Port Carnelian burns through governors faster than a lamp burns gas; perhaps it's time for a radical approach. You refuse to debase yourself further than necessary in the discharge of this wretched office.

Today, we've added a new option for players reluctant to take up their post as governor of Port Carnelian. This includes a small activity for 'absentee governors' who, for reasons of defiance, laziness, or managerial hubris, wish to distance themselves from the post while still earning the favour of Her Majesty's Imperial Court.

This activity is available to new and existing players. It provides an alternative means to advance the Dilmun Club and ‘Restored to Court’ storylines, as well as alternative access to an existing Society Renown item.

Players who have already unlocked Port Carnelian can find it in ‘Your Activities’; new players will encounter the option directly.

If you follow news about Fallen London closely, you’ll probably know that we’ve been making many additions and changes in response to the suggestions and feedback we received in the player survey from winter ‘24/’25. Some of the things we’ve added so far include journal tagging, major story recaps, profile page customisation, a suite of improvements to save your clicking finger from undue overuse, and free access to one Exceptional Story to help people decide if Exceptional Friendship is for them.

At this point we’ve addressed a lot of the most common feedback we received, and wanted to turn our attention to a considerably less frequent but still, we felt, interesting and valuable bit of feedback we received in the survey – that some players were uncomfortable with the level of involvement in London’s colonial undertakings required of them to progress through the game’s story.

By way of context for players unfamiliar with it, Port Carnelian is London’s first and only overzee colony. Previously the territory of the Court of the Wakeful Eye, it faced a failed invasion by the Khanate, and at the present time has been occupied by London. As you might expect, many of the inhabitants (tigers and Khaganians) do not much care for this.

While trying to regain your standing among the Empress’s Court, the game requires that you serve a term as one of Port Carnelian’s governors.

We considered a range of ways we could have changed this story, or added alternate paths through it. There were many we weren’t keen on. We didn't want, for instance, to allow the Fallen London protagonist to moonlight as some sort of saviour of the natives (itself a rather colonial trope), or to sanitise the story in a way that would be dishonest about the relationship of London’s elites in this period to empire.

We like the approach we’ve landed on much better. It provides a way to obstruct London’s imperial enterprise (an absent governor is hardly an effective one) if the player is so minded, subject to certain costs. And it leans into some patterns of action we always enjoy offering the Fallen London protagonist – it can be an act of defiance, if you so choose, but it could also be hubris, decadent indolence, a careless disregard for consequences, or a perverse taste for scandal.

We've also made some prose changes to the existing Port Carnelian content alongside this update. We hope that you’ll enjoy the new way to engage (or perhaps, not engage) with this particular storyline.