Fallen London RPG?

Fallen London
21

I’ve thought about this a lot and here’s what I have to say on the matter.

Most fantasy RPGs have 3 main classes, Warrior, Rouge, and Wizard. The class abilities and features of Warrior and Rouge would be easily replicable in the FL universe, but not Wizard, since FL doesn’t have &quotmagic&quot or spells. Gameplay wise, though, Wizards abilities focus on AOE attacks like Fireball and Cone of Cold, buff/enhancement spells for the party like Featherfall and Fly, and spells inflicting status effects on enemies like Blindness/Deafness and Hold Person. While FL might not be able to replicate the magic of a Wizard, it might be possible to replicate the gameplay effects of a Wizard. Perhaps through an Alchemist, Artificer, or Engineer type class focused on using a lot of the weird items on the FL universe. The Chimney Pot Wars mentions Urchins throwing Primordial Shrieks to stun opponents as some sort of Victorian flashbang. Things liek that could work well in creating a Wizard like class.

A Cleric or Paladin style class could actually work in the FL universe, despite the lack of magic. There could be priests of Stone, Storm, and Salt (and maybe the Drowned Man or Lady Black) and they could place Blessings on their allies and Curses on their enemies. Clerics of Stone would have more healing and buffing &quotspells&quot. Maybe their holy symbol/artifact would be like the Mountain-Sherd. Clerics of Storm would have more damaging Curses. Since we don’t really know much about salt, i’m not really sure what their Clerics would be able to do.

A Druid or Ranger class could also be possible. Not really focused on nature magic, but on animal companions. Being able to summon or use beings like Rattus Faber, Zee-Bats, Sorrow-Spiders, Frost Moths, talking Cats, Pentecost Apes, Blemmigans?,maybe even Fingerkings or the Eater of Chains. Pretty much anything you can breed in the Labyrinth of Tigers or buy from Nassos Zoologicals.

As much as people would like to have Rubbery Men or Devils as playable races in this completely hypothetical RPG, I don’t think we know enough about them lore-wise to have them be playable. Instead, I think most (but maybe not all) of the races would be human, but would be different based on nationality/origin. Surfacers would be one of the more basic ones, along with Londoner. There could be Presbyterate/Elder Continent people who have a boost to Constitution and, like elves, live for a very long time. Khaganians would probably get a bonus to Stealth and Persuasion/Diplomacy. People from the Chelonate would probably get a strength bonus and maybe could enter a barbarian-like rage/battle fury state. People from Anthe could also be a possibility, though I’m not entirely sure. Iremi could also be another possibility. As for non-human races, I think Unfinished Men, Tomb-Colonists, and maybe even Snuffer could be possible.

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Yes, FATE core was my first choice. With an experienced group that understood the setting, that’s all you’d need. But a rulebook that built a Fallen London FATE game would make it a lot easier for everyone to maintain the proper flavor. Sorry, I mean flavour.

23

Having played a pair of campaigns drawing heavy inspiration from Fallen London/Sunless Sea/Speculative Sunless Skies…

Absolutely. It’s a rich, and very fun, world to even draw from much less play in. We used Numenera (Monte Cook), and it’s so far worked fabulously.

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Ooh, that’s an interesting possibility. At least for home games; I don’t know whether Monte Cook is interested in franchising in the way that FATE and Savage Worlds are (and Cortex, but apparently they’re having some sort of legal problems right now.)

I bought the Numenera books a while back, after I kickstarted the Torment video game. (I’ve been waiting for that game for four years, and now that it’s out I’ve barely played it. Too busy with Fallen London, and that other thing … whaddayacallit … oh yeah, my dissertation.) But my players haven’t been too interested, and my RIFTS game (drawing heavy inspiration from Borderlands 2) has gone a lot longer than I expected.

[quote=Kindelwyrm]Having played a pair of campaigns drawing heavy inspiration from Fallen London/Sunless Sea/Speculative Sunless Skies…

Absolutely. It’s a rich, and very fun, world to even draw from much less play in. We used Numenera (Monte Cook), and it’s so far worked fabulously.[/quote]

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Yeah. Sadly, I don’t know that they would be as they seem to be mostly caught up in their own original world (Numenera) or D&D (Planescape: Torment is D&D, correct?). Still, it’s a beautiful system. The only other one I could see working out really well without an extensive write-up would be FATE, as FATE’s kind of a catch-all for most systems. It and Numenera have a wonderful state of pliability that allows them to fit many settings in addition to being really easy to use.

