u/SadSwedishSloth

I loved GK1, played it a ton. I'm not looking to rain on anyones parade. But i feel the need to express my own dissapointment.

Whilst I acknowledge that GK2 sure feels bigger, everything also feels... slightly worse. Including most of the new systems.

The combat is repetitive and honestly not very challangeing. I have lost missions, but that is always because I skip out on healing and throw away my life trying to solo the waves, creating challanges for myself.

Unlooking townfolks quickly turns from a fun and interesting mechanic into a proper chore. 20 Building kits, 10 wood kits and 6 furniture kits and repeat untill you develop insanity IRL.

Same with raising zombies. Interesting for a minute and then it turns into a uninteresting grind where corpses are churned into the cremator in search for the ideal organs.

And then we have the perksystem. Initially I found it very refreshing, but I soon got frustrated realising I early midgame had 999 of red, green and blue currencies. I also had the feeling like atleast some of my talents did nothing. This was later confirmed here on reddit. Half of them are literaly not linked to anything in the code, they are just a pointsink with zero benefits.

I suspect from the discussions here the developers had to make compromises and development was cut short. And goddamn does it play that way.

TLDR: I can see the DNA of a solid game I would really enjoy. But it feels rushed, flawed and with systems that does not do what they say they do and other aspects of the game that feels underbalanced or abandoned halfway through. I honestly can not recommend it as is.

Technically there seems to be two rituals that helps an old kindred resist the Beckoning, one of them is pretty specific to the context in Fall of London and one is from the background material for the boardgame Chapters, that one seems to be more universal in its nature.

the "Web of Hunger"-Ritual (from Fall of London): A unique ritual focused around a Dagger that used to belong to Mithras. The Dagger calms the beast aswell as hunger of whoever is holding it. The ritual is described as more complex variant of the Extinguish Vitae power.

The ritual effects all kindred within the defined area stealing vitae from them and feeding it to the target of the ritual. Its not exactly written out in full, but from how I read it it works from somekind of synnergy effect between the dagger and the ritual. The ritual steals vitae in huge quantities from many diffrent kindred (about 1 hunger point each) and the dagger focuses all that vitae into the bearer. Basicly I read it as drowning the Beckoning in vitae.

the "François Villon"-Ritual (from Chapters): A ritual of unknown orgins. I cant find anything about who created it or where. But Francois Villon, the prince of Paris clearly knows of it. It basicly seems to be based around ritualised Filicide, ie a kindred sacfricifing its own offspring. In Francois Villons case its his childer Francois Duma that is the sacrifise. We know the intent of the ritual is to sever the bloodline between the kindred and whoever holds the reign over its bloodline. We get alot of hints that this ritual comes with downsides for the caster. Francois Villon has not showed himself sinse casting it.

I intend to use a similar (or one of the above) ritual for my own chronicle. But I feel like there is very little to go on from written sources. So my questions are the following:

1) Have I missed any information about the two rituals?

2) What other ways to fight of the Beckoning have you found in the lore?

3) What would you add to the rituals (or other ways to fight of the Beckoning)? Perhaps some obscure and hard to find material? A theory what happens if one uses Villons ritual? Something else? 😃