BOOK OF HOURS has been through some major iterations since we first announced it, and we're now ready to share its new look. Click on the video below to watch our planned customisation in action, and scroll down to see various rooms from the different parts of Hush House.
The building's grown over almost two thousand years of history - from its foundation as the Abbey of the Black Dove, through its time as the Dewulf estate, to its guardianship by the Curia of the Isle, and finally its time as the Cucurbit Prison. So it's a honeycomb coral living history of many different eras. The Westcott Room dates from the time of the Curia.
From other parts of this syncretic castle, here's the solarium in the Church of the Unconquered Sun...
Here's the sweltering servants' kitchen above the smithy...
And finally, deep in the bedrock beneath the foundations of Hush House itself, in the upper reaches of the sea-caves: the Chapel Calcite.
More art, lore and a prototype coming soon. Stay tuned!
Secondly, a new letter has emerged, revealing both the power of skolekosophy (the frightening Night Art of 'studying things that should not be studied') and the origins of the so-called 'Ortucchio Incident'.
At the turn of the century, the Nocturnal Branch of the Metropolitan Police was responsible for protection against ‘troubles unseemly and occult.’ After the fallout from the Ortucchio Incident, the Branch was dismantled and its functions absorbed into the civilian Suppression Bureau...
What happened against the Khusgai, and other stories
Long time no update! We're working towards a vertical slice of the game, which will be ugly and crabbed but will give the first real sense of what BOOK OF HOURS will be like to play. Here're some updates on where we are!
We've finalised the design of the Wisdom Page, the occult sort-of skill tree where you can choose which forbidden knowledge to specialise in, and which affects what you can do elsewhere in the game based on your choices. We've hidden the full size of the chart, but you can see the first four levels here:
(Click for a larger image.)
Players choose cards or objects to commit to each slot up the chain, pledging allegiance - for example - to Birdsong by committing a skill card for Ramsund, the language of secrets. This will enhance the player's Birdsong affinity and ability, opening up new opportunities elsewhere and unlocking the next tier of the branch.
We hope it's also a nice roleplaying opportunity, as you can see that each of the nine Wisdoms is variously associated with several Principles from Cultist Simulator. People have strong feelings about whether they're a Winter-y sort who wants a beautiful end or a Lantern-type who's brilliant but a bit caustic or a Forge-person who really loves hitting things with hammers. The Wisdoms are deliberately broad and ill-defined, drawing from multiple Principles at once, so they should open up new avenues of characterisation. Which is useful in, er, an RPG!
Speaking of the Wisdoms, we've uncovered a new letter from a mysterious 'Arthur' to his nephew, discussing the Illumination-affiliated events that took place in a Pyrhhic battle against the Khusgai of Persia, and the bravery - and unmasking of Lieutenant Malcolmson. Most importantly, though, weep for Menander, the bravest steed that ever was!
"Nephew, make a fist of your hand. Muscles move beneath the skin. So powers move beneath the skin of the world, at impulses equally invisible, but greater."
We also have a mock-up of Hush House's layout to share. Please note that this is not what the game will actually look like (though mmmm isn't it all nice and neat in a grid), but it is likely to represent the layout of rooms in the final game. We've censored some of the more deep-lore rooms, and you can't see all of it - but here's a first glimpse at the library at the centre of it all!
(Click for a larger image, again.)
Finally, as a palette-cleanser from all that war, here're some recent elements for you to deduce the skills going into BoH...
If you like our stuff, please wishlist BOOK OF HOURS to keep updated with our progress! More on that in the next few months.
Finally, inspired by BOOK OF HOURS and launching to celebrate Cultist Sim's birthday, we're releasing an ultra-limited edition series of Secret Historian boxes each month, focusing each month on one of BOOK OF HOURS' occult libraries. The idea is that these boxes come from librarians' bureaus and reveal some of their most significant interests - including forbidden inks, calling-cards from important personages of the House, and more.
