Azhdarchid

Fallen London: The Making of Irem

Alright, I’m allowed a (very) self-indulgent retro post about my favorite thing we shipped all year, as a treat. Here’s an in-depth look at process, creative decisions, and the general how of the biggest piece of Fallen London that I worked on all year.

Heavy spoiler warning ahead. I’m going to discuss everything about Irem in detail, including things that are Deep Secrets best experienced without warning. I’ll be providing a bit of context for those who don’t care about spoilers or don’t play Fallen London, to the extent that's possible. Spoilers below the break.

Irem is the final, capstone location for Evolution, the mainline story we’ve been adding to the game since 2022. It goes along with (and is the home of) the final chapter of Evolution. Chandler Grover wrote Evolution, including the final chapter; I wrote the persistent Irem location that players gain access to upon finishing Evolution.

In the setting, Irem is an island in the cold, distant edge of the Unterzee; it is a place that exists only in future tense, adjacent to the domain of things that don’t exist (the Is-Not). Things that will exist – the future – pass through Irem to be immanentized. Irem was visited briefly in Sunless Sea, but that game spends significantly less time ashore in its islands than Fallen London does; so like with other islands, the FL interpretation was a chance to greatly expand on the setting.

Irem is an interesting brief for a location because while it was intended as somewhere you could revisit, it was never intended as an economically profitable grind. The big draw to Irem was obtaining some cool items (including the final capstone item for the entire storyline, which would become the Memory of a Much Greater Self) and getting to explore all of the different story threads running through it. Once you’ve done so, you are then “done” with Irem, though you can still revisit it; the future is as yet unwritten, after all.

This was more appropriate for Irem; it’s a place of mystery, the furthest and most distant corner of the Unterzee. It’d feel weird if you were going there every weekend on a money-making expedition. This one-off nature allowed Irem to experiment with format more than other locations, since it didn’t have to cohere into something that players could optimize or fit neatly into an action loop.

Narratively Irem itself is themed around the idea of the future. In a Fallen London context, that naturally merges with the idea that this is where you go to change your Destiny. Destinies are a unique item slot in Fallen London that represents a glimpse of your character’s future. No new Destinies had been added to the game since the slot was originally introduced many years ago, so Irem’s changes to this system were a big deal.

Planning Irem

Irem needed to feel big; we felt like players would expect the final chapter of a major storyline to be scoped bigger than a normal zee island. We wanted to get across the idea of it being a splashy moment without completely blowing the scope, so that naturally leads into a lot of elements of Irem being very dramatic, both mechanically and narratively.

And Irem had to make the most of the opportunity that it presented. A lot of things in Irem are story elements that we can’t really touch in ordinary play – things like the Seventh City or the aftermath of the Liberation of Night. Irem was a unique opportunity to show glimpses of things we knew we wouldn’t get a chance to see again for a long time.

We (the Fallen London writing team) had several conversations about Irem. For a big piece of story like this, we’ll normally have at least one ‘kickoff’ conversation where we just informally talk about goals, player expectations, and ideas; and then we’ll have a more structured ‘story breaking’ session where we try to wrangle all the possible ideas into a coherent shape.

We considered a lot of different versions, and some of the things we didn’t use are still echoed in what ended up shipping. For example, one of the things we considered was a version of Irem where every single card would have some new or strange mechanical idea; some of these would be previews of actual future directions we would take with the game, while others would be pure nonsense.1

In the end, Irem felt complex enough without quite this level of added mechanical complexity, so this was toned down so that not quite every Irem card is doing something strange. I won’t share all of the mechanical ideas that weren’t used (because they might show up elsewhere), but here’s a few early concepts that did make it in:

That’s right, the Terrible Deal was basically conceived in early Irem ideation and survived through every round of iteration. Love wins.

In the end, we landed on the structure we actually used for Irem, which turned into the ‘fate-weaving’ activity. Irem would be essentially a maze, a network of connected possible futures that players would have to navigate to find their ideal ones.

Designing the Loom

Designing a puzzle for Fallen London is quite difficult; the game is built with the assumption of fairly perfect information, but doesn’t have great affordances to surface relevant information to the player. This means that if you build any kind of system complex enough to work as a puzzle, you’ll then struggle to keep the state of that system in front of the player in a way the player can manipulate. The action system also makes puzzle design potentially quite punishing, as there’s an implicit cost to experimentation that isn’t present in a typical game.

The design I eventually landed on was a sort of lateral thinking puzzle where the player had to exploit a quirk of the way card decks work in Fallen London. Locations in FL are really two separate concepts: ‘area’ and ‘setting’. Those are really two totally independent conditions, but an ‘area’ is the player-facing zone you are in the game (Veilgarden, your lodgings, Helicon House, etc) while a ‘setting’ is generally broader, more invisible, and determines some of the key rules of play. Decks are tied to settings – this is why you’re drawing from the same deck, and have the same hand, in Veilgarden as in Watchmaker’s Hill. But individual cards can be set to only be drawn in specific areas.

