Funny / Fallen London

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Ambitions

Ambition: Bag a Legend

• During the "Bag a Legend" ambition, one will eventually travel to the Convent of the Sisterhood. The Mother Superior finds it necessary for her initiates to test one's mettle:
  You dodge the first fusillade of bullets, and kick over a table for cover. Two tiny nuns with daggers leap over it and stab at you. While you're dealing with them, that big bruiser with the axe hacks your makeshift defence into kindling. A novice tosses throwing blades at your face.
  
  Few people are violently disposed towards nuns by nature. However, these particular sisters will tear you into chunks unless you defend yourself. You pull a bayoneted rifle from the wall and lay about yourself with it, sending wimples flying. You bludgeon, stab and shoot your way through the sacred warriors. You run out of nuns before you run out of bullets.
• Later on, you need to disguise yourself as Mr. Veils (long story)... and one of the most effective things you can do, knowing Veils' teeth are autonomous, is to make your own teeth autonomous too. The end result is bizarre, and since Polythreme techniques are involved they also have minds of their own that aren't 100% obedient to you. The end result is good for an occasional laugh, even at the very end when you're bragging at the bar.
  You tell them about the Vake's teeth that move on their own. Then you let your own teeth out, as a party trick, and let them walk up and down the bar. The barkeep asks you never to do that again. Bad for customers' appetites, seeing that kind of thing.
  • At one point, you need to soak one of your molars in Black Wings Absinthe for alchemical purposes. Your tooth gets really drunk, crawls back into your mouth and picks a fight with the entirety of your dentition before settling down to sleep it off.
  • The best part about this? This is all to infiltrate a workshop that used to be Veils', but that Mr. Fires seems to be bent on seizing. And you can bite the absolute hell out of him with these aberrant, angry teeth. The cherry on top is that this improves your impersonation, as if Mr. Veils furiously chewing on the other Masters when he's in a bad mood (AKA his only mood) is a common occurrence.
  Your teeth have become accustomed to Mr. Fires, and may not take well to other foodstuffs.
• Another thing you need to do to cover your disguise is learn to talk like Mr. Veils, who has a unique voice even for a master... and your character decides the best way to achieve that is to take a drink. Specifically, a tankload of Strangling Willow absinthe garnished with the screams of a long-dead god. This puts you more in its mindset than you could've expected...
  Every syllable hurts to produce; every sentence makes you angry at the imbeciles who invented speech. Even swallowing is pain. Why should people want to talk to one another anyway? SILENCE. SILENCE BETTER.

Ambition: Light Fingers

• You can draw some amusement for how quickly and horrifyingly what is advertised to you as a simple heist mission becomes. Dark amusement.
• Between being chased by angry Fingerkings and realizing you acquired a stalker there is a point while trying to escape Parabola where you accidentally crash a party by mirror... and an older society lady demands to see your invitation.
• Why have the cats of Parabola never used the spear that can pierce the skin of the sun?
  "Because cats do not have thumbs," says the Knight Marshall, with a haughty look.
  • And the cats refuses to let anyone who isn't a cat wield this weapon. Their solution? Declare you an honorary cat so you can wield it. "Lyon Pursuivant of Arms Extraordinaire", to be exact. And the best thing is, you can make sure everyone in London has to address you as "Lyon".

Ambition: Nemesis

Ambition: Heart's Desire

• "Rules forbid excessive drunkenness unless the Debauchery of Fourth is in play." Obvious Rule Patch much?
• Pages is absolutely hysterical throughout the entire thing.
  • Close to the end, Pages literally moves into the Player Character's house and becomes The Thing That Would Not Leave, eating all the food, drinking all the wine, and insulting its host.
  • Its rivalry with the monkey. When it loses to it, it writes many poems about how much it hates monkeys.
  Pages then keeps you a further hour to discuss its thoughts on Dryden. "I wish, in retroment, we had taken London sooner, so I could have had the great pleasure of performing a taxidermy on him."
• Before Pages's match with the monkey, who happens to be living with you, it uses its municipal power to create an array of inconveniences around your lodgings, such as loud construction at all hours and a road being planned through your living room. However, due to Gameplay and Story Segregation, the game doesn't take into account that you might live in a Spire-Emporium of the Bazaar, making you and Pages next-door neighbors, and so it may well be bothering itself just as badly.
• For the optional side-task of questioning the Boatman about his Marvellous victory, you'll naturally have to die in order to question him. You could of course do this by simply visiting the Carnival and gazing into Heart's Mirror — or you can "call in a favour from Virginia" to have her kill you. Considering how you had to introduce a major cause for paranoia into her otherwise-stable life to compel her to agree to play, it's very funny to see Magnanimous increasing as a result of allowing her this bit of payback.
  "I've been waiting for this..."
• A marker for Beechwood's thesis demonstrates near exasperation at the idea they had the misfortune to witness.
  Here, Beechwood implies that God did not make Man, but rather Man naturally evolved – or devolved – from its original form of Ape. The ape is perfect, Man its debased facsimile.
  The marker wonders if Beechwood's assertions might challenge Newton's assertions on gravity, for the earth surely now revolves due to the speed of Mr Darwin rotating in his grave.
• If the player chooses the Time ending, then Hearts' amusing card game has screwed up all the Masters' plans (except Fires. Fires is thrilled) and trapped then in London for much, much longer than they ever wanted to be. And they are all very aware of who's to blame. Hearts presents you your winnings surrounded by Death Glares on all sides.