This month, we're releasing the box for the Grove of Green Immortals, a mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine, Moth and Heart lore, under the hand of the Applebright. Check 'em out here.
Cultist Simulator and all DLC, soundtracks and The Lady Afterwards TRPG are 50-66% off this week in a mega Midweek Madness sale, so if you've not yet played BOOK OF HOURS' predecessor, now's a great time to jump in.
We also have some other Secret Histories-relevant bits of news:
The Locksmith's Dream is a real-world event set in Monmouthshire, UK and running in October and December this year. Tickets have just gone on sale on the official site - check it out!
Stay tuned for more Secret Historian's boxes, environment art and that vertical slice, coming AS SOON AS WE CAN POSSIBLY DO IT <3 <3 <3
A Peep Into Futurity
Happy Friday, peeps! We've stopped doing our fortnightly sprint updates (please tell us in the comments if you'd like us to start doing them again), but we have lots of irons in the fire and I thought it's high time for me to give you an update. So here's what's coming up in the next chapter of Weather Factory: Still Not Doing the Visual Novel We Made Up In 2018.
BOOK OF HOURS
TLDR: prototype in May!
To be totally honest - we usually pride ourselves on being good at production and hitting deadlines - our plans went rather sideways on this one. We've had some problems as a studio over the last few years, and dealing with them meant AK almost burned out, couldn't work as usual, and I had to come up with projects I could do primarily on my own in lieu of making our lovely library game about peace, melancholy and satisfaction on the top of a rock in pseudo-Wales. But we really are still making this game (!) and by the end of May we expect to hit prototype, showcasing the central game loop. Huzzah!
In the meantime, have a look at what we've been up to! Starting with UI, which we're trying to base as much on Cultist Sim as possible but updated with hard-won experience and, frankly, a leather grimoire-y vibe. Here's what we're working with so far in your main Librarian window:
Familiar but different, right? But unlike Cultist's approach - where the UI is the same whether you're taking a tincture of opium with the Dream verb or sending a Hint to murder Connie Lee - BOOK OF HOURS needs a bunch of complementary but different UI for different moments in the game. Cultist's square verb tiles, for example, will be replaced in favour of real-world interactable locations like desks, gardens and ovens. Clicking on these open different recipe windows where your items and intangibles can be used, and where you can (possibly? probably?) store items. So you'll click on your librarian's desk to open the 'Library Desk' window, for example, and it'll reflect that it's a different interactive point in the game with slightly different UI. Here's what we're trying right now:
You might remember that BOOK OF HOURS is a melancholy, lonely game about managing a crumbling antique library of esoteric books and we want it to feel like a hygge, isolated escape from the world, where you can curl up with your cat and some marginalia while the rain gently patters the lead-glass of your study window. One of the best ways to evince a feeling like this is to occasionally - OCCASIONALLY - have someone visit you to pierce that loneliness, and make you feel it all the more when they depart. Sometimes they'll be friendly. Sometimes they might not. And those pesky Suppression Bureau agents have frankly nothing better to do, and like the way you make tea. So we need a basic UI dedicated to talking to these visitors, every now and then.
Overall, we're working on the assumption that the zoomed-out view of BOOK OF HOURS will look something like the below. NOT the art, which is a super super early mock-up I made in 2019, but a pulled-back simulator view of the whole of Hush House that lets you see an overview of everything going on in your game, and a vaguely mechanically appropriate UI, essentially giving you a quickbar for commonly-used cards and access to a much larger menu of items, skills, attributes, etc. You'll be able to zoom in to see detail and do small, specific tasks like personally ordering your books on your bookshelf. (Please note, if AK sees anyone ordering their books by colour he is likely to cry EHEU and delete all the code).
