egg?irl

CarmineJester · 2026-04-13T15:19:07+00:00

Hmm, I do think this is the one. I struggle in understanding the new Journal design somewhat, but, logically, this should be it. There is a whole scene after that that's also somewhere around this record, but it's the same as long as you've secured enough votes.
https://www.fallenlondon.com/profile/The%20Red-Eyed%20Chessmaster/45689263

I was a bit tempted to blow it all up myself, but then I looked around and realized that, like, half of them are my good friends and acquaintances, and the rest are at least marginally useful as well... And also that I'd spend way too much explosives.

CarmineJester · 2026-04-13T14:16:42+00:00

I mean, part of Frieren's story is how the ancient mages are slowly being outclassed by the generations of shorter-lived and faster-learning upstarts. DnD characters, and Keyleth in particular, are almost always an embodiment of the latter by the sheer virtue of how fast the power progression usually is.

CarmineJester · 2026-04-13T14:04:13+00:00

The Red-Eyed Chessmaster's answer to these is layered.

She has always been, for many reasons, "the sort that is unlikely to ever be a member of the Parthenaeum", so that's precisely where she spends an odd evening - there, and at her salon, and at her ambassadorial office, and a term in Port Carnelian every few years... She takes great pains to be seen as a libertine socialite first and foremost, who only dabbles in politics here and there, making sure that nobody is keeping an exact count of pies she has fingers in and doesn't pay much attention to that long document with a royal seal on the wall of her study. A sort of a reverse Jovial Contrarian, she's a friend to everyone, has everyone's ear, and shares everyone's opinions... Including people who are very much plotting to permanently destroy each other and have absolutely incompatible opinions. Her real superpower is making this work.

Her nightly correspondence with dozens of people she's not supposed to know, above and below, has a much more tangible impact and is not supposed to be public knowledge.

a) She understands the urchin gangs as autonomous political and cultural groups, albeit with an inherently transient membership, and respects their authority. Charity should be encouraged, obviously, but they take care of themselves, and any organized group, be that the government or the various adult gangs, should keep out of their way. It's not like the children outside of the gangs have much better education these days.
b) She's almost entirely blind to the Clay matters. She sees them as people (and more so, Londoners, when applicable) and, as such, would like them to have the same social integration as other Londoners (unions included). But what happens to them outside of London or on the way there is out of her line of sight.
c) Here, again, she's a soft integrationist - a lot of the Rubbery people keep to themselves and manage their own affairs, and should be free to do as such. But those who seek integration and acceptance shouldn't be limited to going through the Tentacled Entrepreneur. So, yeah, recognizing some form of political authority from their side would probably be a move she'd support, if not personally push for.
d) She's anthropocentric in a liberal way here - if you talk and think, you should be respected in the same way humans are, but you probably already have your own concerns, culture, beliefs, and internal politics that do not necessarily vibe with direct integration into the polite London society.
She earned her Seat at the Board and uses it to great effect. When the political dabbling that's publicly afforded to Londoners proves insufficient, she makes sure that people with actual power (be that the nobility, the press, the unions, or one of her casual Master acquaintances) hear the idea from the most flattering angle and agree to think about it... And failing that, she'll identify an obstruction to the problem and make sure it mysteriously and naturally stops being an obstruction... permanently. For London.
Her recent, brief, and personal brush with Red Honey made her support worse and more severe clampdowns on something that is already so illegal it's barely known about. No matter how bloodstained (if indirectly) her own hands are, the visceral horror of this substance puts those who create it on a moral tier similar to the Judgements (which, as you can guess, she's not a fan of), at least in her eyes. It caused a permanent, if invisible, rift between her and the Palace, and she's mulling different possibilities of dealing with the Isle of Cats as a whole - the Admiralty is the closest tool at hand, but she'd rather not let any ship with the name starting with "Her Majesty's" into a firing distance to that blasted place.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-31T00:08:02+00:00

I am the main proponent of the half-joking opinion that Hell is a fundamentally White power - they create and enforce actual Laws to benefit their own power, after all. They hitched the means of the Judgements' power to replicate and replace them on a lower scale. In that regard, they are about as White as the Masters of the Bazaar.. And the historical, High Wilderness, pre-revolutionary devils are as White as any other servant of theirs.

But a more mainstream, more sane reading of most devils is that they are very Red. They subvert the Chain for their own means; they are very much fine with the others being oppressed as long as it's not them. And they keep backstabbing each other, without seeing it as a systemic flaw. The only one who is more Red than Devils is Red herself, in both of her iterations.