Location-based storylets

Great Hellbound Railway Board Meetings:

Reactions and interactions of some board members are very amusing:

• If you have both Jovial Contrarian (August of the Council) and April on board, he may slip her a note. Whatever he's written in it, April deems it too dangerous to disclose and immediately eats the note. Then the whole board stares for the next 30 seconds at her chewing intently.
• While you have to pass a Persuasive check for most directors, Feducci requires Dangerous. You literally wrestle him during the argument.
• If you tried to endorse Tentacled Entrepreneur during the election, the board is not sure how to react. His Amused Lordship and Sinning Jenny feel very awkward, the Bishop of Southwark is mostly just content that it's not a Devil again, Virginia - previous mayor and deviless (the one mentioned by Southwark), thus at odds with Rubberies - is so incensed, she cannot even protest, while the Jovial Contrarian sees the perfect opportunity to troll fellow board members:
  "An endorsement is much less entertaining than a vigorous speech entirely undermining each candidate in turn," says the Jovial Contrarian. "But in this circumstance, let me proclaim whole-heartedly: OTHATAROOTH!"
• Another bit of the Jovial Contrarian being his usual self is approving the road to Station VIII.
  "No one will want to go to Station VIII," he says. "And those who are there won't be happy to see us arrive. Therefore, I vote whole-heartedly in favour of both the ends and the means. Station VIII ho!"
• Of all the various Board Members, the Efficient Commissioner is likely the most suffering, mostly because she needs to represent the Bazaar and protect its schemes in one of the single most plan-threatening ventures anyone can embark on. In particular, voting to cross to Balmoral through Parabola instead of going through a mountain has her just giving up and telling you that when (not if) this results in mass possession by dream-snakes, she'll just quit her millennia-old job on the spot and leave.
  • Choosing to listen to Cornelius and build a Ferrocephalus (essentially a tracklaying Mammoth, ludicrous enough on its own), produces this gem from the Commissioner that encapsulates her experience on the board for many players.
    "Every week I come here for these meetings, and every week I walk out feeling like I should check into the Royal Beth."

The Flit:

• When planning to rob various places, the text in the infobox is usually a short description of how you'll do it or what would interest people. The Rob the bazaar option, however, is hilariously short and blunt.
  "Now that's just the height of foolishness."

The Shuttered Palace

• Writing an opera that is "a light comedy about the lives of the saints".
  "Oh, but what a jolly little opera you have written. You establish your mood quickly. The first song has St Augustine chasing Manichaeans off with a broom. The audience chuckles nervously. The Empress doesn't seem to be offended, so the work continues. Two bishops in the front row walk out during You'll Have To Stand Still If You Want To Be A Martyr. The Bishop of Southwark promises to do something very secular to you."
  • The "Epic mocking the Empress" option is similarly hilarious, if only because of how damned blatant your character makes it, and the sheer, apoplectic, purple-faced rage it triggers in the Empress. One figures your character thought getting kicked out was worth it just for seeing that face.

Your Lodgings

• After acquiring a particularly menacing jade idol, you're presented with a list of things to do with it. Leave it, lock it away, feed it the blood of small animals, or feed it the blood of small animals after inviting an audience around first ("because no-one else has anything quite this sinister").

Ladybones Road

• When the Brass Embassy has a backlog of paperwork, you can get a temp job there, and:
  "Who knew there were so many evildoers in the world? Or that so few of them knew how to spell?"

Disgraced Exile in the Tomb-Colonies

• Tomb-colonist parties are apparently rather boring when it comes to dancing, as the only moves they seem to know are "Zombie Gait" and "Oh sod, my bodyparts are falling off again". Of course, you can then teach them something a little more exciting in one of the many occasions you have to do so while on exile, and while details are spared, we're told enough to make it hilarious
  There were casualties, but there are always casualties in love, war and the mazurka.

Wolfstack Docks

• Training up for both Black Ribbon duels and Hunting Dangerous Prey can get a little frustrating, but the grinding is mitigated by the various storylet failures giving you the bloodier, text-based version of Amusing Injuries, as you get to partake in various painful incidents that your character's simply annoyed about.
  Where's that damnable physician?

The Open Zee

• After the Zeefarer updates started rolling in, and the map to the Unterzee was made available, the option shows up to try and travel NORTH to the Avid Horizon. But if you try going there without being a Seeker (or having some other official business there), the game amusedly chides you.
  Absolutely Not.
  You didn't think this would be so easy, surely? Back to the map. Pick a wiser destination.
• Post-Zeefarer, if you somehow reached Troubled Waters 8 without acquiring a more plausible reason for your unfortunate end, what does the game pick for you? Glim falls. Everyone dies. This comes complete with a fat bounty of Glim as a consolation prize.
  • The developers later chose to Nerf this route so that after the seventh time, subsequent Glim-falls would send you to the State of Some Confusion instead of death, presumably to make this an actual fail state instead of a viable way to grind Glim.
• Alternately, if you pick up every possible reason for your demise, there's a unique option. The game tells you in no uncertain terms that this is the worst possible option on that storylet, but aren't you curious?
  Our Beloved Captain was, as the zailors say, a Person who did not merely Court Disaster. Our Beloved Captain made eyes at Disaster. Needed to be Chaperoned around Disaster. Took Disaster to the Altar and Married It.
• While the Corsair storyline is mainly intriguing with moments of badassery, there is something netly amusing about the fact you become a pirate complete with parrot, and the parrot is the one calling the shots.

The University

• The various misadventures one can suffer in founding the Department of Correspondence can be fairly amusing, partly because you're bound to find particularly weird, stupid or prank-happy students, or due to the fact the department essentially involves research into a thing that actively resents being studied. Incidents include
  • Your character thinking burning down the University within the year is an acceptable price.
  • Finding some particularly odd fellows as your assistants.
  • Students that think Pyramus and Thisbe were Clay Men from the docks.
  • Your attempts to get published causing the Review Board at the unfortunate magazine to flee back to the surface.
  • Your colleagues being assholes and spreading horrible rumors about your classes.
  • Your character getting horrible nightmares over the most innocent things, like the aforementioned Pyramus and Thisbe incident.