There’s also a new system I see advertised a lot called ODAM, but I know nothing about the company except that they like to toot their own horn. The system itself seems incredibly complicated with dream worlds and such… but that could be interesting for Failbetter’s world(s).

[quote=bjharts]Ooh, that’s an interesting possibility. At least for home games; I don’t know whether Monte Cook is interested in franchising in the way that FATE and Savage Worlds are (and Cortex, but apparently they’re having some sort of legal problems right now.)

I bought the Numenera books a while back, after I kickstarted the Torment video game. (I’ve been waiting for that game for four years, and now that it’s out I’ve barely played it. Too busy with Fallen London, and that other thing … whaddayacallit … oh yeah, my dissertation.) But my players haven’t been too interested, and my RIFTS game (drawing heavy inspiration from Borderlands 2) has gone a lot longer than I expected.

[/quote]

26

I’d much rather use an ORE system like A Dirty World or an Apocalypse Engine variant before a FATE shell.

27

Really? But what about the replicability of the third vitreous rarefaction?

Um, that is to say, I’ll have to look those up and get back to you. ;)

28

Fallen London’s challenge mechanics would be too clunky in a tabletop game. Each task requires setting a difficulty value, using the difficulty value and the tested quality to calculate success chance with one of two equations, and generating a random percentile value against the success chance. Keeping track of the change points on each of a potentially very large number of qualities would be a significant bookkeeping task. In storynexus the computer handles the accounting work, and interacting with the mechanical systems from the outside is very smooth, but crunching all the numbers with a calculator and percentile dice would make the game less about mysterious adventures in a subterranean Victorian city and more about trying to arbitrarily assign difficulty values for whatever actions the players want to attempt.

Converting the setting of Fallen London to a tabletop game setting would mean putting everything in an orderly arrangement and publishing it in a &quotguide to Fallen London&quot. That, of course, runs contrary to the entire style of Fallen London, i.e. learning about a world by starting with scattered crumbs of story and background and gradually assembling them into larger chunks, rather than starting at the big picture and choosing a smaller area to focus on. Has the game told me where the Rattus Faber come from? No, not in Fallen London or in Sunless Sea. My first encounter with them showed just what I needed to know for the moment, that they’re rats who know how to use tools and build stuff. Subsequent interactions built on and expanded from there, and I think that storytelling approach is a big part of what makes FL so compelling as a game and as a world. Compiling a gazetteer of Fallen London would result in a book for a game about Fallen London, but I think it wouldn’t be a Fallen London game.

A good tabletop approximation of the Fallen London challenge system would be a dice-pool system along the lines of the Mouse Guard RPG (an adaptation of Burning Wheel which I think surpasses its parent system) or the old World of Darkness games. I’ll give an example of what I mean, using the core Fallen London qualities.

Each character has a numerical value for each of Watchful, Shadowy, Dangerous, and Persuasive. When attempting a challenge, they roll a number of dice (I’ll use 6-sided in this example) equal to their score in the relevant quality. Any dice showing a certain value or above (usually the top half of possible results, which is 4-6 for 6-sided dice) is counted as a ‘success’, and passing a challenge will require a number of successes based on its difficulty as set by the GM. This allows for variable player skill, variable difficulty, and success chances which do not scale perfectly linearly with player skill. It would reflect Fallen London’s conflict resolution mechanic, but with smaller numbers and significantly less arithmetic.

It would also be important to ensure that player characters can be different from one another in ways other than just core stat numbers. Here I think it’d be good to crib a page from Apocalypse World’s book by dividing characters into archetypes, each with exclusive abilities tailored to the setting which the other character types can’t access. In Fallen London, an obvious go-to for this would be the assorted Tier 1+ Professions and their associated &quotConnected&quot qualities: Campaigner (Church or Revolutionaries), Trickster (Hell or the Urchins), Journalist (Bohemians), Watcher (Constables or Great Game), Enforcers (Revolutionaries or Criminals), and Ratcatchers (Docks). If each profession has the unique ability to call in favors, seek information, access facilities, or do other special actions among their particular connected group, then party composition would have a huge impact on how exactly the PCs would go about solving problems in Fallen London and the surrounding Neath.
edited by Anchovies on 3/9/2017

29

Okay, those are really intriguing systems and I can see how they’d fit with Fallen London in cool ways.

Now I really want to try them out. Which means getting my gaming group to agree to it. Better get my cat-herding boots.

Also, you just cost me twenty bucks. I guess it’s a good thing DriveThruRPG is having a sale right now!

