General Seeking Progression As It Stands, Right Now, As Far As I’m Aware (Hopefully)
Seeking; it’s back, it’s big, it’s confusing. The progression throughline is not very clear, and if you aren’t careful you may end up horribly maiming yourself or becoming sad. This should hopefully help you on your way towards the Name and stop you from getting too messed up*. Do note that some or all of this may change over the coming days.
Note: Seeking is not recommended for children under the age of 7. May contain small parts.
*this is a lie
SMEN 0: To get your first point of SMEN, you’ll probably want to either go to the Forgotten Quarter and cycle airs until you get the Seeking branch there, or get Unaccountably Peckish and play one of the options with a Marsh-Mired 0 requirement. Unaccountably Peckish is almost strictly a menace, and you don’t particularly want to have it; it fills your deck with Ubiquitous undiscardable cards with no real benefits.
SMEN 1: You’ll need to wait for another card, An Alphabet of Scars (or, if you have no SotC, A Banner with a Strange Device). This’ll let you get to SMEN 2.
SMEN 2: You get your Big Warning in the form of the storylet which gives you A Bad End. The Seeking Road opens in your lodgings, letting you increase SMEN further. The Seeking Road storylet is basically where almost all of everything happens.
At 2, you can only get SMEN levels at the cost of half your SotC or half your Watchful. Note that the SotC option becomes impossible to play very quickly; it requires a minimum SotC level of your SMEN level squared, so you can’t use it beyond SMEN 5. If you still haven’t gained Marsh-Mired, this would be a solid time to do so.
SMEN 4: The option to spend Appalling Secrets to gain SMEN levels; a difficult Watchful challenge which requires 77 Appalling Secrets per level of SMEN you possess. This is generally the cheapest option, so you’ll probably want to use this over anything else if possible.
SMEN 6: You gain the ability to spend Mourning Candles for SMEN; the Watchful challenge is easier than the Secrets option, but the cost is much higher; 77 candles per Level, nearly 10x more expensive than the Secrets.
SMEN 7: A card is added to your Opportunity Deck; A Dream of Dark Water.. Choosing the “Cry out” option on this card will get you a Weeping Scar. This will come in useful later.
SMEN 8: You gain the ability to spend Searing Enigmas for SMEN. The Watchful challenge is even easier than the Candles one, but it costs even more again; 7 Enigmas per level of SMEN, making it about 2x more expensive than candles.
SMEN 9: An option unlocks, letting you gamble 77 Appalling Secrets for an Enigma. You succeed 20-30% of the time, but on failure sometimes you lose an Enigma. This is pretty useless unless you’re very very desperate.
SMEN 12: Two branches open, entitled ‘Grieve’ and ‘Hate’. Playing one of these sets a new quality, simply called A Question, which is necessary to get to Winking Isle. The value it’s set to depends on which option you pick.
SMEN 14: We get into the real meat of things. Literally. Remember your Weeping Scar from earlier? You’re going to need six more of these, and this is the part where you get them. If you have 1 Scar and 4 Wounds, you can spend 7 actions to try and gain another Scar. Getting Scars kills you.
SMEN 16: Getting to SMEN 16 lets you start gaining Memory of Chains as well. You need at least one Weeping Scar for this, but you should already have it. Getting Chains is likely exactly identical to getting Scars; 7 actions per attempt, get jailed and possibly Chained depending on your luck.
SMEN 18: This level opens the option to stain your soul, as long as you have it on your person (i.e. you don’t have Your Own Infernal Contract). Same business as the last two. You’ll have to track your soul down in between stainings, and the final staining kills you. You’ll also need a frickton of laudanum.
You can also Light a Taper, which requires a Veils-Velvet, an Antique Mystery, Master’s Blood and an Impossible Theorem. Everything except the Mystery is consumed, and you gain a Dreadful Surmise and 2 SMEN. You can gain the supplies for Lighting a Taper if you have a St Cerise’s Candle left over from Old SMEN, at the cost of a Dreadful Surmise and the candle.
SMEN 21: At this level, you can start working towards St Arthur’s Candle, the bone candle. I don’t know the specifics, but I think it’s probably fairly similar to the old route; betray friends, lovers and innocents. You do need to be Stained, Scarred and Chained for this.
