Hello out there. We thought you might be interested in how our approach to character generation is working right now. Feel free to comment or suggest refinements!

What Might Be In Your Undergarments

Fallen London's drawn attention (mostly favourable) for the way it treats gender - we allow players to be a lady, a gentleman, or neither. We've been saying we'll take the same approach in Sunless Sea, but actually, we're going to go a little bit beyond that. We're not going to specify gender at all.

That doesn't mean you won't be able to pick an avatar that looks like a lady or a gentleman or remains teasingly androgynous. Or shaded by a deep-brimmed hat. Certainly you can. But when you're looking through portraits, you won't be limited to the ones for 'male/female/other'. Perhaps you did run away to sea dressed as a boy. Perhaps you don't fit into the usual binary. Perhaps you just want to look through avatars and decide which one you like before you pick male or female.

It doesn't mean that we're stopping you from playing someone treated as straightforwardly male or female, either. We just don't worry about the precise details of what's in your undergarments. Unless we're going to simulate childbirth (which few games do) or limit possible romances by gender (which is a perfectly acceptable fictional approach, but not what we're doing here), does it really matter? What matters is how people see you. So we're offering as standard starting options

'Sir' or 'Madam', for the traditional approach
'my Lady' or 'my Lord', for the aristocrats among us (which won't be possible for all backgrounds - sorry, street urchins!)
'Citizen', for those of an egalitarian or outland bent;
'Captain', for those no-nonsense types whose career comes first.

And unlike gender, these might (depending on budget!) lock or unlock different options. Good luck dealing with anarchists if you've adopted aristocratic stylings!

To sum up - you can play a character who's a man, or a woman, no problem. You just don't need to start the game by passing through a BOY, GIRL or OTHER door. And you can also play a character who doesn't fit neatly into either of those, or you can just ignore the whole issue.

Wreathed in Shadows

Sunless Sea has a lot of roguelike in its blood. This means you will likely see a number of characters ending their career in shipwreck or worse. This means that the seventeenth time you see our options for background and form of address, you may be tired of them; it means that if you're heavily into roleplaying and you spend ten minutes painstakingly working out your character background, you may be miffed when a squid eats her; it means that character customisation options may get in the way of jumping back into your ship and starting over. Part of our solution to this is Legacies, which allow you to carry consequence from one generation to the next - but that can also make character generation bulkier.

So we're going to allow a 'Past Wreathed in Shadows' option that allows you to develop your character in play. Rather than deciding straight away what your character's background is, you can choose 'ask me later', head straight out to sea and wait for the option to pop up again. This might even be a strategic choice. Perhaps you want to decide later that the Street Urchin background's bonus to your Veils stat is what you need. Of course, if you wait to commit, it may be too late.

The Map and the Territory...

Sunless Sea reshuffles most of the map every time you play. The West of the sea - the best-charted parts, where Fallen London and the known ports lie - is always stable, but the unknown reaches can change entirely. Some islands won't even exist from game to game. The Legacies feature allows you to be (for instance) the heir of your last captain. So... if we reshuffle the map, have the islands changed places since your father's day?

Actually, yes. There's a fictional rationale for this. The Neath is a place with unusual laws. But we wanted to highlight this, not make it look like a mistake. So one of the legacies you can choose (besides options like 'your mentor's sword', allowing you to begin with an Iron bonus, or 'your mentor's most trusted officer', allowing you to start with an officer your predecessor had) - is 'your mentor's map'. This will keep the map as it was with your last character, although it'll reset all the storylines. It will also leave fog-of-unknown cleared - which is a mixed blessing, because you can't claim Secrets from clearing it twice. (We are indebted to Rogue Legacy for pointing us in this direction)

Shadows, maps, undergarments. What do you think?