Or: Seeking, an Oral History / Dying
Historic on the Seeking Road / I Went North And All I Got Was This [REDACTED] /
Six Years, Seven Candles / Dehumanising Myself And Facing To Bloodshed: A
Memoir / I’m a Candle, And So Can You!
I did it. I went the whole way NORTH.
All of it.
This has been a long, long time in
coming; I started playing this game six entire years ago, in 2010, and started
Seeking in mid-2012; late August, I think, though the exact date has been lost
to time. I figured, as someone who’s been around for most of the history of
Seeking, it’d be cool to write up an account of everything that’s happened with
this weird obscure punishing side-story which attracts a far bigger crowd than
anyone would ever expect. Buckle up for about four years worth of Instances and
Happenstances; I can’t promise it’ll be earthshattering, but hopefully it’ll be
entertaining, or at least informative. There’s even an origin story or four.
You may also enjoy NiteBrite’s
autobiography from a while ago, which covers a lot of similar
ground.
(This is terribly long, and Tumblr has played merry hell with the formatting. Some of my images don’t seem to want to port over, too. If you want to read the original, it’s here. The formatting’s mangled there, too, but in a way that adds character. There is also a gif of a goat getting owned, so it’s objectively superior.)
The Early Days
It is begun, it is
begun, it is begun…
I started Seeking because I was
bored. It was a thing to do, I was approaching the content boundary, and it
seemed neat. Why not? There’s not particularly much of interest to say about
this, really; at the time, the content boundary was Stains, Scars and Chains,
with nary a whiff of a Candle. You pretty much drew cards and injured yourself
horribly slowly, but surely, over the span of about two months; the biggest
roadblock was probably getting Starveling Cats, needed to stain your soul. The
community was much smaller back then, and the cat economy much reduced. I got
my cats by asking politely on an unofficial spinoff forum, called Inquisitive
Friends; the website went down years ago, but it does hold some significance to
this tale. More on them later. At the time, the whole of Seeking really was
just extracurricular cardflipping where you lost some stats or got some menaces
now and then.
Marsh-Mired
Mr Eaten would like
to send you a dream of long-ago injustice
So, by October, I’d finished
Staining, Scarring and Chaining myself and had hit SMEN 8. I’d mostly run out
of things to do, having finished even the thing people turn to in
boredom-induced desperation. A trip to Polythreme was in order, I decided,
because I’d never actually picked up an Unfinished Hat.
I still don’t have one.
Halfway through the zee-journey, I
just kind of got bored and wandered off. A bit of context; back then, you had
10 actions in your candle, 20 if you were an Exceptional Friend. It took much
longer to get anything done, and zee-journeys were about twice as long
as they are now to boot (especially to Polythreme). Anyway, I didn’t touch the
game for about a month.
On a rainy day, while waiting for a
bus, I kind of absentmindedly checked Twitter on my trashy tiny mobile phone,
only to discover something fairly startling.
Hmm. (Context, again; back in the
day, you could get notifications through Twitter through the slightly janky
medium of a direct message to yourself. I don’t think this happens any more.)
As you can imagine, I logged onto FL
with a renewed fervour, and very slowly started making my way back from the Sea
of Voices. It took me until the next day entirely to make it back to London,
where I was presented with A Dream of Dark Water. You may recognise that card
as the current source of Weeping Scars; back then, though, it was the gateway
to Saint Arthur’s Candle, and an entirely unexpected addition. Playing the
Dream of Dark Water netted you a level of Marsh-Mired in Dreams of Sustenance.
This quality tracked your progress on gaining St Arthur’s Candle.
So, fairly spooky and ominous all in
all. It’s not every day you get an invitation from Mr Eaten, after all. There
were quite a few other people in the same boat; there was a forum thread for
anyone experiencing the same thing. You can
read it if you want, but not all that much remains; posts started
being edited by an emptiness, turned into ominous Eaten-esque snippets devoid
of any information. Anyway, we eventually figured out that anyone who was
Scarred, Stained and Chained got the Mr Eaten action (I genuinely cannot
remember if it was an actual Social Action or something Living Story-esque).
Mr Eaten’s Twitter actually made a
tweet for the first time in the history of ever around this time. That was
pretty exciting.
The Bone Candle
Which is first? Saint
Arthur’s candle. The bone candle.
Soon after, a new card started
appearing in the Opportunity Deck, the road to the first candle, St Arthur’s.
The core of it; send social actions to other people at the cost of a Searing
Enigma and some other expensive gubbin- if they accepted, they’d start Seeking
and you’d get a level of Marsh Mired. If they didn’t… welp, guess you wasted an
Enigma. Enigma sources were fairly scarce back then; I ended up doing the
Affair of the Box again to get some, and the rest came from the Fidgeting
Writer. Heists were added like two weeks after St Arthur’s Candle was
introduced, but I don’t think anyone really appreciated them as a source of
Enigmas at the time, and they ate up the cards you needed to be drawing anyway.
The Truthbreaker Turbine did not exist.
Free of the Name didn’t actually
exist at first, so I got a leg-up by making some alts and betraying them a
couple times. Didn’t last long, though; Free of the Name was added basically
specifically to curtail this kind of behaviour. Still, I blazed a brief trail
to the front of the pack, discovering fairly swiftly that progressing in this
new Seeking World got you some menace cards for your trouble; these cards still
exist, as Knight of Feasts and Knave of Regrets. I actually managed to run into
an unfinished card, simply
called TODO, which just gave me some Wounds and Nightmares. Apparently three menace
cards was considered too harsh, but Alexis forgot to lock the unfinished third
one.
Communication on the official forums
was often tricky, with the emptiness, as a roaring lion, walking around
Seekers, whom it may devour. This is where the Inquisitive Friends forum came
in; as it was free of the emptiness’ dread glare, posting was free and easy. I
was induced into the sacred mystery of a Seeking Document, which still exists
to this day; you may find it in the silence between the tick and the tock of a
grandfather clock. It’s relatively unimportant to the grand scheme of things,
though, only that it existed as a grand reservoir for the efforts of many
Seekers, a secret holy bonfire of community spirit, unbowed and unbroken. I
think it was probably fairly obvious that people were collaborating to record
all this content, but nevertheless it was kept in utmost secret.
