Overview
Having finished the game a few times, I feel competent enough to give you a guide on how to pursue ascension in the most efficient way. I assume you know the following basics: how to stay alive, expand your cult, obtain and upgrade lore, do expeditions, SUMMON ALIEN GODS and use them.
The basics – Study bottleneck
Let’s get started. Our goal is to win the game, and do it quickly. In at least 90% of games what keeps you from ascending is lackluster knowledge of lore. Lore is obtained only through the Study verb, so this verb is your major bottleneck and you need to concentrate on using it as efficiently as possible. This is what my guide focuses on. It’s fine for every other verb to sit idly for a while, but Study must never cease.
Early Work and Study
All the guides that deal with work I’ve seen deal with working at Glover & Glover and earning promotions there. What I have to say is: ♥♥♥♥ these guys! You don’t need to see them, ever. The main point of working is not earning money, but development (read: helping with Study) and the position at G&G only hinders that. In the early game you should focus on unskilled labour and painting. You will not be making any money, but you don’t need to at this point – you’re not reading books yet.
Unskilled labour gives you Vitality and painting gives you Glimmering, which you need to upgrade your Health and Passion. You should start with unskilled labour, because painting needs a skill to be any good. So your first Study priorities are Passion, until you can upgrade it, then Health. Once you get the basic painting skill, you can also turn to studying Reason.
The final stats you need to obtain to finish the game smoothly are: 3 Health, 5 Reason, 5 Passion. It’s also good to have the painting skill upgraded to the point where you put 4 cards in the Work verb, although that’s not necessary and might be tricky to do. You should get all the Health before studying lore, with the other two better wait for random Eruditions/Glimmerings. The first time you get sick after obtaining 3 Health, leave it to get Decrepitude.
Later you can stop physical work, although I would still do this for money from time to time unless I’m a doctor. Painting is always a good source of income when you’ve put in the effort to level up your imagination. It is viewed as risky due to reputation, but it’s really not – more on that later.
Establishing your cult
It is highly recommended that you choose one of these aspects for your cult: Lantern, Forge, Grail. The reason is not the obvious one that they correspond to the three types of victory – this doesn’t matter. The real reason is Restlessness – this is an influence that you get regularly from the beginning of the game, which has intensity 3 of those 3 aspects. That means it can be used as trappings with only level 4 lore to promote any believer to a disciple, which is huge. You need disciples to reliably do expeditions and otherwise you would need level 8 lore or an instrument or a summon to promote everyone. Out of the three possible aspects, Forge is slightly better than the other two due to being more useful in expeditions (you can send a Reshaper instead of two disciples).
As a sidenote, Forge clears so many obstacles that in my last game I had King Crucible solo a few expeditions while waiting for ascension.
Painting and dealing with your adversary
Painting is said to be a risky source of income due to generating reputation that attracts the attention of your Hunter. There are ways to manage your reputation to be safer, but I won’t go into them – they’re not that important. To get you in trouble, the adversary needs to create damning evidence, for which he needs to find Notoriety twice.
In the early game, the best way to be safe is just to avoid Notoriety. You don’t have a steady source of it until expeditions, so it’s really easy. The only thing you need to know about painting is that it will not generate Notoriety unless you use lore or a summon as inspiration.
When you begin sending out expeditions, avoiding Notoriety is no longer an option. Hopefully by then you have some skilled followers, useful bits of lore and are dreaming up the Mansus, so that you can summon a creature from another world from time to time. It’s good to summon one whenever you happen to get the right influence, so that you can later use it to destroy the evidence or the Hunter, if you’re in a pickle. Destroying the former should almost always keep you safe. However, don’t use your followers because they are likely to die.
About the latter: killing the Hunter for no reason will get you nowhere, as another one will soon appear. Some however are more troublesome than others and may be worth exchaning. Contrary to popular belief, A Weary Detective is not the best one to keep alive. The best trait your adversary can have is Erratic. If you get such one, you’re set for the rest of the game. Do whatever you want, keep piles of Notoriety and your adversary will hardly ever get anything done with it. Conversely, the most dangerous Hunter is the Meticulous one, and should be killed on sight.
If you want to kill a Hunter who is not resistant to attacks, it’s best to arrange their meeting with a summon. The easiest ones to get are Maid-in-the-Mirror and Hint, but Ezeem or King Crucible will also do the job. If they are resistant to attacks, you can still try the summon – it’s likely to fail, but you are barely losing anything. The reliable way to do this is to poison your Hunter and it’s worth giving up your poison if you have some.
Studying lore
We’ve come to the most important part. Knowledge of lore is what your ascension hinges on. So how to penetrate its mysteries most efficiently?
First of all, we need to discuss victory type. Your founding principles are irrelevant to this – a level 10 follower doesn’t help in the final rite, you will always use a summon. To be most effective, you should pick your dedication at the last possible moment, when you can see a path to victory. Let me illustrate this with an anecdote. In my last game, I got a ton of Moth, Lantern and Forge lore early, allowing me to upgrade to Forge 8 with plenty of leftovers. Only 10 is needed for victory, so I happily locked in Power and started upgrading. Then my next several expeditions showered me with basic instruments and high level Heart and Grail lore. Those would have let me reach Grail 12 before Forge 10, but it was too late and they found no use.
