HOUSEKEEPING'S PROFILE

1.On your second playthrough, one of Amos's randomized messages tells you how many endings you've seen. He'll also give you a little congratulatory message if you've seen them all and completed the bonus content, but it's not particularly worth aiming for.

2.Sure; I'll go further and tell you exactly when you can get them:

13-Before you climb the rope
12-Before you reach avishun
11-After you get Raccoon and Yvette, before you reach balfur
10-After you get Leif and Cyril, before you finish the Flying Mountain
9-Before you get Ivy back
8-Before you lose Rutger and Oliver
7-Before you get Leif and Yvette back
6-Before you get your town
5-Before you go into the wasteland
4-Before you free Avishun
3-Before you free Balfur
2-Before you finish the Green Heart (the temple with the shapeshifters)
1-Standard Ending; after you see Raccoon's soul tear scene.

3. It's not possible to complete every recipe in one run (chests restock on each playthrough, though), but it is possible to get a full set of end-game gear. Stalwart Knight is the the Green Heart, the Sword of Shifting Mist is under the swamp in Dragon's Throat Forest (you have to fall in the right place--the layout of the map underneath the swamp is the same as the swamp itself, which should give you a good clue), Pinwheel is a recipe that's sold in Terranoire, and Nightmare is inside the Nightmare Castle basement--you need to beat Phobos first if you haven't yet.

4. Nope--dialogue's the same. Although Amos does have that aforementioned addition to his randomized factoids.

5. Prim shows remorse in her Soul Tear scene, but I did make her allergic to Avushinians as a weird internalization of her past opposition to them. Mag wouldn't care, though--she's the kind of person that doesn't particularly like people in general, but she's loyal to the ones who are kind to her. I don't think they would hurt the townspeople--if provoked, they'd probably move somewhere else. They're both used to living outside of society.

6. No, they're not connected to saecelium in any way. A Very Long Rope's world is part sci fi, part fantasy.

7. Yes, that was the Eater. It's canon in that it's part of the collective subconscious, but that means that the gods that are there are figments made real rather than actual gods. I think this is covered in the dialogue there.

8. I think of Mag as a pacifist now that the war's over, which is why she really just sat there as a temple was built around her over the years. I don't really have an origin story for the cult beyond the fact that religions tend to have creepy other-side-of-the-coin aspects.

9. There aren't many left, but since the narrative only shows one, you can assume it's representative of the whole.

10. I consider them missionaries, so their tongues are intact in order to spread the gospel.

11. Since this was the first time the two had ever witnessed death, I wanted them to be severely freaked out by it, which is why I didn't let them go back inside the house.

12. Yeah; otherwise she wouldn't have gotten married in the first place. I probably should have shown them living a decent existence in Old Town in the post-time skip, though.

13. Fair point; probably should have renamed that skill, haha.

14. If I were doing my own spriting, I would have given her an outfit made of animal hides. But, sure, that explanation is as good as any, haha.

15. That's a good parallel, so there definitely could have been dialogue there. I think the only obstacle is that they really don't know each other or their pasts, but if I had a bunch more scenes in the town, I could see how they'd bond over that.

16. I think I've covered all the scrapped stuff--really just being able to explore the wasteland and the puzzle tower. Most of the other ideas that aren't present in the game were modified rather than removed. Saecelium, for instance, is pretty pivotal to the game now, but originally I just had to come up with that because the RTP graphics don't include any computers, and the most futuristic looking thing I had at my disposal were giant floating crystals.

17. It's a pretty long drop--I think that would require some kind of pulley system, which seems like it would be difficult to set up over such a long distance.

18. Mint read from Rose's botany book and she mentions that her and Gram are in the same place at the beginning, so they definitely knew things about their mother, so I assume Gram talked about her even if I didn't directly mention it in the dialogue. He just thought she was dead.

19. She's trying to get Yvette to act responsibly.

-You can't recruit Sylvia.
-Mag isn't dead--she's at Silent Lake Temple.
-Marina is in the Green Vein; she's in the cabin right before the Reflection Pond.
-You left off the character that's frozen in the snowfield--you need to recruit him before you can get Clovis.
-There's one character you can recruit in Attis.

1.One of the things I really wanted to focus on with Raccoon was how alone he was, so I don't cover his first few years beyond being abandoned in the rain as that's his earliest memory, but how old he was when that happened isn't clear. He would have been young enough to get taken into the orphanage, but he instead got by alone. Raccoon's just not a person who seeks out people, and that goes back as long as he can remember.

2. She hasn't in the narrative, so no. It would have been cool to have that tribe in the game, though.

3. After you make it to the mirror, you have to follow that pattern in reverse, so the full pattern is chapel, snow, water, grass, steel, fire, mirror, fire, steel, grass, water, snow, and chapel.

4. That's just referring to the Reflecting Pond.

5. The Ring of the Python is in basement of a destroyed home in the northeastern part of the Ruins of Old Avishun. The Ring of the Cobra is in the last level in the area before you fall into the old teleporter that takes you to ubiquity. It's all the way to the western entrance of that room; there's a gap with a floating platform, so the power has to be on to reach it. You can buy a wheat scythe from one of the street vendors in the western section of Silver Spring after Silver Spring is free from Raccoon.

6. Yeah; there's still some more or less "racist" undercurrents, but it's no longer public policy since the social order was toppled.

7. They're definitely tough in this universe. I don't know if I have an upper limit as to how much punishment they can take, but I consider Prim and Mag to be (relatively) immortal observers. When they were involved in the war, they were pretty unstoppable.

8. Yeah. Rutger hates the fact that he's common more than anything. To him, he's worse than that because of the birth defect that made his eye useless, and I wanted those feelings to inform his power-seeking behavior. The dialogue that he has with "Albus" while on the surface of the planet is all true, as Albus is a self-projection.

9. I think it may be answered in that dialogue, but he wanted to topple the current monarchy in Avishun (i.e. Yvette's bloodline) and watch Balfur fall. He stays with Raccoon out of loyalty since Raccoon accomplished those two goals (well, until Yvette retakes her throne, but that would happen after the events of the game, anyway).

Edit:
10. Yeah.

11. They were a couple of crazy miners that died a long time ago. I was originally going to have one of them show up later from an effect of working with saecelium for so long, and he would have been some crazy hermit who had built a tower where every floor is a puzzle, but I had to cut that because I hit the map limit.

12. He tells you how many you haven't opened.

13. Nope.

14. Maybe not at the very end, no. I don't imagine Cyril living much longer after he went to eastern Avishun.

15. Haha, I like to think that there's a Cindy hanging in the closet at every arena.

16. In a sense; Rose has a bit of dialogue about how she's rooted to her cell like an oak, so I wanted that tree to be where she was standing. It makes sense that her physical body would be buried there, but it's not something I specified in the narrative.