Book of Hours News

Happy Friday, everyone! We've been planning the full BOOK OF HOURS production cycle this week - actually, we planned the whole Weather Factory plan to 2028, which I think you would really like if I could tell you anything about it. But it seemed like a good time to post an update on what we've been up to.



(Also known as the BOOK OF HOURS tarot deck, the successor to Cultist Simulator's Tarot of the Hours.)

Today I've reached an important milestone: all the Major Arcana cards are complete! 🎉

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



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

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



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

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



And notes in it like this



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

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

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

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

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

Happy August, everyone! A juicy BOOK OF HOURS update for you today, as we hit an internal prototype, updated the store page and have a bunch of new lore and design to share. Wishlist the game if you haven't already and receive the blessings of the Sun-in-Splendour, from another History. 🙏



[Written by Mr Lore himself, Alexis.]

We've already intimated that Hush House is one of seven notable libraries, each of a very specific foundation that ensures the attention of the Hours. That foundation is sometimes called the Watchman's Tree (or occasionally, in Britain, the Covenant of the Rood). At one point I wondered whether we might some day release DLC to allow librarians to manage each of the other six. I think now that will never happen. Hush House drips with history. I've drawn on months of research and years of reading around UK history and mythology to make it fit together satisfyingly. The thought of trying to do something like that for a library in China or Indonesia just ain't realistic.

So there's centuries of material available for the librarian to explore, but we want players to be able to enjoy it without feeling like they've been given homework (5% of you want a fifty-page downloadable PDF, but for well-rehearsed reasons, it ain't gonna be that way). It's better, ultimately, for it not to be visible at all than to feel like homework. It still affects the game. An iceberg only just peeks out from under the water; the motive force of a swan is rarely visible; most of the universe is dark energy.

But it is going to be visible. As Reverend Timothy has already intimated, Hush House has grown up in layers, like a coral reef or a complicated personality. The game board reflects this. It's the opposite of the Cultist Simulator board, which begins as a tabula rasa until card arrangements form their own set of layers. With one exception, of course - there is a part of the CS board which isn't a tabula rasa at all.

Lottie tells the story of how she met Ian Livingstone on a train, he advised us to put a map in Cultist Simulator, and that's why the Mansus is in Cultist Simulator as a new screen.



BOOK OF HOURS is all map. Some things go in your hand at the bottom (making that hand usable with potentially dozens of cards is its own challenge, but we'll get back to that). But most things go on the board - for example furnishings, visitors, weather, and, of course, books. Most of the map begins locked and dimly visible. Hush House was, after all, abandoned seven years before the Librarian arrives, in the wake of a mysterious fire. That fire, of course, is part of the history you'll explore.

But the primary board isn't the only map. There's also the Tree of Wisdoms, which we've already shown peeks at. It's one part character upgrade system, one part history crafting workstation, and one part endgame planner. More about that soon.



You saw BOOK OF HOURS' situation window designs in an earlier blog, but we also need a way to manage a CS-number of cards and objects (there're about 700 individual cards in Cultist Simulator, to give you an idea of the scale) with the much more visual approach in BoH. You need to have a clear view of the whole of Hush House while also being able to zoom in and manage individual rooms, be able to open multiple situation and/or information windows, AND be able to easily find and select whatever resources you like from an inventory.

These designs will almost certainly evolve before we actually launch, but it gives you an idea of the mechanics going on behind the scenes if nothing else.

I hope it also gives you the same sense of a hygge little window on a magical world of books and Secret Histories that you control, which is how it feels to me! Also, you can stare at a little Neville portrait all day if you keep inviting him round. Do. His favourite snack is Assam tea and pistachio éclairs, and that is officially canon.





(And yes, Monsieur le Grand-Duc du Jambon is one of the many, many names belonging to Chi, our resident scaredy cat.)



I also have some new room mock-ups to share with you! You may have seen this first one if you're on our mailing listL it's the first chthonic room carved deep in the foundations of Hush House, and shows the Chapel Calcite - the Minoan-inflected sanctuary dedicated to the Red Grail, consecrated centuries ago by the mysterious Sisterhood of the Triple Knot.



The second is our first external 'room' which is, of course, actually a garden - near the pantry and kitchen gardens, but one of the more unusual ways to descend to the underbelly of Hush House through a secret set of stairs within the well itself. Like a sort of jolly reverse-version of The Ring, with Gothic architecture.



Last but not least, this is our first look at Nocturnal Branch's lonely, sea-damp cells. Sparse, cold and infested with things you hope are spiders, but at least you get a jaunty portrait of a certain Mr J. C. to keep you company (or to judge you, implacably, with those icy blue eyes).



