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!

HOUSE OF LIGHT is done*, and anyone who’s ever worked on anything creative will instinctively know what that asterisk means. Done* means I have a task list of about sixty items from my own testing and that of our invaluable beta testers, some of them as trivial as ‘lol forgot to put in a recipe for Batter’, some as annoying as ‘I need to rework saves a bit so players don’t occasionally get lorem ipsum text on a reload’. Done* means the novel-sized narrative material is all written, but I’ll keep fiddling with it until and after launch. ‘ Done* means there are things I’ve missed, but perhaps I can still spot some of them.

But ‘Done*’ also means, by crikey, it’s come together. Remember this? ‘The knee-bone’s connected to the thigh-bone?’ There are a half-dozen different systems in HOUSE OF LIGHT (Cooking, Salons, Further Stories, Invitations, Manuscripts, and the Lighthouse Institute endgame) and now they’ve been in beta for a while, I can see that the ecosystem works. It’s an ecosystem, not a machine, because part of the philosophy of BoH was always that there’s more than one way to do something. So you don’t need to write manuscripts to satisfy Further Story requirements, but it will fill some useful gaps; you don’t need to hold Salons to improve your skills, but it’s another way to improve your Manuscripts; you don’t even need to experiment with Cooking to hold Salons – if you really hate kitchens, you can just put everyone in the garden and feed them blackberries – but it’s a lot more fun if you do.

Which reminds me of something else: we’ve had a clutch of emails recently asking for invites to the closed beta. Sorry – those were all gone months ago! This time round, we invited beta testers for HOUSE OF LIGHT  from a larger pool of people who’ve sent us helpful bug reports in the past, and where we didn’t get a reply to the invite, we pulled some more names out of the hat. This has worked well, and we’re likely to take that approach in the future – so the upside is, if you’re hoping to get selected for future betas, sending us helpful bug reports will improve your chances. But most people who sent us helpful bug reports didn’t get randomly selected, so please don’t think you’ve been judged wanting if that’s you, it’s just the nature of maths. Every bug report, whether actioned or not, helps make the game better for you and for everyone else, and I’m grateful to everyone who makes the effort.

Anyway ‘Done‘ finally means that I’ve been able to focus on the Chinese and Russian localisation of BoH, which is out now, and which has also been ‘Done‘ for a couple of weeks now, but once that’s out the gate I can focus on smoothing the last wrinkles out of HOUSE OF LIGHT for a release next month.

Lottie rounding off this post! The art version of AK’s bit above is that I will be randomly called upon for LAST-MINUTE VEGETABLE STEW or create a button to show people they’ve bought HOUSE OF LIGHT on the main menu, but that it’s not translated into their language yet, or add Steam and GOG achievements (which we are! Anyone want to guess how you unlock ‘Stress Cannot Exist In The Presence Of A Pie’? It is not to simply bake a pie).

I should mention that there’s currently 25% off everything in the merch shop to make space for the Lucid Tarot’s arrival next month (cue AK having conniptions, understandably, about living in a warehouse full of boxes that was once our flat), and that Russian and Simplified Chinese are NOW LIVE on Steam and GOG, and we would extremely appreciate your help getting the word out about the game if you have any Russian- or Chinese-speaking friends. ‘Many pebbles, one Beach’ is the motto of the Institute founded under the ambition of ‘Stone Consumed’ – thank you for being a pebble on the beach with us.

— 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!

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!

“Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we’re at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven’t already heard, you didn’t get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch.”

So that means we hope you’ll really like HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we’re also trying something new. We’ve just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games – you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time – you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week’s top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game’s Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game’s ‘success’ at launch. One developer’s success criterion is different from another’s, of course – a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn’t about judging games as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ – it’s about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it’s pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!

A few things to note:

1. 1. All data we’re using is publicly available. We don’t have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
   2. The ‘Popular Upcoming’ list on Steam is region-specific, so if you’re not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in ‘Popular Upcoming’ that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you’ll discover some games you’ve never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
   3. We’d love you to join in if you’d like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
   4. This isn’t a value judgement on any of the featured games. We’re just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.

Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches – which are by far the scariest part of game dev – go brilliantly.

Now, I leave you with news that Cultist Simulator is today’s Daily Deal on Steam, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now. Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty and the Weather Forecast probably being embarrassingly wrong. Happy Friday, everyone!

