Honestly, if I were to sum up my experience of Fallen London the utterance “ God. The people I’ve killed, man. The strange things I’ve put in my mouth” would do a pretty good job…
Whereas Sunless Sea basically can use the same text with a minor punctuation change:
“God: the people I’ve killed. Man: the strange things I’ve put in my mouth.”
My character in Fallen London has never killed a person (with the possible exception of one spider council) and generally continues to be a bastion of morality, unless you happen to consider casual sex or grand theft or constant flirting with literal devils to be problematic for some reason. In Sunless Sea my first captain ate his crew, my second made her fortune transporting boxes of what I was assured were not sorrow spiders into unattended warehouses in London, my third traded heavily in Red Honey, and all of them will gladly dump a clay man overboard to free up some space in the cargo bay.
My FL character is one giant, steam-powered set of brass plate armour with a ragged, stretched clerk’s suit worn over it. They stink of paraffin and vanilla. No one knows who’s underneath, but it’s generally assumed that whoever they were went insane from Correspondence exposure, built the suit as a defence against the sun and subsequently got arrested for literally running through a slum. Rumours of them originating from somewhere…other, shall we say, are merely that - rumours. Also they’re a terrible flirt, when not out of their minds on a mixture of Honey and even more Correspondence.
My Sunless Sea character is a war vet from the engagement against Hell; he’s understandably prejudiced against all things demonic, runs his ship like a Evangelical church (”No dicing! No zwearing!”) and wishes to further the extent of the Dawn Machine, so he can personally burn the Devils out of London like the insects they are and ensure his gay lover and their child is safe. Levelling up Iron for days, bruhOne day, I’ll draw them.
(via viceroyofforests)
