We’ve been a bit quiet recently, but we haven’t been idle! Today is a long-awaited LAUNCH DAY, but it’s also a good time to update everyone on what we’ve been up to. First up:

✨ The Lucid Tarot is out now! ✨

The first 500 decks of the Lucid Tarot are now available on the Etsy shop. They’re unique collectors’ decks because they come with a signed certificate of authenticity along with their embroidered velvet tarot bag and quick start guide to reading the cards. If you’d like one, get in quick! We expect them to go pretty fast.

To remind you, these cards are a reimagining of Secret Histories lore (you’ll see Hours represented in new ways to highlight parts of them we didn’t foreground in the Tarot of the Hours, e.g.) and inspired by the otherworldly beauty of stained-glass windows. The Major Arcana features all Hours from the Moth to the enigmatic twenty-first Hour sometimes called ‘Giribrago’, but with traditional Rider-Waite names (‘The Fool’; ‘The World’) rather than their Secret Histories counterparts.

I’ve also tried to reflect the Rider-Waite symbology more clearly in the Minor Arcana, but with familiar skills and companions from BOOK OF HOURS. You’ll find Arun Peel the Knight of Pentacles, for instance, or Wolf Stories the Seven of Swords. I hope this adds new meaning on top of the gorgeously rich Rider-Waite deck, as well as giving you a good game of Hey, I Recognise That Thing From Somewhere Else! Anyway, I’m very happy where it’s all ended up, especially considering how derpy some of the original drawings are:

Forgive me, Elegiast.

If anyone misses out on a deck, don’t worry. We’ll be relisting another batch of ~400+ tarots this year, as soon as we can facilitate it. Christmas is coming, after all. I just need time to manage the backlog of orders. I don’t think I could ship 1,000 decks without turning into A Poor Lunatic.

Thank you extremely much for being patient with me while this project went on and on and on. If I make another deck for Game Three, maybe I won’t try to engineer an entirely new way to make cards before I can distribute them? Just a thought, Lottie. Just a thought.

A voice from the other side

AK here. It still tickles me how few people realise Weather Factory is literally just two people (plus, ofc, trusted freelancers). I answer support emails every week addressed to ‘Dear Support Team’. We get speculative applications from people who want to intern with us and don’t realise we work out of a flat. Microstudios composed of couples are more common than they used to be, but it’s still mildly unusual. We like it, but it does make it harder to take holidays, and it does mean we don’t hire.

I mentioned recently that we’ve been working on BOOK OF HOURS, on and off, for five years now. Some of that was pre-production, some of that was the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, but it’s a long old time. A undergraduate degree and a master’s degree. A newborn infant grown enough to go to school. If you planted an apple pip five years ago, you could be eating its fruit today.

Or to put it another way, I was 47 when we started making BH and I’m 52 now. And it occurred to me that I’ve made about four games over fifteen years, and in another fifteen years I’ll be 67. So Lottie and I had a chat about whether and how we want to spend the next fifteen years doing this – both making games, and making games as a microstudio with just the two of us.

If you like our games, you’ll be glad to hear that the answer is, broadly speaking, yes. Maybe we’ll do more physical goods, maybe I’ll take a couple of years out for that MA I keep threatening, but we like working together and we like the artisanal nature of the whole thing. I don’t actually get up on a Monday and think, yay, support mails, Lottie doesn’t get excited about answering Etsy merch queries, but we do like handling this stuff personally: the people who own the company and make the games are the same people you’re talking to. It also stops us from getting too up ourselves.

We’ve talked about Weather Factory being a bit like a band or an artistic partnership but most days it feels more like a family-run cafe that happens to sell coffee through Steam.

And we like making things for you lot – for our audience, I mean. I said as long ago as Fallen London that there is something to be said for making games that work like reading comprehension tests. It brings in a calmer class of customer.

We’ve got ideas, then, for at least another couple of games before we turn in our Dev Guild hat feathers and go off to roast coffee in the hills. Over to Lottie to talk about the next one.

What now? 

We’re still working on BOOK OF HOURS localisation (in case you missed it, HOUSE OF LIGHT’s now fully playable in Simplified Chinese) and various important but not terribly scintillating tech and bug support issues. But as AK says above, we took some time to take stock of where the studio is and what we want to do next. We’ve decided that, while we might come back to BOOK OF HOURS later, we’ve said what we wanted to say with it through HOUSE OF LIGHT. We’d like to leave it there – for now.

Currently, we’re Fascinated by an idea for Game Three. We’ve spent some of the past couple of months prototyping the underlying tech system and art direction so we can share something that’s reasonably likely to look like the final game. We need to do a bit more work before we can announce, but here are some tidbits we can share:

• • • The game is set in the Secret Histories… but another decade on. The world has changed and keeps on changing.

    • It may appeal to AK’s older audiences – from Fallen London and Sunless Sea – as well as Weather Factory fans.

    • It’s a new genre we haven’t developed before. It’s a natural fit for the kind of stuff we do, though.

    • It’s ambitious. And…

    • …who’s this?

It’s finally here! HOUSE OF LIGHT is now available on Steam and GOG – don’t keep reading this! Go play it! That honey-haunted pumpkin pie ain’t gonna bake itself!

Play on Steam   //   Play on GOG

HOUSE OF LIGHT adds a novel’s worth of content to BOOK OF HOURS. It’s free to anyone with Perpetual Edition and 10% off for everyone in the first week of sale. It’s also purchasable as a new Anthology Edition bundle (including BOOK OF HOURS, HOUSE OF LIGHT and the soundtrack) all with an extra 15% off everything – just like the Anthology Edition of Cultist Simulator. This is the best value and most definitive version of the game you can buy.

Once purchased (or if you’re a PE owner, once you update to the latest version of the game), you should see a new HOUSE OF LIGHT button on the bottom left-hand corner of the main menu screen. Clicking it will open a ‘spoiler-light’ introduction to the new content (and how to get it) in-game, but I’ll reproduce it here to whet your appetite:

FOOD

Combine Ingredients, Sustenance, and Kitchenware items at the three Kitchen workstations to create nearly a hundred new dishes. TIP: The Spice Scales, and the Spices & Savours skill, will substitute for each other.

A WRITING-CASE

Once you’ve received this gift, you can record addresses from the calling-cards left by satisfied visitors; and write to these visitors to invite them back to the House. TIP: Visitors don’t arrive instantly; visitors don’t leave calling cards until you’ve helped them; and some visitors are easier to summon than others.

SALONS

Place food and drink in one of the six Salon rooms, and then use the bell to begin a Salon. Do it right and you’ll be rewarded with sparkling conversation… and Lessons. TIP: Visitors usually prefer food and drink which matches their primary Interest, but some have additional requirements.

MANUSCRIPTS

Use Paper, Ink, and a Skill to write a Manuscript based on that skill. These Manuscripts may be necessary to satisfy thirsts for specific knowledge in FURTHER STORIES. Lessons from Salons will help you improve those Skills and write more useful Manuscripts. TIP: You can’t reliably control what Visitors will discuss – it’s a party, not an interrogation – but they’ll usually provide lessons related to their shared Interests.

FURTHER STORIES

Once you’ve completed an Incident, follow it up in the Tree of Wisdoms. Visitors will need more specific help here – perhaps a book on a specific topic, or a specific book. TIP: An Affair opens to Further Stories once all interested Visitors have had the opportunity to ask you for help with it. Be aware in some Further Stories, it can make a difference who you originally helped. Be careful. This is the one part of the game where choices can sometimes have permanent consequences.

THE INSTITUTE

Look for the lighthouse, out at sea. When your Visitors are ready, use it to establish the true heirs to the Curia of the Isle. TIP: Further Stories outcomes can inspire your Visitors to support the Institute – for their own reasons. Their nature is constant, but some story outcomes can make them decide to emphasise one agenda over another.

Please leave a review if you like it 

Recent events have made us even more aware of the fragility of Steam review scores – and how important they are to our ability to do our jobs. So if you like HOUSE OF LIGHT, please leave it a positive review! People tend not to leave reviews for expansions / DLC, but you might be the thing standing between us and a Dreadful Red rating for this sweet, polished bit of content about hosting friends for tea. So if you can, please give us a nice blue thumbs up! ✨👍✨

Excuse me this expansion appears to be only in English

HOUSE OF LIGHT is currently being translated into Russian and Simplified Chinese, to match the tip-top localisations of the base game. Please be patient with us while our wonderful localisers complete their work. We expect to launch the Simplified Chinese beta next week, though – so it shouldn’t be too long before we have full translations ready to go.

Japanese is coming for the full game and the beta ASAP. More news on that when we have confirmed dates.

We’re still considering translating BOOK OF HOURS into other languages. We’ll let everyone know if we decide to go ahead with any additional localisations, just as soon as they’re confirmed in studio.

Anything else?

Everyone’s favourite Canadian (OK, after Benton Fraser from Due South), Systemchalk, is livestreaming BOOK OF HOURS on the Steam page right now. If you’d like to experience the sensation of pouring warm maple syrup into your ear while you drowse by a library fireplace, tune in.

Also, all our merch is currently 25% off in the shop to celebrate HOUSE OF LIGHT’s launch, so go nuts with all the things you’ve had your eye on but were cannily waiting for a good deal (here’s looking at you, Lady Afterwards).

Fingers crossed you enjoy all the love we put into HOUSE OF LIGHT. Thanks so much for playing, and happy hosting in Hush House!