If a videogame is a wall, what do you think – is writing more like the bricks, or more like the mortar? My answer would be usually the mortar… though it depends which game. They’re ‘video games’ not ‘letter games’, after all. The writing serves mostly to locate and direct the gameplay or to explain and contextualise the visuals. One of the reasons that writing in games is not always good is that writers in games sometimes forget this and stuff words into a scene like an panicked upholsterer frantically stuffing goose-feathers into a cushion. Or an overenthusiastic bricklayer adding so much mortar that it squelches out of the sides and leaves the bricks awry. Arrive late, leave early and all that.

Of course some games use the writing as a central feature. In these, the writing is more like the bricks. And of course this is so in Weather Factory games – and in most of my work as far back as Fallen London (née Echo Bazaar). But this isn’t a licence to write long! Even in a writing-centric game, you never want the writing to outstay its welcome. As soon as the player stops reading, it becomes pointless. The bigger the bricks in a wall, the crookeder the courses.

The very first design of Fallen London, from way back in 2009

This brings us to salons. I mentioned last time that the Salon feature in HOUSE OF LIGHT needed a lot of lines. The game benefit of Salons is that they generate Lessons – and you have some limited control over what Lessons they generate. (This is why you can only have one Salon a season, cos otherwise it would be tempting to turn Hush House into Party House so you can rush the Tree of Wisdoms.) But the actual reason that Salons are in the game at all is to extend the fantasy of having a huge occult mansion as your playground – here, by enlarging on the experience of running salons for this kaleidoscope of occult demi-monde types. I could have had the game print out “The conversation dwelt on Herbs & Infusions…” (in fact this remains the backup for when you’ve exhausted everything else) but that would have missed the whole point of the experience. Instead I spent a solid two weeks poring over and comparing tome text and the setting notes and the room descriptions, hammering out things like this:

“Stanislav and Arthur argue happily about which herbal tisane tastes the most disgusting, and hence is most useful to speed lingering guests on their way. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

“Al-Adim describes his memories of Thirza Blake, and her work, in his time as Secretary Nunciant of the House. He is clearly caught between affection and annoyance. Stanislav shakes his head: ‘I wish I had known her. I think we’d have got on.’ [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

“Douglas has been looking into the six-centuries-past death of Abbess Nonna. He’s questioned sources he doesn’t share with Stanislav, and concludes that she was possessed by a Name of the Blackbone and ‘put down’ by her sistren – ‘nasty business, but best thing for it.’ He and Stanislav discuss the herb-mixtures that might have laid her open to that possession. [Lesson: Herbs & Infusions]”

Have you noticed how much longer the third is than the first? That doesn’t make it better. I mean it’s fine, and it’s a fun bit of backstory, but it’s also a bit of a lumpy brick. This is likely because I wrote it at the end of the day when I was tired (Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”) If you can get as much effect for 29 words as for 64, you’ll want to go for 29. The player will thank you. And I’m conscious that when the Salon actually runs, the player will see several of these in a row, like bricks in a wall.  And it’s no more effort to write that 64 words than the 29 words, if anything the reverse – I mean 64 words imply a little more wear on the old distal phalanges, but the effortful bit is reviewing all the details, keeping the lore straight, and then coming up with ten to fifteen decent ideas an hour, for seven hours a day, for five days a week. (Lottie still chortles at me angrily pouring myself a glass of whisky towards the end of a rough writing day and grumbling ‘how many interesting things can you even say about pumpkin pie?’)

No pumpkin pie anywhere in this salon.

Any writer talking about their job eventually ends up complains about how tough writing is, boo hoo, get a real job then, so let’s bring down a merciful curtain and say: about four hundred Salon lines are written, and I’ll need another couple of hundred at least but how many there are depends on the old triage, deadline, cutting-room biz. And now that the essential work is done, I’m enjoying seating Coquille next to Morgen and having Yvette argue Jung with al-Adim. Some of these characters have been knocking around my head for the a good few years now, but they don’t often get to talk to each other, and you see more and different angles on them when that happens. Even Hokobald has a bit more light and shade now. Not to mention poor Zachary.

Lottie here, just rounding out the end of this post. I’ll leave you with two things: first, a round of Guess That Aspect. Can you work out what they represent in HOUSE OF LIGHT? Obviously my favourite is the SUDDEN FISH, becuase I am yin to AK’s yang, and where he drinks whisky while morosely contemplating the nature of pie, I am trying to sneak anarchic Pokémon into his very srs game.

