I've been getting into this setting a lot lately. It started with sunless skies, and working backwards to the browser game. I find it uniquely compelling.
Wondering if anyone else has done a Tabletop game set in it, and if there's any advice on what system to use. I'm not fond of 5E.
victoriana (fuzion)
space 1889 (gdw)
Oh shit thanks! I'mma give em a google.
best of luck & happy sologaming megahomosexual
>browser game
holy shit this has brought back memories of a browser extension game, with a steampunk sort of theme, from the mid 00s. You could leave "gifts" or "mines" on web pages, and other people with the extension would receive the results.
...frick, anyone here know what that was?
It's my favorite setting, it's a shame what happened.
There's a Skyfarer RPG, pdf related. Pretty lightweight, but it is by Grant Howitt so that's to be expected
>it's a shame what happened
What was that? I haven't really checked in on it since I became a candle several years ago
>What was that?
they're probably bitter about the sex pest
FL is in a better place than it's ever been and they didn't need to keep Kennedy around to get there, meanwhile all of Kennedy's independent releases so far are barely playable messes
>Failbetter apologist
I didn't realize you were real, I'd thought the whole thing about keeping his young daughter's portrait in the game out of spite despite the fact she asked to remove it would paint a pretty clear picture about who is the bitter one of the two parties.
Cultist Simulator won btw, what did Failbetter make recently, Mask of the Rose? Fricking lmao
Unhallowed Metropolis is not a fallen London game. But it is so fricking close you can almost taste it.
Listen, all of failbetter AND weather factory games are exercises in grinding and reading the same piece of text over and over again.
If you like fallen London gameplay the only complaint besides a preference for the writing of FL you can make about book of hours is that its timers are too short.
Man that daughter thing was moronic on Kennedys behalf. No failbetter aren't bad people because they won't patch their finished game to remove something HE put in because HE got fired and is now precious about it.
The other complaint I'd readily make with Book of Hours that FL does better would be "you need Obsidian or something similar to keep track of all the text", at least FL has the journal, as roughly implemented as it is.
Book of Hours is a mess with regards to stuff you have to remember and keep track of, but the same is true for Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, Fallen London, and Cultist simulator.
Book of Hours does get very focused on remembering where the frick you put each book and what little weird object gives what bonuses to what stat. Which I imagine Kennedy would argue is putting you in the mindset of a librarian. He would be wrong of course, it's just annoying.
No it isn't. He put a piece of art in, years later he asks to get it removed, and they're not obliged to patch their game with the sole aim of removing art he put in. They're just not. Don't be a fricking c**t.
Yes, they're not obliged to do it, but when you insult a man for years, directly try to ruin his life by accusing him of being an abuser at the height of #MeToo, and things of that nature, well, if that man asks you to remove the portrait of his underage daughter he put in your game back when things were alright, refusing to do it just make you look like a c**t.
Can I get a fuller QRD on what's going on with this topic? I don't know the deep lore that's going on here, but it sounds like you're probably in the right.
Just because someone isn't legally obligated to do something doesn't mean they can't be socially repugnant for not doing it. The only kind of person who can't understand that is a robotic autist.
Regardless of anything, if the man wants the art of his daughter removed, it should be fricking removed. The idea that the art cannot be easily replaced is ridiculous, they're clearly defying him out of raw spite.
>samegayging this obviously
Come on man.
Explain what you're talking about, schizo.
There's a wiki, but expect spoilers
TLDR: The stars are alive, and able to control reality within their local volume. This great chain is the law of the cosmos. Wherever their light shines.
Some men, women, and squiggly creatures believe this is very un-fricking-fair, and wherever there is less to no light. The laws of the stars grow weak.
in which case you're talking about Perdurance, or Pan.
>Perdurance
The place where all the best and brightest of the nobility of London are kept. A gilded cage of a party that never ends, a sun that never sets. These young gentlemen and gentle-ladies are slowly going mad.
>Pan
Part of a realm dedicated to The Liberation of The Night. It's a mix of a pirate port, and a never ending bacchanal.
As for The factions in fallen london.
Revolutionaries... wherever you have an order, you have rebels against it. These, are the Revolutionaries. They're a bunch of anarchists, socialists, and folks with personal grudges united only in their hated of both the ruling elite of london, and the masters themselves.
The most powerful faction is the calendar council, who take this idea of anarchy, and apply it to a cosmic, and eldritch level.
Their ideology can be summed up as "Frick your laws, Frick your titles, frick your social standards, and frick the great chain."
