[The following playthrough is by Dhaze, posted by me with his permission. The original playthrough can be found on the semi-notorious (but often useful for me as a dev) RPG enthusiast forum RPGCodex: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/lets-play-tyranicons-memoirs-of-a-battle-brothel.147180/. My handle there is Tyranicon, and I am mentioned several times.]
[Full disclosure, I liked Dhaze’s scathing but detailed review of another RPG, so I offered him a steam key for Memoirs to give his opinions on the game. While he has yet to utterly trash my game so far, we shall see what happens when he finishes the game.]
[Without further introduction by me, the playthrough will be presented in full with some minor edits where needed. My personal remarks will be in brackets and italicized.]
Ok so continuing with the playthrough, I’ll start using spoilers for a number of important story beats.
First real day on the job as Facilitator to my brothel, and I wake up to discover the Constabulary (hereforth known as ‘the cops’) have placed the area under a mercantile freeze. Meaning no clients coming, thus no exchange of liquidities of any kind. Bribing a cop, I learn they’re investigating a local traffic of Narsum, a drug previously used to treat virus-afflicted sufferers of the Crasher Crisis but now become drug of choice to those of precarious financiary means. After some sleuthing about, I garner favor with a sly member of the Old Watch faction, then bring the whole mercantile freeze situation to its dénouement, and this much to everyone’s satisfaction for the celerity and bloodlessness of it all.
I should note that once again, the game offered me a few ways to properly use my character’s stats, and I saw that yet other means were available though not necessarily to me given said involved stats.
During all this, I meet Kaywin, who is a mechanic—but I suspect is actually a crater in disguise, because girl you are smokin’!
Honestly, as an underboob fan, I must say bravo. I’d clap, but with only one hand available, it’s hard.
She seems a remarkably sweet girl, who found herself more or less involutarily mixed into something she misliked. Ere long I find her in the upstairs part of my brothel, applying for a job; but not that kind of job.
I mean… come on… Kaywin, my perky girl… “Working with your hands.” The pun basically writes itself!
At this point something a bit strange happens in the succession of events. I tell Kaywin I’m all for hiring her, as we’ll need her handywork to fix the vaguely-decrepit brothel up, but advise her to enquire with Zafra anent such details as salary and work hours, since I’m still new here and not exactly au fait with these aspects of our little enterprise. So she goes downstairs, to talk with Zafra. I follow, and… no Kaywin, nowhere? She disappeared. And Zafra—and every other girl as well—still had the same dialogue has before I spoke to Kaywin.
In the end I couldn’t find any next step to this little part of the story, so went to sleep to skip to the next day, and just like that discovered that Kaywin had been hired and was at work in our garage, with fresh dialogue that made it seems as if she had been a part of the group for some time already. It felt a bit abrupt, in a “Ok that’s done; on to the next part now,” kind of way, but that’s alright with me.
Now the game alerts me that my party size is limited to five, and that for the moment said party is fixed.
(nb: please completely disregard the ‘time played’ display as seen in the party comp screenshot; it doesn’t accurately represent my time played since I often pause to organise screenshots and take notes, and it will only get more out of sync as the playthrough progresses)
Second day on the job then, and immediately Diana proposes we name our little brothel. Being surrounded by she-wolves, I go for the only logical option:
As well, I contract a couple of upgrades for our brothel-cum-hovel, being as we are in dire need of such services as security and administration, a janitorial facility (for healthier genital felicity), some privacy booths, and things of like ilk.
Additionally, and though I had previously heard the rapturous clamor emanating from her room, only now do I get to meet Thassia “Balls-Drainer” in the flesh:
How does that thin of a fabric collar manage to stay upright? What does she use, is it an abundance of starch? Oh… oh no, it’s not starch, is it?
