Our consultant on Jewish communities helped us refine our initial vague outline of David and Rachel’s family one that’s more specific and grounded: a comfortably well-off Sephardic household whose ancestors have lived in England for generations, but whose charitable work brings them in contact with more recent Ashkenazic immigrants in the Tentergrounds area. We’ve had – and will continue to have – assistance with these topics. O’Daniel’s Ins and Outs of London the Hansard Parliamentary records from 1862 scanned newspapers, maps, and census data histories of the Anglo-Sikh wars Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Our research took us to novels by Grace Aguilar, ME Braddon, George Eliot, and Israel Zangwill vignettes from W. For inspiration, we drew on both the setting bible of Fallen London and a lot of real-world history. Once we had our character arcs, we needed to come up with plot beats. The internal conflict supplies that character’s inner life and potential for change.įor each conflict, we asked what could the player character do to affect the outcome? Because this is an interactive story, not a novel, we wanted every arc to be meaningfully influenced by the player, even if the problem still fundamentally belongs to someone else.įinally, we considered relationships between characters: Which characters are potential partners? Which characters will spend the most time together? Which dislike each other? Our goal here was interconnection, with lots of reasons for different characters to meet and interact. The external conflict connects the character to the broader setting and generates plot. Using these questions as prompts, we defined one internal conflict and one external conflict for each character. Whose emotional equilibrium would be improved or undermined?Īrchie has always struggled with the cold, dark parts of the year, even when he lived on the Surface – and finding himself in a world without sunlight has made those issues even more acute for him.
Will their interpretive frame of reference be science (like Archie), history and philosophy (like Harjit), or religion (like David, Horatia, or the local Anglican vicar)? Will they get wrapped up in the big questions, or will they focus on pragmatic issues, local (like Horatia) or city-wide (like Griz and Harjit)? How would people understand and interpret the catastrophic thing that happened to them? So she has to decide: whose stories does she tell now, and how? After years of writing as an outsider, a Jewish author in a predominantly Christian society, she finds that the social boundaries have been redrawn, and she’s on the inside of the line between human Londoners and everyone else. Whose hopes, goals, and ambitions would be advanced by a fall to the Neath? Whose would be thwarted?įor Griz, losing traditional gender roles opens the possibility of a whole new civil service or political career for her.įor Rachel, the Fall is just as important to her career, but more emotionally complicated. To arrive at those different types, we asked ourselves questions like these: Along with demographic variety, we wanted a variety of perspectives: characters who would respond to the setting in different ways, and who’d offer distinct takes on our themes of love, community formation, and apocalyptic change.
We knew we wanted a range of character types, with varied ethnicity, age, gender, body type, and social class.
One of the first things we did during narrative pre-production was invent the ensemble cast for Mask of the Rose.
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