To make the prototype look even slightly like the final game, I've been mocking up some very basic assets to indicate relative sizes so we can answer questions like how high the ceilings shoul dbe, how many books you can put in a bookshelf, and whether we want a cosy librarian's nook or an intimidating Smaug's lair of occult grimoires. This is all TBD, and the art style will almost certainly change. But for now pls enjoy tiny Fuchsia's head on a 1930s outfit inspired by President Zelensky's war-jumper. Because why not.
I'm very keen on being able to customise characters, and have plans - but AK is sensibly undecided on this for now and gets the final say. MORE ON THIS LATER WHEN WE KNOW OURSELVES.
Secret Historian Boxes
TLDR: monthly release of limited edition box, £100 + shipping, coming in May
Speaking of letters... I'm back on my boxy bullshit! I'm releasing 25 special, limited edition library-focused boxes each month from May to August to mark That Damned Library Game's prototype, sold via our Etsy shop. You might have seen this photo from our last newsletter:
This is the prototype for May's box, from the desk of the librarian of the Grove of Green Immortals, the mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine, in Moth and Heart lore, under the hand of the Applebright. We're working with a totally brilliant artisan who's hand-carving each box, which will then contain something like the following:
There are inks in which histories are written, and inks which protect against untruth. There are inks which can only be read by night, and inks binding the author to the one whose name is written. And then there are inks of which the Hours take note - and inks that are forbidden. So every box will contain a highly restricted sample of six: uzult, porphyrine, nillycant, perinculate, marakat and the Orpiment Exultant (mixed by the fair hand of your resident apothecary, me). [As WFCAT aficionados will know, one of these things is not like the others. - AK] They'll look a bit like the Cultist Simulator launch present I made AK, which lots of people kindly asked if they could buy but I can't make it work as a product:
Each box will also contain a unique collection of visitors, calling cards from notable guardians of the library, a library membership card, genuine 1900s-1930s sealing wax and ephemera and a couple of letters, among other things. Each box has a particular affiliation with a guest, who'll appear in every copy of that box. In the Grove's case, it's Zulfiya the Barber. You might be able to guess the two of the three other libraries from their main guest, perhaps...?
And some of these guardians you've heard of. Any idea who these cards are from? (In reality, each of these will be gold-foiled - so imagine them being shiny and impressive.)
We'll announce each box at the end of the month when it goes on sale on Etsy, along with a design update on BOOK OF HOURS from AK.
I can already hear some of you thinking: twenty-five? Only twenty-five boxes? These people are MORONS they will CLEARLY SELL OUT IMMEDIATELY! And you're sort of not wrong. AK and I are a two-person team doing almost everything ourselves, and I nearly lost my marbles assembling, packing and sending 500 Lady Afterwards boxes earlier this year. So I'm trying to balance making fun, unique real-life items you can't get anywhere else (like these Secret Historian boxes) with not going totally batshit managing a production line I can't sustain. 25 boxes a month won't make me want to throw myself into the Thames. This is good.
Against that, I do appreciate our volume limitations make it annoying for someone who logs in five minutes later than planned and finds all the boxes they'd been excited to buy have been bought. So if that's you, fear not. Once we've released all four limited edition Secret Historian boxes - which we'll advertise ahead of time, so you know exactly when they're coming - we'll then sell an unlimited Hush House edition, sold in batches so I don't go nuts. This'll make sure everyone who wants a box gets one.
Anyway, back to the fun stuff. Here's the first batch of letters I received from our printer this morning:
You've seen these letters before, though not with their nice updated designs. But there's one that's totally new... What do you lore-hounds make of this?
Anyone fancy a deep-dive into BOOK OF HOURS's Wisdom tree? WELL BUCKLE UP.
In our last update, we shared the image below. This week, we’re going to talk about it. Some spoilers follow, including a couple of possible ending spoilers, so skip ahead to the cat pic if you’d rather not see ’em.
