Simplifying Fallen London Lore

Fallen London
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Yesterday I found the XKCD Simple Writer and for fun wrote this description of what happened to Mr. Eaten using it’s restrictions. Since then I’ve found it is in general really fun to try and translate Fallen London lore into it’s simplified form. The lore is often pretty complicated and/or really weird so trying to find ways to explain it within the word restrictions and still have it make sense can be really tricky. As an added bonus, it also tends to end up sounding pretty funny. So I’m challenging everyone to try and translate a piece of Fallen London lore into it’s simplified form.

As a courtesy to the other forum users, please put you’re description inside spoiler tags like these [spoiler]YOUR TEXT[/spoiler] without the *s and put a description of what they contain above so users can avoid spoilers for content they haven’t seen yet. Note that you can only have one set of spoiler tags per post so if you write multiple descriptions be sure to split them up into multiple posts.

To kick this off, here is a description I put together of Prisoner’s Honey and Red/Gaoler’s Honey.

[spoiler]On the surface there are tiny winged creatures with outside bones that use flowers to make sweet food stuff. If you eat this food stuff you will be happy and if you eat too much of it you will grow wider. But beneath the earth there are special flowers that grow in a crazy dream place. When tiny winged creatures make sweet food stuff using the dream flowers the food stuff does special things. If you eat the special food stuff you go on a trip to the crazy dream place and if you take it with friends you can even go together. But take too much of it and you’re body will come back before you’re brain and you may do things you will later wish you didn’t do.

But dream flowers aren’t the only thing the winged creatures can make special sweet food from. There are places where people are put in metal boxes with holes and the tiny winged creatures use them to make special red sweet food stuff. If you eat the red food stuff instead of going to the dream place you go into the head of the person it was made from. This is fun for you but very not fun for the person because it hurts a lot. Normal special sweet food is okay but red special sweet food is very against the law. If you take some you are probably a bad person or maybe you just wanted to be cool. Or maybe it was just that one time because you didn’t know what it was but you wanted to know and now you’re sorry. In that case maybe you should not put strange things in your mouth. You never know who it might hurt.[/spoiler]

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This is amazing.

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My this is very tricky! (well not such much my last paragraph ;) ) An awful lot of fun to try out! :)

Here is my attempt at the origins of The Dawn Machine and little bit on the Judgements.

When the big city we are now in got taken under the earth years ago people didn’t like that it was dark. The sun and star light keeps things normal above the ground. The stars are just big old leader space people. They like everything to be normal, but they are not always so very good. If they get angry they send cold-blood sky animals, with fire in their mouths, to eat people.

Under the earth the dark makes lots of very not normal, both strange and sometimes bad, things happen. Just look about now! There are talking animals to see, and night-time not bird sky animal people from space, and people with sea animal heads, and not full dead people.

So anyway, the main leader lady in the big rich house had some boat leaders. (The main leader lady had lots of boats back then to put many of her fighting people in, so needed lots of boat leaders too.) The boat leaders wanted to fix things here and make them more normal. They all thought it would be good to go get a new sun, to make it light here under the earth as well.

So they had an idea to make a Sun Rise Machine down South-west in the under earth sea using fire space writing and other strange stuff to be a new sun for us. But when they had made a bit of it, things all turned out very bad! The Sun Rise Machine got all alive and woke up! It took over some of the boat peoples’ heads, and now it wants to take over every persons’ head and be big leader of every thing. Even above ground land and all of space land too!

But it still isn’t all made yet, so it can’t do what it wants for now. So maybe we can still stop it? If not, well then it will be the new sun- THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN…

edited by Charlotte_de_Witte on 1/15/2016

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[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]I love xkcd. [/color][color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]This is too good to pass up. [/color]
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[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)]This is for Polythreme (with spoilers from Heart’s Desire) [/color]
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[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)][spoiler] [/color]There is a place across the water from the big city under the earth that is very strange, and also very loud. All the things are alive in this place, even things that usually would not be alive, like hats, coats, stones and ships. It is loud because everything is talking or screaming. The leader of this place is the Important Leader Person with a Hundred Hearts, and he has to send men made of the stuff that is used to hold stones together to the big city to do work or bad things might happen. These men are good for doing lots of work, but some people are afraid of them because if they have pieces missing, then it can cause problems. Two of these men with pieces missing work for a winged space creature that likes special stones and they sometimes hurt people for him.

