The Fallen London franchise
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You
Formerly the first officer of The Orphean, a disastrous expedition to the Blue Kingdom results in the death of Captain Whitlock and your unexpected promotion to the position of captain. Now it's up to you - and your heirs - to decide what to do now that the skies are quite literally the limit, but beware: a thousand deaths wait in the sky...
- The Alcoholic: One possible way of reducing your Terror is to take to the bottle when given the option; do it too many times, however, and your coping strategy can result in your Nightmares going up as your addiction takes its toll on you.
- And the Adventure Continues: Most ambitions end with your captain retiring to a life of wealth and fame. However, there are a few exceptions...
- The Martyr-King's Cup ambition. You can pledge your allegiance to the Unseen Queen and become a soldier in her war to destroy death; you can accept the Queen's gift and adventure forever in the Golden Day; or you can kill the Queen, drink the cup, and blaze a trail across the heavens as an immortal skyfarer.
- The Truth ambition. In one variation of the story, you can escape from the consequences of discovering the truth by fleeing back through the Avid Horizon, leaving you to spend the rest of your days having adventures in the Neath.
- Badass Bookworm: A distinct possibility for captains who took the "Academic" or "Poet" background, especially if you took the "Fame" ambition, which requires your captain to pour all their experiences into a bestselling novel.
- Badass Bureaucrat: The "Auditor" origin, in which you started out as a functionary within one of London's ministries.
- Benevolent Boss: Maintaining control of the ship doesn't require quite so much of the whip this time around, and it's possible to reduce fear by performing kind acts for your crew. Among other things, this can involve giving an extra ration of rum to your crew, presiding over the funeral of a dead shipmate, or sharing tea with another crewmember roused by nightmares.
- Can't Stop the Signal: At the end of the "Fame" ambition, the Ministry of Public Decency deems the Sixth Canto of your memoirs to be subversive literature and has the publishing house behind the Cantos so far closed down. One possible means of getting around this is to set up an underground printing press and produce the now-bestselling novel in such quantities that the Ministry is forced to permit its existence - if only to spare themselves the embarrassment of being outwitted.
- Famed In-Story:
- Participating in the war between the Stovepipes and the Tacketies will gradually net you a great deal of attention, to the point that you can end up declared the pride of London or the poster-child for the revolution... though this does mean that the enemy faction will soon begin attacking you on sight.
- The goal of the "Fame" ambition is to become this by publishing your memoirs, to the point that successive captains can consider their copy of the book their inspiration.
- In the aftermath of "The Martyr King's Cup" quest, if you killed the Unseen Queen and seized immortality for yourself, your heir can hear some extraordinary rumors about an invincible skyfarer's exploits.
- Friend-or-Idol Decision: "The Truth" ambition is set up by the captain researching the loss of an old friend from before they crossed through the horizon. Near the end of the story you're given the option by The Halved to sacrifice your friend's soul to the Fire That Follows in order to be shielded by The Courtesy, allowing you to murder a sun. If you choose not to, the story instead turns to you and your friend's attempt to escape the Fire That Follows together.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: You start out as the hastily-promoted captain of a tiny, badly-damaged locomotive slowly limping home after a spectacularly failed mission. By the end of one captain's tenure, you may have become one of the richest citizens of the High Wilderness, a famous explorer and author, an immortal adventurer, or maybe even the guy who killed a Sun. And that's barely covering the stuff you can do before you end your current game.
- Horrible Judge of Character: It's possible to make some astonishingly poor decisions concerning trust. This being the High Wilderness, this can and probably will end in your untimely death: barring exceptional circumstances, the Amiable Vagabond is not your friend and will gladly use your naivete to screw you over.
- Immortality Seeker: The "Martyr-King's Cup" ambition sends you on the trail of a mysterious artifact that can supposedly imbue the drinker with immortality. In the endings to this quest, you can choose to live forever within the Lotus-Eater Machine of the cup, serve the Unseen Queen in her quest to make all humanity immortal, or betray the Queen and claim her immortality as your own.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: If you choose to accept the Unseen Queen's offer in the finale of the "Martyr-King's Cup" ambition, you descend into the cup itself and spend the rest of eternity as a heroic knight in the idyllic Golden Day, rescuing damsels in distress and slaying monsters with imaginary versions of your crew by your side.
- Mad Scientist: If you chose the "Academic" background, you can be a half-crazed scholar of Correspondence pursuing "knowledge for its sake alone," or one of the many practical scientists employed by the Crown to open the Avid Horizon in the hopes of accessing the wealth of new discoveries that lay beyond it.
- Mysterious Backer: You can become this to your heir after completing the Martyr-King's Cup ambition; if you chose to claim immortality for yourself, then as a new captain opted to take "your immortal predecessor" in the "A Quester In Your Lineage" facet, then the now-immortal skyfarer will be keeping a friendly eye on the new captain - providing a handy Cryptic Benefactor.
- Rags to Riches: As with the previous game, it's possible to go from the dirt-poor captain of a battered low-end locomotive to the fabulously wealthy master of a Moloch-class liner. However, this is the specific goal of the "Wealth" ambition: you don't just have to retire rich, but acquire a Big Fancy House, personalize it, and introduce yourself to society via a spectacular party.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Accumulating favors with the Parsimonious Chairman or the Ministry of Public Decency can allow you to wriggle out of tricky situations. In the "Fame" ambition, you can acquire a Royal Dispensation that forces the Minister himself to permit the publication of the previously-banned Song of the Sky.
- Shrouded in Myth: Captains who have finished the "Martyr-King's Cup" ambition are soon surrounded by tall tales, some of them claiming that the immortal captain is the victim of a curse, a divine savior, or even the vengeful spirit of Prince Albert.
- Street Urchin: The origin "Urchin" naturally involves this, with the captain having grown up as a member of the Knotted Sock, the Regiment, or the Fisher Kings.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: Captains pursuing the Martyr-King's Cup begin to experience dislocation from reality, slipping into visions of a medieval fantasy world in which they are heroic knights on a quest. Of course, the crew is not subjected to these visions, and react with understandable confusion to your antics.
- Venturous Smuggler: As with the previous game, a lucrative-but-risky way to make your way is by transporting contraband goods across the High Wilderness. For added fun, it's possible to acquire a rather unique form of hidden compartment in the form of the Portsmouth Arsenal's Mechanical Turk.
Officers
The Incautious Driver
- Ambiguous Disorder: Zigzagged. On one hand, it's averted in that their condition isn't at all ambiguous in that it's diagnosed early on in their personal storyline. On the other hand, it's played straight in that the symptoms of this fictional condition — trouble staying still, fearlessness, gambling all their money away, and, in one possible option, sleeping with someone spontaneously (and therefore presumably without protection) — are very similar to the real conditions of ADHD and mania.
- Ambiguous Gender: They are always referred to with they/them pronouns. When required to fill out a medical form, they resolve the ambiguity by neatly crossing out the relevant field as not applicable. A portrait is later identified as one of a young boy and his "younger sibling", again omitting any gender identifiers.
- Black Sheep: Explicitly referred to as the prodigal of the family, for gadding about driving steam-trains instead of pursuing a respectable career. This is reflected in gameplay by them increasing your Establishment connections.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Upon approaching a settlement, the Driver may occasionally wonder if they crashed into this farm as well.
- Captain Crash: If left at Portsmouth House, they'll inevitably crash their locomotive in some far-off location and require you to go pick them up, alongside some things they picked up from the impact site.
- Drives Like Crazy: They live for speed, and don't terribly mind if that involves driving a locomotive clear through a farmhouse, terrorizing the crew all the while. Conclude their story properly and they'll become The Judicious Driver, who apparently possesses a better sense of judgement while at the helm. They really still like the occasional daredevil maneuver like tokyo drifting past asteroids just for the fun of it.
- Heroes Love Dogs: Recklessness aside, they're one of the more good-hearted types you can recruit, and they get along really well with the Inadvisably Big Dog, even giving him goggles when he hangs out in the engine room.
- Parasite Zombie: Implied to happen if you make the wrong choices during their personal quest.
- Puppeteer Parasite: Downplayed; they have a fungal infection in their brain which is said to be mostly benign but causes restlessness and irritation until it sees whatever it is it wants to see (so travel is the best medicine). It is ambiguous at first if this is why the Driver is so reckless. Played straight if you try to get them to set the fungus free; it takes over their mind more and more until the Driver all but goes mad, and runs into the Reserve never to be seen again.
- Timed Mission: If left alone for too long after the Driver's father's funeral, the Puppeteer Parasite will take over the Incautious Driver's mind and turn them into the Reckless Driver. Though statistically identical to the Judicious Driver, they will be permanently lost if you return them to the Reserve.
The Incognito Princess
- Affably Evil: She's always charming and polite but make no mistake, she is not a good person.
- Ambiguously Human: She was born after London fell, meaning her father was more or less a zombie sustained by eldritch magic when she was conceived. While most of the Royal Family had become reduced to monsters, the Princess was likely never fully human to begin with.
- Brown Note Being: From time to time, people react badly to the sight of her beauty, spooning their eyes out or bursting into flames. Watching her transformation into the Queen of Bees results in your Terror spiking dramatically.
- Canon Character All Along: After revealing her identity, it's deduced that she must be the Captivating Princess.
- Compelling Voice: When she asks people to do things, they do them, even if it's impossible. Among a crowd of poets, she suggests they could try describing her in a language with capacities beyond English. All their tongues spontaneously combust and burn the building down. Naturally this terrifies the player and gives them a Searing Insight.
- Dark Action Girl: We don't see it but she casually beats an eldritch monster (apparently the sentient remains of some monstrous form she'd previously assumed) in "fisticuffs." The one time you, a badass skyfarer, can openly defy her to her face, it's suggested that the results will prove fatal.
- Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Marries a Devil at the end of her quest. Not garden-variety humanoid Devil, but one of the most diabolical Princes trapped inside a "well".
- Disney Villain Death: Falls into the Well of the Wolf trying to catch her wedding ring if you opt to throw it in.
- The Dog Bites Back: Given what she puts the Player Character through, the captain is allowed to become this by either locking the Princess in Piranesi or throwing her into the Well of the Wolf, permanently removing her from all future playthroughs.
- Domestic Abuse: After killing all of their friends she keeps her two suitors, who are so obsessed with her that they'd wear her shed skin, in cages and then skips out on them without a thought.
- Eye Scream: If your captain attempts to betray her at Piranesi and fails, she'll sear their tear ducts shut, presumably sentencing them to a lifetime of dry eyes."We don't want you crying, do we?"
- Humanoid Abomination: It's known certain things happened to all the royal family after the Fall, and many of them didn't really retain their form or station within reality's chain. This princess is included, but on the surface she looks entirely human and impossibly beautiful.
- Flaying Alive: Her marriage to the King of Choirs ends with her skin splitting open as she transcends her current state of being to become a divine abomination. All that remains of the woman she once was is her skin... which is still alive after a fashion and can actually assimilate one of the Princess's suitors, creating the promoted officer in the process.
- Friend to All Living Things: Well, all living things are friends to her, anyway. She seems to naturally attract small songbirds wherever she goes. Many of them end up dying of starvation.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Of a very unusual kind; haughty and sociopathic though she may be, the Princess eventually regards you with a twisted degree of affection, even considering you a friend. It's for this reason that she has you give her away at her wedding. And no, she doesn't ask you to give her away.
- Lots of Luggage: Introduced sitting on a mountain of the stuff. Travelling around Old Tom's Well can result in some of it becoming unsecured and concussing your quartermaster.
- Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Interacting with the Princess frequently causes Terror increases, though nothing in her behaviour suggests she has any idea why anyone else would find her effects on the world horrifying. If allowed to set up a Salon in London, the stuff that goes on there becomes the stuff of nightmares.
- Odd Friendship: She genuinely likes the Captain.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Her idea of going incognito is to simply swap out her tiara for one slightly less expensive and grandiose.
- Princess Classic: Subverted. She's the daughter of Queen Victoria, and innocence incarnate. It's just that it's the kind of innocence you get when someone doesn't know the difference between right and wrong.
- Psychopathic Manchild: Approaches everything with either childish glee, naivete, or disdain. She's also forceful, charismatic, abusive, and immensely dangerous to everyone around her.
- Rebellious Princess: Seems to be this at first based on her statement that every princess' highest aspiration should be not to remain so. It turns out that her plan is to become a queen.
- Same Character, But Different: The Princess here is an Obliviously Evil, supernaturally powerful Person of Mass Destruction, which is something of the inverse of Fallen London where her original shtick was being outwardly normal but extremely and knowingly petty and malevolent. Most of her London material has been updated to match her Skies incarnation, largely ironing this out.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The Captain can trap her in the Well of The Wolf during her marriage ceremony.