>Hell
Dreams exist in another dimension. Devils are a species of dream creature who are vaguely humanoid, and utterly sociopathic. People see them as demons, so demons they become.
They've realized being a charming sociopath gets you way more than being a psycopathic brute.
They agree with the revolutionaries that the great chain that keeps them in check is bullshit, and even overthrew their own demonic nobility with guillotines after humans exposed them to the concept of democracy.
Though their idea of "democracy" is one dreamt up by a species of sociopaths.
Obviously these two don't get along despite their agreements.
>phoneposting
>Fire employee
>Employee wants artwork of his child removed from game
>Company refuses
Look, the employee could have been a raging thunderc**t - a company denying this request is still in the moral wrong.
>HE got fired and is now precious about it.
He left the company years before they started this shitstorm.
Btw they never actually signed the papers because they were buds at the time so Failbetter is still legally his.
I still get some enjoyment out of it, but without AKs writing it absolutely loses that sense of the sublime that he managed with things like A Painting Framed in Gold in Fallen London and the Uttermost East in Sunless Sea. It also loses his grasp of linguistics as well, and everything feels a bit more comic book if that makes sense.
I enjoyed Cultist Sim enough to finish an advanced ambition and exile, and Book of Hours absolutely does it for me. I put 100 hours into it without even thinking, but then I'm a librarian in real life so maybe I'm biased. Very excited for House of Light. As for the drama, they have officially buried the hatchet, though reading between the lines of some court stuff it looks like AK could have absolutely fricked them and didn't out of the kindness of his heart.
And while is still enioy FL, I did get some enjoyment out of watching their crap dating sim crash and burn while Book of Hours did well. Even with a Kickstarter campaign and a whole company they can't do better than what AK can write and cobble together in a flat with his wife in like a year. Still would have proffered for Mask of the Rose to be good though.
I don't like Book of Hours, frankly. I feel like all the biggest issues with AK's writing show up in full force. The characters are universally lackluster, and I'm constantly asking l "okay but why should I care about this." half the game genuinely feels like Winking Isle all over again with the amount of gobbledyasiatic they throw at you and AK can't write payoffs worth a damn anymore. It's the same thing as CS at its worst (the base ambitions and Exile): insane atmosphere, cool worldbuilding, but the actual payoffs in the form of the endings are lackluster at best. It's just SMEN all over again (though thankfully without the wtf stuff like "candles was infertile btw and that's why the other Masters hated it")
Couldn't disagree more, but different strokes I guess.
It's fine. I've just been a huge SMEN hater for quite some time and I think it perfectly encapsulates all the issues with AK's writing. I love CS despite them and it annoys me how he didn't improve at all in Book of Hours.
To be honest I think the first part with the memories/scars/betrayals is perfectly fine and rad as frick, it's just that it all goes to shit the second you step into Winking Isle and don't even get me started on the Chapel of Lights.
I never did the storyline (though I had a lot of fun with enigma, shame it had to stop because of lunatics). What was the issue with those locations? I found his flaws are more on the gameplay side, where he's really good at creating certain feelings, but does it almost exclusively through being annoying.
I think SMEN is a huge amount of buildup for no payoff. You're right that AK is incredible at creating feelings, SMEN's early parts have this vibe of self destruction and sacrificing everything you have in a mad quest. It's excellent. The betrayals, throwing your greatest treasures down the well, that is all worth their weight in gold. I love most of the Candle stories as well- the dialogue with the Lady of Lilac in the Nadir is an incredibly brilliant gameplay concept.
Essentially, to obtain the candle from her, you must become Obscure, permanently giving up the ability to have Tattoos, Professions, Notability, Ambitions, and a Destiny besides Torment (a bad one).
The thing is, you don't actually have to do any of that. Obscurity is a hidden quality you can't even display anywhere. You can simply acquire the candle with no penalties whatsoever. If you prefer. Nobody will ever know. Nobody but you.
It's all really really fricking good until you get get to Winking Isle around the mid stretch and it's just a bunch of nonsense thrown at you as you do an incredibly tedious and repetitive task. It's just that you get all this buildup for what is essentially several IRL weeks of clicking and reading the same fricking snippets of incoherent rambling. Then you go to the next candles and hear more incoherent rambling. Then you go to the ending, and I'll just say I don't like it and I don't like what it tries to say.
SMEN's issue is having an excellent beginning but 90% of it is being consumed by complete nonsense babbling that completely murders the atmosphere. I think that the concepts of SMEN basically got reused later by Chandler Groover in the Deeper Discordant Studies storyline and he did it so much better SMEN just looks bad now.
