#tsmendiary

When I left you, I’d just received St. Arthur’s Candle, the first of the candles of the false saints that lead us North. Doing so gave us this option in the Seeking Road storylet in our lodgings:

There was some nasty SMEN math involved with getting the levels of the Seeking Mr Eaten’s Name quality I needed for this candle, but we got there, as one does. St. Beau’s gimmick is that it lies at a crossroads, where you are to choose between steering off the road or staying on it. It requires a trip to Mrs. Plenty’s carnival, arriving at exactly midnight. Doing so unlocks a version of it nicknamed the Nightmare Carnival or the SMEN Carnival, depending on who you ask. It’s a warped, twisted place...

Note that you lose all your tickets when you enter the Nightmare Carnival. That means you’re left buying tickets when you get in, and if you want to see the sights you will need quite a few- 3330 is the bare minimum. I took quite a few more and saw some of the sights. Now, the normal carnival is actually quite an exciting place to be, with an excellent big-top full of attractions, a delicious food pavilion, and a fortune teller profiting off petty superstitions. The Nightmare Carnival is brutal, with disgusting food, shows that haunt your... well, your nightmares, and terrifying whispers of your impending doom.

Once you’ve seen everything there is to see, you attempt to find a specific mirror calling to you in the House of Mirrors. 

In the time since I started this blog, I’ve decided that I’m not a big fan of huge screenshot dumps. It takes some of the magic away and puts the options directly in the face of the reader in a way I don’t like. My logic is that there may be some Seekers simply skimming through the blog to find out what they might miss or what to expect resource-wise. As a result, though I have screenshots of the next steps, I won’t be posting them here just yet. Instead, if you wish to learn more about the Lady in the Mirror, I advise you to look at this journal entry and follow it forward. The only step I missed was the chess success.

I would remind readers that in Fallen London’s world, dreams exist in a real place called Parabola, a place somewhere between the Neath and the surface. One’s consciousness may travel there through tastes of Prisoner’s Honey; one may physically travel there through mirrors. This is one of the reasons this variant of the carnival is called “Nightmare Carnival.” This is likely the reason the House of Mirrors exists in the real carnival. And behind this mirror, in this place, in this time, is the candle we seek.

But who is there, and why is that person there? Ah, ah, ah. I must save some mystery for next time. What I will say, here and now, is that this truly is the point in the quest where you make a hard decision on just how much you’re willing to give up. And after the next blog, which will cover the second half of the Nightmare Carnival and obtaining St. Beau’s Candle, we’ll dive deep into my decisions surrounding the next candle, some optional side stuff, and why I made the choices I did.

Sorry for the delay! It turns out that when you micromanage your actions for 3 straight months, you burn out. I’ll explain why I was in such a rush in more detail in a later post.

For now, we last left off at our own betrayals. As part of the path to St. Arthur’s Candle, we are required to receive 7 Weeping Scars, 7 Stains on our Souls, and 7 Memories of Chains. The Memories are obtained by laying a false trail, hinting that you possess secrets that can be used against those in power so that they arrest you and throw you into New Newgate Prison without trial. We know there is no trial because the SMEN imprisonments don’t add to your Criminal Record quality, which is gained when you go before a judge upon getting to Suspicion 8. Those in power are keeping you locked up, but they are playing right into your hand.

Betrayal is a common theme throughout the SMEN storyline. It’s the plot reason the storyline exists.

After obtaining all 7 Scars, Stains, and Memories, it is time to betray others seven times. You can betray spouses, Midnight Matriarchs, Nomans, and other players. Betrayals of NPCs cost Searing Enigmas; the Stench of Betrayal quality you gain from each option requires a Searing Enigma to convert into one point of the Footsteps of the False Saints quality. Seven Footsteps buy a candle.

I apologize for this, but I seem to have failed to screenshot most of the betrayals I did. The spouse was the exception:

I didn’t notice the Enigma loss as I was too caught up in the excitement of the moment. Note that I had two at this point.

I only knew of needing seven Enigmas for this entire process- one to convert each Stench of Betrayal into a Footstep. I had three Enigmas at the start, plus four Trade Secrets, so I thought I’d have enough. I ended up being wrong, and didn’t figure it out until I’d also betrayed four (!?!) Midnight Matriarchs. I needed to fix it.