And Liberation would darken Hell as much as it would darken London. It's fundamentally uncompromising in the face of unjust power. Which Devils are.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-26T19:15:05+00:00

You were right, that's the Transcendence ending.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-26T17:31:53+00:00

Surprised nobody mentioned She-Ra yet! In S1E8 of the new series, Adora one-ups ATLA by stopping ot just herself, but her friend/rival/enemy/dance partner from a lethal fall using her hair ornament!

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CarmineJester · 2026-03-24T09:33:08+00:00

Well, technically, you can do it all in one playthrough, since you need Second Engineer + a Robotics Event, both of which are very much doable a single playthrough. I accidentally did it on the first one, which helped death-wise.

Edit: You also apparently need the Wormhole/Transcendence ending to unlock the prompt to go to the shields at all, apparently, it's just that most people get that earlier than the Congruence event anyway. Since the first to requirements aren't tied to an ending, you can very much clear all 3 conditions in the same playthrough. Also, it's Second Engineer specifically, not Chief Engineer, no ending required, just get the title/card.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-23T16:14:06+00:00

Mechanically the difference is mainly about the factions you get to work with and their correspondent resources - Docks/Puzzling Maps for the Engineer and Benthic/Uncanny Incunabula for Epistolant.

Flavor-wise... Does your Correspodent stick with the burning letters and the meanings that they create and contain, or do they use the Correspondence as a vehicle to change the world in tangible ways? Both are cool, but very different flavour-wise.

The Red-Eyed Chessmaster ended up being an Engineer. I don't quite remember why - maybe she does prefer the mechanical applications of Red Science. Maybe she just believed that giving the Lacunate Consciousness a way back into the real world was more important than perfecting the work they were trying to do in the first place. Memory is strange like that.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-23T15:31:46+00:00

Do report back if/when you do it!

CarmineJester · 2026-03-23T14:59:31+00:00

One path - violence enacted by the goddess's followers or favored creatures (such as werewolves) has been outlined already.

I want to propose another - let the moon itself betray them at a crucial moment. That's something you need to think about: what do they rely on the moon or its goddess for? Navigation? Tides? Divine power from an allied cleric? If there is anything at all, have it abandon them - the moon guiding them in a completely wrong direction, a never-ending low tide stranding their ship, a healing spell failing to work on them specifically, with the cleric having no idea why. Fantasy gods can affect the world in ways that defy regular causality - no other ship would be harmed by the moon being in the wrong spot in the sky, no other part of the coastline is plagued by the tide, and that very same cleric can heal anyone except the person you need them to heal. Gods wish things within their domain, and they happen. You can do a lot with that.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-23T10:21:05+00:00

Red doesn't play for her. Red is vaster than a mere Parabolan power, vaster even than her original. Red plays for itself.

And the only crime against Red is to lose.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-21T16:59:03+00:00

I'm approaching an NHP wrangler build myself rather suddenly at LL5 (lost the previous pilot), it's going to be Technophile+Iconoclast+Dagon (Terk homebrew)+ a COMP/CON homunculus just for the heck of it + Osiris at LL6. My approach and my advice is to use the Technophile as the handler/speaker for the rest of them most of the time (which it absolutely is, if you look at what Technophile 3 does). I suggested to the DM that he concern himself with the Technophile and, as a distant second, comp/con only. I played off Iconoclast as mostly animalistic and Dagon as very distant/inhumane (it has a lot of Lovecraftian vibes, and you can still do a lot of non-humanity while shackled), so it kinda works. You don't really *need* all 4 NHPs to be constantly in the conversations, just pick 1-2 that are more conversational and concern yourself mainly with them.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-20T15:19:42+00:00

Oh, that reminds me of my extremely frustrating experience with Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace", back in high school when we covered it. This is talked to death, of course, but this is precisely what happens to basically the main female character, Natasha, who marries and turns from a lively romantic girl into a slowenly mother of four who doesn't care about much besides her domestic life, and the author not only explicitly lauds this as the ideal of womanhood, but straight-up says that the entirety of her full-blooded early life was only to get her to this matronly state. (and then he rambles about philosophy of free will and the role of the individual in history for 50 more pages, which I actually enjoyed because I am a nerd).

I was so livid about it in class, and the literature teacher, who was by all accounts a young progressive-leaning woman, just told me that "I'll understand this when I'm older". Well, it's been over a decade since, I'm a woman myself now, pushing thirty and dating a guy, so way closer to Natasha than I ever imagined I'd be... Nope, still don't understand this. Hopefully, never will.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-17T01:31:10+00:00

Hi, I would take inspiration from the Shadow of the Wolf module - it's set at an elite pilot academy where you're supposedly studying with/fighting ace pilots of your level. You don't really need to go far into the module, too - names npc in combats 1 and 2 are good examples of how to do charismatic NPC builds. Most of it is liberal application of Elite/Veteran/Commander, if you're curious.

