Ten words in heavy gold letters adorn the back of the invitation. 'EVERYTHING LOST WILL BE LOVED; EVERYTHING LOVED WILL BE LOST.'

The Shuttering Photographer is spoken of highly in certain circles; they say her tricolour photographs are more vivid than life itself. Her latest exhibition, a meditation on love and grief, is open now – and invites an unusual level of audience participation. Will you give up control over the compass of your heart? Will you hold on tightly to loves old and new? For all is not well in the Sunken Gallery, and few can be trusted to find the truth…

• Writing: Heather Flowers
• Editing and QA: Luke van den Barselaar
• Art: Paul Arendt

EXCEPTIONAL FRIENDSHIP

Exceptional Friendship is the ideal way to support our work on Fallen London. In exchange for your coin, you receive:

• A new Exceptional Story every month
• Memories of a Tale from each story to spend on exclusive companions and items
• A second candle (up to 40 actions at once)
• An expanded opportunity deck: ten cards instead of six
• Four additional outfit slots
• The ability to run an additional concurrent plot, once Agents are unlocked
• Access to the House of Chimes including monthly gameplay perks

Enhanced Exceptional Friends receive all of the above, plus:

• A past story, or two resets of stories they've played from a monthly menu
• Memories of a Tale from every past story or reset
• Extra monthly perks in the House of Chimes
• Another two outfit slots
• Three seven-action refreshes per month

We’ve been on a journey of understanding. Did you know, when they say ‘ship it’ in video games, they mean press a button (and then wander off and have a cup of tea)? When TTRPG people say ‘ship it,’ they mean on an actual ship.

How do you adapt a 4.5-million word epic text adventure into a parseable package of information and rules for friends at a table? First, choose a partner who has an astonishing catalogue of TTRPG adaptations under their belts and who knows everything there is to know about making things out of dead trees.

Making it real

Jokes about dead trees aside, there are book considerations that we’ve become much more familiar with. How colour and design work on a printed page, and how people actually hold and use a physical item; things that we’ve never had the opportunity to consider for Fallen London before. The constraints of working with paper, versus the ones we’re used to dealing with on screens.

Layouts need to not contain too much black, because it’s a physically heavy colour and hard to print without smudging. Going long by one page in one section might necessitate cutting that amount of words elsewhere lest you have to add 15 more sides because of the way pages are grouped. It’s been a great comfort that the folks at Magpie Games know all of this well, and have patiently reminded us about the trees.

Likewise for the accessories. I’m most excited about the Neathbow dice. How do you reflect imaginary colours, and also keep them suitably brilliant and legible? (As is often the case with multifaceted creative projects, the answer was to exercise restraint, and we love how they’ve turned out.)

Getting our hooks in

One of our first questions to Magpie when we were in the early stages of the project was: why would the Fallen London Player Character - a singular yet mutable polymath, adventurer, scholar, captain of industry, (optionally) legendary lover, scoundrel and rogue – ever work together with anyone else?

We quickly landed on what became the driving force behind the game: they would be in need of others to help them achieve something that couldn’t possibly be done alone. A Concern is a group of Fallen London citizens who have enough in common that they can put aside any rivalries and histories to pursue a collective goal (bringing along their personal obsessions, of course).

For those of you who want to port their Fallen London character over into the TTRPG, there will be two likely ways for you to try that.

Firstly, you can re-spec them using the FL:TRPG character creation tools, and play as a version of them. Secondly, you can work them up into a Concern Principal: someone with the resources and connections to go after this incredible goal but not the time to dirty their hands personally.

Putting flesh on it

Elements of Fallen London that have been purposefully vague in the browser game have needed building on for the TTRPG. Death is chief among them. In the browser game, where the player character has to be human, we can have quite a high level of poetry and elision around death; the mechanics of single player death can also comfortably be different to multiplayer.

But when you can be playing a rattus faber, rubbery or clay man, there are questions we’ve had to answer for the TTRPG to work mechanically. We agreed what 'death' looks like for these characters, and what that means in terms of the TTRPG when your character takes too many Wounds. As you might expect from the asymmetry of a lot of Fallen London, it's not always outright death, so there will be potentially major gameplay implications for your player character depending on their nature.

We also spent time sharpening the lore around the Correspondence, Discordance, Parabola and the Red Science, to define the boundaries between them and make their properties clear enough that people at a table could work with them.

Committing to Treachery

Holding all of the Absolute Lore Truths of Fallen London in your mind while also trying to have an improvisational game with your friends might well be impossible (I know some of you are planning to try it, you scallywags, and I can’t stop you - but please have a bucket on hand and maybe some orange slices). So we also took this opportunity to codify one more of the Treacheries – the anomalies of Law that are possible in the Neath because it’s so far from Judgement’s light. This is the Treachery of Hearts.