— Mervyn Bunter, Clouds of Witness (1926)

Facts are the bricks of life, but they need a few licks of paint before you want to look at them. Mr Gradgrind of Hard Times said: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” And he turned out to be the villain of the piece! So today I am giving you facts, but coated in glorious technicolour.

HOUSE OF LIGHT

You all know that HOUSE OF LIGHT is launching on Steam and GOG on Thursday 26th September at 6PM BST. I can now confirm that it will cost $14.99 / £12.99 / €13.99 with a 10% launch discount in the first week of sale (except if you’re a Perpetual Edition owner, in which case it’s free). We’ll also be adding a new BOOK OF HOURS: Anthology Edition bundle, just like Cultist Simulator, which includes the base game, the soundtrack and HOUSE OF LIGHT with a 15%-off-everything discount (making it about $43.32 / £35.67 / €41.21 in total). This should make it easy for first-time buyers to get the definitive edition of the game with one click, and for existing fans to force gentle occult librarianship on all their friends by buying it as a gift for someone else.

AK has already mentioned this in a few places, but it’s worth reiterating that HOUSE OF LIGHT is roughly comparable in size to all Cultist‘s DLCs wrapped up in one. Cultist had lots of smaller expansions, but we tried something different with BOOK OF HOURS and spent much longer making one really chunky expansion rather than lots of little pieces. So just in case anyone was worried about the value of Perpetual Edition dropping, it hasn’t! It’s all just coming at once this time.

Depending on how HOUSE OF LIGHT goes, and how pre-production on our Mysterious Game Three goes, we’ll make a decision in the first half of 2025 about whether we come back to BOOK OF HOURS and release additional expansions like HOUSE OF HUES. More on that as/when we have updates.

Now, for some long-awaited news…

The Lucid Tarot

It finally has a release date! That release date is:

🎴🎃🦇 HALLOWEEN 🦇🎃🎴

(Thursday 31st October 2024)

We’ll be releasing it on our Etsy shop at 6PM GMT, it’ll cost £70 + shipping, and we’ll be starting with 500 signed, limited edition copies. Every deck comes with a velvet tarot bag and quick start guide, but the first 500 decks will also contain a certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by ‘the artist’. Once these are gone, they’re gone – so if the Tarot of the Hours and the Lady Afterwards launches are anything to go by, I’d suggest camping out on the Etsy shop at this time on Halloween and grabbing a copy while they’re still there.

If you miss out on the first 500, don’t worry. Like we did with the Tarot of the Hours – to make sure everyone in all time zones had a fair chance of getting a deck – we’ll release another 500 Lucid Tarots over November / December. If we sell out, we’ll restock for 2025. So everyone who wants a deck will be able to get one – we just have to take it slow so I (and my mum and dad, who have been unceremoniously roped in for packing duty) can manage demand.

Right. See you on the other side of Simplified Chinese and Russian release, which is happening next week on Thursday 29th August. Wish us luck!

• Grand prize: August MK
• Runners-up: Kristen B, Christopher G, Anthony H, Cat, Jason M
• Wildcards: Will E, Paul H, Elegiant, Andrew H, Julián, Matthew L, Sebastian-Benjamin T, Marco I, Agahnim, Matt F

All winners have been emailed. Thanks to all who entered, and if you didn’t win, better luck next time! At least Cthulhu hasn’t woken up. We think.

H. P. Lovecraft was the godfather of ‘weird fiction’ and a major influence on Cultist Simulator. He was also born on 20th August 1890, so we’re running a Lovecraftian giveaway from today until his birthday on 20th August 2024 when you can win some suitably eldritch prizes! Enter (as many times as you like) below…

The Prizes

GRAND PRIZE: The Lady Afterwards 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…”

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts. It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express. Everything you need is included: gamebooks, clues, character sheets, dice sets and more. More info and images available here.

5 x RUNNERS-UP: The Tarot of the Hours

“Do the Hours speak? If they do, this may be the language they use.”

Five runners-up will get one of our bestselling Tarot of the Hours decks. Based off the traditional Rider-Waite tarot, the Tarot of the Hours uses the esoteric full-colour art of Cultist Simulator on every card and packages it up in a matt laminated tuck box. You can see more of the deck here.

10 x WILDCARDS: Cultist Simulator (Steam or GOG)

“Seize forbidden treasures. Summon alien gods. Feed on your disciples.”

You like Lovecraft? Then you’ll probably like Cultist Simulator. Described as the single best video game at evincing Lovecraftian horror, Cultist Sim is a double BAFTA-nominated roguelike narrative card game where you start your own cult, glean snippets of the occult from the House Without Walls, and try your best not to die. 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

FAQ

When do entries close?

At noon on Tuesday 20th August 2024.

When will the winners be announced?

On the afternoon of Tuesday 20th August 2024. You’ll be contacted directly if you win, and we’ll announce winners on all our social channels too.

Can I enter multiple times?

Yes! There are a maximum of five ways to enter: following us on our Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and/or sharing the giveaway on Twitter and Facebook. Each one of those actions counts as separate entries, so you could just do one of them and give yourself one chance of winning a prize, or you could do all five of them and give yourself five chances of winning something. Simples!

I don’t have social media! Can I enter some other way?

We added YouTube to the list this year to help with this! But I’m afraid if you don’t have any social media OR a YouTube account, we can’t add you in to the giveaway. 🙁 You can always check out our merch shop instead, though!

Please tell me legal stuff so you don’t get sued

We’re running this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but it’s not sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with any of those companies.

Still have questions?

Just email us. 🙂

OK, this quote from Cultist Simulator is possibly one of the grimmest things AK ever wrote in the game (the ‘Marinette ending’ from The Dancer DLC. IYKYK). But I am repurposing it to herald to a good thing and that good thing is some secret Cultist Simulator news! Namely:

Cultist Simulator… on console?!

Screenshots from the PlayStation dev kit

This is not a drill! Cultist Simulator is coming to Xbox and Playstation on 8th August 2024.  We partnered with Polish publishers Klabater because a) they clearly know what’s what and b) we love the Poles. (I used to date one and AK used to live there. One winter’s day his hair literally froze into icicles.)

Cultist Simulator‘s console UI is heavily based on Playdigious’s excellent rework for the Nintendo Switch, which we think is the best way to transform a fundamentally clicky PC-first game to a controller-friendly game. So here are the key details to know:

• Launch date: Thursday 8th August 2024
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
• Versions and prices:
  • Initiate Edition (game plus mini DLC: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLC) – $24.99 / €24.99
  • The Exile DLC – $9.99 / €9.99
  • Anthology Edition (everything together: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC) – $29.99 / €29.99

Wishlist the game today if you’re interested! Click to wishlist on….

Perhaps some people reading this have had enough of being nice and homey in BOOK OF HOURS and want to start a new run of hubristic Lovecraftian fun. Maybe you want to go through the game to find something AK wrote that’s even more upsetting than Marinette’s story. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. Whatever your motivation, I hope you pick Cultist Simulator up on your platform of choice next month. It’s the first time we’ve ever released any game on console (including any of our work on Fallen London or Sunless Sea) so we are excited! Excite alongside us, if you like.

Where in a month of Sundays is the Lucid Tarot?

Click for larger versions.

It has taken a preposterously long time to make this a reality. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but some highlights include £44,000 quotes from local suppliers, another supplier running off with our money, and having to come up with an entirely new production process for printing double-sided opaque-but-also-transparent tarot cards. I literally couldn’t find anyone who’d made cards like this before, anywhere in the world. I even tried to contact the people who made the Gloom deck – one of the key inspirations – but no dice. Fortunately, I found a wonderful factory producer and we’re now on our sixth or seventh iteration of the deck. To give you an idea of the problems encountered, here’s a comparison of the first prototype we produced (which I loved) with the first production-ready deck:

The production-ready deck is smooth and scratch resistant and gorgeously made. But the production process significantly darkened the deck from the prototype (which was a manual, not production-viable first pass).

You might think the difference isn’t terribly significant – you might actually prefer the darker version – but problems became particularly apparent when you held the cards up to the light:

Bearing in mind the whole point of the deck is for them to be actually usable as tarot cards – so you can place them face down and then reveal them – this really wasn’t cricket. But thanks to brilliant work from Emma, my contact at the factory, we’ve now come up with a totally new method which involves printing multiple middle-levels of white ink and then splicing those layers with a layer of iridescent ink. This necessitates using specialist ink and materials I hadn’t heard of, but now we have nice opaque cards which also have gently silvered iridescent edges (this is the version featured in the gallery at the top of this section). I love them! There are some minor imperfections – I think they add charm, Emma thinks they can be improved upon – so we’re trying one last improvement before greenlighting full production. As a result, I still can’t confirm a specific release date yet, but I can at least tell you we are very close, and have an MVP (minimum viable product) as a beautiful worst-case fallback.

I appreciate that from the outside it all probably looks like this:

BUT TRUST ME! People are excited about the deck, it’s been a much more complex physical production process than expected, and I don’t want to sell anything I can’t enthusastically and truthfully endorse. Here’s what I can confirm at this stage:

• The Lucid Tarot is almost certainly launching on our Etsy shop this year
• We’ll offer an initial, limited run of 500 signed and numbered decks which will come with a signed certificate of authenticity
• We’ll then move to staggered runs of 100 (or so!) of unnumbered decks, so people in different time zones have a fair chance or getting them when they go on sale
• Every deck – both the 500 limited edition and the unnumbered version – comes swaddled in a rich velvet tarot bag and ‘quick read’ summary of each card’s meaning, so you can get strated tout suite.