There is a story that there were two men that were in love long ago, a man who led a city and a man who travelled far selling things. The traveller was very sick and was going to die. This made the second man sad, so he told the winged space creatures that he would give them his city if they could save his lover’s life. The winged space creatures put a special rock from a mountain under the earth with a lot of life in the chest of the sick man and they took the city under the earth with them as the First City.

The rock made the sick man better, but it made him too alive because the rock had a lot of life in it from the special mountain, and it made everything around him alive too. The traveller was now the Important Leader Person with a Hundred Hearts, but he was very angry because he did not want to be alive like this, and he didn’t love the leader of the first city anymore. This made the leader of the city very very sad. Now he runs a hotel with a few very rich people and a lot of crazy people in it, but he wants to play a card game to try to make the Important Leader Person with a Hundred Hearts love him again.[color=rgb(194, 194, 194)][/spoiler][/color]
edited by Irene on 1/14/2016

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Ahh, but it’s so much more fun to say &quotThe shades and hues of my preference are those of the Xanthous kind&quot than &quotmy favorite color is yellow.&quot
edited by Tyrone on 1/14/2016

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Not really a spoiler, so…

Do you remember how we came to that place? And they sang of their sky-branched-powers and their bad feelings having to do with shapes? And we leaned our moving plates to the side and lifted our tall pointed roofs to a better-liked position. We said hello then and put all the singing groups together. And not enough, not enough. Still it is sad over what it lost, and still waits the Sun.

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Another fan of xkcd here. As someone who owns both What If? and Thing Explainer, this is hilarious!

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A story about where dead people go, in which I try to put simple words in a serious order. Don’t believe every word you read, as I can’t stop myself making up new facts:

[spoiler]
Down here in the dark lands, we almost never die. Safe from the laws of the Sun and its sisters, our bodies accept blows and knives as familiar friends. A few eat strange animals among the sea creatures, and live wet and changed forever after. Others learn terrible arts of blood and heart and brain, and bring the true end to those they kill. But most of us stay dry and alive, and grow older by far than the oldest man on the surface.

When a man becomes as old as a tall tree, his skin dries into paper, and bones break at the blowing of the west wind. He wraps soft sheets around his face to hold in his eyes and tongue. Later, he falls and loses a foot on a sharp stone. He learns from this, and walks slowly to the sea’s edge where travellers sell even softer clothes from far away lands. These he ties around his arms and legs and stomach, and leaves a small hole so he can feel inside and know that everything is there. For years he rests, plays checkers, and eats food his children’s children have never heard of. We see him at the stones of memory, rubbing sight-less fingers over the names of those who disappeared into Hell by one path or another.

One night the man can no longer eat. His family puts on black wooden faces, and leads him to the ship of endings. He sits down next to a woman who forgot her own name, and another who won’t stop laughing at a joke she tells to herself over and over again. After a year that the man does not notice, the ship leaves the city of the living, and travels north to a place a hundred times its size.

Everything I have just told you, the people of this land say to each other. They think of themselves as young, the same way a new building is young even if the stones and trees that built it fell many years ago. We call these people Those Who Settle In Their Final Resting Place, but in their own language they say they are Guards of Time. Deeper into the lands there are those who wear birds and see images in flat black stones. They are the true old ones, and the dead god below them forces them to stay alive.

But the man who just arrived is young, and cannot travel into the furthest lands. He is told that here, safe from the laws of the river and her children, the world will forget his body. A dream of years passes over this man, and he loses himself bit by bit to the makers of light. At last, when his body is something else entire, a wing beats inside of him. Blue life spins his soul into pain and love and a great silent fall. If he fails this moment, he will go to the Final Hospital and no human will speak to him again. If he can break in the perfect way, then all will be well and all that we will ever know will be well.[/spoiler]
edited by TheThirdPolice on 1/15/2016