It’s often been said that the heart is destiny’s engine; in the Neath that’s tangible fact. Desire can change the world. In the case of the TTRPG, this is our way of giving express permission to you to have the Neath behave differently at your table to better serve the stories you want to tell.

By committing your Concern utterly to an ambitious goal, you’ll come to experience this Treachery. It’s not a tool you’ll use or something you need to invoke; your London will simply be your own, to flesh out in your own way. We can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Size is relative

Fallen London is long, but it’s also short. In aggregate it contains over 4.5 million words, with hundreds of thousands more added every year, but its trademark is the delivery of well-honed, piquant sentences over a long period of time. A book like this occupies a different space and time, and stylistically needs to be different.

In passing the drafts back and forth with Magpie, adding a joke or a visceral detail here, sharing a secret there, we’ve given you something fleshier than the browser game, which will hopefully not just illuminate the setting for you, but provide ample tools to play with it yourself.

The business of making things up

Something that’s changed in the public sphere even in the year since the game was crowdfunded is the rise of generative AI in game development and therefore AI scepticism from the community at large. It’s not something we expected to have to defend repeatedly, but it’s worth repeating in the run-up to release that neither Failbetter nor Magpie ever use generative AI for our work. Why would we? Making things up is our joy!

In fact, we often say that we’re in the business of making things up. Even the most solidified lore was once a line in a planning document with a question mark next to it. Something we did quite early on was to give Magpie explicit blessing to create new things - something they don’t necessarily have when working with some other settings, so a new experience for us all.

Wrestling with existing lore is necessary for a lot of the setting foundations, but the freedom to make up new stuff really made the book come to life. The pub we meet at for this adventure doesn’t need to be the Singing Mandrake, let’s create a more thematically appropriate one; the list of Principals needs balance for the kinds of adventures a tabletop group wants to have, so let’s create new ones that fulfil those needs. Fallen London has always contained multitudes, but it has strong themes which we draw from, and that’s no different for the TTRPG. The fact that we have that foundation makes spinning up new things quite fun.

You’ll see known characters next to new ones, new or developed locations, and entire ventures cooked up from scratch that have the spirit of an Exceptional Story. An especial pleasure for us has been watching writers who were new to the world bring their voices to the setting.

There’s also so much new art. From Paul’s cover illustration (those of you who backed for a print will receive an Actual Arendt!), to new character portraits, right down to the new Correspondence sigil which graces some of the accessories (it means, “a vexing improbability that is, nevertheless, the result you got”).

It’s a feast for the eyes, and another opportunity for us to look at extant Fallen London afresh – some of the existing characters have had a proper makeover for this book.

Making it as Fallen-y and London-y as possible

I think it’s been a huge challenge to distil our vast, beloved but somewhat ornery beast of a game (like a stone pig, perhaps, or donkey out of Worlebury-juxta-Mare) into a book that you can hold in one hand. Magpie were game for anything; we’ve been throwing esoteric notes at them for months and they’re hungry for more. Our part in this has been to focus on the things our community expect and love about Fallen London: adventure, comedy, horror, romance, obsession, and that unique tone which blends them all.

The game clicked for us twice. First, when it leans into things only Fallen London can do. And secondly, when it takes Fallen London into new territory, of group play and consequences which we can’t accommodate in the browser game. I don’t want to say too much here, but there are elements which I think have been used to great effect and will give you some starting points to have a rip-roaring time!

Over to you

It’s been liberating to look at Fallen London through a new lens. After what is now 16 years, it’s very easy to be in a cycle of release, feedback, release, feedback, without stopping to take in the view (I always think of the clip from Wallace and Gromit of Gromit laying down the train track in front of the speeding train). The TTRPG has allowed us to think differently about existing characters, lore and activities in ways which we hope you’ll see seeping into the browser game for a long time to come.

Our work on the TTRPG alongside Magpie Games has been suffused with love and a sincere desire to get it right for you. Many of our players have been hoping, some for a very long time, to hold a book of Fallen London in their hands; this is our answer. Come May, you’ll have the chance to preview the PDF of the core book. We hope it takes you on many new adventures, the only limit being your players’ imaginations (and another TTRPG-specific limit: scheduling).

The city is yours, delicious friend.

If this is the first you're hearing of the TTRPG, you still have a chance to back the Kickstarter and receive your PDF copy in May. There are backer exclusive rewards for your Fallen London browser game character, special edition books and special real-life trinkets too, if you like.

