than idle these days. Could also be Mirrors. Or Fires, in a way: it is idle in its actual job, and dwells on the dream of remaining in London... (Mind, that’s a recent development.) 

runtery, aberration: Candles. (Although I’ve heard some interesting speculation that it could have shared “aberration”, at least, with Veils.)

pursuit of a Treachery: I’ve heard fairly convincing arguments that this refers to Mr Hearts’ pursuit of amalgamy. 

failure and defeat; a fall from king to beggar: I have no idea. 

glass-whispering. And worse: charity: Glass-whispering could be either Candles or Mirrors, with a side possibility of Spices and/or Wines (although the latter two’s interest in Parabola could be opportunistic). Charity does not sound like any of the above, although we don’t know enough about Candles to be sure. It could be Apples, but it doesn’t sound very much like any of the Masters, unless I’ve missed something. 

truth-strangling: almost certainly Pages, although they’ve all dabbled (most blatantly, by erasing the memory of their late colleague).

violation of the Order of Days, “which determines the hour of the hunt, the feast, the council, the bargain, and the slaughter”: Everyone seems to agree that this is Mr Veils, who spends an undue amount of time on hunt and slaughter. But then again, if another Master is spending inappropriately much time on bargains, feasts, or councils, how would we tell?

[tvntheatre]

MERRY FUCKING NEATHMAS, TO THE RANDOM CITIZEN WHO LIKES MY OC ART I LOVE YOU!

[6qubed]

it increases tToL if you already have it, as well as Meloncholy, but there’s also a chance you’ll lose the whole vial; it’s listed as an “alternative success, but I never know what the exact odds are for those. this is to my knowledge the only way to increase tToL outside of Neathmas (handy for Noman shenanigans, though I’ve never had the opportunity to try them), so by all means use ‘em, but be ready to lose ‘em

OH I forgot to mention; speaking of purchases, at some point in your academic career you need to go zailing on expeditions. get a bunch of sulky bats for that. I mean you’re grinding Great Game favours for watchful increases so you should have at least one already, but get more. a lot more. at least a hundred. they’re used for a very handy social action when zailing once you’ve started doing research on various islands

btw, I’m “Qube” in FL, feel free to tag me on social actions, I don’t mind being social when I’ve got some downtime from grinding orphans into money :V

Do you have any tips for grinding watchful? My watchful is at around 125 unmodified, and this it's very hard to find hard challenges at my stage that won't give me a lot of menaces. My current method is getting favours through cards and wilmot's to trade for watchful, and asking for menace reducing social actions for the second chances to trade for watchful. Is that the most efficient method? It doesn't feel particulaly efficient, but I'm not sure.

The best single player method should be messing around in the university before completing the making your name. The best social method would be a combination of case note letters and paramount presence lessons

[believerindaydreams]

Ecstasy in Cosmogone Glossary

Some borrowed, some stolen, some invented, but I have enough odd words now that I need a list. (A warning: some of these don’t adhere to Failbetter canon.)

Aich’s alloy: copper, zinc and iron, useful for underwater work.

Apotheosis: Something, someday, will happen to London.

associative trails: Neath hypertext. 

Beloved blubber: when refined, the source of zee-butter, though zailors generally prefer it straight. Can be eaten either hot or cold, very popular condiment aboard the Clipper.

Blemmigan nectar: gods alone know, but it tastes awful. 

blood-letting: the mechanism which lowers your stats for incautious activities in SS. Also applicable for the consumption of Bottled Oblivion. 

bolegus-timber: mushroom wood. 

Calgary Flames: the Innocent Spy’s favourite hockey team. Not that he has any reason to mention this in 1895. 

cavern-tuna: what you feed mogs. 

Celestial Welshman: Arthur Machen. Bohemian author. 

change war: 1. One of SF’s first really good time wars, as recounted in various Fritz Leiber books. 2. the conflict between cats and snakes. 

chiropterochronometry: er, bats and timekeeping?

collop: slice of meat. 

comci: one of those artistic movements only defined by academics long after its flowering. Generally agreed to have been kickstarted by the Sickly Scotsman’s “The New Arabian Nights”, the definition brushes up against magical realism on one side, Chestertonian paradox on the other, and some kind of five-dimensional Lovecraftian horror on both. 

déjà vu: the subject of much vigorous wrangling at the University, where there’s a department attempting to ascertain whether it’s some sort of psychic occurrence, a temporary displacement with one’s reflection, or something else entirely. 

DDD terms: (permanent) death, dismemberment, drownification. Grounds upon which a Neath contract might reasonably be voided. 

(this is getting a bit long, more beneath the jump.)

driftweed: the Underzee’s most common variety of edible seaweed, eaten by vegetarians and very, very desperate zailors. 

duck tape: a dreadful anachronism. Made from zee-glue and Parabola linen duck. 

DXS: Department of External Services, the Innocent Spy's former employers. Seem to take on both internal and international missions without batting an eye. 

First City coin stamp: a joke. 

flectere: the art of mirrors.

flexion: what reflections call us.

fungal mint cake: highly calorific foodstuff, in much demand for Neath adventurers. Sufficiently hearty to ward off the effects of UP, for a day or so. 

freightage: the poor chumps indentured to private companies such as Iron and Misery, who transport the most boring of cargoes. Zee-coal from the Iron Republic, crates of mushrooms to branches of Harbour Provisioners, etc. So pathetic they travel in convoys, and no decent zailor will shame the profession by admitting they even exist. 

Grand Sanction: that which has enabled the Innocent Spy to live through a twentieth century with no space bats or immortality in it. The Phoenix Foundation is responsible for it, though the Spy doesn’t actually know that part.

geas: a bit like an oath, but with more punch and narrative interest to it. 

