You, little rabbit, are not the Reckoning.

The fact backers for both sskies and motr haven't gotten the lore book that was a reward and the last update about it was in June that was like "we'll let you know" like...

#why wasn't it already written? why was it a reward for two kickstarters and still not given out?#sorry I'm still being a hater

Okay SO we did find the sskies one! It was sent via Dropbox link which is now dead and that alone is. Insane. They sent rewards through Dropbox. Okay.

So the lore book exists! It's 14 whole pages long with no new lore no new images and only like covers two ports per area, four enemies and the different trains you can buy. With no information on those ofc.

The free tabletop gave more lore but at least it exists? Unprofessional as a Dropbox and no real content as it is.

The fact backers for both sskies and motr haven't gotten the lore book that was a reward and the last update about it was in June that was like "we'll let you know" like...

I'm not really back sorry

This game means so much to me but the way fbg has been and how fans have been treating things. Im still taking a step back.

My main is @0rdis and I'm currently in baldur's gate 3 hell.

#most people know I'm indigenous and since mask of the rose I've been just... very hurt #also I'm sorry to all my mutuals who I unfollowed #I do appreciate you all and I'm glad everyone is having fun #I'm just going through a lot

mrcards-hearts-desire

how fucking funny would it have been if the collective noun for a colony of bats were a parliament like with owls

Almost positive a group of Masters is called a parliament given how many times they are called that. Kingdom of a Pig, old destinies, Mr Cards, I believe a few others too. Seeking even compares Masters to owls, as does Bag a Legend.

neathyingenue

thanks to @the-avaricious-meddler's journal i can now explain just a few reasons WHY this es is so bad!!! brought to you by my not-even-that-extensive knowledge of maya history (my dad is central american, i majored in spanish, and i spent a semester in mexico)--

(1) the jaguar is not a villain just because it's a carnivore! it's a symbol of power and beauty made even more poignant for indigenous people in the wake of the conquista!

(2) the lords of xibalba weren't seen as these great guys! in fact, the popol vuh, the mayan creation myth, features the heroes defeating the lords of death (xibalba) in a ball game!

(3) yes, there were ritual killings in the pre-conquista americas, but they were way rarer than colonial history would have you think. also like literally every culture has ritual killings, it doesn't make a culture inherently violent

(4) holy shit the idea of a deferential indigenous leader who turns out to want your blood is so pervasive in racist conquistador accounts (if you haven't read hernan cortes's journals, don't, they are disgusting) holy shit

tl;dr the es puts its own assumptions onto maya culture! like thinking jaguar=scary=bad, or existence of underworld gods=people worship those gods=people worship death=people are bloodthirsty, or colonial-era accounts of indigenous people=how it actually was back then. at best that's ethnocentric, at worst, it's white supremacist!!

(anyway i'm a sensitivity reader on the side so failbetter hmu if you want to do BETTER and not FAIL (ba doom shh) )

hard, hard disagree. this is copy/pasted from my discord chat about this post but im posting it to tumblr anyway

The Third City is deeply changed by its descent to the neath and the despotism of its priest-kings that SHOULD NOT be taken as some deeper moral read about the maya as a culture, but more a reinforcement of the core anti-monarchic themes of the entire fallen london.

Kings are bad. Simple as.

There is no "good" royalty, just less bad. Any monarch that would trade a city for personal gain is, at their core not one of the less bad ones.

The Priest-Kings are not exempt from this -- they're the most emblematic.

Systems that produce royalty are anathema to human freedom and respect. The Shuttered Palace gets up to the same shit behind closed doors -- the amount of human suffering that goes on there is insane, just taking a different flavor of neathy strangeness.

except the criticism is about how the god-eaters play into negative stereotypes about indigenous (particularly mayan) people being human-sacrificing cannibals that were used by colonisers to justify their genocide. and they're basically all you see of the third city. but go off i guess

yes, and what would you have had them do about it? just, never touch the tainted story beats again? lot of the early stuff is obnoxiously british-ethnocentric in where its sources come from and where it's speaking from and it's always been heavy-handed. This ES isn't uniquely "so bad" for it. i also think the OP being so adamant that she could do better when she said herself she's not actually gotten very far in FL's story is a bit much.

just give the third city more depth to it than the god-eaters? surely there were people living there who didn't agree with them? it's literally that simple. if they can only portray the third city in this light then yeah actually i'd prefer them to never touch it again

neathyingenue

thanks to @the-avaricious-meddler's journal i can now explain just a few reasons WHY this es is so bad!!! brought to you by my not-even-that-extensive knowledge of maya history (my dad is central american, i majored in spanish, and i spent a semester in mexico)--

(1) the jaguar is not a villain just because it's a carnivore! it's a symbol of power and beauty made even more poignant for indigenous people in the wake of the conquista!