SMEN 24: As long as you have St Arthur’s Candle, you can go get St Beau’s at this level. Again, I don’t know the specifics, but I imagine there’s a trip to the Nightmare Carnival involved here.
SMEN 27: St Cerise’s Candle opens up here. You can get it in the Forgotten Quarter; it costs an Overgoat, or an Ubergoat, or a Classic Short Story, or 7 Fluke Cores, or your Daughter, or a healthy Noman. Don’t bother trying to use the Starveling Cat. You get a point of SMEN gor gaining this candle;’ 2 if you used the Ubergoat.
SMEN 28: The Lower Mysteries option opens up at your Lodgings, if you have St Cerise’s Candle. This is just a cheap point of SMEN (7 Uncanny Incunabula), and a hint that points you at the God’s Editors card.
SMEN 29: The option to bother God’s Editors appears on their card. For 7 Enigmas and 2542 (exactly!) Proscribed Material, you can get Mr Eaten’s Calling Card. At this point, you don’t want to be using the Seeking Road options any more. More on this at the bottom of the post.
SMEN 35: St Destin’s Candle should still open at this level; it requires 12 Noability and no Profession, and nukes your Connected: Society, Notability and Making Waves.
SMEN 42: St Erzulie’s Candle opens at this level. It waits in the Nadir. You have to give up many, many things to get this candle; your past, your present, your future. There is an option to cheat your way out of these costs, which nobody has tried yet, but will probably not end well. We’ll see.
SMEN 49: St Forthigan’s Candle opens at this level. You need to make a zee-journey to the Chapel of Lights for this. Sit and watch and wait, and the candle is yours.
SMEN 63: You will never achieve this candle, and even if you were to do so, you would lose the very head from your shoulders.
SMEN 77: One day, I will go North, and there I will burn until -
Winking Isle; you can go there once you have Mr EAten’s Calling Card. It costs 8 actions to arrive; 1 to fall asleep, and 7 to complete your dream of sailing to the isle. You need to have no Wounds or Nightmares, and you need to have A Question value set (Check SMEN 12). There are three options on the isle; a Lighthouse, where you can surrender St Destin’s Candle for 1 SMEN and some super great text, a Well, where the action happens, and Preparations, where you go before the action happens.
You need to Prepare before you can meditate at the Well. How do you prepare? Well, you need to ensure you own none of these items; and I don’t mean that you lose them. That would be almost kind. No, if you don’t meet the requirements of that list, you have to turn around and go home again, wasting all the actions you spent to get there in the first place.
If you have none of those items, you can begin Preparations; 7 actions to gain 77 Fasting and Meditating to a Foolish End. If you got rid of the Optional items, you can get to 99, but that’s really not very useful. After that, you can use a clutch of luck-based options at the Well to try and increase your FaM quality; the higher unlocks are swingier and, generally, less good. If you can get to 10k FaM, you can cash it all out for 1 SMEN; if you get to 60K, it can be cashed out for 7 SMEN and 1 Sudden Insight. Winking Isle is the place to be if you want to increase your SMEN at (barely) non-glacial rates.
Free of the Name doesn’t stop you from doing anything at the moment.
You can gain Marsh-Mired on an Unaccountably Peckish card to gain 1 SMEN, but it is only reset by Time, the Healer. These options do cap; higher UP options means a higher cap, but you can’t Seek solely through patience. Sacrifices must be made.
From Alexis:
However, there is one very important clue - actually, a couple of sets of clues - that make life a little simpler, and which I haven’t seen anyone refer to yet. Even people who’ve run the numbers. Even people who’ve scrutinised the text. Even people who understand the value of cards.
I (still) don’t know what this is referring to. It’s not access codes, though.
Take my advice: You should probably sell practically everything you own, and use the proceeds to buy Cryptic Clues for upconversion into Appalling Secrets to fuel your progress. If you balk at the concept of doing this, you aren’t going to make it North, because you have to sell all that stuff anyway, and there are much more permanent things for you to lose besides. Consider this your warning; if you want to Seek, go all the way. The only thing that lies on the middle path is pain.
