paisley my beloved

Your body is building a resistance - but that's what your body is doing. It doesn't need you for that. You, the character, are focusing on getting to the next breath, gathering the pain into a little ball in your body and keeping that ball somewhere manageable instead of leaving it all-encompassing. Your body is doing the resistance on its own, and in its own time, it will process what it's been given. The practice, the skill in KT, is in enduring what is needed to survive, so you can stave off an would-be-deadly attack or take the same dose without flinching next time.

I just think that's interesting, as a skill. Dealing with a side effect, while your body takes care of the main attraction. Raising KT has always stood out to me as a thing that puts the PC in a much more undignified and desperate position than late game usually allows - passing out at the party and being seen, for example, or being loudly in pain in the lab - and the trade-off is so often just survival, not any more flashy feat.

But that's what it is. Survival of the impossible. The knowledge that because you've held fast through so much, you now know how to, and an enemy will not get the satisfaction of watching you squirm.

When it hunts, Veils paints itself as a beast. It tells you it's only natural for it to kill, that its appetite must be sated, that its confinement down here is to blame for its actions. This creature, who controls the silk industry in Victorian London, claims instinct is its only motivator and to accuse it of strategy or power-hunger is absurd. But when you want to kill it? Then of course it's an incredibly complex being, so much higher on the chain than you, with plans and strategies beyond your feeble human mind. The whole point of the narrative Veils paints around itself is to both excuse itself of accountability and lift itself above the very idea of being fallible, by manipulating its image to fit either mastermind or animal as it sees fit. And people fall for it. I'm not going to yuck anybody's interpretation of the story (very genuinely I love and value differences in that across players) but I see very very few people acknowledge Veils as a political threat or essentially member of government, and many more focus on the monstrousness of it and the role of instinct in its reasoning.

Bag a Legend is in many ways a story about "violence begets violence", about cycles and corruption, but it's also (as many many stories in Flondon are) a commentary on authority. Veils is, at its core, an authority figure who extended its role from political violence to at-will physical violence against its own charges. Its base role, even if it hadn't become the Vake, is violent. It is heavily involved in the Great Game as well as controlling a vast chunk of London industry, and was actively negotiating the purchase of the Sixth City when the PC killed it - a political action in the interests of the Bazaar that would have killed a vast swathe of people it has no reason to care about beyond as a resource. Even if it had never sunk claws into a person, it would still be violent and extremely dangerous. April knows it, the nuns know it, but it seems a part of Veil's strategy is to get any prospective hunters to forget about that part of its role only when it's convenient and remember it only when it's intimidating.

(tags ft. @thedeafprophet )

You. You get it. I see a lot of people characterizing Veil's relationship with the player as the Batman vs Joker thing ("one cannot exist without the other"/both would be purposeless and sad if they didn't have each other to clash with) and while I love that trope a lot in other contexts, I've honestly never felt that from Veils in the slightest. Veils doesn't want a rivalry, it wants to play with its food. It put a bounty up for itself larger than the Bazaar could even afford. Veils is only happy when it's winning, and it likes a long hunt not because of the uncertainty or struggle but because it gets to see its prey squirm and fear for longer, and show off more of its power and ability while it's at it. This is the trait that let it be killed in the end: the arrogance to walk into a known trap and still think it would be a sure victory (or, debatably, more the attraction to destruction over self preservation, but I think both played a role).

Quarantining my OC and TMA stuff down here for post length, but the comparison definitely fits and I'm happy to have that angle on understanding Veils to add and contrast to my TMA assignment for Hallowrove.

because other curators hunt, in the wilderness, but that is not what we're shown in veils, its pointed out that it does this just for the violence, for the joy of the kill, betraying its own cultural rules and norms in the process. it is not a hunter, not in that way, but brutal, complete violence, for the sake of it, while it itself is kept away from any true harm. there's a reason veils' violence is compared to that of war.

I think it's another powerful commentary on authority, that it tries to live on through you once you've proven yourself violent enough to kill it. The monster is the role Veils plays just as much as it is the individual - probably even more, and the ending hands you that role, no matter what path you pick. There is no ending that does not leave either an aspect of Veils or its responsibilities whispering in your ear. I'm personally of the opinion that the narrative hands you that burden as a way of putting the story and its conclusions fully into the player's hands, a reminder that the monster is only dead if you keep killing it with every decision after that, rather than a definite "if you kill a monster you become one" (which is another common interpretation that's always bugged me)

More OC stuff + your tags on Rory under the cut

They made the freakin... three witches from Shakespeare into rats akshkshdjdj

Three aspects of Hecate... three fates, three furies... the number 3 in fairy tales... the rule of three (a motif appears and on the third time it is relevant)... Hunter's Keep... three sevens... the number nine in the discordance and the inferno... so interesting. Three bodies, the sun, earth, and moon, aligned for an eclipse.

Detailed analysis under the cut!

(Censustaker Cameo by @waterlogged-detective )

I am once again asking you all to please take my Census

The Nosy Censustaker has returned with a new, improved, and streamlined census. I received quite a bit of feedback on the first couple, and the biggest hurdle was collating freeform data in a way that was quantifiable. Therefore, I have put great effort into refining the census into something streamlined, thorough, organized, and accessible.

Additionally, a Summary of Respondants has been helpfully collated by the Taciturn Tiger!

Now, data collected by the Censustaker can be viewed easily, allowing us all to see the wide range of ways we create within, and interact with, the world of Fallen London.

As with before, this Census is in-character, and I welcome responses from characters without in-game accounts.

The data I'm hoping to collect is about the ways that creators and characters interpret and interact with the setting, less about how optomised the playerbase is in regards to gameplay.

And on that note, feel free to share it on platforms outside of tumblr. I am hoping to exceed my original dataset of 301 responses, I'd really like to take a close look at the population that lives and breathes in our sunken city.

(If i can find a way to do so, I may find even find a way to publish a volume of individual responses, but we'll see how this goes first.)

May as well share what I'm working on as part of this. If you'd like to be a part of it, be sure to take the census! It'll be open for a few more months, so you've got plenty of time!