I’m posting this on Bruno’s behalf so please pretend for a moment that I am him… ok go!
Now that the summer festival has come to a close, we’re finally ready to talk about some of our future Fallen London plans for the remainder of 2024, and beyond.
Festivals and ongoing stories
5th September: Fruits of the Zee
The yearly Mutton Island festival returns once again. We expect Fruits of the Zee to run for two weeks from 5th September until 19th September.
Like past festivals, this event is free to all players. Go wreck-diving in the shoals around Mutton Island. Retrieve strange treasures from the bottom of the unterzee. Meet the King-in-Coral who presides over the festivities.
New this year: more items to collect during wreck-diving, and a new premium expansion to zailing.
24th September: Firmament Chapter 3
A free update continuing the ongoing endgame storyline. We’re keeping mum on the story details here – you’ll be able to travel even further afield on the Roof, and visit a new location.
If you haven’t begun the Firmament storyline yet, you can do so after unlocking the first few chapters of the Railway storyline, which itself is unlocked after reaching 175 Persuasive and advanced Person of Some Importance status (Shattering Force, Legendary Charisma, Invisible Eminence, or Extraordinary Mind). Both storylines are free to all players.
Mid-October: Profile page expansion
We’re continuing to update the profile page, making new additions to enable an even more personal profile page. This update is meant to address feedback and add even more customization options.
To view your profile page and share it with others, go to the ‘myself’ tab in-game and click on ‘view profile’.
28th October: Hallowmas
The feast of masks returns to London once again. Hallowmas is a free yearly event centred around companions and confessions; a time of inversions and perversity, when menaces are desirable and sin is rewarded.
As usual, Hallowmas will run for two weeks, until the 11th of November; you’ll be able to claim rewards and turn in confessions until the 18th.
November: New stories
This is a new episodic series of small stories, which will run over the course of the next year or so, in between Firmament chapters. More on this below.
November: Firmament small update
Expect the full fourth chapter of Firmament to launch in January; in November, we’re planning a smaller addition to existing Roof areas, without a full story chapter. More details on the exact shape of this to come.
December: Christmas
The winter holidays return to Fallen London once again, with all its familiar beats: Advent, Mr Sacks and Mr Treats, lacre-fall on the streets. This is a free festival with several different events and things going on throughout the month of December.
Normally, the Christmas season comes with a new premium story, but not this year – we’re delaying that to launch alongside the fourth Firmament chapter in January.
11th January: Fallen London Turns 15
Fallen London’s official birthday is the same day our company was incorporated, the 11th of January 2009! You may have heard we’re celebrating its 15th birthday by partnering with Magpie Games to create Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game. If you’d like to find out more, you can you can catch up on the Q&A we did with Kat Brewster last week or read the announcement blog post.
A new storyline: Candlefinder Society
The five greatest detectives in London regularly meet in an unassuming pub in Veilgarden – the Missing Candle – for lunch. They share stories of recent cases. They consult with one another on ongoing problems. Sometimes, they take off to solve a case together. This is the Candlefinder Society (only the Urchin Detective really likes the name, though).
This is a new, episodic series of stories we’re releasing as Fallen London updates over the coming months, starting in November of this year. Each individual Candlefinder case is a short one-off story. We’re releasing them in periodic updates, each containing two stories; one free story available to all players, and one premium story available for Fate.
Because this is a new story format for us, and a bit of an experiment, here’s a brief Q&A:
Q: How will I unlock the Candlefinder Society?
The Candlefinder Society will unlock fairly early in game progression, right after completing the Watchful and Shadowy Making your Name tracks; some individual stories might require further progression to unlock, and feature harder attribute checks more suited to later-game players.
Q: How big are Candlefinder Society stories?
Each story is quite short, designed to be played through in about 30 to 40 actions. We think of them as being about a third of an Exceptional Story; making them part of an ongoing episodic series, with a shared framing device (you’re a detective solving cases) allows them to be so short
Since the cases can have more specific requirements to unlock them, they can also integrate with the rest of the game in ways Exceptional Stories typically don’t. You might need to travel overzee to pursue a lead, examine some evidence in your laboratory, or even embark on a heist to retrieve a stolen item.
Q: How much Fate are these premium stories going to cost?
The free cases are, well, free. The premium cases are 10 Fate. There’s no specific difference between free and premium cases, otherwise; so you can play the free ones and clearly know whether you want the premium ones.