- Taking Up the Mantle: One of two of her retainers/admirers/prisoners will do this in an extremely literal way, should you complete her quest in the way that she wishes.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Time warps only annoy her because she'd rather you'd turn off the alarm bells. Rotting elder gods are a mere curiosity. Either she's supernatural as hell, has Seen It All, or both.
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: Upon her recruitment, a random passerby took one look at her and casually gouged out his eyes, for those eyes will never see anything so radiant again. No, really. Other people go even further, such as their tongues lighting on fire when trying to describe how beautiful she is, then burning to ash.
The Repentant Devil
"Hero worship from the incompetent is always awkward"
A Devil you may pick up in your travels who offers to be an Officer and also to take care of any problems you may have involving your soul. He dresses like a minister, but he's much more abrasive than most devils, because he doesn't believe in their pretenses. One of the first things he does on board your ship is murder a stowaway, "most unrepentantly."- Affably Evil: In a different flip than most Devils; he's far ruder, but also far more genuine and honest, and he genuinely feels that improving the soul is good for the owner as well as his people.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: He's fond of Victorian-style industrial cruelty, saying that devils could learn a thing or two from man-made hellholes like the Workworlds.
- Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: He can become your lover if you take the right path in his questline.
- Humanoid Abomination: Like all Devils, he's really only human-shaped, though his demonic eyes give it away.
- Noble Demon: It's right there in his name. He's still a devil, though; his primary business is souls.
- Retired Monster: He used to serve Judgements with improving the souls they were feeding on. He currently feels this was unwise (hence why he's "repentant"). Depending on your choices he may return to his old job by taking one with The Sapphir'd King.
- Stern Chase: He is being hunted by an old friend. Or enemy. For a devil, there is little difference. His sidequest sees him and the player character narrowing down his suspect list. It turns out The Sapphir'd King has put out a bounty on his capture.
- Time Abyss: Though all Devils are of ambiguous age, the Repentant Devil is noted to be much older than he looks. He can provide first-hand accounts of a lot of the devils' history and remembers when the devils used to serve the Judgements.
- Warm Bloodbags Are Everywhere: He can see the condition of your soul or anyone else's by looking at them, and since devils consume souls it stands to reason he's seeing fresh mortal essence all over.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: If you opt to romance him during his storyline, he drops his human guise. The only description the narration gives is his true form being "winged" and calling him a "being that can strangle a volcano".
The Fatalistic Signalman
- All for Nothing: He thinks he's wasted his life working on the Isambard Line. Tracking down the actual creator of the Isambard Line just proves it to him, fairly brutally.
- Berserk Button: Incorrect details in official signaling materials, which you use to motivate him into getting back to work following his descent into depression.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Already a smoker, learning the sad fate of the Isambard Line's creator leaves him chain-smoking out of sheer depression.
- Dead All Along: It's implied by the ending of his story that he's been dead for many years, his corpse being too decrepit for a recent death.
- Festering Fungus: After he vanishes at the end of his quest, he mysteriously vanishes from your ship, leaving behind a clue that leads you to an unexplored signal box near Hybras... where you find what appears to be the Signalman's corpse, layered with local fungus and apparently undisturbed for years.
- Heroic BSoD: After learning the depressing truth behind the Isambard Line, the Signalman is left in an even gloomier state than usual, firmly believing that his life was wasted on a failure. He's so miserable that he's unable to work on his book, barely able to perform his duties and chain smokes near endlessly. In the end, you dislodge him from this state by providing him with an example of the sloppy work evident in official signalling material, which gets him so annoyed that he resolves to write something better.
- He's Back!: Used word for word when you awaken him from his depression:
He fumes. "I have to do bloody everything, don't I? Fine! Where's my pen?" He storms to his cabin. A moment later he storms out again. "I've been away too long. I'd better check on the signal boxes. No one will have done that, neither."
He's back.
- Knight in Sour Armor: He still believes in the railway system and the benefits it could bring to the High Wilderness, but fate and human frailty keep throwing impediments in the way.
- Locked Room Mystery: Once you finish his quest, he inexplicably vanishes off the ship without leaving his room, opening a door or being seen at all. He turns up at a heretofore-unseen signal box, having died many years ago.
- Magnum Opus: If you complete his quest he will create his In-Universe one, a long and comprehensive guide to the High Wilderness, including signals and routes. It replaces him as an officer.
- Personal Effects Reveal: The only confirmation that the fungus-covered body you find in the abandoned signal box is really his are his old bowler hat and his pack of cigarettes.
- Refused by the Call: He wanted to serve London's navy, but failed his medical examination — he had a previously-undiagnosed heart condition.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: If left behind in London, he can generate Ministry favours for you or gain you Cryptic Benefactors due to his experience and connections in the bureaucracy.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: The other possible solution of the mystery of his questline ending is implied by one of the previous quests: he used a massive amount of hours to finish his Magnum Opus. Even if were only days for player character, he spent years in that signal box writing his book - and after he died his corpse just lay there until hours ran out. It still doesn't explain how he vanished from the locomotive or where he got enough hours, though.
The Inconvenient Aunt
- Awful Truth: Her sidequest involves discovering that London never used the Unclear Bomb supposedly used to slay Albion's sun — the sun was long dead already, and Albion is more like a squatter on its old domain than a conquering invader. This puts into doubt the idea that humans can slay the Judgements.
- Cool Old Lady: Despite her hideous crockery, fussy behavior, and obsession with primness, the fact that she's lived an experienced life in both the Neath and the High Wilderness mean that she's remarkable for getting so far. She also provides tea parties and the like for any crew member suffering from bad dreams.
- Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: She has been spying on and for London and the Anarchists for so long she's not entirely sure which side, if any, she is on anymore.
- The Dreaded: Just for the captain, but they are always a little terrified whenever interacting with her, for various reasons including the fact they simply cannot command her. Rebuffing her when she wants to come aboard actually raises your Terror, which usually takes ominous or traumatizing incidents to achieve. The fact she is a genuinely dangerous woman in terms of influence accrued, having huge ties to both Albion and the Revolutionaries, only makes things worse.
- Hazy-Feel Turn: Depending on the player character she will either realign with London, or with the Calendar Council by replacing February. Given that she wasn't really on either side to begin with, it approaches this.
- Never Mess with Granny: She used to be a spy, though mostly retired nowadays. She still keeps in touch with some of her old friends, and will poison February during her quest.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Can be interred in the Mausoleum to garner you favour with the Deathless (or nick their supply of Hours).
- Supreme Chef: A point in favor of recruiting her is that her scones are pretty damn good.
- This Is Gonna Suck: Your captain is most unhappy noticing her in St. Dominic's station, and realizing she has noticed them.Dear God.
The Rat Brigade
- Apology Gift: Sarge's vault contains one of these to each member of the Rat Brigade. Cinders and Patronella see this as a blatant attempt to Buy Them Off and refuse to take theirs.
- Badass Adorable: You likely knew this from Fallen London (what with the trouble Rattus Faber gangs could stir), but this bunch of dressed-up rats are bloody dangerous. With their assistance you can easily storm the Windward Company offices at Lustrum and incapacitate every guard inside.Scarper, lads. They've got guns.
- Broken Pedestal: It turns out their Sergeant was the one who sold out the Brigade to the Windward Company, but he died during the backstab: The Company, believing the lieutenant was in on it, simply gave him Sarge's reward afterwards. Cinders is incensed when she finds out and refuses to even see her share of the treasure.
- The Caper: What their quest boils down to, trying to find the combination to a vault their leader filled with treasure.
- Face Death with Dignity: The lieutenant faces down Cinders and her gun with calm resignation while adding sugars to his tea and gives up his numbers whether she shoots him or no.
- Hired Guns: Fought as mercenaries during the Blockade of New Winchester. The moment they struck it big, their lieutenant backstabbed them and had half of them killed in an ambush.
- Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Vivian and Angel, the Brigade's medic and explosives expert respectively, hate each other and you can only recruit one of them (this has no mechanical difference, they just have different recruitment requirements).
- Putting the Band Back Together: Most of their story involves finding the living members of their old crew.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: A ragtag bunch of misfits within your captain's larger one.
- The Remnant: They used to be a much bigger group, but their lieutenant betrayed and killed half of them to steal their combination code to a treasure meant to be split up between all of them.
The Clay Conductor
- The Eeyore: He's as grey and morose as he appears, struggles with fitting in with humans, and would rather be left alone. Indeed, the captain always has the option of booting him because he's just that much of a drag. Put enough effort into him and you can occasionally cheer him up, though.
- Golem: Being a clay man, he is made from living clay.
- Implacable Man: The Conductor accepts zero substitutes in his quest, no matter how remarkable and obscure they are.
- It Was with You All Along: If the captain takes every option to befriend the Conductor, he will realize in the end that he can make new companions the old-fashioned way and become the Caring Conductor.
- Satellite Character: The Companion forged from the Forge of Souls as their development is entirely dependent on the Captain's choices with the Conductor. Their impact is primarily to determine how the Conductor develops in his personal quest.
- Still Wearing the Old Colors: He continues to wear his very natty conductor uniform.
The Fortunate Navigator
- Bold Explorer: His lifelong ambition was to explore the stars alongside his friend Altan.
- Dead Sidekick: The Navigator and Altan always intended to have adventures across the sky together. One of them died before that could happen.
- Due to the Dead: Ropes the player into springing his friend's corpse from a Khanate graveyard and giving his corpse the adventures they intended to have, before giving him a worthy burial.
- Fun Personified: According to his descriptor, "card games and drinking sessions occur spontaneously in his presence".
The Felined Eccentric
- Animalistic Abomination: The Eccentric's cats aren't cats at all, but vestiges of her old identity that still cling to her. They just happen to look like cats.
- Bond Creatures: Three of them. Unusually, they're malevolent examples. Her story involves getting rid of them.
- Cats Are Magic: She'd wish they weren't. They habitually terrorise your crew, too.
- Cats Are Mean: She did name them after devils.
- Crazy Cat Lady: Downplayed. While she doesn't travel without her cats, she's neither crazy, nor a hermit. It soon becomes clear that this trope is subverted. It's the cats who are crazy and they just plain refuse to leave.
- The Engineer: Her work is emphasised more so than the other chief engineers you can recruit. She gets cranky if you have suffered damages to your hull, you can't speak to her if your ship is too damaged due to her needing to work on keeping it running, her secondment at the Royal Society has her hanging out at Portsmouth House, and her and her cats regularly hang out in the engine room.
- The Perfectionist: She doesn't even talk to you unless your locomotive is in top shape.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: The three cats. She mentions she has tried physically to get rid of them (even literally throwing them away), but it never, ever works... the only way is to either quell them enough and give them a better place to stay, or embarrass/disgust them enough with something they hate that they leave your locomotive and never, ever return.
- Was Once a Man: Inverted: She is currently human, but is implied to have been something completely different prior to entering Piranesi.
The Amiable Vagabond
- Affably Evil: He genuinely likes people. He has to consider them friends in order to feed them to the Well in his place.
- Agony of the Feet: Mentions that he lost several toes to frostbite while mining in Lustrum.
- And I Must Scream: If you sabotage his ritual, he is condemned to live out the miserable half-life he sacrificed so many other Skylarks to, spending eternity as a tree at the bottom of the Well.
- Big Fancy House: He turns out to own a big one in Lustrum, and claims to have made his fortune mining hours in a former life.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: He seems like a friendly, knowledgeable adviser of the skies. But he's also a man who would absolutely sacrifice a person he's deeply bonded with just to hold off on a Deal with the Devil for another year.
- The Charmer: Is very good at making friends.
- Chekhov M.I.A.: Old Tom is mentioned in passing as the first to get rich off of Lustrum, only to mysteriously disappear after making his fortune.
- Deal with the Devil: Made one to whatever's in Old Tom's Well, for riches beyond measure. However, to hold off on it collecting him, he now has to spend the rest of his life bonding with people and giving them to it instead. You can choose whether to nullify the ritual (which ends with him sucked into the well, or, if saved by you, partially turned into a tree), complete the ritual with him as the victim, or allow him to use you as a sacrifice, even if you know what it will entail.
- Evil Old Folks: A scummy old bastard from beginning to end, he's been using the Skylarks he pretends to care for as a source of victims to feed to the Well, and is now focused on doing the same to you. Plus, if you choose to make an alliance with him and renege on the deal, he will throttle you to death.
