✨🐫 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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Click for larger versions.)

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

🎉 THE LADY AFTERWARDS: BOXED EDITION IS BACK IN THE CHURCH O’ MERCH! 🎉

The luxury, boxed physical edition of our non-linear, combat-light, story-centric Secret Histories TRPG is an occult Egyptian noir inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express. It contains everything you need for several evenings’ occult entertainment with friends (and/or cultists), including:

• • • • • The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
        • The Secret Histories Rulebook, a ~30 page mechanics primer
        • 18 hand-stamped clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
        • “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards
        • Eight customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and connections
        • Eight art deco character pins in silver and gold
        • A Game Runner’s Journal to keep track of players, game-states and evidence
        • A beautifully-scented black opium candle to evoke the Invisible Serapeum
        • A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria with real 1920s photographs
        • Two sets of antique TRPG dice in a velvet dice bag
        • A year-long 10% discount token for our shop
        • Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs
        • A full digital edition of the whole game

Back by popular demand, we’ve finally another 1,000 boxes to sell. We’ll release them in tranches every Tuesday so we don’t sell out immediately like last time, so if you check the Etsy shop and find they’re out of stock, just check back in again next Tuesday and you’ll probably bag one second time around.

This TRPG is a real labour of love, so thank you to everyone who’s bought one so far. <3 <3 <3

We have some more Lady Afterwards news coming up in a few months, but for now, good luck in Alexandria! I leave you with the fun behind-the-scenes tidbit that gorgeous Audrey Leigh Howard – a woman of no importance – is represented in Lady Afterwards as “Goddess of the Silent Screen” Dolores Costello – who just happens to be Drew Barrymore’s grandma…

…and handsome Jesse Lewis, the rogueish, devil-may-care Texan who wound up in Alexandria running the Métropole hotel, is represented by fin-de-siecle Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, inventor of the hugely influential Rorschach test (and nemesis to all dyslexics who want to spell his goddamn name). Proto-Brad Pitt or what?

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.

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…

Easter

1925

Gwen, dear —

Won’t make it to Alex this time, sorry. Flatter myself you’ll be disappointed. But your ma thinks I’m a bad influence, so silver lining, eh, and I’ll answer the questions I can, here.

You wanted to know about the Invisible Arts and the Great Arts and if there’s a difference. Had to think about this one. Spose an invisible art is any art the Suppression Bureau wants to lock up. And the great Arts count, but you can argue about what counts as an invisible art, and no-one argues about what counts as a Great Art. No-one who matters, anyway.

So the Nine: three Bright, three Night, three Unregarded. The nights are nyctodromy, skolekosophy, husher, the brights are horomachistry and that one I can never spell right and that sort of Persian one. Unregarded are a bit infra dig, tell you the truth. I’m a fair nyctodromist, smattering of some of the rest. But ‘nyctodromist’ means I’ve sharpened up my fet, know my way around the house in the wood, how to catch seventy-seven winks, how to cut corners through the world without getting in trouble. Bit about thresholds, bit about the sea-powers, little bit of Vak. (But Vak makes my teeth twitch.)

(Don’t know how up on your animatomy you are. Fet’s the bit you poke into the Mansus when you go, sort of like poking your tongue in somehwere special. Tell you what, wish I hadn’t written that. Thinking about crossing it out.)

Memory serves, last time you asked me if I was an adept, I started trying to explain, your ma got frosty, I didn’t want to cause a stink, changed the topic. So look. No-one’s got any business calling himself an adept unless he’s been through the Stag Door (and most of ’em are ‘him’, you know how it is). But not everyone who’s been through the Stag Door is an adept. I’m not. Adept’s a state of mind I spose. Scholars know things, adepts do things. Cept scholars also do things and adepts know things! And I do things and I wouldn’t call myself an adept. Spose I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. State of mind.

But don’t say ‘magician’, Gwen, dear. Magicians are trade. Or rabbit-botherers. Don’t know which is worse.

Come to think about it, invisible arts are an adept thing and Great Arts are a scholar thing. Put it like that, adepts are the eones Suppression Bureau locks up and scholars are the ones they don’t. (They try to lock me up now and then but I’ve made it pretty clear I’m not having it.)

My advice honestly is stay away from the whole business. Far away. So why am I in it? Because I couldn’t stay away from it, and if you can’t either, you won’t, and that’s how you’ll know, and that’s how it’ll be. My other advice: read two books on skolekosophy so you know what you’re staying away from, and then stay away from the rest of it. And if you’re going to sharpen your own fet, make sure you dampen down your phost or beef up your trist, because you’ll stick out like a nun in a you-know-what. Never think the House is safer than the Wood. Better lit is all.

Pots of love

Daymare

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.

Project synopsis

We started The Lady Afterwards in March 2021 when we had a surprise gap in Weather Factory’s production schedule. AK burned out and needed an indefinite time off work to recuperate. When you’re a two-person dev team and the ill person is the only one who can code, that’s a problem. So I needed to think of something commercially viable and interesting I could do as a solo developer over the uncertain time period AK might be off sick.

This seemed a good time to try making a Cultist Simulator tabletop RPG which we’d been talking about – mostly as a joke – for years. We decided to ship two versions: a premium physical boxed edition, and a more mass-market digital-only edition.

The project had four key aims:

1. 1. 1. Provide Weather Factory with a marketing beat in an otherwise quiet year
      2. See if we could attract new fans from the TRPG community (particularly Call of Cthulhu and D&D)
      3. Test new physical merchandise
      4. Test high-cost merchandise. Was it out of our customers’ means? Could we make something actually worth a high price point?

The Lady Afterwards launched as a limited physical edition (£150) on 21st October, and as an unlimited digital release (£30) on 18th November. Aims 1, 3 and 4 have all been successes, and we’ll know how Aim 2 went in six months when we can realistically evaluate sales across physical and digital storefronts.

What went well

1. The physical edition couldn’t have sold out faster.

There were only 100 boxes for The Lady Afterwards physical edition. We sold them in sixty seconds with no press and no advertising. I had advertising planned – announcements to 23k-ish social followers and an email to a 20k mailing list, for example – but I never ended up sending those out, because suddenly all my carefully-planned calls to action didn’t mean anything. “Hey thanks for being on the mailing list / following us on [ social media channel ], here’s a thing you can’t have!”

We didn’t expect to sell out so quickly, but we had considered the possibility of selling out at some point. So we had 500 not-yet-made pre-order boxes ready to sell through SendOwl, a direct-sale platform, on this website. We pushed this live ASAP on launch night with a hand-wavey estimate that we’d probably ship in about three months but it wasn’t a promise. We sold out of all of those in 72 hours.