The design of the Irem puzzle is built around the realization that you can draw a card in one location and then ‘smuggle’ that card into a different location, as a way of having a resource in a place you’re not supposed to. This is perhaps too cute an idea; some players immediately noticed that it was a possibility while others found it basically impossible to solve without outside help. And while Irem is designed to try and subtly nudge you in this direction, with the specific arrangement of the different futures, it’s still only signposted to a point.

Again, the action economy puts a lot of pressure on the player’s ability to simply try something, so puzzles are hard – which is why we don’t do them often. But the idea of Irem as a puzzlebox felt too appropriate to the themes of the story. Ultimately, Irem is a place where our tolerance for complexity and confusion is higher than it is in the normal game. It’s intended to be disorienting, unpredictable, and maybe a little provocative.

This is also why Irem was planned as the debut of the full Boon/Burden feature – things go to Irem to be immanentized, after all, so why not game mechanics? Irem even prefigures some design space around Boons we haven’t revisited (yet), with its collection of Boons that work together as a soft-unlock for a specific check.

Writing the Futures

As part of initial brainstorming, I also settled on all the new futures in Irem, and what they would be. This list fell in place very naturally, and stayed almost the same throughout the whole process. The list emerges pretty straightforwardly from:

The new futures that were mostly created by mashing up those two poles; taking a thematic trope (the dystopian future, the sci-fi future, the post-apocalypse) and viewing them through a Fallen London lens. This initial list of new futures stayed mostly unchanged throughout development.

At this point, I actually started writing exemplar text – each future would have its own narrative voice, and would be written ‘off-model’ from the rest of the game; almost as if you’re glimpsing a different, alternate game.

The Nearby Future

The Nearby Future exists to act as an entry point and to ground the player before pushing the real weirdness on them; it also plays with the trope space of a brief time skip – what does London look like a few years into the future?

This future’s voice is intended to hew as close as possible to London, and specifically early Fallen London. Things like the early-game opportunity cards and some of the older writing in the game were used as an inspiration here.

The Ruinous Future

The Ruinous Future plays on the idea of a post-apocalyptic or bad future, which is a staple of time travel fiction in general. The Neath is basically the sword of Damocles store, so this future never specifies which other shoe dropped; maybe it was all of them. Maybe it was one that we didn’t know about.

The voice of this future was inspired by post-apocalyptic fiction like The Road and Threads. The writing is unpleasantly terse and the world presented is incredibly dismal but stated matter-of-factly.

The Ruinous Future is purposefully an unpleasant place to move around in and do things in, almost a sort of tar pit, with its awful little mini-economy of dismal resources.

The Altered Future

The Altered Future exists to complement Evolution – it lets the player follow in the Youthful Naturalist’s footsteps. It also plays with some less obvious ideas about the future: transhumanism, cosmic horror, and deep time.

This is the future that changed the most in actual writing. The exemplar I wrote originally looks nothing like what ended up in the game:

Tendrils slick on your membranes as the conversation/embrace ceases. Memory/fluid sliding down your throat. Image-sequence: spire, spire, eye, serpent, spire.

This is one of those things that got toned a bit back towards baseline Fallen London because of Irem’s already overall extreme complexity; in the original vision, the Altered Future cards would have been actively difficult to even read. Wanting to have the actual Destiny set there written in a satisfying way also pushed in the direction of a more conventional narrative. Also, writing any amount of this type of text that was even a little bit coherent proved incredibly difficult!

The final Altered text is still extremely abstract, while being able to get across the intended narrative thread.

The Brilliant Future

The Brilliant Future exists to counterpoint the Obscure Future; what if the forces of Light and Law won decisively? What does that look like? This is interpreted through the lens of dystopian fiction – if the Obscure Future is terrifying chaos, the Brilliant Future is inescapable tyranny.

The voice exemplar for the Brilliant Future describes it as ‘cloying toxic positivity’; the final text leans a bit more towards open menace. It’s really only a few degrees off from classic Fallen London voice… except for the places where the normally out-of-character informative meta text is overtaken by the narrative, actively obscuring information that usually would be displayed there.

The Neon Future

The Neon Future is there, honestly, to give players a shock. It’s at once expected (Irem has been playing all along with all these ideas on the ‘future’ theme, so of course it would go fully sci-fi) and unexpected (we actually went there). It’s also a slight sidestepping of the trope in that the Neon Future is set in actual 2023; it’s less ‘sci-fi’ and more an interpretation of 2023 through the same skewed lens through which Fallen London interprets 1889.

The Neon Future’s exemplar text actually made it into the final update unchanged. It’s the text that greets you when you move to the Neon Future.

Getting to put the word ‘email’ into Fallen London was definitely the highlight of my day.

The ‘old’ futures: Jeweled, Silvered, Chilly, Abyssal

While these were already set, work also went into defining their voices and expanding their flavor. The Chilly Future hews a little closer to Sunless Skies in tone. The Jeweled Future pushes the scale of events, briefly turning the game into a war epic. The Silvered Future reproduces some of the breathless manic energy of the original material. The Abyssal Future similarly leans into the darkness of the original material.

The Silvered Future also ended up becoming the home for the Terrible Deal; this is mainly because of where it fits into the overarching structure, but it also worked out very nicely – who else would offer such a deal if not the Fingerkings?