- Fate Worse than Death: If you choose to nullify his ritual but don't let whatever's in the Well take him, he still gets what's coming to him: he's forced to "put down roots", by... well, literally putting down roots. He's forever stuck in an immobile form, no longer having the spirit and ability to captivate his audiences with his music or stories. Not that he has an audience anymore, anyway: the crew avoids him due to learning exactly what got him into this state in the first place. Whenever you visit him, he's pathetically grateful and tries to entertain you but struggles with words, and begs you not to leave when the silence becomes awkward.You've planted him in his cabin in a large clay pot. Below the waist, he is a maggot-white tree; one of his arms is a sagging, leafless branch. The wood that constitutes his body is dead. He has no need for water.
- Fingore: If he fails to sacrifice you and isn't rescued, the Vagabond's fingers will snap off in his attempts to cling to the edge of the Well; all that's left of him are his fingertips.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The player can switch mugs with him during the ritual, making him his own scapegoat and fulfilling his pact as intended.
- Given Name Reveal: He is Old Tom, who bound his soul to the thing lurking in his eponymous Well and subsequently spent several years luring others to be sacrificed in his place.
- Karma Houdini: If the player character fools Ratbite into becoming their scapegoat in their stead, the Vagabond will become the Incorrigble Vagabond and form an alliance with the player, preying on your crewmembers instead. Some of your crew start to avoid him but he'll never lack for victims.
- King of the Homeless: Calls himself the king of the Skylarks, essentially the setting's equivalent to hobos. They provide him a steady stream of victims.
- Literal Transformative Experience: If you pull a fast one on the Amiable Vagabond before he can sacrifice you to Old Tom's Well, he will end up being taken instead and transformed into a tree at the bottom of the Well. However, saving him at the last minute allows him to live on as an officer... but still partially transformed, living out his days in a planter aboard your locomotive. Unable to travel on his own or play the fiddle, the now-Dendrified Vagabond's charm and lust for life is completely lost, reducing him to a chronically-depressed shell of his former self, stranded alone in his cabin by crewmembers who now despise him for his crimes. As a result, he's pathetically grateful for any attention you pay him.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: His one unambiguously good act can be the end of him; it's perfectly possible that, at the very brink of it all, when he's ready to sacrifice you to the well, unlike every person in the past, he just likes you too much to let you die. But he has this realization when he's completely out of time to find someone else.Amiable Vagabond: Well, damn me, I can't do it. After all these years, I finally can't do it.
- Offering Another in Your Stead: This is how Old Tom manages to renege on his Deal with the Devil with whatever lies at the bottom of his eponymous Well every year. Rather than offering himself up after striking it rich, with the right ritual, he can just sacrifice someone else in his stead. Even worse, he has to befriend them first to the point they can consider each other proper friends, or it doesn't count; he'll try to do it to you, but you can offer someone else in your stead or just sabotage the ritual so he gets swallowed by the Well like he should have been from the start.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: If you keep him with you all the way to Death's Doorstep in the Blue Kingdom, the Vagabond will very overtly clam up, foreshadowing his fear of his staved-off mortality:Usually the Vagabond has a story for everywhere you visit. But now he is silent and nervous.
- The Power of Friendship: The bad version. He can stave off the payment of his deal with the entity in Old Tom's Well by sacrificing someone who's emotionally bonded with him. So his life is now dedicated to befriending people only to throw them away like receptacles.
- Transflormation: The fate of anyone used as his scapegoat, transformed into a tree to mindlessly worship the light at the bottom of the Well for the rest of eternity. Also, if you sabotage his ritual, he can be subjected to the same metamorphosis; however, he can be rescued at the last minute and allowed to live on as the Dendrified Vagabond.
- Villainous Breakdown: Horror-stricken by his approaching fate, the Vagabond loses all his charm if you sabotage his ritual, reducing him to pleading for his life and then sobbing wordlessly as he's whisked away to his doom.
The Chiropterous Hoarder
- Alien Space Bats: As a Curator, it quite literally is one.
- Ambiguous Gender: Referred to as "Mr" like the other named Curators, has "it" pronouns, and gives birth in the Multiplicitous Hoarder ending.
- Apology Gift: Leaves a cask of red honey outside the Captain's cabin after the rather unpleasant experiments on them are unsuccessful.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: If it achieves immortality, the now Immutable Hoarder will become quiet and melancholy. It is unsure how to handle the new abundance of time on its hands, and considers itself to have lost something.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Reacts with confusion to ideas such as 'gifts' and 'affection', considers its own offspring in terms of usefulness, and regards a romanced or befriended Captain "as it might an item from its collection".
- Brick Joke: In Fallen London, one encounter with Mr Apples leads to it repeatedly touching the player character's knee, making them wonder if this is "Masterly flirtation". It turns out the answer was probably "yes", since The Hoarder does exactly the same thing when propositioning the Captain.
- The Bus Came Back: The Hoarder is Mr Apples, last encountered in Fallen London.
- Immortality Seeker: Like many of its kind. It can achieve this and become The Immutable Hoarder.
- Interspecies Romance: The Captain can "indulge in an assignation" with the Hoarder.
- Riches to Rags: It has quite a hoard but nothing like the amount of stuff, or power, that would have been available to it in London. If asked about the fates of the other Masters it says that most remained belowground and are fat and happy with the Sixth City, but a few, including it, took the opportunity to return from whence they came.
- Supreme Chef: Revealed when it throws a stunning banquet for the Captain after helping with its quest.
- Took a Level in Cynic: The Hoarder starts off rather distrustful and aloof, in sharp contrast to its appearances in Fallen London, where it was one of the friendliest Masters. If befriended and helped it can be quite friendly again.
- Tsundere: Will react with confusion and disdain towards things like gifts and concern over its welfare, though the game will note that the Hoarder is "warming to you".
The Inadvisably Big Dog
- Big Friendly Dog: Extra-huge, and extra-friendly. Running happily through the streets causes as much chaos as a rampaging bull because of its sheer size, but it's all out of sheer, honest excitement.
- Cute Approaches Camera: Its picture looks like this.
The Useless Cat
- Cats Are Mean: The only time it expends any energy is when it claws into your hand for disturbing it. The one event you can use it in notes that, regardless of your preference, the cat will remain with you afterward.
- Non-Indicative Name: It adds to the captain's Iron (though just barely) and can be used in a companion quest to skip a stat check; hence being not completely useless.
The Blemmigan Voyager
- Hero of Another Story: It led many adventures and quests of its own before joining your crew, and over its life was a warrior, a poet and a king.
- Put on a Bus: If taken to the Forge of Souls the Blemmigan will forge itself a companion and retire into the Lyceum, becoming permanently unavailable.
- Seen It All: Its attitude is of someone who has seen everything there is to see, and grown weary of it. Now it just gazes at the stars, day in and day out, through your window.
The Perfect Pangolin
- The Ace: The greatest ever Pangolin to exist, past, present or future.
- Cuteness Proximity: Induces it in all that see it, except for the two nobles playing catch with it and your quartermaster (who is rightly pissed for you bringing boxes of ants aboard for it to eat).
Dilly
- Fingore: When it plays with your fingers, it does some frankly strange things, like shuffling your knuckles around them without spilling blood and somehow being able to put it back just how it was, no damage done. Before you properly recruit Dilly, two of your crew will complain that it somehow swapped their ring fingers, nearly causing a fight because one of them was married.
- Guide Dang It!: Getting this one is a long, luck-based process, with few hints of where to even get started.
Obviously Delicious Rabbit
- Butt-Monkey: The rabbit has a tendency to get itself into trouble at various ports, requiring the captain to save it from being eaten.
- Foregone Conclusion: From the moment it stepped aboard the crew figured they would eat it. And if you do, in fact, eat it when out of supplies, the crew is unmoved (as opposed to the terror spike eating other mascots causes) since they assumed it eventually wind up on a plate one way or another.
The Reach
In General
The Reach's sun died long ago, and in the absence of its laws it has become overgrown with lush, verdant growth. It is now the frontier of the New British Empire, still being settled by colonists from Albion.- Asteroid Thicket: Applies to the whole game, but particularly the Reach, as it has a lot of cramped spaces compared to Albion.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: Despite having no sun, the Reach is still relatively well-lit as it has plenty of starlight coming in from the cracks as well as giant glowing fungi in certain biomes.
- Green Hill Zone: Both the game's first region and its greenest.
- Hub World: That doubles as a world in itself. Transit relays for every other world are found here only, while the rest only have them back to the Reach.
- Space Western: The general theme of the area, see Weird West.
- Weird West: Prospectors, boom towns, mines, bandits, (space) trains, civilization coming into conflict with frontier towns, and very twangy guitar in the backing music. The one major difference is the scenery, as The Reach is extremely verdant versus the usual arid settings expected of Westerns.
- World of Chaos: A very mild one, but since the Reach doesn't have a sun anymore (the Garden-King died a long time ago), technically there's little more than far-off glimmers and reflections to keep order; as a result, most of the chaos is comparable to an overgrown garden that hasn't been tended for decades.
New Winchester
- Floating Continent: As far as cities go, it's unusually divided, with its many chunks spread all over a massive Asteroid Thicket. How the locals move between different chunks isn't really elaborated on, but presumably it's part of the reason why there's locomotives absolutely everywhere.
- Space Cold War: As the main hub of the Reach, it is also naturally the main hub of its conflict. It's not unusual to hear the skirmishes between Tackety Scouts and Enduring Dreadnoughts while you're docked, and while there are no actual battles or riots in-person within the actual city the situation is still extremely tense, to the point the local newspaper has thinly-disguised bounties for both sides of the conflict in its pages.
Port Avon
- Arcadia: A gentle send-up of the English countryside. Cricket is played. Tea is poured. Fresh gossip from New Winchester is appreciated.
- Close-Knit Community: Seems to be this. They tend to turn away outsiders unless plied with tea and news from London.
- Dark Secret: The more time you spent in Avon, the more people will regard you with suspicion, and the more sinister everything seems. Combined with the fact that their main export is souls, it gives the impression that this idyllic community is a lie, and something more dangerous lurks behind the shadows. But no, it's just that they don't trust outsiders that overstay their welcome.
- Gargle Blaster: The local cider, of the Unsuspectingly Soused variant; because it tastes so wonderful, you don't notice how strong it is and you're inclined to keep drinking - and you don't realize just how drunk you're getting until it's too late. Here, you have to pass an Iron test to stop at just two mugs, or else you'll end up making an ass of yourself in public.
- Scenery Porn: Avon is gorgeous.
Polmear & Plenty's Inconceivable Circus
- Call-Back: Yes, the Plenty in the title is that Mrs. Plenty, of Most Distracting Carnival fame. Her practices were known to be mildly shoddy back in the Neath, but clearly the move to the skies didn't help any.
- Crappy Carnival: The storyline here revolves around fixing the acts to make them better.
Magdalene's
- Bedlam House: Notably averted despite the Lovecraftian overtones and Victorian settings. Magdalene's seeks to cure the mental illnesses and traumas that skyfarers develop through very gentle methods.
- Corrupt Church: The Amenable Host has a slight flavor of this. He's living a very cushy lifestyle whilst making sure none of the visitors are taking the church too much for granted.
- Hope Spot: This is a great place to alleviate terror and remove your nightmares. Almost all the crew mention that it's a relief to come here. Except the Incautious Driver, whose condition means all this relaxation is just irritating.
- Kick the Dog: They only want patients who they can reasonably cure. Those who are considered lost causes are liable to get kicked out. Somewhat justified in that apparently, trying to cure such people places a very great mental strain on the staff assigned to them.
- Loss of Identity: Those completely, supernaturally accurate impersonations come at a price for those who do them. Even the Amenable Host has no idea who he is anymore, his memories being almost completely replaced by a collage of those of the people he has imitated
- Tick Tock Tune: You can hear Magdalene's clock from some distance around.
Port Prosper
- Company Town: The Windward Company has its headquarters here, and it dominates both sides of the town in one way or the other. There is some resentment against them in the East side, however.
- Man of Wealth and Taste: The Parsimonious Chairman tries to be, modeling his office and attire after the finest the London nobility would have. The missing tooth doesn't help much at all, however. He does have most of the lack of morals needed to qualify, however, like any Victorian-era boss would (with the added bonus of being the one to pay you for every Tackety nameplate you find, essentially paying you for every Tackety vessel you wreck).
- Rescued from the Underworld: The Bleak Industrialist hires you to retrieve his lost love from the Blue Kingdom.
- Slobs Versus Snobs: Twofold! The city itself is the Snob, with Lustrum representing the Slobs. Then within the city itself you have the poor Eastenders and the high society Westenders.
Leadbeater & Stainrod's Nature Reserve
- Great White Hunter: You can go hunting deep in the Reserve. Captains without very high Irons are advised to have a relaxing picnic in the outskirts instead.
- For Science!: The Phlegmatic Reseacher's motivation.
