DLC for Fallen London
An addon for Fallen London. The Exceptional Story for November and December, 2015. Released original in two parts. First entry in the Season of Heart's Blood.
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I'm leaving this one unrated as I don't feel I could properly deal with the terrible baggage surrounding Alexis Kennedy, the lead writer.
First, some tips if you want to go through the story yourself.
1. I'd recommend having at least several dozen Presbyterate Passphrases and Mysteries of the Elder Continent before leaving London. There are options to get them during your time away, but once you know the small bits of story they give and the (no longer exclusive to this story) reward items, you likely won't be interested in grinding for them.
2. You can take your own ship for the trip, but it appears (I didn't do this in my own play-through) there is a bit more story interaction if you charter a ship instead.
3. The support qualities you're selecting when you're hiring followers aren't used beyond the section where you're traveling inland with your opportunity deck, so don't worry about your stock being low when you get to your destination.
The Bishop of St. Fiacre needs you to retrieve something from the Elder Continent. You recruit a team and get involved in two thefts, committing one and foiling the other. This introduces the other major players: the prioress of the Order Vespertine and the Bishop's Sister. You also get one of Fallen London's big reveals about the Bishop. Then you're off road-tripping through some towns and the wilds of the Elder Continent, before reaching a climax at the Prison of Flint after which the story is named.
Even more than the earlier Exceptional Stories, Flint stands out as a product of it's time. It came out no to distantly from Failbetter's full release of Sunless Sea, and you can see echoes of the designs from that game here. The section in the wilds is like expeditions in Sea, where you've got anonymous followers as abstract, expendable resources spending them or testing your skills to overcome a small random deck of events. Having a second in command picked from a set of characters, but then writing generically enough that many scenes don't need to differentiate is taking a page from the officers in Sea.
For me the comparison favors Sunless Sea. Apis Meet shows up in both, each action you take advances how far you are through the day, and different options are available at different times. You can stay for only one day. In Sunless Sea this helps add variety and a reason to visit a port in the hostile south more than once, but in Flint you do have the option to stay another day by spending 3 passphrases as a bribe. And you can get up to 5 passphrases throughout the day, assuming you are choosing only the options that give passphrases, rather than trying to explore everything else. So you can min-max and gain 2 per day, taking about 6 actions, or actually explore, and probably slowly loose passphrases. There's also an option to upconvert mysteries of the elder continent, but it's very much a feeling that if you want to see everything you will need to spend at least as much time afterwards grinding through the same options to make up for your losses. You also have a passphrase cost to proceed with the story.
Similarly, while you can have any of at least 7 people as your second in command, the story structure means they all have essentially the same arc, with the same climax, and their development is entirely within the agency of the player, as there isn't enough specific characterization in their portrayal, at least within this story, for it to feel like earned character development that you just happened to help with, or even were just a witness to. For that matter, you can replace your second in command half way through the story, and essentially nothing is made of you dragging an acquaintance to the Elder Continent and then leaving them behind. Both the Sunless series and later Exceptional Stories have stories written around characters, rather than the other way around, with the modular elements, if any, usually coming in at the periphery.
The expedition portion, going through the jungle using opportunity cards, actually does beat out most of the similar missions in Sunless Sea, and is level or better than the well constructed ones from Skies. It has the advantage of a big deck of cards to work from for lots of options, and letting itself get very surreal in it's descriptions of the many weird things that happen in the Elder Continent. The one weird point is the distinction drawn between the followers you've recruited, and the advantage they offer, since they start out feeling linked but become disconnected once you can buy more advantages in caution. Along with the abstraction of having most of your team just as faceless numbers, it can raise some weird questions about who's doing what.
Beyond the Sunless comparison, the reward structure feels odd, and somewhat dated. Once you're in the Elder Continent, most actions will give you at least one item that, at time of release, was exclusive to Flint. Many of them were reasonably valuable to, and I suspect the echoes per action in Flint, at least if you weren't stuck in a grind loop, were likely quite respectable for the time. Both of these have lost potency over the years. All the items that were exclusive to Flint can now be found in various other locations that aren't fate-locked, and in general it's just a lot easier to make money than it used to be. You occasionally get rewards in the middle of modern ES's, but it's usually mostly concentrated in a story-end reward, and mid-story rewards are often set-up to be one-time only, actually preventing grinding.