A small anecdote; I complained
lightly on the forums about getting poor luck with card draws, and then when I
tabbed back over to the game I had an unexpected St Arthur’s Candle card right
there and then. This was back before I was an individual of any real note,
before Rats, before any of that. I don’t know if anyone else got this, but it
was very cool.
St Beau and Saint-Arthur
“I seem to ‘ave
mislaid me sense of yoomour. I 'ad it a moment ago, I swear. Just before you
started talkin’ out of yer arse.”
So, anyone who progressed far enough
and betrayed seven people (after waiting for some bugs to be repaired such as
the game crashing if you tried to open the St Arthur’s Candle card after your
third betrayal) got their Candle, losing 20 whole levels of Dangerous and
Persuasive in the bargain. Back then, stats were only 50CP a level, but it was
still a pretty hefty loss; before that, the roughest thing was probably losing
500CP of all four stats after getting 7 Scars, Stains and Chains. Anyone who
had St Arthur’s Candle quickly noticed a new card showing up in their deck, for
St Beau’s Candle. This took you to the wonderful world of the Nightmare
Carnival, where the goal was to raise your Nightmares to exactly 7 by using
weird messed up versions of the carnival storylets, where tickets cost an awful
lot more than usual.
I was one of the first to go through
the Carnival, though I was lagging a little bit behind the cutting edge. I
noticed that one option in particular let you raise Reputation: Abomination, a
quality I’d picked up from poking at the menace cards I mentioned earlier, so I
mostly stuck with it. At the time, Reputation: Abomination was a linear
quality, like Boxful of Intrigue, so I gained 1 whole level every time I played
it. It has since become Pyramidal, using changepoints like most other
qualities, so levelling it has become much slower; in that Carnival tent, I
gained a worse reputation than any player today could ever hope to accomplish.
At the end of the carnival, there’s a
brief conversation with Mrs. Plenty, during which you get the opportunity to
justify to her exactly why you’re bothering with Seeking in the first place. I
went for the option I was pretty sure nobody else would: It’s cheaper than a
divorce. Her response is the quote at the head of this section.
For the candle, I gave up all my
Connections; I noticed it didn’t actually eat Connected: Docks, so I bug
reported that, just to be dutiful. The other option required you to give up all
your Lodgings, though there was a bug that stopped it from consuming Bazaar
lodgings. That bug went unreported for quite a while…
Still, the “no connections ever at
any time” doctrine for efficient opportunity deck usage was born that day; I
noticed that it was much easier to get at the “good” cards with no connections
at all, since I didn’t have to sift through massive piles of conflict cards.
Sometimes strategies come from strange places.
Anyway, I promised an origin story,
so here it is; at around this same time, the secret Mind of the Long Dead God
area was discovered, basically by accident. I created my Tumblr initially just
as a throwaway to Spread the Word of its discovery, since it was neat and I
knew there was some form of Tumblr FL community. I wasn’t entirely satisfied
with just making one post ever, though, so I figured I might as well do
something else, and wrote up an entire guide to Seeking; at least partially in
the hopes that I might encourage some people into letting themselves be
betrayed, helping others towards St Arthur’s Candle. So I, uh, did that; I
don’t really know if it had any major positive effect or anything, since I was
already done with betrayals. I tried, at least!
A Ratty Interlude
“You silly bugger. I
'ope you like your candle. Don’t let the rats eat it.”
After this, things were fairly quiet
on the Seeking front for a while. Seekers collaborated, secretly and
diligently, to compile the entire text of the Carnival with all its branches.
We watched, we waited, we consumed. The very first lacre-fall happened, and the
Twelve Days of Sacksmas, and it was good and cool. Mr Eaten was there, and we
got a glimpse into his motives and learned his Name for the first time.
2013 happened, very suddenly; this
was the Year in which it All Happened. But we’ll get there later.
Here is another
origin story; how exactly the rat business got started. I was bored (again),
and so to amuse myself I decided to bother Alexis on Twitter, asking him how
many rats I’d have to send him to get news of a SMEN or Ambition update. This
was in, like, January or so. His response, which may some day be written in
letters of fire above the ruins of Proto Neo London, was “*what is the
number*, that’s always the question”; so, of course, I set out to send as
many rats as I possibly could.
In March, towards the end of the
Feast of the Exceptional Rose, a vast quantity of rats suddenly appeared in my
inventory, along with a message on Twitter from the Bazaar. (this whole
incident has since been immortalised on tvtropes, I think. But this is my
historical account, so I’m including it anyway)
As it happens, I’d basically run out
of rats at the time. Most people would nod sagely at this and then continue on
with their business, rat-joke forgotten; but not I. This just renewed my vigour
for ratsending, and I vowed to continue sending rats until I had repaid the
entire 50k rat-debt, plus interest.
This took me a while.
The Price of Cerise
There is that ancient
bargain, before the Shame was locked in the Mountain (if it ever was), before
the waters were divided (if they were ever whole).
Besides rat nonsense, not much
happened from January to about March related to Seeking. (Not to say nothing
happened, of course, but recording the entire history of FL is another
endeavour entirely).
Knife and Candle began to claw its
way out of the mists; access was initially given to anyone who solved the
Mirrorcatch Box puzzle, which you
can read about here. I was among the first twenty or so to get it, and
managed to kick off some forums drama by hinting a bit too liberally at the
solution on the Inquisitive Friends forums; but that’s tangential and, frankly,
inconsequential. My Mirrorcatch Box was stolen instantly, anyway.
Anyway, Knife and Candle came back.
It was a wild and roaring time, with rules and mechanics changing on a
near-daily basis, new rewards and methods of murder being included on a weekly
basis, occasional leaderboard announcements, and so on, and so forth. I managed
to get a fair amount of usage out of my blog by releasing a weekly K&C
changelog; there was often quite a lot to talk about.