BOOK OF HOURS

[MAJOR HOUSE OF LIGHT SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT]

AK is away currently on a mysterious writing trip – his last before HOUSE OF LIGHT launches – to finish up the Lighthouse Institute. You’ve probably noticed that our teasers up until this point about the Lighthouse Institute have been, er, here is a lighthouse! Here are some aspects! Be excited! Well, soon we will have some more specifics to share. People in the HOUSE OF LIGHT beta seem to really enjoy the interactions between visitors – for example, surprising revelations about the hobbies of well-known occultists:

“Douglas and Serena discuss a shared, concealed, but evidently profound passion for knitting. Douglas: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll have you locked up.’ Serena: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll give King Crucible your address.'”

Or subtle yet pivotal decisions in other occultists’ lives:

“Morgen and Arun return to their conversation about the Obliviates, who once were called the House of Lethe. She playfully accuses him of being a member, and asks him where he keeps his three chains. He parries by asking her where she keeps her notorious key of black sapphire. Morgen crosses her legs and asks Arun silkily if he would like to search her. After a moment, he says very definitely that no, he would not.”

AK is writing even more to cover the most likely potential outcomes of the Lighthouse board. As there are six positions available and 1-3 people (I think!) who are eligible for that position, there’re a lot of different possibilities here. It’s actually a great illustration of the danger of hidden multipliers in game development. To take an art pipeline example: ‘I will add two vases of flowers to each room in Hush House, which will take 5 minutes each. That’s quick! OK, so there are 107 rooms, multiplied by 10 minutes, which gives me a task list that will take… realistically three full days’ work to complete. Maybe I won’t add those flowers then.’ This is why AK has to basically rent a room and lock himself inside it when it comes to these big writing tasks in BOOK OF HOURS. It’s on us for making such a complicated, baroque game, but hey!

What I can share at this stage is that AK is doing a lot of work on endings, making them truly reflective of your choices and your specific Lighthouse Board. Here’s our new Lighthouse-specific ending page, for example (please note this is a mock-up, and may change before we launch):

You’ll be able to click on each of the Lighthouse Institute roles (‘Secretary Vigilant’, etc) to see what that specific person did in that specific role, or whether they’re still sulking because the Institute decided to be friends with the bug people instead of the year wranglers. So you should have a really good sense at the end of a HOUSE OF LIGHT playthrough of the effect your choices had on the world, and what the personalities you put in power went on to achieve. Hopefully that will feel crunchy and rewarding, like a fresh slice of Amber Pumpkin Pie. But more news on this soon, when AK returns!

HOUSE OF LIGHT is a good-sized expansion with an unusual congeries of different features, which I’ve been assiduously altering from a congeries into a constellation, and I’ll talk about that, but UP FRONT let me say that absolutely nothing here is 100% confirmed or promised, everything may change up until release day, and if I get any grouchy emails complaining there are ‘only’ seventy cooking recipes then I’ll… well I’ll sigh, mark them spam and get on with my day. It’s not much of a threat. [edit: there were just under a hundred in the end]

The foot bone’s connected to the leg bone…

I really wanted cooking in the launch version of BOOK OF HOURS, but it was one of the half-dozen things that didn’t make the cut (a very casual way of describing the late-development triage process, which fails to evoke all the weeping forlornly at spreadsheets and bank statements). This makes it hard to connect meaningfully to the skill system. The risk with ancillary systems added later is that they can be disconnected from anything meaningful, so they just roll around under the surface of the game like one of those horrible oil globules under a steroid user’s skin.

Fortunately we have a natural use for them: salons! Which is to say, picnics, elevenses, supper, etc, where you invite visitors to chat about the invisible arts. Of course that basic outline immediately poses half a dozen questions, each of which has a couple of misleading answers before you get to a workable one, and then where the workable ones create further questions.

The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone…

For example: how  many slots do you need in a Salon verb? Ooh probably about ten, we need to revamp the verb window no that becomes wildly impractical, so instead let’s allow the Salon to respond to food placed in the room. This feels much more immersive for the Librarian, but also means reworking (a) some quite central code and (b) some of the room art – all those neatly placed chairs on the viewer side of the table made it impossible to arrange food on the table. (When I was testing the refectory I had to stack food on the mantelpiece.)

Okay then, how do food Aspects tie into the Salon process? Obviously if you want a good conversation about Resurgences & Emergences you stack the salon with as many Grail and Moth dishes this doesn’t work because much of the reason for the slot system back as far as Cultist was to make it impossible just to stack up twenty identical objects to power through an Aspect requirement. And we don’t want people maxing out Grail numbers by filling the room with cake:

So currently, instead, individual guests have some basic dietary requirements – usually based on their traditional interests (Arthur wants a meal with at least one Lantern-aspected dish) but with some variations (al-Adim doesn’t drink, Yvette isn’t fussy). This immediately throws up some silly preferences (Dagmar won’t eat much besides Aglaophotis Soufflé, Agdistis will eat basically anything because most foods contain Heart) which will entail a final brow-furrowed tuning session and probably some post-beta tweaks, but much of which will stand because it’s basically a game and because the alternative – hand-assigning a hundred-plus food preferences to twenty-plus guests with no particular mnemonic structure – is no fun for anyone, least of all me.

So you set up your Salon in one of the five or six rooms where you can hold it (it’s nice to make more use of the Hall of Voices), you invite your guests and.. wait invite guests? Visitors show up once a season. We need to do something about that, too. So in HOUSE OF LIGHT (and this feature may migrate back to the vanilla game) you can get someone’s address once you’ve helped them out at least once (though Hokobald, paranoid as ever, will basically only give you the general location of a manhole behind a pub where he might sometimes check for correspondence). You can then write ’em an invite, send it via the Postmistress, and they turn up. If you like you can write a number of invitations in advance for your big do. Or you can actually summon them so you can push through the Visitor stories to get to the new late-game Visitor Further Stories (all the systems connect! more on this anon).

And this brings us to the winnowing phase of design, after answering a lot of these questions:

al-Adim travels a lot, do we worry about him turning up after sixty seconds while Yvette who lives in London also turns up after sixty seconds? No. It adds nothing and it makes people think too hard about exactly where everyone is; anyway a lot of our visitors have Uncanny Means of travelling. (Travelling at Night, even.)

What if you keep spamming invitations? do people stop turning up? No. This would be hassle to code, hassle to signal, and would punish people who accidentally invite the wrong guests. There is a rationale (‘when the Librarian asks, the invisible world listens’) and there is a nod to the requirement to put some effort into invitations (there’s a low-ish Aspect requirement that you can satisfy with Soul cards and the right ink, and of course Hokobald will only turn up if he gets an invitation written in Orpiment Exultant). But as with the order forms there is a hazy line between making the invitations feel like some business, so you’re not just clicking buttons on a spreadsheet, and making players jump through hoops – a line that for some people we’re already on the wrong side of.

Do you get unique Salon responses from guests for relevant food and drink? Now we’re really in the meat of it (olol). I would like visitors to have unique lines because other visitors are present. I would like people to comment on the wine. I would like people to comment on paintings hanging in the room. I would like people to have conversations that reference ongoing stories. But that right there is a requirement for – well the maths depends on how you work it, but we can easily get up to ten or twenty thousand unique lines. Or a madlibs approach like the CK3 feast system – which is fine for what it is, I like CK3, but it’s a lot of work and it’s the opposite of the handcrafted Hush House feel. And we’re not even at the headline feature for HOUSE OF LIGHT story content – the Further Stories for Visitors / Lighthouse Institute stuff – and I’d quite like to get the expansion out this year. So the answer is ‘some much smaller subset of some of the above’.

I haven’t even talked about how the cooking system works. Or Thirza’s Knife. OK so briefly: making food is much more like a traditional crafting system, though you get a little bit of potential input from Spices & Savours. Milk plus flour with a mixing bowl (CAKE TIME) is dough, dough plus eggs is cake batter, cake batter plus honey is Cornish Honey Cake (never, never to be confused with Devonshire Honey Cake). Some of the recipes require knives. We don’t actually have a kitchen knife in the game, so if you want to chop onions you might need to bring down Sebastian’s swords from the Hall of Division. Or find Thirza’s Knife, which has probably never been used to cut up anything lamentable, probably.

The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone…

Wait AK what are salons for? apart from ‘deciding not to invite Hokobald’? And what’s the difference between elevenses and a picnic? and why can you only hold salons once a season? For that you’ll have to wait until my wife wrestles me back to the blog to write another update. Right now I have aspects to assign to cake.

Did somebody say cake? LB here, and I have been made very hungry over the last week as I drew all the delectably 1930s dainties that AK’s requested so far for HOUSE OF LIGHT. It requires quite a bit of research – what is the history of Pyrex? What the hell is fish ‘Monte Carlo’ style? – but I hope the consistency will really create an unusual, European historical sense of reality and you can all enjoy making prune whip for people you don’t like. The below isn’t exhaustive – I already have a host of new food to draw, from mushrooms on toast to something alarmingly called ‘Walls-of-Ys’ – but you can already pick a pretty nice meal for yourself from what we have!

You can see in the header image of this blog post how rich, joyful and tasty a full spread of food looks, and how much life it adds to Hush House. AK’s mentioned we had to adjust some rooms to facilitate soirées, but the end result can have surprisingly sweet outcomes. The Refectory looks warm and inviting, like a welcome-home banquet for a long-travelled friend – but how suitably melancholy and sweet is a tea-party in winter in the Physic Garden? I feel like Valentine Dewulf would have been much the better for one of these.