I feel the ending parts follow that same throughly as Secrets Framed in Gold or the East ambition in that after all the horror and suffering there are these tiny glimmers of hope/beauty/justice. Since failbetter has neutered the setting to be a bit of a Disneyland version of itself I think it's lost that feeling.
I really didn't see those fragments of beauty and justice in SMEN. SMEN endings felt like "the world sucks, either have a nice day or kill everyone lol." Sun Beneath The Sea is disappointing as a "take a third option" as well.
Fair. I do feel like the setting has lost its edge though. Every now and then they write something decent, but without AK I feel like the tone has mostly drifted.
Oh it absolutely has, but I honestly think they still knock it out of the park. I loved Discordance/Hurlers, Railway (I adore Cornelius, Furnace is eh, January is delightfully hypocritical), Evolution (even went out of my way to make an alt, play it again and screenshot every single choice, panel and storylet so I could read it whenever I wanted) and I think the new writing direction opened a lot of cool stuff for me.
I have the cider and a saddled hellworm, I'm totally their b***h for life. There's always just enough interesting to keep me invested.
This is one of the things that keeps me a fan of Fallen London even after the quality dropped without AK's amazing imagery. What always drew me into the setting was the combination of exotic worldbuilding and character writing, and recent Failbetter content has been leaning harder on that with the stable of Exceptional Story writers they've brought into more substantial positions.
I liked Mask of the Rose in a "classic theater play that takes call-outs from the audience" way, where all the twists of the setting are familiar to me but new from the perspective of the characters, and being able to see how normal people respond to developments that were already cleanly organized into London's prejudices by the time of SSea and FL was fun. Getting a worms-eye view of the setting was something that I was really looking for, and MOTR filled that in. I'd still have preferred a CRPG or something.
And to be completely fair I think the transition was inevitable. The mysterious tone really doesn't work with such a long-running setting, especially when the players are established as actively trying to change Fallen London. It's fair to say it was neutered, but I think having things like the Correspondence stay mysterious and hidden when there was a department in the University dedicated to figuring it out since the very beginning would be cheap and lead to equally valid complaints.
I wrote a game based on Cultist Simulator, which was his solo game (and IMO, much better). There's also a minor Fallout crossover.
This looks good. I like your take on aspect abilities
Thank you! I ran the game twice. Once was in the Fallout crossover, where there was a Vault full of cultists in NYC. The moment the vault doors opened ALL of the cultists launched themselves into the wasteland to get up to stupid bullshit. The party ended up fighting off non-sterile Super Mutants (thanks to Heart) and fish monsters (thanks to random mutation) and helped a new Hour arise and figured out the Execration (the opposite of the Rite of Intercalate).
The other game was set in the interbellum period in Europe, where the party was the Last Wolfpack in the Black Forest. They were captured, split up, and skinned, giving them human forms. They then proceeded to reassemble their pack to form the Pack United. They then killed, fricked, ate, and got impregnated by the Wolf Divded to ascent to Hourhood as a collective, which caused the Wood to become the Forest.
I'm considering a third game, set in the future where the Earth is different because the Pack United hates civilization and so it became a "points of light" setting. I would incorporate the new stuff in from Book of Hours, and then maybe set it on Mars where the humans are trying to rebuild a high-tech society free of the wolves.
Oooo, a fallen london campaign could be very, very fun. I like the setting a lot.
I did a brief (few sessions) solo game in the FL setting using Sundered Isles for Starforged. Zee captain traveling the trade routes. It worked all right, I ran out of imagination before the system had any serious issues.
I've been on the hellworm grind for months and I think I'm getting close to some kind of revelation about the nature of existence.
Got mine at the beginning of this month. Gacha is pretty good, got cantigaster venom today, but man is the saddle going to be a nightmare.
Why can't we just talk about fantasy settings without hedging our bets by insisting that it's for a tabletop anymore?
There used to be lore threads for Fallen London that didn't require an asterisk insisting that it's for use in an RPG. You want to talk about it, we should just be able to fricking talk about it.
I really liked the browser game back in like 2015. Has the story finally reached a conclusion? All I wanted to do was finally kill the fricking vake, but I gave up because it seemed like it would never end and the grind was insane and constant.
Yes, you can kill the Vake now. All four ambitions are finished.
i am going to run a sunless sky campagin using coc hopefully next week
Too woke for me. The transexual party dimension was the final straw.
