In May, Kickstarter backers will get their first look at PDFs of Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game (see the latest update from Magpie on Kickstarter). As it comes closer to seeing the light, we’re reflecting on what we’ve learned from capturing Fallen London in a book.

We’ve been on a journey of understanding. Did you know, when they say ‘ship it’ in video games, they mean press a button (and then wander off and have a cup of tea)? When TTRPG people say ‘ship it,’ they mean on an actual ship.

How do you adapt a 4.5-million word epic text adventure into a parseable package of information and rules for friends at a table? First, choose a partner who has an astonishing catalogue of TTRPG adaptations under their belts and who knows everything there is to know about making things out of dead trees.

Making it real

Jokes about dead trees aside, there are book considerations that we’ve become much more familiar with. How colour and design work on a printed page, and how people actually hold and use a physical item; things that we’ve never had the opportunity to consider for Fallen London before. The constraints of working with paper, versus the ones we’re used to dealing with on screens.

Layouts need to not contain too much black, because it’s a physically heavy colour and hard to print without smudging. Going long by one page in one section might necessitate cutting that amount of words elsewhere lest you have to add 15 more sides because of the way pages are grouped. It’s been a great comfort that the folks at Magpie Games know all of this well, and have patiently reminded us about the trees.

Likewise for the accessories. I’m most excited about the Neathbow dice. How do you reflect imaginary colours, and also keep them suitably brilliant and legible? (As is often the case with multifaceted creative projects, the answer was to exercise restraint, and we love how they’ve turned out.)

Getting our hooks in

One of our first questions to Magpie when we were in the early stages of the project was: why would the Fallen London Player Character - a singular yet mutable polymath, adventurer, scholar, captain of industry, (optionally) legendary lover, scoundrel and rogue – ever work together with anyone else?

We quickly landed on what became the driving force behind the game: they would be in need of others to help them achieve something that couldn’t possibly be done alone. A Concern is a group of Fallen London citizens who have enough in common that they can put aside any rivalries and histories to pursue a collective goal (bringing along their personal obsessions, of course).

For those of you who want to port their Fallen London character over into the TTRPG, there will be two likely ways for you to try that.

Firstly, you can re-spec them using the FL:TRPG character creation tools, and play as a version of them. Secondly, you can work them up into a Concern Principal: someone with the resources and connections to go after this incredible goal but not the time to dirty their hands personally.

Putting flesh on it

Elements of Fallen London that have been purposefully vague in the browser game have needed building on for the TTRPG. Death is chief among them. In the browser game, where the player character has to be human, we can have quite a high level of poetry and elision around death; the mechanics of single player death can also comfortably be different to multiplayer.

But when you can be playing a rattus faber, rubbery or clay man, there are questions we’ve had to answer for the TTRPG to work mechanically. We agreed what 'death' looks like for these characters, and what that means in terms of the TTRPG when your character takes too many Wounds. As you might expect from the asymmetry of a lot of Fallen London, it's not always outright death, so there will be potentially major gameplay implications for your player character depending on their nature.

We also spent time sharpening the lore around the Correspondence, Discordance, Parabola and the Red Science, to define the boundaries between them and make their properties clear enough that people at a table could work with them.

Committing to Treachery

Holding all of the Absolute Lore Truths of Fallen London in your mind while also trying to have an improvisational game with your friends might well be impossible (I know some of you are planning to try it, you scallywags, and I can’t stop you - but please have a bucket on hand and maybe some orange slices). So we also took this opportunity to codify one more of the Treacheries – the anomalies of Law that are possible in the Neath because it’s so far from Judgement’s light. This is the Treachery of Hearts.

It’s often been said that the heart is destiny’s engine; in the Neath that’s tangible fact. Desire can change the world. In the case of the TTRPG, this is our way of giving express permission to you to have the Neath behave differently at your table to better serve the stories you want to tell.

