— 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!

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.

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!

Aficionados of the Secret Histories may recall that Blaine was killed in a duel. There were no duels in the British Isles after the middle of the nineteenth century, so Blaine’s information is probably at least one feasting-hall out of date. If it was ever true to begin with. Although when I was fact-checking dates just now I learnt that the most recent non-fatal duel was apparently 1994, when a lutenist by the name of Salfield fought another gentlemen with antique cavalry swords over ‘an insult made to a lady’.

The only source given for this is ‘Radio Cornwall’, no details or audio, so it’s not clear whether (a) Salfield was avenging or upholding the insult (b) someone made the whole thing up. It happened in the town of Battle, which as UK-dwellers will know is a real place, though the name is suspiciously appropriate. It’s been widely assumed that Battle is not far from Kerisham, which might I suppose be relevant.

The moral I draw from this: it’s easy to overlook things. 2021 was a chaotic year for us as for everyone, and all our plans were repeatedly upset as yours probably were too. But we got a lot of stuff done. Here’s a quick roundup:

• Cultist Simulator rewrite. This took up an appalling amount of my time and is the least interesting thing on this list. I needed it to address some horrible issues left over from the game’s breakneck development in 2018, to add some QOL features, to support more modding, and to provide a solid base for Book of Hours. The rewrite’s on the beta branch now and I’m damned well going to get it live before January ends.
• Book of Hours. Yup, we’re still making it. Coming 2023.
• Against Worldbuilding, and Other Provocations. A good-sized collection of the essays and columns I’ve written elsewhere.
• The Snare of the Tree, and Other Perilous Delusions. A new very long essay or very short book about game design and its dangers. It’s about the size of one of those reworked Orwells or collections of uplifting cat poetry that you buy on impulse at a bookshop till.
• The Lady Afterwards. Lottie’s first project as creative lead: a luxury boxed TRPG experience not quite like anything else I’ve ever seen. You can’t buy it at the moment. The first run of 100 copies sold out in literally a minute, the preorder run of 500 copies sold out a few days later, but we’ll probably do another run this year.
• The Lady Afterwards digital edition. First time a TRPG’s been sold on Steam, which has confounded some buyers who thought they were getting DLC, thank gawd for refunds, eh.
• A whole nother season of our Skeleton Songs podcast.
• The Weather Factory Catalogue. It’s ongoing.

That’s a longer list than I realised when I started writing it, honestly. What we plan for 2022 is a lot more focused.

• Book of Hours limited preview release. It’s not early access, we’re not calling it a paid beta, it’s the Secret Historian’s Pack. More on this soon.
• My third book.
• The Lucid Tarot. Lottie: “… a world-first: we’re making a stained-glass-window-inspired deck, opaquely printed on transparent PVC. This means light (candlelight; moonlight; King Crucible) shines through some parts of each card, but they have an opaque back so you can’t see the image on the other side.”

• And the Locksmith’s Dream, but we’re working with a partner on this one, so Lottie and I really are focusing on three projects between us this time around.

And I’m back on to that as soon as I’ve posted this and trudged through two weeks of support emails. See you in the feast-halls of the Hours.

It’s Cultist Simulator’s anniversary weekend, so we have some big things to announce. We’re running a mega Daily Deal on Steam (50-66% off everything!) with the honey-voiced Systemchalk broadcasting the game on our Steam page for the uninitiated. Go watch him try not to die!

We’re also running a half-price sale on the Nintendo Switch port, and have a new game, a new book and updates on our stained-glass tarot deck to share. Read on…

THE LADY AFTERWARDS: A CULTIST SIMULATOR TRPG

You’ve been summoned to Alexandria, a city of coloured lights and curious histories. An old friend needs you to track down a woman. She’s probably in trouble. Probably trouble herself. Plus ça change. 

Mirrors glitter at the Cecil, Berbers whisper in the El Bab Cafe, and statues keep their secrets in the cold depths of the bay. Something’s in motion, from the Arab Quarter to the Rue des Soeurs. Somewhere, the Serapeum stirs. The Hours have taken an interest.

Cherchez la femme, the saying goes. But what does the lady look for?

The Lady Afterwards is a limited edition Cultist Simulator TRPG, based on Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing system – think Call of Cthulhu or story-driven DnD, without us getting sued. We’ve streamlined the experience so you don’t have to be a TRPG aficionado to play, and we’ve filled it with Dread, Fascination and the invisible arts.

Track down Audrey Leigh Howard, a woman of high standing and dubious morals. Seek the Serapeum. Investigate the Society of the Noble Endeavour. Abort a plan. Avert a crisis. Protect the heart of the House Without Walls – or let the blow fall.