(2) the lords of xibalba weren't seen as these great guys! in fact, the popol vuh, the mayan creation myth, features the heroes defeating the lords of death (xibalba) in a ball game!

(3) yes, there were ritual killings in the pre-conquista americas, but they were way rarer than colonial history would have you think. also like literally every culture has ritual killings, it doesn't make a culture inherently violent

(4) holy shit the idea of a deferential indigenous leader who turns out to want your blood is so pervasive in racist conquistador accounts (if you haven't read hernan cortes's journals, don't, they are disgusting) holy shit

tl;dr the es puts its own assumptions onto maya culture! like thinking jaguar=scary=bad, or existence of underworld gods=people worship those gods=people worship death=people are bloodthirsty, or colonial-era accounts of indigenous people=how it actually was back then. at best that's ethnocentric, at worst, it's white supremacist!!

(anyway i'm a sensitivity reader on the side so failbetter hmu if you want to do BETTER and not FAIL (ba doom shh) )

hard, hard disagree. this is copy/pasted from my discord chat about this post but im posting it to tumblr anyway

The Third City is deeply changed by its descent to the neath and the despotism of its priest-kings that SHOULD NOT be taken as some deeper moral read about the maya as a culture, but more a reinforcement of the core anti-monarchic themes of the entire fallen london.

Kings are bad. Simple as.

There is no "good" royalty, just less bad. Any monarch that would trade a city for personal gain is, at their core not one of the less bad ones.

The Priest-Kings are not exempt from this -- they're the most emblematic.

Systems that produce royalty are anathema to human freedom and respect. The Shuttered Palace gets up to the same shit behind closed doors -- the amount of human suffering that goes on there is insane, just taking a different flavor of neathy strangeness.

except the criticism is about how the god-eaters play into negative stereotypes about indigenous (particularly mayan) people being human-sacrificing cannibals that were used by colonisers to justify their genocide. and they're basically all you see of the third city. but go off i guess

yes, and what would you have had them do about it? just, never touch the tainted story beats again? lot of the early stuff is obnoxiously british-ethnocentric in where its sources come from and where it's speaking from and it's always been heavy-handed. This ES isn't uniquely "so bad" for it. i also think the OP being so adamant that she could do better when she said herself she's not actually gotten very far in FL's story is a bit much.

mlynar-nearl

op wasn't even saying they could do better they were saying that it touched on their cultural background in a way that was offensive and shallow. i agree with their points wholeheartedly. if they can't even do enough research to know that lurid colonial stories of ritual sacrifices are widely exaggerated, maybe they should leave the third city alone until they can do a bit of googling or get on discord with an indigenous person lol?

neathyingenue

thanks to @the-avaricious-meddler's journal i can now explain just a few reasons WHY this es is so bad!!! brought to you by my not-even-that-extensive knowledge of maya history (my dad is central american, i majored in spanish, and i spent a semester in mexico)--

(1) the jaguar is not a villain just because it's a carnivore! it's a symbol of power and beauty made even more poignant for indigenous people in the wake of the conquista!

(2) the lords of xibalba weren't seen as these great guys! in fact, the popol vuh, the mayan creation myth, features the heroes defeating the lords of death (xibalba) in a ball game!

(3) yes, there were ritual killings in the pre-conquista americas, but they were way rarer than colonial history would have you think. also like literally every culture has ritual killings, it doesn't make a culture inherently violent

(4) holy shit the idea of a deferential indigenous leader who turns out to want your blood is so pervasive in racist conquistador accounts (if you haven't read hernan cortes's journals, don't, they are disgusting) holy shit

tl;dr the es puts its own assumptions onto maya culture! like thinking jaguar=scary=bad, or existence of underworld gods=people worship those gods=people worship death=people are bloodthirsty, or colonial-era accounts of indigenous people=how it actually was back then. at best that's ethnocentric, at worst, it's white supremacist!!

(anyway i'm a sensitivity reader on the side so failbetter hmu if you want to do BETTER and not FAIL (ba doom shh) )

hard, hard disagree. this is copy/pasted from my discord chat about this post but im posting it to tumblr anyway

The Third City is deeply changed by its descent to the neath and the despotism of its priest-kings that SHOULD NOT be taken as some deeper moral read about the maya as a culture, but more a reinforcement of the core anti-monarchic themes of the entire fallen london.

Kings are bad. Simple as.

There is no "good" royalty, just less bad. Any monarch that would trade a city for personal gain is, at their core not one of the less bad ones.

The Priest-Kings are not exempt from this -- they're the most emblematic.