>Good luck! stay sane... not really.
i think that train ship already left station/habor
currently it's only planned to be oneshot around trying to deliver a package, but i hope i can pull my players in with the weird setting
>This has got to be either the calendar council, or Hell.
I don't know what those are. I'm talking about the cottage in endgame of Sunless Skies.
Pretty sure there was an official Cultist Sim ttrpg, the Lady Afterwards
I’ve got a copy but never got around to playing it
Never played Skies, heard it was a watered down version of Sea,
>friend tries to sell fallen London as a "you can do anything" game
>It's just making the number's on my character's spreadsheet go up while stories all end with "and then you won the cool fight now go this new zone where no one gives a shit about you" and "things sucked and fell apart how sad and tragic now go increase points in this new zone where no one gives a shit about you"
I've tried 3 characters, don't see the appeal
It's one of those things that survives on the strength of it's story, it's world, and writing. Not it's mechanics.
Mechanics are from the 00s, and just what you'd expect from one of those games with a cult following.
Even Small blurbs are things like
>Donate to the fund for frequently murdered constables
"You share a cup of tea with the Treasurer of the Fund for Frequently Murdered Constables. Together, you mourn the many ills of subterranean life. You've established some degree of rapport, enabled by just a small exchange of rostygold."
It's literally the worst way to experience its world though.
And because it's a live service the world it's describing is constantly changing. Usually for the worse. So what the frick's the point?
It's not constantly changing, they're just writing more stuff for it, the vast majority of which is good. It just seems like not the kind of game for you though, if what you've already experienced hasn't grabbed you.
>if what you've experienced hasn't grabbed you
Not that Anon. Me, I hit the stats cap. It's still objectively the worst way to experience the Neath.
Yes, they change things, they change things whenever they take an event out or visit somewhere on the Unterzee again. They change it whenever they don't treat what the Masters are with mystery anymore, or drop people talking about Red Science or other previously-hidden elements of the setting like its open knowledge. The gradual shift in Revs being portrayed as inherently contradictory idiots ("13 of our most distinguished anarchists have taken the burden of leadership upon themselves to get us to make real progress" is literally oxymoronic and kind of wonderful) to being very clearly favoured by the writers because they're all a bunch of irl ancoms, the sheer fricking focus on the Railway holy shit I cannot stand the Railway, the Sequence going from a soldier-cult of Mithras/Sol Invictus to being just Mormons like they were in Skies, the list goes on.
It's a game made exclusively for the people who are at its endgame. It IS a different game to how it used to be, and a different world to the one we see in Sunless Sea, both in tone and in the actual substance of the thing.
I love the Neath, and I definitely don't think FL is without merit, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend that FL is 'only getting better' or is in any way the better experience to discovering that setting. Maybe if you REALLY loved Farmville but sorta hate video games, since that seems to be Failbetter's whole fricking audience because they can't put a game together to save their lives.
Pic unrelated, I just love this background. Shame we'll never get to see what the original vision of the Sunless Sky was.
You're correct (other than the railway, which I enjoy) and my response to him was somewhat of an oversimplification because I can't stand talking to people who dislike FL and aren't familiar with it, because in my experience they have zero interest in anything but shitting on it.
I'm so tired of trying to talk with people about flawed things that I still like.
I like that the revolutionaries are good people with good intentions, they just literally went to hell with them. Sue me, it works.
I do think it's lame how they took the mystery out of the artificial sun, from the whole
HESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNT
to now the queen has a sun and there's some sun guys, but they're just like normal guys but brighter.
But they wanted to move forward, and you can't just always have a weird mysterious cult at the edge of London forever. Just like you can't take the red science back, you can't unring the bell that this is all a love story, the judgements can't go back to being unknowable gods at the edge of the setting. Like they can't make the world smaller.
The Sequence getting big isn't the issue, it's being treated like a joke. There's an event in Skies where some Sequencers get into a scuffle with a typical 'hellfire and brimstone' cult and the description lays on like "Oh it's pathetic, it's almost embarassing really", or the one where you land on a platform and it's talked about how they're 'one of the most hated cults in London'.
Motherfricker, these guys are IN CHARGE, how can everyone hate the people they're openly ruled by? This is a religion made up almost entirely of professional soldiers that extolls martial virtue, picking a fight with a Sequencer should get you absolutely fricking bodied.
But the game's written by ancoms so the ideological enemy has to be both so overwhelmingly strong they've created a horrorscape police state and so weak that they're laughable.