The Lady Afterwards is a boxed physical edition, containing everything you need for several evenings’ occult entertainment with friends (and/or cultists). Each edition includes:

• The Lady Afterwards, a Cultist Simulator TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
• A game-runner’s handbook, incorporating all story, locations, lore and mechanics
• An exultation* of clues, curiosities, clippings and collectibles
• “The Essential Hours”, 23-card pocket tarot
• Eight customisable character sheets, complete with secret agendas
• Eight art deco character pins in silver, brass, copper and gold
• A scented Serapeum candle, to evoke that which cannot be seen
• Three Mansus candles, for important plot points
• A full-colour map of contemporary Alexandria
• A set of seven antique TRPG dice in a velvet dice bag
• A Steam key for Cultist Simulator, in the unspeakable instance where someone hasn’t played it yet
• A 50% discount token for the Church o’ Merch
• Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist, to further SET THE TONE!

All together, it’ll look *something* like the image at the top of this section. Though please note that this is all mocked-up right now – as you can, er, probably tell. It’ll likely look a smidge different in the flesh.

The Lady Afterwards comes in a custom-built 1920s-styled recyclable box mailed directly to your door. We’re making just a hundred copies to start with, though we’ll expand the limited run if we see enough interest. We expect to release the game in October, in time for Halloween – we’ll confirm a release date later down the line. Sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date. Now we can talk about this, we’ll have a lot more to share in future updates.

*Yes, this does mean I haven’t finalised the actual final number of findables in-game. BUT IT WILL BE A NICE SATISFYING NUMBER OKAY.

AGAINST WORLDBUILDING, AND OTHER PROVOCATIONS: ALEXIS’S BRAIN IN A JAR BOOK

Alexis has spent over a decade making games, from Fallen London to Sunless Sea to Cultist Simulator, with a lot of other work in between. He’s finally releasing a book on it all, compiling 200+ pages of the best of his pieces on narrative, design, development and why ‘worldbuilding’ busts his nut.

“There are sentences in Fallen London and Cultist Simulator that make me freeze in my seat. This collection of essays is generally not Alexis in freeze mode… It’s Alexis being funny, pragmatic, charitable and humane. It’s like getting to sit down over a plate of enigmatically-sourced goat goujons and a cup of Thracian wine, and be told a bunch of good stories.”

– Introduction, Matt Hosty

Against Worldbuilding is available now in Kindle and paperback format, costing £5.65 and £7.77 respectively. Enjoy!

THE LUCID TAROT: STAINED-GLASS SOOTHSAYING

We announced we’re making a second tarot deck, after The Tarot of the Hours proved so popular. This time it’s a world-first: we’re making a stained-glass-window-inspired deck, opaquely printed on transparent PVC. This means light (candlelight; moonlight; King Crucible) shines through some parts of each card, but they have an opaque back so you can’t see the image on the other side.

The deck features new, custom-made art of the Hours and Cultist Simulator cards that draws on existing lore but follows traditional systems like the Rider-Waite much more closely than the Hours deck did.

We’re calling it The Lucid Tarot. People seemed to get excited about it when we teased it last time, so the cards above are all never-before-seen, to whet your appetite!

The Hours have been around for centuries in every History. They’re a syncretic pantheon, like the loa of Haitian Vodou or the weirder Greco-Roman deities, and they change over time to reflect the current world. You’ll notice that the art style as well as the depiction of the Hours in The Lucid Tarot is sometimes quite different from their original depictions. For example, here’s Justice / The Meniscate from both decks:

These differences are deliberate, and we hope it’ll shed some more lore-y light on things. The new images also suit the abbey-like stained-glass aesthetic, which you’ll see more of in BOOK OF HOURS…

We can’t specify a release date yet, because it turns out making a tarot deck from scratch is a lot of work. 😅 But it’ll be sometime this year! Keep your culty eyes peeled here for news.

Right! That wraps up our squirming bundle of news. Happy birthday to Cultist Sim, and have a lovely weekend! ♥

Step one: why am I even making this?

Our merch has to meet two criteria before I go ahead with it.

★ It has to be something people might want, regardless of whether they’ve played / heard of / like Cultist Simulator (so no ‘Lore of Cultist Simulator‘ books).

★ It has to be something flavourful and interesting that fits our boutique-y, occult-y vibe (so no ‘here is a mug with our logo on it’, either).

There are a few other practical criteria I take into account too, like ‘is this very space-intensive, and if so, where will I store it in my flat without Alexis getting cross with me’ or ‘is it even legal to send boxes of chocolates to the EU? How long does it take before chocolate goes off, anyway?’

