✨🐫 The Mysterious Package Company x The Lady Afterwards edition is NOW AVAILABLE! 🐫✨

The MPC collaboration builds on our original edition by adding hand-aged clues, a silver cigarette case stuffed with calling cards, an antique magnifying glass and a hardwood “Taurus Express” travelling chest to keep it all in, as well as a few other additions. It’s TRULY MAGNIFICENT.

A full list of what’s included is:

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that each box contains a 10% off discount for Locksmith’s Dream tickets (which now have new 2022 and 2023 dates), but there’s also a chance to win a $2,000 “Golden Ticket” giving you and a friend a totally paid-for stay our Secret Histories scavenger hunt in Wales. Alternatively, if you can’t make it – or you inexplicably hate Wales – you can opt for a free Mysterious Package Company experience of your choice. Good luck to anyone who buys a box!

One final thing to share, because I love it. It’s a little known fact is that I am actually an accomplished trombonist – this sounds like a joke but I swear it isn’t. Anyway, here is not me but a 1920s London Symphony Orchestra musician called Freddie fighting off a cheetah in an example of how The Lady Afterwards’ combat mechanics work in The Secret Histories Rulebook. You’re welcome.

(Art creds to a talented MPC artist called George.)

There are loads more illustrations like this dotted about the place, but I can’t share any others without spoilers! Which the Suppression Bureau take a particularly dim view of. So let’s not pique the Suppression Bureau.

But speaking of the Bureau, we have a little announcement coming in the next few weeks which should please a number of creative Cultist Simulator fans. We’ll schedule an AMA with Alexis and myself to talk about it once we’ve revealed it, but watch this space…

Click for larger images!

In case you thought I forged the above, beta attendees wrote some lovely things that they were not in any way forced to say. I swear on the Weather Factory cats’ lives that people actually said this:

There are still a few tickets left for the Locksmith’s Dream in December, so if the above snags your interest, check out available dates here.

The Locksmith’s Dream isn’t a Weather Factory-run project – it’s being run and managed by Ivan, with our input and writing / art direction – so we’re not sure what comes next for the project in 2023. But the beta showed the event has real promise, there’s nothing else like it out there, and nobody got drunk and fell down the stairs. So well done to everyone who attended and didn’t get drunk and fall down the stairs! Well done to Ivan, and all involved staff for doing such a fantastic job! And cheers to the Caer Adars of the future – whatever and wherever they may be. ♥

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oriflamme’s is one of several sponsors who might take an interest in your attendance at the Locksmith’s Dream – others are the Endeavour Club, Kerisham Review, Lighthouse Institute and those ‘creepy Peruvian fungus wizards’ from the Haustorium. Choose your starter Pokemon, please.

The beta’s sold out but there are still tickets available in December if you’d like to join. If you’re coming, good luck! Wear your mask at night.

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

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

Our recent newsletter survey showed us that we should totally share more detail about what you actually do in this upcoming Cultist-adjacent real-world weekend break full of puzzles, lore and cocktails (no idea why some of you don’t know what happens in it, how could we be more coherent). Here is a moodboard to show you very clearly just exactly what this impossible to describe new event-experience is:

Here is another mood board of what the Locksmith’s Dream isn’t.

My work here is done.

…….OKAY okay okay okay. More usefully, I’ve been working with Ivan (the guy in charge of the Locksmith’s Dream) to design enamel pin badges for each of the ‘sponsors’ of the event. So what exactly are sponsors, why should you care about them, and how come they get jazzy lil pins? All these questions answered below, and then you get a cat.

The premise of the Locksmith’s Dream is that five Hours meet each year to ‘exchange secrets and agree particular notes of history’. After their meeting, snippets of their highly occult and super rare conversations are left in their wake, in what we’re calling snippets of ‘Birdsong’. As you might expect, there are numerous insitutions interested in what any Hour might have to say about anything, particularly at an annual meeting of great renown. Some of those institutions care enough to sponsor people to pick over the location of those meetings once the Hours have departed – these after-events are called a ‘counterparty’, among other things – and that’s what YOU’RE doing at the Locksmith’s Dream: a sponsored attendee of an occult counterparty, tasked with gathering as many snippets of lore as you can for your sponsor.

Your sponsor is decided by which room you’re staying in, and your corresponding ‘character’ for the duration of your stay – you’ll get a badge to wear to notify others of your affiliation. As noted in Scientific Fig. 2 above, you don’t have to act or pretend to be that character – it’s just the role you take on when you enter this demi-real counterparty in the Bounds. And because this is all rich Secret Histories lore, things are never as simple as they appear. You might discover things about your sponsor that make you switch sides to their enemy. Or you might find out they intend to do something totally excellent with the lore you bring back for them, and work extra hard to gather as much Birdsong for them as possible.