In other news of things that hopefully brighten your life, we have another MERCH LAUNCH to announce – our limited edition Hours notebooks, now available in the shop. I tried to make them classy and BOOK OF HOURS-y, and I’m delighted with how they’ve turned out. If you have need of a gently occult notebook in your life – to write your hopes, your dreams, reminders of BoH recipes, etc – these guys are for you.

Finally, we’re moving offices next month so are running a major 40% off sale off almost everything else in the shop (the one other exception is the newly-restocked Wisdom Tree pendants, which I’ve just relisted. People selfishly bought them all, but other people also wanted them and were sad, and we can’t have that). So along with the new notebooks, go nuts on our biggest ever merch sale, and help us save our ancient backs by not having to lug 10,000 Lady Afterwards up some stairs.

Launch news first! The Lucid Tarot colouring book is NOW AVAILABLE on the Etsy shop. This is our first foray in to big, juicy art books – it’s only A5, but it’s nice and chunky because the pages are thick (so they can absorb whatever colouring’s applied to them without bleeding through the page). Check it out!

This is your first opportunity to look at all 78 cards of the Lucid Tarot deck in detail, and/or an excuse to spend hours and hours relaxing with an adult colouring book and your pens / pencils / crayons / pots of Porphyrine. It’s 172 pages of the Hours (and their Minor Arcana friends) as you’ve never seen them before – because YOU haven’t decided what Principles to associate with them. Well, now’s your chance! Scandalise the community by colouring the Hermit in flaming hues of Forge-y orange. Give the Stymphling a makeover in Nectar green. Each Hour has its colour, but maybe you disagree…

Aside from new merch, we’ve also been hard at work on HOUSE OF LIGHT. We’re not ready to share screenshots or release dates yet (though both of those are coming soon), but here’s a glance at some of the game writing and design decisions AK’s been wrangling with in the expansion.

AK here, talking about talking.

There’s about twelve thousand words of direct, in-character speech in BOOK OF HOURS – mostly things that Visitors say to you about their business, plus a little bit of villager chat.

“Heist? Oriflamme’s? Poppycock. Forgeries? Poppycock. Bureau all over the place arresting everyone though. Worse than Ortucchio. Bloody pardon me pain in my bloody pardon me hinder parts pardon me.”

— Dagmar, from The Affair of the Oriflamme Heist

None of it is the Librarian, who, says nothing at all out loud. This is mostly the result of a perennial game-writing problem: there’s a risk when you put words into the player’s mouth that the words aren’t ones they’d choose to say, though there’s more leeway with internal monologues, mental asides, and formal contexts like letter-writing.

Some games deal with this by making the words as bland as possible, which is only a solution in games where writing isn’t important.

A second solution is to make the words sufficiently characterful or witty that the player enjoys feeling they said them, which is easier when the PC is a strong character, say, a noir protagonist like Disco Elysium’s.

A third solution is writing several different lines for the PC to choose and hoping at least one lands, which you almost always have to do in a trad CRPG, and which at least diffuses the problem, though you’ll still often find (e.g.) you’re offered Haughty, Direct or Cheery when what you really wanted was Professional, or whatever. (Owlcat’s latest offering did this well, partly because the protag’s attitude to their exalted position naturally breaks one of several ways – partly by throwing a lot of text at the problem – partly because the writing was, by and large unusually good).

And a fourth common solution, one that I usually favour, is the silent protagonist. This is a natural fit anyway for a game where the most likely line of dialogue for the protagonist is shh! It’s put me in a slightly odd place with salons, though – the social events you’re holding for Visitors in HOUSE OF LIGHT. Various Visitors are probably going to be subject to occasional outbreaks of direct speech, but the host will likely keep their mouth shut – the current (TBC!) design is that you can sometimes intervene by adding a Soul card, but more along the lines of directing conversation than holding forth. I guess this makes the Librarian a better host, though. I did start worrying that it was odd that you serve food for your guests and don’t cater for yourself. I briefly fiddled with adding it to the design. But then I thought, is anyone really going to complain if I make salons require 20% less canned ham? Probably yes. But then that’s more canned ham for the rest of us.

What I can share, though, are some juicy new details: because the HOUSE OF LIGHT Steam page is now live! If you can, please head over and wishlist it, even if you’re a lucky Perpetual Edition holder who’ll get the expansion for free when it launches. (Wishlists make Steam think we’ll make them £££ which means they’re more likely to promote HoL / BOOK OF HOURS. Cf the algorithm section on this page from history.) It also means you’ll receive an email the moment the expansion is live, so you can dive in and start playing lickety-split. Thank you!

Here’s a gloss on the main points you’ll see on the HoL Steam page, to explain where we’re taking things…

Social Events

Host influential dinner parties in the crumbling splendour of Hush House. Choose a location that suits you – the Hall of Division, the Chapter House, or the Physic Garden, perhaps? – and send out invitations. Become tastemaker of the occult demimonde, or curate an exclusive society of only the most select adepts. Get to know the great and the good, introduce topics for discussion around the table, and observe the chemistry – or animus – between your guests. You’ll need food, drink, ambience, entertainment and more, but a successful soirée will influence the world in subtle ways, sending ripples far beyond your walls.

NB: AK is still working on the design and this is TBC, but it might be possible to to invite Visitors AND named Assistants – which means you could sit Reverend Timothy down next to Aunt Mopsy and see whether Good triumphs over Evil, or sandwich Denzil between Franklin Bancroft and Daymare to torture his saturnine soul.

Cooking

Your guests will grow hungry, and it’s up to you to cater to their interesting palates. Bake honey sandwich cakes and pair with port. Perfect beef suet pudding. Serve veal and cucumber, dark-smelling ‘garden nectar’, or a simple bowl of tinned peaches and cream. Dive into the dangerous world of 1930s European recipes and influence your attendees with your choice of spices, sweetmeats and dainties.

NB: like my teacake point above, PLEASE NOTE that we do not guarantee the presence of honey sandwich cakes, port, beef suet pudding, veal and/or cucumber, or tinned peaches and cream. We haven’t yet confirmed exactly what recipes you’ll be able to cook in the game, though we will update the description to reflect specific recipes nearer the time if they change from this list. If it makes you feel better, ‘garden nectar’ was actually a thing in 1930s English cuisine, apparently ‘an elegant variation of borscht’ which AK will undoubtedly turn into something horrible like Mondays broiled in the blood of the Thunderskin or something. In hindsight, maybe that doesn’t make you feel better.

Advanced Visitor Stories

You’ve dabbled in the Affair of the Oriflamme Heist. You’ve guessed what lies in the Messenger’s Casket. Now help your Visitors delve deeper. Encourage alliances between strangers, or convince an ally to help you stymie a foe. Using an innovative new system, influence the wider world with in-depth Visitor stories and see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree. Where now does the dappled rose flourish? What did Zuthi hear at the Roost? What is the deeper connection between Rowena, Yvette, and Ys?

Once you’ve met someone, you’ll also be able to add them to your address book and invite them to Hush House to pursue their business at a time of your choosing. When the Librarian calls, the invisible world listens.

NB: take particular note of ‘innovative new system’ and ‘see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree’. Again, this is more UI I can’t show you yet but it is a new format for storytelling in BOOK OF HOURS that a) looks significantly different from stories played out elsewhere in situation windows and b) connects more closely with the Wisdom Tree. More on that later, with pictures.

The Lighthouse Institute

You’ve wined, dined and appraised your chosen guests – now decide who’s worthy to form the board of the Lighthouse Institute. Who should be Treasurer? Who might suit Secretary Vigilant? Does your group all share the same agenda, or does one boardmember sympathise with the Chandler, while another fears his coming Dawn?

Your selection will found the influential Lighthouse Institute and set its course through the world. So take your time, and choose wisely.

Lucid Tarot colouring book

On another news-y note, we announced earlier this week that the Lucid Tarot colouring book – showcasing all 78 cards from our upcoming transparent stained-glass PVC deck – will launch on the merch shop on Wednesday 28th February. As with all our new merch, this is an experiment so it’s initially a limited edition: there’re only 500 copies of this colouring book, to get a sense of appetite for the item in question. They’re really lovely, though – so if you fancy a quiet night in with a glass of wine, or a sunlit afternoon watching YouTube and doodling or something – I think you might like them. 🙂

Remember this from the advent calendar?

It is now a reality! Our very first piece of jewellery – the golden Wisdom Tree necklace – is out now on the Etsy shop. Featuring all the Wisdoms from Birdsong to Skolekosophy, you can now adorn yourself with the occult symbol over which scholars have squabbled for centuries. We’re only making 500 of these as a test run, to see how jewellery sells. Maybe Cultist fans despise vanity! Maybe BOOK OF HOURS players are too busy reading books! Well, if you do want a beautiful gold-plated pendant for your or someone else’s neck, get it while stocks last…

(I especially recommend purchasing now if you intend these as any sort of Valentine’s gift. International shipping takes 3+weeks, so sooner is better!)

While we’re talking merch, we have the Hours notebooks (replacing the long-lost Cultist notebook which ran out a few years ago now), our tarot adult colouring book…

…and the Lucid Tarot itself finally shouldering its way through the world’s skin, like a clawed and ruthless uncle or a headless flapping bear. Hush House cat is on the scene to inspect the latest prototype, featuring for the first time ever our custom velvet tarot bag.