- Nature Hero: The Romantic Ornithologist's remit.
Lustrum
- Boom Town: Still just about, but on its way to being a Dying Town as the claims slowly run dry.
- Bringing Back Proof: If you decide to work for Sweet Jane, she'll pay you fifty sovereigns for each Stovepipe locomotive you blow up, requesting the engine's charred nameplate as proof of your victory.
- Floating Continent: When your location is called "The Mother of Mountains" it's as close as it gets to a full-sized continent.
- Gold Rush: Except what's gotten everyone here is crystallised time, which is far, far more precious than gold.
- Grim Up North: Although not necessarily to the north, this is a profoundly cold and bitter place. The cold comes not from any atmospheric effect, but because Hours tend to suck the heat out of things (in addition to their time-warping properties).
- Ironic Nickname: Sweet Jane makes her dwelling and base of operations here. She is very much less-than-sweet if you are allied to the Stovepipes, paying for every nameplate brought to her and putting bounties on known Stovepipe sympathizers.
- Price on Their Head: If you piss off Sweet Jane by turning in too many Tackety nameplates to the Stovepipes, she'll put a price on your head under the guise of an advertisement in the newspaper.
- Slobs Versus Snobs: Like everything involving the Tacketies, they represent the Slobs side, with their rivals at Port Prosper representing the Snobs.
- Twilight of the Old West: Very much the theme.
Old Tom's Well
- And I Must Scream: Anyone sacrificed as a scapegoat by Old Tom will be transformed into a tree and condemned to spend eternity planted at the bottom of the Well.
- All That Glitters: A cultist will excitedly tell you that she caught a glimpse of gold right at the bottom of the well. She's right, there is something gold down there, but it probably won't come as a surprise that it's not actually gold. And the corpse of the Garden-King is the opposite of valuable where humans are concerned.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Old Tom disappeared without a trace shortly after becoming fabulously wealthy by discovering Lustrum, as according to his wish. The likely moral of this story is lost on those who come here.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: During "The Truth" ambition, you can link your mind to the dead corpse of the Garden-King, which will instantly increase your Nightmare level by one.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Oddly subverted. The Garden-King apparently didn't have wells or anything to throw in them, which you find out as you crawl inside. As it turns out, a half-Judgement, strongly implied to have been the Halved itself, sent in a star-crab messenger bearing a Well-seed and had it planted into the Garden-King itself, which sprung this well out and killed it. The bottom of the well imprisons only the corpse of a sun, which is pretty horrible by itself, admittedly.
- Wishing Well: What this is. Old Tom's wish was granted, so many others have come here hoping to follow in his footsteps.
Traitor's Wood
- Don't Go in the Woods: Expeditions can easily end with the loss of your entire crew. Even weathering a simple rainstorm requires a very high skill check for the point in the game you're likely to first find the place.
- The Lost Woods: You'll certainly lose people in them. Finding the actual dock within the Woods is an ordeal in itself, as it may not be anywhere near where you come across the massive biome.
Titania
- Bee Afraid: The problem with living in a really huge flower is that it's bound to get visited by really huge bees. Chorister Bees, to be exact, which come en masse every now and then and absolutely wreck the city whenever they come to harvest.
- Crystal Spires and Togas: Titania is notably more futuristic-looking than its grittier sister cities in the Reach, and is populated by peaceful philosophers and artists. The (toga-wearing) mayor will even lampshade this trope when you talk to her, and mention they found the settlement like this when they came here. Wonder why it was abandoned.
- Towering Flower: One vast enough for an entire town to be built inside its blossom. From above it is approximately two dozen of times the size of the player's ship.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Titania is home to a criminal group called the Midnight Rose, who produce red honey — a Fantastic Drug that allows the imbiber to enter someone else's dreams, with horrible consequences for the dreamer. Unlike most red honey dens, however, the Midnight Rose's dreamers are all entirely willing participants who can leave at any time.
- True Art Is Angsty: This is why the Midnight Rose's victims allow themselves to be tortured — they want to use their suffering as a source of artistic inspiration.
Hybras
- Festering Fungus: Hybras will literally start growing on you after a while.
- Fungus Humongous: There are giant mushrooms growing out of the corpses of other giant mushrooms.
- Place Worse Than Death: Its distance from New Winchester, its unpleasant and hostile surroundings, the deeply sinister effect of its fungus, and the fact it stops being a place you can resupply at after a while makes Hybras probably the place you least want to visit in the Reach.
- Ghost Town: The inhabitants mysteriously disappear after a while.
- Teenage Wasteland: Inverted. This is a retirement community of people who came out of Albion's workworlds with most of their lives taken away from them, making their eventual fates all the more horrible.
Carillon
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: There are an awful lot of these here, as detailed below.
- Ironic Hell: Most of the punishments on Carillon are designed to suit the sin for which the guest is seeking treatment. Examples include forcing a habitual liar to write out an entire encyclopedia, word for word, and begin again from the start whenever they make a mistake, and having someone overly curious walk around wearing magnifying glasses.
- Misery Builds Character: The basic operating principle of Carillon is that ironic punishments help reduce the impact of your sins on your soul, which in turn improves your character.
- Mountaintop Healthcare: Given that it's situated in a snowy region of the map not far from Lustrum and perched atop series of floating crags - and it's actually described as a sanatorium by the guidebooks.
- Noble Demon: As ever with Sunless's devils, it's zig-zagged. They are running a genuine service for free at Carillon, but ultimately what's happening here is being metaphorically poked with a fork so that your soul is nice and tasty.
- Pleasure Planet: An inversion — Carillon is portrayed as resembling a day spa, but instead of rest and relaxation, you go there to be punished for your sins in the hopes of improving your character.
Albion
In General
The heart of the New British Empire, and the new location of London. Albion was once ruled by a sun, but it was murdered by an alliance between London, the Khanate and the Calendar Council, and now it is lit by London's own Clockwork Sun.- Culture Police: The Ministry of Public Decency views its primary duty as promoting "Britishness". That means, among other things, censoring anything that doesn't align with its view of what qualifies as "British", such as the Welsh language and the works of left-wing poets and philosphers.
- Darker and Edgier: Players of Sunless Sea will remember London, whilst not exactly a place of unicorns and rainbows, as a comforting, understated place of return. Albion by contrast is a huge, stressful place, filled with terrifying, inhuman sights and merciless exploitation, overseen by an absolute tyrant who wishes to freeze the British Empire at its height in place forever.
- Dungeon Town: Albion, as a whole, is London, along with its suburbs. If you're on good terms with the Empire, then most of the central ports and a few of the outlying ones are among the safest places in the game, as the only mobs you'll encounter belong to the Royal Navy. There are, however, still dangerous parts of the region that are home to sky-beasts, marauders, and worse.
- The Empire: The New British Empire is active in the Reach as well, but it's at its most powerful here.
- State Sec: The Ministry of Public Decency borders on this at times, being responsible for making sure that some of London's darker secrets remain hidden.
- Space Navy: Most of the locomotives you run into here are in service to the Royal Navy or Ministry of Public Decency. It's either a very safe region, if you're in favor with The Empire, or a very dangerous one, if you're not.
- Time Police: The Horological Office.
- Underground Railroad: The New Street Line.
- Vast Bureaucracy: It's not quite as bad as the Blue Kingdom, but the New British Empire has a vast and sprawling civil service. The three main branches you interact with are the Ministry of Public Decency, the Horological Office, and the Office of Works.
London
- Cool Old Lady: The Fierce Philantropist, who Zubmariners from Sunless Sea may remember. She's back undercutting London's laws, this time by funding The New Street Line.
- A Foggy Day in London Town: Smog is ever-present thanks to the pollution put out by the Workworlds.
- Mega City: Even setting aside its various off-shoots in Albion, London is massive. You will see whole areas you'll never visit flying over and around it.
- Under City: Underlondon, the lowest of all the levels of the metropolis, where all the refuse from the upper levels accumulates in vast heaps. It's here that the Unseen Queen holds court.
- Victorian London: Taken up to eleven.
The Brabazon Workworld
- Crapsaccharine World: Little Nice, a residential neighborhood for the governor and overseers of Brabazon; it's an idyllic place to live, but it's also the headquarters of an extremely corrupt and oppressive corporate regime, where the biggest atrocities against the workers in Brabazon proper are engineered.
- Hive City: It's very hard to tell where one building ends and another starts.
- Full-Circle Revolution: Should you decide to help the workers fight for their rights in the end their leader becomes the new Governor but quickly cows down to the London elite, essentially running the Workworld the same as the man he deposed.
- Industrial Ghetto: Those who actually have to work at the factories live in filthy slums and shanty-towns plagued with disease, abuse, poor education and limited medical assistance.
- Nightmarish Factory: Victorian industry is dangerous and despair-inducing as is even before the time dissonances come into play. Every last worker you find within the Workworlds is absolutely miserable.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: More or less literally, too. Hour refinement does that, and the factory bosses exploit the hell out of it, too, to keep London supplied with everything it needs. The workers' entire lives can pass as the world outside barely moves, leading to the very real chance of grandchildren dying of old age before their not-on-Brabazon grandparents do and other such horrible possibilities.
Worlebury-juxta-Mare
- Body Horror: Anything to do with the 'donkeys' is just vile beyond belief.
- Crapsaccharine World: On the face of things, it's a luxurious beachside resort town where you can easily bring your Terror down by attending tea rooms and strolling down shop-lined promenades. However, look closer, and it'll start to seem ever-so-slightly off - until you pierce the illusions and find yourself in the cultist-infested nightmare world of "Off Season."
- Dark World: The "Off Season" seems to occupy the same space as the normal resort and the staff can do maintenance here that effects things in the normal resort without being seen there.
- Lethal Chef: Whoever is making the Candy Floss. Pondering the reality of Juxta-Mare has you realize it has an aftertaste of arsenic.
- Meat Moss: However the Off Season side of the town works, it's nightmarishly organic.
- Mysterious Mist: Worlebury is surrounded for miles by thick banks of cloud. You might be able to convince yourself it's sea fog, what with the creak of boats and seagulls on the wind. Anything which might suddenly appear and glare at you is probably just your imagination.
- The Nudifier: The corrosive mist around this "beach resort" is bad for your garments, so you need to buy something every time you go (which limits your stay time). Thankfully it only affects garments and doesn't melt your flesh.
The Most Serene Mausoleum
- And I Must Scream: The Prince-Consort is interred here... and yet he's technically not dead. Of course, it's quickly observed that being trapped in a state of comatose semi-consciousness on the brink of death is no substitute for life, but the Empress considers it a small price to pay to preserve her beloved husband.
- Chekhov M.I.A.: The Dismal Chamberlain has gone missing, and though your attempts to find the man himself fail, his journal can put successive captains on the trail of the Martyr-King's Cup - and into conflict with him.
- Creepy Cemetery: Aside from being a giant tomb, the place is surrounded for miles and miles by the graves of London's dead. The mausoleum's less-than-dead can also be eerie to find; if you're not careful, you'll take some hits to your Terror meter.
- Gilded Cage: To a less extent than Perdurance, but definitely here. Unlike Perdurance, many of the Deathless can at least continue to exert their massive influence on the outside world, even if mostly through sky captains (like you!). Ironically, the two gilded cages are linked; The Empress often sends the parents to the Mausoleum, and then the children to Perdurance as pampered hostages, just to make sure the parents never attempt to leave.
- Legally Dead: The Deathless are favored courtiers of the Empress who are required to be dead for legal reasons. They live pampered lives in the Mausoleum — and ironically receive enough powdered Hours to be very long-lived — but can't ever leave the tomb.
- Immortality Seeker: The Dismal Chamberlain, one of the Deathless, has grown dissatisfied with owing his eternal life to the Empress and has left to quest for the independent immortality that the Martyr-King's Cup offers. Instead, he's consumed by the Silver Dreams of the Golden Day and makes such an idiot of himself that the Empress revokes his status as one of the Deathless - condemning him to a year of remaining life.
- Primal Fear: Try and not be nervous, flying over the vast, black disc that was once a sun, blotted out forever. Certainly your crew can't. It seems to gaze back.
The Floating Parliament
, she decided to cut the parliament loose. Now, the remains of the Palace of Westminster float on the outer edges of Albion, still hosting the House of Commons, without power.- Authority in Name Only: Her Renewed Majesty hasn't given royal assent to a bill in years. If you take an act of parliament to the Throne of Hours, she doesn't even give it a passing glance — a page immediately shreds and burns it on her behalf.
- Beleaguered Bureaucrat: The First Secretary, who winds up essentially drafting you into Parliament simply on the hopes that you'll actually be able to get something done.