For the first time in the SMEN storyline, RNG gave me a gift. During Sacksmas, an advent calendar opens, which gives a gift each day. One of the rewards was a Rat of Glory. The Rat is a devious little bugger, who can randomly steal all your candles including the SMEN candles, be converted into one of the better all-around companions in the game, or have a high-percentage chance of converting into between 1 and 7 Enigmas.

I weighed my options and determined that, on the long run, converting the Rat to Enigmas will yield roughly 3 per use, including the chance of the Rat eating all your candles using this option.

Jackpot.

Enigmas in hand, I went on to finish my betrayals. Sacrificing four Midnight Matriarch owls cats, one particularly unhappy spouse, and two gracious players gave me this option.

“What’s one more loss?” is also a common theme of SMEN. It’s that sunk-cost fallacy that poisons the mind of real-life humans and Fallen Londoners alike. “You came this far, might as well keep going, even if it destroys you.” Alexis knows our weaknesses, and exploited them well throughout his tenure as loremaster of London.

At this point, we’re at Seeking Mr. Eaten’s Name 21. We’ve destroyed our souls. We’ve killed ourselves seven times (6 for scars + 1 more for the last Stain). We’ve spent months of ingame time in prison. We’ve ruined what close relationships we have. All for this.

All for this foreboding candle.

All for this.

And we paid for it. Note the SMEN gain. Note the stat loss. 

The first stretch of the Seeking Road is probably the hardest on your character. She undergoes a very rapid descent into madness once she hits SMEN 14, the kind of madness that would make one want to destroy his very being for the Name. Seven wounds that will never close, the imprint of chains so strong on your skin that they remain permanently etched in your memory, and stains on your soul so toxic that you feel as if your very life force is being torn at the seams.

That’s the beginning of Seeking.

It makes one wonder what kind of monster can inspire such madness. 

From a player standpoint, it leaves us interested in the quest, as we want to find out about this monster. It’s that “wait, but what about-” aspect that is key to good mystery writing.

From the standpoint of the character, it’s a terrifying obsession, a brutal series of self-mutilating rituals meant to find a higher plane of understanding. At some point your character starts going through a form of sunk cost fallacy- he reasons “What’s one more loss?” when confronted with having to give things up at various points in the chain.

SMEN21 is where those losses first start to bear fruit. From a mere look at the bottom of the Seeking Road storylet, we can see that we’ll require seven candles before going North. SMEN21 is where your character realizes such.

It’s also here that you can figure out that the candles actually refer to real saints- or at least, real saints from history. There’s an implication here: Your character doesn’t even realize what he’s attempting to accomplish until he’s already destroyed his body, mind, and soul. That’s insane. That’s worse than insane- it’s madness to the highest order.

But it’s the sort of suffering a character goes through in the name of the Name.

Since my last post two weeks ago, I reached SMEN 21:

I had saved a Mood (+30 to a stat, goes in head slot) for my last week of Drowning Your Secrets rolls, and with that 46% starting chance, I managed two successes off five rolls. That gave me SMEN18, putting me comfortably in range of getting Cerise’s candle during Christmas.

Before we get into St. Arthur’s candle- something we will do in a future post- we need to talk a bit about what it takes to get those two screenshots.

Scars, Memories, and Stains. The very concept is terrifying to me, especially the last Scar. Weeping Scar #7 requires a 70/30 luck check. Success means you die and get the Scar; failure means you die the wrong way and need to recover before attempting it again. I succeeded on the first attempt.

Not just killing oneself in the name of the Name, but having to force oneself to drown, under one’s own power, with a fresh, deep wound having torn apart the shoulder. Note the menace quality, too. You’re on that boat for awhile.

Memories are weird, but feel like the least-detrimental for your character of the three. It doesn’t feel good to have the sense of something on your wrists while you sleep, but it’s not painful, just unpleasant. The currency loss from the betrayals required hurt, though.

It actually ended up helping me because it introduced me to the Repentant Forger, one of the four acquaintances that help you around London. Not knowing one loses Secrets for this, though... ouch.

