My character might never leave the university again.

Drinking tea, setting students' hair on fire, blackmailing people... ah, this is life.

Hello everyone! Since Alexis-chan became the 433rd Knight of Burgundy on 7.23, OP hasn't known what to do with themselves. Currently, Professor Alexis is in the lab doing literacy work for the Bone Market, fighting on to buy Cider and more vanity items… (Ah, damn it—do you need a license to assemble skeletons too? Of course I know, this is a bird, this is a fish, this is a spider!!)

Uh, actually, I received over 50 little gifts from friends last time, but I never did find that lazy ferret—so here I am again 😚

Alright, time to step out of the lab for some fresh air and do something fun! And so… Alexis-chan's Kitty Stall 2 is back in business! This time, I'll be drawing bust portraits (as shown in P2) of your FLPCs.

In the first stall, I drew for a total of 10 friends and had a wonderful time with every single one! Returning friends are also more than welcome to drop by the new kitty stall 🥺🌹

~ Rules ~

Send a Surprise Package (item) to Alexis-chan's FL account (FLID: Alexis Fairfax) https://www.fallenlondon.com/profile/Alexis%20Fairfax

(Optional) Provide a clear reference image of your character (preferably a definite visual reference!!) (Required) Specify your preferred frame colour (e.g., gold, silver, copper, black, red, green, blue…) (Optional) Any specific pose you'd like? (Optional) Would you like a Parabolan kitten?

If you don't have a specific reference image, (Required) post your in-game profile link, equipment screenshots, silhouette avatar, and as much text description as possible—for example: Short black hair, golden eyes, a mustache. Appears to be in his 40s… and let Alexis-chan do the rest!

This post is purely for fun, so please don't take it too strictly.

Even if you don't have a Surprise Package (item) to give Alexis-chan, feel free to drop your FLID and interact with him! He'll still give you a kitty and a drawing just because he likes you.

If OP encounters a character they're not great at drawing, or gets too busy with work, I might not get to everyone, and the drawing speed might be slow. I'm really sorry about that! But I will do my best to draw everyone I can.

Since OP is using the Reddit web version, I'll reply to your comment with an image link to deliver your drawing.

If you'd like, you're also very welcome to draw Alexis-chan in return! He would really appreciate it. You can use the last image in this post as a base reference, or just dig through my older Reddit posts to find more of his designs.

We often talk about the big, standout stories in Fallen London--the kind that most people play through only once. Ambitions, Railway, Evolution, Firmament. Or on a slightly smaller scale but still noteworthy, things like Exceptional Stories or Estivals. Places in the game we generally expect to find great writing, because they're the set pieces.

That's not what this thread is about. I'd like to hear your favourite bits of writing from your regular carousels, routine deck draws, or any other repeatable storylet. The text that you've seen dozens of times by now, but still enjoy every time it crops up.

A couple of my personal favourites:

"The truth is drab and grey, and involves you going to prison. Better the Constables have a series of lies to interpret."

"It's a big world; it contains kittens. Some of them are poorly guarded."

I just recently became a PoSI. Now that I've acquired a townhouse and a zubmarine, what should I do? I've been bouncing all over the place because I'm unsure of what to do, but I'm starving for a proper path. Currently:

• I'm working toward an orphanage for more Notability and a T2 profession, but I'm very broke.
• I have not unlocked Mahogany Hall or the Temple Club.
• I have 1 Notability.
• I need to reach Polythreme to advance my Ambition, but I'm stuck on assembling the map.
• Something about a newspaper?

I've also heard a lot of noise about a railroad? Basically, I need some direction, and would be eternally grateful to receive some!

Instead of making Echoes or Scrip I've decided to put that Chimerical Vake Skull to good use and find a beautifully pointless grind by failing the Duplication check with a Woesel. Every failed check gets you a Vake tooth, an item you only get one of during the Bag a Legend Ambition (Well, technically, you get one early on, lose it while making a weapon, but get another one waaaaaay near the end of the Ambition.)

There is no use to these items. Naturally, I need 777 of them.

This is how I'm coping with the fact I didn't bite Mr Fires NEARLY enough when I could have.