The Missing Candle is a reliably quiet pub in Veilgarden – the drinks are cheap, the food is... extant. These days it is best known as the meeting place of a very exclusive club – one that happens to include you.

The Candlefinder Society – the five greatest detectives in London – regularly meet to talk shop. Sometimes, you join forces to unravel the city’s most unusual mysteries. Today we're releasing another new case for you to solve: the Case of the Clay Kidnapper, written by Gavin Inglis.

A prominent Veilgarden artist has gone missing, mere days before a new exhibition of her work! Eyewitness reports pin the crime, vociferously and with great conviction, on a Clay Man. An open-and-shut case? The Implacable Detective has her doubts. In the art world, the evidence often requires a little creative interpretation...

This case is available for free.

Getting Started

Candlefinder mysteries are episodic stories set in London, available from the midgame onwards. To unlock the Candlefinder Society:

• Complete ‘A Name in Seven Secret Alphabets’ (raise that quality to 7)
• Complete ‘A Name Whispered in Darkness’ (raise that quality to 7)
• Raise your unmodified Watchful to 90 or more

If you meet those conditions, you can gain access to the Candlefinder Society by drawing a guaranteed card in London. Once started, cases must be finished before you can start another one or replay a past case. Some, like this one, require additional progress in other storylines, or higher stats, to begin. Cases can be replayed; Fate cases don’t cost anything to replay. The reward for completing a given case for the first time is more substantial.

Something's bothering you. Like everything is wrong, somehow. Wrong body, wrong place, wrong time. As if it wasn't bad enough being you, now you feel like it's wrong to be you.

The Shuttered Palace is alive for the first time since the Confusion. In a scant handful of days, Mother will return from Balmoral to listen to you play! Your Performance must be perfect, as must your Manners and Deportment. As Her Majesty's youngest son, it is incumbent upon you to do your duty – and to ignore that pesky voice in the back of your head that remembers being someone else.

• Writing: Harry Tuffs
• Editing and QA: Michael Bunning
• Art: Paul Arendt

EXCEPTIONAL FRIENDSHIP

Exceptional Friendship is the ideal way to support our work on Fallen London. In exchange for your coin, you receive:

• A new Exceptional Story every month
• Memories of a Tale from each story to spend on exclusive companions and items
• A second candle (up to 40 actions at once)
• An expanded opportunity deck: ten cards instead of six
• Four additional outfit slots
• The ability to run an additional concurrent plot, once Agents are unlocked
• Access to the House of Chimes including monthly gameplay perks

Enhanced Exceptional Friends receive all of the above, plus:

• A past story, or two resets of stories they've played from a monthly menu
• Memories of a Tale from every past story or reset
• Extra monthly perks in the House of Chimes
• Another two outfit slots
• Three seven-action refreshes per month

Watch on failbettergames.com

In Mandrake, your choices (at character creation and in gameplay) will change the tenor of conversations with your neighbours. Will you be a haughty Doubter, or a good Neighbour?

We'll never lock you out of stories this way, but hopefully offer you a depth and breadth of choices that's unusual in a rural life sim.

"It is the season for affection, is it not?" Mr Spices' voice is high and fluting. It waves a shawl-enshrouded hand airily in the direction of the Bazaar. "It is incumbent upon us to ensure that the city is a fertile bed for budding romance."

The Feast of the Rose is here! A festival bursting with affectionate activities, nuptial phantasies, burgeoning romance… and shot through with scorn. Tend to the business of your heart through 'Celebrate the Feast of the Exceptional Rose', available throughout London.

Join the Revels!

Take part in the festivities to gain Masquing, which can be later spent on rewards. Exchange gifts of love (or disdain, or enticing indifference) with other players. Keep your gifts – or trade them for Masquing!

As always, additional Masquing can be obtained with Fate, which unlocks further options.

Meet New Faces

Every year, the Feast brings new companions to Fallen London. Starting next week, on February 12th, you will be able to spend your Masquing to attract companions from Feasts past, as well as four new companions:

• Engage in not-so-petty thievery with the Once-Dashing Smuggler
• Plumb the depths of the human soul with Milton, the devil
• Break your fast with a Ravenous Thespian
• Face down the Department of Menace Eradication with Blackpelt, the Venge-Pirate

Those last two can be unlocked with Fate.

Matrimony and more!

This year we've added a trove of matrimonial goodness. 

First of all: those of you married to another player can now upgrade your marriage! Look for 'The Possibilities of Marriage' in your Social Engagements to pursue the opportunity. Upgrading your marriage costs 20 Fate, and will add the Opportunity to both you and your spouse's deck to gain week-long Boons that increase either your Mithridacy, Glasswork, or Player of Chess.