There are nine Wisdoms in BOOK OF HOURS which a librarian (or any other scholar) can pursue. Each of these is associated with three of the traditional Secret Histories aspects, and nine skills. Some of these skills are more familiar than others; nearly every skill appears in more than one Wisdom line. The unnamed Wisdom of Edge, Lantern and Winter above includes the skills of Ouranoscopy, Snow Stories, Serpents & Venoms and Sacra Limiae. Ouranoscopy and Sacra Limiae are also relevant to the Horomachistry Wisdom, and Serpents & Venoms is also of interest to skolekosophists.
You’ll notice there’s overlap between the interests of scholars and adepts, but they tend to do different kinds of things, in the same way that good scholars of game design are not necessarily (honestly, not often) good game designers, and vice versa. Different things can be true about the same thing you look at in a different way, especially if those truths don’t conflict. We’ll come back to that.
How do you advance a Wisdom? In an earlier design draft, you found Insights for the relevant Wisdom in books, and you plugged those into the Wisdom tree, which in turn spat out related skills. This is roughly the way a lot of skill trees in games worked, but in a game about knowledge, it seemed rather backwards. If you read a book on the history of fifteenth century Armenia, you’d learn more general things about History, but you wouldn’t get a History insight which you could plug into a notional Wisdom tree which would spit out a skill relating to the history of twelfth century France.
So now it works like this. You read a book about Ouranoscopy, and that improves your Ouranoscopy skill, and then you can present your Ouranoscopy skill card to the Wisdom map above, and say, O Map of Wisdom, behold that I know some Ouranoscopy. And lo the Wisdoms will answer, did you want to advance along the Horomachistry line, or were you looking to improve that other Wisdom? And you might answer, that other Wisdom, cos it’s something to do with Edge and Lantern and AK won’t tell me what it is yet but it sounds like a gas.
So why advance a Wisdom? Well, first, bragging rights. Who doesn’t want to be a skolekosophist (except those losers who don’t enjoy picking hungry worms out of their ears)? Second, attribute advances. There are two attributes – elements of the soul, usually – associated with each Wisdom. So fet (the part of you which dreams, the part you wear when you visit the Mansus, which of course as you know manifests just below the skin of your navel) is associated with Nyctodromy and Horomachistry, and you can choose to get an extra Fet card by levelling either of those up.
But third, if you want to reach a victory, you’ll need to get one of those Wisdoms to the outermost ring. Maybe you don’t, maybe you just want to chill in a library and dabble in all the Wisdoms… but there’s a single unique book (in some cases, not exactly a book) that, if you master a Wisdom, you can use to help you reach a fundamental conclusion about the world. We’ve already mentioned two of these books in passing elsewhere. Here’s one:
Those last two options are possible conclusions about what has happened, or what will happen. Of course, just because you draw those conclusions, it doesn’t mean they’ll happen, right? Who changes the world by spending years in a library? ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’
We also offer a bunch of updates on our upcoming TRPG The Lady Afterwards, set in the same universe as BOOK OF HOURS (and Cultist Simulator). So if you fancy seeing pictures of our Essential Hours deck, new character pins and more, check it out on the blog.
JUNE #1: LEUVEN
We've released a new sprint update where Alexis talks in detail about BOOK OF HOURS's current design process. Expect lots of tantalising screenshots straight from the design spreadie, like this:
And, because it is a Friday, also a GIF of his tumbleweed head.
We also reveal the latest (draft!) version of the Wisdom tree, BOOK OF HOURS's take on the traditional skill tree. Any guesses for what's censored here?
Read the BOOK OF HOURS deep-dive over on the blog, alongside some bonus Lady Afterwards updates. More updates soon, and happy weekend!
NEW GAME, NEW BOOK, NEW TAROT
I'm normally careful not to cross the streams between Cultist Simulator and BOOK OF HOURS, but we've a few announcements that touch both games. So BUCKLE UP!
The Lady Afterwards: a Cultist Simulator TRPG
“You've been summoned to Alexandria, a city of coloured lights and curious histories. An old friend needs you to track down a woman. She's probably in trouble. Probably trouble herself. Plus ça change.