I liked the idea of a playing card deck because

★ people like cards, and the Tarot of the Hours is our best-seller;

★ sales of playing cards surged in lockdown, as people turned to inside and/or wholesome entertainments;

★ I could make a dual-deck that served traditional card fans as well as spooky divination types.

Step two: what’s ‘zingara’?

The word is a corruption of 18th-century terminology from Italy (‘zingari’), Germany (‘Zigeuner’) and India (‘zingani’), all referring to ‘gypsies’. Telling your fortune with playing cards started with them, though cards have a very potted and complicated history going back to the very first gambling games centuries ago.

There are several variants of these zingara cartomancy decks, called things like ‘gypsy oracle’, ‘old witch’ or ‘sibilla’ cards, and they all bleed into each other. A fourth popular version, the Petit Lenormand, is named after the most famous cartomancer of all time, the 18th-century Frenchwoman Marie Anne Lenormand. She derived her own variant of older oracle cards and became wildly popular during Napoleon’s reign (before dying and leaving her nephew half a million francs, at which point he, like any good Catholic, burned all her stuff).

The only actual zingara deck I managed to find was this one, from the 1910s, and even this has the word ‘GIPSY’ on it.

The key thing to take away is that there are a variety of distinct fortune-teller-y rule sets being munged together and teased apart and called something different and played about with, over countries and centuries. It’s fascinating and we don’t know much definitive stuff about it. This is very fertile ground.

I knew I wanted to use the traditional 52-card deck, the usual four suits, written fortunes on all cards and Cultist Simulator imagery. So despite the difficulty in finding examples of the zingara deck in real life, I had a clear idea of what I wanted my version to be.

Step three: getting ready to make the thing

I did all the tedious work of finding a good local printer when I was working on the Tarot of the Hours, so the design process starts further along than if you’re starting your merch from scratch. But tarot are usually printed larger than traditional ‘poker’ playing cards, so I asked my printer for their poker card template. This gave me a blank canvas marked with safety, bleed and cut lines.

For the uninitiated, these define:

★ the area you can trust to show high-quality text and image detail without accidental cropping (safe area);

★ the area you need to extend your design to, if you’d like it to run to the absolute edge of the card (bleed area);

★ the area which will be shown on the card after it’s been cut to shape in production (the cut line or final size).

Basically, you don’t want to have immensely detailed text-orientated patterning around the edge, because this requires absolute precision in the printing process. There are machines out there which have this precision, but almost no general printer can promise millimetre accuracy. So be smart and hedge your bets with a centred, middle-friendly design!

Step four: actually making the thing

I started the designs with some very helpful restrictions. I knew I wanted Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades. I knew I wanted Cultist Simulator imagery. And I knew I needed to create space for reasonably-sized, reasonably-short text on the front of every card. Restrictions might not sound good for art, but they take you further away from the terror of the blank page. I love ’em.

I started with a blank table that looks like this:

I then read around the zingara system, which as you can imagine, is about as varied as the people who used it. There is no one ‘right’ or ‘canonical’ system, so I munged together a bunch of things I read about in internet articles, reviews in 19th-century periodicals, or books like Edward Taylor’s History of Playing Cards. The zingara tradition I had chosen also dated back to the 1800s, so it originally included some outmoded and flat-out sexist and/or racist features. I didn’t want that in my deck, so I took the opportunity of updating some parts. Ultimately I ended up with this:

Now I had my four suits, and the meanings for each card. Time for some pictures!

Modern card suits tend to use extremely crisp designs. I wanted my deck to feel old, so I mussed up the icons a little and chose a subtle cream colour for the background to imply old printers’ blocks and aged paper. Here’s a comparison of modern icons (on the left) versus my zingara ones.

The changes are subtle, but they really add up when you see them on the final designs:

Now for the face cards. These are the Jacks, Queens and Kings of each suit. This is where Cultist Simulator comes back in: bearing in mind the card meanings I’d decided from my zingara research, what Cultist characters best suited those descriptions, and also made thematic sense in groups? I also had to balance which colours worked best, bearing in mind Hearts and Diamonds are red while Clubs and Spades are black. Here’s what I ended up with:

I’m pretty happy with the results. Hearts, the friendliest zingara suit, has the jolliest colour scheme. Diamonds lets me lean into Cultist‘s Grail aspect by doubling down on the red. Clubs is a serious zingara suit, befitting cultists like Victor and Rose. And Spades, traditionally the worst suit of all, lets me put Neville in as a useless man. Win!

Step five: GUBBINS

Now the final part of the process. I had my main designs, but I needed a few more things before I could call the deck done.

I needed a design for the back of all 52 cards…

…a design for the tuck box containing the deck…

…to write up and design the instructions leaflet, explaining my version of the zingara fortune-telling system…

… and to sort gold foil accents on all cards and the box, to make it feel magical. The end result that I ended up sending to my printer looked like this.