It was a bit of a lark, to say the
least. I somehow managed to get involved with not one but two separate gangs of
Candleers, bonded together by a mutual pact of non-aggression. I leaked
information wantonly from both sides; Forms, plans, vulnerabilities… basically
purely for the hell of it. It was, as I say, a bit of a lark, and an extremely
wild time. I swear I’m not actually a chronic backstabber.
Still, it wasn’t fun and games for
long; a new, ridiculously expensive reward showed up, requiring 77 Silver Prize
Tokens; the Waxwail Knife. Shortly thereafter, an option appeared on the
Restitution menace card, requiring 77 Iron Knife Tokens; the price of St
Cerise’s Candle. The cap of 50 Iron Knife Tokens was unknown at the time, so I
basically merrily continued stabbing people and getting medals. I recall saying
to Alexis on Twitter “77 Iron Knife Tokens is a bit of a pain, but at least it
doesn’t require that Waxwail Knife!”
Shortly after that, an option to
trade a Waxwail Knife for 77 Iron Knife Tokens showed up, and I rammed straight
into the cap of 50 Tokens. Getting the knife would take some serious doing, and
the plot to achieve it was fairly frickin’ convoluted; fortunately,
I’ve already written about it. I actually streamed the entire
Waxwail tradein and Candle acquisition for my co-conspirators, which was
probably the most second most exciting livestream of Fallen London ever. Not
the most exciting?, you ask, incredulously; that one comes later on.
Something I did neglect to mention
was that Mr Eaten’s Twitter got in on this, too; it tweeted out a list of
people who were vulnerable to the Prize Token theft option (i.e. anyone who had
St Arthur’s Candle and Silver Prize Tokens); about 31 people in all, I think.
Those tweets have since been removed, but they did exist.
The candle didn’t have a description
until about four or five months after I obtained it. It was just entirely blank
when moused over in my inventory. Still, the text when obtaining it had left an
impression on me; I didn’t really want to tell a soul I had the candle, lest
some option to steal it present itself. None ever came, but I was worried. An
echo of this appears later on, but nothing comes of that, either.
A whole two weeks after I got the
Candle, the price for a Waxwail dropped to 44 Prize Tokens, making things much
easier. True fact; you got a free Elemental Secret with your Waxwail Knife when
it cost 77 Tokens.
Rats, Vol II
jellyfish
It’s quite a while before the next
SMEN update, but when things start happening, they really start happening.
Still, the resolution of my rat tale happens somewhere during the summer; I
finally manage to send Alexis 77777 rats. Admittedly, the numbers were fudged
quite a bit, because I’m fairly sure I lost count at least twice and also I
counted rats sent through the Restitution card as 1000, even though only 100
ever make it to the recipient. The 77 came from Scuttering Squad boxes, which I
arbitrarily decided contained exactly 11 ratty saboteurs, so that’s canon now.
I made sure to include some form of completely daft message with every rat
parcel I sent, absolutely all of which have hopefully been lost to time itself.
Anyway, to cap off the 77777th
ratsending, I wrote an absolutely massive rat post, which has since
been described by Alexis as “about 7000 words of liquid insomnia”. This is
basically accurate, though it’s actually closer to 3000 words.
I was, ostensibly, trying to test the
character limit of the FL message box (it is, for the record, much much less
than 15000 characters), but, mostly, I just got carried away. This marked the
end of ratsending for quite a while, because I figured he deserved a break, and
I didn’t want to disrupt the perfect sanctity of a notional 77777 rats sent.
Some months later, I went on to
create Rat Sending Simulator, partially to get to grips with the underlying
wiring behind Storynexus (and so, by extension, Fallen London), and partially
for lols. It originally ended at the Rat King crowning, and was an excuse for
me to send people copies of Bad Rats. (check out
this screenshot I stole from someone else) It had very little
actual content; nowadays, it’s much larger and more terrifying.
Arthur II, and the Sun
You ascend into the
light and are gone.
In May or thereabouts, St Arthur’s
Candle was reworked a bit; basically, it became much more like it is now, with
the ability to betray Spouses and Midnight Matriarchs rather than other
players. I wasn’t really involved much with this, being well past Arthur at the
time it was reworked, but it bears bringing up. The rework was slightly buggy
at first, though; there was at least one report of someone’s Midnight Matriarch
quality being set to -1, somehow, so they had to buy 2 Matriarchs from the
Bazaar just to have a net total of 1.
I think, during the “dead period” between
Cerise and Destin, all three of the infamous Scorched by the Sun incidents
occurred. The Nightmare Carnival’s Beneath the Neath storylet offered you the
opportunity to spend 50 Fate to have your character deleted; except, well, the
character deletion didn’t actually work. You lost access to your
Storynexus friends list from within FL itself, but that’s pretty much it.
Anyway, you may already be aware, three entire people- Mac Trilby, NiteBrite and Victor
Gulenko - decided to play that option, and at least one of them bug reported
the fact that they didn’t actually experience any lasting harm from the option.
Seekers, eh. The Scorched by the Sun quality was awarded to those three
absolute madmen for their services to self-destruction.
Destin-y
This is how Drownies,
you think, and then the thought is lost in a rush of salt.
Fast forward to Hallowmas. Nothing
really Seekery has happened for quite a while; Emptiness ate some posts, Mr
Eaten sent out some waves of Marsh-Miring, about once a month. Then, suddenly,
a new seasonal event is announced! Everyone is excited.
Bearers of St Cerise’s Candle
especially; at this point, there were quite a few of them, and the candles were
not kept quite so secret. You see, an option requiring a Cerise had appeared on
the seasonal event storylet; bizarrely, with variable difficulty. You could get
odds somewhere between 4% and 11% of succeeding on it, with the odds
recalculating on every refresh. It didn’t do anything particularly exciting on
its own, though; you could get Night-Whispers out of it at the cost of Watchful
and a chunk of menace, but that’s it. Still, it heralded Change; change was
both terrifying and exciting in equal measure. An option also opened which
allowed Seekers to sell their soul; anyone who did so and then went to the
Forgotten Quarter was in for a wild time, as the devils get very upset and
forcibly jam your soul back into you, making you go extremely mad and extremely
dead (all the way to menace level 14) and also lose all your Infernal items and
also all your Echoes.