Mirrors glitter at the Cecil, Berbers whisper in the El Bab Cafe, and statues keep their secrets in the cold depths of the bay. Something's in motion, from the Arab Quarter to the Rue des Soeurs. Somewhere, the Serapeum stirs. The Hours have taken an interest.
Cherchez la femme, the saying goes. But what does the lady look for?”
The Lady Afterwards is a limited edition Cultist Simulator TRPG, based on Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing system, and drawing on all the lore that underpins BOOK OF HOURS too. Think Call of Cthulhu or story-driven DnD, without us getting sued. We’ve streamlined the experience so you don’t have to be a TRPG aficionado to play, and we’ve filled it with Dread, Fascination and the invisible arts.
Track down Audrey Leigh Howard, a woman of high standing and dubious morals. Seek the Serapeum. Investigate the Society of the Noble Endeavour. Abort a plan. Avert a crisis. Protect the heart of the House Without Walls - or let the blow fall.
The Lady Afterwards is a boxed physical edition, containing everything you need for several evenings’ occult entertainment with friends (and/or cultists). Each edition includes:
The Lady Afterwards, a Cultist Simulator TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
A game-runner’s handbook, incorporating all story, locations, lore and mechanics
An exultation* of clues, curiosities, clippings and collectibles
"The Essential Hours", 23-card pocket tarot
Eight customisable character sheets, complete with secret agendas
Eight art deco character pins in silver, brass, copper and gold
A scented Serapeum candle, to evoke that which cannot be seen
Three Mansus candles, for important plot points
A full-colour map of contemporary Alexandria
A set of seven antique TRPG dice in a velvet dice bag
A Steam key for Cultist Simulator, in the unspeakable instance where someone hasn’t played it yet
Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist, to further SET THE TONE
All together, it’ll look *something* like the image at the top of this section! Though please note that this is all mocked-up right now - as you can, er, probably tell! It’ll likely look a smidge different in the flesh.
The Lady Afterwards comes in a custom-built 1920s-styled recyclable box mailed directly to your door. We’re making just a hundred copies to start with, though we’ll expand the limited run if we see enough interest. We expect to release the game in October, in time for Halloween - but we’ll confirm a release date later down the line. Sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date. Now we can talk about this, we’ll have a lot more to share in future updates. :)
*Yes, this does mean I haven’t finalised the actual final number of findables in-game. BUT IT WILL BE A NICE SATISFYING NUMBER OKAY.
Against Worldbuilding, and Other Provocations
Alexis has spent over a decade making games, from Fallen London to Sunless Sea to BOOK OF HOURS, with a lot of other work in between. He’s finally releasing a book on it all, compiling 200+ pages of the best of his pieces on narrative, design, development and why ‘worldbuilding’ busts his nut.
"There are sentences in Fallen London and Cultist Simulator that make me freeze in my seat. This collection of essays is generally not Alexis in freeze mode... It's Alexis being funny, pragmatic, charitable and humane. It's like getting to sit down over a plate of enigmatically-sourced goat goujons and a cup of Thracian wine, and be told a bunch of good stories."
- Introduction, Matt Hosty
Against Worldbuilding is available now in Kindle and paperback format, costing £5.65 and £7.77 respectively. Enjoy!
The Lucid Tarot
We announced we’re making a second tarot deck, after The Tarot of the Hours proved so popular. This time it’s inspired by BOOK OF HOURS, and a world-first: we’re making a stained-glass-window-inspired tarot deck, opaquely printed on transparent PVC. This means light shines through some parts of each card, but they still have an opaque back so you can’t see the image on the other side.
The deck features new, custom-made art of the Hours and the world of the Mansus that draws on existing lore but follows traditional systems like the Rider-Waite much more closely than the Hours deck did.
We’re calling it The Lucid Tarot. People seemed to get excited about it when we teased it last time, so the cards above are all never-before-seen, to whet your appetite!
