Bruno Dias

I think most people in the English-speaking world get an idea beaten into them during their education: that you should write in short, to-the-point sentences that have a very regular and clear structure.

But here's the thing, go read any piece of text that you consider lush and evocative, especially in a texty video game context, and just... pay attention to how much punctuation is there, how often there are subclauses or irregular breaks (em dashes, etc), how often there's grammatical oddities like funky tenses. It's usually a lot!

This doesn't just go for your Fallen Londons and Disco Elysii, either. Look at any game that has a lot of short dialogue without VO, like Animal Crossing. You'll see heavy use of ellipsis, big variations in style from different characters, odd or irregular sentence structures. Lots of little ways of building interest and voice. You can do it without walls of text; you can do it at a grade school reading level.

I think most people in the English-speaking world get an idea beaten into them during their education: that you should write in short, to-the-point sentences that have a very regular and clear structure.

But here's the thing, go read any piece of text that you consider lush and evocative, especially in a texty video game context, and just... pay attention to how much punctuation is there, how often there are subclauses or irregular breaks (em dashes, etc), how often there's grammatical oddities like funky tenses. It's usually a lot!

Every time I see a Fallen London story written by a contractor, I get genuinely really curious how failbetter onboards new writers to the setting. Like, assumably not every single writer they contract is intimately familiar with the universe already? (Maybe they are, I don't know how they pick people). But assuming not, how does that person go from complete newbie to pitching an interesting idea that feels entangled in a world in a reasonable development timeframe? Does FB just dump a lore bible on people? Is there a process of like, the contractor pitches a vague concept and then people suggest appropriate setting elements for it?

Maybe this is all far more mundane than I'm making it out to be but it's one of those things where FL players in particular have such high expectations for setting details and flavour to be absolutely EVERYWHERE, I imagine that has to involve some degree of directorial guidance. Playing in someone else's pool is a thing that everyone does in gamedev sooner or later but the deeper that pool gets the bigger demands on the onboarding process. I always wonder what that looks like internally.

This is something we think about a lot because it is indeed very challenging. I won't go into nitty gritty details of how it works, but:

• We approach people we think will be a good fit based on their prior work, but yeah we generally don't have the luxury of working with folks that have pre-existing familiarity with the setting.
• A first-time contractor is almost always going to be writing a monthly Exceptional Story, and the parameters of those constrain how much mechanical complexity and setting detail they're going to have to deal with. An ES is supposed to be about one thing – a character, a location, an event – and usually there's no space to go tying in every aspect of the setting.
• We treat onboarding as a pretty substantial chunk of work and just assume people will need to take some time to do it. We have some lore documentation written specifically to give people an overview introduction, in addition to our more direct internal docs that just go over lore elements wiki-style.
• There's a back and forth pitching process, and during that process we're also pointing the freelancer towards the setting elements that relate to what they're working on.
• All ESs are edited by an in-house editor who knows the setting, so they can spot issues (ideally early on – we do multiple in-progress milestones) and also suggest or point out connections. The idea is that the contractor only needs to familiarize themselves with the central setting elements that factor into their story, and the editor can bring a broader understanding to guide them, make sure we hit the little connections and grace notes players expect, etc.

I try to end every year by giving out acknowledgements, thanks, and praise; this last bit of Fallen London retrospective is part of that. I’m just going to list twelve of my favorite things from this year, and shout out the amazing work that makes the game not only possible, but a thriving concern 13 years into its existence.

January: The Stolen Stanzas

You may have been around some illicit activity in the past. But it was misreported, or misattributed, or in a different location entirely. Where you were not. Not at the time, anyway.

I always love how Gavin Inglis’ writing skewers the player character. His stories always have a great sense of fun to them; they feel well-observed in a way that’s hard to do in a setting that’s so absurd. He’s written several classic stories and both of his entries for us this year – The Stolen Stanzas and Stripes of Wrath – are instant classics in their own right.

February: The Feast of the Exceptional Rose

George Lockett did our new companions this year. I’m extremely fond of this tidbit from the Abbot-Commander:

The Abbot-Commander insists that climbing is "the only real way to experience sacral architecture." So climb you must. He strips to the waist to free his many arms. He has hands enough to carry you, should you prefer

It’s good that so many years into doing Feast yearly we still find new ways of saying “this strange individual can get it.”

March: Gaider’s Mourn

Hear the name of the living vessel Disobedient Scorn

Is it a ship, or a living being? In Polythreme, the lines blur between the two. Your Prophet does not care.

I wrote a lot about the broader mechanical implications of Gaider’s Mourn in my previous post, but I just want to highlight how much work went into the entire gag with the Blue Prophets speaking the names of those soon to die.

Specifically, the dozen of possible ship names, that are randomized each time you choose a piracy target. That was a true labor of love. Everything about piracy is full of those great little details.

