Today we’re adding the latest expansion to the profile page and player identity systems in Fallen London, finishing up some loose ends and also enhancing how you can personalize your page. You can see a sample of most of these additions in the screenshot below. These changes are going live now, and all of the new options being added today are free to all players.

Cameo frames

Cameo frames are a new feature that wraps your character portrait in, well, a frame. They add more immediate visual variety to profile pages.

Similar to profile page headers, we plan to add more of those over time – currently, there are four available frames. Like other aspects of the profile page, they can be changed from ‘Matters of Identity’, in your lodgings.

We do plan on adding more frames in the future; how often and how many is going to depend on how popular the feature overall proves to be with players.

New adjectives and noun choice

As part of this update, we have added a slew of new adjectives you can pick for your character. Most of these reflect advanced accomplishments – raising advanced skills, obtaining big-ticket items, and so on

We’re also expanding the choice of noun, including both variant gender terms (such as ‘lass’ or ‘chap’ rather than the more formal terms the game defaults to) and a gamut of non-gendered descriptors – you can now be an oaf, a pugilist, or a waif, among others.

Nouns don’t have requirements; we’ve decided to draw a line where adjectives tend to reflect player accomplishments, while nouns are a purely expressive choice and all nouns are available to all players.

New (old) Headers

As part of this update, we’ve taken the opportunity to backport several classic location headers as profile page headers, expanding even more the gamut of choices.

Pronouns

Fallen London has, for a long time, not actually had an affordance to refer to the player character in the third person – which in turn meant that, as a rule, we didn’t. This update finally resolves this, and also gives the player character a set of pronouns. Those pronouns are, by default, aligned with the choice you make at the start, but they don’t need to be; you can now change them independently of your noun (but changing your noun will also prompt an optional change of pronoun).

Currently, this is not used at all in the game; we expect that we will use it in the future, but on rare occasions. An example might be the storylet that describes your character’s demise when you die at zee, which currently is written somewhat awkwardly around the inability to refer to the player in this way.