The Delicious Primer - A new sky captain's guide to Sunless Skies

GHub Platform · Гайд · 0 ответов · 15 просмотров

So, first, a bit about me. I've got well over 200 hours in Sunless Skies at this point and have 25 of the 31 achievements. The ones I'm missing are mostly the alternate endings and couple grindy ones. I pretty much did everything in Sunless Sea (and Zubmariner) that there was to do. On PC and on iPad. I also mess around with Fallen London itself from time to time. So, yeah. I'm a fan. As a frame of reference, this guide is being written in February 2019. The current version is 1.2.0.1 - basically we're in the first month post-launch when they're busily patching, fixing and balancing things. There have been announcements of even more content down the road and, judging by the positive reviews and financial success of the game, a full blown expansion seems likely. I'll try to keep this guide updated as things move along. So let's get to it. What is Fallen London? In short, Fallen London is a fictionalized alternate universe created by Failbetter Games (FG) circa 2009. I'll delve into the lore in more detail below, but suffice to say that FG has released three games in this universe. The first, Fallen London, was released in 2009 and continues to be regularly updated with monthly content. It's a a browser-based game that is purely text based. Think of the port areas of Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies without any of the pesky sailing around, but with almost a DECADE worth of content, choices, rewards, etc. It's a very developed universe. The game itself is "energy" based in the sense that you have a slowly recharging pool of energy points which you use to do various activities. There are some light microtransactions you can use to increase your pool size and there's an "uber" currency to buy various things like full pool recharges and the like. Similar to most games of its ilk it's easy to pick up, fiddle with for half an hour, and then put down. It's also the foundation of most of the lore in the Fallen London universe and many things in Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies find their origins there. Sunless Sea released in 2015 with the expansion, Zubmariner, releasing in 2016. If you haven't played it, it's very similar to Sunless Skies as far as gameplay. You'll feel right at home after you die horribly several times in your first hour of playing (sound familiar?). Instead of 4 smaller maps like our current game, Sunless Sea just has one very large one. But otherwise the mechanics are basically identical. Sunless Skies is a direct (although abstract) sequel to Sunless Sea and many of the locations in Sunless Skies (such as Avid Horizon) directly reference events in the previous game. Zubmariner was a clever expansion, in that it basically allowed your ship to go underwater and explore a new group of ports, with a host of new story lines and interactions. It's still a blast to play and I highly recommend it if you haven't. "OK, swell. But what about THIS game? Yeah, yeah, I'm getting there. So let's do a quick primer on the lore. Note that this is VERY condensed. There are wikis and lots of other resources out there if you want to really dive in. This is intended as more of a light overview for anyone who is unfamiliar and is getting weirded out by how odd everything seems in this game. So. Fallen London began on the same timeline as our own world. The year was 1861, and Queen Victoria had just been devastated by the loss of her beloved husband, Albert, to typhoid fever. In our world his death profoundly affected her for the rest of her life (and she would go on to reign for another 40 years). She became something of a recluse and almost always appeared in public wearing black as a sign of mourning from that day forward. The prestige of the monarchy took a bit of a hit as a result, but rebounded later in her life and she's almost universally beloved in hindsight. But events in Fallen London took a much stranger turn... Following Albert's death, the Queen was approached by a group of odd folks in cloaks who spoke in shrill, shrieking voices. They offered her a bargain - the city of London in exchange for Albert's life. She took the deal. In a single night, London was swallowed up by a huge cloud of bats and, somehow, (the details are murky) cast down a mile below the surface of the Earth. It came to rest in a large cavern called the Neath (roughly the size of Europe itself) on the shore of a vast subterranean ocean - the Unterzee. There were two major continents - a western one (where London was located) and a southern one (called the Elder Continent). The zee itself was also home to a large number of islands of various sizes. As London began to get a feel for its new situation, a number of things became apparent. First, London itself was now home to a new district of black spires covered in strange symbols - the Echo Bazaar. This district, it was quickly learned, was the home of these weird folks in the long cloaks. They called themselves the "Masters." Little was known about them. Although, at least in theory, the government of London was still free to function normally the reality was that the Masters had effective control over anything and everything. This control, however, was rarely utilized. Mostly it was a means for them to regulate certain goods and activities they deemed dangerous. The Masters themselves were clearly merchants of a sort, and players in Sunless Sea could freely trade with them and get bits and pieces of lore. In Sunless Skies, as you may have noticed, they've spread themselves out a bit and you get to interact with a number of them. One of the other interesting discoveries was that London was not the first city to have this happen. There were, apparently, 4 before it. What happened to these cities is not entirely clear although they all appeared in the same location (London literally landed on top of the 4th city). It is known that the 4th city was Karakorum, the capitol of the Mongols in the 1200s C.E.. The Mongols, having had centuries to explore the Neath, had expanded greatly by the time of London's fall. They had established their own empire on the far side of the Unterzee - the Khanate (which plays an important role in Sunless Sea) and also exists in the Sunless Skies as well as Eagle's Empyrean. Not much is known about the 3rd city or the 1st city. The 2nd city may have been Rome but, whatever its identity, the Masters clearly do NOT remember it fondly and get cranky when it is brought up. Londoners themselves, as one might expect, were not particularly happy with their new predicament. The Queen herself bottled up her family in Kensington Palace and forbid any use of her name. She is usually referred to by her formal title - "Her Enduring Majesty" - or, by the unhappier factions, "The Traitor Empress." Dissent and revolution are always boiling just below the surface and play a major role in Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. As you've probably noticed, the setting of these games is something of a mixture of steampunk and gothic, Lovecraftian horror. One of the things discovered after the fall of London was the closeness of the dream world, an actual dimension of existence called Parabola. The "bleed-through" of Parabola's inherent oddity is what gives Fallen London a lot of its otherwordly flair. Also, there was Hell. Hell, as it turned out, wasn't just a religious/theoretical institution - it was an actual place. A nation-state populated by devils. And it was right next to Fallen London. This, predictably, did not go well. There was almost immediately a war between London and Hell within several years of the fall (the infamous "Campaign of '68"), which ended up being a disaster for London. There were a LOT of devils, as it turned out, and a large technology gap. We don't know all the outcomes of the war, but it appears London was forced to normalize relations with Hell and officially permit the trading of certain commodities - such as souls. Hell also set u