Not keeping the secrets of the setting in general just shows that it's only written for people who are FL superfans. Skies will just drop 'oh yeah, those are the Judgements, these are the Curators, y'know the bat people who run London'. Past a certain point in FL yeah, that can be casual knowledge, but for something like Skies why would you assume that people have that knowledge? Because they don't know how to write for people who aren't late game FL players anymore.
And yes, you absolutely can keep a setting's secrets even after they've been revealed, or at the very least not just wave them around. We the audience knowing something doesn't mean that everyone in-universe should know it.
I could rip Skies apart all day but we're getting real Ganker here. Suffice it to say, if one is going to use the Sky as a setting, I wouldn't treat it like FBG did in a lot of different ways.
Not the anon you're responding to, but I definitely agree that Skies feels extremely jarring. When I tried to explain it to a friend, I said it's like going straight from The Hobbit into the battle of Helm's Deep. I ended up quitting after 30 minutes, because I just couldn't get into it (also I didn't like the new UI much).
I do wonder what Skies would have looked like if Kennedy had stayed with FB. The glimpse you get from crossing the Avid Horizon in Sunless Sea is so vastly different from what Skies is.
I'd reccomend getting out of The Reach as soon as possible. I bounced off it at first too but I got to the next region, Albion, and stepping into Clockwork Bladerunner felt much better.
If you want to see what Skies can be, read 'Beyond Death's Door' on the wiki. Just occasionally the game really does come alive (i.e. when it's being written by a handful of old hat writers from Seas)
I always figured once the queen got what she wanted she booted the sequencers to the curb, just like she did the revolutionaries.
She got the "unreality bomb" from the revolutionaries, and an artifical sun she could control from the sequencers. Then tossed both factions aside.
The Revolutionaries went looking for new cosmic patrons, and hide in the dark with axes to grind. While the sequence has been gutted, and responds in fury that the new empire continuously swats aside.
The worst example of something being hidden and then suddenly being out in the open isn't the sequencers. Because like... the sequencers won and they basically don't have a purpose anymore. Its like being a neoliberal today. You're in a post what you wanted to do world, you look inherently silly. They were tossed aside as a movement, because that movement had no more to offer beyond the foundational ideology that permeates society.
No the worst one is Victoria and her family. The traitor empress as this enigmatic figure and her family as these paragons of status and society while being horrifying was a staple of Fallen London and persisted in Sunless Sea and then in Sunless Skies you just... talk to her, you can even defeat her. And the horror of the captivating princess is just there.
You can't make a game set after a sequencer victory with London in space and then pretend the judgements are enigmas any more. The sequencers built an artificial judgement, that's what their whole deal was. That's why it drives you mad. It's because it's an artificial sun imposing artificial laws of nature upon the neath, its imposing its fragmented insane will on you and the world. You can't have that be a foundational part of the society and then also have the existence and nature of judgements be secret.
And the curators being bat people was already out in the open past like the opening years of Fallen London.
Mr. Veils portrait is basically just fricking batman from the animated series but with a snout.
And I mean if anything Failbetter wants to do what you suggest, and thats why it ends up so silly. Sunless Skies isn't canon in Fallen London and their new VN totally disregards it, and tried to pretend that the identity of the masters and the foundations of the setting are a mystery again. Ooooh I wonder what kind of person this mysterious hooded figure is ooooooh
Hello late game Fallen London player. You're the problem, but I'm glad you're having a good time.
I finished Sunless Sea. And I mean FINISHED it, I found my name and everything.
If we went back to the Neath and had people just casually talking about Salt the Nomad Star and Stone the light of the south who doesn't let people die, and treating all the stories of Seas as flippantly as they treat things in Skies, you're goddamn right I'd be disappointed. *I* know what they are, but the game shouldn't be so *flippant* about it.
The way you get around that is by just not making the mysteries we solved the mysteries again. You're right, uncovering what the Masters really are AGAIN wouldn't make for a good story, but just having everyone in-universe know their species and their history and how they play into the Cosmology is incongruent.
You know how I know you can keep doing it as an author? Keep the things that took effort to uncover something you still keep undercover? We're doing it right now. In this thread. Someone censored being 'made a candle', and that's a very indirect reference. Earlier I referenced 'finding my name', a reference that only makes sense if you already know the answer. It's not impossible to keep the spotlight off of the things that were once in shadow.
