Fallen London is a cosmic horror game that is not about the cosmic horror 95% of the time, and I think that's possibly the best way to make that horror hit like a ton of bricks. Most of the time I spend playing or thinking about the game is about the everyday lives and goals of the characters. It's so easy to forget how many messy ends are held poised just off-screen (and then to remember, all at once).
At any time, without a peep of warning for all but the very most well connected, a decision made in the depths of the Bazaar could release the stone pigs to flatten your character's home with them inside it and drown the streets in lacre. The Flukes could rise en masse and wash the city in their own flood of retribution for offenses few living mortals could even name. This summer the law-furnaces of Hell could have backfired in a way that left us too confused or shattered across space and time to deal with it, permanently disassembled. The Sun could have broken through enough to fry London in the Starved War, easily. A dozen potential apocalypses, and aside from them all, still the small-scale ever-present possibility of a set of jaws or a knife in the dark to take one fragile life in a way you can't come back from.
We're on so many different brinks. And yet, never over any of them. Time in London never moves. We can come close to the far shore, but can't ever step on it. We live forever in the golden, frozen moment before the wave crashes down. A cocktail of dread and invincibility, served twenty actions at a time.
I love to think about it so much. Living in it would give me so many anxiety disorders.