Your Laboratory

• Using any of Lettice's regular research options are bound to end in amusing chaos, since she's surprisingly intelligent, very enthusiastic even for the boring bits, and too old and dead to give a shit about safety. She'll turn your neat math into fiery Correspondence messes, repeatedly detonate your devices, and probably stage puppet shows with your paleontology finds.
  • One fate-locked (now simply highly expensive in Whitsun-only currency) story involves combining your Hillmovers, highly explosive eggs found in Parabola (explosive as in their name is completely accurate), with an Illegal Device for the augmentation of eggs obtained from Whitsun. Note that this was her idea and not yours, though she has the decency to take it all the way out in the Wastes...
    After the fire, screaming, vitrification and ash rain, you make the following scientific discoveries. First, the device's effect on a Hillmover is to turn it into more of a Peakmover or an Alpmover. Second, the Hillmover's effect on the device is essentially none at all. The device is still in flawless working order when the rest of the vicinity is glassed over.
• Working with especially long experiments can lead to you simply running entirely out of terminology and letters to keep your research straight. You have two options to deal with this.
  • You can pull another alphabet off your ever-growing shelf, after already exhausting English, Greek and even Hebrew.
  Your assistants shudder as you write down a Cyrillic A – wait, no, you already used a Latin A fifteen terms back, and those are identical. Bother.
  • Or, you can simply engage in cold-blooded cromulence with both Greek and Latin terms intertwined, which actually raises your scandal from the winceworthy results.
  Confidently, you coin a word that would make Mr Pages blush. Your assistants cringe, but they say nothing. Pah! What do they know of hirsulogotempography?
• If you hate the Struggling Artist cluttering your deck enough to shove him into your laboratory, and his Honey grind still isn't enough for you to let go of the grudge, during longer experiments you can go and use him as a test subject. The results are lethal, but this being the Neath, your character grudgingly admits they'll probably be back at your door.
  He will, undoubtedly, return one day. Perhaps the trip will inspire him – maybe he will become a Nocturnal and draw languid vistas of a dark shore on the far side of a slow-moving river.
  Most likely he'll be at your doorstep asking for money once again. But one can dream.
• The earliest student research assistant you can get is the shifty student. He is not good at research and is terrible at everything. If you look at his reflection in parabola, he is described as a future dean.
• Unwise Ideas can be spent all at once for a big load of Research, accompanied by a proportional load of non-Suspicion Menace of your choice. The one for Scandal is to publish an unproven theory, which has your character touching off a massive controversy:
  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
  For a week, the University takes to separating out anything addressed to you (by name, or simply via string of expletives) as soon as it comes in. It's one thing for you to keep getting letters that spontaneously ignite; quite another for them to set other faculty's post alight.

The Iron Republic

• Check the Bazaar tab while doing your romp through the Iron Republic. That's right, that's Fuel and Supplies from Sunless Sea. It takes a special kind of chaos to let you buy items for the wrong game.

Veilgarden

• You can write a short story. One of the things that improves your story is editing it, which increases its potential quality and decreases the number of pages you have. Selecting the Daring Edit option gives you a rather amusing lampshading of Fallen London's vocabulary.
  You've dared the shambolic barricades of verbiage and brought out a shining... no, let's not talk like that. That's how all this started. Cut it out. Cut it all out.
• One of the early Making Your Name jobs in Veilgarden is working on a commissioned epic poem... about harvesting fungus. The option to submit a normal version of the epic reads:
  Turn over four hundred stanzas of dutiful fungal enthusiasm. Please God let this be enough.

The Hinterlands:

• One of the options in Balmoral is to utterly obliterate your Suspicion if it's risen too high and you've stockpiled enough of the "Disappearing" quality with some work in your Cabinet Noir.
  Evidence was mounting against you. You arrange for it to melt like lacre. Documents catch fire. Witnesses recant. The day of your supposed offences never even happened, and the date was a calendrical misprint. The 33rd of March indeed!
• Throughout the Hinterlands, you have the chance to make a statue of yourself at each station, be it as Poet-Laureate, an eminence in the Correspondence, or as Defender of Public Safety, depending on the place. But then you get to Balmoral, where the Empress and her family simply won't allow any statue raised unless it's someone in the royal family... so you get the option to invent an alternate identity that is part of it and make a statue to them instead. It's not even useful like the other statues; you'd just do it because, for whatever reason, you really want to have an effigy of you right in the backyard of the Empress' summer home.
• Station VIII lets you build up a kitchen and serve various Neathy dishes from it to your passengers. The good news for you, you can never serve people something improperly cooked, it will always be delicious. The bad news is, Neathy cuisine is utterly unforgiving to its chefs and tends to inform them of their mistakes both quickly and violently. Since your character has Seen It All by now these horrific mishaps are mostly just exasperating.
  The peppercaps are stronger than you realized. Their dust gets on your fingers, and in your eyes, and before you know it you are weeping profusely. That is what causes the mishap with the stove.
  Just to make sure, you experimentally light a half-cup of absinthe on fire – my, that stuff just jumps onto your sleeve like it has a mind of its own.
  Improperly managed, these ingredients don't so much simmer as combust in the stewpot. Your eyebrows do not survive the encounter.
  Kitchens are used to things being on fire. But not like this.
  Oh no. Oh no. One day, perhaps, the kitchen will be clean again. But it is not this day.
• In Burrow-Infra-Mump there's a Devil Prince named Drummer In The Dark imprisoned under the church. He demands you to participate in his drumming ritual, otherwise he won't stop drumming himself and will drive everyone mad from the noise. You can unleash a Submerged Rector on him - a man with a deep love for loud shouting and music. The devil will curl up in his prison, trying to escape ear-splitting non-stop drumming.
  Submerged Rector: OH. DREADFULLY SORRY, GOT CARRIED AWAY.
• One of the Discordant Laws that can be passed upon your unfortunate person is that "no two bodies in disagreement will remain in disagreement"... while it often turns you and others into Extreme Doormats, you can also end up accidentally trolling the hell out of the Jovial Contrarian if it's in effect.
  In a debate with the Jovial Contrarian, you agree completely with the point he makes. Which prompts him to disagree, and argue the opposite side. When you still agree, he pivots back. Naturally, you raise no objections. "This isn't much of a debate, is it?" he asks, crossing his arms with a frown. You agree that it's not. He protests that it is, and you agree with that too.

Parabola:

• There is something terribly amusing about the final, secret campaign in the Parabolan wars. Mostly because your dire, fearsome opponent is yourself. Or rather, your reflection, after you have unwisely fortified it too much, and it got its own ideas and stole your troops to accomplish them, forcing you to chase it with what's left of them. You can taste the annoyance in the narration sometimes.
  There is a fortress nestled within the mountains, between two peaks where they scrape the ground below. Its strategic advantage is obvious to you immediately – as it would have been to you. There are traces that you fortified as you would have done so, were you you. Which you are. So that's settled.

