We’re Failbetter Games, an award-winning game development studio and makers of Sunless Sea , Sunless Skies , Mandrake and Fallen London. We’re known for inventive narrative design, atmospheric storytelling, and rich, fantastical settings.
We’re looking for a Writer and Narrative Designer to join our small in-house team at either a senior or mid level, working specifically on Fallen London. This position is permanent, remote, and full time, which for us means 35 hours a week.
We’re based in the United Kingdom, but as long as you can be available during our core hours of 11:00 to 16:00 UK time, you don’t have to be.
Also, if you are based elsewhere, it’s likely we’ll have to structure this as a contract position: we’ve found the administrative requirements for direct employment can be impractical for a studio our size in many jurisdictions.
About the Role
The game is over 16 years old, with more than four and a half million words last time we counted. It’s a live-service RPG we’re actively updating, and very politely free-to-play: development is funded mostly by monthly subscriptions and premium stories. A tabletop roleplaying game in the setting raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter in 2025.
Because we’re a small team, your duties will be varied. You can expect to do all of the following:
- Pitch story arcs to other writers, and take part in high-level planning for the next several months of work.
- Write stories of varying length, complexity, and tone, with a wider range of subject matter than video games usually explore.
- Design quality-based narrative structures that support story and theme while also giving rise to enjoyable gameplay.
- Update and extend existing content (for example, for seasonal events).
- Offer feedback on work by other writers.
- Provide short pieces of marketing copy to explain released or upcoming stories to players – the equivalent of a book’s blurb.
- Draft briefs for artists to help them illustrate your work.
Requirements
You don’t need a particular degree or some arbitrary number of shipped titles or years’ experience to work for us. As long as you’re able to do the job well and can demonstrate that in your application, we’d love to hear from you.
Because Fallen London is primarily a narrative game and more oriented towards prose than dialogue, we find it benefits from conventional writing skills, of the kind that would be helpful for writing a novel or short story.
Our writing is also denser in choice and consequence than is usual in video games. We use an approach we call quality-based narrative. Qualities, in our parlance, might represent any of the following (and other things besides):
- A character’s capabilities which we can test when the player attempts challenges – for example, how persuasive they are, or their skill with Shapeling Arts.
- Complications and menaces. These might track how scandalised polite society is by a character’s behaviour, or mounting peril on an underground ocean.
- Currencies and resources. These might be physical, like souls in bottles, or abstract, like terrible secrets.
- Aspects of world state that reflect the progress of their current activities, like a complex theft or archaeological expedition.
We're interested in the ways interactivity can produce literary effects, akin to how a writer of conventional fiction might use devices like foreshadowing, metaphor, or just careful choice of syntax or diction. One example we're known for is choices that tempt the player to go against their own character’s interests for the sake of humour, emotional catharsis, or plain curiosity.
For this role, we don’t require you to have done previous work with quality-based narrative, but you will need to be comfortable translating your story ideas into this framework. We anticipate that this will usually require you to have experience with some form of interactive writing that goes beyond branching narrative.
Finally, although you don’t need to be a native speaker of English, you will need a very high level of proficiency, including a sensitivity to the nuances of words.
Optional Extras
Any of the following would be helpful and worth telling us about in your application, but they’re very much secondary and not required for you to apply:
- Familiarity with Fallen London or other games in the same setting.
- System design skills, such as balancing
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