Eagle-eyed readers might have clocked that I buggered up the instruction leaflet designs, because my mental object rotation skills are that of a dried sponge. So I was extremely grateful I opted to pay for one test deck before ordering 2,000 copies. PHEW.

Step six: it’s done!

After the near-disaster with the backwards instructions leaflet, here’s how the deck came together IRL. I’m really pleased with them! You can get them here, if you like – but hopefully this has also helped explain how these things get made. Happy fortune-telling!

*Yes, this does mean my boxes live under the stairs. Into the cupboard they go.

Hey everyone! As you may have seen in his recent blog, it’s been a quiet sprint while Alexis deals with burnout. So I don’t have any BOOK OF HOURS updates for you, I’m afraid! I do have some other stuff to share, though…

First up, I’m delighted to announce we’re making another tarot deck! The Tarot of the Hours proved so overwhelmingly popular it gave me the tarot bug, and I’ve been thinking about making a BOOK OF HOURS version for a while. Stained glass has become a theme, so I’m currently designing another 78-card tarot deck printed on transparent PVC (rather than opaque card) to emulate the experience of looking through a stained-glass church window. I don’t think this has been done before, so that’s exciting! Here’s what it’ll look like…

The card on the right is the back of all 78 cards. Flip it over and you’ll see a corresponding face or suit design. This deck will use Cultist Simulator imagery and, of course, the Hours, but it follows the traditional major and minor arcana of the tarot more faithfully than the Tarot of the Hours. You can see the Mother-of-Ants is The Hierophant, and the Meniscate is Justice. Alexis used the major arcana as inspiration when he was originally designing the Hours, so they fit very well.

Unlike the Tarot of the Hours, every image in this deck will be brand new and drawn by yours truly! So you’ll see some familiar faces and some familiar icons from Cultist Sim, but with new twists. The deck – name TBD – will probably start life as a signed limited edition, but more on that later!

Finally, a shout out to The Star, also known as the Vagabond. Her sketch accidentally mirrors the infamous Ukrainian Eurovision performance of 2007 in ALL ITS SPANGLY GLORY, which is exactly the sort of whimsy the Vagabond likes. The Laughingthrush is ever at work in the world.

Full video here, if you haven’t seen it, and want to know what it is to LIVE.

My other project is even more secret than the stained-glass tarot. I teased it first in Gondishapur; here’s another clue. ANY GUESSES?

We plan to announce it on Cultist‘s anniversary at the end of May. So as my Geordie grandpa would say, keep yer wool on ’til then!

I leave you all with a reminder that we’re releasing German and Japanese on mobile on Tuesday 27th April (this coming Tuesday!) so if you’ve been waiting for the game in your language, now’s the time. Have a lovely weekend, and more news on all these projects – and hopefully more Alexis – soon. ♥

The long-awaited newest edition to the Church o’ Merch is finally here! The Sibyl’s Leaves: Playing Cards for Divination, Fortune-Telling and Augury is now available in the shop! 🥳

“THE SYBIL’S LEAVES; or, a Peep into Futurity!” (sic) is a real deck printed in the 1820s and 30s. It haunts me because I can find lots of amusing old reviews of it but no description or images of the deck itself. It’s a cartomantic ghost apple whose soul has gone but whose shape remains.

William Hone mentioned it in 1831 in one of the popular game compendiums he produced when he wasn’t being a proto-investigative-journalist and kickstarting freedom of the press. He thought:

“The idea of telling fortunes at home is very pleasant; and the variety of ‘the Sybil’s Leaves’ assists to as frequent opportunities of re-consultation as the most inveterate craver can desire. A lady condemned by one of the leaves to ‘wither on the virgin thorn’, on turning over a new leaf may chance to be assured of a delightful reverse; and by a like easy process, a ‘disappointed gentleman’ become, at last, a ‘happy man’.”

– William Hone, The Every-Day Book and Table Book

In the same year, the wonderfully-named Reverend Blunt interpreted the deck through a moral lens. He usually wrote quite boring-sounding books about early Christian exegesis, but The Sybil’s Leaves caught his attention as he moonlighted as a contributor to the popular New Monthly Magazine:

“Unlike fortune-telling cards in general, they are free from all vulgar associations; and their claims to notice are, the universal applicability of the prophecies and fortunes they dispense, the unusual poetical ability displayed in the verses, and the nice attention to propriety and good taste exhibited throughout.”

– Rev. John James Blunt, The New Monthly Magazine (vol. 33)

Speaking of being free from vulgar association, our Sibyl’s Leaves really are based on a genuine early nineteenth-century fortune-telling system, popularised by the famous Parisian seeress Madame LeNormand. But our version uses a unique system of my own devising, because the original needed a bit of updating to avoid, erm, quite a lot of racism. But that’s gone now! Yay!