The Gatekeeper's Cottage

• Hearts' Game. The whole damn thing. You'd think that a game about poisoning someone to death in ways they don't expect would be pure Nightmare Fuel, and sure, there's a lot of horror to be found behind the scenes. But the methods you and your partners come up with are so wacky that the whole thing reads like a pure slapstick cartoon.
  • The Knight of Ribs: You and the knight slather poisonous oils on your fashionably edgy carriage wheels - and then apparently try to run the target over while 'accidentally' grazing them. This is somehow legal in the game, though you have to illegally hit-and-run to pull it off. Or you could accidentally put multiple pedestrians in the boat hospital.
  • The King of Spines: Ever wanted to poison someone by shooting a melting bullet across the alley, ricocheting across multiple signposts just so it decreases its velocity to fully stop when it enters the center of his gelato? Probably not, but now you can! Unless you get the calculations wrong, in which case you have to apologize for cutting a hole through some lady's expensive hat. Ever gaslit a guy so hard during his home renovation that he completely ignores the giant nail in the ground? Now you can!
  • The King of Motley: This guy is a tough act to recruit but so very worth it. He allows you to recruit more than the standard three accomplices - and then uses them all at once to power his cons. His comedy scheme involves bullying and roasting the target with a giant crowd until they're so humiliated that they don't care whether or not the wine bottle they're chugging down is poisoned. His tragedy scheme involves hiring the target to play the lead in Romeo and Juliet - and then the audience applauds so fiercely at the death scene that nobody notices you used actual poison.
  • Oh, and the main reward for winning the game? A tiny trophy - which you are expected to throw in the closet with hundreds of other tiny trophies in a scene befitting an animated movie.

Opportunity cards

• "A Polite Invitation". No matter who you are, you'll be invited to a fine party apparently hosted by someone absolutely terrible at picking guests. More likely than not, you will have to narrowly avert a disaster, or be part of one. It helps that London nobility overreacts to anything.
  • The Jovial Contrarian can end up killing a guy through sheer annoyance, which spoils the party entirely.
    He doesn't know why this keeps happening
  • The poor, poor Tentacled Entrepreneur has zero idea what's going on through the entire thing, and needs your help throughout the whole party. He's also rich enough to make even the snootiest lord/lady reconsider their stance.
    "I'm really not sure that- I'm sorry, how much?"
  • Some usually minor Cross Cultural Kerfuffle with the Turkish Girl taking off her shoes to dance.
    Ankles! Naked ankles!
  • Expressing an opinion is apparently extremely risky, and saying something even remotely shocking will cause one of the older guests to pass out face-first into his soup from the sheer shock.
  • Trying a fiery dance of the Elder Continent, only to find out that exact dance was banned by the Ministry of Public Decency last week. Everyone agrees to never speak of it again.
• The more difficult option on the "Her barbed tongue" opportunity card:
  "You spit foul recriminations and vicious calumny. Ladies faint dead away and gentlemen stagger under the barrage. Your target runs, weeping, with her hands over her ears. You follow her! Your tirade continues in the street, where hansoms careen hastily off and urchins fall from rooftops. You pick up your victim's dropped letters and wave them as a final salute. You are spent."
  • The failure message for that storylet is pretty excellent as well:
    "Three ladies faint. So do three gentlemen and a passing waiter. Two cats fall off the roof and and an elderly horse outside keels over. You are denounced in two newspapers and a sermon. What words! You have definitely gone too far this time."
• Also, the second option of the "supply information to a foreign power" storylet. "Your contact can't write fast enough. He breaks a pencil. Another pencil. Russia is sinking! Fallen London will annexe the tomb-colonies! Mr Wines is marrying the skeletal corpse of a nun! The Spider-Council is holding a debutantes' ball! It's almost impossible to stop once you've started. Just keep talking. Everything will be fine."
• The second option of the "Publish a scientific article" card where "It appears that you have showed them all. Furthermore, it seems very unlikely that they will laugh at you again."
  • In addition, you can get thrown out of the University. The description of this status says, verbatim, "They laughed at you and so on."
• When asking the Shivering Relicker to recertify your scraps, you may get "A straight answer, at least: 'You know what that is? It's rubbish.'"
• If you lost your Correspondence Stones, you later get a chance to buy them back with a large amount of Muscaria Brandy. If you do, you get this message:
  The librarian swaggers off, presumably to poison a few hundred people. You are left alone with your stones. There's blood on one and ash on another, but they're definitely yours. It's like meeting old friends. Old friends that occasionally set you on fire.
• The second option success on the "Dealing with an Assassin" card. You send the assassin a box of chocolates and an insulting note. This gets him so angry that he marches to your door and knocks on it furiously. You respond by dropping a coal bucket on him from the upper floor window, then loot the unconscious body.
• "Bounty Hunting" gives you an option to track down Jasper, a rather notorious Unfinished Clay Man, on behalf of the Constables. If you fail to persuade him, you're dealt with in a rather straightforward manner:
  You confront Jasper, telling him that it is time he returned to his duties. He hits you with a sledgehammer until you go away.
• The failure text for the first option on the "A meeting with cats" Shadowy card:
  "That didn't happen. You didn't slip and end up dangling from a cornice. Cats didn't mock you for your efforts. A large ginger certainly didn't sit on your head as your feet flailed. Nothing happened at all."
• Some of the "Sever ties with this faction" cards are heartwarming or moral, like saving a soul from Hell or utterly embarrassing (and revealing uncomfortable truths about) a hypocritical noble to his every acquaintance. Some are just plain dickish, like chasing your tomb-colonist friends out of the house with candles or turning your roof into a deathtrap so urchins won't come back. But writing down the location of spies' super-secret shrine and graffitiing its location (and some unsavory secrets to start a cloak and dagger free-for-all) all over London? Taking the chance you were given to give a sermon on proper behavior to rail against the church for hours, naked from the waist down and drunk out of your mind? Switching out wardrobes to something drab and sensible much to your bohemian friends' horror? Finding a zee-bat, which sailors are extremely superstitious about hurting, and cooking it for dinner in front of everyone, making a hardened zailor cry in the process? That's just hilarious. Cruel, but hilarious.
• When you meet a local steamer on The Sea of Voices, it tries to befriend you. If you own a Majestic Pleasure Yacht, the steamer tries to mate with it, or at the very least seduce it.
  I say, must you do that?
  The Steamer sails dangerously close to your yacht, engines purring.
  What is it doing?
  The noise! The Polythreme steamer emits a wheezing scream. Perhaps it's music - resolutely atonal music - to non-human ears. The ship bumps suggestively against the hull of your yacht, and the lights at the prow turn an ethereal blue. It looks like you're being overrun by luminescent jellyfish. After half an hour of this, the stranger sighs, cuts engines and drifts off despondently. You steam away from the thing.
• If your Suspicion climbs high enough, and you haven't increased your "Counting the Days" too high, you can overwhelm the Constables with the Neath's most feared law firm, Baseborn and Fowlingpiece. The result?
  The Constable in question has signed a testimonial to the effect that you didn't do it, you wouldn't know how to do it, and that you were in Paris at the time it happened.
• Once you've established a reputation for dangerousness, a callow youth hoping to make a name for himself challenges you to a duel. If you accept, he asks what time the duel should be, and you shoot him on the spot.
  • Alternatively, you can get annoyed, tell everyone where to go if they want a piece of you so you can deal with them all at once, have around a dozen young aspiring fighters show up, only for you to start taking shots from a pre-planned sniping position.
• If you have both an Urchin and a Monkey in your employ, they occasionally have a conflict card where the two of them have a very nasty feud that starts getting out of hand. You can support one, the other, or neither... or you can give them both some Compromising Documents on a vicar that they BOTH have a grudge against. After that they disappear for a time, before the newspaper puts out an edition saying the offending vicar was "repeatedly defenestrated" and the two come back home laughing like old friends.
• In one story, the Tracklayers' City is faced with the threat of an artist possessed by a Fingerking, who paints murals of the city being swallowed by Parabola. Left alone, these risk luring citizens in to be possessed themselves. How does the player remove the danger? By marking one building on the mural as offering discounts on the "BEST SOUP IN TOWN!", turning an elaborate mind-stealing trap into an advertising billboard that no-one will look twice at, except to find where to get some good soup.