We regularly get emails from people asking if there are any more physical boxes available, and when the box will go on sale again. There’s clearly appetite for the physical Lady Afterwards box. It’s made a nice contribution to the Weather Factory coffers already, and we plan to release another 1,000 physical boxes for sale next year. 👌

2. We tried loads of new things, so we learned a lot.

Neither of us had ever made a physical commercial game before, though AK has a long history of releasing video games and I’ve run a successful merchandise shop since 2018. We’d never made a commercial TRPG before, though I played a bunch of Call of Cthulhu at university and AK has been writing and running TRPGs since he was eight. We’d also never converted one of our IPs (in this case, Cultist Simulator) into another medium (TRPGs), I’d never worked with PDFs properly, designed and printed books of the complexity of The Game Runner’s Guide, and we think we’re the first game studio to sell a digital TRPG through Steam (grossing £10k in three weeks, so far). Now we’ve done all this, we have experience, we have suppliers and process, and we’ll do it better next time.

The project also changed our company strategy. We weren’t sure if anyone would buy a physical box of stuff we made for £150 + shipping. That’s more than ten times the cost of Cultist Simulator. But so many people clamouring for a box meant we really were producing something prestigious, unique and attractive enough to merit the cost. This has changed our expectations of ourselves as a studio, will make us more accurate with price points and sales projections, and means we’re highly likely to offer similarly boutique products in future. We have several new plans in motion that have only happened because we experimented with The Lady Afterwards.

3. We produced a project we’re proud of. 

The box looks beautiful, the game is 80 pages of well-researched 1920s Egyptian occultism, and the rules feel loyal to Cultist Simulator while respecting their new medium as a tabletop RPG. Designers and artists are always hypercritical of their work – you see all the flaws and the ‘could have beens’ – but even I thought it looked great when I saw the components together, tied with various ribbons, placed in various velvet bags and nestled into black shredded packing paper in its custom eco-box. I don’t think there’s anything else like this out there. The Lady Afterwards was inspired by the Horror on the Orient Express deluxe box set, but that’s no longer available (or costs £750) and is geared towards hardcore CoC players, not the more generalist audience we focus on. I’m proud to call The Lady Afterwards a Weather Factory product.

The digital version – after a few post-launch tweaks in response to feedback! – is equally unusual. Graphic design isn’t usually a key part of TRPGs (with a few notable exceptions, such as Swedish ‘doom metal’ eye-candy MÖRK BORG), but it matters to me. Subtle feminist touches that don’t alienate audiences but update old assumptions aren’t that common, either. And I did a lot of research into Alexandria at the time – from the British occupation to it-girls’ cheetahs and the history of gaslight on the continent. Most people who play The Lady Afterwards probably won’t care that much, but I do! And it all contributes to a coherent, believable setting unlike any other TRPG I’ve played. 

4. We made it really quickly.

Here’s a mock-up of the The Lady Afterwards from 2nd April 2021, next to a photo of the final thing on 21st October 2021.

The whole project took just over six months with one main dev and assistance from one other, neither working full-time on the game. There are 49 separate components that go into hand-packing a Lady Afterwards box, using 11 different suppliers. 44 of those components required individual designing. Two of those 44 were fully-fledged TRPG scenarios and rulebooks, totaling 80 pages of original design, writing and research. This is just the physical edition: the digital edition required other things, like turning print-first designs into editable PDFs and editing files to make them manageable and disseminable for online-only players.

Six months from conception to launch means we spent about £30k in total on it. This kept our costs low and limited disruption to Weather Factory’s other projects. We like doing projects quickly and efficiently: the quicker you work, the lower your costs, the less pressure on launch to turn a profit. There’s also less pressure on you as a developer to pick something ‘safe’ that’s been done successfully before, meaning you’re more free to try new, creative things.

5. We’ve added to our back catalogue without burdening our main dev.

We now have two high-value additions to the Weather Factory back catalogue which don’t rely on AK. I can manage the creation, shipping and customer support. He’s free for tech support on Cultist Simulator, and oh, to develop that whole new game we’re working on. 

It also boosts our commercial long-term viability. Cultist Simulator did well for us, but every year it’s an older product and there are newer, shinier games cooing seductively beside us. Steam sales are the most obvious and effective way to keep cashflow coming in year on year, but this increasingly reduces the money you make on each copy sold. Being able to inject a new, higher-price offering into the mix is really valuable. We did this before by bundling Cultist and all its DLC into an Anthology Edition, and our new Tabletop Bundle does this again with The Lady Afterwards. This should keep money coming in over time, while we work on other games!

What didn’t go well

1. We limited how much money we could make.

Selling out rapidly was great, but it strongly implies we could have sold many more Lady Afterwards boxes than we did. We had limitations because we’re a two-person team and have finite storage space, but if we’d expected to sell a greater number of boxes at launch we could have brought on extra help or hired extra space. We simply didn’t have the data or the confidence to make more realistic projections, meaning we significantly underestimated demand. This probably cost us some tens of thousands of pounds in potential revenue.

If we’d been overconfident with our sales estimates, of course – bearing in mind this is a physical product which needs stock ordering prior to release, and significant cash upfront – we could have ended up with tens of thousands of pounds of stuff that nobody wanted to buy. But we should expect to sell more high-value physical items in future, and be more bullish with our sales estimates next time. 

2. Production took a back seat.

There was a lot wrong with The Lady Afterwards‘ production, for two main reasons:

• The producer was also the main developer of the game. I was both in the business and on the business. But you can never be in and on the business at the same time: they’re fundamentally conflicting perspectives. It meant production took a back seat to creative development, and there wasn’t a neutral outside observer checking reality against estimates. I’m fortunate the project was successful, and that it was designed as a small project for one dev to complete on her own. Things could have gone a lot worse – I could have burned through £30k of Weather Factory’s money with limited return, for instance – if I’d been unlucky.

• I didn’t properly spec out the project. Because The Lady Afterwards wasn’t a project! It was a side-project, like the Lucid Tarot! Except that wasn’t true. Whether it had ever truly been a side-project or not, it certainly turned into a major project, and I didn’t acknowledge that. We’d started in such odd circumstances – when AK was too ill to work, indefinitely – that I didn’t consider it a serious Weather Factory project like Cultist Simulator or BOOK OF HOURS. I thought of it as time-filler with a nice commercial return while he recovered. This was a huge mistake, as it meant I did almost none of the usual budgeting, planning or sense-checking we’d normally do on a ‘proper’ project.

Exacerbating these mistakes was the fact that I’d never developed a TRPG before, and other than writing Cultist Simulator‘s romance victories, I’d never written a game before. I vastly underestimated the amount of work it’d be to research, design and write, as well as the amount of work I’d need AK to do. He was originally supposed just to be an occasional independent advisor, but that’s not what happened. The more I dug into TRPG design, the clearer my own limitations became. I was faced with the choice between with lower quality systems and design versus asking a sick, stressed AK for more of his time, undermining the whole point of the project in the first place.