More significantly, we’re finally ready to tell you when all this food, fraternity and occult demimondering will come out. HOUSE OF LIGHT will release on Steam and GOG on…

Thursday 26th September 2024

Wishlist it and mark your calendars! We’ll be running a closed beta for it ahead of time – more on that in the next few weeks, for those interested in helping test it out – and we’ll announce price points and more info as we get closer to launch. It’ll be free to anyone with Perpetual Edition (thanks again, early adopters!), and we can’t wait for you to get stuck in, like Hokobald into aglaophotis soufflé.

While you’re waiting, we’ll also be releasing full translations of BOOK OF HOURS into Simplified Chinese and Russian on Thursday 29th August (Japanese TBC), and we’ll even have some smol Cultist Simulator news this year for you all too. Dream furiously, friend. The Lighthouse awaits…

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.

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.

;

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but: BOOK OF HOURS is OUT NOW on Steam and GOG! 😱😱😱😱

If you like what you see, leave us a review. Our games tend towards the weird and inexplicable, and it’s incredibly helpful to let other gamers know that we’ve not just, like, knitted a sock and drawn a face on it or something. Help unweird and explicate us! As much as is possible. ♥

After Cultist Simulator, we wanted to set our next game in the same universe – but AK felt bad that he’d made another game about eating people and bringing the apocalypse, and he wanted to write something kinder. Fast forward four years and here we are, in the soft golden glow of a deep auburn game about managing an occult library, of organising things carefully and thoughtfully, of being left alone in a beautiful Gormenghastian abbey to light candles and read books and walk the parapets, where every so often someone drops by to ask you something or give you a book – and then they go away again. BOOK OF HOURS: the introvert’s dream!

I thought you might be interested in some fragments of development history. You might recognise some things that evolved into the game we’ve just released, and others that (rightly) were left by the wayside because for the love of god how was that UI ever going to work? Here’s a little sample:

Early sketches for our hero art:

Some of the earliest design notes:

The first draft layout of Hush House:

Early Hush House design:

Some early prototypes of what BoH‘s art might look like:

Our ‘porthole’ phase:

We wanted to build something that had the crunchy recipe-based mechanics of Cultist Sim but was a welcoming place, somewhere you could go just to be on your own even if you weren’t working to achieve anything: a sun-dappled hammock; a candle-lit nook; a secret walled garden whose only key is yours. BOOK OF HOURS will not be for everyone, but I hope everyone can feel the love we poured in radiating from the worn stones of Hush House, the wave-weathered rocks around Crowcross Sands, the lamp-lit leaded-glass windows of the Sweet Bones, and the purr of the well-fed cat you brought in from the cold.

The mellifluous Systemchalk is broadcasting BOOK OF HOURS live on the Steam page, if you’d like to see the game in action. Alternatively, join us at 8PM BST / 12PM PDT for an AMA on r/Gaming (live here!), or in a live interview on GOG’s Twitch stream tomorrow at 7PM BST / 11AM PDT. Thank you so much for reading, and if you decide to pick up BOOK OF HOURS this week, may the Hours look kindly on your deeds.

Love, Lottie & Alexis

It’s exactly one week until BOOK OF HOURS launches on Steam and GOG. Our social countdown has begun, there’s that terrifying clock ticking down above this paragraph, and AK and I are finally releasing our most ambitious game ever, the culmination of years of effort.

I thought it’d be useful to collect all the most important release info in one place. Let me know if I’ve missed anything, and feel free to ask questions in the comments!

The main points

• Launching: Thursday 17th August 2023 @ 6PM BST / 10AM PDT
• Platforms: Steam + GOG (on Windows, Mac and Linux)
• Price: £19.99 / $24.99
• Launch deal: 10% launch discount + Perpetual Edition for anyone buying in Week 1

‘Perpetual Edition’ means you get all future paid expansions for FREE for EVER, just like people who bought Cultist Sim in its first week of sale. Every copy of the game sold in Week 1 is automatically Perpetual Edition (you don’t have to do anything special to unlock it), it costs the same as the normal version of the game, and it’s available on both Steam and GOG. You can check if you have Perpetual Edition by looking for this badge of honour on the title screen:

How YOU can help

Now I will let you into one of the deepest and most guarded secrets of professional game development. Knowledge that is passed down in hushed tones from elders to their apprentices and jealously guarded from public view by archons of our industry, lest such power fry your tiny minds. This is how PC games succeed:

Steam is a slumbering god. Steam does not give a pair of foetid dingo’s kidneys about an indie game until something pokes it to say there’s something worth waking up for. And it is only with YOUR help that we can be the twitching and irresistible mouse in this totally viable metaphor that will make the algorithm perk up, dilate its pupils to the sizes of twin moons and bless us with its attention – thus making BOOK OF HOURS a success.