If you’re signed up to the mailing list you’ll get an email any time we launch any of these, so I recommend it! Especially as The Lucid Tarot will initially launch with 500 limited editions including a signed certificate of authenticity, so those might go quickly.

In other actual video game news, AK released a new patch – EHSAN – to beta, containing:

I haven’t heard of anyone finding the ‘well-hidden surprises’ yet – I yelped with surprise and delight the first time I found them – so perhaps they’re too well-hidden. It’ll move to the main branch some time next month now AK’s fixed the bug that removed all unlocking requirements from certain rooms, and the one that seemed to play the shrieking howl of the Wolf-Divided every time you clicked a button.

Over to AK…

The EHSAN e.7 patch is the fifth major patch and the… fortieth? incremental update since launch. I started typing a long preening bit about all the changes we’d put in and then realised that would be interesting mostly to me, so I’ll spare you lot, but if you are interested, the in-game patch notes go all the way back to October, and the TWELVE DISMAYS OF CHRISTMAS post explains the silliest bug of my career. The well-hidden surprises Lottie mentions: apparently one player found one with the assistance of their dog; others may be available to a keen-eyed, or a forward-looking, Librarian. There’ll be more quality-of-life updates eventually, but for now I’m shifting focus to the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, so those updates will likely arrive in a free update alongside it.

While I work on HOUSE OF LIGHT I’m also answering dozens of questions from our Chinese, Japanese and Russian translators. Just as with Cultist Simulator,  localisation is a trip. We vetted all three teams to make sure they include fans who understand the context, and it’s bloody great to be answering questions this detailed, but it’s hard work. I remember sitting in a hut in Dungeness inventing daft hybrid etymologies and thinking ‘this’ll haunt me if we do Chinese again’; well, now I’m haunted. Some of my recent answers:

• “Both suggest a cross in English. ‘Rood’ is an Old English term for the Christian cross, ‘Cruciate’ is from Latin crucis, cross. ‘Chancel’ has several meanings in English but one is the dividing screen between the more and less holy parts of a church – which is also known as the ‘rood screen’. The terms are as you say all largely equivalent and the general sense of ‘something that separates the profane from the sacred / more sacred from less sacred’ would be good. If in doubt, I’d just use the same term three times.”
• “There’s an obscure adjective, ‘nivean’, from Latin nix/nivis, which means snow-white. I used a variant spelling because ‘Nivea’ is a popular European skin-care brand 🙃”
• “Speculum is Latin for mirror, and later in English was used to mean (a) a particular kind of mirror used in telescopes (b) a scrying-mirror used by seers. So ‘speculist’ implies a mirror-specialist, probably with an occult connection. NB a speculum in modern English refers exclusively to a medical instrument used by gynaecologists! This is definitely _not_ a reference I want to imply here.”

HOUSE OF LIGHT. I want to do three things with this:

• • • Variety of outcomes from the Visitor stories. I actually loathe the term ‘branching narrative’ because it imprisons us in a 1990s idea of CYOA tree-diagram structures, but ‘stories with variety in outcome’ lacks zing. Whichever term you use, there ain’t any of it in the Visitor stories as they stand. Partly this is just because I wouldn’t have had time to write the things, partly because it’s hard, maybe impossible, to write stories with variant outcomes in a game that explicitly tells you that there are no mistakes and you can’t lock yourself out of anything (ask ten dedicated CRPG players of your acquaintance how many of them don’t look at a wiki nowadays before making a key narrative decision – and then imagine finding you’ve missed out on a decision because the visitor came and went while you were unlocking the Wine Cellar). But obviously people were always going to want more (a) relevant story about (b) known characters with (c) choices that allow self-expression. So releasing that as an expansion neatly addresses both probs: we now have some months we didn’t have before launch, and it’ll be an opt-in for people who’ve played the game once already or who want a bit more variety in their outcome, FOMO be damned.
    • Cooking, and social events. There’s a bag of flour and a mixing bowl in the Hush House kitchens, but you can’t bake a cake. This is because we started with art for the kitchens, which we sliced up and turned into manipulable objects, and some fitted more naturally into the crafting system than others. But that’s not relevant to people who just want to bake a cake. Or have vegetables less generic than a sack. Meanwhile I’ve seen a heartening number of players talk about how they in-game RP afternoon tea with Visitors and villagers. And it ties together with more Visitor engagement. Some parts of this point may end up in the game as a free update – I don’t know until I’ve worked through the design – it depends on how easy or not it is to tease apart from the rest.
    • A bridge to the next game. Lottie and I have an unusually clear idea about Game Three – though we might change our minds and we won’t be starting on it until at least 2025 – and I want to lay down a few barrels of the good story so it’ll be aged and flavourful by the time it shows up in Three. I’m also planning ahead and trying out some ideas with design, with narrative structure and with UI that – by Three – should ultimately take us beyond windows-and-slots. It’s a good model, it’s brought us a long way, but it does feel sometimes like trying to write through a keyhole.

To establish a skeleton that links all that, I’m going off to spend a week in a quiet place with good light, a very large table and a boxful of cards and coloured pens (and zero cats, so I can go to bed with a tableful of cards and enjoy a morning without regret) – while Lottie tinkers with a prototype for something to do with BOOK OF HOURS’ visuals which will, we hope, make some people fall off their chairs.

‘Til next time…

— ‘Ulysses’, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson knows what’s what. It’s hard to sit still with art: it jiggles around like a catnipped kitten or a goose on a Roomba or a kid who needs the loo. We’ve been updating BOOK OF HOURS a lot, and it’s put new wind in our sails as a studio – but we have mountains of ideas, and we’ve been working on other things as well.

Tennyson also says that you are a part of all that you have met – so if you’re here, reading this, you’re part of the Secret Histories, too. Here’s a round-up of all the things that have just launched or that you and we both can look forward to in 2024.

BOOK OF HOURS content expansion

“Only twins drown twice.”

Europe, 1937. The War in the World is coming, and worse yet, the War in the Sun. In this gathering gloom, the notables of the occult underworld consider new weapons; new alliances; new paths. Who can they turn to for help, if not the Librarian of Hush House?

Explore visitors and their stories in much greater depth. Host exotic feasts and sophisticated soirées. And in your own quiet way, shape the genesis of the controversial Lighthouse Institute.

The big ticket item is the HOUSE OF LIGHT content expansion, coming to BOOK OF HOURS in 2024. It’ll be more like the Exile DLC in size than The Dancer, and will be a paid DLC (though free to anyone with Perpetual Edition).

It’s one of several content expansions planned for BOOK OF HOURS, which we’re hoping to release next year alongside with the QoL / general improvement patches you’ve been seeing already. So buckle up, librarians! Or more appropriately, get yourself nice and comfy under that charming wool blanket. Brancrug calls.

BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack

Featuring twenty-five remastered tracks from the game, arranged by the composer, Maribeth Solomon, herself. It’s available now, costs $10.99 / £8.99 / €9.99 and you can get it on (deep breath): Steam, GOG, Spotify, iTunes, YouTube Music, Amazon, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Medianet, Pandora AND EVEN MORE go see if you can find a place we aren’t listed. Who ever said baiting the internet was a bad idea?

BOOK OF HOURS localisation

A small but significant confirmation that we are now working on official Simplified Chinese, Russian and Japanese translations of BOOK OF HOURS. These will almost certainly come out next year!

Depending on how these languages do at launch, we may add more localisation in future. Fingers crossed.

Secret Histories merch

The Church o’ Merch has been in need of a bit of a revamp for a while, but I was too busy with BOOK OF HOURS to give it the love it deserved. December was a great time to right this wrong, so we now have a variety of new items coming to the shop next year:

Tarot colouring book

An A5 wiro-bound colouring book with all 78 Lucid Tarot cards in glorious black and white for you to bring to life. Pages are thick so they’ll carry everything from crayon to felt-tip pens. Colour in while listening to your favourite piece of music, sipping your favourite beverage, and generally having a jolly chill time.

Wisdom Tree necklace

The first piece of jewellery we’ve ever made! Keep your Wisdoms close with this gold pendant chain with embossing, coloured enamel and cut-out detailing.

Hours notebooks

Hardback French-creased notebooks with cloth covers, foiled detailing and page-marker ribbons! Inside, the Magician has lined paper, the Hermit plain and the Wheel of Fortune dotted. They’ll be available individually or as a beautiful threefold set. These should look classy and occult at the same time – more photos when I get them from the printers.

Lucid Tarot

Just an update on the long-awaited Lucid Tarot deck, which is currently in production at two different factories for a test deck. Hoping to have two test decks early in the new year, and be able to move into the first production run. More on that when I have more news! It’s taking a while because what I’m trying to do is, frankly, so weird. But it’s wonderful making weird, and bearing in mind this project began here…

…I’m pretty happy how it’s turning out.

(The scholars of the House watched the courses of the stars to determine their pasts and understand their future. You just need to be on the mailing list if you want to know when these items come out. They’ll all be limited runs initially, so get in quick!)

Reverend Timothy’s gifts

A number of small gifts appeared by Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree in BOOK OF HOURS. They’re still there if you haven’t collected them, and they’ll remain until midnight on 31st December 2023. If you’d like your in-game advent calendar gifts, load up BOOK OF HOURS some time between now and the end of the year, wait until in-game winter rolls around and find your horde by the Rectory. For those of you who don’t like surprises, you can see exactly what awaits by clicking below.

