Fallen London Is Where BG3 Writers Let Hair Down

By Indie Kings | October 7, 2026

Updated October 7, 2026: PC Gamer columnist Jeremy Peel reports that Failbetter Games' Fallen London has become the after hours playground for writers from Baldur's Gate 3, Dishonored, Stellaris, Borderlands 4 and beyond, with freelance Exceptional Stories now carrying some of the boldest text adventure writing in the medium.

Image: Fallen London Exceptional Stories. Credit: PC Gamer.

AAA writers, indie sandbox

Per PC Gamer, there is a place deep beneath the earth where the narrative wranglers behind our favourite games come together. Writers who helped deliver the planned ending of Destiny in The Final Shape. Writers who made sense of Stellaris' irresistible mix of strategy and story. Writers who spun up the Tim Curry sass of Baldur's Gate 3 companion Astarion, and writers who scribbled the funny ambient dialogue that keeps surfacing in Borderlands 4 compilation videos. They all tangle in Fallen London, the sprawling text based RPG from the makers of Sunless Sea, and there, per the column, they do their bravest, smartest, most depraved and moving work.

Fallen London is a near bottomless brunch of comic and cosmic horror, an interlaced network of choice driven literary stories woven together over more than a decade and a half. It is a regularly updated living world riddled with mysteries, set against the backdrop of a sunken Victorian capital city. You play in the browser, but PC Gamer urges readers to abandon their expectations about how slight, forgettable or exploitative browser games can be. The column describes it as a regularly updated and living world rather than a museum piece, and the distinction matters for everything that follows.

Most Fallen London players are chasing an overarching main quest that swallows up their resources as they play gadabout slash magnate. Those adventures, assembled in episodic instalments by Failbetter, take you far across the Unterzee and eventually up to the cavern roof where the false stars shift and glitter. They take months and years to see through. Fallen London is a game you might prod at in spare moments on your phone, but one that gradually becomes a slow burn and deeply rewarding parallel existence.

In between those major plotlines sit the Exceptional Stories, and this is where the column's argument lands. Reserved for subscribers, they are bite sized entry level quests that arrive every month, as regular as a ratwork watch. Per PC Gamer, they are not typically written in house but handed off to freelance contributors, and that fact is crucial. It is the reason Exceptional Stories feel like unpredictable entries in an anthology series. Each one is self contained, often introduces new characters whose fates are decided by the story's end, and reflects the tastes and personalities of its writer in distinctive ways.

Per columnist

Exceptional Stories model

Take Baudelaire Welch first, per PC Gamer. This is the architect of Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge path, the thread that makes your protagonist responsible for a string of murders they do not remember. Their Fallen London entry is The Goblin Poet, a potently sinister story in which you follow a cult of BDSM bohemians through the mirror to the Reddest Keep, where they toil to capture the beauty of the Red Handed Queen using their own lifeblood as paint.

The Keep itself is viscerally horrible, its floors made of taxidermied beasts tied together in a carpet of rodent death. But it is the attitudes of the infatuated artists that lend the story its lasting unease. Their adoration of the queen is conditional. The moment she reveals the slightest imperfection they turn on her in misogynistic rage. The queen argues: "The vision I presented to you, that is who I am. Who is not a different person when they turn to bed for the night? ... All of you will age and wither: why must I be confined to one skin alone?" Yet the artists reject this argument. Their impossible ideals of womanhood ultimately unravel the queen, and free them from a trap of their own making. Per PC Gamer, it is hard to imagine such an uncomfortable conclusion to a mainstream RPG quest.

Then there is Tired of London, another missing person case among this year's Exceptional Stories, from Paradox designer Giada Zavarise, whose name many readers will know from Stellaris. It takes the player somewhere utterly different. Channelling the opening hours of Failbetter's most famous roguelike, Sunless Sea, it carries you north on a steamer to the Tomb Colonies, where an ingenue seeks to escape the stifling obligations of nobility among the crumbling near dead.

It climaxes with the kind of grand spectacle a text driven game can offer without breaking the budget: a last cruise of the mummified living, designed to end in a split hull and a rush of water. "The captain removes the ship's wheel," Zavarise writes, "and throws it overboard." The ship lists and lurches into the black zee as the band plays. Where Tired of London ends with a half drowning, the column notes, the next tale begins with one.

Per columnist

Voices in the Reddest Keep

Nessa Cannon's Old, New, Drowned and Blue offers a lethal love story rooted in the deep zee court of the Fathomking, who appreciates a good yarn as much as any Fallen London subscriber, per PC Gamer. Dishonored and Destiny scribbler Hazel Monforton, meanwhile, introduces a romanceable rodent with three heads in The Prince of All Rats, the kind of figure you could not imagine kicking about The Tower with Ikora Rey and company.

It is cool, the column argues, to see AAA writers let loose in a universe that can accommodate their wildest ideas, empowered to tell a whole tale from start to finish. In this context their individual voices come through more clearly, rather than becoming muffled in the mix of a much larger product. Fallen London plays host to both the blockbuster brains and the cult interactive fiction legends at once, and that split is exactly the point.