But finally, the focus of Flint is firmly on the lore. Not story, but lore. I only gave a brief sketch of the plot earlier, but there isn't a lot more to it. Talk with bishop, prepare for voyage, climax. Two elder continent towns, elder continent wilderness, part 2 climax. The climaxes are where most of the plot happens, and much of that is more exposition. There are 3 or 4 major characters, depending on if you're counting your second in command, but there doesn't feel like any of them really have arcs. You find out revelations about the Bishop, but it doesn't seem like he really changes. The Vespertine Prioress has some small reveals, but is mostly a pretty distant antagonist outside the climaxes. The clearest arc is what your second in command goes through, but there's definitely an "Oh wait, do they all have that happen?" moment that feels like it undercuts that.
Finally there is Alexis Kennedy. He was a co-founder of Failbetter who is no longer with the company. He was the lead writer of this story, and is an alleged abuser. Flint was his magnum opus, and I don't know how to grapple with this in relation to the story.
The most resonant emotional arc I had was of rescuing a woman from near death, nursing her back to health and then talking her out of an effective suicide. I might give that some side-eye in any story, but I cannot personally separate that from the writer being someone who coerced a subordinate into a romantic relationship, despite the fact that this arc only exists with one of the many options for second and command, the context would be very different otherwise.
I can look at the craft and the writing in the segment in the wilds, where your just dealing with the weirdness of the elder continent, and the long expository conversations just gushing about secret knowledge, and say that this was written by someone who was in love with the world they created but didn't care about the people in it. But is my judgement more negative about the resulting story because I despise the writer?
I don't have answers to these questions, but I do know that regardless of any correlation or causation, I do feel those criticisms of the story hold true. They more than anything else feel like elements than in honing and polishing the craft of Exceptional Stories over the years, have been dropped for better ideas. And like Alexis Kennedy, I'm glad that Failbetter has done it's best to leave them in the past.
First, some tips if you want to go through the story yourself.
1. I'd recommend having at least several dozen Presbyterate Passphrases and Mysteries of the Elder Continent before leaving London. There are options to get them during your time away, but once you know the small bits of story they give and the (no longer exclusive to this story) reward items, you likely won't be interested in grinding for them.
2. You can take your own ship for the trip, but it appears (I didn't do this in my own play-through) there is a bit more story interaction if you charter a ship instead.
3. The support qualities you're selecting when you're hiring followers aren't used beyond the section where you're traveling inland with your opportunity deck, so don't worry about your stock being low when you get to your destination.
The Bishop of St. Fiacre needs you to retrieve something from the Elder Continent. You recruit a team and get involved in two thefts, committing one and foiling the other. This introduces the other major players: the prioress of the Order Vespertine and the Bishop's Sister. You also get one of Fallen London's big reveals about the Bishop. Then you're off road-tripping through some towns and the wilds of the Elder Continent, before reaching a climax at the Prison of Flint after which the story is named.
Even more than the earlier Exceptional Stories, Flint stands out as a product of it's time. It came out no to distantly from Failbetter's full release of Sunless Sea, and you can see echoes of the designs from that game here. The section in the wilds is like expeditions in Sea, where you've got anonymous followers as abstract, expendable resources spending them or testing your skills to overcome a small random deck of events. Having a second in command picked from a set of characters, but then writing generically enough that many scenes don't need to differentiate is taking a page from the officers in Sea.
For me the comparison favors Sunless Sea. Apis Meet shows up in both, each action you take advances how far you are through the day, and different options are available at different times. You can stay for only one day. In Sunless Sea this helps add variety and a reason to visit a port in the hostile south more than once, but in Flint you do have the option to stay another day by spending 3 passphrases as a bribe. And you can get up to 5 passphrases throughout the day, assuming you are choosing only the options that give passphrases, rather than trying to explore everything else. So you can min-max and gain 2 per day, taking about 6 actions, or actually explore, and probably slowly loose passphrases. There's also an option to upconvert mysteries of the elder continent, but it's very much a feeling that if you want to see everything you will need to spend at least as much time afterwards grinding through the same options to make up for your losses. You also have a passphrase cost to proceed with the story.