Non-repeatable storylines

• The whole Rattus Faber infestation story... just... seriously, while the L.B.s are quite dangerous in-story (being sapient and extremely good with mechanical systems), the battle with them has texts that escalate the whole thing into Mundane Made Awesome levels! An example of a choice you can make:
  The battle of the pantry: defend it against all comers!: "The rats are after your victuals! The pantry is a crucial battlefield. You will protect your last packet of Mr Murgatroyd's Fungal Crackers with your life!"

  On success: "It's hard to get a good swing in a small pantry, so you settle for jumping up and down on the horde of rats that come for your comestibles. Your milk jug is smashed in the fracas, but you have shown them! They shall not have your dinner!"

  On failure: "They came. They came by the dozen. They came by the hundred. You fought them. You fought like a cornered beast, but there were too many. They took them. Damn the little furry bastards. They took your crackers!"
  • The battle in general has a very WWI-esque feel to it. You can attempt to negotiate during a ceasefire, duck in cover behind tables (a bit like trenches) when tactics go awry, you can engage in a battle of attrition (the aforementioned defense of the pantry) and... play cricket with the enemy for a bit of competition and fun (reducing Nightmares if you win!), after which they go back to shooting.
  • If you have a Starveling Cat, you can get the option to "unleash the Thing from the Wardrobe".
  • Also this:
    "The rats are more cautious, but you're more accurate. No bullet goes astray. Which is good, because that last rat was standing in front of rather a handsome terracotta vase in the Egyptian style. Not an original, certainly, but let's not sacrifice art willy-nilly to the needs of the moment. Anyway, rat expunged, vase narrowly escaped."
  • If you opt to challenge the rat leaders to a duel (which in rat terms, means a series of deadly ambushes):
    This one was hiding in your pillow with an ether-soaked napkin and an ear-drill. Fortunately, you are in the habit of distressing your pillow thoroughly with a poker before sleep, in case of ambushes just like this one. Good to see the habit finally pay off.
  • One of your options for morning preparations is to call in a friend whose quite skilled with the Bagpipes to engage in psychological warfare on the L.B.s. It can work... but if it fails, well, the pipes are enough to raise your Nightmares.
• If you fail at asking a bat for work, you get the message, "Can bats look affronted? Apparently they can. You wouldn't think they had the requisite facial muscles."
• Many parts of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name are pure Nightmare Fuel, but ever so often amusing snippets can find their way in.
  • The Snicket Warning Labels gradually become longer and elaborate to the point of absurdity. In particular:
    THIS WILL PROBABLY DESTROY YOUR CHARACTER FOR EVER AT A COST OF FIFTY NEX AND FIVE CARNIVAL TICKETS. THERE IS NO TEXT WORTH READING BEHIND THE BRANCH RESULT. IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO PLAY THIS BRANCH TO CONTINUE THE STORY. IF IT DOES NOT DESTROY YOUR CHARACTER, IT WILL IRREPARABLY DAMAGE IT AND END YOUR QUEST FOR THE NAME PERMANENTLY. DO NOT CONTACT SUPPORT TO COMPLAIN IF YOU ARE RASH ENOUGH TO CLICK THIS BUTTON.
  • The funniest part is that someone picked that option, and their character wasn't destroyed. The player's response to this was to submit a polite bug report.
  • At one point, you're asked why you seek the Name. One possible answer is "It's cheaper than a divorce."
    "Excuse me," she says. "I seem to 'ave mislaid me sense of yoomour. I 'ad it a moment ago, I swear. Just before you started talkin' out of yer arse."
  • Devouring your own entry in Slowcake's Exceptionals:
    "I was hungry," you say as you tear the page from the book, "and you gave me only the pelt of trees. I was thirsty, and you gave me only ink. I was mmff mff ff mm. Mmm hmm fm." Your mouth is full of paper.
  • On the Winking Isle, you can visit the Lighthouse if you have St. Destin's Candle. This is quite hard to get, so the game reassures you that "no candle will be lost" in your visit. Of course, St. Destin's candle is stated to not truly exist, so you indeed lose "no candle".

