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MORE SKETCHES OF SAM'S PARISH COUNCIL...... I'm just very attached to all of them. truly a miracle this weird church got off the ground

comments on each drawing under the cut:

Anyone??? Please???????

Ambition: a New Form!

You've dreamt of it. Everyone has. Lights on high towers; eyes glimmering in the dark, like stars in the night; claw, scale, fur, wing. Most find these to be terrible nightmares. But you always rise with a terrible heartache...

Similar to Evolution (though not motivated against Destiny), the FPPC is pursuing a transformation under peligin light into something quite strange. The quest towards that dream is sinuous and shadowed, sending you all around the Neath to learn what it means to be a monster. Along the way, you'll find a colorful cast of characters who all have their own perspectives on the question, and the liberation and loss involved.

One such character is William Ashcroft. Pointed to him by Minerva, who's a guest character from another Ambition (The Grand Hunt!), you find what seems initially to be a Parisian academic but is soon revealed to be a shaken survivor from the Fifth and already a monster. Bereft of purpose in his life by the vast tides that swept through the world, heedless of whatever it was he wanted to do (he's forgotten), he ends up being quite willing to tag along with you. I am, alas, too hungry to work out how he ends up. It's probably dependent on your choices; Ashcroft's will is fickle, and if he doesn't have a purpose he'll happily take any offered to him.

Third-act twist is that the New Form things are essentially four-sexed, with the claw/scale/fur/wing theme actually being the tetrachotomy, providing the near-obligatory Treasure forking - the FPPC chooses one to turn into or to reject the New Form and accept their humanity, which is possibly a worse and less justified ending than LF Diamond.

Treasures

First in the Order of the Cavaliers Chthoniform - +13 Dangerous, +7 Persuasive, +2 Monstrous Anatomy, +4 Dreaded Your armor has not yet formed; your new eyes have not yet opened. But your fangs and your claws are keen as ravenglass, and your blood courses in the drumbeat of war, and others walk behind you, in the shadow of the banner you will fly - when the time comes - when your towers rise, against all who might rend them to the stones from which they came - when it is, at last, the hour of liberation.

The Hood of the Emerald-Eyed - +13 Shadowy, +7 Persuasive, +2 Mithridacy, +2 Respectable, +2 Bizarre Silk and spice, life and love, are traded in the markets of mankind; but you no longer count yourself among their number. You take for your coin the scales of dragons and the tears of gods, and in their exchange memories, hearts, secrets, snatches of song. You are still so nascent; but already your eyes glitter, green as venom, and soon you will cloak yourself in scales to mark what you have become. Nothing will be beyond you; and even the merchant-kings of the Bazaar, worn in their age, will be bought in time.

The Mantle of Beasts - +13 Persuasive, +7 Shadowy, +2 Artisan of the Red Science, +4 Bizarre For so long, you have been only human, clay-fleshed, stone-eyed, chrysalid-skinned; but now you are aflame with rebirth. Your fur is only the thinnest of tufts, and your senses still so heartwrenchingly dull; but the Change is set in your bones and your blood, and when at last the hour comes, all that remains of what you were will perish in an instant - and you will not regret.

The Feathers of the New Wind - +13 Watchful, +7 Persuasive, +2 Artisan of the Red Science, +4 Bizarre You can almost pass for human, right now. But feathers burgeon from your skin, and their tips are a red none under the Sun could ever know. The colors and the treacheries of the Neath are old friends to your new heart (though always your wings waited in its hollows), and in their glory you break chain and chain and chain again. It is a motion as natural as breathing; as natural as flight.

(And the obligatory alternative, for if, after the Ambition all about understanding and pursuing monstrosity, you decide you don't want to be a monster.)

Further the means of your kind (Hood)

In the Dragon's cave, you dreamt of the merchant's scales. 

The new princes of the world

For now, your number are rare; but London dreams in apocyan, and as the seasons turn, more of its people answer. You compose codes, draw plans, advance your position, inch by inch; and when the work releases you, you guide neonates on their pilgrimages West. But always you return. Power's tide flows through London, and you are no longer a mere observer to it.

Airs 1-20 | You move through London, playing a game all your own. Pots of apocyan-hued honey, adulterated with the Dragon's dreams; allegorical novels and anonymous essays, swiftly censored; silken words and subtle shifts. The right ideas, seeded in the right places. They will take time to grow; but you have time enough to wait.

