victoria

Fallen London is a 13-year-old game that’s been handled by dozens of writers over its lifespan, with a lot of emphasis on big mysteries and a hugely complex setting. I think we’ve figured out a trick or two.¹

As usual, this is a casual post going over a few strategies we employ, rather than a coherent essay trying to find one grand argument about worldbuilding. This is also more of a discussion of methods and strategies, and is therefore probably going to be a little dry; I’m not going to get into themes or tone, or how to “worldbuild like Fallen London” in the sense of how to make something that has a similar vibe. Rather, this is about how to care and feed a very hairy IP without losing your mind.

There is no canon but player-facing canon

Sometimes, for my own amusement or to disturb the players, I come into the official Discord and say some word of God type statement. Or I clarify something that’s confusing to the players.

Truth is, though, those kinds of statements aren’t really canon. Our internal documentation isn’t really canon. It’s accurate to the canon (I hope), but it’s not the source of truth. The source of truth is material in the games that players can see. That’s it.

This is the only sane way to do it. I really think it’s pretty delirious to make decisions about the setting and then just lock them in a document somewhere. That makes sense for a project in pre-production, where you’re trying to align everyone on the vision for what’s going to be the story; but for an ongoing game with hundreds of thousands of words of player-facing narrative, you really can’t work that way.

We document intentions and future plans, but those are just that… intentions and future plans. We also document things that we’ve implied, or that form the background of released stories, but which isn’t explicitly stated. Ultimately, though, if something hasn’t made its way to released content, it’s subject to change. The major reasons for this approach:

1. This is how it ends up working out in practice. It’s very, very difficult to convince a writer – including oneself – to stick to ‘lore’ that only exists in a setting bible.
2. Once you’re writing in an established setting with established characters and rules, there’s really quite a few constraints on what writers can do. You don’t want to pile on more constraints unnecessarily.
3. If you document real player-facing canon facts alongside things that only exist in your head, point 1 will eventually come around to bite you in the ass. Someone will eventually mess with something thinking it wasn’t ‘real’ canon when in fact it was. Writers need to be able to trust that if they see something put down on a lore document as canon, that means we’ve said so to the players, too.

In practice, because of the way that we work, we almost never really decide or think very hard about setting elements far in advance of when they start to affect real content. Of course, we write a lot of mysterious implications and future hooks; and when we do, we do think about what is probably behind those. But that remains at least theoretically fluid until the time comes to peel back the curtain and confirm a particular version of things.

Making calls and managing conflicts

A major question when dealing with this type of setting where you have a bunch of stories in flight concurrently and they all have to coexist: how do you handle conflicts? As in, when two stories are pulling the setting in different directions, how do you decide which version to go with?

In reality our main strategy for dealing with this is just setting ourselves up to succeed by not letting it happen very often at all in the first place. Our setting is expansive enough to give everyone elbow room, basically. We’re not putting writers in the position of picking up a character, doing major things to that character’s arc, and then setting the character down for someone else to handle.

This is especially important when working with freelance writers; external writers are hugely important to Fallen London – they bring voices and perspectives that we just can’t supply in our small team, for one thing. But we can’t demand that they know every last detail of the setting, or that they have the same kind of awareness of upcoming stories that I have. So we have to make sure that they have space to play without getting trampled, which often means being able to develop their own characters and arcs.

That the setting can support this is, therefore, really important to making all this work. Fallen London is set up so that the setting doesn’t revolve around 20 named dudes and their specific character arcs. Having room to create new things is a major tool.

But okay, let’s say a conflict does happen. This is extremely rare for us, but the approach to solving these cases starts with communication and awareness; it begins with having multiple people on our small team who know what’s going into upcoming stories. If a call does need to be made, it gets made based on two criteria:

• Earliest ship date wins: If a story needs to come out next month, it simply can’t change as much as something slated to come out in six months.
• Point of focus wins: If a story is about a certain setting element or character, it has more influence over them than a story that merely features that setting element.

Note the way I’m phrasing this – the question is not “which writer gets to define this”, it’s “which story gets to define this.” Because…

Lore serves story and not the other way around

I mean, that’s supposed to be an obvious observation, though I sometimes wonder. But let’s think through the implications of this.

First, we’re willing to complicate, contradict, or diverge from past canon if it makes sense for a particular story. Part of this is a luxury of Fallen London’s mode of storytelling; the game is very oblique, and things are rarely stated in unambiguous terms. We try not to do this willy-nilly, because it does have a cost. Most apparent inconsistencies that do make their way into the narrative are intended as unreliable narrators or different lenses into the same underlying truth; most actual contradictions are simply mistakes.

But sometimes we make a conscious decision to change things. Often this is because we’ve changed our philosophy on how we want to portray something.

Second, wanting to answer a lore question is not a valid reason to write a story. Never ever. Stories are about themes, interesting characters, conflicts. Sometimes a story is just about a really good scene and all you want to do is build the vehicle that gets there. But the open mysteries of the setting are never the reason to write a story. Sometimes they’re a starting point to ideating (“I wonder why Virginia is Like That…”) but the point is that this ideating is supposed to lead to something – a character, an arc, a moment, a theme – that really gets a story going.