- Clock Tower: Big Ben is here, and you'll be hearing it a lot in the area around Parliament. Funnily enough this isn't a case of For Doom the Bell Tolls — the tower is one of the very few landmarks in Albion that alleviates Terror rather than raise it.
- Government Procedural: Should you get elected to Parliament.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Fail to pass a law twice in a row and you get put in charge of the Department of Well Exploration.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The Loquacious Civil Servant, who true to his name would make Sir Humphrey proud.
- Vast Bureaucracy: Albion's is on full display here. You get assigned to a new branch of the civil service after every Parliamentary session. They include (but are not limited to) the Department of Albion Affairs, the Ministry of Fish, Agriculture, and the Great Exodus, the Office of Qualification Qualifications, and the Department of Well Exploration.
Perdurance
- Gilded Cage: Perdurance is supposedly a paradise, where the children of the Empress's favourites enjoy eternal youth and never-ending revels — but none of them are permitted to leave.
- Not on the List: No outsider can get in without an exclusive invitation, this rule being strictly enforced. Fortunately, the president of the Royal Society has a whole bunch of them (for some reason he won't reveal) and will trade them for Sky Stories.
- Royal Brat: It turns out living a perfect day in a perfect place every single day of your life will make you kind of out of touch and spoiled. It's laughably easy to ingratiate yourself to the Servants because they are just that unused to anyone treating them as human.
- Snobs Vs Slobs: You have to choose whether to ingratiate yourself with the servants, the debutantes, or split the difference with the chaperones. Success with each opens up different rewards.
Avid Horizon
- Call-Back: if you played the previous games chances are you've been here before. There's even an interesting inversion of what was observed before; whereas in Sunless Sea you would start seeing stars in the ceiling above, reflected on the water, approaching here from the other side lets you see oceans down below, as if the gate has a surrounding overlap between both.
- Cool Gate: Still a gigantic gate flanked by two alien figures. Still firmly locked. Still uncomfortable to be around.
- Derelict Graveyard: Visible in the sea below are hundreds of abandoned ships, presumably left behind following the last big attempt to open the gates.
- Eldritch Location: Though you can't open it this time, this is merely the other side of the door you saw in Sunless Sea and Fallen London. It is still just as inexplicable, and would still likely utterly obliterate any unfortunate human who tries to touch it unprepared.
- Living Statue: As revealed in one ending of "The Truth" Ambition, the statues flanking the gate are, to some extent, alive and actively preventing the gate from being opened again; escaping through it requires a monumental sacrifice of resources to divert their attention for even an instant.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Its staff is mostly composed of those who have been subjected to this trope.
- Space Is an Ocean: It literally is, near the Horizon. Some of the seawater came through when the gate was opened, and stuck around in a rather eerie way.
- You Can't Go Home Again: The gate has closed itself, trapping everyone who went through into the High Wilderness. The fact there’s no escape route back to the Neath has deeply shaped human society in the High Wilderness, for example being the reason the Khanate cannot simply cut their losses in Elutheria. There is a way back through, as your character can find out should they choose to flee the Fire That Follows in "The Truth" Ambition.
The Royal Society
- Item Crafting: You can "purchase" experimental modifications, a sort of "currency" representing the research you have assisted with, which can be traded for experimental equipment that is better than anything else you can find (barring weapons obtained by killing certain enemies).
- Mad Scientist: There are a few. Studying the unusual physics of the High Wilderness requires a certain unique mindset.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: Not them. London. They can't move the Telescope without permission from London, and London repeatedly refuses to give it. You can't actually really start the stories here until you bring pre-stamped ministry paperwork allowing them to bypass all the red tape.
- Pretentious Latin Motto: Nullius in Verba, just like the real institution. Which means "on the word of no one", or "don't take our words for it" if you are to believe the Rat Brigade.
- Scienceville: Essentially a university campus that counts as an entire port in its own right. Hidden away in a desolate corner of Albion, it's a village of beautiful marble buildings and lush, verdant gardens; here, the Royal Society continue bleeding-edge research and invention - sometimes aided by you, naturally.
The Well of the Wolf
- The Devil Is a Loser: The devils here are not having a good time at all, and are too worn down by living in the hellhole that is the well's rim to do much of anything evil; they're actually unnervingly altruistic.
- Eldritch Abomination: Like any well, it has something inside it, locked up. In this case, it's a devil of the worst sort known as the King of Choirs, one that's full-on abominable rather than simply looking like a man. It's likely that this is exiled/banished royalty of the sort that had to flee Hell after the revolution.
- Horrifying the Horror: There's something terrible living on the colony that has all the devils frightened beyond measure, and they want you to get rid of it at all costs. As it turns out, this terrible thing is the Useless Cat.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Like most wells, it keeps something tightly imprisoned. In this case, something that could genuinely be called evil, which is one of the Princes of Hell.
- Unholy Matrimony: The Incognito Princess is seeking the King of Choirs' hand in marriage, and provided you don't screw her over during the ceremony, the wedding is a success.
The Clockwork Sun
- Abandoned Playground: A kind of resort was built here, where people could bathe in the Clockwork Sun's glory. That got abandoned quickly.
- Affably Evil: The High Sequencer may be the high priest of a cruel and angry god, but he's nevertheless a cheerful and generous fellow who's one of the few elites in Albion actually trying to do something for the lower classes.
- Deus est Machina: The New Sequence worships the Clockwork Sun as their god.
- From Bad to Worse: The Dawn Machine in Sunless Sea was by no means good, but it did give its followers something in return when it took away their free will. That something was the sort of fulfilled happiness most people spend their entire lives trying to achieve. It was often hard to tell where the brainwashing ended and the genuine thankful loyalty began. Here, the newer and bigger Machine is a hateful, spiteful thing whose upkeepers (barring the High Sequencer) seem to be acting more out of fear than any kind of loyalty, and it seems to be actively seeking to kill those who serve it through vitrification instead of rewarding their work in any way.
- Good Shepherd: The High Sequencer is a kindly priest who just happens to worship an Eldritch Abomination.
- Horrible Judge of Character: The High Sequencer is incredibly naive. With a modest Hearts check you can trick him into hiring you to deliver "charitable donations" consisting exclusively of unmarked and untraceable gold ingots.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The reason it's freaking out even worse than in Sunless Sea? The Clockwork Sun brainwashed all the engineers tasked with maintaining it so that they'd spend all their time stroking its ego over its perfection. And as a result it's now got irreparable mechanical damage caused by neglected maintenance that is going to eventually kill it, proving concretely that it is not in fact perfect. The only downside is that it's not dying quite fast enough to stop it trying to murder everyone in range.
- Light Is Not Good: You see its radiance, and what it's done to vessels and buildings that got too close, well before you near it. The fear starts about the same time.
- Madness Mantra: THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN. Players of Sunless Sea should recognize this one.
- Mechanical Abomination: Trying to emulate what's essentially a deity through purely mechanical means can have some terrible effects indeed. The Clockwork Sun is unnatural and horrible even by Judgement standards. It causes Terror to your crew for miles around.
- Place Worse Than Death: No one wants to come here for any reason, to the point the docking areas are decayed and rusty. The Royal Society even pays really well for port reports of the place because it's so seldom-visited they rarely have an idea what's going on there.
- Sheltered Aristocrat: The High Sequencer is well-intentioned, but so breathtakingly out-of-touch that he actually thinks pistols are an appropriate charitable donation for an orphanage.
- Star Killing: Work against the Sun and you will take its radiance away, to the point where it doesn't cause Terror at all. Go the other way, on the other hand...
- Villainous Breakdown: A big part of the reason it's even worse of a deity than before crystallizing everything in range is The Clockwork Sun is dying and doesn't know how to handle that. Having brainwashed all its engineers into mindless servants fawning over it, forced to believe it was utterly perfect, they weren't able to recognize any of the various breakdowns occurring. By the time the sun noticed the damage was so great that even working its engineers to death it can't be fixed. Going from immortal to not long for this world has not done its temperament any favors.
Queen Victoria
- The Empress: Ruler of the New British Empire.
- Galactic Conqueror: She's working on it, at least. Her official title even declares herself empress of "the Soon-to-be-Conquered Territories".
- God-Empress: While she's rarely actually worshipped, as such, her command over the Clockwork Sun and the hours trade give her power over life and death, and the New Sequence, at least, seems to venerate her.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: A more understated example than most, in that she is more
Lawful Evil than Chaotic Evil, but it's still there. In Fallen London, she was more guilty due to apathy and the Masters of the Bazaar were largely responsible for the state of London. Here, however, utter atrocities like the Brabazon workworld are done with her approval as she seeks to conquer as much of space as she possibly can. - Historical Domain Character: Although by this point her life has significantly deviated from that of her historical counterpart.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Averted for the first time in the series.
- Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Her Renewed Majesty, Empress of Albion, the Reach, London, and the Soon-to-be-Conquered Territories, Victoria, Queen of Britannia.
- The Unfought: Despite being one of the game's most prominent antagonists if you choose to fight against The Empire, she survives through the game basically no matter what you do. The best you can do is blackmail her into surrendering power to Parliament.
Eleutheria
In General
A shadowy, lawless realm that attracts rebels and outcasts of all stripes to it. Lawless here is meant quite literally — without the light of a sun, laws of physics and time have broken down in numerous, alarming ways. The Khanate, nominal allies of London, holds onto a corner of Eleutheria — what happens in its other, darker areas is barely known, and may in fact be unknowable.- Eldritch Location: A part of space where reality is literally breaking down, home to maddening things and entities.
- Orientalism: Sultry, dark, mysterious, lethal, filled with tea, spices, enigmatic authorities and strange cultural practices: Eleutheria does everything a Victorian notion of the East should. The only reliable light source is a moon, for goodness sake.
- Reality Is Out to Lunch: Reality as Londoners understand it is... loose, in Eleutheria. You'll encounter light warps, invisible enemies and Alien Geometries as a matter of course.
Pan
- Anarchy Is Chaos: Somewhat. Where it's not entirely played straight with turf wars and everything, it's still present in the form of being a city-sized Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that cannot agree or settle on anything, barely even counting as civilized. Even engine repairs are a hassle because there are no real standards anyone is interested in enforcing.
- Authority in Name Only: There is technically a king, but the only thing they do is act as a mediator when an argument simply cannot be settled at the forum, otherwise doing absolutely nothing. He or she also does something like security duty by "bribing" you with money and mysteries in exchange for taking your port reports off your hands (storytelling is forbidden in Pan).
- Meaningful Name: Named after Pan, the satyr-esque Greek god of the wild who was as freedom-loving and lawless as it got among the other Greek gods. Also a terrific pipe player, which is fitting enough since you will start hearing pipes as soon as you come close to the city.
- She Is the King: The Cypress King is called that regardless of gender; in fact, the first one you meet is the very female February.
- Truce Zone: The center of Pan acts as one, with entirely opposed factions at least trying to be civil within, fighting their battles on the rim instead.
- Wretched Hive: Many of the factions around here are less-than-reputable, fighting for their slice of Pan's territory. Outlaws of all kinds, from those merely breaking human laws to those that are seen as criminals in the eyes of heaven itself, take refuge here.
Achlys
- Bazaar of the Bizarre: It's a sprawling market of tea, hookahs and silk.
- Call-Back: The town is protected mainly by a gang of urchins called the Ringbreakers, previously seen in the Fallen London Exceptional Story HOJOTOHO!
- Child Hater: Amberly Murgatroyd despises the Ringbreakers, saying they could all do with a good few spankings.
- Child Soldiers: The Ringbreakers are this combined with Free-Range Children. They are effectively Achlys' police force, operating out of an old locomotive wreck and keeping order in the port while also protecting the Midnight Monastery with surprisingly effective weapons and armor made from colanders and broomsticks.
- Corporate Warfare: Amberly Murgatroyd, the head of the Murgatroyd family's Achlys branch, is obssessed with trying to destroy the Midnight Monastery, as the Midnight's Favour tea is diverting interest from her own tea house.
- Kids Versus Adults: The War of Midnight, consisting of Amberly Murgatroyd and her small army of Clay Men and mercenaries against the Ringbreakers over the monastery that grows Midnight's Favour.
- Opium Den: The House of Silks, owned by the Curator Mr. Pipes. Whether or not it's actually opium or a Fantastic Drug is unknown.
- Plant Person: Midnight's Favour is a sapient tea. Although it's difficult to entirely understand it, it seems to absorb the regrets of those who drink it, ultimately leafing into the most refined bitterness imaginable.
- Swamps Are Evil: The marshes surrounding Achlys are a textbook example, filled with everything from will-o-wisps to quicksand. The mists are also madness inducing, and too long spent wandering the bog can induce strange and horrifying hallucinations.