This is a one-time purchase; if you buy it and (heaven forbid) divorce, you will be able to apply the same benefits to any future player spouse. If you're married to someone who has purchased the benefits, you will enjoy and retain these benefits for as long as you're married.

Secondly, we've also added two new NPC 'Spouses'. Engage in aromantic intimacy with the Attentive Reporter, and become deep, platonic friends with the Clay Courier. We've also added a couple of 'Spouse' items that don't represent people, for those who want to remain single: An Unwavering Commitment to Your own Good Self, if you’re complete just as you are, and The Call of the Unterzee, for those whose true love is the waves.

The Attentive Reporter and the Clay Courier can be encountered and their relationships formed for free, in your Lodgings and Spite respectively. The last two cost 20 Fate; the Unwavering Commitment may be made from your Base-Camp in Parabola, and the Call of the Unterzee may be felt from Wolfstack Docks.

A Task for Mr Spices

Mr Spices takes a direct interest in the rose-festivities, and believes that true love might need a little helping hand in order to take proper root. Many things might act as catalysts – a rousing play, a touching story, a thoughtful gift. Even violence, when deployed properly, has its uses.

For the duration of the Feast, select activities in and around London have exclusive options that pay out in Burgeoning Romance, in addition to their usual rewards. Trade your Burgeoning Romance with Mr Spices to receive additional payment, in the form of items that can be used to send gifts to friends during Feast-time.

These activities are:

• A play at Court
• A plant in Vertiginous Horticulture
• A Theft of Particular Character in the Flit
• A laboratory experiment
• A duel when 'Getting into other fights' for the Black Ribbon'
• An expedition in the Forgotten Quarter

The Lady in Lilac

"You are desired," she says. "Give me the proof of it, and I'll make arrangements."

Starting on February 12th, the mysterious 'Lady in Lilac' card will appear, allowing you to visit Millicent Clathermont’s parlour and exchange your Feast gifts for Masquing.

Skin-bound Memories and Nuptial Phantasies!

How better to prove your devotion than through permanent ink? High time for a visit to Clathermont’s Tattoo Parlour! Make your way to Ladybones Road to complete the story of the Clathermont family, as long as you have reached level 4 or higher in A Name in Seven Secret Alphabets. Tattoos will become available from the 12th of February.

Also available during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose: Nuptial phantasies! Obtain custom-tailored dreams of nuptial bliss (or marital discord) with some of your favourite Fallen London characters. Find these by visiting the Shopkeeper in Viric, in Veilgarden.

Meet your Destiny!

You can obtain a Destiny or alter your existing one during the Feast. Destinies offer unique insights into the deeper mysteries of the Neath, and once acquired, confer a mechanical bonus too. 

Find the way to the Perfumer-Semiotician's shop through the card 'The Feast of the Rose', which can be drawn in London.

Those who know the way there could also zail to Irem, where destinies are grown, altered, and consumed.

A Continuing Mystery

Just what is the Exceptional Rose? Rumours abound. Some say that it's a vicious, fanged flower. Others that it's a cherub sent to watch over star-crossed lovers. Yet more tut, calling it an elaborate ruse cooked up by Mr Inch. Whatever it is, nobody has seen the real Exceptional Rose in years. But perhaps this Feast is different? But, the Exceptional Rose, like love, is a changeable thing...

Newcomers may start this story in 'The Exceptional Rose', available anywhere in London. If you were here last year, you already know the way; seek the Rose out once more when Millicent's Parlour opens on the 12th.

Key Dates for the Festival

• The Feast of the Exceptional Rose starts today, February 5th.
• February 12th: 'An Encounter at the Feast' and 'The Lady in Lilac' become available. Trade gifts for Masquing, and obtain new companions. Tattoos will also be available in the Forgotten Quarter.
• February 19th: Gift exchanging and obtaining Masquing closes. You will still have a week to exchange Masquing for companions and to experience Feast seasonal stories.
• February 26th: All remaining Feast storylets close.

That sweet music. That joyful, upbeat tempo, which promises to deliver mirth to all. You must get to it. You must see what is causing it. You must be part of it.

The circus has come to London's shores! And none of Mrs Plenty's common-and-garden sideshows, either; the mere music is enough to buoy you upon a tide of joy. The Downtrodden Dreamer, too, is caught up in the crowd – a little rat searching for a big break. Will the circus offer the fame and recognition she seeks? Is the circus all it's cracked up to be? And why does the ringmaster look like that?