We can’t afford to be precious

Over the course of a typical year in Fallen London we do:

• 12 monthly Exceptional Stories
• 1 yearly Premium Story
• Updates to five yearly festivals
• A summer festival with a wholly new story each year
• Several chapters of a major ongoing storyline
• Several new locations
• Several smaller story drops like Living World Events, Hearts’ Game seasons, and so on

This is a lot of material. It’s enough material that no single person can have close editorial oversight of every single thing going into the game. And we do it pretty lean and fast, with a small team and the aid of a small group of brilliant freelancers.

This is all to say: this all works because of trust. Fallen London passes through many hands and when it’s in someone’s hands, they have a lot of autonomy to define new truths about the setting. On a broad collaborative project, the role of a creative lead is to keep everyone rowing in the same direction, not to make individual calls every time someone wants to invent a character or a setting element.

This holds for every aspect of the game. I have a lot of notes about the themes of Fallen London, the underpinning ideas of the setting, the tone, the voice, etc, etc, etc. But writers need to be allowed to bring their own sensibilities; and for whatever length of time they get to carry Fallen London, they get to pour their own voice and preoccupations into it. We have an Exceptional Story in flight right now that’s about subject matter that nobody on our writing team would have even started on.² That’s exciting. That’s something that enriches the setting.

In conclusion...

Again, this is a methodology that works for us and makes sense in the context of a long-running project like Fallen London. It contradicts a lot of widespread advice about this kind of thing. Some of this is because that advice is very wrong. Some of this is because that advice makes sense, but in a different production context or for a different type of setting. Figuring out which is which is left as an exercise to the reader.

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1. These are, of course, my own thoughts on it, and they may differ from others who have led the game creatively over the years. I write these blog posts primarily to clarify my own thinking.

2. No, don’t ask what it’s about or who’s writing it. You’ll find out when it comes out. Don’t ask me when that’s happening either.

the first point here is interesting to me because this is the effective way Lost was run, and for their trouble they were vilified as "making it up as they went along". which in a sense, I suppose, was true. everything had an explanation. my understanding is nothing went on the show without someone saying "ok, this is what we think is going to happen with this hook." but none of that was carved into stone in a Series Bible. those explanations stuck until 1. they reached the audience's eyes and were fixed in place (unless... well, more on that in a moment) or 2. someone in the writer's room came up with a better idea.

which makes sense if you think about it. imagine that every time you came up with an explanation for one of the show's mysteries, and it was so self evidently superior to the first draft idea, you were told "unfortunately, if we changed course from the Lore Bible that would be Making It Up As We Went Along." having to settle every time for the first, probably worst idea that someone suggested doesn't seem like a particularly fulfilling way to work. it seems like a particularly self-defeating way of working if you're setting out to make 6 seasons of television... or a few decades of a serial interactive fiction, or the next few years of 60 year old program Doctor Who, or the next however long it takes for us to finish Godfeels, the Vast Error team to finish that, and the Homestuck team to finish Beyond Canon.

unfortunately the lesson a lot of people took from Lost was "nerds online got mad that they were making it up as they went along so we need to have a Lore Bible we can wave at people". you can see the results in a show like From, which often has an incredible first draft quality, like they couldn't quite figure out how to make the character arcs or the weird lore reveals work because they decided those things HAD to be true, they BRAGGED in fact about how they had the answers all sorted out going into the series, and so through the whole production stuck with their first, worst idea. if you have a sense of flexibility, you can embrace something like "wait, our White Male Lead Dad Character actually has a real shitty side to him, maybe we should lean into that" rather than leaving it on the table. but because Lost had a level of flexibility and willingness to adjust, when Michael Emerson turned in this performance as "Henry Gale" they didn't have to stick with the original plans to, iirc, kill this "minor character" off. they could make him into a much, much more significant figure.

actually "Henry Gale" here segues pretty neatly into one other note, which is that it's weird how little serial writers seem willing to lean on unreliable narration. again, Lost is a bit of an exception. characters in Lindelof's stories in particular (the Leftovers and Mrs Davis both love this dynamic too) are constantly lying, exaggerating their access to knowledge, misinterpreting their experiences, jumping to conclusions... a lot of what people think of as "making it up" is just characters turning out to have been... wrong. or deceitful. or kind of right but manipulating what other characters know strategically. so even things fixed in the audience's view don't necessarily have to be "the truth".

this makes some amount of sense since we spend every day of our lives surrounded, to an extent, by unreliable narrators and are unreliable narrators ourselves. leaning into this often leads to more satisfying storytelling because it means you can play around, as Steven Moffat does, with ambiguities: in Heaven Sent and Hell Bent it's not clear what the "Hybrid" everyone's so afraid of is, if it's anything at all. the story freely hurls out alternatives: Daleks combined with Time Lords, the Doctor (Me delightfully speculates they might be "human on their mother's side"), Me themself... the story ultimately settles on the toxic relationship between the Doctor and Clara, but plenty of other possibilities suggest themselves. the Cyber-Masters! the DoctorDonna! NOTHING AT ALL! maybe the whole thing is bunk and Time Lord society has been jumping at shadows the whole time!

in retrospect it feels like for a solid decade and a half if not more creators have been jumping at their own shadows. it's nice to see the terror of things like the accusation of "making it up as they go along" start to fall away, hopefully alongside boogiemen like "mary sue", "comics-accurate costume we're embarrassed of", and other stuff that was mostly only ever a cardinal sin to Channel Awesome types.