Welcome to Laburnum, also known as the wholesome-sounding murdercrafting update. (To see the changes you’ll need to start a new save game, so please don’t worry if you’re continuing a save and don’t see anything different.)
Our overall aim with this update is to reduce the cognitive overhead involved in crafting murder-related stories. We’re making changes to help clarify what murderboard choices actually matter, and you should feel like you have more understanding of and agency over the trial itself.
- We've made the initial Ministerial Exposé assignment that Archie gives you after the tutorial more linear. The idea is that it guides you, step by step, through the process of first forming a question (a hypothesis) on the board and how this opens up new options to explore on the map, which lets you unlock new tokens before being able to form solutions (a theory) which can be handed in.
- We’ve made the murderboard smaller (every slot on it now potentially really affects the trial outcome). This will only impact murder-related stories; stories about rats, revolution, romance, etc will have the same number of slots as they currently have.
- We’ve also made both the generated text and Harjit's response much clearer about what you've generated, whether it's a hypothesis or a final theory, and what it's likely to achieve.
- Harjit will now expressly warn you if you've formed an "incorrect" murder theory, something that's plausible but hard to prove, and which will therefore mean the trial is likely to go sideways.
- You now can't invent explanations that are too fundamentally incoherent (like that Griz took the candles in to David, because everyone knows she didn't).
- It'll be harder to get into a bad situation in the trial unless you do it on purpose, but also easier to get out of said situation using One Weird Trick (can’t wait for you to discover this one, hahahah).
We hope this makes the whole experience simpler, the categories of murderboard outcome easier to understand, and the generated text more consistently satisfying (because it's less likely to be full-on bonkers).
Laburnum also introduces more autosave points, and all the bugfixes we can squeeze in.
We hope you enjoy. Barring any hotfixes, this is the last Mask of the Rose update you’ll get from us until the new year! So until then, perhaps you’d like to join us in Fallen London, where the Christmas festivities will begin with our advent calendar on the 1st of December.
