Book of Hours News

Disclaimer: Weather Factory is a two-person husband-and-wife team. In the following guest post, the two localisers translating BOOK OF HOURS into Russian are incredibly kind about AK's writing. Because we are Extremely English we're both touched and slightly embarrassed. Please note we didn't write this ourselves under the pretense of being two other people we just made up.

First, a… warning? This is going to be a series of longish weekly (?) posts with no TL;DR takeaways. But we are confident that the core Alexis Kennedy audience doesn’t mind a bit of reading.

But I seem to be forgetting my manners! An introduction is in order: my name is Boris, and whenever I say we, I mean me and my colleague Mikhail. We are a two-geek team of Alexis Kennedy aficionados dispatched by Riotloc (of Baldur’s Gate 3 fame) to help Weather Factory localise Book of Hours into Russian. (Because OF COURSE a team whose forte is handcrafted localisation of narrative-rich videogames is bound to have its own chapter of the Alexis Kennedy fan club!) 

So, what can I say? Book of Hours is, without a doubt, a unique gig. At a minimum, unique in terms of how we go about localising it. As funny as it may sound, with Alexis’s prose we often find ourselves spending inordinate amounts of time on a single sentence, writing, and rewriting the translation - only to realise a couple of days later (usually during a lunch break or a family dinner) that there is a still better way to phrase it (which we HAVE to write down that very instant!).

I recently asked Alexis whether his writing routine looks like Mozart effortlessly transcribing his music, or like F. Scott Fitzgerald endlessly rewriting his masterpiece until it reads just right. He quoted Hemingway by way of an answer: ‘I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket’.

By the way, it is no random thing that I mentioned Fitzgerald. I vividly recall an episode from my Translation Studies where we were given different translations of The Great Gatsby and told to argue which of them was better. I distinctly remember poring over one such translation genuinely wondering why on Earth did the translator make so many lexical departures from the source material?

The answer is, there are more things to meaning, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your strict literal translation orthodoxy (or something like that; sorry, Shakespeare mate). Things like flow; prosody; visuality; alliteration. The Great Gatsby had them in spades, and, translated literally, would have lost most of what made it so, so beautiful.

Well, thus appropriately humbled, I try to go about reading Alexis’ prose in a more nuanced manner, always on the lookout for things beyond mere literal meaning. And things beyond mere literal meaning there are!

Take the following description:

"There in a smoothed hollow at the altar's foot - something coiled like a serpent, but stiller by far."

Seems straightforward enough, eh? You can probably Google Translate it into another language, and the meaning will be there, right? Right?

How about we arrange the phrase’s presentation a bit differently:

"There in a smoothed hollow at the altar's foot -
something coiled like a serpent,
but stiller by far."

Unless you are a chatbot, by now it should be pretty obvious that this looks suspiciously like poetry. Not strictly haiku verses, no - the same principles apply to things like rhetoric, speeches, etc. This particular technique is called a descending tricolon: when the phrase is arranged in lines of decreasing length.

Here’s a famous example from Churchill:

"(Never in the field of human conflict)
has so much been owed
by so many
to so few."

There is also a reverse, or ascending, tricolon. Churchill once again:

"Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

So, with that in mind, one will probably think twice before treating the following line of Kennedy’s as mere prose:

"Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner's energies."

Let me arrange it for you:

"Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
          by the former
                       prisoner's
                                   energies."

And this isn’t us philologists discussing arcane minutiae of the English language. These are incredibly potent tools that help poets, writers, and politicians charm their audience. To lose this aspect of a text would make it powerless, neutered. It simply won’t do.

And this is where we break off. Next time I will continue with my story of the eldritch horrors that lurk beneath Alexis Kennedy’s prose (kidding). Stay tuned!

"To mix the rarest colours, a merciless detachment is required."

Firstly, EHSAN (2024.2.e.11) is now live for everyone on the BOOK OF HOURS main branch. The changes are:



[h2]Conversations in HOUSE OF LIGHT[/h2]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834350/BOOK_OF_HOURS_HOUSE_OF_LIGHT/

AK here, talking about talking.