Anyway, the absolutely earliest reference to the Sybil’s Leaves I can find is The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1826, which calls it simply ‘a Christmas Game’ and moves on. But a Christmas game it can be again if you order quickly enough! I can’t guarantee the decks will make it to international addresses in time for Christmas, but I’ll be packing ’em more quickly than usual to give them the best chance I can. 🤶

Full product deets on the Etsy page, but the key thing is you can use this 52-card deck with shiny gold bits on to maybe tell the future and to definitely play any card game that requires a normal deck of cards. Also, you can finally get merch with Neville on it. What are you waiting for?!

Alexis has been busy with setting up modding and Steam Workshop, which you can read about in detail here. Can’t wait to see what you crazy kids come up with, bearing in mind we already have the infamous My Little Pony total conversion. What depths have we yet to plumb?

I’ve been on boring production and marketing things this sprint, but I’ve also been merchifying! Our Travelling at Night Kindle / eReader cases are all set up and ready to go on Friday 21st August…

…and I’m very pleased to announce another bit of merch you haven’t heard about yet! The Tarot of the Hours did so much better than anticipated I figure more occult cards are the way to go. So I’ve bought myself a bunch of books on cartomancy and early 20th-century fortune-telling playing cards, and voila!

I’m working on a 52-card deck which can be used both as normal playing cards AND as a fortune-telling tool, in the style of early 20th-century zingara decks, carnival magicians and gypsy oracles. Instructions will be included, and those central yellow ribbons will be GOLD-FOILED, along with (probably) the backs. SHINY. 🙂

I leave you with news that we’re running a fun giveaway next week in the run-up to #lovecraftday, so look out for that going live. Lots of delectable things to be won, and Lovecraft gets a tiny hat. ‘Til then, cultists!

 

 

Appropriately named sprint, eh? It makes me a little worried that our upcoming sprints are IMMORALITY and JUSTICE but May #2 is KING ARTHUR so here’s hoping.

The big news this sprint is we moved house! 😱 Alexis has started a sourdough culture he refers to only as “The Bred Möther”, and inspired by our current work on Exile, Sulochana has started an eternal feud with Big Ken whom she bites until I spray lemon at her.

I, meanwhile, bought a huge orange velvet sofa because I *laugh* in the face of my overdraft. No don’t go away Barclays Bank I need you

Anyway, Exile!

After a delay to the start of the beta (everyone will have keys today! SORRY!), Alexis asked people who live in fun places we don’t to tell us something about their city. If we use any of your anecdata we’ll give you a ‘special thanks’ mention in the credits.

Alexis has been working his butt off writing snippets for, by my count, forty-two cities, so Exile has turned into a sort of occult travel blog written by Carmen Sandiego.

“No reckoner is ever foolish enough to pass into the higher levels of the Mansus. To draw the attention of the true Long – or their masters – would invite annihilation. But my Foe certainly knew something of the invisible arts. Perhaps I should, too.”

More info on Exile details next time – when we’ve had some time in beta.

Now, I have a bit of merch news. Firstly: THE TAROT OF THE HOURS IS BACK IN STOCK! These aren’t hand-numbered, but otherwise they’re exactly the same as the original decks. If you missed out originally, now’s your chance!

One thing to note. The surge of orders last time threw me into disarray, so I’m going to cap stock to 200 decks at any one time. Don’t worry – we have 1,000 to sell! This is just to make sure I can post everyone’s deck in a timely fashion and not e.g. crumble under the pressure like a gingerbread girl in a kiln.

Meanwhile, our Iris pin (and, consequently, the Adept’s Bequest) are out of stock, but they’ll be back on the market in a month or so. In the meantime I’m announcing some NEW items!

Firstly, pins! Meet the Marinette, Hint, Lunatic and Maid pins, which may or may not experiment with different finishes like gold plating and GLITTER. I’ll sell them individually, in case you particularly identify with one of them, but they’ll also go into a six-pin bundle along with Iris and the glitter witch pin. Hold your breath for the Beach-Crow’s Treasures, coming ASAP.

Secondly, I’ve been thinking about things that might be nice during this stupid pandemic. And then I thought:

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.“

– E. M. Forster, Howards End

What Forster meant, of course, is when people are lonely in 2020 in a coronavirus lockdown we should all send each other postcards. Ideally glossy, outré postcards you can use to cast subtle judgement on recipients with the particular Hour you choose.

We’ll sell these as a collection of seven different postcards, randomly selected, which in no way will involve me spilling them all on the floor, smooshing them around and then picking up seven cards and tying them together with string. This is a professional operation.