The Stains were physically painful for me to read, not just because I hate that damned Cat, but because the very concept of damaging a soul makes me shiver. After all, at least in FL, the soul is a significant part of the being. To hear the devils tell it, having a soul improves the perception of beauty and happiness. Giving it away leaves one melancholy and occasionally indifferent. What must tearing a soul that one is still using do?

I don’t have anything to add to this. I find the whole sequence of events beautifully terrifying. Experience it for yourself, please. Even with the milestones posted here, there’s a lot of cool text I’m not posting from various steps in between and you should experience it.

My goal in starting SMEN when I did was to be in a position to get St. Cerise’s Candle by Sacksmas (Christmas). St. Cerise requires that you make a great sacrifice to draw her candle from the well: The highest tier of short story you can make, seven fluke-cores, an ubergoat, or a long-lost daughter. Alternatively, during Sacksmas, you can throw your Noman down there. I decided to save myself a bunch of frustration and go for the Noman.

This required a bunch of very boring math on my part, and the conclusion I came to was that, from starting the previous week at SMEN12, I needed 2 at least. There’s an option during Sacksmas that gives you a point of SMEN- it’s how Trand started down the Road last year- but I don’t know the maximum value it can give nor whether or not it will even show up.

So assuming that option would be there, I’d need 2 levels from the Appalling Secret-burning option of Drowning Your Secrets, and then I’d be cutting the menace zone grind toward the first candle very tight.

Alternatively, if I got 3 successes on Drownings, I would be comfortable in earning St. Arthur’s Candle just before Christmas, going to Winking Isle for 7 SMEN, then returning to do Beau’s and Cerise’s in one swoop.

Four successes allows me to be in a position to do Cerise’s a week early, and also gives me a buffer should something unforeseen happen.

This meant that I would be uncomfortable with anything less than 3 successes. Without getting out the spreadsheet and calculator, I’ll tell you that I had roughly 48% chance 12->13, 44% 13->14, and 38% 14->15. Grinding the University -> Flit loop all week gave me enough Secrets for 8 attempts guaranteed if I failed the first 7, and 7 attempts 100% even if I got three consecutive successes.

I got 3 successes.

I post a shot of the entire storylet so you can see the preposterous amount of resources and menaces we’re dealing with on the Road. Note the 3 Unaccountably Peckish from my 3 successes, as well. It was a hard-fought victory, and one I savored for awhile. Those three UP levels actually saved me an action harassing my cat as I went to draw my Marsh-Mired card for the week.

SMEN16 is where the second option that leads to St. Arthur’s Candle opens- the ability to be betrayed for Marks of Chains. We’re not doing that yet. You lose a bunch of items (I haven’t checked which ones! It’ll be a fun surprise!) and it’s a bunch of time in prison and I still have more University looping to do. However...

She did die, for the very first time. Not the last, though.

Again I post the actual storylet, this time for the irony of “You were fortunate!” on an option that kills you, gives you a permanently-bleeding wound, and makes your stomach feel like a black hole. 

As an aside: Look for me to write a page from the diary of my character about this first death from her perspective. It must be crazy to come to the Neath thinking you’ll do some writing then go back to the surface with some money and experience only to have this happen to you.

Back to the meat of things: scars 2-7 kill you, with scar 2 being a 50/50 luck check on which failure gives you some Scandal, and scar 7 serving up a 70/30 luck check on which failure kills you the wrong way, forcing you to come back from the boat and try again to earn your self-destruction.

At the suggestion of Alan on the IRC, I have held onto a key item: A Mood. Moods come from rare opportunity cards, go into a head slot, and boost one of the main stats by 30 for one hour. Given that they take up that slot, your effective gain will be 30 - your best hat for that stat. I have a +8 Watchful hat (gloam-foam), so I will get a 22 point effective boost. That means that I’ll be rolling for another Drowning at ~223 Watchful at the end of the week. One success puts me in Stains range after I do MMiDoS; I’ll have 5 attempts at about 46%. That one success means I get Arthur’s on Dec 13th at the latest, as I stop Drowning for now and start Dreaming.