We ended up somewhere in the middle. I was still the main developer but AK jumped in to design specific parts of the game like the re-roll system and to write chunks of lore for some Cultist Simulator characters. There was quite a lot of tension between us as a result. AK kept having surprise work to do, and I kept feeling like he inexplicably resented this lovely game I was working on. Normally we work excellently together, as we’ve worked closely together since 2015. But we were set up wonkily from the start, and it’s hard to right a ship in motion. This is part of the nature of creative work: when there’s something wrong with it, it often spills over into real life. I think the solution is to do production upfront and properly so you’re not fighting your own project from the start.

3. We launched the same thing twice.

The Lady Afterwards was always designed as two distinct parts: the limited physical box, and the more affordable digital-only version. I’d originally planned to launch both at the same time as part of Steam’s Digital Tabletop Fest in October 2021. Digital tabletop fans convert particularly well for card-game-y Cultist Simulator, and we usually get at least a smidge of featuring during relevant Steam sales. AK sensibly talked me out of this, to limit variables and lower stress. I acquiesced, and our sanity benefitted, but we missed capitalising on a sudden influx of high-converting traffic. We had nearly 61,000 page visits over that five day Steam sale – wouldn’t it have been nice to get even a percentage of those 61,000 digital tabletop fans to buy The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition?!

Everyone hates launches, as a rule. Every developer knows about post-launch blues, the strange emptiness that follows even the most successful release. And I’d been focused on this project as a developer and as a marketer for half a year. So when we launched The Lady Afterwards boxed edition in October 2021, it was a fantastic relief to have it finished and done with. But it wasn’t! Not really! I had to start beating the same drum almost immediately for the second launch of the same product, which was kind of exactly the same but less prestigious, and that felt weird and boring and draining. I’m not sure what the alternative would have been, other than launching both versions at the same time. If we release anything like this again, with a physical and a digital component, I’m forewarned.

4. Focusing so much on physical meant digital suffered.

The key selling point of The Lady Afterwards was the glamorous limited edition box. The digital edition was secondary: something to give the project more reach, to ensure everyone who wanted to join in could without a prohibitive price-point, and to make the project more scalable. (One of the big things I’ve learned selling physical merchandise is anything you have to send through the post doesn’t scale – it gets harder and harder to manage the larger your business grows. Digital is wonderfully easy to distribute, appearing instantly to the customer and without the messy interim of packaging and shipping. Digital scales brilliantly.)

But we’re game devs, so we know digital. We don’t know physical that well, so The Lady Afterwards was first and foremost a physical project. That meant that every part of it was designed with the physical box in mind, and later retro-fitted to suit the digital-only release. Sometimes that mattered very little: the game’s Spotify playlist of 1920s mood-music is exactly the same whether you bought the physical box or the digital edition. But sometimes that mattered a lot. The original print version of The Game Runner’s Guide is 50 colour A4 pages of text and images at 300dpi wrapped up in a PDF. That’s 364MB for one gigantic, unsearchable word document, which went down about as well as you’d expect when we included it in the initial digital edition. A few iterations later and I’m glad to say the Guide’s searchable online and less than a third of the size, but it wasn’t at launch. Equally, our eight different character sheets – lovingly designed like real-life 1920s British army forms – had similar size issues (one combined 28MB 300dpi PDF) and no editable text-boxes. We fixed this shortly after launch in response to feedback, but it again marred the original release of the digital edition.

5. Digital TRPGs are… their own special world.

To put it bluntly, I don’t know how anyone makes money making digital TRPGs if they don’t already have an audience. As well as selling through our own site and our Etsy shop, we launched The Lady Afterwards on two TRPG-specific storefronts: DriveThruRPG and the Open Gaming Store. We’re selling in line with my sales estimates on the TRPG-specific platforms, but digital TRPG sales seem more similar to book publishing than video games. If we’d released The Lady Afterwards only as a digital TRPG on only digital TRPG stores, the project would be a failure. Here’s why.

DriveThruRPG is the biggest, most successful digital TRPG shop out there. They operate a tiered badge system for increasingly successful products, ranging from Copper to Adamantine. They’re not super open about the number of sales needed for each tier, but here’s what I found out with a little research. My experience on DriveThruRPG corroborates this so far!

• • • Copper: needs 51 units sold (14% of all DriveThruRPG games sell this much)
    • Silver: 101 (15%)
    • Electrum: 251 (7%)
    • Gold: 501 (4%)
    • Platinum: 1,001 (1%)
    • Mithril: 2,501 (0.3%)
    • Adamantine: 5,001 (0.1%)

To put these numbers into perspective, we’ve sold an average of 250 copies of Cultist Simulator a day over the last year. Take that number with a pinch of salt because of the feast and famine effect of periodic major sales, but we’re still talking about a divisive three-year-old indie game, not Stardew Valley. Video game numbers eat digital TRPG numbers for breakfast.

DriveThruRPG also operate a 65% royalty rate for non-exclusive games, meaning if I sell The Lady Afterwards anywhere else, they take 35% of my money on every sale I make on their shop. If I promise only to sell through them, this royalty shifts slightly up to 70%, like Steam. But many devs already think Steam doesn’t do enough to justify their blanket 30% cut, and I can tell you as someone who’s sold on both platforms that I see more value added by Steam than I do DriveThruRPG.

This isn’t me hating on DriveThruRPG: other digital TRPG stores have similar terms, and they’re able to set self-preferential rules because they were smart enough to build the go-to digital TRPG storefront. But the combination of low sales figures – even for the most successful products – and a hefty platform cut means the money you make selling digital TRPGs is low. It’s bloody low. It encourages people not to spend lots of money making an original digital TRPG, but to do something quick and low-cost, probably using an existing ruleset that players already know. I’m also strongly disincentivised to spend any money marketing The Lady Afterwards on digital TRPG sites, as I make much better profit margins through SendOwl and Etsy. This explains why there are so many non-professional $0-10 digital TRPGs in digital TRPG shops: it must be extremely difficult to make decent money as a full-time digital TRPG developer.

Conclusion

Am I happy with how The Lady Afterwards went overall? Absolutely. The physical edition was a huge success, beyond my wildest dreams, and the digital version is a modest success which a bit of tenacity and cunning marketing will likely turn into a solid success over time. I learned more on this project than any other project of my career, and saw through the looking glass what it’s like to run a creative project. That’s a wonderful, empathy-inducing experience for a dev like myself, as I’m more usually on the production or art side of things.