Anna Anthropy, a legend in the field of text based interactive fiction, wrote September's The Poetry of God. Per PC Gamer it is a clearly personal work concerning a disabled academic who handles dangerous sigils with the same matter of fact fearlessness she does her wheelchair. Yet it is also something of a Cold War thriller, full of delicious turns of phrase. Grief and yearning are briefly revealed in the eyes of a revolutionary, "like darting things in a hidden pool." At one point you learn that a book burning censor has been surveilling the academic while keeping his distance. Anthropy writes as if peering down her glasses at the man with disdain: "Perhaps he fears that the small woman in the chair that he has been watching might turn and look back at him." It is the story of a powerful person, underestimated.

The column reads Anthropy's prose as proof that Fallen London gives established voices room to say something personal at a scale no live service anthology would risk. The same logic applies to Welch's Reddest Keep, which twists a cult of artists into a horror about conditional love and conditional beauty standards. Per PC Gamer, none of this would sit naturally inside a mainstream RPG quest, yet inside Fallen London it finds an audience that opted in for strange, literary, choice driven material.

Indies and old hands

Fallen London's Exceptional Stories are a home for more esoteric indies too, and the column says they introduced the writer to new favourites. His ears now prick up whenever he hears about the latest story drop from Heather Flowers, a devious designer who likes to muck about with probabilities, both in Fallen London's dice rolls and in her own projects, such as the heads or tails mindfuck of Unfair Flips.

Jim Rossignol is another name regular PC Gamer readers will know, from the byline of the classic Half Life 2 review and the credits of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, the British riff on Stalker that lampooned the country's fondness for fox hunting and class warfare. His dark whimsy has proved a strong fit for Fallen London. In recent months he has contributed stories about a painting that refuses to live in its frame, a malevolent building that follows you around the city, and a new aesthetic movement that treats illness as art. "Oh, let me look at you, my poor darling," one character gushes. "Yes, it's just as I thought! You have the Lily Tongue Sweats. Fascinating. Beautiful!"

Before the year is out, Fallen London will serve up another handful of distinct short stories from all corners of the gaming medium. There is a bank of them going back a decade at least, beginning with the nascent tales of Nighthawks writer Richard Cobbett. Per PC Gamer, it only remains for the wider world to discover them. These stories are Exceptional in both senses of the word: deeply unusual, and bloody good. It simply does not get bloodier than the Reddest Keep.

The practical takeaway for readers is simple. If a Baldur's Gate 3 collaborator can smuggle a story about taxidermied floors into a London zee full of secrets, then a Stellaris designer can stage a final drowning as high maritime theatre, and a Borderlands 4 writer can sell you a court beneath the waves, the browser is not the limit. The medium is. Fallen London's decade and a half of accumulated canon gives those freelancers guardrails and a ready audience, while the subscriber model gives them monthly room to be weird on purpose.

For indie watchers, that combination is the interesting bit. AAA talent gets a sandbox with no publisher kitbash compromises. Cult fiction writers like Anthropy get a platform where ordinary readers already accept survival horror told entirely through prose. And Fallen London gets a steady drip of new texture that keeps a sunken Victorian capital feeling alive. Every month another storyteller treats the zee like a writers room with teeth.

FAQ

What is Fallen London?
Per PC Gamer, a browser based, text driven RPG from Failbetter Games, the studio behind Sunless Sea, set in a sunken Victorian capital and woven from choice driven literary stories over more than a decade and a half.

What are Exceptional Stories?
Per the column, monthly subscriber only quests that are bite sized and entry level, usually written by freelance contributors rather than in house staff, and structured as self contained anthology tales.

Who writes them?
Per PC Gamer, names include Baudelaire Welch of Baldur's Gate 3, Giada Zavarise of Stellaris, Nessa Cannon of Borderlands 4, Hazel Monforton of Dishonored and Destiny, Anna Anthropy, Jim Rossignol, Heather Flowers and Richard Cobbett.

Which AAA connections appear?
Per the column: Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge and Astarion voice work, Stellaris storytelling, Dishonored and Destiny writing, Borderlands 4 ambience, Paradox design, and a decade of Nighthawks tie ins.

Is it only for veterans?
No. Per PC Gamer, Exceptional Stories are entry level and self contained, so a new reader can jump into one monthly tale without first clearing the main quest's years long arc.

Why does it matter for indie games?
Per the column, it proves text adventures still give writers room for bold, personal, strange work, and that a browser RPG can host the same people writing our favourite big budget games.

Bottom Line

Fallen London's Exceptional Stories have quietly become the best address in interactive fiction: monthly, subscriber only, freelance written, weird in both senses of the word. Writers from Baldur's Gate 3, Dishonored, Stellaris and Borderlands 4 are using it to test ideas no mainstream quest would risk, while indie fixtures like Anna Anthropy and Jim Rossignol keep the literary floor high. Per PC Gamer, the wider world has yet to catch up, and that gap is exactly the opportunity.

Sources: PC Gamer