The reason FBG disregards Skies is because the setting is a fricking mess. It never had intentionality behind it because it was cobbled together mostly by guest-writers and it hasn't a shred of the soul that's found in the Neath. Why would they ever bother going back there when they aren't happy with the setting, the general audience isn't as invested in the setting, and the whales they make their games exclusively to appeal to haven't sunk hundreds of hours and dizzying amounts of money into the setting? We'll sooner go to Parabola than we'll ever go back to Skies. Skies was dead on arrival because the setting is poorly conceived and only ever comes alive when imitating its predecessor.
Imagine being a fake fricking grog for Fallen London. Lol and I must hasten to add lmao.
Why would the judgements being stars and also gods be a secret when the cult dedicated to building one won, got everything they wanted, and the entire society is now built around the post "Queen Victoria owns a god" world. Those two things coexisting would be extremely fricking dumb, so they don't, they just admit the nature of the judgements. Because why wouldn't they. And they can't make a game after they already made this thing open where they reveal that to you again.
And treating that obvious fricking fact (And it is just a fricking fact) like some sort of admission of noobishness or statement of how I think they couldn't have handled things better is moronic, and you're being a moron.
You want them to treat the lore the way they've done in the Visual Novel, with a return to the pre Sunless Skies status and everyone pretends the mysteries are still mysteries, you got your way and you didn't like that. Because it's moronic, your suggested is moronic. "Oh but I just want them to treat the old lore with reverence instead of making light of it". They've made jokes of the mysteries of the past since at least the time Silver Tree was made.
Isn't the complaint of
>late game players are the problem
calling grognards themselves the problem?
eh to heck with it. If we don't like somthing, then we just create our own version.
Also my Players snuffed the snuffer, though one had his teeth knocked out, and the other got his leg broken.
I've also added a little detail to my GM'ing for the setting. In that most people they interact with don't have names. But have titles.
>The Warden
>The Guard with the Upturned nose
>The pox-marked guard
>The light fingered woman
>The Kind Hearted Widow
The Players have really enjoyed the concept.
I tend to look up failed games from a year. Findi character designs that worked, ignore the lore, write down a few descriptors, and a single paragraph backstory. If the PC's guess about the character, and take an interest. I confirm some of their hunches, and make them part of the character. Pretending it's all Just As Planned.
Pic Related, the rest easily fell into place. One of the "London Notables" visitors to the widow's soup kitchen. Both to donate to her cause, and to take advantage of the poorhouse's residents for cheap labor. The PC's approached him.
Now they're working for "Deni, The Maestro of Mahogany Hall."
They started discussing him, and then I welded a few of the rumors into a coherent character. Like "the eyes on the hat thing", or "the jellyfish hair."
The result of them talking and plotting to maybe blackmail him.
The Maestro, is in truth a clothes colony from polythreme. Who found itself a perfectly compatible (and compliant) host in some half-mad mutant from The Nook. Since coming to london he's had himself retailored and made fine.
Now he is part of the upper middle class, works as a band-leader at mahogany hall, has his own little townhouse in spite (that orphans occasionally steal from which is how they know his secret) a girlfriend, and two mistresses.
His jobs for the PC's are mostly strange fetch-quests of things he needs for mahogany hall. Which lets me have them deal with other parts of the city.
Good idea with the failed designs thing. I've got an ocean of terrible obscurities like that to draw from.
Most games, movies, and books that flop still have some decent parts. Visual aids help me to depict a character correctly.
This guy seems super nice, and positive. So I'm going to depict The Maestro the same way.
Fallen London helped me with this immensely 10 years ago, with the Quirks each character has. I've revived that for some NPC's in game.
Basicly assigning them Quirks from 1 to 10 as a short hand on how to improvise their actions, and reactions, to the player's bullshit, of which there is much.
So far though only The Maestro, The Warden, The Light Fingered woman, and a pair of dipshit zailors from a random encounter have gotten this treatment.
Other games I've done this in are mostly Pathfinder and 5E, because 5e is so... mechanical... and makes Gm'ing really hard.
So I look up a game that flopped from like 2009, pick a random character that fits, write like a paragraph of a description, and bam. Quest Giver created.
Only if the players give a shit do they get the expansion treatment.
Incidentally that's what's happening to The Maestro. The players plotting to blackmail his ass means he's gotta have a few dark secrets, have a good life he wants to maintain, and be at least morally complex enough to tug the players heart strings when they threaten him.
Then of course, their actions to him will be reflected in his character later on if he lives.
Like he's both nice enough to not just donate to the widow's poor house. But to pay the PC's well, and has a positive relationship with the orphans, even when they pick his locks and rob from his second story.