Change, when it came, was indeed
terrifying and exciting. The first Hallowmas marked the introduction of
Destinies as a concept; I lunged upon them as soon as they opened, reduced to
using terrible bus wifi on my morning commute to university just so I could see
what the heck was going on. Here’s exactly what the heck was going on; I
merrily chopped off my own arm and was rewarded with St Destin’s Candle and the
Torment Destiny, which gave -3 to all stats. I still have Torment, to this day;
I could easily have removed it, but that wouldn’t be very Seekery of me. Now
that I’ve gone North, Torment is all that remains.
The Year Where It Happened
Time. I used to think
it was a wheel. The Fingerkings say it’s a flame. Coolest at its heart. But
wildest at its edges.
After St Destin’s Candle, Seeking
started to get very, very busy indeed. This was late October; Seeking was put
on hiatus in December. While the rest of the year was defined by large gaps
between SMEN content, after Destin was added, things happened practically on a
weekly basis. Plenty of other things happened around or before this, too, like
the Sunless Sea Kickstarter and the creation of the FL IRC channel. The second
half of 2013 was a bustling time to be an active FL player, especially a
Seeker. Chronological ordering of things may start to get hazy from this point
on, as it’s tricky to remember (a ton of stuff happened) and it’s rather
hard to dig up some records, since many
threads were basically nuked from orbit. So; any incidents
listed from now on up until Winking Isle may not be in precise order, but
you’ll get the gist of it. Treachery of Clocks???
The Many Roads to Destin
Damned
by deed and damned by destiny. Drowned and driven. Debased. In the depths.
The
first source of St Destin’s Candle was Destinies, but the item description
promised seven sources in total. In the end, I think maybe four or five were
actually implemented. Someone on IRC jokingly suggested, I think in a support
ticket, that the description should get longer every time a source was added.
This suggestion was actually taken onboard; the candle’s description increased
in size with every source added. I think the final description was something
like;
This
is the candle that does not yet exist. There will be seven distinct ways to
obtain it. Each is worse than the last. This is the candle that does not yet
exist. There will be seven distinct ways to obtain it. Each is worse than the
last. This is the candle that does not yet exist. There will be seven distinct
ways to obtain it. Each is worse than the last. This is the candle that does
not yet exist. There will be seven distinct ways to obtain it. Each is worse
than the last. Some things will not come to pass.
The
first source, Destinies, you already know of.
The
second came shortly afterwards; during Confessions at Hallowmas, the follow-up
event to the Destiny business in early November. The initial Confession-sending
period had a Seekers-only Confession option; this did absolutely nothing but
tank both parties’ stats by a full level, while implying that only one person
would ever actually complete the Search
The path you are set
on is narrow as cheesewire. No room for two.
During the second
phase, when Confessions could be betrayed or kept secret, an actually
functional option showed up; it would allow you to share St Destin’s Candle
with someone who had trusted you, at the cost of half your stats, as long as
you had at least 77 levels in all four. The receiver would lose 5 levels of all
stats, as well as half their second chances.
One of NiteBrite’s
self-inflicted goals was to send out as many St Destin’s Candles as possible.
This was achieved through a little bit of trickery; Tier 3 Professions had just
been released, but they were slightly buggy, and you could manage to have
several of their Profession items at once. This made the 77-stat requirement
easier, and NiteBrite managed to send out a total of 9 candles; two on an alt,
and seven on their main. Personally, I didn’t actually send anyone a St
Destin’s Candle at all; too fond of “actually having stats”. Though old-Seeking
had plenty of savage stat loss, I somehow managed to escape the worst of it.
The third source
required you to forsake your Notability and Connected: Society, as long as you
had 7 Notability, 7 Making Waves, 77 Connected: Society. Back in the day,
Notability was much, much harder; you lost 1 point per week, no matter what,
and you weren’t guaranteed to gain a level from the Amanuensis, either. Gaining
Notability required you to succeed at a Making Waves challenge (difficulty 20 +
4*Notability - BDR; i.e. the same as the current unlock requirements). Success
would zero your Making Waves and give you 1 Notability; failure would halve
your Making Waves. Nobody really liked Notability, it was awful and terrible
just to maintain it, never mind make forward progress. Getting to 7 Notability
was no easy task, though a few people managed it eventually.
The fourth source was
Winking Isle. More on that place later.
The repetitions in
the description indicated a fifth source which was never actually found, if I
recall correctly. In any case, Sources 6 and 7 weren’t implemented before the
hiatus. Even though each source was supposed to be worse than the last,
I can’t help but feel the first was the most savage by far. Notability may last
a week, but Torment is for life.
A Failure to Communicate
Just an aside about the Emptiness’
post-manipulation, since it hit a fever pitch at around this time. Basically
any significant discussion of current Seeking content was likely to be deleted
or edited into ominous snippets which would bear little resemblance to the
original content of the post, except when Alexis was feeling sassy. As
mentioned above, some threads basically got totally wiped out, all their posts
replaced with the same sentence over and over again and their titles changed to
something ominous. Additionally, some word filters were put in place, which
would instantly delete your post without warning if triggered; I don’t really
remember many of the banned words, but at least one of them was literally just
the number 7. Some of
the censored words are hidden in this crossword.
This was, to be honest, a bit far,
and some people protested that it was unfair. Alexis basically agreed, and
admitted that the whole emptiness thing was eating up more time than it
probably should have, so the forums became a free haven for discussion once
more, mostly.
Gawain, The Hell Candle
You will never
achieve this candle, and even if you were to do so, you would lose the very
head from your shoulders.
I will preface this
segment by making something very clear; I got owned. I got super owned. Really,
ultra super wonderful owned.