The postcard bundle will go live next week, so watch this space!

Anyway, hope you’re all keeping safe. Not too long until Exile’s launch on Wednesday 27th May, so we’ll be back at the end of the month with lots more art, design and lore. ‘Til then, Believers!

Hey, Believers! Hope you’re all doing okay in lockdown. It’s not fun, is it?

Lancing this cloud of gloom like a wafer through ice-cream are the Priest and Ghoul DLCs, which launched on mobile yesterday. They’re available as £1.99 IAPs, and Cultist Simulator is 50% off for a week on the App Store and Google Play Store to celebrate turning one. 🎂

Mathilda, Communication Manager at Playdigious, wrote a piece for Pocket Gamer about our first year on sale from a porting and sales perspective. I wrote a companion Gamasutra piece sharing all the data we have: sales figures, ratings, features, etc. If you’re in a pondering, number-crunchy mood, give ’em both a read.

Now, an Exile update. Cultist is a deceptively big game, and writing DLC for it had got really difficult. Alexis needed to find interesting mechanics each time, and those mechanics needed to interlock meaningfully with the mechanics that were out there. It’s even harder now that we’ve localised the whole game, because it’s very difficult for Alexis to go back and change existing content.

Then he watched a couple of seasons of Ozark. The protagonist is burdened with an extraordinary sum of extremely illegally obtained money that they need to dispose of quickly and safely. It was the total opposite of the usual Cultist Funds tension. What if, in Cultist, you had as much money as you needed, but you were in constant danger and had to think hard about how you could safely spend it and stay ahead of your pursuers?

It didn’t sound practical as a DLC theme, because it would mean completely re-inventing half the game. If you were on the run, you couldn’t send out expeditions or built up books in the same way. The Suspicion mechanics would have to work very differently. You probably wouldn’t even have a cult.

Then it occurred to Alexis that this was also an opportunity. If he blew up all the mechanics the player was used to, then he wouldn’t have to integrate all my new systems with them, and they’d have the fun of rediscovering how everything works from scratch. It might just take too long to build, but it might also take less time starting over without worrying about fitting everything that already existed.

He spent a week prototyping. He got enough working to be confident that it would be a big chunk of work, but not a crazy big chunk of work. The core loop was this: you’d land in a city, you’d set up capers and operations with your contacts, you’d convert the stolen goods into cash, and then you’d pick your moment to run. Run too early, and you’d lose opportunities. Run too late, and your pursuers might catch up with you. He had an idea for the stolen goods and the pursuers, too, something he’d wanted to get into the game for a while: the reckoner mobs, the illicit dealers in years who existed uneasily alongside the taxonomy of Know and Long.

Your final goal would be to disappear, with as much luxury as you could arrange for a comfortable retirement. Your other final goal would be an Edge ascension – something our players had long hungered for – but that would come in an unexpected way. Exile’s got seven different shades of the victory conditions at the moment.

It’s a big one – right now, it looks like it might be as big as the Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLCs put together. (😱) Let’s hope it works out! At least – and he didn’t expect this at all when he started in January – after a couple of months of lockdown, people might be more in the mood for a dramatic flight across Europe and beyond.

The closed, secret beta will start next week, so this is your last chance to register for a potential invite! Help us make Exile exilent. 😎

Meanwhile, this was my life.

FOR BASICALLY A WEEK STRAIGHT. This means I have no new Exile art to show you, but all tarot decks (and various other merch orders) are now on their way to their respective owners, who were very patient and didn’t get too cross with someone trying to send out a zillion parcels in the middle of a global pandemic.

For those who missed out on the lightning-quick limited edition, we have another 1,000 decks coming in a couple of weeks. They won’t be numbered, but otherwise they’ll be exactly the same. Check the Church of Merch in mid-April-ish, or watch this space for an announcement that they’re back up and buyable again. 🙂

Finally! We were too busy this week to record another Skeleton Songs, so episode five’ll be out next sprint instead. We are able to make our first donation to coronavirus-y charities, though! This month, you helped us raise…

Thank you! This’ll go to the National Emergencies Trust. Next month we’ll donate to Médecins Sans Frontières, and the month after that it’ll go to the Trussell Trust. Spread the word if you can, and keep safe! ♥

Sooooo. Everyone really likes tarot decks.

We sold all of our 500 decks within 36 hours. Thank you so much if you ordered one! My phone makes a cash register cha-ching noise every time we sell something on Etsy so it was the closest I’ll ever get to

BUT. We seriously underestimated how many people would want this tarot. Coronavirus means some people don’t have the money right now, or that they don’t want physical packages coming through the post. The decks went so quickly and it’s such a difficult time that we feel it’s unfair to disappoint people because I simply underestimated demand. So: we’re going to extend the Tarot of the Hours by another 1,000 decks.