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Anchovies, myself, or (probably) both?

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That reply was to you, Mordaine. I’m still thinking about the issues that Anchovies raised. The Apocalypse Engine work-from-the-inside-out approach could solve the issue of preserving the mysteries of the setting, but at the price of every campaign going off-canon. But that might be an insuperable problem. Anyway, you’re the one who cost me money, because I already had a copy of the Mouse Guard game. ;)

32

Well, teh Apocalypse World games are pretty nifty mechanically, and A Dirty World is worth the price of admission for just the one roll plot generator in the back.

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[quote=bjharts]The Apocalypse Engine work-from-the-inside-out approach could solve the issue of preserving the mysteries of the setting, but at the price of every campaign going off-canon. But that might be an insuperable problem.[/quote]I think going off-canon for Fallen London TTRPG games is pretty much inevitable. It’s kinda shady and definitely in bad faith to rework Fallen London stories (especially Fate-locked material) into tabletop-compatible form and distribute it online, and original content based on existing canon is not itself canon unless the creator happens to be a writer for Failbetter Games. I think a Fallen London TTRPG would work best with a group of players who also partake in the browser game, perhaps detailing further adventures of their online citizens of the Neath. It’s also worth noting that a strict adherence to Failbetter-published canon isn’t necessary; heck, the islands of the Unterzee rearrange themselves quite regularly, so the mysterious forces behind Parabola, the Bazaar, Hell, along with the Neath’s general refusal to adhere to the Judgements’ laws, could result in reality changing in unexpected ways on shore as well as at zee.

Fallen London in Storynexus allows for friendly dinners, friendly games of chess, friendly loitering, and friendly murder (knife-and-candle), but there’s no avenue for multiple characters working together and handling challenges as a team or on each other’s behalf. What if the members of your expedition into the Silken Chapel or Forgotten Quarter were not nameless background bodies, but other characters with their own skills, motivations, and associates? It’s territory the existing game doesn’t and/or can’t explore, so a tabletop Fallen London system (whether entirely fan-made or somehow official) could work to fill that design space without stepping on Fallen London’s existing toes (or other foot-bound appendages).

[quote=bjharts]Anyway, you’re the one who cost me money, because I already had a copy of the Mouse Guard game. ;)[/quote]It’s some good stuff, isn’t it? I picked up a really nice hardbound copy at gen-con last summer, and I’m almost as impressed with the quality of the printing, art, and typography as I am with the game itself!

[quote=Mordaine Barimen]Well, teh Apocalypse World games are pretty nifty mechanically[/quote]It’s definitely a useful system. I think it and its adaptations work well for games with a focus on interactions between player characters and high-stakes conflict with external forces, but there’s not a lot of room in the game for character improvement. Characters can improve, of course, but when conflict resolution is always 2d6 against targets of 7 and 10, a character stat can only be increased so many times and an increase of +1 can mean a huge change to rate of success.

Fallen London, however, is very much about continuous improvement in small, gradual increments, which needs a more flexible conflict resolution method. So I’ll agree that the playbook structure is a good approach to thematic design, and some Profession-specific actions could work best with the Apocalypse World system of 2d6 (plus a modifier between -1 and +3) against 7 or 10 for costly or total success, but I think a dice pool would be a better approach for the core mechanic of challenges against Watchful, Dangerous, Shadowy, and Persuasive.

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I may have inadvertently threadjacked earlier on: the initial question was about whether there would be an official tabletop RPG, and I started talking about homebrew games using Fallen London as source material. Two different beasts, really. The thing is that there’s not much to say about an official game. All we can do is speculate and make it known that we’d like one. Well, I suppose that a fan or group of fans with the right skills in writing, game mechanics, business, and law could put together a really good proposal and pitch it to Failbetter (and whatever other entities would prove to have a say in the matter.) But that would be an ambitious project, requiring a lot of time and energy and likely coming to nothing in the end anyway. And it would also have a serious problem with the issue of mystery vs. canon that Anchovies originally raised, as this would bear a Failbetter imprimatur. Unless, I suppose, the gaming book made it clear from the beginning that it was not canon for the video games.