Seasonal events

The Feast of the Exceptional Rose

• One of the gifts at the Feast of the Exceptional Rose was "A Tear-Drowned Collection of Incomprehensible Love-Poems", which was written by someone under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Frontispiece" (quote marks and all). The descriptions for it are hysterical.
  The contents are smeared and mostly illegible. You may never find out if the author managed to find a rhyme for "cohabitude". [...] The pages crack with salt. The ink is a briny smear. Only fragments remain: "Oh, furnial passion, hot as the glance of stars!" "...the palputating beat of my hear..." and the disturbing "...my love; will you reciprocreate?"
  • And your character tries to guess who could possibly have written it... (In case the cromulence didn't tip you off, it's probably Mr. Pages.)
    To ensure everyone knows that "Mrs. Frontispiece" is a pseudonym, the true author has diligently hung the name with quotation marks every time it appears. But who were they, really? Perhaps some slim clue remains. You find a page with an unsmeared fragment of poetry.
    "Your eyes are inglobulant as pocketed toads,
    your teeth are fortifically straight.
    I long for the expositous tone of your voice,
    and your sighs elegiate."
• Another gift is "Terrifying Candies." The description?
  NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO (YES) NO NO NO NO NO

Whitsun

• In response to the Moray Heels being used to stomp holes into brawling opponents, one wiki editor came up with a parody song, and then three other posters added onto it.
  Shad0: (I'm sorry)
  When your boots punch a hole
  In your enemy's sole
  That's a Moray!
  anonymous:
  When you stomp with your heels
  And the opponent reels
  That's a Moray
  Doctor Flamingo:
  When you aim for a kick
  But their shoe is too thick
  That's a Moray!
  PSGarak:
  When you knock out your foe
  By stepping their toe
  That's a Moray!

Summer Festivals / Elections

• Feducci's term as mayor ended with a bang. Literally. He blew up the town hall as his last act.
• Though not as explosive as Feducci's exit, the Contrarian managed to slip one last, subtle dig at his successor upon leaving, by changing the title of the office from "Mayor" to "Lord Mayor." Giving an aristocratic title to a senior devil and veteran of the Season of Revolutions is a major insult, and it wasn't lost on Virginia, who (if the player supported her) not-so-subtly threatens to take the Contrarian out on a hunting trip in the Forgotten Quarter for the offense.
• The Inorganic Sciences Wing of Veilgarden's Museum includes free tasting samples of poison. After many humorously painful attempts, you come to the scientific conclusion that you shouldn't drink poison.
• If you're familiar enough with the Bone Market, and especially if you've abused the hell out of it before, the focus F. F. Gebrandt puts on her museum doing real paleontology instead of whatever the hell they're doing there is bound to amuse. Especially since you can still scam her with Mammoth Ribcages you grew in your lab from human ones, and if you know that whatever the hell the Prismatic Frame came from really was alive once, since you dug it up.
• The Malicious Ushabtiu that Gebrandt and the Empress accidentally unleash on London are one of the city's more amusing threats, mostly because even if they're stony golems with enough strength to push over a chimney and much faster and more silent than they look, they were also hilariously petty. They'll frame you for jewelry theft, drop bricks on you and poison your tea, sure, but they'll also rearrange all your clothes and trinkets so everything is in the wrong place, rearrange dinosaur skeletons into spiders, and in one case one woman got all her clothes sliced apart and sewn back together into nightmare patterns. As such, they're less a reanimated horde of vengeful revenants and more a giant gaggle of petty assholes.
• While the invasion of the Starved Men is more tense and even nightmarish than humorous, the Overworked Commodore you deliver intel to in order to combat them gets some good lines thanks to him being at the end of his rope throughout the whole affair.
  "A fireside chat is all well and good," he splutters, "but they dropped a giant rock on us! In what language is that a hello?"
  "Our subordinate never returned from Ealing," he says, brows furrowed. "This supposed ecstasy has overpowered even his fear of our drill sergeants." He taps his pen against his teeth. "Incidentally, if you see that officer again: tell him he's court-martialled."
  "So: they know enough about London to map it. And dislike it enough to drop enormous spears of rock upon it." The Overworked Commodore taps his chin with the finial of his pen. "Hardly surprising information, but good to know nonetheless. If this was all a freak accident I'm not sure what I'd do."
• In a mix of Painting the Medium Black Comedy and a legitimate Wham Line, at the beginning of the invasion, when you're about to be crushed by a stalactite, there at first seems to be an option to endure it. But when you look at the Dangerous and Wounds checks...
  No. Not even you.
• The way you convince the other factions of the Neath has a few gems:
  • When meeting with the Corsairs, one of them asks "What has London ever done for us?" And you hit him with the biggest Rhetorical Question Blunder you can by providing an itemized list of both the goods that they've stolen to furnish their caves, and the impact of the invasion on the production of such goods. You don't even get halfway through before they're sold (fairly literally too, joining for share of the loot).
  • Convincing the Khanate is twofold. Their ambassatorial apparatus is convinced by telling them they'll be out of a job and so much bribe money would be wasted if London was destroyed. And the actual government? You tell them that if London made a peace treaty or even surrendered to the Roof, the Roof would become a Great Power much nastier to the Khanate than London is. And by their reaction, at some point they also got the idea they could get to show off, because they bring the finest airships they have and most impeccably-dressed and least-accented sailors around.
  • For the Godfall lot, you barely even need to say anything. You arrive, and the Abbott is already getting so ready they were fixing up the Saint's old dirigible before you even arrived.
  • Hell is still as unhelpful as ever, even when you head into its heart to beg for their help. They weigh London's needs against their own and find nothing... and then you let slip the word "Sunlight" the one moment their usual measures even let you speak the concept. Going by the narration's sudden bluntness and heading straight to the point, the idea of a Judgement getting anywhere near Hell makes them quietly but thoroughly lose their collective shit, and they gear up for war pretty much instantly.
• When you grab an airship, it gets a random name from a given list. A few of the names show Failbetter has probably been reading The Culture novels. The full list is compiled here, but a few gems are:
  • Percussive Phrenologist
  • Are You Mad At Me
  • I'm Not Mad At You
  • Responsible but not Accountable
  • Wagger of the Dog
  • Left as an Exercise to the Reader
  • After You I Insist
  • Ran Out of Zee To Plunder
• And then at the end, after you (and most of the fleet) are killed in action, you can choose to snap and start screaming your head off in a musical like a reality sitcom teenager. This is enough to convince Death to let you all out early. It's especially amusing considering what got you there gave you eighty levels of Wounds, which would've taken actual real-life weeks to work through; the idea of putting up with that the whole ride was perhaps too much for the Boatman to bear.
  Player Character: ROW, ROW, ROW, YOUR BOAT, LONDON ISN'T DEAD! MERRILY, MERRILY, MERRILY, WASH THE BOATMAN'S HEAD-
  The Boatman: Out. Get out.
  • It's made even better by your only other companion on the boat being the Starved Lithologist, who is beyond baffled by whatever the hell you're doing but doesn't interrupt out of what might be morbid curiosity.