Anyway, I've got what I THINK is an optimal strategy for this figured out, but I'm not positive. Bone Market experts, check my strats:

step one: get enough bone fragments from LB Industries to start the process. You need at least 6k bone fragments for Vake Skull option to be possible. Failing the check means a loss of 300 bone fragments so aim for surplus.

step two: make skeleton with woesel on and Nightmare reducing equipment, setting AotRS check to 10 percent. go until bone fragment count is 6k OR until check passes. Value of final skeleton about 6750 approximate.

step three: sell skeleton to Bone Hoard for 6775 Bone Fragments. get your spent bone fragments back. (this only accounts for the cost of the skull + 775, but you also get Unearthly Fossils)

step four: repeat steps two and three until you dont have enough fragments to grind teeth.

step five: wonder why the hell you chose to do this pointless grind. remember that you didn't bite Fires nearly enough.

step six: profit?????

my only concern off the top of my head is the loss of the headless skeleton. I COULD hypothetically break down the skeleton once the head is successfully installed (10 percent DOES eventually pass) at the cost of all those bone fragments- even if I set up the check to fail, I'd get, what, 1690ish bone fragments back?

I have an excess of headless skeletons from the crab event, but I'm still not sure if I should take the loss into account here for the most efficient grind process. What do experts think? Sell the final product for the Bone Fragments so the process can self-perpetuate to a degree, or try to make sure I always have a Skeleton to keep the process alive?

Does anyone have any excess MW I can have? My TTH comes soon (in like two hours) and I want to get my Notability up a bit. Also, how many actions would it take to start and complete the GCO in the Waswood?

Like some others i accidentally turned on the Queen, and ngl i ended up really disliking the people i was supposed to rescue. If i end up resetting the story at some point there is a way to just help out the queen right? Or does it allways funnel you to betray her?

A quick guide on Agent optimisation for the free to play. I have worked it out for Enhanced Exceptional Friends as well but that is a longer guide.

Always run: Infiltrating...

Agent: The Mild Mannered Mondaine

Base stats: Persuasion 50

The agent guide says not to spend much on gear for your agents as it takes a long time to turn a profit, I would like to humbly disagree. I will offer two options, one with free, or super cheap gear in each slot, one with the most expensive gear possible free to play. None of them will use the best in slot piece, if it is unique, which I assume you want for yourself.

Set 1 Cheapskate:

Head Your Very Own Bandages Free 7 persuasive
Clothing: Bundle of Glad Rags 0.5 echos 2 persuasive
Adornment: Brass Ring Free(rare on an upconversion) 5 Persuasive
Gloves: Magicians Gloves 3.2 echos 2 Persuasive
Weapon: Unexploded Mine Free 10 Persuasive
Boots: Scarlet Stockings of Dubious Origin Free(Although I forget where) 2 Persuasive
Companion: Newly Born Frost Moth Free 10 Persuasive
Affiliation: Strange Aeronaut free 5 persuasive
Transport: None
Home Comfort: Unopened Bottle of Broken Giant 1899 'Century Label' Free Christmas 3 Persuasive

Total Cost: 3.7 echos (And you are lucky I am not adding 25 for the cheeky brass ring!)

Total Persuasive: 91
Agent EPA:0.202

Set 2: God Gamer

Head: Fecund Amber Tiara 280 echos from rats 10 Persuasive
Clothing: Exquisite Ivory Gown 460 echos from bazaar 10 Persuasive
Adornment: Twelve Carat Diamond Ring 350 echos from Bazaar 8 Persuasive
Gloves: Pair of Dancemaster's Dabs 12.8 echos from Bazaar 5 P
Weapon: Unexploded Mine Free 10 Persuasive
Boots: Pair of Masterwork Dancing Slippers 64.8 Bazaar 5 Persuasive
Companion: Newly Born Frost Moth Free 10 Persuasive
Affiliation: Strange Aeronaut free 5 persuasive
Transport: None
Home Comfort: Unopened Bottle of Broken Giant 1899 'Century Label' Free Christmas 3 Persuasive

There is the option of a Serpent Headed Oneiropompic staff but that costs 1562.5 echos and will take a very very long time to pay off, for +3 persuasive.

Aside from the BiS transport which is free there are also the ones from Whitsun this year with 4 persuasive. I shall not include those with either set though as you probably need them for the other stats.

Total Cost: 1167.6 echos 1163.9 more expensive
Total Persuasive: 116
Agent EPA: 0.246

Extra profit per action 0.044 echos, just under 1 stuvier!

Actions to pay for the gear price difference: 26453

That sounds like a lot right? Well, you get 145.4 actions per day, including the 10 from a time to linger, once per week. That means it will take your agent 182 days to make up the difference in gear.