Systems that produce royalty are anathema to human freedom and respect. The Shuttered Palace gets up to the same shit behind closed doors -- the amount of human suffering that goes on there is insane, just taking a different flavor of neathy strangeness.

except the criticism is about how the god-eaters play into negative stereotypes about indigenous (particularly mayan) people being human-sacrificing cannibals that were used by colonisers to justify their genocide. and they're basically all you see of the third city. but go off i guess

And from Seeking:

You have read:

“To ascend is not possible, save by the Science (and the Science does not exist). But the flesh and blood of the Twelve is intoxicating and transcendent. If you consume something greater, then you may incorporate it: unless it incorporates you. This is the lesson of stars. This is the lesson of Couriers. This is the lesson of the knives and the pool.”

#fallen london spoilers

They say: before the Third City fell, Camazotz was the god of night and death. Afterwards, sacrifice was added to the list of things the god was associated with.

(— You had flown over the city several times before you formally approached them to broker a contract. You took on a disguise to learn their ways and study their culture so you could better offer them something they wanted.

It had been your first time acquiring a city and perhaps you had been proud about it. You wanted to prove that you could do something as well as Wines, as well as Candles, despite not being bright like them.

When you finally showed yourself to them, it was you they crowded around, not Wines. That was the first time you anyone but Candles had looked at you with such awe. You would become addicted to the worship. After all, it was something never given to you until now. The others always hoarded the attention of humans. You never thought you wanted it until then.

Until then, Candles had been enough. Perhaps that’s because you had never tasted more. But now you had.

You were a god to more than just the Third City. The change to the deity was recorded for all to see and it spread across the continent like wildfire. You were young and selfish and drunk on that.)

They say: Camazotz will watch all sacrifices to the gods and judge them. If they are found worthy, he will carry the sacrifice to the gods himself.

(— You had watched it all. You had wanted to store it in your collection but you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. You had tried to find some sort of sick pleasure in it. You couldn’t. The Priests’ work was sloppy, wrong. They had a god laid out and bleeding before them and they couldn’t even comprehend it to the extent they should.

You don’t think about it anymore.

But when they were finished wiping their mouths and licking their lips, you grabbed up the remains with bared teeth and took Candles back down to the darkness and deeper still. The least you could do was give it to a well.)

They say: Camazotz brought light to the humans.

(— And you did, didn’t you? Bright white and golden? So beautiful that it aches to look at? And humans didn’t deserve it. Not even Sol could match Candles.)

#oh you know

bizarrebazaar13

see the thing with the previous cities is that I would genuinely love to learn more about them! but fbg has consistently proven that they can’t write about them, especially the third city, without being racist as fuck.

(also, side note: does the writing for the khanate/fourth city descendants in general give anyone else an icky feeling? I haven’t explored the khanate much (no safe-conduct yet lol) but I’ve read through some exceptional stories and interacted with fourth city characters in London a bit too… and it just feels Bad)

thedeafprophet

agreed 100%. there's some much interesting history stuff u can do outside of london. the khanate stuff def feels off too.

also like....reminds me that fl use to have "Connected: The Orient"

obviously i can't speak on the inherent anti-indigenous stereotypes in the third city depictions but i can say that a lot of flavour text for khanate stuff used to be Weirder, like the airag being compared to horse sick iirc? also port carnelian exists full stop and it's a required bit of the game if you wanna unlock other stuff

but i'll be honest like... they still have a lot to do. iirc the staff is almost all white people, which doesn't stop them from writing good rep but it clearly means they need to put in the extra effort. even recent-ish stuff like the khanate feels gross with how a nation just as (if not more) storied as london turns into a playground for the flpc to do great game stuff in for their personal benefit. the most you even see of what life there Really is like is the flavor text for the time of the day changing. mask of the rose also has its problems with assuming a christian and british perspective by default—i know they did a lot of research and it paid off but it still feels like it falls flat if the pc isn't allowed to personally engage with it. and of course there's the growing undercurrent of uncritical british exceptionalism (for example, the "uninhabited frontier" narrative of sunless skies. there's a gco option that went "we need to preserve london for the revolution because it's the tinderbox of history" which Yikes i guess none of the real world revolutions from the various colonised countries at the time matter?)

idk where this rant is going but i guess i just think they haven't Entirely improved beyond removing some of the overtly racist stuff and doing more research. which is great! but there's still so much to address

like i'll be real with you all i hate people pretending every bad thing ever about fl disappeared when AK left

I am not sure I am going to be able to keep the lore document updated. I have been struggling mentally very badly. I may even cancel my sub. It's been really hard to make myself play. I'm sorry.

You can still talk to me about FL or anything really but I am just very distant from myself