The outcome of the project is that Weather Factory will consider special, limited, high-value physical components seriously in future, including them more frequently in our offerings alongside our video games. It’s already influenced some key factors for The Locksmith’s Dream, another off-beat non-game project we’re spinning up next year, and we’ll know whether it’s worth producing more non-game digital items once we have some long-term sales figures for the digital edition of the game. But I levelled up during these six months, we added another flawed indie gem to our collection, and I bloody loved working on it. More like this, please.

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

“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?”

Welcome to ROUND TWO! The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition is now live and available on (almost) all storefronts: Etsy, the WF website, our new Tabletop Bundle on Steam, DriveThruRPG, the Open Gaming Store and Amazon!

We make the most from buying through Etsy (where you can leave a kind review) or direct through this site, if you’re looking for guidance. 😄

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players, set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts. It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG where you’ll unravel a shameful history, meet some of the city’s strangest denizens, and ally yourself – or not! – with some familiar faces from Cultist Simulator.

The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition includes everything you need to play in digital form:

★ The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria

★ The Secret Histories Rule Book, a ~30 page mechanics primer

★ 18 clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more

★ 8 customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and Egyptian connections

★ A Game Runner’s Journal to keep track of players, game-states and evidence

★ A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria with real 1920s photographs

★ Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs

Best of luck in Alexandria, and hope you enjoy The Lady Afterwards as much as we enjoyed making it! It’s a proper labour of love.

More news on Lady Afterwards boxed pre-orders, BOOK OF HOURS and its 2022 roadmap, and an unannounced third project soon…

Our clearest update is the new Weather Factory website being finally live. We’ve a new freebies page, better navigation through our blogs and a wildcard SHUFFLE option which’ll pick any blog post or page from the site – including, potentially, one of the fabled WFCAT pages (‘Weather Factory catalogue’, if you’re not following AK on Twitter). There’s some hinkiness – it looks less good on some resolutions than others, for example – but please let us know if you discover anything technically borked. There’s a lot of weird formatting going on in blog posts, so don’t worry too much if you click SHUFFLE and are taken to a page with a massive grey box as a header and seemingly random blank spaces where images once were. It’ll take me some time to work my way through it, but I’m on it.

The Lady Afterwards is this sprint’s big news. The original 100 boxes sold out in 60s, and the 500 pre-orders we put up on the site sold out in 72hrs. This is not only hugely encouraging – thank you so much to everyone who joined in, either buying a box or joining the AMA or just being part of the community – but gives AK and I much food for thought when it comes to the future of Weather Factory. We’ll always be video-game-first, but seeing The Lady Afterwards‘ launch makes us seriously consider more TRPGs, more complex boxed items, and more ambitious physical offerings in future. Though I need to finish The Lucid Tarot before I start anything new…

But the lady’s not done yet! I’m mid-pre-order prepping (it’s looking like February 2022 for shipping at this stage, for anyone who’s pre-ordered a box), and we’re launching the digital edition of The Lady Afterwards – the £30 unlimited version – next sprint, on Thursday 18th November. This’ll go live at 6PM GMT / 10AM PST across our merch shop, digital TRPG sites like DriveThruRPG and OpenGamingStore, and even as a new ‘Complete the Set’ bundle on Steam – which we don’t think any indie has ever done before!

The digital edition contains everything you need to play The Lady Afterwards, just none of the physical components. So each edition includes:

• The Secret Histories Rule Book
• The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide
• 18 artefacts
• 8 character sheets
• Map of Alexandria
• Spotify playlist

Can’t wait to see that out in the field, and hear what you think of it. So far we’ve only discovered one typo and some bad Latin, which is pretty good for a launch!

AK’s putting up a new build of Cultist to the Steam and GOG beta branches shortly, and we can finally get back to all you patient players who’ve sent in bug reports we haven’t been able to resolve for a while. Thank you for giving us time on that! Next sprint we’ll have some BOOK OF HOURS updates to share, along with photos of our new IRL office which is covered in ivy and overlooks a sort of posh caterpillar full of street food. A snapshot of Weather Factory’s new digs coming soon…

 

The Lady Afterwards is a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG for 2 – 8 players set in the Secret Histories – the world of Cultist Simulator – where hidden gods watch over a Lovecraftian world of apocalypse and yearning. It’s been designed to offer an accessible experience to people who’ve hesitated to played TRPGs before, but to offer plenty of meat to tabletop aficionados too.

Track down Audrey Leigh Howard, a woman of high standing and dubious morals. Investigate a suspicious gentlemen’s club. Abort a plan. Avert a crisis. Or – depending on your choices – let the blow fall.

Each box includes:

★ The Lady Afterwards Game Runner’s Guide, a ~50 page TRPG scenario set in 1920s Alexandria
★ The Secret Histories Rulebook, a ~30 page primer explaining the mechanics and perils of the game
★ 18 hand-stamped clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
★ “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards
★ Eight customisable double-sided character sheets, each with personalised questionnaires and connections
★ Eight art deco character pins in silver and gold with backing cards and helpful quotations
★ A double-sided Game Runner’s Journal, to keep track of players, game-states and evidence uncovered
★ A beautifully-scented black opium candle to evoke the Invisible Serapeum, a mythic library
★ A full-colour A3 map of contemporary Alexandria, with real 1920s photographs
★ Two sets of antique TRPG dice in a velvet dice bag
★ A Steam key for Cultist Simulator, for the unspeakable instance where someone hasn’t played it yet
★ A year-long 10% discount token for our merch shop
★ Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs
★ A full digital edition of the whole game, so you can play with people online as well as in the real world

It all comes in a custom-made 1920s recyclable box, padded with black paper. Watch AK and myself doing a chill candle-lit unboxing and talking design here.

For anyone who misses out on the boxed edition – or for those of you who prefer digital TRPGs only – we’re releasing a digital version of The Lady Afterwards next month, on Thursday 18th November, on our shop, Steam, and various digital RPG shops like DriveThruRPG.

Tabletop Fest

We’re releasing The Lady Afterwards in line with Steam’s Tabletop Fest, where Cultist Simulator and all DLC is 40% off. Beloved CS-master Systemchalk is doing one of his epic broadcasts on our store page right now, we released some free Lady Afterwards-style Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons character sheets, and Steam invited us to make one of their new-fangled animated Game Profiles too. Check it out in the Steam Points Shop!

We’re also running a weekend-long developer AMA on the subreddit, live now until 6PM BST on Monday 25th October. AK and I will be there at the start and the end in person, but will answer whatever questions we can in between as well. Hope to see you there!

…though its seats apparently want to make you AS STRESSED AS THEY POSSIBLY CAN.