Airs 21-40 | You flow through the crowds of the Brass Embassy's latest gala. You charm; you dance; you keep yourself at enough of a distance to be alluring. And when you are not curling a little prince around your finger, you watch the devils' persuasions; wine, flirtation, contortion of the truth. 

Airs 41-60 | You journey to the Castle of Forests in Parabola, the seat of the Fingerkings, to hold audience with your un-cousins. It is not your first time navigating the maze of their speech, and it will not be the last. Their kind is old and wise in the methods of Mephistophelian bargaining. They will always be older than your kind; but you may yet be wiser.

Airs 61-80 | You lurk in the shadows of the Bazaar's spires, listening to the movement of treasures, secrets, skills. A courier carries a crate of the Widow's brandy, disguised as ordinary Greyfields. A haberdasher and a cobbler discuss troubles in the Clay Tailor Club; but you can hear four voices from their alley. A young lawyer of Baseborn & Fowlingpiece rushes past, clutching papers in disarray. You bump into the courier, nudging them towards the tailors; you swift a bottle from the crate; and you slink after the lawyer. You will offer the vitality and energy that she needs, in exchange for a few secrets, and a little of her considerable wit. 

Airs 81-99 | You are invited to an exclusive soireé at a restored estate in Ealing Gardens. Most of the attendees are those of London with great influence and little sense; but you are drawn into a back room, discreetly, to meet with your kin. You speak of secret things; recent plays in the Great Game, shifts in the politics of the Presbyterate, rumours of the movement of a secret coin of the Bazaar. But you also speak of your transformations; the growth of scales, the shifting of flesh under skin. The Dragon in the West dreams on.

Airs 100 | In a quiet hour, you stand at the end of a dock and look over the zee. Do you recognise your reflection in the water?

+4 Confident Smiles

+10 Making Waves

+1 Primaeval Hint

I'n not sure why, but I've yet to hit that point in fallen london despite being more or less current on content. I think the format contributes to it - something about text, as opposed to a graphical world you run around in, is more... permissive, to the imagination, for me? you never find yourself blockaded by an arbitrary wall, you rarely find maps that contradict your imaginings of what exists in the spaces in-between (and if you do, well, we all know that maps in the neath are treacherous). you have more ways of interacting with the world than picking things up or killing things - even if you're basically just pushing buttons to do contextual actions in both formats, the writing invites your mind to fill in the gaps. and of course, everything being text-based makes it way easier to make locations more detailed, and to introduce new and wildly out-there events, like, hypothetically, a fleet of spider-puppeted ships encroaching on london. just hypothetically.

I'n not sure why, but I've yet to hit that point in fallen london despite being more or less current on content. I think the format contributes to it - something about text, as opposed to a graphical world you run around in, is more... permissive, to the imagination, for me? you never find yourself blockaded by an arbitrary wall, you rarely find maps that contradict your imaginings of what exists in the spaces in-between (and if you do, well, we all know that maps in the neath are treacherous). you have more ways of interacting with the world than picking things up or killing things - even if you're basically just pushing buttons to do contextual actions in both formats, the writing invites your mind to fill in the gaps. and of course, everything being text-based makes it way easier to make locations more detailed, and to introduce new and wildly out-there events, like, hypothetically, a fleet of spider-puppeted ships encroaching on london. just hypothetically.

This movement is called the Liberation of Night - its people are called Liberationists. It's no secret that I hold a special spot in my heart for the Liberation, problematic aspects and all, to the point that if you asked me what my IRL political alignment is, I'm likely to say "Liberationist (of Night)" and only half mean it ironically.

Also shoutout to the one for “An old orbit, fondly remembered”, which at least to me looks like an exclamatory symbol interlaid with an orbit and a little guy swinging his arms. “Yup that’s my orbit! What a nice orbit that was :)”

I periodically see people complaining about the direction the lore and writing surrounding the Judgements (basically the gods of the setting) and the celestial order have taken - namely, that it's become less dark, less eldritch, that the Judgements are no longer distant, alien, incomprehensible beings, but increasingly human (for lack of a better word) in their motivations and portrayal. and while I understand why people preferred it the other way around, and acknowledge that the setting loses some of its mystique in bringing the heavens closer, I also like this direction shift and think it works well with the underlying themes of the setting.