Cultist Simulator on Steam Deck

It’s been a long-time coming (h/t our long-time coder-collaborator, Chelnoque), but Cultist Simulator is now Verified on Steam Deck! We’re testing it out on a beta before rolling it out to the main branch. Deck-owners who’d like to check it out just need to opt in to beta (Steam Library > Cultist Simulator > Properties > Betas > ‘gateofhorn’ in the dropdown menu). As ever, if you run into any issues, please let us know at support@weatherfactory.biz.

Everything else

Finally, we updated user flairs on the subreddit (tag yourself with any of the nine starting Legacies, from Archaeologist to Twice-Born), released a new Skeleton Songs all about how much we love Susanna Clarke, and there’s a wintry HD Hush House wallpaper for PC and mobile at the bottom of our freebie On the House page, in case you’d like to festive-up your backgrounds.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Kiss your beloveds, hug your loved ones. If you’ve had a good year, long may that continue. If a bad one, remember: though much is taken, much abides. Love from AK, myself and the House Without Walls. See you in 2024. ♥

🎁🎄 …a 25-day advent calendar of Hush House! 🎄🎁

Each day we’ll open a door containing treats in BOOK OF HOURS or the ‘real’ world (you’ll see it on all of our socials [ Twitter / Facebook / Instagram ], and we’ll update this blog daily with What’s Behind Today’s Door).

Most are tasty amuses-bouches. Some are pretty major reveals. A few real world treats will only last for 24hrs, but you’ll never miss anything in-game. Playing BOOK OF HOURS any time in December will give you everything the calendar’s revealed to date whenever in-game winter rolls around. So there’s no stress if you’re ‘out’ having ‘fun’ with ‘friends’. Except, you know. Have a think about your life choices there.

Door 1: Seasonal art in BOOK OF HOURS

The next time you’re playing BOOK OF HOURS and winter comes around, you’ll notice some festive cheer sprinkled throughout Brancrug Village and Hush House. For anyone who wants to be left alone like the Weary Detective and his Illustrated London News, there’s an option to turn off seasonal art in the Settings menu. For everyone else, take careful note of Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree next to the Rectory…

Door 2: something smooth as an egg and frosted like a winter window

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 3: 24% off The Lady Afterwards for 24hrs

Both the boxed and digital version of The Lady Afterwards are 24% off for 24hrs. Seek the occult in 1920s Alexandria, in a luxury Call of Cthulhu-esque TRPG based in the world of Cultist Simulator!

Door 4: something fiendishly simple and wretchedly fragile

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 5: new Reddit user flairs

By popular demand, we’ve added BOOK OF HOURS-specific user flairs to the subreddit. Mark yourself as your favourite starting character, from the Archaeologist to the Twice-Born!

Door 6: something hard for mortal men to dig

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 7: new colouring book

This is another item people have been asking about for a while. We’re launching a tarot-based adult colouring book in 2024, featuring the stained glass tarot art from the Lucid Tarot!

Door 8: something salty and savoury

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 9: 24% off the Tarot of the Hours for 24hrs

Our best-selling item, the Tarot of the Hours, is 24% off for 24hrs.

Door 10: something healthful and slippery

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 11: “Only twins drown twice.”

Europe, 1937. The War in the World is coming, and worse yet, the War in the Sun. In this gathering gloom, the notables of the occult underworld consider new weapons; new alliances; new paths. Who can they turn to for help, if not the Librarian of Hush House?

Explore visitors and their stories in much greater depth. Host exotic feasts and sophisticated soirées. And in your own quiet way, shape the genesis of the controversial Lighthouse Institute. The HOUSE OF LIGHT content expansion comes to BOOK OF HOURS next year!

Door 12: something ‘musky’

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 13: 24% off the Mansus for 24hrs

Our fine art Mansus poster is 24% off for 24hrs. Decorate your walls with the House Without Walls!

Door 14: something from the shores of Brancrug

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 15: BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack out now!

At long last, the BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack is now available on Steam, GOG, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and many other places! Featuring remastered versions of music from the game, customised and ordered by Maribeth Solomon and Mickymar Productions. Sublime.

Door 16: new Wisdom Tree necklace

This is something we’ve never made before! Look out for our new gold and enamel Wisdom Tree pendant necklace, coming to the merch shop in 2024.

Door 17: something alive to every draught and spark

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 18: The Wood Between the Worlds

Lord of the Rings + Narnia + Jane Austen = ? Listen to a brand new episode of Skeleton Songs, all about the beautiful world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Piranesi, and a very ‘English’ magic system.

Door 19: something not alive (or not very)

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 20: new notebooks

We retired our Cultist Simulator journal a few years ago, and are finally back with revamped notebooks inspired by BOOK OF HOURS. Coming 2024!

Door 21: something that can only strike Now

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 22: Cultist Simulator on Steam Deck

Cultist Simulator’s Verified on Steam Deck! The new version’s available on beta and should work smooth as butter. (But please send bug reports to support@weatherfactory.biz, if you find any.)

Door 23: something that will not, will not, will not stop dancing

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 24: HD Christmas wallpapers

Two new HD wallpapers for desktop and mobile to download On the House. Featuring Hush House in the snow and the Wisdom Tree.

Door 25: something whose brightness lingers for a little while, even in the dark

Merry Christmas! Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

And that’s it! Warmth, good cheer and a glass of Chateau Raveline to you and yours. Merry Christmas, friend.

;

NEXT COMPLETED WORKSTATION WATCHER/BUTTON. This function was in the game from the beginning, but you had to hammer the BACKSPACE key, and the implementation was a little rough. It’s much easier to keep track of what you’ve done and where you’ve done it, now.

Now the features that are almost ready to come out of the oven (or you can try them now on the beta branch on GOG or Steam):

LESS CLICKY ROOM NAVIGATION. Mouse over a locked room to get a preview of its unlock requirements – which will also highlight any relevant assistants you have ready to go…

…and when you click to get the room unlock window, I’ve tidied it up so all the details are in one place.

SAVE-INDEPENDENT ENDINGS. BOOK OF HOURS is a long game – I didn’t especially plan for people to replay it, at least not without waiting for expansions and updates. More – the reason there are so many endings is that I wanted people to play through once and get a distinctive ending that most others would never see. I didn’t really particularly think people would want to save-scum and try out different endings. So endings were locked to a particular save file.

But almost everyone else felt differently! In hindsight it seems obvious that people would want to fossick around and experience at least a couple of endings, without starting a whole new save. (This is the peril of making the games that you want to play yourself.) So I’ve fixed it; all endings are stored save-independently and you can build up a library of logged histories from multiple saves. When the update hits, it’ll pick up any endings in your current save and add them to the store.

THE CRAFTING HELPER PANEL. Used to be that you could lock yourself out of lower-level crafting recipes if you increased your skills too much. This was usually not a problem, because you could usually just leave a relevant ingredient out and not activate the higher-level recipe, but it was much more annoying than I’d realised. This helps with that, but it also makes it much easier to explore the crafting system… and it’s a starting-point for further crafting improvements in this and future games.

The response in beta was enthusiastic, but a few harder-core folks were worried that it might automate away some of the fun of exploration. Banish those worries. (1) it doesn’t show all the recipes in the game, just the ones most relevant to the crafting system (though I’ll probably enable it for Determinations and Histories, too) and (2) you can just leave it permanently hidden if you prefer.

SCREENSHOT MODE. This has caused an unexpected degree of excitement…

.. AND THIS. A very small number of people are very enthusiastic about getting rid of the stray penny in their Sundries tray. There will almost certainly be more uses for pennies in the future, but

Back to Lottie’s hornswoggling art, also known the long-awaited Lucid Tarot. I announced this aaages ago before BOOK OF HOURS evolved into the all-encompassing Fabergé egg it became and I had more free time to focus on merch. Let this be a humbling lesson to me to remember that Even If You Are Excited About Something It’s Not Necessarily The Best Time To Tell People About It, and the other sobering truth, There Are Only So Many Hours In The Day. I feel guilty about not having completed it yet so I’m trying my hardest to get the Lucid Tarot out on our Etsy shop by the end of the year – ideally in time for people to order as Christmas presents! Here are a few WIPs to give you a sense of the minor arcana, which I’ve never shared before:

Anyone want to guess who the Knights, Queens and Kings of each suit are? I shared this already on my Twitter, so here’s Aunt Mopsy to get you started:

UP NEXT…

1. Another big performance pass. That’s AK’s priority for this week.
2. Nuisances pass. Why are Pale Mommets so hard to make? Are some skill evolutions technically possible but practically impossible? why is bookshelf x in room y 10 pixels shorter than it should be? etc. etc. etc.
3. Another QoL pass. AK hasn’t forgotten he said he’d add notes; and he really wants to sort out that zoom-to-cursor function.
4. New Free Content and/or Paid Expansions. By Christmas, we’ll be sorting out what content goes free into the main game and what goes into our first paid expansion (though these are free to anyone with Perpetual Edition, too).
5. Soundtrack. Everyone seems to like it (everyone has EARS) so we’re getting this out ASAP. Please note that because of royalty splits with our composer, and because it’s not a content expansion, this isn’t included for free in Perpetual Edition like almost everything else. But it will be extremely reasonably priced!
6. Localisation. We’re starting with Simplified Chinese and will announce more languages as they’re official.

May Hush House keep you warm as the season turns to autumn. More news soon!