• Writing: Ben Sabin
• Editing: Luke van den Barselaar
• QA: Michael Bunning
• Art: Toby Cook
  

EXCEPTIONAL FRIENDSHIP

Exceptional Friendship is the ideal way to support our work on Fallen London. In exchange for your coin, you receive:

• A new Exceptional Story every month
• Memories of a Tale from each story to spend on exclusive companions and items
• A second candle (up to 40 actions at once)
• An expanded opportunity deck: ten cards instead of six
• Four additional outfit slots
• The ability to run an additional concurrent plot, once Agents are unlocked
• Access to the House of Chimes including monthly gameplay perks

Enhanced Exceptional Friends receive all of the above, plus:

• A past story, or two resets of stories they've played from a monthly menu
• Memories of a Tale from every past story or reset
• Extra monthly perks in the House of Chimes
• Another two outfit slots
• Three seven-action refreshes per month

There are knives on the way. Slicing, flensing, flaying. Ribbons of you flutter behind, like gaudy banners. Everywhere you look, there you are.

Firmament Chapter Seven has arrived! Travel east, and follow the intrusions of Lost Time to the red, red ruin of Queeneater's. Search for the breach at the heart of this hungry castle, wake the power whose dreams spill over into your own, and walk the stage of the Queensmen, who perform bloody tragedies to the listening Roof.

Firmament is Fallen London's current major expansion, a main story arc that's free to all players. It begins once you have progressed the Railway as far as Ealing Gardens, although requires more progress in the Railway as chapters progress. 

As part of this chapter, you'll unlock permanent access to a new location: Queeneater's Castle, a ruined holdfast of masked actors and crimson performances. Take a starring role in tragedies and comedies, and learn the truth of the absent mistress for whom they perform.

Continue the story of Firmament from 'To Queeneater's Castle', in Burgundy. If you've not yet begun Firmament, look for a card in London named 'The Fire in the Looking Glass.'

Pieces fall, and others rise to take their place. Dreams filter through into the real. Random chance becomes precedent, which in turn becomes law. The conflict was played out to the endgame before you even gave the signal; all you're seeing now are the consequences.

As an enterprising business owner, extortioner and nautical power you can now pursue additional pursuits at zee, in the Great Game, and in the depths of your honey-den. New opportunities for your Agents are here!

Some of these opportunities will be immediately obvious:

• Order a Nautical Agent to escort vessels through the tumultuous Sea of Voices!
• Assign an Intelligencier to filch hidden secrets from the premises of your high-tier lodgings!
• Send Silvered Agents to brave the conflict at the heart of Parabola!

Other new opportunities may take some time or luck to uncover.

What are Agents?

Agents are capable retainers who will gladly take care of business on your behalf. Engage agents of different types, with their own skills; equip them with your second best gear and send them on various Plots.

Once you’ve unlocked Agents, you can run a single Plot at a time, and unlock the ability to run a second through gameplay. Exceptional Friends can run a further Plot, provided they have enough Agents to assign.

Players who have attained ‘A Person of Some Importance’ at tier-two status can begin to gather Agents to their cause. Start to build your intelligence network in ‘Playing the Game in Wilmot's End’, located (you guessed it) in Wilmot's End, or pursue opportunities at zee in ‘A Zailor Down on his Luck’ in The Blind Helmsman. Players with their own Parabolan Base-Camp can also find allies in Parabola via 'A Golden Opportunity' in the Singing Mandrake.

"The glow penetrates everything in the room. There are chains around it, but you see through them like they're glass. It is alive."

The Affable Explorer has returned from the far Unterzee, with a new wonder to display to the great and the good. Attend the auction on his island mansion. Learn about the Specimen, and your fellow bidders. Just who is the Self-Declared Heiress? What ailments trouble the Angular Butler? What will any of you do to get your hands on the Explorer's precious treasure?

• Writing: Anna Anthropy
• Editing and QA: Luke van den Barselaar
• Art: Paul Arendt

EXCEPTIONAL FRIENDSHIP

Exceptional Friendship is the ideal way to support our work on Fallen London. In exchange for your coin, you receive:

• A new Exceptional Story every month
• Memories of a Tale from each story to spend on exclusive companions and items
• A second candle (up to 40 actions at once)
• An expanded opportunity deck: ten cards instead of six
• Four additional outfit slots
• The ability to run an additional concurrent plot, once Agents are unlocked
• Access to the House of Chimes including monthly gameplay perks

Enhanced Exceptional Friends receive all of the above, plus:

• A past story, or two resets of stories they've played from a monthly menu
• Memories of a Tale from every past story or reset
• Extra monthly perks in the House of Chimes
• Another two outfit slots
• Three seven-action refreshes per month