Failbetter Games has announced that their Fallen London videogame world will soon come to the adjacent world of tabletop roleplaying. It’ll be “a fully-fledged, custom tabletop roleplaying system for Fallen London, in a big book,” says Failbetter. So prepare to explore the neath and its great big city, Fallen London, in 2025—and probably don’t talk to any devils.
“In Fallen London: the Roleplaying Game, players create their own characters by drawing on the factions, archetypes, and settings of the city — cutthroats, socialites, radicals, academics, and other, stranger creatures. They are brought together by a shared ambition; a very nearly unachievable goal. Such ambitions may destroy or drive mad those who pursue them… or they may change London forever. The Heart, as they say, is Destiny’s engine,” reads the official description.
“Fallen London is turning 15 in 2025 and this is our big anniversary project. We wouldn’t have got here without you; we hope that this is a suitable anniversary present,” said Failbetter in the announcement.
Failbetter says more information about Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game will be forthcoming on August 23, when they reveal the full project in a live stream on Johnny Chiodini’s YouTube channel. That stream will include Chiodini, a streamer with an enthusiasm for tabletop, alongside representatives from Failbetter and the tabletop game’s publisher.
The Fallen London tabletop RPG will be published by Magpie Games, an outfit that started as a pretty small indie RPG publisher but has really blown up over the years. They still do quite bespoke little indie games, but they’re now well known as big-IP publishers. Their most successful game is the official tabletop RPG for Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was the most-funded tabletop roleplaying game of all time on Kickstarter at a total of about $10 million.
Fallen London is the ever-so-popular world of the eponymous free browser game that it’s named for, started in 2010 and still going strong, where a strange alternate Victorian period plays out amid the lightless depths of a London stolen by bats and plopped into a metaphysical sinkhole that is, geographically, somewhere near Hell. It later became the setting of delightful doomed-ocean-captain simulator Sunless Sea in 2015 followed by equally-doomed-space-train-engineer simulator Sunless Skies in 2019.
You can read the full announcement on Failbetter Games’ website.