All of which leads us smoothly to the question of who the sponsors actually are. WELL HERE YOU GO:

The Lighthouse Institute

Preserving the order of things, with current Hours at the top and humanity safely at the bottom. Not quite an esoteric order, not quite a think-tank, Lighthouse was established after World War 2 by the notorious Arun Peel to ‘keep humankind from the rocks of endless night’: that is, to ensure the invisible world stays in balance, and that people don’t get inhabited by Worms, eaten by fallen immortals, cursed by curses, etc. Lighthouse is the most benign but arguably the least effective of the Sponsors. They’re better at policy documents than they are at exorcisms. Solid research and safety protocols, though.

Haustorium

What do you get if you cross an excommunicated Catholic friar with a renegade Incan magician? A religious foundation with a mission is to ‘preserve that which would not otherwise be preserved’, and a commitment to ‘interfaith symbiosis’. Or, if you listen to Church authorities, ‘a depository of blasphemies’ committed to ‘mongrel heresies’. Haustorium provides a welcome home to renegade clergy from Christian and other backgrounds who’ve developed too keen an interest in dangerous knowledge. To their credit, very little of that knowledge ever leaves the Haustorium archives.

The Kerisham Review

Kerisham is a British coastal town whose physical reality is occasionally disputed. In the 1920s, the Review could reasonably be described as a literary magazine for those with specialised tastes. The world moved on, the Review moved on with it, and it is sometimes now described as ‘an occult tabloid’. This is wildly unfair, if only because it can boast nothing like the circulation of even the feeblest actual tabloid. It also, now and then, publishes real investigative journalism, from reckless contributors willing to risk being arrested or devoured.

Oriflamme’s

An auction house specialising in curios, perfumes, taxidermies, rare texts… and secrets. Oriflamme’s may be the last auction house in the world with no online presence at all. Don’t talk to them about NFTs.

The Endeavour Club

Smiths, technologists, alchemists, patriots. The Endeavour Club has a reputation for snobbery, largely because so many of their members are snobs. Of all the Sponsors, they’re the oldest and most traditional – ironic, really, that they’ve changed so over the centuries. From their birth as a martial order in the fires of the War of the Roads; to their time as a gentleman’s occult lodge; to their conspiracies of Empire; to their current, laudable, funding for education and research initiatives… their only constants are their bravery, their determination and their ingenuity. And their snobbery.

Please note for the sake of my artistic pride that all of these are mock-ups of the final badges, which will all be perfect and trim. They’re in production as I write, so we’ll share finished photos when we have them! But hopefully the above makes it slightly clearer what sort of stories you can write for yourselves in the Locksmith’s Dream. More info, photos and lore as the project comes together! Or you can rifle the official Locksmith’s Dream website for further info and images. In the meantime, as promised –

Have a spooky day. ♥

“Secret gods live beneath the skin of the world. Five of them meet every year to exchange secrets and agree particular notes of history. Their conversations aren’t for our ears, but even after they’ve gone, their gossip still troubles the earth; the air still prickles with doors…”

🎉🐦 The Locksmith’s Dream tickets are AVAILABLE NOW! 🐦🎉

Each year the Avian Hours – that’s the Beach-Crow, the Witch-and-Sister, the Elegiast, the Vagabond and the little-known Name of the Moth, Ferezeref – meet to discuss the topics of the gods. Afterwards, mortals attend the Roosinghall to pick through abandoned tidbits of secret knowledge. This is what we’re calling the Locksmith’s Dream, and invite you to pick through the snippets of the gods this October and December with us.

Ivan has done a wonderful job of setting up the official site, where there’s bagloads of photos, info and you can see all the properly beautiful rooms you can stay in. It’s also where you can actually book tickets, so go forth and enjoy! If you can make it, see you there…

Secret Historian boxes: The Grove of Green Immortals

As you know from my blog last week, our first Secret Historian boxes are also now available on the merch shop! There are only 25 of them available, though, so nab yours quick – or wait until next month’s box comes out, which will be all about Crossrow. Your only two options! 😎

BOOK OF HOURS updates

We’re not ready to share a vertical slice of the game yet, but here’re some updates!

We’ve finalised the design of the Wisdom Page, the occult sort-of skill tree where you can choose which forbidden knowledge to specialise in, and which affects what you can do elsewhere in the game based on your choices. We’ve hidden the full size of the chart, but you can see the first four levels here:

Players choose cards or objects to commit to each slot up the chain, pledging allegiance – for example – to Birdsong by committing a skill card for Ramsund, the language of secrets. This will enhance the player’s Birdsong affinity and ability, opening up new opportunities elsewhere and unlocking the next tier of the branch.

