Right now, Fallen London uses Connected qualities to track your relationships with many of its inhabitants. We'll soon begin replacing this with a new system that uses two kinds of qualities: Favour and Renown. This is a preview of the changes, and what they might mean for your character.

But first, a couple of caveats. Much of this is provisional, and some of the details are subject to change. And because Connected qualities are used so widely, we won't be making the changes in one go. To begin with we'll use this system for just one of London's amorphous factions, the criminals.

Favours

Most of the work currently done by Connected will be done by Favours. These represent a significant debt owed to your character, and you'll be able to trade them in for various benefits. To begin with, those will be the same kinds of benefits currently provided by Connected, although often they'll be much more profitable or effective than they are at present. For instance, you might call in Favours to gain items or improve your abilities or escape prison sooner.

In the longer term, we'd like Favours to sometimes unlock special opportunities. To give a couple of examples, you might exchange them for access to a unique expedition, or an opening that unlocks a profitable card on heists. We'll add these gradually, because it's much easier to do as part of wider additions or extensions to a piece of content.

An individual Favour is very valuable, so it won't be straightforward to grind them. The main ways to acquire them will be available opportunity cards, rare successes, one-off stories, and individual branches that form part of a wheel. In particular, you'll always be able to gain Favours using branches on the existing Connected cards. So you'll always have at least one reliable source.

There'll be a limit to the number of Favours of a single type that you can store. Since this is Fallen London, the number of Favours is the Number, which of course is seven.

Renown

Your Renown represents the extent to which you are known to members of the Connected group: it's a measure of your celebrity or notoriety or both. It can go up, but it won't go down; you might lose your Favours: Hell if you're caught robbing the Embassy, but it won't make Hell forget about you. And there's no way to spend it.

If you own a Connected item, you'll be able to spend Favours to increase Renown. The more Renowned you are, the harder it will be to increase. At higher levels, increasing it will also affect quirks, potentially raising them above 10.

We're discussing these changes and what they'll mean for your character on the forums.

Questions and Answers

1) I have lots of Connected: Criminals. What will happen to it?
We'll convert part of it into Favours. If you have a lot of Connected, we'll convert what's left into Renown. Renown is harder to raise than Connected, so the exchange won't be one to one: we haven't settled on a number yet, but 200 Connected, for instance, might become 25 Renown. If you'd prefer material rewards, you can trade your Connected for items before we implement the new system.

2) How will conflict cards work?
Conflict cards will appear when you're owed a significant number of Favours by certain groups, like Constables and Criminals. You won't be able to discard them, but they'll disappear if you spend some of your Favours. Playing a branch on the conflict card will usually remove all Favours of one type in exchange for a substantial benefit.

3) What about unusual Connected qualities, like Connected: The Masters?
We're not sure yet! These are large changes, and we'd like to see how things shake out for a typical Connected quality before we decide how to implement the more unusual ones