Hello, delicious friends! Herein are summarised the questions asked in the Failbetter x Magpie Games Q&A about Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game on 23 August, 2024. Plus, I’ve included some quickfire points which we didn’t necessarily cover but which people were keen to hear about. Everything you hear at this stage is up for change as we discover what works best.

Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game confirmed details

The system will use a pool of d6
Art for the book will be drawn from existing Fallen London art where suitable, with new art commissioned especially
The game system is designed for 3-5 players and 1 GM
There will be opportunities to get involved in playtesting
Depending on how the base game goes, there’s much appetite internally to produce Zee and Skies expansions, but the core of the game will be set in London
The player characters will come together to form a Concern, a communal goal that they’ll work together to achieve
Every Concern has a Principal NPC who the group will engage with to get things done
Having FLPCs work together doesn’t mean you love each other and everything’s smooth sailing: you’re going to be at odds as much as in harmony
Obsession is going to be a functional mechanic throughout the game; we want the structure of the game to support this
Most of Magpie’s work so far has been in the Powered by the Apocalypse framework, but here we are moving away from it in order to tell more, different kinds of stories
If you have equipment that’s useful in the moment you’ll be able to add to your dice pool. Likewise you’ll add more dice for skills, with the idea that skills create more consistency instead of wild heights of success. Wild heights come from Obsession dice: big successes with potentially big costs
There’ll be multiple categories of success, partial successes with some costs, and so on.
We want to have a set of Conflicts which blow really important moments out into, essentially, minigames, with a significant variety of different outcomes from the conflict than if you had just rolled some dice.
There will be many different ones of these for different interactions, like types of violence, social conflicts, putting on a good show, dancing, seduction…
This book will focus on London itself: the setting core, which is hugely deep and rich without going beyond to the Zee, roof and other continents. Maybe in future…
You will be able to play non-human characters, including Rattus Faber. It’ll need testing but it’s our fondest dream for people to be able to play the freakiest little guys they want.
What if your character is an Urchin, and is integrated into a faction in a way that the player character in Fallen London the browser game can’t be?
We want you to be able to flesh out a character by adding lots of details from different categories: where you’re from, your profession, your associates. Reading all of those lists will be a way to come to understand the world, too!
The players will all have the opportunity to have a unique twist which will be exclusive to them within their group.
We’re going to use the systems from Fallen London as much as we can, building on what you already know but making it work at the table.
Principals are NPCs who lead your concern, bringing resources but also making demands of you. We’ll provide a written list of potential ones, but we’ll also give tools for creating your own, including transferring an existing Fallen London player character.

Crowdfunding details

Expect a crowdfunding campaign in Q1 2025, to be run by Magpie
The crowdfunding campaign will offer everything from a pdf option up to a collector’s edition, dice, supplements and GM screen
We propose to produce custom d6 and these will be available through the crowdfunding campaign (at minimum). And yes, we are considering making them Devilbone Dice!
Expect there to be international shipping, but we can’t confirm any costs until the time of the campaign as everything to do with shipping is fluctuating hugely lately