We hope it’s also a nice roleplaying opportunity, as you can see that each of the nine Wisdoms is variously associated with several Principles from [i]Cultist Simulator[/i]. People have strong feelings about whether they’re a Winter-y sort who wants a beautiful end or a Lantern-type who’s brilliant but a bit caustic or a Forge-person who really loves hitting things with hammers. The Wisdoms are deliberately broader, drawing from multiple Principles at once, so they should open up new avenues of characterisation. Which is useful in, er, an RPG!

Speaking of the Wisdoms, we’ve uncovered a new letter from a mysterious ‘Arthur’ to his nephew, discussing the Illumination-affiliated events that took place in a Pyrhhic battle against the Khusgai of Persia, and the bravery – and unmasking of Lieutenant Malcolmson. Most importantly, though, weep for Menander, the bravest steed that ever was!

“Nephew, make a fist of your hand. Muscles move beneath the skin. So powers move beneath the skin of the world, at impulses equally invisible, but greater.”

Click here for alternative read-friendly text.

And finally, we also have a mock-up of Hush House’s layout to share. Please note that this is not what the game will actually look like (though mmmm isn’t it all nice and neat in a grid), but it is likely to represent the layout of rooms in the final game. We’ve censored some of the more deep-lore rooms, and you can’t see all of it – but here’s a first glimpse at the library at the centre of it all!

If you like what you see, please wishlist BOOK OF HOURS to keep updated with our progress! More on that in the next few months.

Cultist Simulator’s birthday

It’s Cultist’s anniversary, so we’re running a Midweek Madness sale on Steam throughout this week. You can get everything [i]Cultist Sim[/i]-y for basically dust and a broken ha’penny (50-66% off everything, to be exact). So that’s

• Cultist Simulator (66% off)
• The Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC (50% off)
• Cultist Simulator’s OST (50% off)
• Anthology Edition bundle, which includes all of the above @ 65% off-ish (bundle maths is hard)
• The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition (50% off)

Enjoy!

The indomitable Canadian sensation that is Systemchalk – probably a Long by now, at least – is broadcasting Cultist on the Steam store page, for anyone who’d like to see the game being wrestled to its knees while a soothing voiceover describes the inevitable descent into penury, madness and occult calamity.

AND FINALLY we’re restocking The Lady Afterwards: Boxed Edition on the Etsy shop tomorrow at noon BST. We’ll restock the boxes every Tuesday, alternating between noon BST and 6PM BST to facilitate different international buyers. Be there! The box is really great! I promise!

Happy birthday to Iris, the Mansus, all the Histories and most importantly to Cultist Sim, the little game that could. Celebrate in your favourite way for us, Believers! We couldn’t have done it without you. We’re off to desperately refresh the Locksmith’s Dream back-end and see how many people are buying tickets, and then play a bunch of V Rising to chill out. TOODLE PIP ♥

Tuesday 31st May 2022

This is beloved Cultist Sim‘s official anniversary, so we’re launching our final round of luxury Lady Afterwards boxes. They go live at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on our Etsy shop. To avoid them all selling out immediately, we’ll release 50 boxes every Tuesday at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT so people have multiple chances to get their hands on one. Hopefully we’ll scale up to 100 boxes every Monday, but this depends on my mum, who’ll be boxing and sending them all. (She’s currently threatening to unionise, but gin will probably make her more amenable.)

If you’d like to know what’s inside, read more about our Lady Afterwards boxes here.

Monday 6th June 2022

For reasons that will become clear on the day, we’re also releasing some major things the following week – in particular, the Locksmith’s Dream tickets go on sale, and we release the first of our Secret Histories boxes series – this month focused on the Grove of Green Immortals.

The Locksmith’s Dream tickets will have their own dedicated site, and you can purchase tickets for our beta event in October AND/OR the full events in December. We have a bunch of gorgeous photos of the rooms, house and grounds, as well as further details on food, timings and how it all works. Tickets will launch at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Monday 6th June 2022 – watch this website, our mailing list or any of our socials for a ping when it’s live!

We’re also releasing our first Secret Histories box, the super limited edition monthly librarian’s chests containing letters, lore, clues and some old friends from Cultist Sim. Our first box focuses on the Grove of Green Immortals, so those of you interested in horticulture, medicine, Moth and Heart – or those of you wishing to make nice to the Applebright – should particularly take note. Here’s what our boxes look like at the moment, though they’re missing some key components…

I think these are my favourite physical boxes I’ve made to date, so I hope you love ’em too! They’ll drop at the same time as the Locksmith’s Dream tickets, at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on our Etsy shop. There are only 25 Grove boxes, but if you miss out, don’t worry! We’ll release another 25 boxes next month – this time, focused on Crossrow, the jazzy library beloved by the Vagabond.

I’ll also be sharing some BOOK OF HOURS updates and lore, as a lil celebratory sweetener. Buckle up, believer – we got some exciting stuff on the horizon, and the horizon is near.