But he's also looking the other way as long as the PC's get him whatever strange things he needs for his performances. As well as paying in moon pearls, glim, and rostygold.
This is why my characters always seem really cool to players. I'm just making shit up, and having the NPC's react to the players actions.
>most games, movies, and books that flop still have some decent parts
I really wish my group would understand this, I'm really sick of not being able to talk about things they dont think are good.
I know that feel, you try to show your friends Dick Deadeye or Duty Done and all they talk about is how terrible it is.
Do yours also do the thing where it's fine if things have flaws if they like them? The extreme scrutiny only comes out when its something they're not as into anyway, in my experience
I don't think any of them like things which aren't conventionally well-received.
People are biased based on prior experience usually. However I've always held to the idea that any story or character can be done well. If it isn't, then clearly someone was being lazy.
There's probably a cool idea that was poorly implemented, one that can be recycled.
You're still the GM. You're still in charge, but my advice is to build the skeleton of your story, and let your players add the meat, so to speak. They are the protagonists, but they are not gods, or heroes. Unless you're playing that sort of game.
It's a collaborative story, and that means your players have to work with you as much as you work with them. You're the narrator, and how much of an ass you should be depends entirely on the story you're telling.
I'm an ex-Goon and I'm unfortunately not only used to angry nerds insisting you're evil for liking a thing you like, or even saying it had good points, they'll often try to smear you as a racist or pedo. For the longest time, I couldn't mention anime without some white boy insisting I'm a creep. It's not a new mindset but it's common in humans, unfortunately
It's all so tiresome
>The players plotting to blackmail his ass means he's gotta have a few dark secrets
I've noticed that style of GM'ing can be somewhat contentious sometimes. How far do you think playing along with player expectations should go?
>holy shit I cannot stand the railway
I disagree. I very much so liked the railway. The stuff with the union was okay to mid and the tracklayers city was a bit of a letdown but the individual stations were all great.
Especially Moulin I would move there if I could.
I think it's just a cause of being a Twitter-only game at first + being really focused on writing. Not to say they're ~anti-games~ like a lot of mouthbreathing g*mers would say, but more that they're clearly used to text gaming.
(To be fair to the ancoms, Anarchist figureheads becoming massively popular with the working class was a thing.)
I still haven't finished ANY of the storylines in FL, primarily because there's no 'what was I doing again' button and I forget to check in when my actions are refreshed.
>It's just making the number's on my character's spreadsheet go up
[Laughs_in_SMEN.mp3]
Someone homebrewed a system for it a good while back, long before Skies released. I've never tried it, nor am I familiar with the systems it's based on, so I couldn't tell you how good any of them are. But hey, it exists.
Thanks for the upload, anon.
>I'm going to start them in prison, trying to hunt down a Snuffer.
I feel like killing a Snuffer is starting off a little strong. Remember, Snuffers are stupidly strong, in FL you don't face one until after you've out-duelled the Black Ribbon. Granted, that's a single person rather than a group, but still.
I'm surprised it's still going on, but it makes a bit happy to see that.
What's the easiest way to get the cursory lore for this game without actually playing the whole thing? A Let's Play video or a wiki? I need a short tl;dr. Thanks.
There kinda isn't, it's not like the Neath has its own Vaati Vidya or anything, none of it's presented well or digestibly. There's the Fifth City wiki, I guess? You could also find somebody who likes reading to listen to play Sunless Sea.
>the Fifth City wiki
wikis are honestly the worst way to get into something.
They're structure with zero respect for context or layers, dropping you right in.
Imagine saying "Oh, the magnus archives? They're a great podcast it is about immediate spoilers about the highest tiers of the lore smashed together with the day to day lives of the cast, events out of sequence, and yet not enough detail to be enjoyable
When it comes to story-heavy properties, they are almost universally written by people already deep into the thing, for people already deep into the thing.
Well hey if anon starts with Sunless Skies he can get the highest tiers of lore smashed together, events out of sequence (or out of Sequence, fnar fnar) and yet not in enough detail to be enjoyable and have people come onto Mongolian basket weaving forums to defend that actually doing anything other than that would've been a mistake.