Now I should probably state what level of lore you need for each victory type.
1. Enlightenment
If you have the instrument to open the Peacock Door: 10
If you don’t, but have a 12 ingredient and a rite that can use it: 12
If you don’t: 14
2. Sensation
If you have the instrument to open the Peacock Door: 10
If you don’t, but have a 12 ingredient or instrument and a rite that can use it: 12
If you don’t: 14
3. Power
10
So Power is usually the way to go unless you find the right instrument for the Peacock Door. Then it’s probably Enlightenment, because then you can use the same lore to get to the Door and to ascend. Now that you know what you’re aiming for, let’s sit down and Study.
First principle: be very careful about what you read. To read a book in English, you need 1 minute. That’s not bad, but these books rarely contain lore that will be useful to you. To read a book in a foreign language, it takes you twice as long and these books contain most of the lore you need. A useful tip here is that you can tell what kind of lore a book contains by the colour of its background.
Second principle: be much more careful about what lore you upgrade. Upgrading lore takes 3 minutes and may fail unless you’re extensively prepared for it. So you should have a serious reason to be doing this. The viable reasons, from the strongest to the weakest are:
1. You need a certain type of lore to get up the Mansus.
2. You need a certain type of lore to ascend.
3. You have Secret Histories that can be upgraded.
4. You need lore to fulfill a commission.
You must never upgrade lore unless you have one of these goals in clear sight or there are no books you can read.
About preparation for upgrading: you need a source of Erudition and Glimmering to upgrade reliably. This is what your Work verb is for. When you’re starting to upgrade, paint to get a Glimmering or two. When your study needs Erudition, sell a previously prepared commission to a patron. Commissions are also a great source of income in mid-late game, and the reason why you never need to go to Glover & Glover.
Now, let’s turn to what you should be reading from the start, after you’re done with basic stat upgrades.
Your first goal is to quickly get to the Stag Door, which will give you a riddle. The riddle can be difficult, so the sooner we start working on it, the better. To get there, you need 4 Lantern or Knock, so prioritise books that can lead you to it. You should be able to get it very fast. The riddle will require of you level 6 lore of a certain aspect. You can read up on which one it is once you have the riddle, or experiment with different ones. This is the stage where you will be buying and reading lots of different books from Morland’s and Oriflamme’s. Although most of them won’t be of any use in your ascension, I recommend reading them to get at least one scrap of every lore aspect for commissions, which will sustain you later. The sooner, the better. Also at this point you’re still talking your ass off in the streets, looking for competent followers to start sending out, so there’s not much to work towards lore-wise.
So now you have solved the Stag Door’s riddle and are looking for further challenges. Your next goal is the Spider Door – this is the lowest you need to get in the Mansus to have a shot at ascension. You need 8 Lantern or Knock to get there. Unless you lucked out and have a ton of Lantern and Moth lore lying around, I suggest doing this with Knock. The best aspects to subvert to Knock are Edge and Winter – these two are pretty much irrelevant to any victory type. You must not subvert any of the victory lore aspects unless you have already picked your dedication. At this point it’s very unlikely.
When you are at the Spider Door, victory is close, but there are still multiple ways. If you have something that opens the Peacock Door, I recommend that you go there. It gives better Secret Histories, easy Sensation or Enlightenment victory and is less troublesome to open. You need 10 Lantern or Knock for this.
If you can’t open the Door, don’t bother crafting the lore to get there. Look at how far you can upgrade each of the three victory aspects (remembering that Forge only needs 10 and the other ones likely need 14), and get to work!
If you’re still far away from the desired level of lore, try upgrading Secret Histories instead, to look for more advanced lore in expeditions.
Ascension
When you get the required lore, ascension is very close! First, you need to summon a powerful minion to perform the rite for you: Teresa, King Crucible or Ezeem, depending on victory type. I assume you know how to do it. Most often, you will summon it way before you’re ready to ascend. Then it’s best to keep your minion alive while you’re still grinding lore instead of fishing for the right influence to summon it again later. There are a few ways to do it:
1. Paint its portaits. Not very reliable because you want to do commissions often, to get Erudition, which helps you study.
2. Talk to it about anything. Works well, but I don’t recommend it – there are often better uses for the Talk verb.
3. Send it out on expeditions. Works very well.
4. If all of this is not enough, make the minion resummon itself. This is what Rite of the Crucible of Soul is for – you only need a crude instrument and some basic lore to have your minion reborn into this world. However, there is a risk that it escapes as usual.
You have your assistant and your lore, all you need now is that 15 influence, so dream on! Or if you’re doing it the hard way with an ingredient or instrument, you are ready.
One last tip. You might need a steady supply of prisoners on your way to the high chambers of the Mansus. This can be provided by your Grail disciple (or Cyprian) seducing people in the streets. This takes some time, but you have plenty of it on your Talk verb at this point, and it’s perfectly safe. If they fail, you only get Notoriety. If you already have all the ingredients needed for victory and only need more time, just imprison a few of your followers. You no longer need any of them.
That’s it! Thanks for reading and see you at the Tricuspid Gate!