After a few weeks away, I’m back, slightly more tanned and salt-crusted, and ready for my close up, so here goes.

I suspect this very much dates me…

Contrary to the gif above, my name is actually Ivan Carić, and I will be your pilot (as well as tour guide and conceptual sommelier) for the Locksmith’s Dream. Practically this means that I will be shaping, building, and unleashing what we’re confident will be a unique, delightful, and intriguing series of events, all rooted in an unexplored part of the Secret Histories.

As I mentioned in my first post, I come from the “before times” and I’m an old friend and colleague of Alexis. I’ve been quietly working in the background on aspects for the Locksmith’s Dream on and off for the last six months or so.

It’s strange to be back on my own in my fancy shed, where I do most of my work. It’s eerily quiet, with only the most under-appreciated member of the team for company (he does give high-fives though).

Grom raising morale (literally a salty seadog)

Designing the Locksmith’s Dream is like playing chess with an invisible opponent. Each move opens up new possibilities, which may themselves be traps. Each time I’m sure of a great play, the opponent of practicality puts new obstacles in the way.

Can anyone identify this set? It may well be relevant, come October…

The excitement of fleshing out the world of the Secret Histories in a way that can be represented physically leads to rabbit holes which turn out to be sprawling warrens. Developing real objects which can be interacted with – and that offer insights or clues – is no easy feat but a delightful challenge filled with moments of joy when an idea works.

All this leads to say it is coming together. This month, we’ve engaged our chef and are starting to get excited about meals and special foods to entice you. We’re refining the design and looking at the implications for props and artefacts. For example, I’ve been fiddling with prototypes for satisfyingly tactile coins and tokens for the guests, as well as looking to source exactly the right sort of lanterns for guest excursions into the grounds of Treowen at night.

Some very early prototypes  

Progress

This last month I have managed to find someone who will design a model of Treowen that we can then actually build (that’ll be a whole other fun bundle of problems to solve!). Currently the plan is to build an open model out of wood (like a doll’s house, but without the cold, dead eyes) that will sit in the main staircase, and which will provide cues about objects and places that it might be interesting to explore. There are lots of fun ideas with lighting, tiny little props, furniture and models that we’ll be experimenting with.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve hired a fantastically talented chef (welcome Dominic!), and over the next few months we’ll be researching and exploring dishes to tantalise, and delight. We will be  providing, lunch, breakfast and assorted delicious in-between treats (to keep your strength up). With a four-course dinner in the beautiful wood paneled dining hall in front of a warming fire as the centerpiece. The food will be traditional British country house fare, 1920s inspired but with some Secret-Histories-flavoured amuse-bouches, and entremets scattered throughout. We’ll devote a blog post or two later in the year about this.

The website is progressing nicely, and unless we cause serious offence to any gods in the intervening month we’re still on target to launch ticket sales at the end of the month. They’ll go on sale at 6PM BST/10AM PDT on Tuesday the 31st of May.

Dates

• Beta – Saturday 15th – Sunday 16th October (✨HALF PRICE TICKETS✨)
• Saturnalia Midweek – Wednesday 7th – Thursday 8th December
• Saturnalia Weekend – Saturday 10th – Sunday 11th December
• Yule Midweek – Wednesday 14th – Thursday 15th December
• Yule Weekend – Saturday 17th – Sunday 18th December (with a 🎄seasonal twist🎄)

What you’ll do

We’ve talked about the Locksmith’s Dream as ‘a series of live, invitation-only overnight events’, but what do you actually do during your esoteric weekend in Wales? The experience triangulates somewhere between a high-end murder mystery (but nobody dies and you don’t have to act), D&D in a Castle (but we’re not LARP) and occult Downton Abbey (without, sadly, Maggie Smith). It’s a cross between a luxury weekend holiday and a scavenger hunt.

You’ll arrive to find your welcome pack in your chosen room, providing you with instructions, backstory, a badge and a mask, a personal journal and possibly some hidden things to find… Then you’ll make your way downstairs to (probably) the Wheel and Flint Pub to meet your fellow seekers, the genial Bartender and his excellent refreshments, and the Inspector from the Suppression Bureau, who’ll give you the lay of the land. It’s up to you how you spend your time from here: seeking out snippets of Birdsong, outwitting a puzzle-box discovered in the Oak Chamber, braving the fading light outside to find secret things on the edge of the wood, or piecing together scraps of triptychs with your fellows, figuring out the location of a secret piece of lore.