But now on to matters of a more serious nature. As briefly remarked upon earlier, the Guild Of Courtesans is split in halves, these being the Traditionalists and the Progressives, whose belligerence is escalating of late. To prevent said escalation reaching the corpse-strewn heights of all-out war, Nena—the Grand Dame of the Guild Of Courtesans—aims to organise a meeting between the rival leaders; and we girls, a thus-far unaffiliated brothel wherein work people sympathetic to both sides of the conflict, are to play a role in this.
Alas, afore her endeavor could come to any fruition, in a skipping heartbeat Nena is brutaly assassinated. Seemingly, by none other than the Bloody Hawk, a supposed crazed Shaper whose monicker I had previously heard on the news, and whose bloody trail spreads, drip by drip, across MoonFall.
A cursory investigation (Perception, baby!) reveals most gruesome details: Nena’s whole body, with preternatural thew, has been wrung like a wet towel; and likewise has the head of a man present with her at the time in the room been twisted so violently on his neck his skin became partially detached. Curiously, it seems a drug was involved in the matter; as to said drug being Narsum or not, I could not ascertain. But wait! there was a security camera in place. Yet damnation has it it is was hacked and deactivated, and my proficiency with computer technology is laughably low, thus can not obtain me any additional clues.
Before leaving the place, I meet and talk a bit with Hatsuo, adjutant to the late Nena:
———-||———-
And during these last events has surfaced in full a problem that is, I guess, practically inevitable. Sorry, this part will be rather long and a bit shop-oriented so to speak, but it’s an interesting point to discuss. Still, feel free to skip this part if you’re not Tyranicon, as it might prove super boring otherwise.
The game is centered around the Guild Of Courtesans, and as noted previously I consciously chose as background for my character that of an ex-courtesan, expecting certain interesting interactions. So while I the player logically know next-to-nothing about this game’s world, I the character on the other hand should already know pretty much everything there is to know about the Guild, about its hierarchical structure, its history, its size, its unique characters, down to its ideological cleft between Traditionalists and Progressives.
In every work of fiction the writer has to choose how to approach that problem.
The most brutal solution is to drop the player straight into the deep end, no matter how troubled the waters, to possibly never even explain a huge number of things, and let the immersion hopefully work its ineffable magic. For a relatively well-known example: Glenn Cook did that with The Black Company.
Another, diametrically opposite solution, is to over-explain, to over-expose—even if in tiny bits. For the anecdote, there used to be a lot of that in vaudeville plays, wherein a character might say to another, “As you know, monsieur Petypon has gone for the day […]”, thereby explaining the context of a scene to the spectators, despite the characters in the play already possessing that specific information.
By going the brutal way you risk alienating readers who, by lack of adequate-for-them introduction, won’t ever manage to enter your world, won’t never not feel alien to it (that’s a valid criticism regularly aimed at The Black Company). By going the opposite way, you risk alienating readers who don’t need that much information to submerge themselves comfortably in your waters, and who might even be turned off by but the slightest repetition of information already provided them.
In practice here, facing my ex-courtesan character talking with Diana anent the Guild Of Courtesans, the game has my character say, “Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve left the Guild; couldn’t hurt to ask for a refresher.” But the explanations I can obtain at that point are a bit redundant with what I’ve already learned; some titles like ‘Grand Dame’ are perfectly self-explanatory so I don’t need more on them; and I have in my journal a few books that already touched on the subjects at hand.
In a similar vein, at one point Diana explains something to me about how Shapers come to be, which has my character interject: “Yeah, I know. I’m a Shaper too, remember?”
All in all, it’s not an inelegant approach to the problem, if at times a bit on the nose, and it works well more often than it doesn’t.
———-||———-
Back to our home turf then, and a bit out of the blue I find myself harboring a refugee of sorts, Isutyr:
She is what the game calls a Goada Naren (‘tall ones’, called thus from ancient times, when Man was still rather small in stature compared to these elf-like, natural Shapers); and for the time being she is on the run from the Travelers’ Guild, arguably the most powerful faction.
But since it’s already a rather long post, I’ll cut it short here. In the next part, we finally get to kill people!
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