To keep the exclusivity of that first batch, we’re not going to number the decks anymore. Only the first 500 are officially part of the limited edition. But we do want to make sure people have an opportunity to buy this deck, regardless of situation or job security or COVID-19 nonsense. MAY THE HOURS PROTECT YOU.

The new batch is in production now. I’ll announce their restock (in probably a couple of weeks…?) on Twitter, Facebook and reddit. View the ~ secret ~ delisted Etsy store page in the meantime! Delight in currently unattainable occultism! The real-world equivalent of not being able to enter the Mansus ’cause you don’t have the right goddamn card. 🤘

10,000 boos to COVID-19

The games industry is in a fortunate position. Many of us are naturally unsocial creatures who work on digital products that aren’t affected by real-world supply chains currently being severed by COVID-19. We’re a two-person family business who work from home, anyway.

Alexis and I wanted to do something useful in this crisis to pass on that good fortune. For the next three months, we’re going to give 10% of our total monthly profits to charities who can help. This includes everything on our digital stores (Steam, GOG, Humble and itch.io) and all our physical merchandise in the Etsy store. For the avoidance of doubt, this includes the tarot deck!

We’ll share the amount we’ve raised at the end of every month, so we can all feel good for having helped. Yay!

National Emergencies Trust

They step in whenever there’s a major national crisis in the UK. Working with the noble British Red Cross, they’ve launched a major coronavirus appeal.

Medecins Sans Frontieres

Also known as Doctors Without Borders and very dear to Alexis’s heart. An international and life-changing charity getting medical aid wherever it’s needed the most.

The Trussell Trust

A British food bank charity making sure the poorest and most vulnerable people are cared for. Coronavirus must be bloody awful for people who were already struggling financially.

We may extend this initiative for longer than three months. It depends on what the hell happens with COVID-19. Here’s hoping we don’t have to.

The long-awaited Tarot of the Hours is finally available in the Church o’ Merch! For £30 + shipping you can get your probably not entirely innocent hands on your very own hand-numbered tarot deck, granting you ultimate insight into the House without Walls.

Thanks for being patient while I sorted ’em. <3

Speaking of patience, you may have seen some of the Exile teasers Alexis has been tweeting. It’s not actually very long to wait now – just until the end of May! But I have a smol, non-alarming update for you, because here’s a transcript of every day at Weather Factory:

LOTTIE: Wow it’s so great that we have everything planned for the next six months

ALEXIS: Er

LOTTIE: Isn’t it just wonderful having a clear production schedule we can rely on

ALEXIS: Um

LOTTIE: How stressful would it be if you were to turn around and tell me suddenly all the plans we’d agreed on were changing, ha ha

ALEXIS: * reaches for the gin *

Alexis has some really fun ideas that break the mould of the rest of Cultist Sim, so we wanted to spend some extra time and lean into Exile as our largest bit of DLC to date. He’s been totally reworking the mechanics so all you adepts with 200 hours in the game will be faced with learning the rules ALL OVER AGAIN.

There are several different victories, some much easier than others. The hardest are as punishing as New Game+, but… this is Edge, right?

The above doesn’t change our release date, but we’re going to set its price point higher than £2.50 – exact price TBC. So, to summarise:

• Exile will launch on Weds 27th May at 6PM GMT / 10AM PDT
• It’ll release in English, simplified Chinese and Russian at the same time
• It’ll cost more than other DLCs, though we haven’t confirmed how much yet
• Perpetual Edition owners get it FREE

More info ASAP!

The fact that we’re spending more time on Exile than planned does mean I now expect BOOK OF HOURS to launch in 2022 rather than 2021. When we get into production proper on that game and have a clearer scope I’ll confirm either way. But a heads up that my producerly senses are tingling. Wishlist it for now, anyway!

Here’s some new Exile art to make all that production more palatable. Can you figure the DLC out from these…?

Last but not least, we’re on sale currently in GOG’s spring sale, so if anyone you know is, for example, stuck at home for an indeterminate amount of time, there’s a slightly cheery-uppy deal available right now.

‘Til next month, Believers!

Yes! This should really be called ‘NOV #1: WESTENRA’, but this producer is Off The Rails. You can’t stop me. I’m naming this sprint update after the rather curious case of D and The History of Inks, written to a Dr. Serena Blackwood at the Office of the Curia.

Click to read photographs of the original letter, long now lost to a fire. Or if you struggle to read D’s handwriting – well, she should have delegated to Propsy, now, shouldn’t she? You can scroll down to the bottom of this post for a transcription in plain text, anyway.

