#fallen london

failbettergames:

Right now, Fallen London uses Connected qualities to track your relationships with many of its inhabitants. We’ll soon begin replacing this with a new system that uses two kinds of qualities: Favour and Renown. This is a preview of the changes, and what they might mean for your character.

But first, a couple of caveats. Much of this is provisional, and some of the details are subject to change. And because Connected qualities are used so widely, we won’t be making the changes in one go. To begin with we’ll use this system for just one of London’s amorphous factions, the criminals.

Find out how Favours and Renown will work, and what it means for your character!

Now, when I were a lad, all of this was fields, you could still get a pint of beer for £1, and Fallen London was still called Echo Bazaar.

When you made an Echo Bazaar account, you hooked it up to your Twitter. Then, when you took actions in the game, you had the option of letting the game post a Tweet – a tiny snippet of narrative, summarising whatever it was you’d just achieved. This was called an ‘echo’. So if you had friends on Twitter who were playing the game, every so often you’d see something like:

This is an excitingly risky reproductive strategy (for the game, not the player), because it’s balancing intrigue against irritation. If people get sick of #ebz Tweets sprouting all over their timeline like mushrooms, it’s going to actively prejudice them against the game – so you have to hope that, before irritation sets in, they’ll have been sufficiently tantalised to click on a link and get ensnared.

I was using Twitter in 2011, and several of my friends were playing Echo Bazaar. I could very easily have developed a Pavlovian antipathy to the very words ‘London’, ‘bats’, and ‘delicious’. And, honestly, if you’d tried to elevator-pitch me on the whole concept, I’d have wrinkled my nose. ‘A dark and hilarious Gothic underworld’? Dear God, it sounds whimsical.I bet it’s got flippy-floppy skellingtons like a Tim Burton movie, and the kind of arch, pallid humour that used to characterise about 70% of fandom’s Rose Lalonde dialogue. I bet everyone wears hats.

But I was curious. I clicked a link. Three years later, I was using Echo Bazaar (now hight Fallen London) to plan my wedding.

Let me fill in a little context. FLis a role-playing game with only one real mechanic. You are a citizen of London some time in the very late 19th century. In this alternate history, the entire city of London has been uprooted and transplanted into a huge cavern below the earth, where it is ruled by mysterious cowled entities called Masters. Your character has four statistics: Dangerous, Persuasive, Watchful, and Shadowy. (Take a moment to admire how those are broad yet unambiguous – it’s very clear what you’re going to need for what – and how, just by existing, they sketch in the kinds of things the game will be about and hint at what you might be getting up to.)

Almost everything you do, from flattering a vicar to punching a wolf, tests your score in one of the four statistics. If you succeed, the vicar is charmed or the wolf is concussed, and you get a reward (which may be money, fame, or simply access to a more important vicar). If you fail, you take a penalty. Either way, your score in the relevant statistic gets slightly higher – so that if you fail often enough you will still get better, much as I did as an undergrad with Greek verse composition.

To prevent this from being a frustrating guessing-game, you’re given a sense before you attempt a challenge of how likely you are to succeed.

‘Straightforward’ there means I literally cannot fail, because these are Watchful tests and my character is extremelyWatchful. But it might also say ‘very modest’, or ‘almost impossible’, or something in between. (These days, you can also mouse over the words to get a percentage chance of success, if 29% means more to you than ‘high-risk’.) So you can tailor the challenges you attempt to just how lucky you’re feeling: do you want to stay safe and improve slowly, or roll the dice and hope for a big payoff? If you know it’s going to be almost impossible to thaw this particular vicar’s icy heart, you can be phlegmatic about failure, and unreasonably gleeful about success.

(Some people find this level of transparency unrealistic and ‘gamey’, but I actually find it closer to real life than many of the alternatives. In real life, if I try a task, I generally dohave some sense of how likely I am to succeed in it: I can almost certainly make this cake, whereas I probably can’t fix that laptop. In games, you don’t have that contextual intuition – you can’t compare the task at hand to other, similar things you’ve attempted in the past, or to your general sense of your own limits – so it really helps my immersion to have the game fill it in for me. Compare some RPGs, where you try to pick a lock and are told ‘Failure’ or ‘Skill too low’, and nothing else. So, what? Did I nearly have it? If I see a similar lock down the hall, is it worth my trying that one too? Or was I just stabbing blindly at the door, and the phone video my healer is now uploading to YouTube is about to reap thousands of upvotes on r/therewasanattempt?)

The only real ‘objective’ in FLis the story. In a sense, the whole game is one very long and complicated novel, where each individual page has been torn out and hidden in a different box. Information is tightly controlled and drip-fed at an exquisitely modulated pace. You learn very early in the game that London is the fifth city to have ‘fallen’; as you progress, you start to pick up more and more little hints to the identities of the previous four cities. By the time you’ve played for a while, and as long as you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know what the Fourth City was; you’ll know roughly where the Third City was, but may not be sure of its exact name; you’ll probably have a theory about the Second City; and you’ll be almost none the wiser about the First City. (I have still never seen a fully satisfactory proof of the First City’s identity.)  But these Cities aren’t just hand-waved in as fodder for speculation. They’re concrete puzzles, with solutions you can piece together. I once spent more than a thousand words trying to figure out the meaning behind one particular location in the game (spoilers for Hunter’s Keep).