The Fruits of the Zee Festival

• For the Fruits of the Zee Festival, you can hire a fishing boat on Mutton Island and go fishing and may land a catch depending on the "Running Battle..." quality. You may catch:
  "If you crossed a pumpkin with a lobster you'd get the front end of whatever this is. The other end is best undisclosed."
  "Your catch is inconveniently ambulant. It keeps trying to wander grumpily back into the water. You give it a good talking to and hit it with an oar."
  "Oh, look. Just what fish needed: pedipalps. You get a close look at them as it gamely tries to catch your head in a net of sodden silk."
• Also from Mutton Island in previous years, you could pick up an armored Pre-Emptive Guinea Pig. And he counts as a weapon, not a pet/companion. Which is slightly unfortunate if you wanted to name him Boo.
  "He insists on formality. He's a projectile, not a conversationalist."
• In 2016, then-mayor Sinning Jenny attended the Festival. The next year, Feducci was expected to follow her example, but didn't. An empty chair was set up in his place. In 2018, the Jovial Contrarian attended...and had Feducci's chair set up again, so people could yell at it/kick it/sit on it and cry.
  "Mayoral tradition," he calls it. "That I have just made up."

Hallowmas

• Early versions of Hallowmas allowed players to help other players with menaces in exchange for confessions. In practice this led to some players intentionally racking up menaces (or failing to rack up menaces) so that other players could farm them.
• Hallowmas 2016 gave players the opportunity to enhance a number of their Companions into upgraded versions with better stats. One of them is a goldfish that becomes so traumatized by overhearing your confessions that it bonks its head into the wall of its bowl whenever a human gets too close to it, which is horrifying and hilarious at the same time.
  Turning from your gaze, it swims into the little coral fixture in the middle of its bowl to contemplate the awful breadth of human sin. Thereafter, whenever someone puts their face near its glass, it swims away, thudding fruitlessly into the opposite side of its bowl.
  • For even more hilarity, you can have Mr Huffam "interview" it:
    Mr Huffam raises one eyebrow. He then raises the other. He does not speak till he has managed to wrestle his expression back to neutrality. "I see."

    He tries. He tries very hard. He kneels beside the bowl. He licks the nib of his pen. "I... ah... hello. How do... that is... I... well. Have you been a goldfish long?"
  • It's even funnier in its full context: a goldfish that you drove insane is being interviewed by a noted newspaper editor who happens to be Charles Dickens in a city dragged underground by Alien Space Bats. And every single thing you just read makes sense in context.

• Hallowmas 2018 gave the player the opportunity to learn from the Jovial Contrarian. How is this done? He gets you into a Debating Theater and makes you debate yourself. Later on, he joins you. The result is the best Persuasive weapon in the game.
  It is among the three most infuriating events of your life. It is an invaluable experience.
  • Not only that, it also has +2 Dreaded, the implication being you are now as feared as the Contrarian for picking apart every benign statement anyone could make at the slightest opportunity. With only two exceptions, this is the highest amount of Dreaded you can earn with a weapon. That's right, your sheer annoying rhetoric make people cower in fear.
    Some people hide behind sofas when you near.
  • Later, Huffam comes to interview you about the event. If you have taken the Contrarian's lesson, you have the opportunity to demonstrate.
    "A rather nice day, isn't it?" Mr Huffam begins the interview. You wonder what he can mean by this outrageous remark. You ask him to qualify what he means by 'nice' and 'rather' and 'day' and 'it'. Mr Huffam slumps into a seat with an expression of harassed horror. The interview continues in this tenor.

    The resulting article in the Gazette is headlined 'Mayor's Sinister Scheme to Corrupt the Population!' You can probably count this as a success.
  • On the other hand, if you let Huffam interview the Contrarian, this is the Quality you get.
    The Unexpurgated Gazette: Hallowmas Edition of 1896 - 'Oh no!' The Gazette reacts to the Jovial Contrarian's appointment as ambassador to the city of roses with appropriate restraint. 'Not him!' The Jovial Contrarian is thrilled and nationalises that particular issue of the Gazette, so all Londoners may receive a free copy.

Sackmas

• The "peace offering" from a certain rage-inducing deity as part of the Christmas Advent Calendar. Which turns out to be — naturally — a pair of dice. Forged from Hell-related materials.
  We've had our differences. But this is Christmas. Best wishes, the Fallen London Probably Random Number Algorithm.