Similarly, while you can have any of at least 7 people as your second in command, the story structure means they all have essentially the same arc, with the same climax, and their development is entirely within the agency of the player, as there isn't enough specific characterization in their portrayal, at least within this story, for it to feel like earned character development that you just happened to help with, or even were just a witness to. For that matter, you can replace your second in command half way through the story, and essentially nothing is made of you dragging an acquaintance to the Elder Continent and then leaving them behind. Both the Sunless series and later Exceptional Stories have stories written around characters, rather than the other way around, with the modular elements, if any, usually coming in at the periphery.
The expedition portion, going through the jungle using opportunity cards, actually does beat out most of the similar missions in Sunless Sea, and is level or better than the well constructed ones from Skies. It has the advantage of a big deck of cards to work from for lots of options, and letting itself get very surreal in it's descriptions of the many weird things that happen in the Elder Continent. The one weird point is the distinction drawn between the followers you've recruited, and the advantage they offer, since they start out feeling linked but become disconnected once you can buy more advantages in caution. Along with the abstraction of having most of your team just as faceless numbers, it can raise some weird questions about who's doing what.
Beyond the Sunless comparison, the reward structure feels odd, and somewhat dated. Once you're in the Elder Continent, most actions will give you at least one item that, at time of release, was exclusive to Flint. Many of them were reasonably valuable to, and I suspect the echoes per action in Flint, at least if you weren't stuck in a grind loop, were likely quite respectable for the time. Both of these have lost potency over the years. All the items that were exclusive to Flint can now be found in various other locations that aren't fate-locked, and in general it's just a lot easier to make money than it used to be. You occasionally get rewards in the middle of modern ES's, but it's usually mostly concentrated in a story-end reward, and mid-story rewards are often set-up to be one-time only, actually preventing grinding.
But finally, the focus of Flint is firmly on the lore. Not story, but lore. I only gave a brief sketch of the plot earlier, but there isn't a lot more to it. Talk with bishop, prepare for voyage, climax. Two elder continent towns, elder continent wilderness, part 2 climax. The climaxes are where most of the plot happens, and much of that is more exposition. There are 3 or 4 major characters, depending on if you're counting your second in command, but there doesn't feel like any of them really have arcs. You find out revelations about the Bishop, but it doesn't seem like he really changes. The Vespertine Prioress has some small reveals, but is mostly a pretty distant antagonist outside the climaxes. The clearest arc is what your second in command goes through, but there's definitely an "Oh wait, do they all have that happen?" moment that feels like it undercuts that.
Finally there is Alexis Kennedy. He was a co-founder of Failbetter who is no longer with the company. He was the lead writer of this story, and is an alleged abuser. Flint was his magnum opus, and I don't know how to grapple with this in relation to the story.
The most resonant emotional arc I had was of rescuing a woman from near death, nursing her back to health and then talking her out of an effective suicide. I might give that some side-eye in any story, but I cannot personally separate that from the writer being someone who coerced a subordinate into a romantic relationship, despite the fact that this arc only exists with one of the many options for second and command, the context would be very different otherwise.
I can look at the craft and the writing in the segment in the wilds, where your just dealing with the weirdness of the elder continent, and the long expository conversations just gushing about secret knowledge, and say that this was written by someone who was in love with the world they created but didn't care about the people in it. But is my judgement more negative about the resulting story because I despise the writer?
I don't have answers to these questions, but I do know that regardless of any correlation or causation, I do feel those criticisms of the story hold true. They more than anything else feel like elements than in honing and polishing the craft of Exceptional Stories over the years, have been dropped for better ideas. And like Alexis Kennedy, I'm glad that Failbetter has done it's best to leave them in the past.