I would advise against anyone rushing any part of SMEN as I am doing. It’s a fantastic story and a lot of fun to play and I’m missing some cool Unaccountably Peckish card text by doing this. The only thing I could really advise against in the early stages is doing the Blacken Your Mind Like Paper option, because it halves your watchful and the text isn’t worth it. These stories are meant to be fun, so have fun! Well, as much fun as tearing your character apart piece by tiny piece can be. It is neat to see a storylet in which killing yourself is a success, and killing yourself is a failure. It makes you think about the kind of insanity your character must be going through as the whispers drive him ever-deeper into madness. When killing yourself six times is the first part......

I wouldn’t be surprised if people who had been on board with Seeking stopped right around where I’m at now. The grind to St. Arthur’s Candle is by far the longest part of SMEN because it’s very resource-intensive and requires a ton of baby steps that set you back by seemingly arbitrary amounts of stats and items, and all before you’ve unlocked the Winking Isle carousel that gives 7 levels of SMEN through Fasting and Meditating to a Foolish End. You either take things slow and do a single point of SMEN a week through the Marsh-Mired in Dreams of Sustenance cards, or you burn a ton of Secrets/Enigmas/Mourning Candles pushing yourself through. It’s insanity.

First, a little progress update. And the progress is... not much.

I failed seven consecutive attempts at drowning secrets on Saturday, at a 52% success chance. The chance of that happening is in the low single digits. As a result of these failures, I fell behind about a week compared to where I expected to be.

On the other hand, there’s a user in the IRC that offered a bit of help...

The “normal” way of finding the calling card involves going to God’s Editors and giving them the correct number of Proscribed Materials later on in the line. If you haven’t actually done it, I encourage you to do it- the text is cool as hell. It was spoiled for me at some point, and it is the single best piece of SMEN lore I’ve read to date. Please, do it.

Otherwise, know that the calling card opens up Winking Isle at SMEN21, no wounds or nightmares, and A Question? (meaning you have to Hate or Grieve before going- that option opens at SMEN12). The Isle is where you get the book required to get to the Chapel of Lights for candle #6, and also allows you to do a convoluted series of luck-based checks to get 1 or 7 SMEN levels depending on how far into the carousel you go. It’s almost mandatory for those who want to Seek, as beyond a certain point it’s the only method of getting levels that won’t have astronomical costs. There are rumors of one seeker attempting to go down the Road without using the Isle for anything except the book...

Millicent Clathermont is the wife of the guy who runs the tattoo parlor, and is also the one that does the +BDR tattoos during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose. There are mentions of her throughout SMEN, including on Mr. Eaten’s twitter. Why? I legitimately want to know. It’s the second most interesting mystery to me, besides what lies beyond the gate.

I personally think she’s going to be the lady who allows you to become Obscure in the Nadir. Part of her quest line is that she’s trying to be lost and forgotten. The Nadir is the perfect place for such a person. It would make logical sense, then, that not only does she attempt to be forgotten, but that she helps you do the same. As an added bonus reference, she knows what you’re on about when you ask for a certain tattoo during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose. If she knows The Name, she needs to hide in the Nadir for most of the year, for fear of coming under scrutiny from the Masters.

The only other possibility that comes to me offhand is that she’s the Lady in the Mirror that asks for a sacrifice in the nightmare version of Mrs. Plenty’s Carnival when you go for St. Beau’s Candle. Whoever is in that mirror mentions having gone Seeking once, and failed, which would be consistent with Millicent’s desire to disappear.

That’s the main mystery left for me, beyond the actual Gate itself. I still think Sunless Seas had it right when it suggested the gate isn’t a literal gate, but rather the physical manifestation of the laws of the Judgments which oversee the Neath- laws which, by invoking the forbidden Name, you are violating. I still think it’s sunlight that lies beyond the gate on the Hate ending, because sunlight reaching the Neath is a violation of the Judgments and kills (or at least, is supposed to kill) anyone exposed to it down there. Sunlight is so forbidden that smuggling a sunbeam in a mirrored box is profitable in SSeas. The Hatred ending, in which Eaten seeks revenge instead of retribution, would then kill the Bazaar itself.