Our Mysterious Man is quite a gourmet, so dinner will be opulent and excellent, prepared specially by the unflappable Cook. And when night falls and the open fires crackle in the halls, you’ll wear your masks, become part of the Locksmith’s pageant, and find the deepest secrets buried in the darkest places of the house…

Where you’ll stay

Treowen is a 17th-century Grade I-listed manor house in the bosky hinterlands between England and Wales. It’s four storeys of oak panelling, ancient staircases and one secret priest’s hole that’s really hard to find. The Locksmith’s Dream takes place in all of it (as well as, almost certainly, the extensive grounds around the house – including fields, lakes, forests and – sometimes – lil fluffy sheep). But the bit that matters most to people buying tickets are the individual, unique rooms across three floors, all of which come with their own character for you to roleplay as much or as little as you like during the event. So here they are!

(Please note: all prices are for the whole weekend experience and include your room, food, drink and welcome packs etc. Details below may change over the next six months as the project progresses – we reserve the right to take backsies.)

Let me know if anything isn’t clear in the comments! It’s difficult to show such a meandering, beautiful house as Treowen in floor plans alone, but it’ll make sense once you’ve visited.

How much it costs

You can see the usual ticket prices included in the floor plans above: this is how much tickets for the Locksmith’s Dream will cost in December 2022, when we run our first full live event. But we’re also running a beta in October 2022, to make sure everything works in real life as we hope it does on paper (narrator: it won’t). As such, we’re able to offer a low, flat rate for all beta tickets, as you’re helping us make the Locksmith’s Dream excellent. (The beta will be as much like the real thing as we can make it, it might just be a little rough around the edges.)

For the first year, the Locksmith’s Dream is a loss-making experiment. If it works, we’ll run a much larger number of events next year – but for now we’ll have to see how it goes. So here are the full ticket options:

Please note, again, that these prices are per person and cover your whole Locksmith’s Dream experience. You’ll almost certainly be able to add on a night for a small extra cost if you’d like, and Monmouthshire is well worth spending time in as it’s totally beautiful and the land of green and pleasant hills pubs wind-y roads dragons etc.

Tickets go on sale at the end of next month when the Locksmith’s Dream’s website launches. For now, have some more photos to give you a flavour of the house. Hope to see you there!

Cultist Simulator

TLDR: it bork, we soz

As you may have seen, AK revamped the entire Cultist Simulator code base (to make it more stable, and to prep for BOOK OF HOURS), nearly had a nervous breakdown because coding is not what he likes best, released what we professionals call a ‘buggy AF’ update in March, and has since pushed a patch a week to put the fires out. [Now I’m doing a patch a week. In the first two weeks I pushed a patch a day. – AK] All while also developing a second game on top and agonising which doublet to wear in Witcher 3.

His latest update was Tuesday: read for experimental multi-select and snippet-saving! He’s now working on improvements to the new card placement system, which has a few weirdnesses and bugs, and is by far the most annoying thing still going wrong in the live game. We’ll update ASAP when that’s ready to go out.

Maybe we should implement a ‘Chaos’ slider that places cards ANYWHERE THE GAME GODDAMN WANTS

BOOK OF HOURS

TLDR: prototype in May!

To be totally honest – we usually pride ourselves on being good at production and hitting deadlines – our plans went rather sideways on this one. We’ve had some problems as a studio over the last few years, and dealing with them meant AK almost burned out, couldn’t work as usual, and I had to come up with projects I could do primarily on my own in lieu of making our lovely library game about peace, melancholy and satisfaction on the top of a rock in pseudo-Wales. But we really are still making this game (!) and by the end of May we expect to hit prototype, showcasing the central game loop. Huzzah!

We’ll be inviting a small number of people to test the game then, so make sure you’re signed up to the mailing list if you’d like to see an early first pass of the game.

In the meantime, have a look at what we’ve been up to! Starting with UI, which we’re trying to base as much on Cultist Sim as possible but updated with hard-won experience and, frankly, a leather grimoire-y vibe. Here’s what we’re working with so far in your main Librarian window:

Familiar but different, right? But unlike Cultist’s approach – where the UI is the same whether you’re taking a tincture of opium with the Dream verb or sending a Hint to murder Connie Lee – BOOK OF HOURS needs a bunch of complementary but different UI for different moments in the game. Cultist’s square verb tiles, for example, will be replaced in favour of real-world interactable locations like desks, gardens and ovens. Clicking on these open different recipe windows where your items and intangibles can be used, and where you can (possibly? probably?) store items. So you’ll click on your librarian’s desk to open the ‘Library Desk’ window, for example, and it’ll reflect that it’s a different interactive point in the game with slightly different UI. Here’s what we’re trying right now:

You might remember that BOOK OF HOURS is a melancholy, lonely game about managing a crumbling antique library of esoteric books and we want it to feel like a hygge, isolated escape from the world, where you can curl up with your cat and some marginalia while the rain gently patters the lead-glass of your study window. One of the best ways to evince a feeling like this is to occasionally – OCCASIONALLY – have someone visit you to pierce that loneliness, and make you feel it all the more when they depart. Sometimes they’ll be friendly. Sometimes they might not. And those pesky Suppression Bureau agents have frankly nothing better to do, and like the way you make tea. So we need a basic UI dedicated to talking to these visitors, every now and then.