Caduceus
- Cue the Sun: The Rites of the Rose take place when sunlight shines down on Caduceus. This is very strange, considering this is Eleutheria.
- Defector from Decadence: The Thorn-Maiden was once a revolutionary, but left Winter's Reside when she failed to find any beauty in their fervour.
- Fill It with Flowers: The Thorn-Maiden's ultimate goal is to bring the magnificent sunlit rose garden beyond the mirror into Eleutheria proper.
- Magic Mirror: This is the real secret of Caduceus; it is home to a gateway to the realm of Parabola, home of the serpentine Fingerkings. It is heavily implied to be the place that the first devils used to flee the High Wilderness, before eventually finding their way to Hell.
- Ritual Magic: The Rites of the Rose are central to life in Caduceus. Everything the inhabitants do is merely preparation for the next Rite.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: One of the Saints of Hell, the Drummer, is contained within a massive glass heart deep in the caverns beneath Caduceus. He is the one who determines who is worthy of the Rites of the Rose.
- The Tragic Rose: Iconography of this is everywhere in Caduceus. It's partially the reason the Thorn-Maiden arrived at all.
Langley Hall
- Bigger on the Inside: The outside is already massive, as are most of the rooms, but the sheer amount of rooms and hallways inside the walls utterly defies physics. This phenomena is called "the Treachery of Distance."
- Big Fancy House: While more public than most, this was definitely the intent, if scaled up from merely "big" to "absolutely titanic". It's so gigantic the entrance hall needs seven hearths burning at once to keep it warm, and even the coat rack is so huge it doubles as a textile shop.
- Big Labyrinthine Building: Large enough that you need to conduct expeditions to find specific rooms.
- The Ghost: The eponymous Lord Langley has not been seen in quite a long time. He's been hiding in the mansion's ballroom, hoping a lost lover of his would find him.
- The Lost Lenore: Lord Langley is consumed with sadness over a lover that he has long been seperated from. You can try to find them for him, or even offer up yourself.
- Meaningful Name: Langley used to mean "long glade" in Old English. Langley Hall certainly is long, and could be called a manner of glade in comparison to the wilderness outside...It may also be a reference to the building's former status as the library of the tree-like Scrive Spinsters.
- Possessive Paradise: In a way, it won't directly stop you from leaving but doing so causes you and your crew to suffer withdrawal symptoms which will make your terror skyrocket if ignored, staying in Langley Hall for an extended period of time negates the effect. Lord Langley himself is marked with Correspondence sigils that draw people to the manor, placed upon him by the Halved.
- Recurring Element: Just outside the Hall proper is the Last Lamp-Post, "the furthest flung part of London." This is a reference to the gaslamp used as the logo for each of the main Failbetter titles, as well as a
Development Gag to the game's original title screen during Early Access.
Piranesi
- The Alcatraz: Prisoners trying to leave find the place looping back to where they started.
- Alien Geometries: The place looks like it was designed jointly by Escher and the titular man himself.
- The Atoner: The Gallant Reformer was the prisoner for which Piranesi was built, having been responsible for the perversion of whole worlds, several extinctions, and even "theft of hope." Ultimately, the Reformer changed for the better, now extolling the virtues of achieving redemption through Piranesi.
- Body Horror: The Glistening Deformer, having transformed beyond all hope of recognition, now presides over prisoners who will have to physically change in order to leave the prison. Expect to see the human body developing in extremely disturbing ways.
- Dark Is Not Evil: The Chaplains might be disturbing by nature and in appearance, but three of the four are genuinely trying their best to help their prisoners free themselves.
- Eldritch Location: For the prisoners at least; when sentenced, space bends so that you cannot actually move without moving on from your original self.
- Fallen Hero: It's heavily implied the Glib Performer, Token Evil Teammate of the Chaplains, used to be the Dark-Spectacled Admiral, but a combination of the New Sequence winning and having to hide in Piranesi caused him to hit the Despair Event Horizon and become the ruthless warden he is now.
- Immortality Seeker: The Grey Conformer used to be one of the many Questers for the Martyr-King's Cup, but abandoned her quest - and presumably her desire for immortality - when she came to Piranesi.
- Prison Changes People: This is actually a requirement of inmates at Piranesi. People who've been sentenced only stay for as long as they remain the same: only by undergoing a serious change can you ever be allowed to leave. This can mean permanently dinging your stats... or it can mean undergoing a hideous physical mutation, or even having amputated personality traits manifest as physical entities. It's a strange place to say the least.
- Retired Badass: The Grey Conformer, once a legendary sky-pirate and a Quester, now extinguished by a stay in Piranesi.
- Wardens Are Evil: Averted for three of the Chaplains, who are actively trying to stop the only straight example from breaking the prisoners.
Eagle's Empyrean
- Bread and Circuses: It's pretty much the only way to survive. With the Belt of Midnight encroaching on them, an idle mind allowed to ponder or wander is one that goes quickly insane, so the Khan has provided vast entertainments for his people. A Khanate citizen is either working intensely or deliriously enjoying themselves.
- Ghost Town: The Khanate tried expanding further into Eleutheria at one time. You can explore the darkened ruins of the expansion yourself, though they've been taken over by Curators.
- Evil Knockoff: Inverted. The Xanthous moon definitely has a negative effect on those who witness it, but it keeps order well enough considering the city is engulfed by the Belt of Midnight and unlike the Clockwork Sun it may have been inspired by, it is not a narcissistic Mechanical Abomination who will glass you for the slightest doubt or negative comment.
- Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: It is a shining beacon in the middle of the Belt of Midnight- where Elutheria loses any semblance of order as it is plunged into complete, and true, Night.
- Repressive, but Efficient: Similarly to the old Khanate, the movements of foreigners is tightly watched and controlled here. But given the Liberation of Night would dearly like to see an end to the city...
- It's worth nohing that, provided you haven't been intentionally stirring up trouble, their treatment of you as they escort you out is extremely polite, coming more across as "apologetic security guard" instead of "secret police".
- Scenery Porn: The luminous beauty of the narrow streets and tiered palaces of the Empyrean is made all the more striking by the wild darkness that surrounds it on every side.
- Took a Level in Kindness: Their attitude seems to have improved a lot, which is ironic considering the dire straits they are in. In Sunless Sea, even when you managed to get proper access to the city they seemed to barely tolerate you. Here, they almost seem regretful when they have to kick you out at the end of your allotted time.
The House of Rods and Chains
- Call-Back: Remember when you dove into the eye in the last game? This is where you ended up. You can go back the other way and almost drown in the zee-floor if you're really that curious.
- Cthulhumanoid: The Rubbery Men are here in force, being their own inimitable selves. You can trade the amber you find dotted around Eleutheria with them, or try and work it yourself in their vats.
- Eldritch Location: This is one of the most alien places in the game, the corpse of a demi-god bathed in the black radiance of an inverted sun. Much of the descriptions could've been penned by the man himself.
- Giant Corpse World: It's built inside a creature similar to the Bazaar.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: An unusual example brought about because its superior, the Halved, did an about-face as to its goals. It likely recognized that, when taking an agenda against the other Judgements, having a courier to communicate with them that might tell them things was not the best idea.
The Well of Wonders
- And I Must Scream: The performers of its play have been trying for the better part of a century to pull it off, but since they've never completed it, they've never aged or been able to leave. Thankfully subverted when you do help them, as No Ontological Inertia hits.
- Genius Loci: It's a sentient wormhole that used to be a Fingerking that quickly starts using your logbook to communicate.
- Hostile Show Takeover: While you're in it, your logbook becomes its own journal.
- Kick the Dog: While the other Judgements gave the Fingerking plenty of good reasons to rebel against their tyranny, the "King who Speaks" was among the more reasonable Judgements portrayed, being not only willing to hear it out but also give up all its authority and power for the cause. Once it had willingly let go of its protection, it is immediately killed and consumed to presumably strengthen its killers.
- Mad Artist: It is insanely determined to finally finish the play taking place within it, to the point of warping reality and abducting your Captain to play the protagonist.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: How evil is debatable, but the intelligence in the Well is a Fingerking from Parabola who has undergone Abstract Apotheosis and become a living story; the first time its play is completed is its sole criteria for escape, making it just entering means that it'll likely be free as soon as you leave.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The play is ultimately a paean to the necessity of the Liberation of Night and exposing how unjust the Judgements are — and that they can be killed.
The Halved
- The sun is black. It squirms.
- Berserk Button: Several.
- Storytelling. Because a story killed its other half, The Halved has banned storytelling in Eleutheria.
- The other Judgements, to the point where showing it physical proof you are an ally of The Sapphir'd King or claiming you have aided The Clockwork Sun is enough to send you to Piranesi's core, the place it takes a century to get out of.
- Speaking its true name as The King who Wars will condemn you to Piranesi as well.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: In its backstory. The King who Wars inflicted this upon the revolution that killed its other half and condemned the survivor to a Fate Worse than Death.
- Dark Is Not Evil: To the extent that 'evil' is even a concept applicable to Judgements, The Halved is one of the least objectionable Judgements. The fact that it's still a massive jerkass and aims to kill every other Judgement in existence should tell you just how low a bar that is to clear.
- Deal with the Devil: The Halved is involved heavily in "The Truth" ambition, where you must offer it something for information. It ultimately offers you the ability to join The Courtesy and be saved from The Fire That Follows if you will sacrifice your Old Friend to it.
- Defector from Decadence: There are many, many reasons to hate the Judgements, and the Halved clearly has some of its own to hate them despite being one itself.
- Fallen Angel: More of a Fallen God. The Halved has completely revolted against its brethren, to the point of outright emitting what can only be called Anti-Light that erodes away all law and sanity, to turn Eleutheria into a haven for all that rebel against the Judgements. If the implications are correct it's even killed a Judgement before, murdering the Reach's sun with one of the seeds that create Wells.
- Hypocrite: Possibly. Despite spearheading the Liberation of Night and apparently aiming to free all beings of the tyranny of the Judgements and their laws, it seems to see no issue with imposing its own laws and will punish those who disobey. The ban on storytelling imposed when the Halved was still a Judgement remains in place. It will send you straight into Piranesi (which requires you to forcibly change yourself beyond recognition, taking centuries before you reemerge as an entirely new person) just for speaking its name when it was a Judgement. Tellingly, one of its former servant claims that the Halved has not changed as much as it thinks it had.
- Kill the God: As you learn during "The Truth" ambition, The Halved slew The Garden-King, and is responsible for offering you the chance to kill The Sapphir'd King.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Before it became the Halved. After the Fingerking and its follower killed the "King who Speaks", the Halved's other half, the "King who Wars" lived up to its name and promptly killed all the ones responsible before throwing the Fingerking down a "well", imprisoning it there until you accidentally release it.
- Space Master: Unsurprisingly given its field of influence, it has the ability to change how spatial relationships work.
The Blue Kingdom
In General
The land of the dead. All of them. Whether they're humans, animals, plants, stars or undefinable abominations, all must pass through the vast, monstrous bureaucracy overseen here by the Azure King, and be filed unto their fate.- Fantastic Caste System: It has a fairly strict one as part of its Vast Bureaucracy, although changing caste is mostly a matter of paperwork:
- The Antedeceased are people who are legally recognized as still being alive.
- The Ephemera are the souls of the dead attempting to make the pilgrimage to Death's Door.
- The Yoked are souls of the dead who have been employed as servants in the Celestial Bureaucracy.
- The Invisible are people with no standing in the caste system at all.
- Our Angels Are Different: The Logos, the Sapphir'd Kings servants, are its orders pronounced in the Correspondence, and resemble wheels of living fire.
- Protocol Peril: Everyone in the Blue Kingdom is subject of its Fantastic Caste System; being a member of a specific caste can open options in some of the ports, but it also pisses off certain locals into attacking you in the world map. The trick is to change castes to get what you want done. The caste system also includes people who just got there and didn't fill out the paperwork to get assigned to one of the different castes — that's the worst possible position, as you have no protection from ANY of the residents or access to caste-specific options in ports.
- Vast Bureaucracy: Beyond comprehension, and you'll be made to feel it. Whatever you're trying to do here you will need a particular status or favor, and to get that...
- The Underworld: Limbo, more or less. There's Only One Afterlife, and you can visit it to see what's waiting for you. You don't necessarily have to accept it.
Sky Barnet
- Ambadassador: Downplayed, but the Ambassador from Albion is noted to be bedecked with old medals, is constantly matching wits with devils to try and keep the Embassy running, and apparently survived an attack by the Logoi that left her with strange, script-like lesions on her arms.
- Beleaguered Bureaucrat: The human staff of the Embassy of Albion are not well respected by the rest of the Blue Kingdom, and the apparently constant attempts at reclaiming dead relatives by the Empire's citizens only worsens the issue.