An Incomplete and Meandering Summary of Everything Else We Said

Hannah was eating some nuts that at one point became overwhelmingly spicy
Sabrina Carpenter wouldn’t last five minutes in the Neath
Both teams have been talking about doing this together since about 2020, but the upcoming 15th birthday of Fallen London was the catalyst for making it happen
And both teams are about 15 years into their businesses, too, meaning we’re both very experienced in pulling off a project like this!
For Failbetter it's been a joy to work with other game designers on a different kind of game, and to look at Fallen London itself with a new lens
Printing something on dead trees is wild to the team at Failbetter, and there’s an interesting path to walk with making something that feels like Fallen London but can exist in that format
We shuddered to somewhat accidentally call Fallen London a franchise, but then we rallied
If there were a playlist of Fallen London songs, it would be called Bad Decisions Made with Loving Care (according to Mark)
We all love terrible decisions made because of burning desires
The Fallen London playlist according to Brendan would be “'Obsessions' by Brendan Conway"
What happens when you go as far as you can go in pursuit of something?
The players will link arms together and jump into the abyss
Fallen London has three thematic pillars: desire, self-desctruction, and rules/rule breaking
If we make a button that says ‘if you do this, you will die’ then people do it, and they love it
Fallen London the browser game is Jeeves to the player’s Wooster; we “yes, and” the player’s worst impulses
Hannah’s playlist would be called “Please, please, please let me get what I want”
One of the big things we’re interested in is a mode of play that’s less reactive. Slower build stories, and for things to get slowly, steadily worse for the player characters over time.
There may be other entities that are interested in the same ambition that your party is interested in…
In PbtA games, often the only part of the world that’s rendered is the immediate surroundings of the players, but in Fallen London, things already exist which will impact the players whether they want that or not
It’s not that anything can happen, but that the conflicts driving the story are so deep and rich and interesting that we care a lot about what does happen
It’s thematically correct for the players to drive the bus in this game: the theme is self-destruction!
You’re in over your head from scene one
We will need to hit many things with hammers. Probability and math(s), narrative, tone, and what’s plain fun will all need tuning until they sing
D6s are nice and simple for probability’s sake and as a bonus they’re nice to make!
Will the dice have correspondence on them?!?
It was crucial for Failbetter that we wanted combat to not take over other kinds of conflict.
Fallen London is grounded in Victorian fiction which his weirdly familiar to a lot of people. It’s skewed; Fallen Londoners are very uptight, but about things that don’t matter, while there are also people running around with the faces of squid.
We want the game to be friendly to the person who has never played Fallen London before.
Reminder that you should go play Fallen London. Have you heard of it? It’s free!
We’ll start with some basics but you’ll be able to learn the rest incrementally. It’s only your table that matters to your game.
There will be very informed GMs who can have a lot of fun leading a table of new people through the mysteries!
Perhaps the more esoteric parts of the world will be separate in the book in some kind of interesting way??
Did we say we're excited to make an actual book!?
Maybe there will be Secrets in the book. We’re saying nothing.
The hope is that the established rules will permit lots of fun customisation - like explicit tools for making new character backgrounds. We want to make the game work so you don’t have to ‘make it work’ for your table, and give you tools so you don’t have to figure out how to build your own homebrew stuff from scratch.
We don’t want people to feel beholden to specific lore points, unless you manage to be an entire table of lore heads who’d all enjoy it.
We have a secret meme that we use in the Failbetter Games Slack that’s a reminder that ultimately the whole of Fallen London is made up and which includes the phrase “get your piping hot bollocks here!”
We’re going to give pillars, core ideas, tenets, themes: everything the GM and players need to feel confident in making the call about what things to put in the game, what moves to make, etc.
What’s the difference between a real holiday and a fake one? Not much!
We’re planning some exciting things before the crowdfunding starts: previews, playtesting, all sorts.
Crowdfunding has changed so much in the time that Magpie and Failbetter have been using it. It’s very hard to say exactly what we’re doing even within a year of it happening.
We’re really excited about making some really cool physical stuff.
(Don’t forget that we already work with Gametee in the UK who’ve made the Fallen London playing cards and other things.)
What about UV ink? Gosh! Magpie have done this on a recent book and it looks GREAT.
We want to make something that you can leave out at your house and visitors will be like, what is THIS??
Everyone is keen that we have devilbone dice but what would that actually be made of… we don’t know yet but wow we’d like to work that out.
Hellworms will not be playable. But if you come across one you can probably kiss it.
All of the writers at Failbetter are huge TTRPG players, and they’re all very psyched to be involved in making this shine.
It can be really creatively challenging to run a service game, and doing this is giving us so much new joy for the setting!
The 15th birthday of Fallen London is the 11th of January 2025, so watch out for some excitement around that date.