User:Dotsent/Ambition:Heart's Desire (spoiler-free hints)

This page is a Work in Progress by User:Dotsent.

Intro

This is a spoiler-free hints page for Ambition: Heart's Desire. It doesn't give out any spoilers for the story itself, but it presents a list of qualities and items that might be useful when going through this Ambition. This page explicitly omits the links to specific Ambition steps to avoid accidental spoilers.

Useful items

This section lists the items that you might obtain during your normal play in Fallen London and might wish to keep for the Ambition: Heart's Desire.

Certifiable Scrap

One of the steps of Heart's Desire requires a very rare item, Intriguer's Compendium. At the moment of writing this, the only way to get this item is purchasing it from the Curt Relicker, which requires modified Shadowy 175 and 680x Certifiable Scrap. Acquiring this much Scrap means significant time investment, if done in one grind, but collecting Scraps through the entire game can easily give as much. So, an advice: as long as you didn't get the Intriguer's Compendium yet, collect all Certifiable Scraps you can get, especially from the Lodgings cards.

Useful qualities

This section lists the qualities that you might obtain during your normal play in Fallen London and might wish to keep for the Ambition: Heart's Desire.

Dreams

One of the steps of Heart's Desire requires the player to have at least level 15 in one out of four Recurring Dreams, namely one of:

• A Game of Chess
• The Burial of the Dead
• The Fire Sermon
• What the Thunder Said

Dreams can generally only be obtained from related Opportunity Cards, so building these qualities is a fairly long work. On the other hand, these cards never or almost never have any stats checks, thus they can be efficiently used from the very beginning of the game. Advice: use any Dreams cards you get, don't spend your dreams (for example, in Parabola) and don't get to Nightmares level 8+ without having at least one Memory of Light (to avoid losing Dreams qualities eventually).

Other tips & hints

Free Parabola access

At some point, this Ambition will send you to Parabola. The catch here is that a special storylet that appears in your Lodgings would then provide you access to Parabola for free once you establish your Parabolan Base-Camp. This storylet will keep showing up in your Lodgings until you finalize a certain task in Parabola, but it doesn't force you to do it right away, so you can keep going between London and Parabola for free as long as you stay at a certain stage of your Ambition. Advice: this saves you a lot of Drops of Prisoner's Honey, so use this opportunity for as long as you can.