- Brick Joke: Failbetter finally delivers on their promised joke that started with Low Barnet in Sunless Sea. For reference, the real life place is called High Barnet.
- Cassandra Truth: The Ambassador's reports on the Blue Kingdom were dismissed due to how unbelievable the rest of Albion found them, leading to the Empire cutting off most of its support. The Attache's job is to compensate for this by writing cheap, half-true books about the region and selling them to the greater populace.
- Loophole Abuse: The crux of the argument over the Embassy's lease. The document allows the Embassy to remain "for three viewings of the Sun." The local devils argue this to mean three calendar days, while the Ambassador responds by claiming that she hasn't met the Sapphir'd King even once.
- Ret-Gone: Failure to secure London's lease of the Toll-Tower will cause the eviction to be applied retroactively, leaving you to be buffeted by a storm of passing years as the Embassy is instantaneously swept away and replaced by the Devil-run Court of Porphyry and Brass. The devils will also claim the souls of the staff "as a partial settlement."
- Slobs Versus Snobs: The Secretary shares an office with the Cultural Attache; her half of the office is neat and well-ordered, while the Attache's is a mess of documents scattered everywhere.
- The Slow Path: Should you choose to try and murder the Sapphir'd King, you must set up a specialized chamber in the Toll-Tower called a Gallery of Aeons to keep you alive long enough for the necessary poison to be developed, then for a sufficiently enticing soul to be found to carry the poison, and then for the posioned soul to make it past Death's Door to be consumed. The whole process takes about three hundred years, during which time your captain becomes extremely bored.
The House of Days
- Stubborn Mule: The Court of Mules is in charge of appeals.
- Vast Bureaucracy: The heart of the Blue Kingdom's. Getting anything done here is a complete pain in the ass. Even something as simple as getting a rental agreement renegotiated requires you to visit four separate courts and put your liver up as a deposit.
The Stone-Faced Court
- Government Conspiracy: The Graven are attempting to cover up the fact that the Watcher in the Well is dead, and has been for centuries.
- Judgement of the Dead: A variation - the Court's purpose is to verify that the dead are, in fact, dead.
The White Well
- And I Must Scream: The Spider-Senate describes the ultimate fate of the Failed Dead. It's not pretty.
- Evil Versus Evil: If you agree to bring the Psalmists here, they quickly get into a conflict with the Widows. Neither side of the conflict is even remotely sympathetic.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Depending on the perspective on the matter, of course, but this is what wells are made for, keeping things that threaten the suns forever locked inside. And the thing inside this one is probably pretty damned malevolent, even if you can side with it.
- Unholy Matrimony: The Widows are actually the bodies of a Hive Mind who lives here to look after the Spider-Senate, who your captain quickly realizes is best approximated to a spouse.
- The Worm That Walks: Remember Sorrow Spiders? Those cat-sized, eye-robbing nightmares on eight legs? And do you remember that a few dozens of them could form great masses of fused spider-flesh with a single mind, called a Spider-Council? Down here, in the deepest parts of the White Well, there is a Spider-Senate. Billions upon billions of spiders forming a single, gestalt being that is a deadly threat even to the Suns themselves.
The Forge of Souls
- The Cameo: The First Venturer, the unwilling Custodian of the forge, is The Merchant Venturer from Sunless Sea.
- Great Big Library of Everything: The Lyceum contains a humongous collection of knowledge of the Judgements' creations, their laws, and the Judgements killed by the Courtesy. It's so enormous that actually finding the Forge of Souls inside it requires you to mount a days-long expedition (or a suitable bribe through a Locutor).
- Item Crafting: If you can restart the Forge of Souls, you can use it to craft certain trade goods, and even a new companion.
- Previous Player-Character Cameo: The First Venturer mentions he crossed the Horizon with a single companion, which is exactly what the Player Character can do at the end of his quest in Sunless Sea. Said captain left the forge before the current player character arrived.
Death's Doorstep
The Shadow of the Sun
A palace built specifically for the Daughter of the Sun.- Affably Evil: The Daughter of the Sun is never hostile to you in any way unless you break a promise to her. In fact, she seems to rather like you. Nevertheless, she's still a devout follower of the ideology of the Judgements.
- The Dragon: The Daughter of the Sun, to her father.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Played with. To look upon the Daughter of the Sun safely, you have to take on a form more like hers.
- Knight Templar: The Daughter of the Sun is extremely loyal to the order-above-all-else philosophy of the Judgements.
Death's Door
The Sapphir'd King
- Asshole Victim: Remember the promise that you could "Murder a Sun"? This is that Sun. And since it's such an archetypal example of why people are even considering siding with the Liberation of Night, it's very much deserved.
- Cruel and Unusual Death:
- This is the fate it offers to those who pass through Death's Door; their souls are skewered, dissected, and fed squirming and writhing into the King's yawning maw.
- Following the right ambition path, the King faces this himself. How does being Eaten Alive from the inside out by billions of spiders that feed on its flesh and from it spawn more spiders to eat it with sound?
- Hate Sink: The Garden-King is long-dead and knew his gardens, the Clockwork Sun is a furious abomination and the result of human hubris, and the Halved is at least hosting a rebellion and has the excuse of having its better half betrayed and murdered. The Sapphir'd King may be an abomination of its own in some regards, but it's mostly just unpleasant. It's a clear example of why the Judgements' rule is opposed by many, and it's very difficult to feel any measure of sympathy if/when you kill it, which you can notably do at the climax of TWO different Ambitions, just to drive home how terrible it is.
- Jerkass Gods: Of all the Judgements present in the game, it's the most stereotypical. This means it's snobby, racist, cruel in its enforcement of the Great Chain of Being, and soul-devouring, having set up the whole Blue Kingdom to act as its personal wine cellar. You can kill it and take over with the help of the Sorrow Spiders, which may we remind you reproduce through eye robbery, and the people of the Blue Kingdom still like that more than the Azure's rule.
- Press X to Die: You are allowed to try and take it on using only your locomotive. This works about as well as can be expected.
- Spell My Name With An S: Occasionally spelled as "The Sapphire'd King" in the game files, but the one lacking the 'e' is presumed to be canonical.
Sky-Beasts
Cantankeri
- Elite Mook: Bull Cantankeri are bigger, tougher, even more irritable variants of the standard Cantankeri.
- The Goomba: Hands down the simplest enemy in the game — they're only capable of executing a simple charging attack, and have very little health.
- Money Spider: You can potentially loot valuables worth money from their corpses, because of their habit of chewing on precious Hours or other rocks.
- Irrational Hatred: As their name (and collective noun, A Disgruntlement) suggests, Cantankeri are apparently just permanently pissed off. They especially don't like heat, warmth and laughter, which is why they attack trains.
- The Power of Hate: Going by certain dissection notes, Bull Cantankeri get to be that way by dwelling on an old bitterness that congeals in the form of Hours, and ruminating upon it until it grew hardened and plates accreted around it. Not that regular Cantankeri are any less powered by pure hatred.
Colonised Cantankeri
- Bullet Hell: As they take damage, they switch from their initial homing attacks to simply firing as many projectiles as possible in all directions.
- Mighty Glacier: Slow as a rock and as tough as one, too. It has trouble hitting anything from too far away, but takes a lot of hits to die.
Chorister Bees
- Bee Afraid: Less aggressive than many sky-beasts, but they frequently come in large groups, and actively menace Titania.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Each individual bee is the size of a dog.
- Berserk Button: They may act passively towards you. If you're carrying their nectar, however, they are 100% hostile.
- Glass Cannon: They can't take many hits, but do a lot of damage to your hull if they manage to close on you.
- Hornet Hole: They have their own corner of the Reach, the Apoidean Gardens, heavy on honey and flowers.
- Organ Drops: Blowing up a swarm gives you a chance to risk your crew to raid some of their valuable honey.
- The Swarm: You don't fight the individual bees, you fight their swarms.
- Zerg Rush: There is never just one swarm of Choristers. If only one is obvious, you just can't see the rest yet. And once you attack, they will all make a bee-line for you.
Scrive-Spinsters
- The Blank: They don't have faces. The hunting club that challenges you to bring the mounted head of one ultimately regret doing so, because it's just that creepy to look at.
- Elite Mook: Senior Scriveners are essentially their Chief Librarians, both in terms of knowledge kept and level of danger.
- Magic Librarian: What they were originally.
- Organ Drops: Scrive-Spinsters are made of Bronzewood, one of the single most valuable common resources in the Reach. Taking pickaxes to one after you defeat it is usually one option.
- The Pen Is Mightier: They have pens that drip with ink eternally, though the pen goes dry when the Spinster dies. A frustrated scientist isn't sure why, but he knows that the spinster itself is not a living inkwell—he's dissected one to make sure.
- Super-Scream: In addition to their projectile attack, at close range they have a scream that increases your Terror.
Curators
- Affably Evil: There's actually several Curator characters throughout the game who are mostly genial towards the player, including the scout-selling Mr. Menagerie.
- Alien Space Bats: Not only are they, in fact, literal alien space bats, but about a dozen of them are responsible for the Fallen London universe's rather significant divergences from our world's history.
- Bat Out of Hell: They look like giant bats.
- Collector of the Strange: Every Curator is obsessed with establishing a collection of some particular thing, and they guard these collections jealously. You can pilfer part of these collections off their corpses, which is profitable, and the rest (and weirdest) can be found cocooned in Curator's Eggs.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: One of the few enemies that isn't either suicidally brave or brutally persistent, Curators will try to fly away from you after taking a certain amount of damage.
- Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: They used to be, back when the only Curators London knew were the Masters of the Bazaar. Just leaving a scar on one of them was worthy of legend, because they were that far above humanity in the Great Chain of Being. And then, unfortunately, humanity caught up; it's almost saddening how quickly a Curator can be murdered when you're aboard a locomotive.
- Piñata Enemy: The pieces of their collection they carry with themselves are usually very valuable. They are fairly hardy, though, so they'll make you work for it.
- Super-Scream: Their main attack is a sonic burst of some kind, likely a form of weaponized sonar.
Guests
One of the more insidious dangers a Locomotive can face is a Guest infection; just one stray tentacle stuck in a fender can create a whole infestation crawling through the vents. The ones you face in the High Wilderness, entirely piloted by these wormy creatures and presumably with their crew devoured, are merely the terminal stage. Don't get too close.- Abnormal Ammo: Guests shoot themselves at enemy locomotives, and any hit has the potential to infest your locomotive. This can be cleaned up at a port, but the things are incredibly difficult to remove otherwise.
- Elite Mook: Not even Imperial Dreadnoughts are safe from the wiggly menace, and like Scouts are a lot faster than the locomotive is supposed to be.
- It Can Think: They are strangely good pilots, and even know how to use the lateral vents of their locomotive.
- Lightning Bruiser: Guests soup up the locomotives they infest. They're faster and far more maneuverable than the normal versions, while also being roughly twice as tough.
- Organ Drops: You can gather individual Guests from the shattered, roasted husk of the locomotive, in order to eventually make a powerful weapon that uses their secretions as ammo.
- Spot the Imposter: They look just like Scouts or Dreadnoughts, but give themselves away in several ways. Guests don't use their lights, move in unnatural ways, and most importantly, don't use their engines to move.
- Tentacled Terror: They are disgusting masses of tentacles that invade space locomotives. Trains that have been taken over by them seem innocuous at first, but then they sprout tentacles and you'll realize it's time to get the hell away from there.
Scorn-Flukes
- Covered in Scars: Not that you can see them, but Scorn-Flukes in particular usually have ritual scars around their core.
- Organ Drops: It drops some kind of bizarre, tumorous organ that, to people who have an extremely rare secret and are already half-insane, can work to create the Wrath of Heaven.
- Sea Hurtchin: As usual. They ram you at high speeds with terribly sharp spines, they yell Correspondence at you to set your vessel on fire and madden your crew, they bring as much hurt as ever.
- Unstoppable Rage: The ship-destroying sort of Fluke is already pretty pissed off as-is. Scorn-Flukes are even angrier, due to being exiles from their kind on top of everything else, and they'll take it out on anything that comes in view. They even twitch in fury whenever they're attacking you.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Possibly the main source of their anger. Axile is gone. They will destroy any locomotive they come across to forcibly extract the memories and experiences of the crew in an apparently fruitless attempt to find any clue of the location of their home world.
Sleeping Grievers
- Action Bomb: Their only attack is to charge your locomotive at high speed and blow itself up in your face, spewing corrosive acid absolutely everywhere.
- Alien Geometries: Its internal anatomy is strange, much bigger on the inside than it has any right to be. Further investigation reveals this was intentional, as the Grievers were made to find places where the laws of distances had been broken and correct the mistake by eating the excess distance.
