I recently watched old episodes of Dr.Who again and the episode “The Beast Below” reminded me very much of the atmosphere of Fallen London or rather “Sunless Sky”. Except for a few small things, the whole episode would have fit wonderfully into the setting.
In the real Fallen London, the only thing missing is a somewhat bizarre character who constantly travels through mirrors into new adventures and a suitable name. Although time travel would also be an option, at least to some extent, in Sunless Sky.
In any case, I’m really looking forward to the TRPG and the opportunity to introduce new characters into the world on my own. There are a few that could be easily reworked to fit into the Setting of Fallen London.
Apologies in advance. I’m about to be rambling and esoteric.
There’s an arc of the Doctor Who books about a conflict in the Doctor’s future, the War in Heaven, between the Time Lords and a mysterious Enemy that mere mortals don’t get to know much about. (It was an Eighth Doctor thing, and may or may not be identical to the Last Great Time War introduced by the modern show.)
Some intriguing snippets:
Much of what was revealed about the War was through the machinations of Faction Paradox, an opportunistic cult of Time Edgelords involved in looting weapons from the higher temporal powers and recruiting from species who had been exploited and devastated by the conflict. The Faction is mostly driven by spite towards Time Lord society and its pretensions to immortality and scientific supremacism - they personify cosmic forces that the other Time Lords regard as mere mathematics and worship them as loa, style their Tardis controls as sacrificial altars, and dress in fancy black velvet and bone armour made from species that never existed. Usually the armour is claimed to be the bones of Time Lords from a timeline where the Great Vampires corrupted them into giant alien bats. Sometimes they even claim to use masks of the Divergence, a species that would have evolved on Gallifrey after its current civilisation went extinct naturally… except that the Gallifreyans used the Eye of Harmony to rewrite history and become the Time Lords, and don’t enjoy being reminded that their ascension was selfish rather than inevitable.
The Faction’s home base was the Eleven-Day Empire - a shadowy and anachronistic version of London, created in a ceremonial bargain with King George II to purchase the eleven days “lost” during the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. (A non-place outside of history ought to have been a perfect place to hide from a time war, and the Georgians weren’t going to use them.) The sky is dim, lit as though something is burning just past the horizon, and its only native organisms are enigmatic corvids called Unkindnesses that can turn carrion into prophecy.
(The thing that originally prompted all of this for me was the thought of how furious Grandfather Paradox would be after the Traitor Empress declared it to be 1899 forever, turning the Eleven-Day Empire into the -354-Day Empire.)
The Enemy was only meant to be encountered indirectly, through the proxy agents they and the Time Lords used to try to protect themselves from direct confrontation. The Time Lords themselves, so powerful that lesser species mythologise them as “Sun Builders”, avoid trying to identify the Enemy as any specific enemy; they can’t truly identify it, because it’s attacking them from outside the epistemological principles they imposed on the universe to make it revolve around them! The Enemy is not the Daleks, or the Divergence, or the Great Vampires, or the Master’s Tardis, or the Eight Legs, or the Gods of Dellah, or the ancestral cells of life, or any of the other known factions involved in the War. It might be the Time Lords’ mass paranoid delusion, or a scapegoat for their own infighting. Before they started taking it seriously they believed it originated on Earth and sent an agent to colonise the planet before it formed; except only the agent’s decapitated head returned, a few minutes late but trillions of years older, accompanied by the message “we are not amused”.
But humanity isn’t the Enemy either, though. The Enemy isn’t just a species, or an organisation, or an ideology. It’s most clearly described as a “process”, or “a new kind of history” - which suggests something fundamentally different. An alteration of not just the laws of nature, but to the meaning of “natural law” as a concept. A new genre of non-fiction. A new kind of timeline besides the linear structure with occasional branches and loops. A new chronology, where events happen some other way than one after another. Perhaps, one might say… a New Sequence?