If you’re not sold yet, please read Part 2.
If you are sold yet, you can find Fallen London here.
Hey friends. If you want to know why I’ve been ranting about this game nonstop for months on end…well, here you go.
See more posts like this on Tumblr
#fallen londonMore you might like
That was somebody's mom whose dream had always been to be a restaurant owner but sadly she married into the mafia and she was like the mom of someone important and moms are like the one authority italians recognise so when she put her foot down and said "NO. We are going to make them great food and give them the most lovely evening!" Nobody dared disagree and thanks to op she got to live her dream for a night she probably remembers them as fondly as they remember her
The full Mind Mine Adventure Seed is up! You guys can download the full PDF for FREE here at my Gumroad, or here at my Patreon!
Special thanks to all of my patrons that made this all possible!
-M
The Monster Squad Campaign
I make a lot of game recommendations, but what kinds of games do I actually play? I figured I'd lead you through something that I did for the first half of this year that both I and my players got pretty stoked about.
At the beginning of the year, I started a project that took a group of players on a tour through various monster-related tabletop roleplaying games, following a singular timeline, and I'd like to tell you about it! I'm also going to include the playkits I made for each game.
We kicked things off with Wardens, a 24XX hack about peasants with spirit companions who gave them the ability to protect their local village from supernatural threats. The main goal was to establish a bit of the setting, and introduce the idea of magic seeping into the world. The characters saved a dragon egg from the clutches of a greedy sorcerer, and received magical talismans that they could pass on to their children or spiritual heirs. (Playkit Here)
Our next game was Wolf Hounds, a PbtA game about the Benandanti, werewolves being hunted by the Inquisition. This took place in the same world, 200-300 years down the road. This was where one of the players decided to carry a wolf through-line throughout the entire campaign, while another player decided to highlight a masonic/magical through-line. By the end of this game, the characters had discovered that vampires had infiltrated the Church. (Playkit Here)
Our third game was Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants, a Forged in the Dark game. This was a slightly longer campaign, where much of the lore came in full force. We moved forward in the timeline to a point where vampires had taken over the entire isle, and players cobbled together characters blessed by the Fae - following the traditions of their peasant ancestors. We re-visited some locations that had changed over time - namely, a lake from Wardens and a monastery from Wolfhounds. We didn't play out the entire revolution, but watched the brigands gain ground, and made guesses as to what the final days of the Rebellion would look like. (Playkit Here)
Next up was Knights of the Road, a high-flying game of monster-hunters in the 1920's. This was a quick one-shot game, where the players had to figure out what was causing disappearances. It turned out to be a set of demons who had taken over the running of a train - and together they managed to resist the temptations of Hell in order to well, blow up the engine. It was quick trip of high-flying adventure before we took a big jump forward in time. (Playkit Here)
I proposed Urban Shadows 1e because I already had the book, and I really wanted to dig into some more traditional PbtA games. And boy did it deliver. The GM tools in this game showed me what kind of preparation I needed for an Urban Shadows game, and we hit the ground running. Our werewolf character had two previous incarnations revived as NPCs, and the whole crew got mixed up in a series of plots involving cabbalic rituals, werewolf hunters, a faerie lawyer and a poor girl stuck with fortune-telling abilities. The end was big and tragic and all of the characters left hints leading to Apocalypse Keys. (Playkit Here)
Gosh, Apocalypse Keys. Let me tell you, this is where the play group really shone. My players had bonded as a group and sank their teeth into character creation like it was a carcass and they were ravenous wolves. I wrote my own mystery about a summer camp that was housing teenage monsters. During the entire mystery, we were able to tie in pieces of the past games. Knights of the Road made an appearance as a rival faction, looking to do harm to monsters. Our Werewolf player (The Last) collected the echoes of their previous characters into a shared body and flirted with bringing the Fae back to their full power. Our Mason character (The Fallen) adopted a dragon and accidentally converted him into their worshipper. The Shade convinced The Found to sever a victim's lifeline so that she could bring them back untouched by the Harbinger. The Summoned called upon the Fae from our Brinkwood campaign to help them but ended up hardening their heart and pushing themselves closer to Ruin. And our newest addition, the Surge, wrestled with a Harbinger she had contained within herself, giving him more and more power over her in order to save her nephew. (Playkit Here)
The ending of the campaign was big and emotional. A number of characters made callbacks to previous games. One of our players chose Soft to be Strong by Marina as our ending track, and we had a chance to re-live our favourite moments before we brought the campaign to a close.
Looking back, what would I have done differently about these games? I think I would have chosen something other than Knights of the Road, tbh. It didn't add much to the game experience as a whole - when it came to theme it was too distant from the rest of the games. There were other games that I had been thinking of adding to this lineup that I cut for various reasons, like Sunset Kills, Turn, Subway Runners and Adiotopia. I think Sunset Kills might have been the ideal switch-out for Knights of the Road. The monsters would remain sympathetic, rather than become simple opposition, and the players would probably learn the game pretty quickly, considering the number of other PbtA games on this list. The biggest drawback would be a pretty significant timeskip. However, adding the Knights into Apocalypse Keys definitely redeemed it a bit in my eyes.
I'm excited to do another run of thematically-tied games in the future, and when I do, I'll blog about it!
verdantmeadows asked:
I thought this might be fun for you to talk about because I know I love talking about my stuff, and if you don't want to talk about it I will just look it up, but since I see you post it all the time, I'll ask: What is Fallen London?
hallowgendered answered:
HI VERDANT OH MY GOD YES I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.
fallen london is a free browser game that takes place in late 1800s london after the city fell through the surface of the earth in the 1860s into a vast impossible cavern beneath the ground called the neath. the sun and other stars are essentially the gods of this universe who control what is and what isn’t, and since the neath isn’t exposed to sunlight, the rules of the sunlit world don’t apply, which results in things such as death being impermanent and more of a minor inconvenience than anything else. in fallen london, you play as someone from the surface who comes down into the neath for whatever reasons they might have, and you fuck around and find out.
that’s a very basic summary of it. there’s a lot more to go over, a lot of which i don’t even know yet because i haven’t been in the fandom for very long, but i am obsessed with it right now (which i’m sure you can tell). there are some other fun details i could add even to that paragraph, like how it’s currently the third year of 1899 because the empress decided london just wasn’t going to enter the new century, and how hell is right next door and there are devils casually walking around the streets, but i don’t want to overcomplicate things. it’s pretty interesting, but it’s also pretty fucked at times, just as a warning. this game will be a horror game if and when it wants to be
there are other games in the same universe that are paid on steam (sunless sea, sunless skies, mask of the rose) but i don’t own any of those (yet) so i’m not gonna comment on them too much. sunless sea has you exploring the massive underground ocean in the neath called the unterzee as the captain of a ship, sunless skies takes place in a “possible future” where london discovers space travel and you get to explore space, and mask of the rose is a dating sim/murder mystery that takes place right after the fall of london and shows how its people react and adjust to their new lives in the neath.
also, if you’ve ever seen this before:
ALTthis is from fallen london’s character creation screen.
also also, the stupendium wrote a twelve minute song about it, and it’s one of my favorite songs ever.
i highly recommend it if you’re interested :]