- Berserk Button: They absolutely hate being woken up. Whether it's a light being shined on its face or a locomotive's engine noises, their somewhat fragile slumber will be disturbed, and they will immediately attempt a kamikaze dive on the one responsible.
- Expy: Once you know what they are, they might remind you of The Langoliers, except with space instead of time. And are also explosive.
The Undeparted
- Humanoid Abomination: They appear vaguely humanoid at first glance, like a grim reaper's torso.
- Invisible Monsters: Being (un)living violations of the Judgements' laws regarding mortality, they don't really exist and as such can't normally be seen. Illuminating them with your engine's light makes them real enough to see them. Note that just because they don't exist doesn't mean they cannot harm you, so you can be ambushed easily.
- Kill It with Fire: While fire's effectiveness is unknown (it may be just disappearing back into nonexistence rather than getting Deader than Dead), it's certainly very calming to burn their corpses up to make really, really sure, reducing Terror significantly.
- Not Quite Dead: Being what they are they can't really die, but they can be incapacitated long enough to loot them (though haste is recommended before they wake up again).
- Undead Abomination: As far as abominations go, it rarely gets as nasty as "literal mistakes of reality".
- Wolverine Claws: Packing big ones that can open a locomotive up like a can of sardines.
The Logoi
Messengers of the Judgement running the Blue Kingdom, who are also its commandments made material. A parting shot from one of them is responsible for cursing Captain Whitlock to die from burning up inside-out at the beginning of the game.- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: They recover, but the reason you can reduce Terror as one of the victory options; you still still rendered a demigod punch-drunk.
- Fantastic Caste System: They enforce one in the Blue Kingdom, with each type of Logos harrying members of a specific caste. They don't like folks that haven't done their paperwork and are thus outside it.
- Language of Magic: They're made out of Correspondence. Not with the Correspondence, from it; when you're as fluent with it as the stars themselves, you can do this sort of thing.
- Lightning Bruiser: They can move pretty quickly in short bursts, and bar none the toughest thing you can fight. It takes four shots from the Wrath of Heaven to kill one, when three will do in anything else.
- Not Quite Dead: "Killing" one just causes it to enter a dormant state where it is purely Correspondence lettering to heal.
- Our Angels Are Different: Under certain definitions of angel, at least; they certainly serve a deity-like being, and are called princes of heaven at that. It helps that they usually look like wheels of flame, giving them a resemblance to Throne angels.
- Starfish Aliens: They're living proclamations made by a Judgement.
Eaters of the Dead
- Glass Cannon: One of the weakest predators of the Blue Kingdom, they nevertheless do truly horrific damage if they manages to get their plentiful teeth around your engine. And they usually come in groups.
- Our Monsters Are Weird: The head of a crocodile, attached to the body of a hippopotamus, with a peacock's tail. With a dozen eyes.
Outlaw Locomotives
Reach Marauders
- The Goomba: With respect to other locomotives — Reach Marauders can only fire a single, slow-moving projectile at a slow rate of fire, and they have weak armor. They're also the first enemy you encounter in the game.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: All of the standard hostile engines have black and red color schemes, readily identifying them as baddies.
- Space Pirates: The reason they're so interested in attacking you in the first place.
Albion Marauder
- More Dakka: They use the same scrap launcher as the Reach Marauders, except they fire it like a machine gun.
- Space Pirates: Much like their cousins in the Reach.
Resurrectionists
Star-Maddened Explorer
- Ax-Crazy: Their crews are utterly raving bonkers, if their locomotive's erratic charges and name didn't give it away. Boarding one further underscores this, with your captain finding the insides covered in disturbing drawings.
- Close-Range Combatant: Their main strategy boils down to moving into close range, then either firing a blunderbluss-like cannon or just plain ramming your locomotive.
- Dead Man's Chest: If you fail to gain crew from a defeated Explorer, one of the dead crew is found stuffed into a cupboard.
- Fragile Speedster: Marginally weaker than the basic Marauder, but make up for it by being faster and more maneuverable than a locomotive has any right to be.
- Ramming Always Works: It certainly does a ton of damage if they make contact with you, not to mention puts you in a very bad place to be when it comes to their blunderbusses. Notably, they're the only locomotive enemy that tries this tactic. Notable also that this can backfire and blow themselves up if they take too much ramming damage.
- Room Full of Crazy: The insides of these locomotives are covered in disturbing paintings, unfamiliar constellations, and other bizarre scrawlings.
Deranged Dreadnought
- Apocalyptic Log: Searching the crew quarters may reveal a crewman's diary, which slowly changes from patrol records to crazed ranting about the Clockwork Sun's radiance.
- Flechette Storm: Their guns shoot high-velocity glass flechettes rather than bullets. And with a good Mirrors score, you can safely unscrew them, install them on your ship and do the same; apparently, bullets come in, glassy death comes out.
- Still Wearing the Old Colors: While, as the name implies, their crews are no longer loyal to the Royal Navy, they're still painted in its colors and their nameplates can still be sold to Sweet Jane to collect her bounty on Stovepipes.
- Taken for Granite: Both their hulls and ammunition have glassed over, to say nothing of their crews.
- Replacement Mooks: Glorious and Deranged Dreadnoughts start showing up much more frequently if the Clockwork Sun is functioning well, replacing the normal Enduring Dreadnoughts.
Spirifer Engines
- Elites Are More Glamorous: In a manner of speaking; they're the shiniest and richest-looking of all the outlaw engines you'll find, and by far the most well-armed. Justified, in that all the bling they carry is meant to fool officials by looking funerary, and that spirifage brings in a lot of cash.
- Your Soul Is Mine!: Like any spirifer, if they find someone whose soul is valuable, they'll mug them for it.
Stovepipe Locomotives
Enduring Dreadnoughts
- Mighty Glacier: Like most Stovepipe ships, they're slow and have no lateral jets, but are heavily armored and have powerful weapons.
- Mooks: The most common ship in service to The Empire.
- More Dakka: In addition to their main guns, they have a turret that sprays low-damage shots in all directions like a machine gun.
- Piñata Enemy: They're much tougher to take down than Tackety Scouts or Marauders, but they tend to have better loot on them, like barrels of gems or unlicensed maps. Notably, if you side with the Tacketies these guys are going to be your main source of vital Ministry Permits, either straight from the source or by delivering the charred remains to Sweet Jane.
- Space Navy: The Royal Navy, of course, has taken on this role.
Glorious Dreadnoughts
- Elite Mooks: London's more powerful warships, most often found near the Throne of Hours.
- Load-Bearing Boss: Downplayed, as they're Elite Mooks rather than bosses, but each one you destroy weakens the Clockwork Sun.
- Magitek: They're Enduring Dreadnoughts juiced up by the power of the Clockwork Sun. Looting one risks causing you to lose crewmembers to something similar to the Clockwork Sun's vitrifying radiance.
- More Dakka: They're armed with what can only be described as a turret-mounted long-range automatic shotgun.
- Space Navy: Like the Enduring Dreadnoughts, they're under the command of the Royal Navy.
- Replacement Mooks: Glorious and Deranged Dreadnoughts start showing up much more frequently if the Clockwork Sun is functioning well, replacing the normal Enduring Dreadnoughts.
- Underground Monkey: They're gold-plated versions of the Enduring Dreadnought with a slightly stronger main gun. They also have really good loot and potential Terror reduction, so long as you can bring them down.
Ministry Monitors
- Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: They only mount a single weapon, and it's one of these. It's powerful enough to take out the starting ship in three shots, though.
- Glass Cannon: They have lighter armor than other Stovepipe ships, but they have one of the most devastating ranged attacks in the game.
- Space Police: Their primary mission is hunting for smugglers, and they'll automatically attack you regardless of your standing with the Stovepipes if you're carrying contraband.
- State Sec: With their introduction, the Ministry of Public Decency now toes the line between this and their old role as Moral Guardians.
- Wave-Motion Tuning Fork: Their bow is split down the middle to accommodate their main gun.
Tackety Locomotives
Tackety Scouts
- Drives Like Crazy: Apparently, they say hello by ramming into things, and will swerve around like the Captain's been hitting the whiskey.
- Fragile Speedster: They're explicitly not made to last, but they are quick and evasive, making good use of their lateral jets. However, they are armed with only one of the weakest gun, so they can't do as much damage as their Stovepipe adversaries.
Tackety Liberators
- Kill It with Fire: If you get close to their sides, they let out a damaging burst of flame with decent reach.
- Mighty Glacier: Compared to the lighter Scouts, they're much slower and less maneuverable, but more powerful.
Other Locomotives
Dousers
- Berserk Button: Light. Specifically and relevantly to your captain, locomotive lights. If they catch you with that thing on, they will immediately try to blow you up for daring to "poison the dark with its light".
- Darkness Equals Death: The inside of the Locomotive is pitch-black, and almost all failed events related to dealing with a defeated Douser include at least one member of your crew dying aboard them, whether due to a Douser ambush or some kind of quarrel that other crew members refuse to speak about.
- Nothing Is Scarier: In-Universe — your crew are utterly terrified of even a defeated Douser engine, as they really do not want to know what the crazed crew members did in the dark. Considering the kind of things you can find aboard them during a successful plundering mission, they may have a point.
Empyrean Outriders
- Berserk Button: Don't let them catch you with your locomotive's lights off. Douser or not, they'll blow you up just to make sure.
- Do Not Go Gentle: Some of the crew remain alive after battle, and if you try to pillage their locomotive they will put up a formidable defense. That said, they'll also surrender peacefully if you allow them.
- Foil: To the Dousers. While the Dousers are fanatical adherents of the Liberation of Night and attack any engine with their lights on, Empyrean Outriders are bent on keeping the Eagle's Empyrean lit, and react violently to any locomotive that travels with their lights off.
Gods of the Sky (unmarked spoilers)
Like the Zee, the sky is the domain of mysterious, powerful deities who rule over it as their domain. They are more powerful, and more inscrutable, than their Zee counterparts.
The goddess of the lost, the forgotten, the missing, and the shipwrecked. Associated with the edges of territory and the freezing cold of the High Wilderness, as well as the many many wrecks that scatter its “waters”. She is the most mysterious of the three.
The living corpse of the King of Hours, the original Judgement of Albion. He is very unhappy with the Clockwork Sun, and with humanity in general.
The Waste Waif
- Berserk Button: As the name might suggest, events that waste supplies tend to piss her off. Burning supplies for fuel, for example.
- Due to the Dead: If the Captain chooses to give up and freeze to death while Adrift, the Waif will appear to close the dying Captain's eyes and take them away.
- Eldritch Abomination: Her true nature is more obscured than with the other two, but whatever she is she’s definitely cosmically significant, very powerful, and can be undeniably terrifying.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Appears as a frostbitten, hairless child in rags when she comes to take away those she has chosen.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Associated with horizons, easily the most mysterious of the gods, and the hardest to understand? The Waste Waif is essentially the new Salt. That being said, she plays a far smaller role than Salt did.
The Storm That Speaks
- Berserk Button: The Clockwork Sun. The King of Hours sees it as a false judgement and a usurper, and about the only way to get on something resembling its good side is to help it sabotage it.
- Eldritch Abomination: It’s what remains of a dead Judgement, lashing out violently and erratically.
- Evil Versus Evil: It doesn’t seem much better than the Clockwork Sun, at least in its infuriated state.
- Odd Job Gods: An odd take on this. It’s too dead, though mostly too angry, to have any kind of coherent far reaching domains like the other two do. Instead it simply tries to hurt the Clockwork Sun, hurt anyone who helps the Clockwork Sun, and encourages others to do the same. It is essentially a god whose entire domain is the opposition and downfall of a different god.
- The Power of Hate: It is, simply put, a dead Judgement persisting as a ghost out of sheer anger and hatred.
The Burrower Below
- Abstract Eater: It eats time, in all the forms it comes in. When you pay it back to appease it, you pay it with the lifespans of your oldest crewmates.
- Berserk Button: Many; it’s incredibly easy to piss it off. It hates oathbreakers, those who shirk debts, those who use transit relays (since it’s an intrusion on its sphere of influence) those who dig too deep into mysteries above their station on the Great Chain, etc.
- Eldritch Abomination: As a massive Aeginae, and considered the strongest of all of them (who are already called “Princes” to the Judgements' “King”), it is a being of inconceivable cosmic scale and power. It can kill your crew from anywhere in the universe by eating their lifespans right out from under them.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Aeginae like Storm were already weird and different enough from archetypal dragons. The Burrower is the original Dragon in The 'Verse, and she’s even weirder than them.
- Mother of a Thousand Young: Said to have, through lineage, mothered all Aeginae.