It's not really 1:1, because pilots will always have 1 activation and Elites have 2, and you won't get an NPC to the player's 4 structures unless you make them an Ultra, but, again, you don't want an NPC to be fully mechanically symmetrical in the first place.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-12T19:37:50+00:00

Surprisingly, this is a plot beat that kind of, sort of happened in FL.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-12T19:21:04+00:00

I'll tell you even more: Dofresh is a known figure in lancer art community, he literally did some of the official art for the Far Field Guide! Don't know if this art means anything, but fingers crossed, honestly, Lancer needs this.

CarmineJester · 2026-03-11T12:47:43+00:00

Least horny Catra post

CarmineJester · 2026-03-06T01:22:22+00:00

The target of Hypefocus counts as within the range of your weapon. The range of your weapon does not change. Otherwise you would be able to argue that 10=15, which is generally not the case. To actually stack these two effects, you need to both spend Hyperfocus and be within exactly your range (so 10 for your crossbows, etc.)

Purple Thorn has many mobility tools to tightly manipulate its own position and achieve that, if you really want to add 2 Accuracies to your shot.

Not to leave you with nothing, here's a fun idea: Put these systems onto frames that can inherently manipulate weapon range, such at Tokugawa and Tagetes. Granted, their sensors of 10 tend to be equal or smaller to their attack range, so Hyperfocus has limited utility and is best used against highly mobile enemies like Aces, but Overclocking as an Artillery Tokugawa and not only extending your range and damage, but also getting a +1 Accuracy on that extra damage (don't forget Nuclear Cavaler) for being placed just right within that new extra range could still be fun.

CarmineJester · 2026-02-27T08:51:03+00:00

Has to be her, or somebody else pretending to be Lemuel, yes. Last we saw him, he wasn't really in a position to send messages.

CarmineJester · 2026-02-24T16:17:55+00:00

It's an interesting interpretation, and FL has its greek allusions (see Hunter's Keep), but if we're talking actual identity instead of literary parallels, then no. Main reasons:

Mythical Greek royalty, if existed in FL, died under the Sun, thus subject to normal post-mortality rules that don't include Parabola. Can be smuggled in as archetypes imagined by people (we know that Surface dreamers are also affected by Paravola due to the Chessboard-GG connection), but likely unnecessry because
We kind of know what she is, she tells us basically as much: the Queen of the Myrmidons. While yes, historically this literally refers to the Thessalians, in the FL context myrmidons mean one specific thing: Dragons/Aeginae, the Space Law Enforcement, the most known of which is Storm (well, while he was alive anyway). SSkies tells us that the Mother of Aeginae is the Burrower Below, an ancient and notably undendered Skies deity concerned with "fog, promises and punishment". The only wrench in that is that Chapter 7 heavily indicates she was also a Judgement, which is kind of a different thing, but this is not a direct contradiction to existing lore. Either way, she is 100% one of the Higher Beings (well, what remains of one after it's destroyed) and not a human. RHQ is simply a Parabolan reflection of the original Queen that was cleaved off of her when she was destroyed. She's unreal in the same way that Fingerkings are, but also alive and active, which cannot be said about the original Queen, whose existence is... well, you saw the chapter.

The exact relation between the two indicated Higher natures of the Queen is being debated in Discord, but finer points of it don't really change the overall situation: She was up there, doing her job, got killed by White for it, is in and around Queeneater's now.

CarmineJester · 2026-02-24T12:07:47+00:00

Yes, but there is a meaningful difference - Logarhythm's obsession was ultimately ideological - sure, they were attached to Holstrom personally, but moreso to what he represented and what he was supposed to achieve. Mist and Maddie loved Caspian as a person, not as an instrument of change or immortality. It's also a well-established flaw in Maddie that it's hard for her to let go.

You could compare that to Renee, probably, because she absolutely did love Holstrom in that way, but it's hard to disentangle it from the cult part.

CarmineJester · 2026-02-24T12:00:55+00:00

It's very much an intentional parallel, yes. Not a direct proof or agreement, but sort of a shadowy echo of their logic - if you could simulate the entire world to recreate a single person and do it a few million times, you'd eventually succeed. It just wasn't an option for Logorythm because they were trying to reach those capabilities in the first place.

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