Here are the best things you can do to poke the god:

• Buy BOOK OF HOURS at launch. Lots of people buying very shortly after launch tells Steam: this game is beloved by its people. Perhaps I should attend.
• Leave a positive Steam review. Positive Steam reviews are one off the biggest factors in people’s decision to buy a game (as far as I can tell, it’s screenshots + Steam reviews) AND ALSO they tell Steam: this game is good. It can make money. Promote it!
• Tell all your friends. The more traffic our Steam page gets, the more enticing the game looks to the algorithm (‘If I promote it more, even more mice will come’). So if you enthuse to your friends, suggest BOOK OF HOURS to streamers, talk about it on social media, share screenshots or do anything that might encourage more people to check out the game, that makes the algorithm think: this is the most popular game in the world. It will bring Valve 8 trillion delicious English mice pounds. I shall put it on the front page.

TLDR: help us twitch enticingly at launch, like a doomed mouse. I am available to explain further hidden mysteries of game dev for a shockingly high day rate, please see my agent (AK) for further details.

What’s coming next

Apart from this damn library game actually, finally, genuinely launching, here’s what to expect over the next week and a bit:

• 17th August – AK and I are running an AMA on launch day at 8PM BST / 12PM PDT on r/Gaming. We’ll crosspost to the WF subreddit for ease of access, so come say hi and chat with us!
• 18th August – AK and I join Cultist Sim super-streamer Systemchalk for a BOOK OF HOURS dev stream at 7PM BST / 11AM PDT on GOG’s Twitch. Try explaining that sentence to someone from the 1930s.

We have lots of post-launch plans – additional features, QoL updates, big content drops and later paid DLC, localisation, etc – but we’re waiting to see how the game lands before confirming anything. Testers will notice a bunch of improvements since the last beta – an in-game music player, improved workstation UI, adorable pet SFX, more books, loads of art tweaks (including new places to put things down…!) and more. Wish us luck, and thank you so much for your support over the years. Get ready to library your hearts out. ♥

What secrets lurk in old grimoires? What histories lie beneath Hush House? What’s true about the invisible world, and what legacy will you forge with your hard-won numina? It’s finally time to share BOOK OF HOURS’ launch trailer, the first step across the threshold for all Librarians. Hopefully this gives everyone an appealing taste of the game, from hardcore Cultist Simulator fans (here’s looking at you, Apostle Entheates) to people who’ve never heard of the Secret Histories. Watch below, share it around and let us know what you think! 🤫

So shiny! Much heart-feels! Wow!

Now, onto development. Our beta period is now officially over, so a serious thank you to everyone who participated in any of them over the last few months. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful, and AK’s full-time job at the moment is tweaking the game based on what we’re hearing from players. He only implements a few suggestions – as with all Kennedy games, BOOK OF HOURS is highly distinctive and therefore divisive – but he really does read and think about every email we receive. AK + Feedback in the ‘Consider’ verb = Better Game + Need of Gin…?

As a result of everyone’s hard work, I’ve finally been able to take some shiny new screenshots (see ’em all on the Steam page)…

…and have been feverishly finishing off all remaining Aspects, Elements and Things, with some help from veteran element artists Clockwork Cuckoo.

Most importantly, we now have proper states for all pets. Like the Wild, Tame and HONGRY cat below:

AK, meanwhile, has been working flat out on polishing the game post-beta. This means bringing the last 20% of Hush House to life (that’s right: the caves under the House remain unexplored until launch), QoL improvements, and zillions of technical bugs like ‘this runs at 3FPS on my potato’, ‘this runs at 10FPS on my laptop’ and ‘are you trolling us with the phonograph, where the hell is it’. Having finally had the time to play more of the game myself, oh my Hours am I sorry I didn’t put in more wall art / comfort / thing slots for you all to put things down! I love the idea in theory of picking up a snake and then never, ever being able to put it down, but in reality it’s less fun. So… I’m working on that! But let me hand over to AK for one moment…

In Sheri S. Tepper’s Sideshow, there’s a recurring children’s story that has always stayed with me. I re-read it today, and it sounds oddly relevant in some expected and unexpected ways.