Overall, we’re working on the assumption that the zoomed-out view of BOOK OF HOURS will look something like the below. NOT the art, which is a super super early mock-up I made in 2019, but a pulled-back simulator view of the whole of Hush House that lets you see an overview of everything going on in your game, and a vaguely mechanically appropriate UI, essentially giving you a quickbar for commonly-used cards and access to a much larger menu of items, skills, attributes, etc. You’ll be able to zoom in to see detail and do small, specific tasks like personally ordering your books on your bookshelf. (Please note, if AK sees anyone ordering their books by colour he is likely to cry EHEU and delete all the code).

To make the prototype look even slightly like the final game, I’ve been mocking up some very basic assets to indicate relative sizes so we can answer questions like how high the ceilings shoul dbe, how many books you can put in a bookshelf, and whether we want a cosy librarian’s nook or an intimidating Smaug’s lair of occult grimoires. This is all TBD, and the art style will almost certainly change. But for now pls enjoy tiny Fuchsia’s head on a 1930s outfit inspired by President Zelensky’s war-jumper. Because why not.

I’m very keen on being able to customise characters, and have plans – but AK is sensibly undecided on this for now and gets the final say. MORE ON THIS LATER WHEN WE KNOW OURSELVES.

Secret Historian Boxes

TLDR: monthly release of limited edition box, £100 + shipping, coming in May

Speaking of letters… I’m back on my boxy bullshit!  I’m releasing 25 special, limited edition library-focused boxes each month from May to August to mark That Damned Library Game’s prototype, sold via our Etsy shop. You might have seen this photo from our last newsletter:

This is the prototype for May’s box, from the desk of the librarian of the Grove of Green Immortals, the mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine, in Moth and Heart lore, under the hand of the Applebright. We’re working with a totally brilliant artisan who’s hand-carving each box, which will then contain something like the following:

There are inks in which histories are written, and inks which protect against untruth. There are inks which can only be read by night, and inks binding the author to the one whose name is written. And then there are inks of which the Hours take note – and inks that are forbidden. So every box will contain a highly restricted sample of six: uzult, porphyrine, nillycant, perinculate, marakat and the Orpiment Exultant (mixed by the fair hand of your resident apothecary, me).  [As WFCAT aficionados will know, one of these things is not like the others. – AK] They’ll look a bit like the Cultist Simulator launch present I made AK, which lots of people kindly asked if they could buy but I can’t make it work as a product:

Each box will also contain a unique collection of visitors, calling cards from notable guardians of the library, a library membership card, genuine 1900s-1930s sealing wax and ephemera and a couple of letters, among other things. Each box has a particular affiliation with a guest, who’ll appear in every copy of that box. In the Grove’s case, it’s Zulfiya the Barber. You might be able to guess the two of the three other libraries from their main guest, perhaps…?

And some of these guardians you’ve heard of. Any idea who these cards are from? (In reality, each of these will be gold-foiled – so imagine them being shiny and impressive.)

We’ll announce each box at the end of the month when it goes on sale on Etsy, along with a design update on BOOK OF HOURS from AK.

I can already hear some of you thinking: twenty-five? Only twenty-five boxes? These people are MORONS they will CLEARLY SELL OUT IMMEDIATELY! And you’re sort of not wrong. AK and I are a two-person team doing almost everything ourselves, and I nearly lost my marbles assembling, packing and sending 500 Lady Afterwards boxes earlier this year. So I’m trying to balance making fun, unique real-life items you can’t get anywhere else (like these Secret Historian boxes) with not going totally batshit managing a production line I can’t sustain. 25 boxes a month won’t make me want to throw myself into the Thames. This is good.

Against that, I do appreciate our volume limitations make it annoying for someone who logs in five minutes later than planned and finds all the boxes they’d been excited to buy have been bought. So if that’s you, fear not. Once we’ve released all four limited edition Secret Historian boxes – which we’ll advertise ahead of time, so you know exactly when they’re coming – we’ll then sell an unlimited Hush House edition, sold in batches so I don’t go nuts. This’ll make sure everyone who wants a box gets one.

Anyway, back to the fun stuff. Here’s the first batch of letters I received from our printer this morning:

You’ve seen these letters before, though not with their nice updated designs. But there’s one that’s totally new… What do you lore-hounds make of this?

Read-friendly text version here.