Items

• If a "friend" tries to give you a Starveling Cat and you accept, the game will give you this message:
  The Starveling Cat has moved into your Lodgings. May God have mercy on our souls.
• One of the rarer non-Fatelocked items is a Blemmigan Secretary, a large, mobile, tentacled mushroom that eats people. When you discover one, it emerges with a small pointy blade, and scratches onto the lid of its box:
  OBLIGATION BEGINS NOW AT BOX-OPENING YOU HAVE FIFTEEN YEARS OF BLEMMIGAN TIME. DO NOT ASK PERSONAL QUESTIONS.
  Don't look a gift mushroom in the hymenophoric lamellae.
  • Then when you look at it in your inventory, the description says:
    The last thing you'd expect about a savage and eyeless anthropophagous mushroom is this: that those tendrils enable wonderful penmanship. The Blemmigan Secretary will be delighted to take dictation.
• Several messages when you deliberately deal with dangerous secrets are amusingly deadpan. For example, if you decide to "Repeat a great many Maniac's Prayers":
  This is a plan without a flaw nor any possibility of error!
  • And the result:
    Some time later
    A room. Possibly your room. You don't know the time of day, or which day it is, or your name. But these are trifles, and your hair will grow back eventually.
• One of the items available from the charity drive to raise funds for the Mediterranean refugee crisis is an Outlandish Artefact. The description is a subversive Take That! to Indiana Jones:
  This belongs in a museum! Assuming that colonial-imperial appropriation for the purpose of hegemonic taxonomisation is a suitable response to the problem of intercultural contact. Which it probably is, because museums are magnificent institutions.
  • Later on, a less pointed, though similarly acerbic description, is given to Unprovenanced Artefacts, which crop up on a few more places (including one particular Bone Market customer you're gonna be seeing a lot)
    Meticulously crafted by skilled, far-away hands for a deliberate but unknown purpose, and then appropriated, boxed up, and brought to London because "it will look so handsome over the fireplace?"
• The rare success message for converting Inklings of Identity:
  '...this one is about... me! Give me that! No, no, I'll see you're well compensated. I just need to purge this calumny before my wife sees it. Or my mistress. Or my other mistress.'
• The... 'snow' (called lacre) that falls in London during winter has... interesting properties. Chief among them seems to be its poor effect on living creatures' health. There are a lot of options to feed it to other creatures/your soon-to-be ex-friends, all of them with a message about how it's long odds that you'll get something useful out of it. And then, towards the end of the list, is an option that simply says 'Eat it'. The description:
  Really? Really?
• One of the renown items you can get from the Bohemians is a wooden barrel... used as clothing. The description asks the obvious: "Are you really going to wear that?" It raises Dangerous by 4 and Scandal by 1... but only by one, and it only sticks if you have no Scandal when you put it on. So if your Persuasive is naturally high enough, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from attending a high-class party, courting your paramour(s), raising your notability in Slowcake's Exceptionals, holding a business meeting for the Great Hellbound Railway, or composing a symphony for the Traitor Empress herself... while wearing nothing but a barrel.
  • One long-standing but now patched exploit for refilling your Opportunity Deck used the barrel plus two other Scandal-boosting items, the Moddish Bonnet and Scarlet Stockings of Dubious Origin. It involved starting a Flash Lay while wearing those items (as the initial Scandal check only uses your natural value) and immediately failing it (because that check uses your actual value). So you now have the mental picture of a Successful Spirifer being accosted by an endless line of barrel-clad con artists. Or alternately hearing out the player's offer before Nope-ing out of it as soon as they got a good look at who they're dealing with.
• One of the new railway commodities is the Sausage About Which No One Complains. It was originally represented by the icon for the Talkative Rattus Faber, making it rather obvious what the sausage is really made of. Later it was replaced with a generic sausage drawing, but during Hallowmass of that year, you could "improve" your own Talkative Rattus Faber by revealing "how the sausage gets made." The result is that your little buddy becomes a lot more somber and starts carrying the sausage around, with the implication that the injustice of it all is all he will ever talk about again.
  The Sausage contains multitudes. And now, so does its bearer.
• The best non-fate, permanently available Persuasive weapon in the game is a Sea Mine that you just haul around for the person-to-person equivalent of Gunboat Diplomacy. This helps with any Persuasive check, too, so seduction, negotiation and general persuasion are all improved by having an explosive that could permakill everyone in the room casually slung over your shoulder.

Miscellaneous

• If you're a Correspondent, the message when you get your pay reads:
  "Your investigations bear fruit. Occasionally the fruit is on fire."
• The Alt Text for one sidebar snippet about the Starveling Cat: "Yes, it can haz cheeseburger. It can haz anything it wants!"
  • For a snippet on where revolutionaries gather to hand out pamphlets and rant about the Bazaar: "Why can't they just rant on Facebook, like everyone else?"
  • A sidebar snippet, on the Vake: "They say it's not a monster at all. It's a man who dresses up as a bat. To, ah, prowl the city by night. But that would just be stupid."
  • Another one, on "snow" in the Neath: "There's a zee-captain down at Wolfstack Docks who claims you can render Neath-snow into white glim on any kitchen stove. I have tried it. I have a pan of goo to show for it. Three of my cats tasted the goo when I left it unobserved a moment too long. The one that lives is locked in the cellar now. I do not expect I will ever dare to release it. I have developed a dislike of zee-captains."
• A bit meta, but there is one player who takes every opportunity they get to send the head developer Alexis Kennedy rats-on-a-string every time the relevant card comes up. At the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, this happened. And then this.
  • It gets even better when they decided to test how many words the message box will allow. At 4 am. And became an "honorary rat consultant" for frightening Alexis Kennedy.◊
  • And once more, the rat game continues. Literally.
  • There is now a category in the inventory named "Ratness". You have Contraband, Academic, Wild Words, Curiosities, Elder, Cartography, Advantages, Goods, Influence, Legal, Luminosity, Rubbery, Rag Trade, Wines, Rumour, Nostalgia, Mysteries and...Ratness. Alexis Kennedy says it was actually always intended to be a division, but got a bit lost - that certain player's antics inspired FB games to sort it out.
  • Alexis now has a quality called "Accepting No Further Rats"◊. Of course, the aforementioned player decided he'd set up a whole Ratmas project so everyone else in Failbetter Games gets swamped with rats. And for reasons unspecified sending Christmas cards to Mr Eaten, which is either hilariously dangerous or sweet.
    In a pinch, cats will also suffice, because you can turn a cat into a rat by rubbing out a bit of the c.
  • In honour of Alexis' departure from Failbetter, said player declared an emergency Ghost of Ratmas Past and asked everyone to send dead rats to Alexis (and Alexis' test account).
  • The secret origin of ratsending (among other things) was finally revealed in their giant Seeking Mr Eaten's Name memoir:
    I was bored (again), and so to amuse myself I decided to bother Alexis on Twitter, asking him how many rats I’d have to send him to get news of a SMEN or Ambition update. This was in, like, January or so. His response, which may some day be written in letters of fire above the ruins of Proto Neo London, was “*what is the number*, that’s always the question”; so, of course, I set out to send as many rats as I possibly could.
  • Said player also truly became a rat consultant as they received a permanent position at Failbetter (mentioned in the above memoir).
  • In 2016, Failbetter organized their own Ratmas, complete with invitations to "shower @Spacemarine9 with rats"◊.
• A character without a specified gender will be referred to as "ah, Si-, er, Mad-, er, yes,". Amusing from an urchin. Moreso in stuffy, official correspondence. Or from a talking cat. Others will simply address you as a "...whatever you are", which is particularly funny when coming from people that are otherwise cultured and polite, like Mr. Inch when dealing with Labyrinth topics.
• Very early thing you can run into is the identity of your Mysterious Benefactor if you choose Persuasive... They are two Urchins in a trench coat.

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