April: Hearts’ Game

I am cheating, somewhat, since this text came out in a later update, but:

A beleaguered-looking officer scratches her head. "I didn't even know there was a Mr Cheese."

C’mon. That’s a classic.

The text for the various Hearts’ Game updates was split between Gavin, George, Luke van den Barseelar, and myself. Somehow we kept finding new and fascinating weird little guys, as the number of accomplices in the game grew to 27.

The Queen is not dressed for subtlety. Her clothing is a riot of colour – not quite a jester's motley, but only by a matter of degrees. She displays a waist-belt of conspicuous vials and powders, along with a holstered honey-spoon. She picks her fingernails with a syringe needle.

May: Whitsun

The source of the sound, it transpires, is a set of feathered, leathery bagpipes. Chanters and drones sprout from the bag like the heads of a hydra, smooth as bone and cool as iron. Were it not for its extraordinary noises, you would mistake the instrument for a butcher's offcut.

Sure. Why not!

Fallen London is basically a machine for generating insane briefs. “Increasingly absurd things hatching out of eggs” is one of them. Luke did a fantastic job on this one, also.

June: The Midnight Whale Event

As you peel away from the Midnight Whale's unhurried wake, one of the haruspex-skiffs draws alongside. The seer's robes are arterial red, their face shadowed beneath a bloody cowl.

I loved the idea of inverting the normal logic of the zee-hunts. This one was all Luke, who did a lot of problem-solving to make it work.

I’m also very fond of Paul Arendt’s art for the whale. I’m very fond of all of Paul’s art, really; he’s done most of the great posters and key art we’ve had this year. But the Whale is just especially lovely.

July: Boons and Burdens update

This actually released with Irem a little bit earlier, but we made it more broadly a part of the game in July so it counts damn it.

The updated boon/burden slots are one of those mechanical features that seemed really useful on paper and turned out to be even more useful. It’s a gift of design space that keeps on giving, a key part of making Irem work and a key part of making lots of other things work, in 2023 and beyond. Shout outs to Jim Frisby, who did the implementation work here.

August: The Bloody Wallpaper

Chandler has been killing it continuously for a long time now, and after coming off the long train ride that was Evolution he immediately set to work writing this tour de force. The Bloody Wallpaper is our 100th Exceptional Story, it was planned to be big and special; meeting those expectations (while still managing to stick to the monthly story schedule) is no small feat.

As with most Chandler stories it’s impossible to get across everything that’s going on here, or list everything that I love about it. The Urge. The incredible use of the card deck. The names of the basement imps (I will never stop thinking about Sizeable Josiah). It’s a hell of a thing.

I highly recommend Chandler’s own blog post about writing it.

September: Fruits of the Zee

In the shadows of a lesser-visited cove, the kelp-draped litter of the King-in-Coral rests. His attendant Drownies mill by the water's edge. From within the litter's scalloped shell rises a vast and lumpen bulk – barnacle-clad and salt-bitten, crowned with branching coral.

Luke took point on renewing this festival. There’s always a risk when you refresh something in the game of it being compared unflatteringly to the old version, but I think new Fruits – with some added mechanical complexities, som new details, and a new story – has been a big success. It keeps Fruits’ identity, both thematically and mechanically, while modernizing the design.

October and November: Enhanced Exceptional Friendship

This has been a huge group effort for the entire team, involving everyone from George (who wrote the new fantastic story material in the House of Chimes) to our producer Stuart Young, to tech, to Tobias Cook (who contributed UI design), to our comms director Hannah Flynn.

The amount of work that goes into something like this is, hopefully, largely invisible; to the players it should mostly Just Work and mostly make intuitive sense. Getting to that point took months of careful work.

November: The Profile Page update

Another huge group effort, and I think a very successful new feature. I’m glad we finally gave the players a better tool to show off their characters.

I’m particularly fond of the new equipment grid display, which shows off the slightly-bigger versions of some of the beautiful item artwork we do. It’s been very fun seeing players posting their outfits on the Discord, on Tumblr, and here on Cohost.

December: The Green King

It arrives in a pale envelope. Your name and address are written in a mossy-hued ink. The details are correct to the letter, but the invitation is to a club you have never heard of: a group calling themselves the Old Pretenders.

I just love this story so much. James Chew’s writing is as ever incredibly lush, even when describing the most disturbing events imaginable. I honestly don’t even want to get close to spoiling this; just go play it if you haven’t.

Further Acknowledgements

I’d be incredibly remiss if I didn’t mention Erion Makuo, who did brilliant art for the game throughout the year. She did the poster for the Green King, among other stories; I’m honestly just continuously amazed at her work.

And finally, there’s Emily Short, our creative director. Her attention was mostly on Mask of the Rose over the course of 2023, but her presence, the work she did setting up the game’s modern systems, and her input was felt throughout everything we did. Especially, of course, in the City in Silver – which we didn’t quite manage to ship this year, but which I am enormously looking forward to seeing in the hands of players.

Here’s to another year of Fallen London.