User:Institutionalist/Bone Market for Dummies

I've you're involved with the Fallen London community, you've likely heard about the Bone Market. Maybe you've read a guide or two, and were still left scratching your head.

Fear not, I've got you covered. (I hope, at least).

Why Bone Market?

The bone market offers efficient access to some resources that you need for example for the Railway.

These include:

• Nightsoil of the Bazaar and Preserved Surface Blooms, which you need to create Perfumed Gunpowder, both for lab equipment upgrades and for the first stretches of railway tracks. (Note that you can now get both from the Rat Market as well)
• Bessemer Steel Ingot, which you need a lot of to create Railway Steel (90 ingots for 5 pieces of steel).
• Hinterland Scrip, the currency of the Upper River (the stations you build during the railway project)

Access to the Bone Market

This is the progression that leads you to get access to the Bone Market:

• become a Person of Some Importance, see A Person of Some Importance (Guide)
• open up your own University Lab, see University Laboratory (Guide)
• complete five research projects to bring The Prestige of your Laboratory up to 5
• under Begin a Scientific Investigation, select Accept a Palaeontological Task from the Dean
• finishing this research project gives you Route: The Bone Market
• now Dept. of Menace Eradication has a new storylet, The Back Stair to the Bone Market. Play it to enter the Bone Market

Before you can Start

Assembling your own skeletons requires you to Invest in a Stall of your Own. If you buy a small stall first, it won't make the upgrade to a larger stall any larger, so you might as well get the biggest one (the handsome dais) right away. But for the rest of this tutorial, a small stall is enough.

What's the difference between the stall sizes? It's simple, if you work with bigger skeletons (built on a Mammoth Ribcage, Prismatic Frame or Leviathan Frame), the small stall isn't big enough.

The Rhythm of the Bone Market

The Bone Market is fundamentally an exchange, a market place.

Interacting with it usually consists of these steps:

• Acquire some stuff to sell, often outside the bone market
• Potentially assemble a skeleton out of your stuff
• Approach a buyer
• Sell your stuff

Let's break this down based on an example.

Example: Acquire Bessemer Steel Ingots

We'll start with a simple example: Acquiring 10 x Bessemer Steel Ingot.

These are the steps, more details to follow:

• Acquire a Femur of a Jurassic Beast
• (do not assemble anything)
• approach the Enthusiast of the Ancient World
• sell him the femur

The details are

Acquire a Femur of a Jurassic Beast

First, check your inventory, You might already have one.

If not, a simple but action-intensive method to acquire some is to use Brawling with Dockers and chose the large create from the bone market.

This will give you quite a few femurs, which might seem like a waste for now, but you'll needs lot of these later on when building the railway, so it's not a waste.

There are other ways to get this and and other bones; if you're looking for a specific bone, it is usually advisable to check Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Bone Sources.

Approach the Enthusiast of the Ancient World

In the Bone Market, select Seeking Buyers. One of the options should be Sell to an Enthusiast of the Ancient World. If this option is not available to you, it is because this buyer needs Respectable of at least 3.

At this point in the game you very likely have enough equipment to reach this threshold; go to your possessions, filter your equipment to show Respectable items, and equip the highest you have per slot. If that doesn't bring you to three, use these access codes which gives you some items, including Rusty Census-Taker's Badge, a Respectable +2 clothing item, and Portable Lamp-Post, a Respectable +2 home comfort.

Other buyers have other requirements, we'll get to that later.

Sell him your bone

Once you have reached the Enthusiast, there is a checkless option Sell him a Jurassic Thigh Bone.

It costs one action and one Femur of a Jurassic Beast, and gives you 10 x Bessemer Steel Ingot.

Congratulations, you have just finished your first Bone Market transaction.

Wasn't that bad, was it?

Building your First Skeleton

The Bone Market starts to get really interesting once you assemble skeletons and sell them.

To do that, you need your own stall, and you need a torso to start with.

The Torso then dictates how many heads, limbs (arms, legs, wings) and tails you can attach.

At the end, you need to declare what your skeleton is supposed to be. If, for example, you started with a Human Ribcage, attached two arms, two legs and one head, you can declare it a human.

If you didn't follow anything that fits into a pre-made category (such as human, ape, bird, ...), you can always declare it a Chimera, which makes it harder to sell.

Harder to sell means you need to pass a possibly steep Shadowy check, and you gain Suspicion on failure (and have to try again until you pass the check, or else decide to eventually break down your skeleton for parts, which isn't as profitable as selling it).

Another aspect that makes a skeleton harder to sell is Skeleton: Self-Evident Implausibility, which you gain in two ways:

• doing something obviously unfitting, like using a Carved Ball of Stygian Ivory instead of a head
• some attaching operations require an advanced stats check, like Mithridacy or Monstrous Anatomy. If you fail those, you can gain implausibility.

But, enough theory, let's actually build something.

Start with a Plan

We want to build a human skeleton and sell it to the Enthusiast of the Ancient World, same as before.

The Enthusiast wants at least one point of Skeleton: Antiquity in its skeleton