The Hours have been around for centuries in every History. They’re a syncretic pantheon, like the loa of Haitian Vodou or the weirder Greco-Roman deities, and they change over time to reflect the current world. You’ll notice that the art style as well as the depiction of the Hours in The Lucid Tarot is sometimes quite different from their original depictions. For example, here’s Justice / The Meniscate from both decks:
These differences are deliberate, and we hope it’ll shed some more lore-y light on things. The new images also suit the abbey-like stained-glass aesthetic, which you’ll see more of in BOOK OF HOURS...
We can’t specify a release date yet, because it turns out making a tarot deck from scratch is a lot of work. 😅 But it’ll be sometime this year! Sign up to the mailing list for news, and/or keep your culty eyes peeled here for news.
Announcing the BOOK OF HOURS tarot!
Stained glass tarot
Today we announced we're making another tarot deck, with a twist! Cultist Simulator's Tarot of the Hours was so popular it gave me the tarot bug, so I'm developing an entirely new 78-card tarot deck for BOOK OF HOURS designed around medieval stained glass windows.
The key thing about this deck is it's printed on transparent PVC, so it should actually look quite stained-glass-window-y in real life! As far as we know this hasn't been done before, so that's exciting. Here's what it'll look like!
The big Mansus-y image is the back of all 78 cards. Flip it over and you'll see the minor and major arcana. All art is hand-drawn by me and will feature the Hours and some reimagined images from Cultist Simulator. It may also end up in the windows of Hush House in BOOK OF HOURS, but that's in the lap of the gods...
The tarot's in-progress, obviously, so let us all take a moment to appreciate how Vagabond it is that the current sketch for the seventeenth major arcana card, The Star - corresponding to the seventeenth Hour, the Vagabond - looks exactly like the mad 2007 Ukranian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. This is exactly the sort of whimsical accident the Laughingthrush likes...
Our focus as a studio is on BOOK OF HOURS, as you probably all know! But while that project's in its early stages - and a producer/artist/marketer is not as in-demand as she is later on - I'm working on a secret second project we indend to announce at the end of May on Cultist Simulator's anniversary. It's of particular interest to both Cultist fans, but if you're interested in BOOK OF HOURS you'll be interested in this too. Here's what we've teased so far...
Happy spring, everyone! I come bearing the dry, enigmatic bones of the Tomb of Lies, another new library from BOOK OF HOURS. It lies somewhere uncertain in the subcontinent, probably. And it's the home of the Hooded Princes, who guard its collection on the Five Histories under the joint guardianship of the Mother of Ants and the Horned Axe. As BoH libraries go, it's a relatively safe one - if you can find it.
Click for a larger version!
"The Great Hooded Princes are described as having 'escaped from the history of their death to a history where they yet live'. The text claims that there are now one hundred and eight of them, but - in one of many instances of twinnedness - before they crossed from their death chronicle, there were only fifty-four."
Another quick update while BOOK OF HOURS is in the early, non-sexy-can't-really-share-much-at-this-stage part of production. Meet another one of BOOK OF HOURS' sister-libraries, the bookish troves you'll work with when managing Hush House. This update it's the Grove of Green Immortals, a mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine and patronised by the mysterious Hour known as the Applebright.
(The Applebright, as any lore-hound will tell you, is a little-known God-from-Nowhere who is probably very, very dangerous. But look how lovely her library is! How bad could she really be?)
Click for a larger version.
More info and updates over on the blog. And have a bonus photo of one of the Weather Factory cats: Chi, He Who Never Shuts Up. ♥
Introducing: THE HAUSTORIUM
Happy spring, everyone! BOOK OF HOURS will feature an overarching cycle of seasons, including the four you know and love along with the mysterious Season of Numa - but more on that later down the line.
For now, I'm just sharing another occult library, like Crossrow a few weeks ago. Meet the Haustorium, the chilly, unforgiving fortress dedicated to things other libraries fear. Click for a larger version!
More on the Haustorium and development on the blog!