This is of course appropriated from Pathologic 2, which plays in a similar space at one point. I think in Fallen London it has an even stronger valence given how permanent things are in this game; and the live game nature gives this kind of idea a whole other dimension. We really couldn’t do this anywhere other than Irem, so I stuck it in Irem.

Fallen London as a whole has gotten better over time about being fair to the player about what might happen if they make certain choices. This choice is, in a way, kind of playing with that idea; we workshopped the way this meta text was phrased quite a lot, for example, to try and make absolutely clear how this would work.

And, of course, the Terrible Deal is placed where it is specifically because not taking it is slightly inconvenient, but doesn’t prevent you from seeing anything (other than the text for the choice itself).

The new old future: the Dark Future

This one was the product of a lot of consideration and discussion. I realized fairly early on that while I could follow the lead of and extend the other existing futures, that wasn’t really possible for the Obscure Future.

Ultimately, the way we portray the Liberation of Night has changed over the years, and the tone of how we depict Liberationist characters has shifted. This change was already well underway with Sunless Skies, for example. So adding more Obscure Future material required either:

This the kind of challenging circumstance that will naturally happen when you have a long-running setting with a lot of interconnected factions and issues within it. The eventual solution was to just accept and highlight the gap. Hence why in Irem you won’t find the Obscure Future, but rather the (distinct) Dark Future. This is in some ways a stitch in the continuity, but it also lets us counterpoint perspectives and explore some different ideas that, I think, broaden the faction in narratively useful ways.

This was also some of the hardest material to write, because the Liberation as an idea is so slippery; it had to be both hopeful and a little scary.

How this ended up playing out in the writing is exemplified well by the card ‘The Liberation, in Violant’ – which is about the idea of sharing, or more properly of a non-monetary economy driven by mutual aid and the fulfillment of community needs in a non-extractive way. But it’s played for a little bit of disquiet:

Those who still care to remember London (before the Liberation, when such names applied) might compare it to the winter holidays. But you are all Mr Sacks. "Take these lapsarian wines," a neighbour tells you. You gladly oblige.

You share, above all, those things you have in excess. Help those in your community who are lacking in regrets, in minor indiscretions, in old extravagant pre-Liberation clothes, in curious travelling companions...

The Liberation is meant to retain a little edge, even if you’re sympathetic to it. One of the thematic ideas it plays with is the sense of examining one’s political discomfort – “is this too extreme or am I not radicalized enough.”

No Future

This was a bit of a late addition, a little extra-secret bonus. It has no cards; you might say it barely exists at all. I’ll say a bit more about it when I get to discussing Destinies.

Writing the Destinies

Knowing we wanted to add new Destinies, I set about figuring out what they were. The direction here was pretty clear:

All the original Destinies have evocative names that, to my mind, sound a lot like the names of Major Arcana cards. I wanted to take this connection and run with it, naming the available Destinies after their own Major Arcana. In practice, the new Destinies are named with a mix of ‘real’ Arcana names and ‘neathy’ Arcana names – suggesting that the old Destinies are also found somewhere in the Neathy Tarot. It does after all have 77 whole major arcana (and is presumably very hard to shuffle).

The exact mix of Destinies actually changed a lot over development, because they ended up being much more closely tied to the futures than I thought they would be – with futures suggesting other possibilities and therefore asking for an extra Destiny here or there, or with Destinies that didn’t feel interesting ending up being cut.

Designing the Destinies

The narrative and creative parts are only half the equation, however. A lot of work in Irem went into figuring out how Destinies would be obtained, how to match the old/new Destiny options against each other mechanically, how to line it up with festivals. This is a big part of design in FL that’s fairly invisible to players, at least when we get it right: lining up new material with old material while meeting player expectations and avoiding unpleasant swerves.

We chose deliberately to lean towards being fairly generous to players about whether and when and how you could change your Destiny. Partly this is just meeting the power fantasy where it is, narratively – you did all this work, you zailed to Irem, you got your grubby little hands on the Loom of Fate itself, you should get to manipulate your destiny a bit. But it’s also part of generally steering the game towards being a bit more generous and a bit more realistic to how most players actually play it.

Putting it all together

Irem was a big lift; it was tough to write, and it demanded an unusual level of coordination with Chandler Grover, who wrote the final chapter of Evolution. The intent was for that chapter to act both as the ending to the main storyline, and as an introduction or semi-tutorial to Irem itself; a pretty tough brief that I think Chandler handled exceptionally. His ideas informed a lot of what Irem became. Since Evolution was based on an original story treatment that I did, getting to riff on the ideas and vibes that Chandler brought to it was a very satisfying moment of coming full circle.

Irem remains my favorite thing I’ve ever done for Fallen London (thus far). If you couldn’t tell from the preceding 4000 words about it. I still think about it a lot, and I think it’ll remain the thing that I think about when I think about 2023, professionally. I hope it was as baffling, frustrating, joyful, absurd, surprising, and vicious for you as it was for me.

  1. Astute readers might notice where I stole this idea from.↩

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