Bumping because I love this setting as well, it has a really unique blend of somewhat silly and somewhat creepy victorian weird fiction
Was thinking of running a game in it as well, some time back but wanted to base it primarily on Sunless Sea. I mean, exploring weird ass islands in a creepy subterrean ocean is basically a perfect RPG campaign concept
>finish Irem and Evolution
>go back to /tg/
>see this thread
kind of fitting
Someone made a scenario for CoC 7th Edition, but I think Fallen London fits a pretty rules-lite system, just the four basic stats plus traits.
players are just going to want to play as freakshit like Curators and devils
Playing as a Curator in FL is too much, but I don't see the problem with playable devils? I mean, they're just a kind of people. I wouldn't let a player be a Grand Devil or the like but playing a regular one works fine
Devils feel a bit too far for me (even the ones with human-like emotions and motivations still don't sit right)
I would allow Clay Men and Tomb-Colonists though. Any maybe the more cooperative sort of drownie or L.B.
I'd only trust someone to play a Devil if they're deep into the setting and can throw around the appropriate levels of smug "I know what's going to happen but I want to see the kids find out firsthand" dickhead energy Devils emit.
Rubbery Men are also out. Beyond the obvious problems with not being able to talk, the info we get about Rubbery perception suggests that investigative plots would have to add in a lot of extra thought just to suit all the extra stuff they can see.
Rats would be easier to add in, the biggest concern there is figuring out how to do combat when one of the fighters is smaller than a loaf of bread.
Rats would compensate for their physical weakness with being incredibly capable at roguish business/Shadowy tasks, I suppose. In a lategame campaign, ratwork weaponry would close the gap.
Rubbery Men... yeah, that's out. I'd admit a Rubbery-enhanced human at most and use the extra perception stuff as a bonus for them.
Rubbery men have access to extra senses, but a devil would just automatically know stuff that the players aren't supposed to.
Obviously it would be extremely fallen london for both the players and the character themselves to maintain kayfabe about most of it though, as well as any power the devil may have.
And rats would be fine, give them massive penalties to any kind of physical confrontation with any larger creature and bonuses to anything sneaky or tech related and go nuts. This works for basically any system really.
Tomb Colonists you would just have to allow. It would be silly not to. They're just humans. There's so many people in Fallen London who are so much weirder than a guy who is merely dead.
Drownies I would not. They have predefined motivations in a way that's too hard to square
I think the best way to do it is something like Dogs In The Vineyard and have the players make up their own stats and use them as applicable. So a player could make up a skill called like... pneumismatics and then let them roll it whenever we're dealing with finances, theft or air travel.
I'd give Tomb-Colonists social maluses (because you stink, you're visibly falling apart, and people aren't fond of seeing you outside of your little leper colony) and just give them a "completely shrugs off pain" alongside optional bonuses to Dangerous-related tasks, maybe. Tomb-Colonist fighting techniques could be an unique trait to them alongside "old as balls" and "nearing mothification"
Hmm, I wonder if Khaganians, Presbyterate travelers or New Sequencers should be a valid option for players.
Here's an out-of-the box one, snuffers!
Exceptional Hats and similarly sentient objects are a maybe, cats/tigers are a no just because of who I'd expect would want to play them.
I could be sold on playing some sort of Parabola-entity, just one that's less powerful or knowledgeable than your average fingerking/tiger.
Aunts are another maybe.
>calls them Freakshit despite devils being practically human
>ignores the Rubbery Men, who are treated like IRL furries
How would the Advanced Skills be implemented, though?
How about a sort-of freeform "gimmick" skill system too? Instead of hard-coded skills like Brawl, Sneak, Run, etc. you have your four attributes (Dangerous, Shadowy, Persuasive, Watchful) and some Risus-style generalized "gimmicks" that can represent your profession/personal passion/exotic anatomy/backstory. If a given skill check would be relevant to your gimmick, you get a bonus to your roll on top of whatever attribute you're using.
What the frick is that thing down there
Chthonosophy? It's a new skill. Basically ancient historical Neath knowledge, apparently? Does pretty much nothing so far but it's getting more usage in the Roof expansion.
I see people aren't fans of Mask of the Rose, and I get it. But I do have to applaud Fallen London for making a game where it is not actually possible to grind.
Failbetter games, not fallen london. Sorry, the two are just linked in my brain.
I'm not entirely confident they'll be able to successfully move away from Fallen London as a setting. I don't know if they have the chops for it.
God I wish Failbetter would make a real videogame. I'd pay full AAA price for it, I swear, as long as it's like FL and not Skies.
Are there any systems that do naval combat particularly well? Unless you manage to scrape together a group that's super into detective or social games or you're imaginative enough to make a whole campaign out of monster-hunting, a Sunless Skies/Sea game feels like the only way to go.