There’s about twelve thousand words of direct, in-character speech in BOOK OF HOURS – mostly things that Visitors say to you about their business, plus a little bit of villager chat.

"Heist? Oriflamme's? Poppycock. Forgeries? Poppycock. Bureau all over the place arresting everyone though. Worse than Ortucchio. Bloody pardon me pain in my bloody pardon me hinder parts pardon me."

— Dagmar, from The Affair of the Oriflamme Heist

None of it is the Librarian, who, says nothing at all out loud. This is mostly the result of a perennial game-writing problem: there’s a risk when you put words into the player’s mouth that the words aren’t ones they'd choose to say, though there's more leeway with internal monologues, mental asides, and formal contexts like letter-writing.

Some games deal with this by making the words as bland as possible, which is only a solution in games where writing isn’t important.

A second solution is to make the words sufficiently characterful or witty that the player enjoys feeling they said them, which is easier when the PC is a strong character, say, a noir protagonist like Disco Elysium's.

A third solution is writing several different lines for the PC to choose and hoping at least one lands, which you almost always have to do in a trad CRPG, and which at least diffuses the problem, though you’ll still often find (e.g.) you’re offered Haughty, Direct or Cheery when what you really wanted was Professional, or whatever. (Owlcat’s latest offering did this well, partly because the protag’s attitude to their exalted position naturally breaks one of several ways - partly by throwing a lot of text at the problem – partly because the writing was, by and large unusually good).

And a fourth common solution, one that I usually favour, is the silent protagonist. This is a natural fit anyway for a game where the most likely line of dialogue for the protagonist is shh! It's put me in a slightly odd place with salons, though - the social events you're holding for Visitors in HOUSE OF LIGHT. Various Visitors are probably going to be subject to occasional outbreaks of direct speech, but the host will likely keep their mouth shut - the current (TBC!) design is that you can sometimes intervene by adding a Soul card, but more along the lines of directing conversation than holding forth. I guess this makes the Librarian a better host, though. I did start worrying that it was odd that you serve food for your guests and don't cater for yourself. I briefly fiddled with adding it to the design. But then I thought, is anyone really going to complain if I make salons require 20% less canned ham? Probably yes. But then that's more canned ham for the rest of us.

[h2]Colouring book out now[/h2]

Lottie here again, and I'll sign off with the news that the limited edition Lucid Tarot colouring book is now live in the Etsy shop.



This is your first opportunity to look at all 78 cards of the Lucid Tarot deck in detail, and/or an excuse to spend hours and hours relaxing with an adult colouring book and your pens / pencils / crayons / pots of Porphyrine. It's 172 pages of the Hours (and their Minor Arcana friends) as you've never seen them before - because YOU haven't decided what Principles to associate with them. Well, now's your chance! Scandalise the community by colouring the Hermit in flaming hues of Forge-y orange. Give the Stymphling a makeover in Nectar green. Each Hour has its colour, but maybe you disagree...

- All bookshelf plaques are now invisible until they have text

There were just a handful of plaques that were invisible even when blank

- 'De Bellis Murorum' is now considered a Curia period not Dawn period book

There are a few others that are arguably miscatalogued, and a few more that are debatable (is 'Ettery After' actually Baronial or Curia? It depends partly on whether Eva actually wrote it or not) but I'm cautious about changing them because it's easy to break implied continuity, and easier still to break people's saves

- It's no longer possible to repeat unique book interactions with visitors

You can't farm Peel anymore

- It's no longer possible to clone a village resident by hiring them twice

Mrs Kille is not twins

By popular demand, added period marker aspects to books; no in-game effect, just helps with scholarship

It does crowd the visuals a bit, and there'll be another aspect on each book coming in the free release alongside HOUSE OF LIGHT, so this may not stick

- MacOS: now includes binaries to run natively on Apple Silicon

Happy perf day

- That last window shelf in the Windlit Gallery is now a bookshelf

It was upsetting peopley

- Fixed an anomaly where you could dump a language card from a window and the aspects display didn't update

Man, this was complicated. It's always the little things

- Analysing a craftable item will usually now give you hints on how to craft it

I've been working on some new revolutionary (!) UI for our upcoming BOOK OF HOURS expansion, but I can't show you it yet because it's not final functionality, and we don't want people misconstruing an early mock-up of an eight-slot situation window devoted entirely to teacakes as a promise that HOUSE OF LIGHT will feature, at minimum, 400 different types of bun. But I am very excited to show it to you when we're more certain of the direction: it makes a lot of our upcoming expansion functionality much clearer.