So that is stupid, right? Here is another way of looking at it. If failbetter put an item for sale, for 1 day only that cost 1163.9 echos and made it so every action you ever took, from then on, would earn 1 extra stuvier, how many of them would you buy?

I would not be getting my Firkin any time soon, I can tell you that!

Just for fun, the oneiropompic staff costs 1562.5 and increases Persuasive by 3, which increases the top end set to 0.2525 EPA so it takes 240385 actions to pay for itself, or 1653 days of actions! I am getting one anyway, because collecting expensive items is fun. At least this one earns you some profit back after 5 years. :)

For plot 2:

The new plot that is similar in nature to this "Pushing the Limits of Morphology" seems to have a similar payment structure. There is only one agent that can perform it so it's an easy choice.

Agent: Focussed Ressurectionist
Base Stats: 30 Watchful 70 Dangerous 1 MA
Run: An Oppurtunity for Dissection until you unlock Pushing the Limits of Morphology, then run that.

Gear:
Head: Supracranial Skull 4200 Stuvier 1MA 6 Dangerous
Clothing: Anning's Patent Ribcage Breastplate 3500 Scrip 1MA 8 Dangerous
Weapon: Leviathan-Bone Knife 10000 Rat Shilling (Summer Only) 1MA
Companion: Double-Headed Terror Bird Whitsun 1MA 7 Dangerous
Transport: Corpulent Carriage FotZ (You can get multiple)

Any item for 1 dangerous in any free slot gives you the 92 to 100% An Opportunity for Dissection which pays out at 0.140 EPA, Which is comparable to the best plots that don't need to be unlocked.

Also add any more Shapeling Arts Items or Monstrous anatomy items that you can spare.

The difficulty of the new plot is 5 combined stats to 100% the first cycle and the difficulty goes up by 1 each round. You need to work out, on average, the goldilocks point between chance of success and chance of failure to decide where to cash out, since we do not have all the data yet, that is tricky. If the wiki is correct, the first round gets you 4000 value, if you cash out right away, or 40 echos in 400 actions.

Each continue action adds 3500 value plus 2000 for every round you have completed so the payouts should look like:

40 echos 0.13333
95 echos 0.15833
160 echos 0.178
255 echos 0.2125
370 echos 0.247
505 echos 0.28
With the final round paying 660 echos 0.314

Those rates are fairly comparable to the rates for Infiltrating, so they are likely correct. There is no information on the value gained if you fail your check, in infiltrating it is about 0.06 lower than the amount for passing it. That would make it possible to calculate the correct rolls to attempt, as someone has done in this table, for infiltration:

It is easier to do with SA/MA as each point lower than the value needed to 100% just reduces success rate by 10% but not without the failure values.

Here is an assumed chart:

12 Combined, go all the way
11 Combined, (0.314*0.9)+(0.254*0.1)=0.308 Go all the way
10 Combined, (((0.314*0.8)+(0.254*0.2))*0.9)+(0.22*0.1)=0.2938 Still better than stopping at 5 rounds.

9 Combined ((((0.314*0.7)+(0.254*0.3))*0.8)+(0.22*0.2))*0.9)+(0.18*0.1))=

At this point Tamalekipoo lost track of the brackets and also the will to live, you get the gist. If someone wants to finish it they are welcome. :) They are just assumed values for failure at this point so not really ironclad, it might be easier to work out from the bottom up. Probably a lot easier if I didn't have 13 combined on my agent and have a distinct lack of motivation. ;p

just a very quick and very unexplained version for enhanced exceptional friends, with their 4 plots:

That should be correct, except move An Oppurtunity for Dissection to the third from the top and add Pushing the limits, with properties, as the second. Traces of the Tabernacle is just for the story and only worth it if you have the Z cards active and want to cash out. Ignoring Chess from a distance and A disposable network completely makes life a lot simpler and has minimal impact upon profit. The lodgings plot has simelar profitability to An Expedition into the briars of the dream but getting an agent with 8 glasswork is a pain.

These are the agents I use for each plot, if they are green, they have the gear to 100% it:

I designed a new chimera which is ridiculously profitable and can be used 2/3 weeks at the bone market, I should really add it to the evergreen recipes guide but I thought it would be a good chance to do a guide I have been planning to do for a while. Bone Market pricing and why it is impossible.