Finally, we can also share some new element art from our most excellent freelance artists over at Clockwork Cuckoo, the same team who worked for us on Cultist Sim. This batch are all skills, some of which we've already mentioned in previous updates. Any guesses which images represent skills you've heard of? There's so much MEANING in all of them...





We're now finally in a position to announce a release date for This Damn Library Game. DRUM ROLL PLEASE:

[h2]📚🎉 BOOK OF HOURS will launch in June 2023! 🎉📚[/h2]

We'll confirm a specific date nearer the time, and are now are working towards a public, playable alpha/beta/whateva later this year. More on that in our next update - we really see BoH coming together, and AK and I are incredibly stoked by its future design and improvements.

Oh! And one more thing - WE GOT MARRIED! Finally. [AK adds: we've been together for six years, and trying to get married for three of them. We finally did it, and we did it under a ship. Worth waiting for even if I'd married her under a bin, though.] We're waiting on the professional photos, but here's proof! Anyway - more BOOK OF HOURS soon, Beloveds. It's gonna be swell. ♥

BOOK OF HOURS has been through some major iterations since we first announced it, and we're now ready to share its new look. Click on the video below to watch our planned customisation in action, and scroll down to see various rooms from the different parts of Hush House.

The building's grown over almost two thousand years of history - from its foundation as the Abbey of the Black Dove, through its time as the Dewulf estate, to its guardianship by the Curia of the Isle, and finally its time as the Cucurbit Prison. So it's a honeycomb coral living history of many different eras. The Westcott Room dates from the time of the Curia.



From other parts of this syncretic castle, here's the solarium in the Church of the Unconquered Sun...



Here's the sweltering servants' kitchen above the smithy...



And finally, deep in the bedrock beneath the foundations of Hush House itself, in the upper reaches of the sea-caves: the Chapel Calcite.



More art, lore and a prototype coming soon. Stay tuned!

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Secondly, a new letter has emerged, revealing both the power of skolekosophy (the frightening Night Art of 'studying things that should not be studied') and the origins of the so-called 'Ortucchio Incident'.

At the turn of the century, the Nocturnal Branch of the Metropolitan Police was responsible for protection against ‘troubles unseemly and occult.’ After the fallout from the Ortucchio Incident, the Branch was dismantled and its functions absorbed into the civilian Suppression Bureau...

Long time no update! We're working towards a vertical slice of the game, which will be ugly and crabbed but will give the first real sense of what BOOK OF HOURS will be like to play. Here're some updates on where we are!

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:



(Click for a larger image.)

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 Cultist Simulator. 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 broad and ill-defined, 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 full images + alternative read-friendly text.

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!



(Click for a larger image, again.)

Finally, as a palette-cleanser from all that war, here're some recent elements for you to deduce the skills going into BoH...



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

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Finally, inspired by BOOK OF HOURS and launching to celebrate Cultist Sim's birthday, we're releasing an ultra-limited edition series of Secret Historian boxes each month, focusing each month on one of BOOK OF HOURS' occult libraries. The idea is that these boxes come from librarians' bureaus and reveal some of their most significant interests - including forbidden inks, calling-cards from important personages of the House, and more.



This month, we're releasing the box for the Grove of Green Immortals, a mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine, Moth and Heart lore, under the hand of the Applebright. Check 'em out here.

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Cultist Simulator and all DLC, soundtracks and The Lady Afterwards TRPG are 50-66% off this week in a mega Midweek Madness sale, so if you've not yet played BOOK OF HOURS' predecessor, now's a great time to jump in.

We also have some other Secret Histories-relevant bits of news:

• The Lady Afterwards: Boxed Edition is back on the merch shop! It restocks every Tuesday - tomorrow it's restocking at noon BST.
  
• The Locksmith's Dream is a real-world event set in Monmouthshire, UK and running in October and December this year. Tickets have just gone on sale on the official site - check it out!
  

Stay tuned for more Secret Historian's boxes, environment art and that vertical slice, coming AS SOON AS WE CAN POSSIBLY DO IT

Happy Friday, peeps! We've stopped doing our fortnightly sprint updates (please tell us in the comments if you'd like us to start doing them again), but we have lots of irons in the fire and I thought it's high time for me to give you an update. So here's what's coming up in the next chapter of Weather Factory: Still Not Doing the Visual Novel We Made Up In 2018.



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.

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.

TLDR: lots of it

Read our latest blog for more news on Cultist Simulator, our Secret Histories TRPG The Lady Afterwards, and our upcoming series of live events, The Locksmith's Dream. More updates for BOOK OF HOURS coming soon!