All cases, free and premium, are replayable (for free) once you complete them.
Q: Why a detective story?
In a way, a return to Fallen London’s roots. The detective role gives the player character a natural reason to nose in on other people’s business. This dovetails nicely with wanting the Candlefinder Society to be a venue for more grounded storytelling. Candlefinder cases focus on ordinary people in London, and the way their ordinary lives collide with the weirdness of the setting.
Q: Why is this coming out alongside Firmament?
We like having a smaller series of updates that are less involved than mainline story chapters; and this fulfils an ongoing goal of refocusing on the ‘street level’ of Fallen London. It’s a very different type of update, but it fills the same ‘slot’ in our schedule as something like a Hearts’ Game season.
Q: Five detectives, the Missing Candle… wait, that sounds familiar.
Yes, the Candlefinder Society is a sequel of sorts to the Exceptional Story ‘Stripes of Wrath’, including the return of the Banded Sleuth and the aforementioned Urchin Detective.
Q: Do I need to play Stripes of Wrath?
I mean, it’s a really good story. But no, it’s not required to access Candlefinder Society.
But because we do think you’ll enjoy it more if you have played it, we’re discounting ‘Stripes of Wrath’ down to 30 Fate, from now until a week after Candlefinder Society launches.
The state of the game
Besides the dates and announcements, I wanted to talk briefly about the pace of updates and other things about the game that we are looking at.
In short, we’re tapping the brakes a bit on the pace of updates that we’re doing. My rough plan at the start of the year was to launch four chapters of Firmament and two Candlefinder Society updates in 2024; I knew this was pretty ambitious and pretty likely to slip, and it now has, to a more comfortable pace that will see us releasing three chapters of Firmament and the initial release of Candlefinder.
Part of this is just about matching what we’re doing to the actual bandwidth we have on our team; while we’re constantly making more Fallen London, we need to be making it at a sustainable and healthy pace for us. But partly it’s also about turning our focus towards longer-running issues, better post-release support for new content as it comes out, and more gradual improvements to the game itself.
Behind the scenes, we’ve done a lot of under-the-hood work to Fallen London this year, helping address performance issues – although we know we have more work to do in this area – and working on technical debt that we’ve had for years. On the design side, one specific area we’re focusing on is the London Opportunity Deck.
Habitual patch notes watchers might have spotted some changes recently to the Opportunity Deck in London, as well as other adjustments to the early-to-midgame.
Right now, we’re at the start of an ongoing process for improving the Opportunity Deck. This process will happen gradually over the course of months, and I’m not going to attach dates to it. But the end goal is an Opportunity Deck that is great for us as a storytelling tool, and feels great to the players as a game mechanic.
We want to continue to use the London deck as a storytelling tool without every new card instantly annoying optimizer players who want their draws to be as high-value as possible. The deck is really useful in this way because drawing cards in London is a bottleneck that we know everyone reliably goes through periodically – so we can put the initial thread of a new story there, or a consequential epilogue to a concluded story, and be reasonably sure players will find it. We still regularly do the former, but the latter is currently something we avoid doing exactly because adding cards to the deck is, for a segment of the playerbase, something they never want to happen.
We also want to make sure that optimising the London deck isn’t fiddly, counterintuitive, or unforgiving. It’s not great for the game experience if players are purposefully avoiding one of the most beloved Exceptional Stories to keep it from adding a card to the deck, for example. It’s also not great if players are drawing cards and then immediately regretting it because they forgot to equip the right items to hit the right attribute breakpoints.
But, at the same time, we want to return some control over the deck to players. A thing the London deck currently really doesn’t do is reflect your character, your goals, or the way you want to play the game. As an example, all the factions are represented equally in the deck – irrespective of whom your character is really rubbing shoulders with. We do think this type of play can be fun, both for optimisers and for role-players, if it’s done in a way where the game presents it as a mechanic, rather than the haphazard way players have been able to do it over the years.
But we’re not going to get to this point overnight, or even in a single update. We want to change the deck incrementally, bit by bit, to eventually fit this vision. I’m sharing this intention now, so players can put those individual changes into context. Things like taking the area locks off various cards is one of the early steps in this process.
I hope this update has been enlightening, and I hope you’re as excited as I am for the next six months – and beyond – of Fallen London.
But, considering it has such tie-ins, I will most certain make a jump to it and back to my backlog.
Hoping it feels like more of a slow-down to everyone at Failbetter than it does to me the player!