As you may recall
earlier, I sent Alexis seven Boxes of Saboteurs to round my rat total up to
77777. These lay unopened for a very, very long time; then, one day, for no
real reason, he opened all seven at once. This was a fairly big surprise, but
not as surprising as the two social actions which came after.
As you can imagine, I
freaked the heck out at this. For all I knew, this was in all full
seriousness an actual Thing that was Happening. I turned to the IRC channel for
advice, getting a range of responses varying between “do nothing” and “do
everything”. I made exasperated noises on Twitter, and Alexis said I had until
midnight to do something about them, or they’d be withdrawn. I may have
panicked slightly.
So, I resolved to set
up a livestream so that the general public could watch me in my death throes.
The order of operations I decided on was to accept the Candlecurious, then the
Gawain, since if there was a correct order that would hopefully leave me with
no candles except Gawain’s. The world waited with bated breath as I accepted
the Candlecurious…
The game locked up
for almost a solid minute.
I accepted the
Gawain’s Candle, barely even taking the time to register the acceptance message
for the Candlecurious. The game locked up a little bit again, but not for very
long in comparison.
The results of these
social actions were not what I expected.
Still, Alexis chimed
in over Twitter, telling me to look at the maximum length of a living story in
Storynexus; it had previously been one week, but new options all the way up to
4 weeks had been added. So, I thought, the lagspike when accepting the Candlecurious
had been because this was weird new tech, and I was actually subscribed to a
living story, for realsies. For the next 4 weeks, I resolved not to make any
significant progress in Seeking, lest something terrible happen. So, even
though at one point I had enough Searing Enigmas to play the Cyriac option, I
dallied, waiting for my four week timer to pass, just to make sure.
In case you’re
wondering, absolutely nothing happened. Nothing at all. The entire thing was a
giant prank, and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker, like a goldfish. By the
time the four-week timer had run out, Seeking was already being locked away and
put in stasis.
Hithes, Trithes, Mercenaries, Lizards
You
soaked your hair with tears and dressed in white. Your enemy found you at the
seeking-place. You fought. Both lost blood. One lost fire.
Around
the same time as all of the above was happening, some new options appeared on
the Restitution opportunity card; competitive social actions, allowing for the
transfer of Searing Enigmas.
Hithes
required and transferred seven Enigmas; trithes, three. They required both
parties have Reputation: Abomination. Hithes needed 100 Dangerous, Trithes 150;
sending a request reduced Dangerous somewhat. Hithes gave both participants
about 7cp of all four menaces; this is important, keep it in mind.
So,
with hithes and trithes, the cutting-edge Seekers had a way to transfer Enigmas
willingly or steal them from the unwilling. The exact metric used was
uncertain, though we were fairly sure it was Dangerous. At some point, we
noticed Alexis was a valid target for Hithing/Trithing, and that’s when things
started to get a bit silly.
My
memories of this are actually a bit foggy, but a Twitter snapshot of the event exists here.
Nitebrite
and I had a sort of mock-feud going on based on relative successes/fails at
enigma transfer through hithing. At some point, Alexis got dragged into this,
but he hoovered up Enigmas like the research team for the world’s toughest
cryptic crossword. Many people tried to rob him of his Enigmas, but few
succeeded. I poisoned him, which he responded to by trithing the bejesus out of
me. After this, he claimed to have de-geared, so I boldly went forth and tried
to get my enigmas back. I failed, I succeeded; which is to say, I didn’t get my
enigmas back at all, but I did manage to murder him, drive him mad and
send him to prison simultaneously. This is, in its own way, a triumph, even if
he just devhaxed his way out.
The
resolution of all this; some people got social actions to accept Primeval
Instruments of Plated Vengeance (actually lizards); NiteBrite managed to get
most of the Enigmas back from Alexis; some people who asked politely got Boxes
of Exploding Misery, containing enigmas or lizards, depending on how Alexis was
feeling. Personally, I got another goddamn Candlecurious, though the text was
different, indicating that it actually contained Enigmas (7, in fact). In the
end, I think my enigma-count mostly just equilibrated; whatever I didn’t get
back ended up in NiteBrite’s coffers. Some other people got Boxes of Exploding
Misery that just contained lizards.
.
This
was not the only menacing social action of its day. Some time before this, I
woke up in the morning and checked FL to discover I’d been hit by Alexis with a
social action I’d never seen before, which gave me approximately 1 frick-tonne
of Nightmares, as well as decreasing my Reputation: Abomination. I was mildly
bemused, but didn’t think much of it. At about the same time, emptiness posted a big list of Seeker usernames on the
forums,
with no real explanation; Mr Eaten’s Twitter posted a link to this list, too.
A
few days later, I got hit with it again, this time by an absolute stranger. I
sent them a confused letter, and discovered this was due to a new option in the
Royal Bethlehem. Anyone could play this action, Seeker or no, and it allowed
them to harass anyone with an Abominable Reputation and give them hella
Nightmares in exchange for Memories of Light and a fairly sizeable Nightmares
drop.
I was mercenary-contracted a few times while the option existed. Not, it
has to be said, particularly often, but every now and then I’d suddenly get
like six levels of Nightmares out of nowhere. The joys of being a Seeker.
Cyriac
Seek, and ye shall find.
On November 21st, Mr Eaten’s Twitter
account woke up from a brief hibernation to produce a single-word Tweet;
“Cyriac”. The assembled armies of the forum and IRC started theorising
frantically to work out what the hell he was on about; the solution was found
fairly quickly. A branch on the God’s Editors card appeared, requiring 77
Searing Enigmas and SMEN 7, and bearing a Warning.
What exactly passed for the right
quantity of Proscribed Material? Nobody really had any idea, though most
guesses involved varying amounts of sevens. Some sharp-eyed Seekers noticed
some text had been added to an option one one of the Seeking menace cards,
though.
For I was hungry, and
I ate you. I was thirsty, and I drank you.