The Lady Afterwards

TLDR: boxed edition for sale from 31st May

As I mention above, I took on too much assembling and shipping 500 Lady Afterwards boxes on my own. But lots of people still want one, I’m delighted to say. How to square this circle? BY MAKING YER MUM DO IT FOR YOU! (But, paying her a decent wage to do so, so she can buy tulip bulbs and wine, her two major expenses.)

So we’re releasing another 1,000 Lady Afterwards: Boxed Edition boxes for sale on Tuesday 31st May 2022 on our Etsy shop. Like we did with the original runs of the Tarot of the Hours, we’ll release these boxes in tranches of 50-100 so my mother doesn’t totally lose the plot. This means if you go to our shop and don’t see any boxes available, don’t worry! We’ll restock every week – if you miss out one time, there’ll be another batch of boxes available very soon. Hopefully this’ll allow our teeny studio to provide boxes for everyone who wants one, without us having to stop doing all the other work we’re doing on actual games and becoming a physical-first TRPG store. Woot.

The Locksmith’s Dream

TLDR: prices + dedicated website coming soon

This post has gotten waaaay too long, so I’ll just say that there’ll be a separate website coming soon, with photos of all the different rooms, more info on what goes on during a weekend event, and allowing ticket purchases. We’ll announce ticket prices next week, most probably – keep an eye out! They’re pricey, because you’re buying a luxury weekend holiday in the Secret Histories, with posh nosh and Bureau agents and everything. And with everything we’re planning for Treowen they’re worth every English penny…

This post APPEARS to be posted by Lottie, but it ISN’T. We just can’t put the man’s actual name without revealing him. AND HE’S NOT READY TO COME OUT YET.

So, who on earth are you?

I’m an old friend of Alex, from the times before. I live in the UK and I’m the person who is fortunate to be making The Locksmith’s Dream happen, and making sure that everyone who comes along has an amazing time, as well as having some great stories to tell the friends and families.

If for some inexplicable reason you haven’t heard of The Locksmith’s Dream yet and don’t know what I’m talking about, read about it here!

What do we know so far?

We announced the beta of The Locksmith’s Dream is running in Monmouthshire, UK, in October 2022, followed by the first full event in December. We talked about its location, ancient country seat Treowen, in our last newsletter:

“Only a few places have the same name in every History. The house called Treowen is one, and in every history, the Wheelocks have found their way there. One history has them born from it, another says they shaped it, but they always return…”

Treowen, the faded Monmouthshire seat of the Wheelock family, on the Welsh Marches at England’s edge: the border between myth and legend.

Explore an untouched corner of the invisible world in this Suppression-Bureau-sponsored foray into the Bounds of the Mansus. Assume an identity of the House. Seek snippets of the Secret Histories. Trade Birdsong with the Curator, relax before an open fire in the Flint & Wheel Pub, and decide whether or not to believe everything the Inspector says…

Think occult Downton Abbey. Or a weekend invitation to your long-lost aristocratic aunt’s stately home, when your aunt is also a witch. Or the sort of stop-over the Vagabond might book on her way to the Fourth History, Atlas of Dreams and a bottle of sherry in tow.

We’re running a beta event in October, and our first full event in December 2022. Save the dates in your calendar! We’ll announce ticket prices and more details soon.

What have you been doing, then?

I’ve been scouting for suitable venues, found a few likely candidates, but when we came across Treowen, which has such a magical, otherworldly quality, we all realised that it was the perfect place to run The Locksmith’s Dream.

Then, having to decide the date of the first event. It was only after this, that I genuinely felt, right then this is actually happening, I’d better get on with it!

The Beta event will be running on October the 15th, which gives us a good seven weeks  to tweak and refine The Locksmith’s Dream before December the 7th, which will be the first of four events in December.

The other big thing I’ve been doing is getting a team together to create a wonderful experience for our guests. So, that means looking for actors that can help bring the experience to life, as well as a chef with an interest in the obscure and the mundane, who can help conjure up wonderful comforting dishes, as well as things that will surprise and delight.

Excitingly, I’ve just hired my first performer (hello Jade), who is brimming with enthusiasm and ideas, and I’m so looking forward to the next few months, once we start fleshing out the experience.

Where exactly is this going on?

Well, I’m usually sitting in my fancy shed in the garden. Occasionally a squirrel comes and gives me the eye whilst digging up the lawn outside my window, or the dog makes a huffing noise in his sleep.

I’m surrounded by beautiful (often tentacled) framed horrors that keep appearing on my walls as gifts. In front of my keyboard, I’ve got two reminders of what I’m up to: a proto/pre-memento of The Locksmith’s Dream (or whatever the word is for a reminder of something that hasn’t happened yet), and the other speaks for itself – an anti-inspirational card, which sometimes cheers me up and is, as Alex once told me, words to live by.

Behind me, I can feel Iris staring at me, approvingly or not I can’t tell, but I’m certain she’s conspiring with her tentacled neighbour on the wall.