Homebrew games are different. There’s nothing to keep you from cobbling together a home game and playing it with your friends in the privacy of your home or even in the not-quite-privacy of the back room of the comic book store. The scenario that Anchovies suggests would be ideal, but it would require a really dedicated group of players. Maybe I could have done it in my undergraduate days, but these days it’s hard enough to get everyone to come to the game and remember what happened last session. I’ve been trying to get my current group into Fallen London, but with little success so far. Maybe my sales pitch is wrong - &quotIt’s a game where failing is really fun! And it’s super-mysterious, so you never know quite what’s going on!&quot

But a homebrew game inspired by Fallen London is easy enough to do, and there the unfolding-mystery element really works for you instead of against you. That’s possible now. I’ve done it, and (glancing upthread) so has Kindelwyrm.

Perhaps we should make a separate thread about ideas for and experiences from that sort of game? Perhaps we should check with the mods first.

PS: I agree both that the Mouse Guard book is gorgeous and that the Dirty World one-roll mystery generator may have been worth my $7 in itself.
edited by bjharts on 3/9/2017

35

Hell, I just realized: take the name from almost any character from the Neath and you already have their High Concept (from FATE Core). ‘The Traitor Empress,’ ‘The Last Constable,’ ‘The Repentant Forger,’ ‘The Wry Reactionary,’ ‘The Sardonic Music-Hall Singer.’ Come on, Failbetter. A fifty page PDF explaining the tone and the bare basics of the setting and most of us can fill in the blanks. Slap it onto DriveThruRPG and it would print money.
edited by ProfessorDetective on 3/9/2017

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If you get to choose your race in any theoretical game I would obviously be a blemmigan. If you don’t I would less obviously be 7 blemmigans in a trench coat, a big scarf a very large hat.

As the Neath has sapience being granted all over the place their should be some sort of heuristic method for converting “monsters” into playable characters that are at least sensibly (if not fairly) balanced with humans. I wanted to be able solve mysteries with a team of a spider council, a cat, a blemmigan and a raven.

37

You’re right, that’s … pretty perfect, actually. Some of them even have other obvious Aspects, like The Last Constable’s &quotFamily and Law.&quot Really, any of the Connections and Qualities you get could be Aspects. And most of them already have that double-edged quality a good Fate aspect needs. Profession, Ambition, and Closest To are obvious candidates. But then you’d have to choose a couple to go on your character sheet, and you’d have to pick what was most important for the character. Which of your Accomplishments defines you the most? Which Quirks really define you? Which Stories had a lasting impact on you? In a tabletop game, a character who chose something as an Aspect would be the member of the group who dealt with it. If the group only has one Master Thief, one Scholar of the Correspondence, one Darling of the Ambassador’s Ball, and one Bringer of Death, then it starts to become pretty clear what kind of challenges each PC is going to focus on (even though in the actual FL game, each PoSI is probably most or all all of these.)

If you wanted to model FL a bit more closely with a Fate engine, then instead of using the Fate Core skill system, you could use the four attributes as &quotApproaches,&quot as in Fate Accelerated. In Fallen London, most tasks are a test of one attribute, but sometimes you get to choose: instead of using Watchful to tail a spy, you can choose to use Shadowy to go through her purse; instead of using Dangerous to tame a monster, you can use Watchful to speak to it in its own monster-language. Inventive PCs could come up with a lot more of those. And the Menaces you acquired would become aspects too, which enemies could exploit, allies could ameliorate, and could eventually take take you out for a scene or longer. In that sense, Fallen London is a good match for Fate’s multiple health tracks (was that Fate or Cortex? maybe I’m confused) in that dying, going insane, and losing your reputation are tracked on the same scale and all equally inconveniencing.

[quote=ProfessorDetective]Hell, I just realized: take the name from almost any character from the Neath and you already have their High Concept (from FATE Core). ‘The Traitor Empress,’ ‘The Last Constable,’ ‘The Repentant Forger,’ ‘The Wry Reactionary,’ ‘The Sardonic Music-Hall Singer.’ Come on, Failbetter. A fifty page PDF explaining the tone and the bare basics of the setting and most of us can fill in the blanks. Slap it onto DriveThruRPG and it would print money.
edited by ProfessorDetective on 3/9/2017[/quote]

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FATE Accelerated, I almost always forget that that exists and, yes, the Approaches fit almost perfectly. Seriously Failbetter, we’re practically writing this for you, already. I would feel better if they wrote it, though. I’d rather pay some cash to professional writers and designers for a game then homebrew it myself, especially with licensed works.
edited by ProfessorDetective on 3/11/2017
edited by ProfessorDetective on 4/10/2017

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No more to add?

40

Well, I think it’s been established that such a project isn’t officially planned for any time soon. I’d be interested in further discussing how one might use Fallen London in a home game, but perhaps that ought to be a separate thread?