chances are that if you're a Tumblr user who's played Fallen London enough to get into the Deep Lore, you've recognized that the whole celestial order is an allegory for social mobility - or rather, the abject lack of it. you've probably seen parallels regarding race, gender, class, all sorts of real-world marginalizations in the way that beings in the Fallen London universe are stratified by species. if you're born a sun, you're a literal god with the power to enforce your will anywhere your light reaches, and if you're born as anything else, your entire role in life is to serve the suns - sometimes by being dinner! because if you're a human you are basically livestock! changing your species (and therefore your place in the Great Chain) is a crime, and punishable by smiting. being born as something outside the established order is also a crime, and also punishable by smiting. and this is only the tip of the iceberg - there's all sorts of rules about what you are and aren't allowed to do, including the ways you're allowed or not allowed to associate with others outside your class. it's a vicious and cruel system.

and, you see, the Judgements want to cover this up. they want everyone to believe that they, the literal stars, are beings beyond mortal reckoning or questioning. but they aren't. for all their power, they are intensely fallible. they are still alien in the sense that they operate on a timespan far beyond any human's and understand the world and its mechanisms in a fundamentally different way (given that they literally create natural law), but their motivations are, in the end, not that far removed from a human's. they have ambitions. they crave sustenance and power. they hold grudges over personal slights and differences in ideology. they fall in love, and they grieve those they've lost. this is the secret they try to conceal, to the point of smiting any humans who learn that the Judgements will murder each other over politics, because learning it shakes the whole foundation of the celestial hierarchy, of their right to rule. if the suns aren't infallible, if they aren't pure and superior in their motivations, then why should the rest of the universe be in thrall to them?

so, you can see how this works with the overall arc of the setting. but I'd argue that humanizing the Judgements does something I consider even more important: it adds culpability. it complicates things no matter where you fall on the in-universe political scale - and yes, that includes for the revolutionaries. when the beings responsible for making the world suck are distant, alien, incomprehensible, they are also other. it is easy to justify slaying them, the monsters, and to imagine that will be enough to fix things. but if those beings are not other, if we can recognize ourselves in their love and their grief, then we have to contend with the fact that we are struggling against people, that we would be slaying people. it places upon us an impetus to either find ways forward that don't involve slaying people, or to acknowledge the moral weight of doing so. and it makes us ask: if the people in charge are, fundamentally, not that different from us, then how can we avoid making their mistakes? what must we do to not only tear down the old world, but build a better one?

I went through setting up the Burrow church with Samuel recently (extremely funny and embarrassing for him that this storyline starts with getting slapped on the wrist by the entire church of england. can a man not be catholic in peace) and I got very very attached to Sam's absolute disaster of a parish council, so I wanted to try to figure out how to draw them...... I didnt mean to render them all i just got carried away.......

Basic gist is that you are charged by a "Delightful Reverend" with helping to organise a "church in the wild," with the aim of making a church with the traditional vibes of a liturgical christian church but without the christianity, one that's open to humans and devils and anyone else and can't be claimed by either group. My favourite bit of this is that you are asked to assemble a Parish Council and they all give you their advice on any decision you have to make, which MAY OR MAY NOT ACTUALLY BE HELPFUL. Despite being very Christian himself, Sam was intrigued by the idea and wanted to give it an honest try. He chose:

Percy aka The Intrepid Deacon, an alarmingly hell-curious but deeply genuine deacon friend from a different adventure where Sam worked hard to help him seek answers while keeping his soul safe. Probably the one most aligned with Sam's values and the only person here that he trusts. I love him.

The Retired Vice-Admiral, who was the Reverend's pick and Sam didn't want to overrule her on everything. HES SO NORMAL and clearly just trying to recruit for some kind of sun cult. THIS ISNT THAT KIND OF CHURCH, MAN. I love him, Sam wanted to punch him on multiple occasions

The Crimson Captain!!! Sam wanted a devil on the council but felt oddly more comfortable with one of the devils who still serves the old devil monarchy.... They feel the most like they have a Faith as he understands it so there's a strange sort of kinship there? ANYWAY this guy is the soggiest devil imaginable, clearly still haunted by his mistakes and losses in an old Hell war in every piece of feedback he gives. Like getting relationship advice from someone who's been divorced six times. I love him.

And the Delightful Reverend herself! Every time you have to make a decision and ask her opinion shes like "augh i hate making choices" thus making her THE MOST RELATABLE CHARACTER IN FALLEN LONDON, A GAME THAT IS 80% MAKING CHOICES. She's very hard to draw but I love her.