Sunless Sea, like Fallen London, takes a gender-blind approach. As part of that, whenever I write story that involves the player's crew, I am deliberately alternating male and female pronouns for zailors: 'Your crewman recovers, and you share a pleasant chat with her', and so forth.

This is often a bit double-takey because there were basically no female Victorian merchant sailors. But I'm cool with that - the double-take is part of the point. Sunless Sea is history-flavoured fantasy, not history.

I do, however, find myself hesitating at 'You crack his mutinous skull with a blow from the gaff-hook' vs 'You crack her mutinous skull with a blow from the gaff-hook'. Violence directed at women makes me uncomfortable.

I can't tell how much this is (i) retro chivalry, given I'm middle-aged and grew up in an era when men were taught to open doors for women (ii) an assumption that my avatar or other characters will be male, because I'm male (iii) a valid concern, because violence directed against women is An Issue in a way that violence directed against men isn't.

I asked my team, and we're split (interestingly, along generational lines) between 'err on the side of caution' and 'equality should be consistent'. And of course, I can just write around it - it always happens that the men get their skulls stoven in with gaff-hooks in the prose - but even that absence is itself a choice.

So what do you think?