I updated our Steam page at the end of last year. Check it out if you haven’t seen the new screenies!

“There was a storm. It smashed the ship like an egg. But I seized this book as the sea seized me… then the sea brought me here to Brancrug.”

BOOK OF HOURS looks like it’ll end up five times the size of Cultist Sim. The whole game is set in a single location (see below), but there’s a hell of a lot to dig into with the story, nine different origins to choose from which direct your initial interests, and that’s before you get into the lore in all those books or the nine Wisdoms. We wouldn’t normally attempt a game as large of this – it’s just the two of us + friendly freelancers – but we’ve a big leg-up from Cultist Simulator. It provides the basic code framework (things nobody thinks of but you have to do before launch, like saving and loading systems, or Steam achievement integration) and the core mechanic (card + card = new things + new story).  This means we can focus on improving things from CS while building out a new world for BOOK OF HOURS. It’s not a roguelike, which makes us a bit nervous because we’d love people to replay the game as much as people replay Cultist Simulator. But it is big, deep and visually charming, like Chi at the bottom of a well.

We’ve been really hustling these last two weeks to get a first-look demo of BOOK OF HOURS in Steam Next Fest at the start of February. We’re on track for that – just! – so look out for more info in our newsletter, going out next week. It’ll be pretty rough around the edges, but it should give you a good understanding of where we’re going with the final game. You’ll crawl your way out of the freezing sea to the door of an old friend, charm some suspicious rustics who just want to be left alone with their pints of bitter, and eventually cross the Cucurbit Bridge all the way to Hush House, where you’ll unlock the first room of the library. Until I played an earlier build this week, I hadn’t realised how large this game world is.

In the meantime, this means I have a great many other things to update you on. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Firstly, we confirmed the final look and feel of the overall game world – goodbye old cliffs, hello turquoise sea. It’s still WIP (don’t look too hard at the beach) but the vibe is there. We’ve also revamped the misty effect that the game opens with, which form the fog of war you spend the first part of the game unlocking. I’ve a lot of work ahead of me representing the different seasons (including Numa), and animating various parts of it to bring it alive. But I like where it’s going, finally.

More importantly, Alexis has finally been writing content! He’s focused on the first half hour of the game, with our upcoming demo in mind – which is why he has been reading up on Cornish hospitality in the ’30s, and why he left a card on my desk which just says ‘YARG’.

“At last, the light of a hurricane lamp bobbing in the dark. As it approaches, a face looms out of the night.”

A face! Quite a rugged face, but not a rock, or a vengeful sea-bird, or a poisonous snail. This face helps you to the nearby village (banishing Brancrug’s misty fog of war), where you end up dripping interesting patterns into the well-worn wooden floor of The Sweet-Bones. But it’s not exactly an overwhelming welcome:

“After the Restoration of 1930, the New King’s agents came looking for his enemies in these parts… and they weren’t gentle about it. Since those days, the locals are suspicious of foreigners. No-one in the Sweet Bones will talk to me.”

Using your character’s chosen skills, an old friend and your own actual brain, you must convince the villagers to aid you. Once you have, it’s on to Hush House, to unlock the first of very many unusual rooms…

Now, books. You’d expect a game christened ‘That Damn Library Game’ to have quite a lot of them. But how to represent them is a surprisingly thorny issue, because they have to fulfil lots of sometimes contradictory requirements. They must be small enough to fit reasonably in rooms designed for humans; they have to be large enough that players can click on them realiably; they have to be complex enough to tell you something meaningful about their contents just by looking at them; they must be simple enough that Lottie doesn’t lose her mind. Most importantly, they’re also the meeting point of our two different art styles – the vibrant, vector-style element art we’ve kept from the cards of Cultist Simulator, and the textured, illustrative style of the world of Hush House. Because books are now objects, not cards. They exist as real-world items you’ve carefully organised on a shelf in the library, but they can also be used within the UI as part of recipes with cards and other objects. So they need to straddle two quite different and demanding worlds. And you thought books were just opportunities for Hokobald of Pocsind to complain about the various iniquities perpetrated against him! #BIGHUFF

Anyway, we’ve come up with the following, which I think does all of the above very nicely. There are lots of different designs (in various sizes, so they look interesting together when you arrange them on a bookshelf), but you get the idea from the two examples below:

We can also use this style to differentiate the nine different starting roles you can choose for your Librarian. You start every playthrough freezing and storm-wrecked on a beach, your only possession a carefully-wrapped journal. These journals accompany you through the game, ‘evolving’ into different versions of themselves as your Librarian progresses.

“My journal – I’m sure of it. The storm scattered my thoughts, but each page I turn is familiar. I begin to recall now why I came here… and the knowledge I yearn for.”

While I’m futzing about with books and AK’s writing about cheese, Adrien continues his great work populating Hush House. The Curia-period rooms are now totally complete, so puzzle over what, exactly, needs so large a cage in an upper room of Gullscry Tower; settle select guests in the moony Severn Chamber; be grateful that the unseen servants of Hush House clean the morgue for you; and don’t set foot in the Hall of Division if you’ve ever insulted a Hint.

We’re also working with Clockwork Cuckoo for our card art, so perhaps you’d like to try and guess what skills are represented by their latest batch of sketches. We only pick one from each group to become the Final Icon, so look out for a number of polished versions of these in the final game.

If you’ve seen our latest screenies, we’ve also been revamping the UI. UI is the part of game dev that’s interesting to artists and lethally boring to anyone else, so I won’t go into too much detail. But there’s one new change you might find interesting:

Alexis still has nightmares about the tooltips from Fallen London. If you’ve ever played a Paradox game you’ll probably know what I’m talking about: hovering over something brings up some extra information about that thing, which is a really useful way of explicating deep and complex games without overcrowding the user’s basic experience. The downside is that you can often end up in a terrifying SCP-like tangle of tooltip after tooltip after tooltip, ending up more confused and distracted than you were before. So we’ve come up with the above approach for the deeper lore in BOOK OF HOURS: it’s optional (only displaying if you click on it), linked to other relevant parts of the game through aspects, and visualised separately from the main text. This is something Alexis wanted to do in Cultist Simulator, actually – we just never had the time.

Anyway, you’ll see all of the above and more if you choose to give the demo a go next month. So I leave you with news of a totally different project! I received a few enquiries about the Lucid Tarot over Christmas, so I just wanted to confirm that the deck is very much still going to happen, and it’s probably still going to happen this year. Here are a set of Swords cards I drew over the holidays to prove it’s still an active project – nice to see some familiar faces, eh?

More news on the demo next week! Get hype, Librarians.

MPC are the absolute top of the pile when it comes to making beautiful antique physical items. They usually specialise in Lovecraftian stuff (AK and I bought their Hastur experience years ago, and it was amazing), so The Lady Afterwards caught their eye. The MPC edition includes everything that’s in our Weather Factory Lady Afterwards box, but adds an extra layer of high-quality artefact…ry: a custom wooden carrying case, hand-aged clues, an antique magnifying glass, a sterling silver cigarette case with never-before-seen business cards inside, an “Essential Hours” and a full Tarot of the Hours deck…

The MPC edition costs ~£180 + shipping and launches at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Tuesday 8th November 2022, just under two weeks from now. There’s limited stock available, so if the above floats your boat, I highly encourage you to join MPC’s Lady Afterwards waitlist to be pinged the moment the game is live.

(For the avoidance of doubt, we’re still happily selling the original boxed version of The Lady Afterwards. So if you prefer the original ‘cottagecore’ concept, that’s still available! Regardless, it’s incredibly cool to see this lil project that grew out of a pretty bad time in my life become something as gorgeous as this. Thank you, MPC.)

Now, I suppose I should talk a bit about that game we’re supposedly launching next year. AK’s been primarily working on BOOK OF HOURS‘ visitor loop – which includes characters you might recognise, like a certain Detective-Illuminate Douglas Moore, but also new faces like Señor Corso Reverte and the notorious Princess Coquille. It’s not ready to share yet, but I can talk about Brancrug village, your conduit to the outside world in BOOK OF HOURS. It’s the place you’ll visit to find the assistance you need to restore the library to ‘not a blackened ruin’.

First up, here are its five major stops: the post office, rectory, carpenter-slash-handywoman, smithy and village pub, The Sweet Bones. (A ‘handywoman’ is not what it sounds like – look it up!) Sometimes these buildings will be shut – at night, most likely, and perhaps in a particularly cold and impassable winter – but when they’re open you’ll be able to petition their owners for particular assistance. In The Sweet Bones, you’ll also find a rotating roster of specialists who may come in useful: a maverick geologist, a surrealist painter, an occasional convict, or perhaps an unexpected nun.

Here’s what it looks like when you put it all together. Remember this is ALL TERRIBLY WORK IN PROGRESS – lots more to do before it looks like the final thing. 🙂

Annnnd just as a petit digestif at the end of the meal, here’s a look at a few new rooms – not all drawn by me this time! We have a modded Librarian’s Quarters from our usual element artists Clockwork Cuckoo, the ground floor of the grand staircase by me, and the very first room you unlock in the game – the Lodge of Hush House – by Adrien Deggan, whom you may remember from that lovely concept art of Hush House and Brancrug Isle many yonks ago. He’ll be working on a lot more rooms in the future, which makes me both exceedingly excited and relieved…

(Click for larger versions.)