ANYWAY. This sprint, AK uploaded a new, semi-Neville-borked build of Cultist Simulator, and wrote a horrible update about “a sort of quasi-digestive self-immolation”, because of course he did. We’d appreciate any and all feedback from the GATE_OF_IVORY_ALPHA_UNSTABLE branch on GOG and Steam, sent to support@weatherfactory.biz. Please prepare yourselves for Cultist to do strange things, though it will not endanger your save file.

The Lady Afterwards launching next sprint!

We’re gearing up for The Lady Afterwards‘ launch next sprint, on Thursday 21st October at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT. The components are arriving bit by bit and are exactly what I’d hoped they’d be. I wish I could share more of the artefacts and Game Runner’s Guide, but here’s a non-spoilery group shot instead!

 

 

This is about 70% complete: only half the artefact handouts, one out of eight character pins, one out of eight character sheets, a missing one-page Game Runner’s Journal and a missing digital download card. I can’t wait to photograph the final collection! Especially on, er, a non-reflective surface.

Ask Us Anything

We’re running an AMA in line with launch, starting on Thursday 21st October at 6.30PM BST / 10.30AM PDT over on the Weather Factory subreddit. Join us to celebrate The Lady Afterwards‘ release, ask us about That Damned Library Game and wonder at AK’s ability to avoid answering lore questions!

We’ll keep the AMA ticking over the whole weekend, so if you can’t make it on Thursday feel free to leave a question and we’ll answer as and when. We’ll be back in person on the subreddit on Monday 25th October at 4PM BST / 8AM PDT to wrap the weekend up. A weekend-long AMA!!!! No, we don’t have anything better to do with our lives. 🤩 🤩 🤩

More delicious things

We’ll have a few fun things to announce when we launch – a freebie, a semi-freebie, a special Skeleton Songs and some news – so keep your eyes on our Steam page and social media. If you’re signed up to our mailing list, you’ll get it all direct to your inbox. Thank you, invisible and untiring internet mules!

(Fun fact about mules: Alexandria’s second-century necropolis, the Mound of Shards, was lost and forgotten in the fourth century. It wasn’t until an ill-fated donkey stumbled into the covered access shaft in 1900 that the catacombs were rediscovered. WE SALUTE YOU, UNFORTUNATE FRIEND.)

Be Kind to Ur Mind

AK and I are big advocates for mental health (cf. “Everything is remembered somewhere”, “Living with depression that isn’t yours”, part of Dread in Cultist Sim*), and it’s World Mental Health Day this Sunday. So we’re donating 100% of our Steam revenue on Sunday 10th October to mental health charity Mind. If you’d like to donate by buying Cultist Simulator for a friend, Sunday’s a good opportunity to make a difference!

I leave you with news that no, I wasn’t microdosing when I announced naively that the website would be live soon, IT JUST APPARENTLY TAKES LONGER THAN I THOUGHT. Soon WF.biz will be shiny. Today is just not that day.

Get hype for The Lady Afterwards while you wait! I can’t wait to hear what you think. ♥

*AK is very clear that Dread is not a simple analogue for depression, though the wolf that devours thought and colours leeching from the world are closely linked to the depressive experience.

Happy secret library sprint! Anyone notice anything different about the website? Ha ha me neither because staging site issues mean our designers haven’t been able to push it live this week after all. Which is a bummer, but not enough of a bummer that we’re going to push a new site live on a Friday and spend all weekend going OH GOD and HOW DID SOMEONE DO THAT and THE SITE IS SENDING EVERYONE TO A PHISHING WEBSITE IN NEVADA

(True fact: The Lady Afterwards was briefly purchaseable on this site, and someone found the link and nearly bought it before sensibly asking us if it was legit and us nuking the page into the sun. TLDR: websites are tricky and you should never give them an inch.)

Speaking of The Lady Afterwards, it’s now 🎉PRINT READY🎉! We’ve had most of the boxed edition items for a while, but the final versions of the 27-page Game Runner’s Guide and 15-page Secret Histories Rulebook will arrive on Wednesday next week, to shrieks of delight and/or horror when I realise there’s a typo on the cover. (It’s okay, they’re only proofs – I already found two typos on the page where I joke about being mildly dyslexic. 🤦‍♀️)

I can’t share much of the scenario without spoiling it for everyone, but I can gesture to what’s inside by sharing the contents page and the updated A3 map. Ommmmm nom nom nom.

One of the most significant recent changes was giving all our major NPCs faces, characters and relationship states. It took a long time to find relevant ’20s photos for everyone, but it really adds a new dimension to the game and should make it a lot easier for the Game Runner to get into character. Here’s an early section where we intro the NPC system:

The typo on this page is already KNOWN and NUKED >:(

Separately, we have The Secret Histories Rulebook, where Cultist Simulator is squeezed into a set of TRPG rules like some sort of arcane sausage. Here’re a couple of examples which don’t give too much away: the Chart of Days mechanic, and something AK mentioned a while ago – having to be really clear about things that we’re not normally up-front about.

We received a lot of feedback early on with Cultist Simulator that people wanted either some sort of glossary, library or other form of list in-game to track progress and show them how much was left to discover. There are lots of good reasons to do something like that – I love seeing a progress bar go up, or ‘x/9 collected’ somewhere in my quest inventory – but it would’ve punctured Cultist Simulator like a cat’s claw to a balloon. Cultist‘s whole thing is peeling back layer after layer of lore-snippets and comparative references; if we’d said things like ‘You have read the blue book and there are four more blue books you can find’ or ‘The Mansus is a physical place where magical people live, and there is a river in it full of salmon and grebes’, I don’t think you’d be reading this blog now.

Anyway, we’ve had to solidify things for the Game Runner to be able to do their job, but we hope we’ve managed it without draining the invisible world of too much of its mystery. YOU DECIDE!

One clarification, before we move on: after multiple enquiries, we can confirm that anyone buying the boxed edition of The Lady Afterwards will also automatically get the digital edition, too – in case they want to play with people who aren’t in the same physical place as they are.

Now, what was that video game we’re allegedly developing, but haven’t been sharing much of recently? Ah yes, BOOK OF HOURS. Updates have been slow because AK’s in the final throes of Cultist code rework (also the reason our tech support has been so shoddy recently. Thank you for bearing with us!), so I thought I’d share some of his design as it relates to the game’s soundtrack. This week we received a second round of BOOK OF HOURS music from composers Maribeth Solomon and Brent Barkman. They’re beautiful – a bunch of Cultist homages, a bunch of new tracks, a scary Wolf-Divided song that isn’t so menacing I don’t like listening to it (here’s looking at you, “The Old Must End”).