“And so, sustained by this ambition, he went higher and higher yet, gray stone and gray cliff and gray rain falling, year after year, until he came at last to the place the swallows danced in the air above the bottomless void…”

Back in 2021, Lottie and I described BOOK OF HOURS as a game of ‘peace, melancholy, satisfaction and curiosity’. If you’ve followed our work, you’ll know that we’re theme-first; you might also know that I have a thing about there always being an core, understated theme that the others orbit like an invisible sun. In BOOK OF HOURS, this understated theme is loneliness.

“When they saw him, they stopped dancing to perch beside him on the stone, and when he saw them there, silver and black, beautiful as a night lit with stars, he was possessed once again by a great longing, and he told them of his desire for wings. ‘Perhaps you may have wings, but you must give up your shell,’ they cried…”

One of the things they tell you in children’s books is that if you’re a loner, but gifted, or virtuous, or interesting, you will have a happy ending. This much is often true. But many children’s books end with the loner getting a medal, or a big parade, or a special hat, while everyone cheers. This is not, in my experience, how it generally works.

“And even as they told him he might have wings, he seemed to hear in their voices some of the carelessness he had heard in the voice of the owl and the bat and the bullfrog, who had told him where to go without telling him the dangers of the way. He heard them rightly, for the winged gods have a divine indifference toward those who seek flight. They will not entice and they will not promise and they will not make the way easy, for those who wish to soar must do so out of their heart’s desire and their mind’s consent and not for any other reason…”

The Librarian of Hush House has left the world behind. Visitors will pass like seasons into their life and out of it, and the Librarian may never see them again, let alone know the end of their stories. The Librarian will live, die, and leave something for whoever might come after. This is of course what all of us do, all our lives. Much is taken, but much abides.

“And the turtle struggled with himself, wanting wings but not wanting wings, for if he had wings, they told him, he would no longer be interested in going back to the pond to tell the creatures there of his journey—that comfortable telling, the anticipation of which had been, perhaps, more important to him than the wings themselves. So, he struggled, wanting and not wanting …”

I don’t think anyone will thoroughly enjoy BOOK OF HOURS if they have never been lonely. I hope that people who’ve never been lonely will still like the game. But, honestly, I don’t know if there’s anyone in the world like that.

………I always come across as a bit of a cheesepuff (light; dusted; non-profound) after I let AK write anything, so I shall epilogue succinctly. We’ve a bunch of stuff coming between now and actual release, including streamer access, social countdowns, a launch-day AMA on r/Gaming and a gameplay-focused final video. It should all be terribly exciting and I will be appealing to YOU good souls to help us, if you like, make BOOK OF HOURS’ release as big as a game about being left alone to read quietly in a library can possibly be. Thank you for sticking with us so far – you must now enjoy launch on our behalf while we run around with our hair on fire saying British things like ‘ah, I am undone’ and ‘halp’. Stay tuned.

For our final ‘dog on a skateboard’ story, I leave you with news that everybody’s favourite Weary Detective from Cultist Simulator has been working hard, working out and has duly received a much-deserved promotion. Good job, Douglas! That means you get a cooler hat. ♥

“Detective-Illuminate of the Suppression Bureau. A stoic, but weary, fellow. His dearest wish is to move to Chingford and grow roses. But the buggers won’t let him retire.”

It’s June the 28th, once again. So we have presents to share! Shiny animated presents. Here’s a fresh new atmospheric trailer for BOOK OF HOURS, introducing how it feels to play this melancholic, bittersweet CRPG. I hope it tugs at your heartstrings like a kitten alone in the rain.

Click to watch the ‘COME HOME’ trailer!

