We are giddy to announce that we are working with tabletop roleplaying legends Magpie Games to create Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game, a fully-fledged, custom tabletop roleplaying system for Fallen London, in a big book and everything!
In Fallen London: the Roleplaying Game, players create their own characters by drawing on the factions, archetypes, and settings of the city — cutthroats, socialites, radicals, academics, and other, stranger creatures. They are brought together by a shared ambition; a very nearly unachievable goal. Such ambitions may destroy or drive mad those who pursue them… or they may change London forever. The Heart, as they say, is Destiny’s engine.
We’re doing a live-stream to introduce the project in full on August 23rd at 16:00 EDT/21:00 BST. Hosted by friend, scholar, journalist, streamer and Doctor of the Internet Kat Brewster on their Twitch channel, guests will include Mark Diaz Truman and Brendan Conway from Magpie, and Fallen London creative lead Bruno Dias and communications director Hannah Flynn from Failbetter Games.
Fallen London is turning 15 in 2025 and this is the big anniversary project. We wouldn’t have got here without you; we hope that this is a suitable anniversary present. <3
If you want to, you can use this thread to submit questions for the livestream and I’ll come back and scoop them up. I don’t know if we’ll get to everything, but we’d love to know what you want to know!
… oh wow - not what I had suspected (I honestly had no clear expectations at all ;) ) but being a tabletop rpg person myself I have to say I am more than thrilled!!! =)
… my first question would be (as parts of your endeavor have already been discussed in a threat here), given how vague and interpretable (is that actually a word?) Fallen London is and - given the continuous nature of the game - probably somehow needs to be, how hard is it to formulate information, lore, content strict and settled enough for a rpg rulebook - or will it maybe open more of an „alternate universe“-Fallen London?
Oh, wow, I did not see this coming, but I am very pleasantly surprised! Glad you got Johnny Chiodini to show it off; are they planning to do an actual play of it, too?
Wait! You mean the 10 year anniversary, with all that content bomb, was 4 and a half years ago?! Big congratulations, delicious! Now I am 100% certain we will celebrate 20 years of FL!
I got into Fallen London based on the recommendation of a friend in my D&D group, who’d happened across it while collecting inspiration for an as-yet-unplayed alternate history Victorian setting she was working on. Since then, I’ve been hoping for a chance to bring my FL character to the table. My group is really looking forward to playing this next year!!
Super excited! Maybe I can finally get my friends into the games. Sunless Skies was definitely a nice entry point, but I always will love the Neath and FL.
I admit that my pen-and-paper-roleplaying-every-free-minute days are now years (or, oh gosh, actually far more than a decade) behind me and the same holds true for the rest of my old groups - so this is not as totally exciting to me as to others. But I’ll still definitely back it, and peruse the rulebook curled up on the sofa, and smile a lot of silly little nostalgic smiles while reading. :-)
This is really cool to hear! I’ve been looking for an RPG I use to run fallen london campaigns for a while and Magpie’s stuff is always pretty good. I’ve quite liked their playbook format in what I’ve played of them (I’ll admit to being most familiar with their superhero and Avatar content so mostly Powered by Apocalypse rulesets. I’m kind of expecting something similar here, but I’d be excited either way). I also feel like Magpie’s normal focus on emotionality over physical damage could replicate London’s ‘death is reversible’ rules really well.
I am curious as to how the less human characters will be treated. I had a go at homebrewing stuff a while back (never really produced anything, mostly just loose ideas) and one thing that struck me was the vastly different knowledge bases characters like cats, rubbery men, devils etc start with, and that seems like it could be a little difficult to build out to playable. Excited to find out what they go for though