But obviously there has to be other stuff to keep you busy in your search for the next page of story. You can buy things for your character: I saved up for weeks to afford my Semiotic Monocle, and much of the fun for a late-game player comes in acquiring difficult, expensive, or limited-edition items to show off, just like in any MMO. There are also social actions. You can have a list of in-game friends, and you can invite these friends over to play chess, talk to them when the Nightmares are getting too much, even send them a card at Christmas.

In early 2014 urbanAnchorite and I were planning our actual, real-life wedding. This was a complicated process, made worse because she was still living in New Zealand, so the whole thing had to be sorted out by E-mail. We were keeping ourselves sane by sending our FLcharacters on adventures: I had two, Daniel and Evie, and she had two, Thomasina and Meredith. I’d been too busy with work to write anything substantial, so we kept up a running exchange of narrative snippets. Daniel and Thomasina were investigating forged antiquities while embroiled in an increasingly baroque flirtation. Then, for Valentine’s Day, Failbetter unveiled the option to marry another player in-game.

This was simple and realistic: the more you could spend, the more you could have. You needed to build up a quality called Organising a Wedding by spending other resources, and then eventually ‘buy’ one of a number of possible weddings, from a dubiously legal handfasting at the Docks to the society event of the season at St Fiacre’s Cathedral. So I have a string of E-mails from the time, full of paragraphs like:

I’ve E-mailed the Chaplain at John’s, making enquiries about using the chapel for a Nuptial Mass. I’ve also dragged Daniel and Thomasina’s Organising up over 100, largely by calling in an old favour and getting the Bishop of Southwark as the celebrant; he owes Daniel big time, and he’s one of my favourite NPCs in the game because he’s somewhere between Brian Blessed and Equius. My Connected: Church has gone down to 6, but never mind. I also used the ‘something old, something new’ option because I happened to have all the stuff lying around and I thought it was cute. There’s plenty more I can do: I have a Cellar of Wine and can get more, I have a decent cache of Blackmail Material, and I have a stack of Sworn Statements from being a Journalist for ages, though they exchange at 2 for 5 OW so they’re not as useful. I’m going to see if I can get my hands on some Fourth City Airag, but that’ll be pure luck.

In real life, we did not have much money and could not afford a big wedding. In the game, though, I was rich as Croesus. So we spent fictional currency like so much water, and got as big a wedding as we wanted. Daniel and Thomasina ended up married in St Dunstan’s, with the reception in the Shuttered Palace, and the occasion was attended by most of the game’s long-term NPCs, including at least two Masters and the Tiger-Keeper. It remains one of my proudest achievements in video gaming, and a validation of Dorothy L. Sayers’ famous advice:

At the time I was particularly hard up, and it gave me pleasure to spend [Lord Peter Wimsey’s] fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly.  When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare, I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.

In the last twelve months I’ve hardly logged onto FL. Moved by loyalty and affection I became an Exceptional Friend, which is what Failbetter call their subscriber programme, and which gave me access to a brand-new story every month; but these Exceptional Stories were of uneven quality, certainly compared to the rest of the game, and ironically they managed to cool my enthusiasm. One story in particular was very nakedly and unsubtly game-like in exactly the way FLis so good at avoiding – it was a repetitive grind culminating in an arbitrary Bioware-type choice between two factions – and, as stupid as it may sound, I felt like Daniel’s time was being wasted. It dragged me partway out of the illusion, and reminded me that I was playing a browser game in my coffee break, not exploring ghastly mysteries in a city forgotten by the light.

So I drifted away. I’d seen most of what I wanted to see. I’d chickened out of the game’s notorious unwinnable quest, Seeking Mr Eaten’s Name, because it destroys your character and I couldn’t bear to have Daniel destroyed now he was a married man with a nice house and an ocelot. But I’d accessed all areas; I’d tackled all the main story quests; I’d bought my Semiotic Monocle; I’d even finished the ‘secret quest’, Ambition: Enigma, which is hidden away for only nerds to find. There were still plenty of bits and pieces I hadn’t done, but none of them quite had their hooks in me.

I played and enjoyed Sunless Sea, Failbetter’s rather better-known nautical survive-em-up set in the FLuniverse, but was never able fully to resolve its balance of the traditional and the roguelike: in an early run I got lucky and pulled off so many impressive feats of exploration and derring-do, including getting the Scarred Sister to Naples, that I felt any subsequent run would be a disappointment. I backed its sequel, Sunless Skies, on Kickstarter (one of only two KS projects I’ve ever backed), and played an alpha build, but I think the transition to outer space may take me too far beyond my interests and too close to the horrifying maw of steampunk. I’ll reserve judgement until the finished product is released.