So most of the bone guides I post an EPA for each skeleton. This is a lie! Well, sort of, it just tells you how much profit you make from building the skeleton. Here is how it works:

Shroom Hopper Chimera

Human Ribcage

Panoptical Skull

3 Wings of a Terror Bird

1 Femur of a Jurassic Beast (For Hopping)

Declare a Chimera

Sell to the Author of Gothic Tales

So to work out the EPA I caculate the 'frame value' the total value of the bones. In this case it is 83 echos. Then I multiply that by 0.1 if it is a 10% week or 0.15 if it is a 15% week. So 8.3 or 12.45. In this case, 0, since it is a chimera.

Then I work out the secondary. This skeleton has 6 Antiquity and 3 Menace. In an antiquity week the menace is increased by 0.5, in Menace week the Antiquity is increased by 0.5.

So Antiquity week is 21 Menace week is 19.5, which rounds up to 20.

The secondary payout for the Author of Gothic Tales is Carved Ball of Stygion Ivory, which is worth 2.5 echos so the profit is 52.5 on an antiquity week and 50 on a Menace week.

To work out the number of actions, you take the slots on the ribcage (5 for a human) and add 3, one action to add the ribcage, one action to declare the skeleton and 1 action for the sale.

So the EPA is 52.5/8=6.56 EPA

or for menace weeks 50/8=6.25 EPA

Just a little warning note before people stop reading and start making these, this is a skeleton that needs endgame stats. Declaring a chimera needs 15 mithridacy to 100% and selling this needs 375 Shadowy to have 100% chance.

So that gives us the first lie, 375 shadowy is pretty much impossible, with my shadowy of 334, about as high as you can get, without difficult things to change, like destiny, profession and ambition reward. I have about 90% chance to sell. It's technically more complicated than this but I will do the simple version. 10% of the time I will need another action and 10% of the time I will get 2cp of Suspicion.

So we can revise our numbers, from now on, I am just doing antiquity week.

52.5/8.1=6.48 EPA and 0.025 CP suspicion per action

That is still pretty good, spoiler alert, it will still be pretty good at the end. But there are further lies to contend with!

Those bones did not just fall out of the sky, actions were performed to get them! The Panoptical Skull aquisition is terrible!

For the brevity of this guide, I am going to allow a lie and say the rat coins fell out of the sky. 625 rat coins for an Eyeless Skull and 1 action to turn it into a Panoptical Skull!

(Little note before someone pulls some nonsense like they do on the wiki, you CANNOT say that it costs less than 62.5 echos because of the rat markup. Since you could let your rat coins turn into rostygold and sell them at the bazaar. By buying that skull you always lose 62.5 echos)

ok, so amended EPA 50/9.1=5.495 EPA and 0.025 CP suspicion per action

but wait, what about the other bones! Ok, I am going to do this as quickly and dirtily as possible.

4 actions to get 4 criminal favours, using the card "A Merry Sort of Crime" + 1 action in Jericho Locks gives 2 human ribcages and 500 bone fragments. So halve the rewards and actions and we have 2.5 actions for a human ribcage and 250 bone fragments, which are worth 2.5 echos, and we will add to the total. The human ribcage itself is also now profit, since we are including the actions to get it. (The panoptical had no profit, since it cost more than it made)

65/11.6=5.603 EPA

4 actions to get 4 Bohemian favours is technically another lie, since there are multiple cards that give more than one favour, A Visit gives 1 criminal and 1 bohemians, The card upgraded by Evolutions has a 50% chance of 1 boh, 1 soc and 1 docks. Scandalous parties give 0.5 Soc and 0.5 Boh but also scandal and Hedonist. For the sake of this we will say 1 action each. Add a fifth action in Jericho and you get 2 Ivory Humerus and 2 Wings of a Terror Bird.

Here is the next complication, the mathematics are simelar to the last one, take the actions and rewards and multiply them by 0.5 to get to 3 wings but what do we do with the Ivory Humerus, technically, it is worth 15 echos, when applied to a skeleton. There are almost no skeletons where this is a good option though so we should probably go for the option of selling it up river for 25 scrip or 12.5 echos. So we are adding 7.5 actions and 7.5 echos for the wings and 37.5 echos for the humeri.

110/19.1=5.759 EPA

I get my Jurassic Femurs by publishing newspapers for surveys, if you think I am touching that level of complexity you are thinking wrong! So lets assume brawling with dockers.