What I can share, though, are some juicy new details: because the HOUSE OF LIGHT Steam page is now live! If you can, please head over and wishlist it, even if you're a lucky Perpetual Edition holder who'll get the expansion for free when it launches. (Wishlists make Steam think we'll make them £££ which means they're more likely to promote HoL / BOOK OF HOURS. Cf the algorithm section on this page from history.) It also means you'll receive an email the moment the expansion is live, so you can dive in and start playing lickety-split. Thank you!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2834350/BOOK_OF_HOURS_HOUSE_OF_LIGHT/

Here's a gloss on the main points you'll see on the HoL Steam page, to explain where we're taking things...

[h2]Social Events[/h2]

Host influential dinner parties in the crumbling splendour of Hush House. Choose a location that suits you - the Hall of Division, the Chapter House, or the Physic Garden, perhaps? - and send out invitations. Become tastemaker of the occult demimonde, or curate an exclusive society of only the most select adepts. Get to know the great and the good, introduce topics for discussion around the table, and observe the chemistry - or animus - between your guests. You'll need food, drink, ambience, entertainment and more, but a successful soirée will influence the world in subtle ways, sending ripples far beyond your walls.

NB: AK is still working on the design and this is TBC, but it might be possible to to invite Visitors AND named Assistants - which means you could sit Reverend Timothy down next to Aunt Mopsy and see whether Good triumphs over Evil, or sandwich Denzil between Franklin Bancroft and Daymare to torture his saturnine soul.


[h2]Cooking[/h2]

Your guests will grow hungry, and it's up to you to cater to their interesting palates. Bake honey sandwich cakes and pair with port. Perfect beef suet pudding. Serve veal and cucumber, dark-smelling 'garden nectar', or a simple bowl of tinned peaches and cream. Dive into the dangerous world of 1930s European recipes and influence your attendees with your choice of spices, sweetmeats and dainties.

NB: like my teacake point above, PLEASE NOTE that we do not guarantee the presence of honey sandwich cakes, port, beef suet pudding, veal and/or cucumber, or tinned peaches and cream. We haven't yet confirmed exactly what recipes you'll be able to cook in the game, though we will update the description to reflect specific recipes nearer the time if they change from this list. If it makes you feel better, 'garden nectar' was actually a thing in 1930s English cuisine, apparently 'an elegant variation of borscht' which AK will undoubtedly turn into something horrible like Mondays broiled in the blood of the Thunderskin or something. In hindsight, maybe that doesn't make you feel better.


[h2]Advanced Visitor Stories[/h2]

You've dabbled in the Affair of the Oriflamme Heist. You've guessed what lies in the Messenger's Casket. Now help your Visitors delve deeper. Encourage alliances between strangers, or convince an ally to help you stymie a foe. Using an innovative new system, influence the wider world with in-depth Visitor stories and see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree. Where now does the dappled rose flourish? What did Zuthi hear at the Roost? What is the deeper connection between Rowena, Yvette, and Ys?

Once you've met someone, you'll also be able to add them to your address book and invite them to Hush House to pursue their business at a time of your choosing. When the Librarian calls, the invisible world listens.

NB: take particular note of 'innovative new system' and 'see the results between the branches of the Wisdom Tree'. Again, this is more UI I can't show you yet but it is a new format for storytelling in BOOK OF HOURS that a) looks significantly different from stories played out elsewhere in situation windows and b) connects more closely with the Wisdom Tree. More on that later, with pictures.