So let’s do a deep-dive into creative direction for music in a video game. Here’s what AK started with for BoH:

We also needed specifically musical references. When I was helping out with Sunless Skies‘ soundtrack I went into a lot of detail about specific instruments, but AK’s always been a big-picture kind of guy. So he suggested particular composers and big themes (like Sunless Sea was a game of ‘exploration, loneliness and survival’, while Cultist was a game of ‘apocalypse and yearning’).

Now for the game-specific stuff. AK already has a rough idea of BOOK OF HOURS‘ plot, and we know we want the game to follow a much more repeatable, seasonal cycle than Cultist Sim. The Hours are good thematic touchpoints: they each represent different parts of the world, and underpin the whole game – but they’re rarely interactable with, and easy to forget in mechanics. I love the idea of them and their music laying the foundation for the player experience in BoH.

We work with Maribeth and Brent to develop the final soundtrack, and our creative direction moves around and changes over the course of composition. Names and briefs morph as we develop actual, listenable tracks to work with, but here’s an early snapshot AK sent to commission, develop and assemble first passes at the soundtrack.

As Maribeth puts it, “The grid becomes a conversation in words and music… It’s a  conversation I cherish like a hidden story only I can excavate. I usually arrive somewhere else, somewhere unknown, and swim or travel back to new ideas. We fill out the grid together and walk around in a new space together.” See? THE CREATIVE POWER OF ART FTW!

I have dreams of using my otherwise useless knowledge of ’30s jazz for trailers (think “Blue Moon” from Fallout: New Vegas, but like, on a major budget), but I’m sure we’ll use at least one of the final tracks listed here too. Can’t wait to share them with you!

Next week, expect photos of our office – very Chapel Perilous, which is, of course, also our wedding theme – and FINALLY MAYBE THE NEW GODDAMN WEBSITE.

Have a lovely weekend for now! We’re off to play Psychonauts 2. 🧠

The Lady Afterwards release date

You can get your hands on The Lady Afterwards‘ limited edition physical box on Thursday 21st October 2021 and we’re releasing the digital PDF bundle a few weeks later on Thursday 18th November 2021. Here’re the deets:

We have some contingency plans if the boxed edition sells out in five minutes, but I don’t want to count our chickens before they’re hatched. But whatever happens, we gotchu.

This sprint we ran another TLA playthrough with Alexis as Game Runner – he’s alarming good. As a result I’ve made another round of changes – splitting the original booklet up into a Lady Afterwards guide and a Secret Histories rule book, for example, and replacing Mansus candles with a second set of dice to better build the Regard of the Hours. I don’t think we’ve spoken about the Regard of the Hours yet, the dice-rolling mechanic reflecting the Hours’ personal interest in players’ goings on. So here’s how it works:

Wish I could share more mechanics with you, but I can’t without spoilering the plot or revealing too much of the Secret Histories rules! But I think Cultist fans will like it. 🙂

Enigma

Finally – some of the more eagle-eyed in our audience have already noticed this, I believe – Alexis has relaunched the Enigma of Secret Histories project. He says:

Cultist Simulator, like Fallen London before it, had a complexus of Easter eggs and puzzles for highly engaged players to chase down. And just as with Fallen London, this complexus – ‘Enigma’ – got more elaborate and difficult over time, in a sort of arms race between me and the keenest players that left everyone else behind and took up way too much of my time.

So for attempt three, I’ve designed it as a more relaxed, more accessible, and longer beast. A sun-basking serpent, as it were, rather than a hummingbird; or a hedge maze rather than a carnival. I want people to be able to wander into the labyrinth on their own, or in pairs and threes, without needing help from or feeling that they’ve missed out on the fun.

• The initial phases are much less obscure. (They’re still quite obscure.)
• There are many ways through the labyrinth. If you find your way to the top, you can go back and explore the others.
• Right now it’s theoretically possible but, currently, ridiculously unlikely that anyone will be able to solve the whole thing. This’ll change over time as we release more clues. I’ve often seen Enigmatics get obsessive and frustrated. So it’s a long slow engagement, to help everyone stay a little more chill.

There are marks of distinction to be gained from engagement. You may see them on other folks’ avatars or elsewhere. Go here to begin. 🌓

Still here? Let me talk about WFCAT. WFCAT, the Weather Factory Catalogue, is an illustrated accounting of all our works, distantly inspired by the Factory Records catalogue. It’s very much a work in progress, but it already includes prototypes, games, books, occult entities, material entities, artworks, merchandise and miscellanea. When we’ve done, it’ll be something you can browse on the new site – a formal garden to go alongside the hedge maze of Enigma, which will occasionally afford views and clues. We like the idea of putting out an illustrated book, too.

Our new website should go live next week, and we move into some snazzy new offices managed by – I kid you not – something just called ‘The Bureau’. Stay tuned for more BOOK OF HOURS, Lady Afterwards and photos of our cats having their birthday. Happy weekend for now!

A day late ’cause last week was stressful, but HERE’S A NEW UPDATE ON FUN GAMES THINGS ANYWAY

BOOK OF HOURS [ in the voice of AK ]

A long time ago, I decided that everything I ever said about the Secret Histories would be inside quote marks. Or to put it another way, a long time ago I decided that everything I ever said about the Secret Histories would be ‘inside quote marks’. No, put the candlestick down please, I’m getting there.

What I mean is this. ‘There are many Histories’. Everything you read in game text is something that appears to have happened, or something that someone believes. All the books, all the primary sources, are books. There’s no one window into truth. If there is any kind of canonical truth about what is really going on in the Secret Histories, it’s contained in my notes, and I’m afraid that I’ve made arrangements to have my hard drive ritually pulverised and buried with me. In the past I’ve occasionally made clear and specific statements, but I’m just another source. Anything I’ve said ex cathedra you should consider to be a quote from the sermons of Ferezeref the Magpie, of whom you’ll hear more soon. Including that. ‘Including that.’

Except, except that Lottie is writing a sodding TRPG.

We can put a lot of stuff in quotes, and infoboxes, and on texture, but at some point, if you’re trying to GM/GR the game, that just gets precious and frustrating. So here and there she’s nailed me to the page. I’ve had to work through some of the details of what Forge-long and Lantern-long can actually do, at least in this History. Here’s an excerpt.

…can send dreams to trouble an enemy. The better idea the fulgent has of the enemy’s nature and real-world location, the more likely they are to find them. [Each of these is a bonus from Trivial to Major.]

– If the fulgent knows what city the target is in, that’ll help. If they know their address, that’s much better. If the fulgent has visited the address, that’s best.

– If the fulgent knows what the target might dream of – their hopes and fears – that’ll help. If the fulgent knows what the target has been doing recently, who they’ve met or what they’ve eaten, that’s better. If the fulgent has met the target recently, in dreams or in the world, that’s best.