So, what are you doing next?

Apart from staring at the inspirational words, and trying to avoid Iris’s gaze, 

• My main priority is getting the website up and running, so people can actually book tickets.
• Flesh out the team, hire a chef and more actors.
• Trying to get a model of the Treowen manor house. As many ideas that lead to sleepless nights often start, someone says Wouldn’t it be cool if ….  (insert slightly mad thing. In this case, it was a scale replica of Treowen that the guests can peer into, and see hints and clues).  I am spending far too much time looking into how and who can build this thing!

Make sure you’re signed up to the mailing list to hear more about The Locksmith’s Dream as soon as we announce things!

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.

The Snare of the Tree

LUCIDITY. ATTENTIVENESS. GENEROSITY. VITALITY.

What makes us glad we’ve played some games, and regret we’ve played others? What are the game design equivalents of ‘savoury’ and ‘sweet’? Why is a working title dangerous, what menaces lurk in model railway dioramas, and what is the Snare of the Tree?

First up, Alexis has released what I happen to think is his best non-game writing yet: a short, punchy treatise on what makes games savoury called The Snare of the Tree, and Other Perilous Seductions. He says I’m not allowed to say it’s a book about what makes games ‘good’, but it is certainly a book about criteria and response: how different people (developers, gamers, activists, scholars…) look at games, and if there’s one consistent, objective way of evaluating games when everyone’s coming to them with their own #beeeff.

Fear not: if this sounds like the difficult first essay English students are asked to write in their first term at university, it’s not. I can confirm it is (a.) short, spicy and extremely readable and (b.) thought-provoking without the density of French philosophy and/or decades-old Christmas cake.

Here’s an indicative extract:

“…The more a game allows a player to feel like they’re engaging with another human mind, the more valuable and exalting an experience it will be. And the best way to allow a player to feel that way is for them to engage with a game that embodies human qualities. The most obvious route to this is actual engagement with another human mind. […] This doesn’t mean multi-player games are better than single-player games. Single-player games have a steeper hill to climb. But despite increasingly sinister efforts from large tech companies, it’s not yet possible to distribute friends in a box, or to power them off when you don’t need them. And not all of us want company all the time. And there is of course a virtue in making art against challenges and under constraints…”

The Snare of the Tree is out now on Kindle and paperback on Amazon. The paperback will be coming to Etsy on its own and as part of a book bundle with Against Worldbuilding next week – just as soon as we get physical copies in. 🙂

AK and I elaborate on the best laid plans of mice and keyboard in a new Skeleton Songs episode, “A City Is Not A Tree”. Listen to us talk about Jack Cohen and Brian Aldiss’ fight over speculative xenobiology, how to avoid the perils of categorisation and diamonds, and simply to hear Alexis fake his own death. Literally. As usual, it’s available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or a host of other places all findable at the bottom of this page. Enjoy!

Announcing: The Locksmith’s Dream

Now, ah yes – we have an entirely new game to announce! Well, it’s sort of a game. We’ve been talking about this behind the scenes for a while, and are spinning off a new business to manage it next year. But we can now officially announce The Locksmith’s Dream, a series of invitation-only live events coming in 2022!

Since these are live events, places are seriously limited. Many people won’t be able to get tickets, and many others wouldn’t be able to travel to the UK anyway (particularly if the pandemic rages on – we’ll deal with that as it comes). So we intend to offer a physical Lady Afterwards-like home edition for people to run their own private embassies of night. More on that when we have more concrete details to share.

What does this mean for BOOK OF HOURS, I hear you ask? Absolutely nothing. BOOK OF HOURS is happily underway and we’ll have an updated 2022 roadmap for you next sprint. You’ll see a lot more movement on that project next year, including an expected early alpha and public beta. This year has been, well, a funny one – next year, we hope, will be more focused.

For anyone waiting on their pre-order box of The Lady Afterwards, you can now track your box’s progress here. It’s looking like a ship date of (probably!) February 2022, but we’ll keep pre-order customers updated as suppliers finish the various components that go into each box, and email with a confirmed ship date once we have it. Thanks for being patient!

For everyone else, you can get your Christmassy mitts on The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition here, on Etsy or a number of other places listed on The Lady Afterwards page. But if you really want a physical box – and I have to say, they do look pretty darn shiny when I pack them up – I’m delighted to be able to confirm that we’ll be releasing another batch of physical edition boxes next year. We’ll confirm the date they’re launching in advance so you can get the date and time in your calendar. They went pretty fast last time…

Hope you’re as excited as we are for BOOK OF HOURS, The Locksmith’s Dream and AK’s most excellent musing on the umami of games. We’ve a lot of dark, delicious things to look forward to. And it’s basically already Christmas. <3