[h2]The Lighthouse Institute[/h2]

You've wined, dined and appraised your chosen guests - now decide who's worthy to form the board of the Lighthouse Institute. Who should be Treasurer? Who might suit Secretary Vigilant? Does your group all share the same agenda, or does one boardmember sympathise with the Chandler, while another fears his coming Dawn?

Your selection will found the influential Lighthouse Institute and set its course through the world. So take your time, and choose wisely.





On another news-y note, we announced earlier this week that the Lucid Tarot colouring book - showcasing all 78 cards from our upcoming transparent stained-glass PVC deck - will launch on the merch shop on Wednesday 28th February. As with all our new merch, this is an experiment so it's initially a limited edition: there're only 500 copies of this colouring book, to get a sense of appetite for the item in question. They're really lovely, though - so if you fancy a quiet night in with a glass of wine, or a sunlit afternoon watching YouTube and doodling or something - I think you might like them. :)

"January 9th, 1838. A heavy snow falls on Brancrug. When the staff dig themselves out, Solomon Husher, third Librarian of the House, has disappeared from his quarters in the Long Tower, leaving a letter of resignation. 'Winter,' the letter concludes, 'does not wait forever; though Janus might.' Husher is never seen again, but every year on the same day, his footprints can be found beneath the Tree."

What were you doing on the 9th, when Husher's footprints once again appeared beneath the tree? We were working on BOOK OF HOURS' latest patch, EHSAN, which contains:



I haven't heard of anyone finding the 'well-hidden surprises' yet - I yelped with surprise and delight the first time I found them - so perhaps they're too well-hidden. It'll move to the main branch some time next month now AK's fixed the bug that removed all unlocking requirements from certain rooms, and the one that seemed to play the shrieking howl of the Wolf-Divided every time you clicked a button.

The EHSAN e.7 patch is the fifth major patch and the... fortieth? incremental update since launch. AK started typing a long preening bit about all the changes we'd put in and then realised that would be interesting mostly to us, so we'll spare you lot, but if you are interested, the in-game patch notes go all the way back to October, and the TWELVE DISMAYS OF CHRISTMAS post explains the silliest bug of his career. On the upside, those well-hidden surprises mentioned earlier: apparently one player found one with the assistance of their dog; others may be available to a keen-eyed, or a forward-looking, Librarian. There'll be more quality-of-life updates eventually, but for now we're shifting focus to the HOUSE OF LIGHT expansion, so those updates will likely arrive in a free update alongside it.



Over to AK...

While I work on HOUSE OF LIGHT I'm also answering dozens of questions from our Chinese, Japanese and Russian translators. Just as with Cultist Simulator,  localisation is a trip. We vetted all three teams to make sure they include fans who understand the context, and it's bloody great to be answering questions this detailed, but it's hard work. I remember sitting in a hut in Dungeness inventing daft hybrid etymologies and thinking 'this'll haunt me if we do Chinese again'; well, now I'm haunted. Some of my recent answers:

• "Both suggest a cross in English. 'Rood' is an Old English term for the Christian cross, 'Cruciate' is from Latin crucis, cross. 'Chancel' has several meanings in English but one is the dividing screen between the more and less holy parts of a church - which is also known as the 'rood screen'. The terms are as you say all largely equivalent and the general sense of 'something that separates the profane from the sacred / more sacred from less sacred' would be good. If in doubt, I'd just use the same term three times."
  
  
• "There's an obscure adjective, 'nivean', from Latin nix/nivis, which means snow-white. I used a variant spelling because 'Nivea' is a popular European skin-care brand. 🙃"
  
  
• "Speculum is Latin for mirror, and later in English was used to mean (a) a particular kind of mirror used in telescopes (b) a scrying-mirror used by seers. So 'speculist' implies a mirror-specialist, probably with an occult connection. NB a speculum in modern English refers exclusively to a medical instrument used by gynaecologists! This is definitely not a reference I want to imply here."
  
  

[LB: This is our upcoming BOOK OF HOURS expansion! If you haven't heard of it I'm not doing marketing properly. Excuse me while I go cry over there. Sorry, back to AK.]