I can also now tell you useful launch info. BOOK OF HOURS will cost £19.99 / $24.99 when it releases at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Thursday 17th August. (It’s double the size of Cultist Sim at launch, with 120,000 words to Cultist‘s mere 60,000.) [Sorry, I went away and wrote more, it’s well past that now, but I promise I’ll stop before 140,000. – AK] [Two weeks on: I discovered a bug in the word counting function, and it’s actually up to 170,000 already NEVER MIND I don’t think we’ll quite make it to 3x the size of launch CS – AK, again] [August 11th 2023 – okay we made it to 3x the size of launch CS, shut up, I’m not going to run any more word counts. – also AK] We’re also offering the same Perpetual Edition deal we did when Cultist Simulator released: anyone buying the game in the first week of sale will get BOOK OF HOURS: Perpetual Edition and receive all future DLC for free, for life! (This means we’re committed to releasing DLC, in case anyone’s worried we’ll scam ’em.)

Now, let’s get to the GAME. AK’s written 99 101 different endings – I am not making that up, that is not a typo, there are 99 101 different endings. [I apologise to my wife for adding content even while she’s writing this blog post. – AK] Some of them are variant endings rather than totally unique ones (my favourite is an extremely lovely homage to a famous ending of Cultist Simulator‘s) but I feel even our most enigmatic players still have quite enough to get on with within that vast array. With some of AK’s most weird and wonderful prose, too:

“I crouch beneath like the scavenger I am, but the bloody gods favour me – I feast on furry shadows…”

We’re also implementing a record system which tracks players’ endings over multiple playthroughs, so you can see all your different characters’ ends:

And in case you feel that’s setting the bar too low, I’m working to implement 77 achievements with names like ‘A Knowledge In The Look Of Things’ and ‘The Bells of Ys’. One of these is a total troll-y condition and I will not apologise for it. You’ll know it when you achieve it. >:)

All major content is now in-game. AK’s finished the core of the writing, including the Visitor stories – hence the enigmatic quote at the top of this blog. Any guesses who the quiet ex-Bureau gentleman is? We now have a month and a half of fixing and tweaking time before launch. That means we have a final round of card art, aspect art, new books, text tweaks, bug fixing and UI love before launch in August. AK will be spending a lot of time playing the game and making sure there are helpful breadcrumbs just the right side of esoteric to lead players enjoyably through the game, while I’ll be desperately polishing assets, taking screenshots for our Steam page (finally!) and adding all the little extras that should make the game sing, like custom cursors…

… and fixing crabbed old fossils like this. 😅

This is what the save menu looks like currently. It will not be what the save menu looks like in August. [sez you. – AK]

Finally, all Cucurbit Gaol and underground Dawn rooms are now in-game and functional. Some took a lot more effort than others (the Night Gallery with all its shadowy swathed-paintings was particularly complicated) but that means the game can really be properly fully played and all of Hush House unlocked. So our last beta – the NOCTURNAL beta – launches on Monday 17th July and runs until Friday 28th July. It will include all rooms up to the end of the Cucurbit Gaol, a bunch (if not all) our endings, and probably achievements. It will be our last beta before launch – we want to save the true horror/wonder of DAWN for the full game.

Look how pretty it looks in winter.

Hope you felt the love and loss in the new trailer, and are as excited as I am for release! That is: terrified and determined, like a storm-wracked sailor at dawn. Stay tuned.

Just a quick update to say that SOLAR is now live for all beta testers on Steam and GOG! New and old testers will get an email shortly, so check your inboxes. And if you miss out, don’t worry – we’ll email at least once more before SOLAR closes on 9th June, so you might just make it in yet.

New content includes all of the abbey complex at the top of Hush House, and the dilapidated Gullscry Tower – probably the most melancholy place in the game, but also where you’ll meet a good few friends. It also allows me to go totally bananas with flame animations, like the Chancel –

We’ve also been working with some Unity specialists to improve the look and feel of the Wisdom Tree, which I always wanted to make a little bit more ‘alive’ and magical. I’m very happy with what we have now, and SOLAR testers will get to be the first to see it in action today.

Now, I promised in our last blog post that there would also be something fun for non-beta players. And I wasn’t lying! As we’re launching BOOK OF HOURS on GOG for the first time, we thought it was a nice opportunity to re-release an updated version of the demo so everyone can play the game again. This is the same demo we first released in Steam’s Next Fest earlier this year – it ends at the same place, just after you unlock the Lodge – but there are a large number of improvements to the rest of the game since February. There’s more of AK’s magical writing, more (and more refined) features like seasons and crafting recipes, there’s better UI, better polish… and thanks to my valorous efforts, there is only one set of pugs. (I love pugs really. Removing them is sadly just part of my job. However, I have introduced Terrence and Tuppence, so I hope they win me some points back.)

