Here’s this week’s thread for any Fallen London questions you don’t want to start a whole thread for!
Does anyone know what age the urchins kick out old members at? The TTRPG says ‘adulthood’, but I can’t think of any teenage urchins - they all seem 12 at the oldest, and the Longshanks Gunner was kicked out for growing too tall. Is it when their growth spurts hit, and they can’t clamber around the Flit as easily?
I would expect it to be a vague ruling. I faintly remember that they don’t necessarily know their age, so that would be a weird basis.
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In the ES The Tempest, I think it’s even stated that Storm’s patronage can delay adulthood. Slivvy might be thirty years old. Also from that ES, said patronage is more based on emotional maturity than physical, it’s about how kids experience rage in a more pure and unrestrained way, whereas grown ups temper it.
The youngest-appearing ex-urchin I can think of is the guttersnipe you can hire for social assassination. I think puberty is a wobbler. I think it wouldn’t be out of place for an urchin gang to have an elder kid who’s a foot taller to show new ones the ropes, but most urchin leaders we see of the major gangs (Molly, the Guttersnipe Princeling) are not visibly older.
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Back in the old Christmas content, Mr Sacks was accompanied by urchin assistants who, it was claimed, gave it their years to remain young for as long as they needed.
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Yeah, but if it’s a loose rule of thumb thing, tossing out 12-13 year olds in the middle of their growth spurts would be a different rule of thumb than throwing out 16-17 year olds
It’s all very Peter Pan and the lost boys so my gut feeling was ‘circa puberty and growth spurts.’ I didn’t know about Slivvy and Sacks’ urchins either, that’s interesting.
This is on my mind because the TTRPG’s preview PDF is out and I’m thinking about having a former urchin PC, and being kicked out and having to find work or a new home at 12 would be different than doing the same at 17.
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I’m confused by the epilogue to the Case of the Clay Kidnapper. I take it the waitress is the “guv’nor,” but who is the guv’nor? Eric? Is the joke that the “kidnapper” is a woman disguised as a clay man and “waitress” is a clay man disguised as a woman? I know Candlefinder cases like to have a little twist at the end, but this seems a bit weak-hitting compared to the others considering we were introduced to Eric one sentence before the reveal and the waitress has no role in the story. Lore-wise, would a clay man be able to disguise themselves as a human? Why would Eric want to impersonate a human waitress? It just seems a little random, like the twist was shoehorned in purely so there could be a gotcha.
I think it’s The honey addled detective (aka Sherlock Holmes). The Urchin refers to him by that nickname in other stories (if I’m remembering Stripes of Wrath correctly, she became a detective inspired by him) and it would be totally in character for him to disguise himself implausibly.
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Yeah, I also thought it was the Honey-Addled Detective. He does a lot of disguises like that in FL and the Sherlock Holmes books, and IIRC he’d been conspicuously absent up until that bit happened. And it’s funny that the Urchin had been able to spot him when all the other detectives hadn’t.
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Thirded. Pranking his friends with disguises is straight out of the canon.
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Reread the scene today and realized my brain had somehow substituted the Implacable Detective with the Honey-Addled Detective in the line “You must give me his card,” the Implacable Detective says. Mea culpa, it obviously makes sense if you don’t misread it.