The Grieve ending is still up in the air under that hypothesis, but my best guess is that you open the gates to spread nightmares specifically to the Masters and the Bazaar itself (the fact that the Masters and the Bazaar are different entities was an interesting revelation in itself) to drive them insane. That would kill or disable the Bazaar and allow forgiveness of a society which has no knowledge of the betrayal of Mr. Candles.

The other possibility is that Grieve reaches out to the Duchess, his ally in the Third City, and in some way helps her- perhaps by lending his remaining power to her precious Cats, or spreading his Name to them so that they may spread it, or sending The Name to the Duchess herself. Whatever the case is, it will be something that has the potential to cripple, but not destroy, Fallen London.

Before I go, I have an amusing tidbit to share. Someone in IRC joked that I was turning SMEN into accounting. Payable: a reckoning. Receivable: Secrets and Enigmas. He wasn’t kidding. Here’s a picture of my SMEN math.

I’m excited to be on the Road, and I hope you’re excited to share my journey with me. If you want to follow my progress in realtime, check my alt’s journal, as I save echoes of interesting steps along the path. 

This entry is going to be about the preparation required for the early stages of the Seeking Road. We’re at the end of Samia’s first full week of seeking! I actually made more progress than I expected to:

I thought I’d get maybe SMEN8 in my first week, intending to hit 7 with Appalling Secrets then go to 8 with the Marsh-Mired in Dreams of Sustenance black cards. This expectation was a miscalculation of the scaling of the Watchful check and the number of Secrets I’d had stashed away compared to how many were required for the check as SMEN increases.

Unfortunately, there was another miscalculation along the same lines. SMEN takes a lot of Secrets. I assumed that a better way to raise SMEN would open up once I had my first Weeping Scar. This turned out to not be the case, as the Take a Wild Guess option only gives Wounds, Nightmares, and a Searing Enigma. Here’s the SMEN-increasing options I have at SMEN10. Note that all of the options are marked as unavailable to me because I have some Sudden Insights, and lack Mourning Candles and Searing Enigmas:

The Watchful check for Drown Your Secrets is 20 * your current SMEN level and it requires 77 * your current SMEN level Appalling Secrets to attempt. Set Fires Around the City is a Watchful 15 * SMEN check and requires 77 * SMEN Mourning Candles, but gives a significant boost to Watchful on a success. The Char Yourself option is a Watchful SMEN * 10 check and requires 7 * SMEN Searing Enigmas. It gives a dramatic increase to Watchful on a success.

Blacken Your Mind Like Paper halves Watchful so just don’t do that. Pervert Your Studies requires Scholar of the Correspondence = SMEN squared, and since that quality maxes out at either 23 or 24, the option becomes impossible beyond SMEN4.

Right now I’m looking at 770 Secrets for a 45% chance, 770 Candles for a 60% chance, or 70 Enigmas for a 90% chance at another SMEN level. And that’s 10-11, on cards that grow exponentially in both difficulty and required materials, with 151 effective Watchful.

I mention all this to highlight just how brutal the Seeking Road is at the early stages. These options, plus the black Unaccountably Peckish cards, are the only available ways to raise SMEN from here until 18, at which point a horrendously resource-intensive option opens. You get two “freebies” when you earn the first two candles, then an “easy” way to grind SMEN the rest of the way opens at SMEN 29. In practical terms, that means someone rushing down The Seeking Road- which I don’t recommend, by the way, at least not with a new character- will need tens of thousands of Appalling Secrets, or to go slowly and do Unaccountably Peckish cards.

“Unaccountably Peckish cards? That sounds neat, Trand! Tell me more!” Well, sure. Unaccountably Peckish is a measure of Mr. Eaten’s influence on you. The quality goes from 0 (not hungry) to 10 (a black hole consuming your entire being). Each level of Unaccountably Peckish puts another black-bordered card that has severe consequences and cannot be discarded into your deck.

You’re Seeking, though. You know that “severe consequences” = “story progression” already. Such is the case with UP.

With a single exception, the most damaging option on a given UP card will increase your SMEN by one level, provided it is below 3 * the UP required to receive the card. So the Four of Eyes can raise your SMEN up to 12; the Seven of Words can raise it to 21.

