None Of The Above

I loved my time with Fallen London. At each location, you’re given a list of things to do. These options change depending on all sorts of factors—your stats, items, past decisions—but ultimately, you choose from what’s offered. That’s it. There’s no button that says, “None of these, actually—here’s what I want to do.”

And that’s fair. Fallen London isn’t built to handle that kind of improvisation. Even if it was, there’s no way its creators could personally review every player’s off-menu idea and write a narrative branch for it. 

Compare that with a tabletop roleplaying game. A GM might say, “You see a locked door, a hallway, and a trapdoor.” But the players might say, “We knock down a wall,” or “We bribe the rats,” or “We go back to town and start a bakery.” And the GM rolls with it.

That spirit of open-ended agency is something I wanted in Scribarchy. Like in a TTRPG, in Scribarchy players aren’t limited to the choices they see at a Place. They can make new ones—literally—using the Choice editor. Once submitted, those custom choices go to the Curator of their Multiverse for approval.

Why might this work? Because the player does a lot of the work. The Curator still has the final say and a good Curator (like a good GM) will go to the effort to integrate the Choice into the Multiverse, but hopefully this will result in a truly collaborative writing experiment.  I am excited to see how this plays out!