– If the target has fulfilled potential requirements for entering the Mansus – e.g. someone’s been murdered in the room recently, or if they’re a Know – then they’re more vulnerable. If they’re in the Mansus, they’re most vulnerable.

– However, if the target has fulfilled requirements for entering the Wood, they’re safer. These include cutting a lock of hair; wounding the sole of the foot; or sleeping in the presence of as few colours as possible other than white and black (including hair and clothes).

– The more light there is in the place the target sleeps, the more likely the fulgent’s sendings are to find them.

Fulgents can enter a mirror, lens or light-source in the physical world: a process that has been called ‘transinhabitatation‘ by the Church of the Unconquered Sun, ‘alighting‘ by the Tragulari, and ‘scrining‘ by the Obliviates. An inhabited item of this kind, then, is a ‘scrine‘…

THE LADY AFTERWARDS

If your eyes haven’t been burned from their sockets by all that Lantern colour, I’ve been working on three things this sprint: the Game-Runner’s Handbook, the all-important artefact handouts, and actually getting my mitts on physical, IRL versions of everything prior to setting a release date for the game.

I have a release date in mind – I’ll announce it as soon as I’m confident we’ll be able to deliver on time. Watch this space!

It’s difficult to share images of the handbook or the artefacts without giving significant spoilers away. But here’s a look at the general aesthetic of the handbook…

…and here’s some of the physical stuff I can share.

(Please note that the map is a basic print-out for testing purposes – it’ll look much better in the final version!)

The boxed edition will be both limited and pricier than our other merch, but it’s worth reiterating that we’ll absolutely sell more boxed editions if the appetite’s there, and we’ll also be offering a digital-only PDF version for those on tighter budgets. So everyone will get a little slice of the tabletop pie if they like, and none of it will have Glassfinger Toxin in, probably.

A NEW LOOK

Lovely though it is, we’re revamping the Weather Factory website so it looks and works better! You may have noticed some odd numbers and Hush House-style category notes in the ‘Games’ dropdown of the site already – check out Ophir and Procopius if not.

We’ve been talking a lot about the Factory Records catalogue (the cats are definitely each getting their own catalogue number) and the SCP Foundation, which reminds me of the Cultist Simulator wiki if it had gotten drunk and fallen over. So we’re working on a new WF.biz that leads people through a variety of info, lore and strange pages with ‘artist’s impressions’ of centipedes on them, in the hopes it’s a more interesting (and easy!) place to browse with the new design. I expect this live at the end of the month, but we’ll confirm when we know for sure!

Also, this might be relevant:

🌓

BUGS

Finally, I’d like to apologise for anyone who’s been waiting on support help from us for Cultist Simulator. We’ve been behind on the support queue since AK’s been ill, and I, sadly, am as gifted a programmer as a vole from the eighth century. We’ve also been unable to push out smaller JSON-specific changes because all the refactoring work AK’s done to Cultist‘s code base to make BOOK OF HOURS work better has to be finished before we can build new versions. TLDR: we’re sorry, and we should be back on support form in the next few weeks! Thank you very much for bearing with us. <3

Alexis has been on some weird Wes Anderson odyssey with his best friend in Croatia this week, but he kindly found the time to write an update on the work he’s been doing on BOOK OF HOURS before then. Take it away, AK-from-the-past!

Last time, we shared this image. This week, we’re going to talk about it. Some spoilers follow, including a couple of possible ending spoilers, so skip ahead to the cat pic if you’d rather not see ’em.

There are nine Wisdoms in BOOK OF HOURS which a librarian (or any other scholar) can pursue. Each of these is associated with three of the traditional Secret Histories aspects, and nine skills. Some of these skills are more familiar than others; nearly every skill appears in more than one Wisdom line. The unnamed Wisdom of Edge, Lantern and Winter above includes the skills of Ouranoscopy, Snow Stories, Serpents & Venoms and Sacra Limiae. Ouranoscopy and Sacra Limiae are also relevant to the Horomachistry Wisdom, and Serpents & Venoms is also of interest to skolekosophists.

You’ll notice there’s overlap between the interests of scholars and adepts, but they tend to do different kinds of things, in the same way that good scholars of game design are not necessarily (honestly, not often) good game designers, and vice versa. Different things can be true about the same thing you look at in a different way, especially if those truths don’t conflict. We’ll come back to that.

How do you advance a Wisdom? In an earlier design draft, you found Insights for the relevant Wisdom in books, and you plugged those into the Wisdom tree, which in turn spat out related skills. This is roughly the way a lot of skill trees in games worked, but in a game about knowledge, it seemed rather backwards. If you read a book on the history of fifteenth century Armenia, you’d learn more general things about History, but you wouldn’t get a History insight which you could plug into a notional Wisdom tree which would spit out a skill relating to the history of twelfth century France.

So now it works like this. You read a book about Ouranoscopy, and that improves your Ouranoscopy skill, and then you can present your Ouranoscopy skill card to the Wisdom map above, and say, O Map of Wisdom, behold that I know some Ouranoscopy. And lo the Wisdoms will answer, did you want to advance along the Horomachistry line, or were you looking to improve that other Wisdom? And you might answer, that other Wisdom, cos it’s something to do with Edge and Lantern and AK won’t tell me what it is yet but it sounds like a gas.

So why advance a Wisdom? Well, first, bragging rights. Who doesn’t want to be a skolekosophist (except those losers who don’t enjoy picking hungry worms out of their ears)? Second, attribute advances. There are two attributes – elements of the soul, usually – associated with each Wisdom. So fet (the part of you which dreams, the part you wear when you visit the Mansus, which of course as you know manifests just below the skin of your navel) is associated with Nyctodromy and Horomachistry, and you can choose to get an extra Fet card by levelling either of those up.

But third, if you want to reach a victory, you’ll need to get one of those Wisdoms to the outermost ring. Maybe you don’t, maybe you just want to chill in a library and dabble in all the Wisdoms… but there’s a single unique book (in some cases, not exactly a book) that, if you master a Wisdom, you can use to help you reach a fundamental conclusion about the world. We’ve already mentioned two of these books in passing elsewhere. Here’s one:

Those last two options are possible conclusions about what has happened, or what will happen. Of course, just because you draw those conclusions, it doesn’t mean they’ll happen, right? Who changes the world by spending years in a library? ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’

I (Lottie, again) have been working on the Lucid Tarot and The Lady Afterwards while Alexis has been doing insane things with spreadsheets that would make your brains explode with Fascination. I’ll write about the tarot later, but here are some of the updates for TLA. We mentioned that part of the mechanics – the ‘Regard of the Hours’, specifically – require a tarot deck, so in case anyone doesn’t have one we’re including a mini pocket-deck called the Essential Hours. Here’s a mock-up!