This pointed at a
passage of St Matthew… or, more precisely, two different passages of St
Matthew; 25:35 and 25:42. They were both strong guesses, but I was fairly
convinced that 25:35 was the right one, for reasons I no longer remember. My
plan was to amass 77 Enigmas, using the new (at the time) Truthbreaker Turbine
and Hithes, then try playing the branch. If it turned out I didn’t have the
right number of Material, I could just pop over to the Bazaar tab and buy/sell
some to see if I could get the right answer. At around that same time, though,
Proscribed Material’s price in the Bazaar jumped from 0.08e/unit to 1.01e/unit.
This was a bit rude, and it made some people fairly antsy as it was pretty much
a barb directed at Seekers which had a knock-on effect on the rest of the
playerbase, but the change has persisted to this day.
In the end, I never
got around to playing this branch, for reasons which I’ll go into a bit later
on. Maybe my strategy would even have worked, or maybe not; the Cyriac content
does still exist in New-Seeking, but it may well have been changed since then
as part of the rework (At the very least it costs only 7 Enigmas, rather than
77).
Winking Isle
What
a blasted, desperate speck. What a stony, hopeless reach of nothing.
In
December, the Acquaintance/Influence system was added, introducing the Calling
Card social action to the game. One brave and/or foolish soul, Alexander Feld,
decided to send a card to none other than Mr Eaten. This began the chain of
stories that led to the downfall of the old Seeking order. How did that happen?
Well, it’s a long story; a story I pretty much only observed from the
sidelines, to be honest (remember the Candlecurious!). If you’d like to read
the account of the person actually at the heart of it all, it’s here. I’ll probably be using a lot of the same
screenshots, if anything.
A
minor anecdote of note, though; I had similar plans to send Mr Eaten a calling
card, but was hamstrung by my only internet access being shoddy public
transport wifi, which cut out on me before I could do anything. The Fates
willed against it, I suppose.
Anyhow,
the introduction of the calling card into the ecosystem caused no small amount
of panic and excitement. There was a bit of a lull before anything happened,
though, because, as you can see, accepting the card was ridiculously harmful.
These effects only applied to the very first introduction of the Calling Card
into the world; future card transfers didn’t touch stats or give menaces at
all. There were other complications, though, but we’ll get there.
If
you want an absolute recap of all Winking Isle had to offer, I recommend
clicking that link above, as it is fairly comprehensive. The isle was basically
being worked on as it was being explored, so there was a fairly tangible sense
that things needed to be hurried along.
At
its core, the island worked like this; you could spend 10 actions to try a
50/50 luck check which would either increase or decrease your Fasting and
Meditating quality by some amount. Certain rare items could be thrown down the
well for guaranteed progress, occasionally with a lessened action cost. If you
managed to get to 77 Fasting and Meditating, you could claim a candle. You
could get St Destin’s, at the cost of half your stats; St Cerise, at the cost
of St Destin’s; or St Fortigan’s, at the cost of both Destin and Cerise.
A
further wrinkle was quickly introduced in the form of menaces; the Fast and
Meditate option initially had no negative effects, but before long it was
adjusted to dish out Nightmares and Wounds, fail or succeed. If your Nightmares
or Wounds grew too high, you became unable to do anything. The intended method
of progression, then, was probably that you’d go to the island, try your luck
at Fasting and Meditating, return before your menaces grew too great, then
repeat.
Things
didn’t exactly go to plan, though. The playerbase rallied forth, bearing
weapons against the cruelty of the Isle; cheery, festive weapons. Christmas
Cards, in fact. They could be sent anywhere, with no restrictions on location,
so they could be used to salve the menaces of anyone on Winking Isle. This
allowed for longer stays and faster progress than possibly intended, but I
don’t think this was a particularly glaring design flaw or anything;
Christmas Cards and Winking Isle were introduced at practically the same time,
so it may well have even been intentional. The mental image of a beleaguered
postman hauling a giant, sodden sack of cheery festive mail all the way to the
desolate hellish Winking Isle is a pretty great one, though; if I hadn’t
already come up with Nuncio at this point, that probably would have been a big
inspiration for it.
Anyhow,
Alexander Feld progressed through the island, throwing the dice on Fasting and
Meditating to try and get the full set of required candles. The menaces weren’t
the only thing that changed along the way; the action to travel from Wolfstack
Docks to the Isle
Impatience
started to mount at the slow progress; Feld received at least some Fate to
speed things along. Fortunately nobody got too discourteous, but there was
certainly some amount of fear that Winking Isle, and everything that came with
it, would be entirely temporary, and that we’d have to hurry through things as
quickly as possible. All the “Seekers are enemies” fluff from the social
actions only served to add fuel to this fire.
There
was a waiting list drawn up, with priority based on the number of candles and
traitor-status; if you’d ever betrayed someone using the Prize Token-theft, you
were placed lower on the list. Of course, I did all my betraying through
proxies, so I was basically top of the leaderboard; but I deferred my position
to NiteBrite, so I could work on the Cyriac option (and I was still
worried about Candlecurious, of course).
Alexander
Feld was reassured that the arts and armies of the Seeker playerbase could help
him get a Cerise fairly easily in London, so he resolved to leave shortly after
obtaining St Fortigan’s Candle. This happened on the 9th of December, 2013; a
Monday. By my reckoning, the Candlecurious, if it truly existed, would fire off
on Friday night, and then I could go do the Cyriac option and see what lay
behind it.
NiteBrite
got the calling card and went to the island to poke around. I went to bed
early, but I saw a post on the forums; something about losing all progress to a
Nightmares menace storylet after spending lots of Fate and even a Veils-Velvet.
According to people on IRC at the time, he was fairly devastated at getting
owned that harshly (and unexpectedly, as Feld hadn’t run into the Nightmares
menace storylet) by the Island. I got a fairly incomprehensible PM, which
should probably accurately convey the atmosphere of the situation.
I
didn’t get this until the next morning, because I’d just seen his post while
checking the forums from my phone, in bed. While I slept, things escalated even
further.