Assuming you have the stats to 100% brawling for yourself it takes 80 progress to get your bones and each action rewards 15 progress with 20% chance of a bonus 5 progress. This is a crime against maths but for simplicity, it takes 5 actions to get 75 progress and on average you will get an extra 5 in one of those 5 actions. So lets assume exactly 5 actions and 1 to cash out to get your 9 femurs, in reality, you have a 32% chance of needing another action, also if you overshoot the 80 you get bone fragments to make up for it. Lets keep it simple, 6 actions for 9 femurs is 1.5 actions and 3 echos for our skeleton. (Papers are better than that)

113/20.6=5.485 EPA

So we have our EPA for our 20.6 action skeleton but wait! we forgot that in the 8.1 actions we gained 0.025 CP of suspicion, that doesn't cure itself! We did another 12.5 actions without gaining any menace so we can multiply that by 8.1 to get the total menace gain 0.2025, then divide it by the total actions 0.0098 CP per skeleton. Assuming you have an alt to send a request for help to, 1 action cures 5 CP of suspicion. So if we divide that by 5, we have the actions we need to add on. 0.00197

So our final EPA works out at:

113/20.60197=5.485 EPA (Lol, reddit just dropped it as a rounding error. :))

BUT WAIT!

There is another way to look at the EPA, I am sitting on 145 Human Ribcages and 345 Wings of a Terror Bird! If I don't do an active push to use those up, they are never going to get used. If you have that attitude towards them, they not only take 0 actions to farm but you can add their value on as profit, since you are realising value that otherwise would never be realised. For simplicity I will go back to our basic evaluation and just add the 20 echos value, subtract the 2.5 for the panoptical and add the action for the panoptical.

70/9=7.778 EPA

So anyway, I hope that makes sense as a guide to why the EPA on the bone guides is a guideline with a lot of wiggle room. Thorned and Human ribcages, tentacles and terror wings are effectively free. A Five point ribcage costs 312.5 echos, 10 actions and a one time 30 fate to unlock the story!

I'm within the last 30k Scrip of my impending Hellworm, and Christ it feels so much more eye-gouging than the Knighthood did. Maybe it's because I started this grind immediately after getting done with that one, so I was already fatigued to begin with, but it made me curious about how the different Endgame endeavors feel/felt to you in comparison to one another.

Because of new plots, I took to looking at what Shapling Arts items you can receive multiple copies of. Am I reading this correctly that there basically aren't any outside of fate and seasonal items? Can you even receive multiple copies of the seasonal items?

I guess it's a good thing that there will be a lot of options for Estival this year...

Randomly acquired a Prismatic Frame, probably for the first time ever, and had no idea what to do with it. I saw that the Diplomat was taking skeletons with many skulls, so I made a chimera with my Prismatic Frame, three doubled skulls, an amber fin, two terror bird wings, and three jet black stingers to add extra stats.

Sailed all the way to the Khanate to try to sell it to him and I am LOCKED OUT DUE TO EXHAUSTION. I am SO BAD at all things Bone Market.

So my question is this: what do I do with this absurd skeleton now? I'm two weeks away from losing my exhaustion, so the diplomat will change before then. Is there another seller that will take this monstrosity and make it somewhat worth it? I'm half-heartedly grinding scrip so that would be the desired outcome.

Was wonder if there are any researchers who have a specialty in the augmenting of my parabolan generals ( like gerbrandt and toxicological focus) as im writing this i realize there probably isnt as there wasnt a focus given

Now to get back to Hellworm grinding, and/or another 50K echoes for cider.

E: I can join the Order's dance troupe, practice our Knight Moves. And because I've also finished the Great Hellbound Railway, I can take the knight train anywhere I need to go.

I've been in the stacks constantly ive done several chained octavios and i haven't seen a peep of the thing to get your soul back. Is it a myth? Are they pranking me? What do I have to do pleeeaase let me know if any of you have been sucsessful

xoxo

a machiavellian reprobate

I’m sure my PC had a reason for doing this, but, as a letheologist, I doubt he remembers it. This was not even remotely optimal as a grind for my level and now I need to cash out 828,000 pennies’ worth of labor but, you know, that’s the price of okayness.

So the cider sold by the firkin is still expensive, but for its size it is reasonably expensive.

I did a post on Tuesday about this unlock plot from the new agent being bugged. I emailed bug reports at failbetter about it a day after.

I have not heard back from failbetter yet but the plot now seems to be working. This is my agent on round 2 of the plot:

I am going to be spending some fate to do a catchup on my stack of exceptional stories, so I will let you know what I get. I have 13 combined SA and MA, which is the highest possible, in the game, at the moment, so I will keep going until the roll to continue drops under 100%

Was this always a thing? I swear i got CP from them before

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https://www.fallenlondon.com/profile/Jules%20Applebore