I’m actually more excited for Cultist Simulator(the other one), which is being made by Alexis Kennedy and Lottie Bevan, both Failbetter alumni, and releasing 31st May: although technically a much simpler game, it seems to preserve more of what I treasured about FLin the first place – crisp writing, sinister lore that has to be unpicked with tweezers, and an aesthetic of what I suppose you’d have to call occult melancholy.

(Alexis Kennedy, it should be said, has become one of my favourite writers on the Internet purely off the back of FL.He didn’t write the whole game himself by any means, and some of my individual favourite sections were the work of Yasmeen Khan or Nigel Evans, but he set the rules and the tone – and he excels at small-scale technical precision of the kind I really value. One good Kennedy sentence is worth your average short story, and it’s largely down to his facility for saying little and suggesting much that I first clicked on a Twitter echo back in 2011. Here, for example, is his 2,000 word dissection of how he wrote a single sentenceforCultist Simulator.)

But there’s something special about the game where you practised marrying your wife. uA has on her desk some small plastic models of our FLcharacters, which I bought for her off Hero Forge and painted ineptly with acrylic paint. We’ve put Daniel and friends in a Sims house and on an XCOM team. FLhas evolved beyond a browser game we both play, and into a shared cultural referent, a kind of background note in day-to-day life. I remember describing an event I attended as ‘an almost impossible Persuasive challenge’ in casual conversation with someone who’d never heard of the game. I have a whole tag on this very Tumblr for things that make me think of FL. I even adapted it into a set of tabletop rules so I could run it as a campaign for some friends. It’s just there, now, like a book you take off the shelf just to re-read the first page.

I know some new content has been added to the late-game since last I explored it, and one day soon I’ll probably go and check that out, for curiosity’s sake; but even if I never logged in again, Fallen London would be one of the most important games I’ve ever played. If you haven’t tried it, there’s a really extraordinary banquet of wonderful places and people and ideas there, just waiting for their next explorer. 

And did I mention it’s free?

corsairesix:

I’m not super into IP-driven ttrpgs but if I had the opportunity to make a tabletop game for Fallen London I’d agree no questions asked.

I read through Skyfarer and it’s very good if reliant on a bit of prior knowledge of the universe. My ideal game would be a BitD-style storygame with lore book attached

I will have more thoughts on this later but rn I’m gonna say that in Fallen London if you have high Watchful, you’re a follower of the Beholding, if you have high Persuasive, you’re a follower of the Web, if you have high Shadowy, you’re a follower of the Lonely and if you have high Dangerous, you’re a follower of the Slaughter.

Also, the Neath comes into existence as part of a successful collaboration between the Buried, the Dark, and the Stranger. The Flesh is having a grand old time re: the whole Seeking the Name storyline. The End and the Vast probably prefer to avoid London. The Spiral uses mirrors as its main motif instead of doors.

absolxguardian:

So looks like Karakorum wasn’t a great city in its own right. Which makes sense, it’s the capital of a bunch of nomads forced to build a capital to administrate their sedentary subjects. Therefore:

Mr. Veils: What is this? This is the fourth city?

Mr. Spices: It’s so puny.

Mr. Wines: I did what you told me!

Mr. Irons: This is supposed to be the capital of the largest empire on the Surface?

Mr. Wines: Yes.

one day i hope to have a gender as good as ‘giant becloakéd space bat’

I love in Fallen London how weird you sound when you discuss it with friends. Like “That time I made myself go insane and then sane again just to complete part of an ambition” or “I bought this child from the bazaar and he kinda just hangs out with me now”.

it-is-milo:

ID GIVE MY LIFE FOR FERRET

ferret is friend

corsairesix:

It’s interesting that Fallen London (/the Neath in general) has both “indeterminate gender, others have to awkwardly guess” characters and “openly non-binary, referred to as gender neutral” characters, including the option for the player to be one or the other! I’ve never seen a piece of media do both.

took us a little while to make this happen, and came directly from player feedback, but in hindsight of COURSE having both is cool and the best.

jackof-smiles:

maggie-wittington:

so that passage in SMEN where eaten calls spices “intimate of wines” has been sitting in my head lately

perfumed-gunpowder:

would anyone be interested in contributing to a little collection of art/writing/etc about the jovial contrarian (and other fl revs) in memory of @rubberymen

We’re so sorry to hear of @rubberymen’s passing. Giving this a boost in case any of you would like to get involved. <3

jackof-smiles:

house-of-mirrors:

My friend, whom I love very dearly, got a wee bit drunk yesterday

She doesn’t play Fallen London

fanonical:

in fallen london, there is a serial killer obviously based on jack the ripper, named jack of smiles

except in the fallen london world, nobody has the ability to permanently die

so he’s eternally frustrated when people treat being murdered as a minor inconvenience

crossdressingdeath:

There’s something hilarious about how cheerful this is.

we wish all delicious friends a very disgraced exile

house-of-mirrors:

Making ironic jokes about wanting to seduce the masters is a pipeline

the endpoint is making a game about it