INCURSION: an unpleasant but not lethal random encounter in the Iron Republic.

Innocent Spy: current work-name for one MacGyver. Accidental time-traveller, brilliant engineer, and oh yes, also a spy. 

jati: borrowed from the Hindi word for caste, appropriated by Londoners to mean something more like untouchable. That which happens in London entirely outside of the Bazaar’s remit, and officially does not exist. Examples of jati would include driftweed sellers, anybody living in a terraced house, the chap who’s next-door neighbours with The Most Boring Man in London.

knitting: something the Innocent Spy does to make a jumper. Something the Herald does to upconvert Whispering Hints and Cryptic Clues.  

Kabulstan: a country in central Asia. Location of the Ammukash valley and the Mountain of Youth, better known to Neath inhabitants as Stone. 

Last Night’s pudding: the flaming pudding traditionally eaten twelve days after the first lacre-fall. Society folk rather look down at this; Dockers love it. 

late-reign: 1. anything that’s happened in the Neath since the Innocent Spy arrived, more or less. 2. for later historians, the fin de siecle period of the Traitor Empress’ reign. What precisely this entails is a matter of hot debate amongst the handful of academics permitted to study the matter. 

Lillywhite’s: the bible of cricket.

Literary Postman: Anthony Trollope, Society author and postal worker. His last public act before a graceful retirement to Nuncio was pressing forward the decimalisation of Echoes, making London’s currency minimally less terrifying.

Norton: those who would take a Liberty. The umbrella term for a loose association of anti-Fall ideologies, ranging from those who insist that London never left the Surface, to those who insist it’s fated to return. Originally referred to a number of activists from Spite who tried to bring the Empress to court, on the grounds that she lacked the legal authority to bring their street to the Neath. You can usually find one at the Square of Lofty Words. 

obscurity: 1. to posies and potential posies [every single PC], the most horrifying fate imaginable in London society, only undertaken by the maddest of Seekers. 2. to everyone else in London (of whom there’s rather a lot), an exchange in which one trades away a never-gonna-happen future of Making Waves in exchange for the safety of being Closest To a particular faction. This is how random zailors are closest to Dockers and so forth. 

The Penniless Archeologist: loosely based on Eduard Glaser, the Archeologist is a late-19th century Surface scholar attempting to find the location of the Garden of Eden. His map, a hundred years later, leads the Unimaginative Assassin to start investigating a mountain in Kubulstan...

posy: a more amusing and period-appropriate bit of slang for Persons of Some Importance than POSI. 

Phoenix Foundation: the Innocent Spy’s employers. Partly a do-gooding charity, partly an agency for plausibly deniable intelligence work. 

Pinksaw's Guide to Edible Fungi: exactly what it sounds like. 

quirks: the measure of a man.  

rat extract: Neath Bovril. 

red-handled knife: the Innocent Spy’s tool of choice. 

reflection: that which you see in a mirror. May occasionally be sentient. 

reppeljack: newly Fallen. Mildly offensive. 

ritual: the Herald’s all-purpose term for anything quasi-magical, esp. for her ship-keeping prayers to Stone, Salt and Storm. (She usually refrains from telling the Innocent Spy the proper names, both for safety and to head off arguments about how silly the proper names are.)

“The Sapphire”: Fallen London’s equivalent of “The Gem”. 

scintillack: that blue stuff that helps you shoot things.

secret sharing: a ritual to improve one’s stats, by offering up a secret to another party. Usually undertaken as a matched set, unless a Captain is involved (it is the duty of Captains to give, not to take).

Sickly Scotsman: Robert Louis Stevenson. Author, affiliation indeterminate (he notoriously cycled through Closest To on a regular basis.)

Slug and Mushroom: a terrible chain of pubs owned by Murgatroyd’s, found across the Underzee. 

solacefruit extract: sweet substance akin to stevia, usually used to flavour Darkdrop coffee.

speaking tubes: a piece of historical accuracy! How people at opposite ends of a steamship can talk to each other. 

Sporting Times: The name the Pink ‘Un is forced to trade under, in Fallen London.

suchenroman: literature dealing with Seekers. Only became popular in late-reign London, and even then only as penny-dreadful tosh, more illegal than red honey. Ironically, due to their confiscation on sight, one of the few forms of popular Neath literature available for Surface historians after the Grand Sanction. 

Surfacer: 1. Someone who lives on the Surface and has never seen the Neath. 2. A Londoner stupid or optimistic enough to keep insisting they’re going to return to the Surface, one of these days...

“Tasted on the wind”: depending who’s talking, either foretold or made a lucky guess.

telesthetic: what the Student calls telepathy, cos it sounds cooler. 

Tireless Mechanic: the Innocent Spy’s later work-name, after a number of as-yet undescribed events. 

travel slate: the thing the Herald chalks courses on for her shipmates to follow. 

trionfi: the Herald’s predictive tarot games, in which she studies the Hours.

tree-effigy: Guy Fawkes Day not being on anyone’s mind these days, there’s now a Neathmas tradition among the lower classes to make a flammable effigy of the Consort. Other popular candidates for the effigy are the Traitor Empress, especially hated zee-captains, and, if you’re feeling especially daring, one of the Masters. 

tynged: Welsh version of a geas.

Unimaginative Assassin: Surface name Murdoc, the Innocent Spy’s nemesis. 

Venderbight: that Tomb Colony I can never remember how to spell.

zee-code: something the Captain is constantly blathering about, and which may or may not exist. 

...huh, that was more than I expected. 

[violant-ink]

No Homes as usual missing out on the festivities 😢

Or at least, no Advent. We'll see if anything else pops up. Maybe, just maybe, something that makes this possible? Perhaps a single redirect to Your Activities? Maybe...