Play the BOOK OF HOURS demo on GOG!

Now – I’m off to draw 1,00000000000000000 more tidily organised vessels with decreasing amounts of liquid in them, so you can realistically quaff armagnac while crafting azoth in your snootle jar.

And AK’s off to the Cucurbit Prison. Stay tuned, lest you miss an inmate steathily jimmying their lock…

“The occupant of *this* cell could not be allowed fresh air and exercise. It could not have reasonably expected to leave this cell ever again, even while it wore human shape. But it could not be confined forever; in the end, somehow, it found its way into the walls.”

Big news first: GET HYPE! We can finally reveal that BOOK OF HOURS is launching on Steam and GOG (across Windows, Mac and Linux) on…

✨ 17th August 2023 ✨

This means we can extend the beta and make it a more polished game on release. It’s later than we’d hoped, but the feedback so far makes us think we could make this lil’ library game really special. We want to take the time to do that. ✌

Now: click below to watch BOOK OF HOURS’ first ever trailer!!!11!

Click to watch the STORM trailer!

This game is increasingly like an only slightly poisonous puzzle box of luxury chocolates. Is that a clear enough description? There are chambers and secrets and little jewels to find and lore to discover alongside Mrs Killes’ cooking and the sound of rain on a stormy Cornish night. And deadly bon-bons. We originally intended to make a light, agile game like Cultist Simulator, which has tonnes of words in it (200,000+ including DLC, I think?) but hasn’t had a good meal in weeks. But over the years BOOK OF HOURS gained a patina, and the game grew roots. It’s now probably the ‘deepest’ game we’ve ever made, with layers and layers of lore lain on top of one another like resting bones in Mesozoic rock.

One of the key parts of BOOK OF HOURS that we haven’t discussed much is the player’s ability to influence the Secret Histories – or at least what’s canonical in the Histories. The Wisdom Tree is part skill tree, in traditional RPG style (‘I kill u with Horomachistry’; ‘I am so unskilled in Bosk I cannot even wear this green hat’), but also part branching narrative, where the Librarian gets to decide what’s ‘true’. AK tweeted a thread on this recently, but to illustrate on example: every skill can be assigned to one of two nodes in the Wisdom Tree. Which one you choose not only increases your understanding of that particular Wisdom, but also makes a lore statement about the nature of the invisible world. Take ‘Pentiments & Precursors’, which can be assigned to Skolekosophy or Birdsong:

Is Medusa a Name of the Twins, or is she descended from the Carapace Cross? (Preservation suggests: whichever is true, you should be polite.)

AK’s also been writing contagions, so our long-touted game description – “Defend your library against storm, fire, theft and the occasional theoplasmic assault” – is now a reality! Horribly, some contagions can spread to OTHER NEARBY THINGS:

“This book is blotched with keeperskin, a luminous fungus that grows in the Wood we see in sleep, and enters the world when a dreamer inhales its spores.”

Then there are other types of contamination, which might not start a pandemic, but will make you equally unhappy. Take winkwell, for example, which illuminates parts of reality better left unseen:

“Sometimes when I turn this book to the right angle, I see an eye peering at me from its pages or covers. They close and fade when I leave them in the dark… but light will always bring them out eventually.”

Enjoy! 😃😃😃😃

The latest beta build, BARONIAL, went live yesterday, adding all rooms in the central core of Hush House: this includes the ultra-hygge of the Librarian’s Quarters; the glittering Hall of Mirrors, with its Pierrot le Fou energy; the homely charm of the Kitchen, where one might indulge in a shnack… Along with more text and functionality, we’ve also started incorporating a mini-Easter Egg hunt throughout the library, where you can (should you wish!) populate the Grand Ascent with the busts of all significant Barons and Librarians of the House that you’ll find scattered through its 107 rooms. What happens if you get the order wrong when you assemble them up the stairs? Just ask poor ol’ Abbot Thomas.

If you’re signed up to the beta list but didn’t get an email yesterday, don’t worry! We’ll be adding new testers about twice a week, so you have DOUBLE the chances next week of getting in. I understand statistics, I am a artist. DOUBLE.