It
was discovered that the card duplicated itself when sending; instead of
removing 1 card from the sender, it gave 1 card instead. This sort of viral
propagation was fairly clearly buggy, but with St Destin’s Candle using a
similar system only a few weeks before, it may have seemed plausibly
intentional. I think about six whole people ended up on the island at once,
with some quantities of Fate bouncing around to complicate matters.
In
the morning, the duplicate cards were removed; NiteBrite was left with the only
Mr Eaten’s Calling Cards, and anyone on the island got shunted into the
Mirror-Marches. Things turned from bad to worse, though; someone threatened to
sue over the Fate they’d spent on the island; it quickly emerged that they’d
never been on the island in the first place. Still, there was still a fair
amount of tension even after that, involving complications with Fate refunds or
some such; eventually, Alexis decided the best thing to do was just to freeze
up all the content and come back to it at some later stage. At the time, it
seemed like the hiatus might have lasted only a few months or so… but, well,
you know how that worked out.
I
accepted NiteBrite’s card invitation a few days after things died down. It did
nothing except give NiteBrite another card, for some reason.
In
the end, the Cyriac option locked before I could ever play it. The
Candlecurious was, of course, a joke. If you’d like to read further into this
whole thing, the final page of the Mr Eaten discussion thread has plenty to read,
as well as Alexis’ official blogpost about the incident.
The First Ratmas
<&Spacemarine9> this is my
revenge for candlecurious
<&Spacemarine9> invoking the playerbase to fling rats
Chronologically, this actually takes
place about midway through the Big Well Incident, but that’d be tricky to
convey without making things very messy. Anyway, I kind of arbitrarily decided
to make the 7th of December an officially unofficial rat-based holiday, to cap
off a year filled with rats and ratsending and Rat Sending Simulation. Also, as
the quote above indicates, I wanted to get back at Alexis for causing my heart
to miss no less than 77 consecutive beats with the Candlecurious business.
So, off I went, writing up a big forum
thread about rats, proclaiming far and wide (i.e. IRC, Tumblr and
the Skype group that I haven’t mentioned at all in this history) that all and
sundry should come and send Alexis rats on a string, as is tradition, because
Ratmas is definitely traditional and not something I made up on a whim.
About nineteen hours later, the
assembled ratsenders got their just deserts; namely, Rats of Glory, those
menacing yet wonderful rat-candles. They’ve been domesticated a little since
their original incarnation; at first, there was an option to spend 77 Fate on a
guaranteed success at lighting it. I played it, for some reason. It was
relatively unexciting. There was also a fairly ominous option involving St
Fortigan’s Candle. This spooked Alexander Feld a little, but I reassured him;
after all, it’d probably never unlock. (It never did.)
“This is no
betrayal.” Is that what you told yourself? Submit to the wolves that came in
across the darkened sea, save bloodshed, and win yourself allies against the
North? It was so long ago. If this option ever unlocks, it will likely allow
you to steal St Forthigan’s Candle from another. However, it will probably
never unlock.
On Twitter, Alexis claimed that he
was planning on giving them out as a Christmas present anyway, but Ratmas accelerated
things. And, perhaps, worsened them; he claimed that the sleeper-agent
functionality originally didn’t exist, and that it was added as Ratmas revenge.
It is up to the reader whether or not you want to believe this. The item
description promised that the candle could awaken at any time to devour Saint’s
Candles; it would be a very long time before this paid off. But it did, in the
end.
This incident also caused the
instatement of the Ratness category; apparently, it was always supposed to be
there, but it hadn’t been properly implemented until I came in and started
causing a big ratty ruckus. Alexis also gave himself the quality Accepting No
Further Rats, preventing him from accepting any further rats. This was very
sad.
The Between Times
The cold Between is
not a winter cold. It is the electric cold of the curved places.
So, Seeking went
away. Plenty happened in the times between, of course; this is largely a
Seeking history, but I will fill this gap with some tales of what happened in
the times between, and also maybe one or two silly things that happened in the
time before. Some of these may have some payoff later on in this historical
retelling, so you should probably read them.
The mysterious
Destiny that had been hinted at since Hallowmas, Passion, was found basically
through a string of accident and coincidences. Still, it’s an interesting
Destiny, and finding things is cool.
In that very same
week, the trail of clues leading up to Ambition: Enigma was found, and several
people managed to crack the code and get all Enigmatic. Ambition: Enigma had
shown up in a few places before this, largely as a joke; on developer
mantelpieces or the House of Chimes intro option. Having be an actual Real
Thing For Reals was a bit of a surprise; nevertheless, it is indeed a Real
Thing For Reals.
Anyone with a SMEN
quality of more than 2 got presented with a big threatening warning storylet,
giving them the A Bad End item if they decided not to quit Seeking there and
then. This opened a storylet in their lodgings, promising that Seeking would
return “Soon, but not very soon”; this storylet was pretty much the placeholder
work-in-progress version of the current Seeking Road, and basically every
option on it then still exists now, though usually with altered costs.
I got married to a
rat.
Anyone with
Unaccountably Peckish more than 10 was presented with a storylet which set
their Unaccountably Peckish to 10 exactly; a cap was put in place so it
couldn’t go any higher. We were informed this was for our own good.
Flyte, the previous
owner of the IRC channel, went off to work for Failbetter, and passed the
prestigious Host position to me. I promptly ran the entire channel straight
into the ground and it has never recovered since.
http://ubergoatcluedispenser.storynexus.com/s
Someone managed to
stumble across a previously-undiscovered Seeking option in Mahogany Hall, which
required that you had a Marsh-Mired quality of exactly 8 (i.e. you’d betrayed 6
people exactly on your way to St Arthur’s Candle). It just gave 1 Marsh-Mired
at the cost of some connections; it’s kinda weird, and I have no idea how long
it was lying there before someone found it. Let’s be real; who the hell does
anything in Mahogany Hall?
Sunless Sea came out,
and Nuncio was put into it. Nuncio is very cool and rad, and I’m not just
saying that because I came up with it.