By committing your Concern utterly to an ambitious goal, you’ll come to experience this Treachery. It’s not a tool you’ll use or something you need to invoke; your London will simply be your own, to flesh out in your own way. We can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Size is relative

Fallen London is long, but it’s also short. In aggregate it contains over 4.5 million words, with hundreds of thousands more added every year, but its trademark is the delivery of well-honed, piquant sentences over a long period of time. A book like this occupies a different space and time, and stylistically needs to be different.

In passing the drafts back and forth with Magpie, adding a joke or a visceral detail here, sharing a secret there, we’ve given you something fleshier than the browser game, which will hopefully not just illuminate the setting for you, but provide ample tools to play with it yourself.

The business of making things up

Something that’s changed in the public sphere even in the year since the game was crowdfunded is the rise of generative AI in game development and therefore AI scepticism from the community at large. It’s not something we expected to have to defend repeatedly, but it’s worth repeating in the run-up to release that neither Failbetter nor Magpie ever use generative AI for our work. Why would we? Making things up is our joy!

In fact, we often say that we’re in the business of making things up. Even the most solidified lore was once a line in a planning document with a question mark next to it. Something we did quite early on was to give Magpie explicit blessing to create new things - something they don’t necessarily have when working with some other settings, so a new experience for us all.

Wrestling with existing lore is necessary for a lot of the setting foundations, but the freedom to make up new stuff really made the book come to life. The pub we meet at for this adventure doesn’t need to be the Singing Mandrake, let’s create a more thematically appropriate one; the list of Principals needs balance for the kinds of adventures a tabletop group wants to have, so let’s create new ones that fulfil those needs. Fallen London has always contained multitudes, but it has strong themes which we draw from, and that’s no different for the TTRPG. The fact that we have that foundation makes spinning up new things quite fun.

You’ll see known characters next to new ones, new or developed locations, and entire ventures cooked up from scratch that have the spirit of an Exceptional Story. An especial pleasure for us has been watching writers who were new to the world bring their voices to the setting.

There’s also so much new art. From Paul’s cover illustration (those of you who backed for a print will receive an Actual Arendt!), to new character portraits, right down to the new Correspondence sigil which graces some of the accessories (it means, “a vexing improbability that is, nevertheless, the result you got”).

It’s a feast for the eyes, and another opportunity for us to look at extant Fallen London afresh – some of the existing characters have had a proper makeover for this book.

Making it as Fallen-y and London-y as possible

I think it’s been a huge challenge to distil our vast, beloved but somewhat ornery beast of a game (like a stone pig, perhaps, or donkey out of Worlebury-juxta-Mare) into a book that you can hold in one hand. Magpie were game for anything; we’ve been throwing esoteric notes at them for months and they’re hungry for more. Our part in this has been to focus on the things our community expect and love about Fallen London: adventure, comedy, horror, romance, obsession, and that unique tone which blends them all.

The game clicked for us twice. First, when it leans into things only Fallen London can do. And secondly, when it takes Fallen London into new territory, of group play and consequences which we can’t accommodate in the browser game. I don’t want to say too much here, but there are elements which I think have been used to great effect and will give you some starting points to have a rip-roaring time!

Over to you

It’s been liberating to look at Fallen London through a new lens. After what is now 16 years, it’s very easy to be in a cycle of release, feedback, release, feedback, without stopping to take in the view (I always think of the clip from Wallace and Gromit of Gromit laying down the train track in front of the speeding train). The TTRPG has allowed us to think differently about existing characters, lore and activities in ways which we hope you’ll see seeping into the browser game for a long time to come.

Our work on the TTRPG alongside Magpie Games has been suffused with love and a sincere desire to get it right for you. Many of our players have been hoping, some for a very long time, to hold a book of Fallen London in their hands; this is our answer. Come May, you’ll have the chance to preview the PDF of the core book. We hope it takes you on many new adventures, the only limit being your players’ imaginations (and another TTRPG-specific limit: scheduling).

The city is yours, delicious friend.

If this is the first you're hearing of the TTRPG, you still have a chance to back the Kickstarter and receive your PDF copy in May. There are backer exclusive rewards for your Fallen London browser game character, special edition books and special real-life trinkets too, if you like.