This sprint I’ve also been hard at work with some new merch. I announced what that was to the select few of you who follow me on Twitter: a 78-card, full-colour, totally illicit TAROT OF THE HOURS.

(The dark background detail on the card backs / box are quite hard to see if your monitor isn’t set to ‘Mental Artist’, so if all you see are white lines on black, TRUST ME THERE’S MORE THERE.)

I’m waiting to receive a test print of the whole thing, to check all the art looks nice. Then it’s a matter of buying a tonne and making a new listing on the Church of Merch.

The question in the meantime is: who are the Pages, Knights, Queens and Kings of each suit? And which Principles correspond to Swords, Wands, Cups and Pentacles? Try your luck in the comments below, and I’ll reveal any of the correct cards in next sprint’s update…

The rest of this sprint was devoted to, oh, you know, launching our Russian beta on Steam and participating in this year’s Singles’ Day, which you probably all know is a manufactured celebration of both being single and being in a relationship which Alibaba co-opted to sell stuff, but hey, it’s 2019, and it makes me feel all Blade Runner-y to put Chinese text on my designs.

Any Russian speakers waiting until the beta’s complete have only another WEEK to wait until Russian’s live in the main game on Steam, GOG and Humble: that update’s coming on Monday 25th November. So yay, my drugis, which is the only pseudo-Russian I know from reading A Clockwork Orange when I was sixteen.

Enjoy your weekends, Believers.

“VIENNA
January 15th-ish, 1906

Dear Serena –

Got your book. Pretty good condition, too. Bit blurred round the edges, but the little fellow’s taken good care of it. Not what I expected, though, rum business all round. Tell you how it was.

Trail in Venice long cold, obviously. They still tell stories about old Hokobald, say the place is cursed now, but it’s mostly cursed with rising damp. Don’t know how anyone lives there. Anyway, no trace, so I thought, all right, D., my girl, get your head down, get seventy-seven winks, see if the Sage-Knight’s entertaining, he’ll know what’s what.

You’re reading this and thinking, come on, D., you know better than that, Sage-Knight’s a bit high in the Mansus to be talking to Raw Prophets, what? But here’s the thing, Sage-Knight knows the odd Ivory, Ivories know the odd Thirstly, Thirstlies know Raw Prophets. So I’ll put the word out.

Sage-Knight’s in a helpful sort of mood, so we both have a cup of that wine of his and then another cup and then another cup and we get to gossiping. He’s all right for a Name. Shame he doesn’t keep proper port, even dream-port, but he’s all right for a Name. And I wake up and I pop out for a dawn smoke and a bit of the old practice and when I get back inside there’s an address written on the mirror. Not bad for a Name at all.

Address is in Vienna. Now you know how I feel about Vienna, never quite comfy there since all that with the Club, but I think, Serena’s a good sort, owe her a favour or two, not so far on the train. Off I pop.

Vienna, two days on. Find the address, have a snout about, you know, see what’s what. Nasty little den, full of the wrong sort of the wrong sort, and they’ve got their own little shrine for the Raw Prophet. (Sage-Knight gave me its name, I tried to write its name, won’t fit in this alphabet. Let’s call him Propsy.) Little cult for Propsy. Now you know me, Serena, live and let live, all sorts, but a shrine to something like Propsy, I always thought it’s like building a shrine to a lamb chop. You’ve seen Prophets, haven’t you? They look like a horse stepped on a starfish. But bigger.

But, dashed odd thing… Propsy’s not a bad sort. Can’t talk, of course, but the little feller can write. And I don’t just mean write like I’m writing this letter, express itself, put its point of view, sort of thing. I mean it’s a calligrapher. Dashed good calligrapher. Every one of those little tentacle things, good as a Japanese paint-brush. Where does it get the ink, you’re wondering, aren’t you, Serena? Be glad I’m not telling you.

Long story short, Propsy reckons it wrote the ‘History of Inks’, reckons it was stolen, reckons all sorts of the worst about H.H. (Sorry, Serena.) So we had a good old chat, and I did knock it about a little bit, but we agreed in the end, and it gave me the book back, but it wanted paying. Seemed fair enough. And I’ve added a line to my bill for that. Bit of a sum, I’m afraid, try not to kick. Sure you won’t, know you’re a good sort.

So here you go, bill, book, all we’re missing is a candle, ha ha! I’ll be by again for the Equinox. Could use your help on a thing with the Mausoleum. And the Club, actually. Bit of a business, there.

Pip pip
D.

PS! Propsy wants proper attribution. Name in the catalogue. Course, can’t write its name here. Won’t fit in this alphabet. Hope you can sort that out. Might cause a bit of a stink if not. Leave it with you. Best of luck. D.“