Rat Sending Simulator
grew ever more complex and vertiginous. It may still be growing, for all I
know.
At least several
Ratmasses happened. I made a Twine game for one of them, because I could, and
directed the Masses to send Rats to any and all FBG employees I could track
down.
I did an internship
at FBG over the summer of 2015. I put the ‘ship’ in ‘internship’ by tweaking
zee-journeys; however, I avoided internment. While I was there, I received
three model rats from Alexis himself; they are now the totems of my ultimate
power, and one day I will use them to initiate Ratnarok, the twilight of the
gods.
Stuff happened
Things, too.
A Heptagoat was born
through the sheer magic of clearly announced intentions.
Alexis showed up in
the IRC at the very start of 2016, with things to say about the Treachery of
Clocks and other such things. He mentioned that it was unlikely that he’d write
any substantial FL content in 2016, and that it might be 2017 before Seeking returned.
Fast forward a few
months, and Alexis
announced his intentions to depart Failbetter and go ronin.
Fast forward a few
days, and…
The Return
A reckoning. The bill
is almost due.
On June 2nd, 2016, Mr
Eaten’s Twitter rumbled back to life after a long, long silence. I was in the
middle of my final exams when this happened, so I stumbled into IRC, yelled
angrily that Mr Eaten was getting in the way of my studies, then left again. I
kept the Seeking Road storylet open in the meantime, though, so I could keep an
eye on any activity. Sure enough, things started to shift around; new options
were added, existing ones were tweaked. Then I hit Perhaps Not, and discovered
that the Seeking Road had disappeared from my Lodgings entirely, so I lost out
on my little porthole into the heart of the action.
After a few days of
cryptic tweets, Seeking began again in earnest. Fortunately, I was done with my
exams by then. There was no great fanfare, no announcement; it came upon us
like a thief in the night. Cards unlocked with Unaccountably Peckish flung
themselves merrily into your hand, menacing the bejesus out of you with their
black borders and their actual menaces. The Seeking Road reappeared after its
brief absence, replete with new and exciting options to increase your SMEN
quality and ruin yourself.
The SMEN quality
itself behaves very differently to how it did in the old days; previously, it
slowly increased as you played cards, acting as a sort of very classical
progression tracker. Now, however, it’s something you increase a level at a
time by spending vast amounts of resources on challenges that become ever
harder and ever more demanding. When you hit a milestone, you get the
opportunity to maim yourself even harder in order to achieve something, like a
Candle.
Mr Eaten kept
cryptically tweeting all through this. I figured out pretty quickly that he
made scheduled tweets several times a day, always at X:56. Anything that wasn’t
tweeted at that time generally heralded an update of some form.
Progress was slow
going at first, though. The Seeking Road options seemed sadistically difficult
and expensive, and I was convinced there must be some other way to go about
doing things. I spent about two days messing around with SMEN cards and
Unaccountably Peckish, trying to find something of interest. I ended up
in the Mirror-Marches a lot accidentally, wasting even more time. Eventually, I
realised that I was just wasting time; the Seeking Road was the only road, so
I’d just have to walk it. It seemed like sinking vast amounts of cash into
Appalling Secrets was the only really feasible option to progress.
But not before I set
some fires.
Not To Be Postponed Indefinitely
So, really, the core of Seeking progress was not terribly exciting for a
while. Just buying Cryptic Clues at the Bazaar, converting them up, and trying
(and often failing) to level SMEN through the Seeking Road options. I was
towards the head of the pack, but not at the cutting edge; bjorntfh had raced ahead,
committing to the road of Appalling Secrets while I was still faffing around.
We didn’t really have any specific goals to aim for; we were just
pushing, pushing, pushing ever onwards. I managed to knock myself into the
Mirror-Marches again after fumbling my Nightmares reduction gear. While I
worked my way out, I ran into something rather heart-stopping. A Rat of Glory
had awoken.
This was, I have to admit, fairly terrifying. I don’t know why I keep
falling for this stuff, frankly; if Alexis sent me a scarily-worded email
trying to get my bank account details I’d probably end up forking over a
tiger’s ransom before my brain turned back on again. As you may have guessed;
yes, the detonation was indeed a hilarious joke. I tried playing the Breath of
the Void option, but it didn’t actually matter. For my trouble, I got a free
level of SMEN, which was nice, and the We’ll always have Paris quality; you may
recognise this as the quality you got for sending Alexis rats on the Final
Ratmas, if you engaged in that activity.
;)
Camphor; crushed flowers; ice.
So, forward progress continued apace. I eventually managed to coax bjorn
into getting a Rat of Glory from someone else, since it was free progress and
all. I think that put bjorn in position to do the Lower Mysteries option on the
Seeking Road, which I was intensely curious about; truth is, it’s not terribly
exciting- it’s a cheap point of SMEN and a signpost to the Cyriac option, which
has been intensively discussed above. The revived Cyriac option cost only 7
Enigmas, rather than 77; the correct number of Proscribed Material turned out
to be 2542. The whole point of the thing was to get a Mr Eaten’s Calling Card,
though the option to get it comes with a luck check. The odds of success are
only 10%, and nobody has managed to see what you get for succeeding at the time
of writing. When bjorn got the calling card, the option to use it was locked,
so forward progress stalled for a little while.
I was lagging a bit behind, but not too far. I had a Plan, very
specifically laid out; I’d get to SMEN 24, then burn my old, hard-won St
Cerise’s Candle to get the materials needed to Light a Taper, an expensive
option giving a guaranteed 2 SMEN. This would let me get to SMEN 28 and reclaim
my Cerise; the new costs of Cerise were mostly known, since Alexis posted a
picture of the goat murder options on the forums. While I was doing this,
NiteBrite sent me the last remaining Calling Card from the olden times of 2013.
In doing so, 3 other Calling Cards were lost; sending the Card set the Card
quality to 0, so NiteBrite went from having 4 cards to none.
The calling card action opened; bjorn was nowhere to be found. I was too
worr