• xe/xer/any

mysterious individual


dog
@dog

Put together a little interactable project...

There's a couple cards in Fallen London I've always wondered about: The Northbound Parliamentarian and The Paranomastic Newshound. They both have a second option on their card that's clearly connected to each other and hints at some kind of esoteric story in the background, but I couldn't quite tell what was going on.

Well, it turns out there were originally six cards, not two, and together they told a little story about the six of them getting trapped in a distant tomb colony. They were all added to tie in with the release of The Silver Tree back in 2012, but it sounds like they got cut not that long after because their rewards were overwhelmingly powerful.

Well, I don't care about rewards but I did want to see the rest of the story. So I did a little spelunking, and I manged to recover the full text of all of the missing cards. And this being cohost, why not make them "playable" again with the power of CSS? (Huge thanks to @ticky for helping me out with the CSS!)

So here they are, all six cards in the "lost in the tomb colonies" story.

Image of a woman in British parliamentary dress

The Northbound Parliamentarian: https://cohost.org/dog/post/6527517-div-style-margin-0

Image of a male newspaper reporter

The Paronomastic Newshound: https://cohost.org/dog/post/6543924-div-style-margin-0

Image of a woman

The Reclusive Turophile: https://cohost.org/dog/post/6543980-div-style-margin-0

Image of a man with an intense glare

The Cat-Beset Perfectionist: https://cohost.org/dog/post/6543998-div-style-margin-0

Image of a bearded man with cards

The Bawdy Cardsharp: https://cohost.org/dog/post/6544016-div-style-margin-0

Image of an odd-looking man

The Libertarian Esotericist: https://cohost.org/dog/post/6544060-div-style-margin-0

(If anyone from Failbetter would rather I not republish these, I'm happy to take it down. I can also remove the still-active cards if wanted.)


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in reply to @dog's post:

Like 95% of that CSS is stolen directly from Fallen London; I'm surprised it wasn't too hard to make it compatible. Took some real trickery to get the buttons to look right though - Jessica figured that out.

Excellent, thank you for this. They're before my time, so I've never seen them before.

I'm given to understand the art on at least some of these are portraits of players. Backer rewards for the Kickstarter. I'm not sure if their removal from the game intersects with that in any way.

I dug some more, the FL wiki has a screenshot of the Kickstarter backer rewards. 3 players got the "your picture in the game" reward tier, but could have chosen to be in FL or Silver Tree.

So for sure the Parliamentarian and Cardsharp are player portraits. At most one more, but perhaps not.

I had always assumed the Newshound was also a portrait, based on art style. Unfortunately the Wiki doesn't have file history for the image, due to the Crash of '99 ('23).

https://fallenlondon.wiki/wiki/The_Silver_Tree

I agree the file name is generic. But the other appearances basically constitute a single use, with a few manifestations. The other images appear dozens of times each.

Gr, this is going to bug me until I find out for sure. There probably is a third player portrait somewhere, and there's valid reasons to believe and doubt it's the Newshound. I found a ton of cases of players starting it's a portrait... but also most players said with confidence all six cards were portraits and that's demonstrably false.

If it's not the Newshound, then who would it be? Probably a character in Silver Tree I guess.

Thanks so much for compiling and sharing these! I had no idea these two were part of a once-larger set, and it's really neat to see the whole story here in one place.