Azhdarchid

The Fallen London approach to worldbuilding, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the lore

Fallen London is a 13-year-old game that’s been handled by dozens of writers over its lifespan, with a lot of emphasis on big mysteries and a hugely complex setting. I think we’ve figured out a trick or two.1

As usual, this is a casual post going over a few strategies we employ, rather than a coherent essay trying to find one grand argument about worldbuilding. This is also more of a discussion of methods and strategies, and is therefore probably going to be a little dry; I’m not going to get into themes or tone, or how to “worldbuild like Fallen London” in the sense of how to make something that has a similar vibe. Rather, this is about how to care and feed a very hairy IP without losing your mind.

There is no canon but player-facing canon

Sometimes, for my own amusement or to disturb the players, I come into the official Discord and say some word of God type statement. Or I clarify something that’s confusing to the players.

Truth is, though, those kinds of statements aren’t really canon. Our internal documentation isn’t really canon. It’s accurate to the canon (I hope), but it’s not the source of truth. The source of truth is material in the games that players can see. That’s it.

This is the only sane way to do it. I really think it’s pretty delirious to make decisions about the setting and then just lock them in a document somewhere. That makes sense for a project in pre-production, where you’re trying to align everyone on the vision for what’s going to be the story; but for an ongoing game with hundreds of thousands of words of player-facing narrative, you really can’t work that way.

We document intentions and future plans, but those are just that… intentions and future plans. We also document things that we’ve implied, or that form the background of released stories, but which isn’t explicitly stated. Ultimately, though, if something hasn’t made its way to released content, it’s subject to change. The major reasons for this approach:

  1. This is how it ends up working out in practice. It’s very, very difficult to convince a writer – including oneself – to stick to ‘lore’ that only exists in a setting bible.
  2. Once you’re writing in an established setting with established characters and rules, there’s really quite a few constraints on what writers can do. You don’t want to pile on more constraints unnecessarily.
  3. If you document real player-facing canon facts alongside things that only exist in your head, point 1 will eventually come around to bite you in the ass. Someone will eventually mess with something thinking it wasn’t ‘real’ canon when in fact it was. Writers need to be able to trust that if they see something put down on a lore document as canon, that means we’ve said so to the players, too.

In practice, because of the way that we work, we almost never really decide or think very hard about setting elements far in advance of when they start to affect real content. Of course, we write a lot of mysterious implications and future hooks; and when we do, we do think about what is probably behind those. But that remains at least theoretically fluid until the time comes to peel back the curtain and confirm a particular version of things.

Making calls and managing conflicts

A major question when dealing with this type of setting where you have a bunch of stories in flight concurrently and they all have to coexist: how do you handle conflicts? As in, when two stories are pulling the setting in different directions, how do you decide which version to go with?

In reality our main strategy for dealing with this is just setting ourselves up to succeed by not letting it happen very often at all in the first place. Our setting is expansive enough to give everyone elbow room, basically. We’re not putting writers in the position of picking up a character, doing major things to that character’s arc, and then setting the character down for someone else to handle.

This is especially important when working with freelance writers; external writers are hugely important to Fallen London – they bring voices and perspectives that we just can’t supply in our small team, for one thing. But we can’t demand that they know every last detail of the setting, or that they have the same kind of awareness of upcoming stories that I have. So we have to make sure that they have space to play without getting trampled, which often means being able to develop their own characters and arcs.

That the setting can support this is, therefore, really important to making all this work. Fallen London is set up so that the setting doesn’t revolve around 20 named dudes and their specific character arcs. Having room to create new things is a major tool.

But okay, let’s say a conflict does happen. This is extremely rare for us, but the approach to solving these cases starts with communication and awareness; it begins with having multiple people on our small team who know what’s going into upcoming stories. If a call does need to be made, it gets made based on two criteria:

Note the way I’m phrasing this – the question is not “which writer gets to define this”, it’s “which story gets to define this.” Because…

Lore serves story and not the other way around

I mean, that’s supposed to be an obvious observation, though I sometimes wonder. But let’s think through the implications of this.

First, we’re willing to complicate, contradict, or diverge from past canon if it makes sense for a particular story. Part of this is a luxury of Fallen London’s mode of storytelling; the game is very oblique, and things are rarely stated in unambiguous terms. We try not to do this willy-nilly, because it does have a cost. Most apparent inconsistencies that do make their way into the narrative are intended as unreliable narrators or different lenses into the same underlying truth; most actual contradictions are simply mistakes.

But sometimes we make a conscious decision to change things. Often this is because we’ve changed our philosophy on how we want to portray something.

Second, wanting to answer a lore question is not a valid reason to write a story. Never ever. Stories are about themes, interesting characters, conflicts. Sometimes a story is just about a really good scene and all you want to do is build the vehicle that gets there. But the open mysteries of the setting are never the reason to write a story. Sometimes they’re a starting point to ideating (“I wonder why Virginia is Like That…”) but the point is that this ideating is supposed to lead to something – a character, an arc, a moment, a theme – that really gets a story going.

We can’t afford to be precious

Over the course of a typical year in Fallen London we do:

This is a lot of material. It’s enough material that no single person can have close editorial oversight of every single thing going into the game. And we do it pretty lean and fast, with a small team and the aid of a small group of brilliant freelancers.

This is all to say: this all works because of trust. Fallen London passes through many hands and when it’s in someone’s hands, they have a lot of autonomy to define new truths about the setting. On a broad collaborative project, the role of a creative lead is to keep everyone rowing in the same direction, not to make individual calls every time someone wants to invent a character or a setting element.

This holds for every aspect of the game. I have a lot of notes about the themes of Fallen London, the underpinning ideas of the setting, the tone, the voice, etc, etc, etc. But writers need to be allowed to bring their own sensibilities; and for whatever length of time they get to carry Fallen London, they get to pour their own voice and preoccupations into it. We have an Exceptional Story in flight right now that’s about subject matter that nobody on our writing team would have even started on.2 That’s exciting. That’s something that enriches the setting.

In conclusion...

Again, this is a methodology that works for us and makes sense in the context of a long-running project like Fallen London. It contradicts a lot of widespread advice about this kind of thing. Some of this is because that advice is very wrong. Some of this is because that advice makes sense, but in a different production context or for a different type of setting. Figuring out which is which is left as an exercise to the reader.

  1. These are, of course, my own thoughts on it, and they may differ from others who have led the game creatively over the years. I write these blog posts primarily to clarify my own thinking.↩

  2. No, don’t ask what it’s about or who’s writing it. You’ll find out when it comes out. Don’t ask me when that’s happening either.↩

#Fallen London #cohost #on writing