Hope you’re hype about The Lady Afterwards: MPC edition, and can see the shape of BOOK OF HOURS’ world coming together! If you haven’t already, please wishlist the game and tell your friends / familiars / enemies as a cunning double-bluff to wishlist, too. It helps us tackle the mighty beast that is Steam’s ‘How Successful Do You Want Your Game To Be’ algorithm, so you would gain the blessings of the Mother of Ants if you do. 🙏🙏🙏🐜

The Devil never turns down a contest. So he in turn invented the lethally delicious grape-liquor chacha, made from what remains after the wine-pressing. He invited God to taste it. God liked it enough to take a second cup. The second cup inclined him to a third. By the fourth cup, even God’s head was swimming. “To drink three glasses of chacha,” he told the Devil, “is to open the door to my kingdom. But the fourth cup opens the door to yours.” To this day, the wisest feasters drain the fourth cup quickly and move quickly on to to the fifth.

And so we come to the Monastery of the Fifth Cup, with its teahouse, its vineyards, and its triple-locked cellars. The Monastery is counted among the nine great libraries of the Watchman’s Tree, but of all the nine, its actual book collection is the smallest. “Never spoken, never stolen,” a monk will say if you ask where their knowledge is kept.

If you visit, go easy on their thick red wine. And be careful of the materteral lady you might meet in dreams, and of her perilous proverbs.

The Monastery box goes live on our Etsy shop at 6PM BST on Friday 14th October. Be there! They’re our last planned Secret Historian’s boxes – though if people miss out and really want them, let me know in the comments. We might add an unlimited Hush House box to the shop later down the line… though my next focus is ART ART ART for BOOK OF HOURS. (So much art. So much. I ded.)

In other quick news, the Locksmith’s Dream beta runs next weekend from Saturday 15th October – we’ll share any photos of the event Ivan sends our way, and you might even recognise a familiar streamer in amongst the guests.

AK and I have done a load of BoH work this week but it’s all that annoying work that changes everything for the better but you have really nothing to show for it when it comes to, for example, updating the people who read your blog and actually want to play the damn thing. Hopefully we’ll have a juicy update to share in the near future – watch this space! 🤫

The Lucid Tarot

This is a project I started way back when AK was unwell, so work on BOOK OF HOURS was paused. Now he’s healthy again (woot!), this has turned into a personal project of mine – BOOK OF HOURS takes priority, so I complete the cards I can in my ‘spare’ work time. But today I’ve reached an important milestone: all the Major Arcana cards are complete! 🎉

Check out the Lucid Tarot page for a few larger versions of the below, or bask in the joy of seeing pockets of colour appear out of an inky blackness. I intend to go back and zhuz a few of these just before printing, but to give you an idea of the full set:

Each of these cards was designed, drawn and coloured from scratch, because obviously the Hours deserve as much love and attention as they can get. I wanted to put a more human spin on the Hours with this deck, as we already have a lot of gorgeous symbolism in the Tarot of the Hours. But what would you see in the chapel windows of the Church of the Bright Edge, for example? Or what would gaze semi-benevolently down upon the altar of the Temple Unceasing? I’d love for these to actually appear in the windows of Hush House in BOOK OF HOURS, but AK and I spent a lot of time talking production schedules this week and we have quite enough to get on with for that game already…

Minor Arcana cards are more numerous than Major Arcana (56 Minor, 22 Major) but they’ll deliberately harken back to cards you’ve mostly already seen in Cultist Simulator. You’ve seen the 10 of Swords already, for example:

The 10 of Swords represents martyrdom, victimhood and ‘bottoming out’ – so the Incursus seemed like a pretty good touchpoint for that. You can expect to see a Lucid Tarot reimagining of your Cultist cards in the next set of these cards you see – anyone want to guess who I’ve chosen for the Page, Knight, Queen and King of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles…?

BOOK OF HOURS

Among many other things, AK’s been thinking about skills this week. When I turn around, I see the silhouette of his fabulous hair against a terrifying sheet of incomprehensible data, like an adorable kitten slightly obscuring your view of the sun exploding in the sky. It has tabs in it like this

And notes in it like this

AK alleges it is all very well organised and self-explanatory. The game has been through a hell of a lot of reworking and rethinking since we first announced it, so it needs a bit of a monster framework. For example, AK says –

The Illumination Wisdom: “Mystical exercises to purify and illuminate the self and its surroundings.” One of the skills in Illumination (and in Skolekosophy) started out life as the Four Regrets. This was an evocative name for a skill that deals with Edge and Winter. It referenced the ‘Four Regrets’ in an original CS tome, The Skeleton Songs (yes, like the podcast), and it was one of a list of skills (Three Exuberations, Nine Disciplines…) that sounded nicely esoteric. And it fitted into an elegant schema for crafting rarefied things about light and knowledge.

But when I went back to the skills list after some time away, I realised it’s hopelessly confusing to have Four Regrets at level 5, and Nine Disciplines at level 2. I didn’t want to change the whole scheme, so I tried out things like Crossroads Regret and Ninefold Practices. The numbers were still in there but less confusing.

But Secret Histories stuff balances rather carefully between the allusive and the incomprehensible. If I call a skill ‘Flame Enchantments’ that’s boringly on the nose and there’s no exploration to enjoy. But if I call it ‘Articulations of the Laminar Secret’ it sounds great, but it’s bloody hard to work out what the skill actually does. Especially when you’re crafting, like, a Wild Surmise into an Earthquake Intimation, or something.

So I went back again, and I worked it properly into our web of references. So Four Regrets has ended up as Ragged Crossroads (alongside Disciplines of the Scar and Meniscate Reflections). That would still be absurdly bewildering for anything game that isn’t about plumbing occult knowledge in a secret library. Even in BOOK OF HOURS, they’re the most obscurely named skills, compared to Drums & Dances or Lockworks & Clockworks. But anyone who’s dug into the lore – veteran, or newb ten hours in – will be able to guess which Hours they connect to, and once they see the items in the game, they’ll have enough to start figuring out what the hell they actually do.

We have a few other announcements in the wings – something Lady Afterwards related, for instance – and we’re moving towards monthly builds of BOOK OF HOURS like we did with Cultist Simulator. So expect more art, updates and LORE in the near future. For now, AK and I are going on a long-awaited holiday where we will curl up next to a roaring fire and wake up with sheep staring only slightly ominously at us through our rented cottage window. See you in a week!

A quick update! Firstly, the Haustorium boxes are OUT NOW on the merch shop. As ever, there are only 25 of them and they usually sell out pretty quick. So grab your nillycant, letters, library membership and exclusive Lord Gristwood cards below, along with everything else you see! Get ’em here.

Secondly, a smol progress report from the world of the Locksmith’s Dream. We showed you mock-ups of the event’s sponsor badges a while ago, so thought you’d like to see the final things! They’re all based off genuine 1930s designs and are exceptionally shiny. Tickets still available if this tipped you over the edge…

• Grand prize – Ky Brocker
• Tarot of the Hours – @jinxedwanderer, @gilnaure, @cyborgmas, kieranwiseman and Jérôme-Alexandre Soumastre
• Cultist Simulator keys – @LeTrolliteur, ryanmwagner, finnygoat, Ben Groenheide, Jess Meakin, Mitch Holland, Harry Taylor, Eric Schmeisser, @fey_lear, heelys_not_feelys

Ends in…

It’s BACK! H. P. Lovecraft, the godfather of weird fiction and literary influence on Cultist Simulator, was born on 20th August 1890. So we’re running a Lovecraftian giveaway until 20th August 2022 across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – with some suitably eldritch prizes up for grabs.

How to enter

To enter the giveaway on each site, you have to do two (really simple) things:

If you do everything in the table above, you have three chances to win one of our prizes. If you just choose one of these social channels, you’re still in with one shot of being picked as a winner! And because we have sixteen prizes in total to give out, you might well win something. Speaking of which…

The Prizes

The Grand Prize: The Lady Afterwards box

“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…”

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts. It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express. Everything you need is included: gamebooks, clues, character sheets, dice sets and more. More info and images available here.

Runners-Up: the Tarot of the Hours

“Do the Hours speak? If they do, this may be the language they use.”

Five runners-up will get one of our bestselling Tarot of the Hours decks. Based off the traditional Rider-Waite tarot, the Tarot of the Hours uses the esoteric full-colour art of Cultist Simulator on every card and packages it up in a matt laminated tuck box. You can see more of the deck here.

Wildcards: Cultist Simulator

“Seize forbidden treasures. Summon alien gods. Feed on your disciples.”

You like Lovecraft? Then you’ll probably like Cultist Simulator. Described as the single best video game at evincing Lovecraftian horror, Cultist Sim is a double BAFTA-nominated roguelike narrative card game where you start your own cult, glean snippets of the occult from the House Without Walls, and try your best not to die. 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Sixteen people will be picked from entries across all social channels, and

FAQ

When do entries close?

At noon on Saturday 20th August 2022.

When will the winners be announced?

Early in the week beginning Monday 22nd August 2022. You’ll be contacted directly if you win, and we’ll announce winners on all our social channels too.

Can I enter multiple times?

Yes! You can enter once on each platform: one entry on Twitter, one entry on Facebook and one entry on Instagram. This means one person can enter this competition a maximum of three times.

I don’t have social media! Can I enter some other way?

I’m sorry, you can’t. 🙁 This is a specifically social-media-related giveaway. You can always check out our merch shop instead, though!

Please tell me legal stuff so you don’t get sued

We’re running this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but it’s not sponsored, endorsed, administered by and/or associated with any of those companies.

Still have questions?

Just email us. 🙂