I want to do three things with this:

• Variety of outcomes from the Visitor stories. I actually loathe the term 'branching narrative' because it imprisons us in a 1990s idea of CYOA tree-diagram structures, but 'stories with variety in outcome' lacks zing. Whichever term you use, there ain't any of it in the Visitor stories as they stand. Partly this is just because I wouldn't have had time to write the things, partly because it's hard, maybe impossible, to write stories with variant outcomes in a game that explicitly tells you that there are no mistakes and you can't lock yourself out of anything (ask ten dedicated CRPG players of your acquaintance how many of them don't look at a wiki nowadays before making a key narrative decision - and then imagine finding you've missed out on a decision because the visitor came and went while you were unlocking the Wine Cellar). But obviously people were always going to want more (a) relevant story about (b) known characters with (c) choices that allow self-expression. So releasing that as an expansion neatly addresses both probs: we now have some months we didn't have before launch, and it'll be an opt-in for people who've played the game once already or who want a bit more variety in their outcome, FOMO be damned.
  
  
• Cooking, and social events. There's a bag of flour and a mixing bowl in the Hush House kitchens, but you can't bake a cake. This is because we started with art for the kitchens, which we sliced up and turned into manipulable objects, and some fitted more naturally into the crafting system than others. But that's not relevant to people who just want to bake a cake. Or have vegetables less generic than a sack. Meanwhile I've seen a heartening number of players talk about how they in-game RP afternoon tea with Visitors and villagers. And it ties together with more Visitor engagement. Some parts of this point may end up in the game as a free update - I don't know until I've worked through the design - it depends on how easy or not it is to tease apart from the rest.
  
  
• A bridge to the next game. Lottie and I have an unusually clear idea about Game Three - though we might change our minds and we won't be starting on it until at least 2025 - and I want to lay down a few barrels of the good story so it'll be aged and flavourful by the time it shows up in Three. I'm also planning ahead and trying out some ideas with design, with narrative structure and with UI that - by Three - should ultimately take us beyond windows-and-slots. It's a good model, it's brought us a long way, but it does feel sometimes like trying to write through a keyhole.

To establish a skeleton that links all that, I'm going off to spend a week in a quiet place with good light, a very large table and a boxful of cards and coloured pens (and zero cats, so I can go to bed with a tableful of cards and enjoy a morning without regret) - while Lottie tinkers with a prototype for something to do with BOOK OF HOURS' visuals which will, we hope, make some people fall off their chairs.

"Scholars and adepts recognise nine Wisdoms... though they disagree where one Wisdom ends and another begins."

Now, back to LB for a final arty update. Remember this from the advent calendar?



It is now a reality! Our very first piece of jewellery - the golden Wisdom Tree necklace - is out now on the Etsy shop. Featuring all the Wisdoms from Birdsong to Skolekosophy, you can now adorn yourself with the occult symbol over which scholars have squabbled for centuries. We're only making 500 of these as a test run, to see how jewellery sells. Maybe Cultist fans despise vanity! Maybe BOOK OF HOURS players are too busy reading books! Well, if you *do* want a beautiful gold-plated pendant for your or someone else's neck, get it while stocks last...



(I especially recommend purchasing now if you intend these as any sort of Valentine's gift. International shipping takes 3+weeks, so sooner is better!)

While we're talking merch, we have the Hours notebooks (replacing the long-lost Cultist notebook which ran out a few years ago now), our tarot adult colouring book...



...and the Lucid Tarot itself finally shouldering its way through the world's skin, like a clawed and ruthless uncle or a headless flapping bear. Hush House cat is on the scene to inspect the latest prototype, featuring for the first time ever our custom velvet tarot bag.



If you're signed up to the mailing list you'll get an email any time we launch any of these, so I recommend it! Especially as The Lucid Tarot will initially launch with 500 limited editions including a signed certificate of authenticity, so those might go quickly...

Anyway, that's it for this update! May January treat you with an unusual consistency and warmth, may your beard never grow thin, and may the winter light of the Madrugad catch you flatteringly upon your cheekbones. More updates on HOUSE OF LIGHT soon...