Speaking of art, all Hush House art is now complete (including seasonal variants, which will be going in soon…), so we wave a sad goodbye to our fabulous Breton freelancer, Adrien. His Gallic personality and an infamous misunderstanding when we asked him to draw ‘pigeon holes’ – a phrase apparently that does not translate easily into French – will be missed. He ended on a bang, though: check out his version of ‘Our Lady Beneath’, the post-Roman chapel of the Sisterhood of the Knot in the bowels of the rock beneath Hush House:

I, meanwhile, have descended into trolling AK through aspects (there’s one I drew the other day that I don’t think he’s spotted yet – he will probably make me take it out).

And I’m slowly but inexorably dropping gentle animations through the world, like a poor man’s version of the Flowermaker.

Hope you like what you see so far of BOOK OF HOURS and its trailer! We really think it’ll be something special that you haven’t played before. More beta, more lore, more Secret Histories and more MORE coming over the next very rich four months. Please stand by. ♥

How It Is

Something about the Secret Histories enthuses people. Fanworks, fiction, commentary, art; I’ve lost count of the number of TRPG homebrew rules projects I’ve seen. For a long time, our take on this was sure, it’s nice to see this kind of thing, use our stuff… as long as you’re not making any money out of it, because our IP is our livelihood, and we need to protect it.

But a few months ago I had a conversation with a smallish YTer who wanted to do actual-play videos with their own Secret Histories-based content. I said, sure, as long as you’re not making any money out of it… they said, well, we make a little bit out of ads. I pressed for details and when they said it was literally only a couple of dollars a month, I immediately felt abashed.

Lottie and I began to realise two things. Firstly, we get a lot of these sort of borderline requests – can I run a LRP based on your work and charge to cover costs, can I use your tarot deck to do professional readings, can I do DeviantArt commissions – and our answer is nearly always yes, but it’s often complicated and we have to think about it. And secondly, we really don’t mind if a semi-pro or even pro creator pays the rent using our IP, as long as it doesn’t hurt our own ability to pay our own rent. And if someone does really well and helps grow the audience, so much the better.

But what, people always ask, if Hollywood calls and then their lawyers say the IP situation is too complicated? Bugger Hollywood. We got optioned for TV a few years ago, did I ever mention that? Like most options, it never went into production, and I realised afterwards how relieved I was. Even though the people involved (a) were clearly nice and smart and (b) had actually played Cultist. If the upside of community licensing is that people make interesting things, and the downside is that we damage the remote possibility of a someday deal which would make us, eh, about as much money as a really successful piece of DLC in exchange for titrating away a quarter-soul’s worth of our distinctiveness over several subjective years of meetings… I lost my thread. You get the gist.

How It’s Going To Be

So we started talking about permissive licensing. This is where we ran into a snag. It’s the lore – the background, the story, the mysteries – that most attracts people. A lot of you want to write your own answers to the questions posed by Cultist Simulator et al. But we designed a lot of those gaps and mysteries very carefully, and we need to be sure there’s a clean distinction between Weather Factory answers, and everyone else’s.

Here’s what we came up with. There is not only one History, as they say.  The known Secret Histories are five in number. So if there were an unsanctioned, unknown, unlawed Sixth History… it would be your playground.

We’ve talked to our lawyers and we’re finalising the licence details. We’ll release the licence next week but basically:

You’ll be able to use the Secret Histories setting as a basis for your own TRPG, board game, app, fiction, art commission…and earn money from it, up to a limit of 50K GBP p.a… without needing to check with us… as long as you follow the licence, particularly by using the Sixth History logo to make clear it’s not an official Weather Factory project.

That’s the tl:dr;  but for God’s sake do read the whole license, don’t skip bits, if you’re planning a project along these lines. (And of course this is meant for small-scale works. If you’re thinking of proposing a serious commercial project that may make more than the revenue limit, or if it needs our direct creative involvement, like the Mysterious Package Company’s super-deluxe Lady Afterwards, or the Locksmith’s Dream, then you’ll still need to talk to us, and we don’t usually agree more than one of these a year.)

Where’s the licence again?

Here! Happy creating. 🙂

I have other questions!

r/weatherfactory on Thursday 1st December 2022 at 6PM GMT. Bring snacks and a post-work drink! Or if you’re in America and it’s therefore early in the day, I don’t know, bring porridge.