Manipulation of your Unaccountably Peckish stat is important, because the options on these cards that give SMEN either don’t lower UP, leaving you with a ton of black cards with dire consequences. Further, using one of these cards to raise SMEN gives you a quality called Marsh-Mired in Dreams of Sustenance, a quality which is cleared by Time, the Healer and exists solely to prevent players from using UP cards more than once a week.

One can gain 3 points of Unaccountably Peckish with a Starveling Cat; Lyme can reduce the quality by 3 points, and the Labyrinth has an option to lower it by 2. This manipulation can get you to SMEN27 on its own if you’re willing to wait.

In summary, if you want to get started on The Seeking Road, I would advise the following:

1. Grind out thousands of Appalling Secrets. The best route for this is to investigate the University murder for Cryptic Clues (note: the last option costs Cryptic Clues), then use the Investigating... gained to Raid a Message-Drop in the Flit

2. Raise your modified Watchful as high as you can stand to. This is a secondary benefit of the University grinding you’ll be doing. I strongly recommend taking time to grind out some money to buy the best Watchful gear you can get.

3. Get a Starveling Cat. While I’ve talked about the Cat’s relationship to Mr. Eaten in a past blog, suffice it to say that you should have at least one now, and a total of four by SMEN18.

4. Unlock the Labyrinth of Tigers and Mahogany Hall if you have not done so already. The Hall will save a step later on and gives you access to Lyme’s UP-reducing option.

Next time: Some lore speculation and another check on my character’s progress! If you’d like to follow my progress in real time, you can watch my alt’s profile, as I Echo interesting steps along the Road.

I started down The Seeking Road during Sackmas (Christmas) last year. During the holiday season, an option on one of the cards can start you down the Road with SMEN 4, skipping a painful step. The alt got no such luck. She did it the usual way- the Seeking Curios and Secrets in the Forgotten Quarter card with nightmares 5+ and Scholar of the Correspondence 1+. There’s other ways to do it, but I can’t recommend them.

This is my current The Seeking Road card in my Lodgings. Only the first two options are available at SMEN3, which is where the non-Sackmas options place you. Blacken Your Mind halves your Watchful, with no second chances allowed. Pervert Your Studies requires Scholar of the Correspondence 16, and halves that. Those are expensive. Don’t do them to get to 4. Instead, fish for a rare success in the Labyrinth of Tigers, head down to the Nadir, or use one of the Unaccountably Peckish cards (more info about those in the future) to get a “cheap” point.

The “Drown Your Secrets” option burns 77*SMEN Appalling Secrets for a chance at a point of SMEN, and outside of the Unaccountably Peckish cards is going to be your cheapest SMEN option in the early game. SMEN 4 is where you use these, as due to the formula it gets exponentially more expensive to do this.

Okay, so that’s the start of The Seeking Road. Now I want to talk about what I’m getting into a bit. If this isn’t your thing, if you only want to know about my progress without the discussion of my hypotheses regarding my future on The Seeking Road, I thank you for reading this far and hope you will join me for the next post. This section has spoilers that go a bit deeper yet.

My original impression of SMEN was that Seekers are searching out the true name of Mr. Eaten, before the betrayal that put him beyond the Horizon. That belief collapsed almost immediately when I discovered a holiday card that calls the Drowned One by name- Mr. Candles. 

Sunless Sea offers a clue as to what’s going on, in its quest to go East. Much like SMEN, it is a difficult, brutal quest. But it has a quality to it: Letters of the Name-Which-Burns. You know that Salt is called Salt. You seek to learn its Name in Correspondence sigils.

We learn through various Opportunity cards that the Correspondence has power. This is especially obvious when attempting to study the Correspondence in the Forgotten Quarter, and from the description text on Correspondence Plaques. The symbols burn. Mr. Eaten’s name- or rather, the forbidden sigils that comprise his name in the language of the Correspondence- must be fire.

That’s a means, though, not an end. Knowing The Name isn’t enough. Something must be done with it. A hint as to what you might have needed to do is found when asking Millicent Cathermont for a tattoo. But that is not the current end goal. The goal is to open the gate at Avid Horizon.

Why? How do the candles and The Name help? Why are there so many references to Millicent Cathermont in SMEN?