Each deck’s a portable A7 size and includes the 23 Hours we know and, possibly, love, from the Moth to the Mare-in-the-Tree. No minor arcana, no messing about, and the only way you can currently get a God-from-Nowhere on a card. Who wouldn’t want a God-from-Nowhere in their pocket?

I’ve also been working with a new supplier on our character pins and have a test run in the works. They’ve told me we have to change the design slightly to cater to ‘reality’ – pfft – but it should still maintain the 1920s feel. I’ll share pictures of the real things when they arrive!

And the biggest part of my sprint’s been on writing the whole Game Runner’s Guide, which I can’t show you at all yet. So in the meantime, as everyone seemed to enjoy the Dancer’s, have another character questionnaire! This time for the BYT.

I’ll leave you with a new Skeleton Songs episode on D&D and TRPGs’ enduring legacy. Listen on our YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you normally listen to people talking into your ears. I genuinely thought that whole bit where Alexis explains Debbie and Elfstar was him ad-libbing a joke, until I looked it up. 😫

First things first: we’re 33% off in GOG’s Summer Sale, and today is Stop Cyberbullying Day. Cyberbullying is a cause close to our hearts,
having been on the wrong side of it once. We’re keen to encourage a better understanding of how even benign-seeming interactions on the
internet can contribute to people having a really rubbish time. So we’re #stopcyberbullyingday sponsors, and we’re donating 100% of
Cultist‘s revenue today to CyberSmile, the internet charity behind it all. Please buy Cultist and support the cause! Or, y’know, just donate if
you already own a copy. ♥

Now, onto bizniz. BOOK OF HOURS? Remember that? Alexis has been getting into some core design work this sprint, and has produced the single most juicy design doc I’ve ever seen him make. I’ll let him talk it through…

Here’s a very early, long-superseded draft of the skills system in BOOK OF HOURS:

(1) my games generally outgrow early design documents and the early docs get cast off chrysalis-wise, but I’ve learnt that it’s useful to hang on to the discarded husks. The design process is often like roaming a semi-wilderness, and you’ll never have a definite map, just a series of explorer’s diaries. Earlier diary entries may describe places you’d thought were unhelpful, but you later want to return to. Pixar used the phrase ‘exploring the neighbourhood’ to describe this incremental quality.

(2) you’ll notice a mixture of hard numbers, fluffy design notes, and extremely fluffy design notes. This ties into the incremental, exploring-the-neighbourhood, exploring-the-forest aspect of the design.

The arrows tend to go one way, but later steps inform previous steps. I might start with something like this:

but a lot of those numbers are obviously just easy multiples of 5 or 10. Most of the time you may as well stick with the easy multiples, because it makes everything more intuitive and you can tweak elsewhere, but often you’ll want to go back and change it. Or as the lore develops, you’ll think, crikey, Winter stuff should work differently, and you’ll go back into the mechanical design to change it.

Back to the skill design.

(3) Some of those skills are very flavourful, some less so. Nyctodromy is an invented word (thanks Matt for Greek etymology help!) which plugs back into the lore of the game. But ‘Horticulture’ is a more traditional top-down way to try to characterise skills – the kind of thing it’s useful in the real world to decide to read a book about, or score an interview candidate on, but not necessarily the kind of thing you’d use to distinguish one interesting character from another in a game. You get a lot of this sort of thing in skill systems (and I know, cos I’ve written a lot of them and done a lot of this sort of thing). It’s not always what you want. Let me move to a concrete example.

All the green-highlighted items are things that would conceivably fit under ‘Horticulture’. But isn’t this more fun? The system goal is to let people learn the world and define their characters (both as librarian and as library), not for us to assess the character’s career suitability as a guardian.

Of course, there’s a fierce complexity cap here. One of the problems with all my games, from Fallen London onwards, has been what you’d expect from an ADHD designer working in an ADHD framework: everything can connect to everything, and that’s sometimes exciting and sometimes a problem. It don’t fit easy in a spreadsheet and it don’t sit easy in a player’s mental model.

As has now passed into Weather Factory legend, Lottie got talking to a man on a train and the man turned out to be Ian Livingstone and Ian, when he saw the Cultist prototype, advised us to put a map in it to show people where to go and so almost at the last minute, we added the Mansus:

and for Exile, we made sure to add this:

and the equivalent for BOOK OF HOURS started as this:

and now Lottie’s turned it into something more coherent and attractive, though still extremely draft, which is this:

If you spotted any resemblances between that and our BOOK OF HOURS road map, you’re paying attention, award yourself a nine-pointed gold star.

See you next time.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hard at work on The Lady Afterwards, which I was delighted to see get a really positive reception! To answer two common questions I’ve seen floating around:

“Will there be a digital edition, too?“

Yes, we fully intend to release the limited edition boxed version along side a cheaper digital download. We just haven’t confirmed how that will work yet, so don’t want to promise it and then have to renege. You won’t get the full experience (e.g. we can’t send you candles in PDF form), but you’ll be able to play TLA whatever your budget.

“I want a boxed edition! But the 100 boxes of the limited edition will sell out really quickly…“

We hope they do! Based on the response so far, we’ll probably produce more copies after the 100 limited edition boxes are sold. They might look slightly different, but they’ll still have everything you need in ’em – just like our follow-up run of the Tarot of the Hours after their limited edition sold out.

Now, some actual updates on the game.

I’ve been working on the all-important character sheets, trying to create something that feels TRPG-ish, doesn’t require anyone to have any experience in TRPGs in the first place, and feels true to Cultist Sim. The above is the character sheet for the Dancer, for instance: double-sided, with personal details and skills on the front, and character details and notes on the back.

Here’s the questionnaire in more detail, for anyone who’d like to create their Dancer character now.

I’ve also been working on the soundtrack for the game, which will be a QR-code-unlocked Spotify playlist (hence the need to pixellate). I’m a massive early jazz / easy listening fan, so this is my opportunity to get some 20s vibes up in everyone’s grills.

I also finished the map of Alexandria, which players will explore in their efforts to hunt down Audrey Leigh Howard. There’ll be a lot of lore here, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is a tentative search area for the elusive Serapeum…

Finally, for Fascination points, I leave you with this trenchant quote from the back of the box. Make of it what you will.

Oh, and a long-awaited revamp of the merch corner happened this sprint! So I’ve finally managed to get rid of all the cardboard boxes scudding around our eyrie and have everything neatly aligned on copper shelves. This is where all orders come from if you buy anything on the Etsy shop. Hush House vibes, eh?

We’re going on holiday in a week’s time, so there’ll likely be another pause in updates while we’re away. But more on BoH, The Lady Afterwards and the tarot soon. 🕯