Cultist Simulator News

[h2]MPC x The Lady Afterwards edition now available![/h2]

The Mysterious Package Company's beautifully reimagined edition of The Lady Afterwards is out now!



It 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. It's TRULY MAGNIFICENT and includes all of the following:

• 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-aged clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
  
• An antique golden magnifying glass, to inspect them all
  
• “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards
  
• A full 78-card "Tarot of the Hours" deck
  
• Eight customisable character sheets with personalised questionnaires and connections
  
• Eight art deco character pins in silver and gold
  
• A sterling silver cigarette case, including several in-fiction calling cards and clues
  
• 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 burlap bag
  
• A year-long 10% discount token for our merch shop and the Locksmith's Dream
• Access to a custom-built mood-music playlist of 1920s songs
  
• A full digital edition of The Lady Afterwards worth £30
  
• Housed in a custom hardwood "Taurus Express" travelling chest
  

Only 1,000 sets are available, each costing $199. They're shipped from Canada, so North Americans - you don't have to worry about international shipping fees for once.

[h2]Will you win the Golden Ticket?[/h2]

Each edition of MPC x TLA comes with a 10% discount for Locksmith's Dream tickets, apart from one lucky box. That box includes a winning ticket for a totally free stay at our Secret Histories scavenger hunt, worth $2,000. (If you can't attend any of the 2022 / 2023 events, you can opt instead for a free MPC experience of your choice.)

Good luck! We call upon the Flowermaker that it's someone from the Cultist Sim community who wins. 🙏

Originally posted by Afterwards

"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..."

We're working with the Mysterious Package Company to create a new, extremely high-end Lady Afterwards edition with MPC-level props and accoutrements!

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 original Lady Afterwards box, but adds an extra layer of high-quality artefact...ry: a custom wooden  chest, hand-aged clues, and a few extras like an antique magnifying glass and silver case with new business cards inside, a Essential Hours and a full Tarot of the Hours deck...

Originally posted by Afterwards

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

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

The Lady Afterwards is a 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: an occult Egyptian noir inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express.

Each MPC x TLA 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 mechanics primer
  
• 18 hand-aged clues, including telegrams, lovers’ notes, photographs and more
  
• “The Essential Hours” pocket tarot deck of 23 Major Arcana cards and a full 78-card "Tarot of the Hours"
  
• 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 sterling silver cigarette case, incasing several characters' business cards
  
• An antique 1920s magnifying glass
  
• A custom wooden carrying case
  
• A full digital edition of the whole game
  

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 version of The Lady Afterwards. So if you prefer the original 'cottagecore' concept, that's available too! 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, and HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY IT! ♥)

The expansive gentleman in the picture below is (probably) the naturalist Pehr Kalm:



He was a widely-travelled eighteenth-century Finnish naturalist, and the genus kalmia was named after him:

.

Pehr looks cross in that picture. It might be that his handsome waistcoat is too tight, it might be that the pinecone is spiky, or it might be that the flower named for him was later nicknamed kill-kid. This is less horrible than it sounds, because 'kid' is also a juvenile goat, and kalmia is also nicknamed lamb-kill and sheep-poison. It's stuffed with neurotoxins, is what I'm saying. Don't let your goats near it. Or your kids. If Cultist has taught us anything, it's the unwisdom of putting something in your mouth just cos it looks pretty.

Over to Chelnoque for the patch notes for KALMIA. These are pretty bland, because he's done a lot of work behind the scenes on content import and logging that isn't interesting to write about. We've also just put the LONGIFLORUM release on the beta branch, which is a bit funner, especially in that it makes games more resistant to the notorious Cat Jumped On My Keyboard bug. But I'll post the patch notes for that one when it goes live.

2022.9.k.3 KALMIA

- Several minor typos in slot requirements are fixed.
- Blank credits panel in Russian localisation is fixed.
- HOTFIX: The game started to treat some save files as if they were corrupted. They, in fact, weren't, and this all is now behind us.
- HOTFIX: Newly-spawned verbs no longer snatch a single random card from their birthplace.
- HOTFIX: Newly-spawned verbs no longer snatch a single random card from their birthplace.
- MODDING: Greatly increased the vigilance and informativeness of JSON import logs.

bonus content:

The Monastery of the Fifth Cup box. It's sold out, but there's some lore here that people got excited about.



The Locksmith's Dream. Pictures from the beta!

Have a spooky day, as they say on that one podcast. - AK

Happy Friday, everyone! I hear you like the secret gods known as the Hours, and AK is good at tantalisingly not revealing much about them. So I just wanted to share a quick update on the Lucid Tarot, our upcoming tarot deck for BOOK OF HOURS, whose Major Arcana focuses entirely on the Hours of Cultist Simulator. It's all-new art drawn directly from the saucy, source-y lore of AK's 'CS Design' spreadsheet. You can't get tastier than that.



Bask in the joy of seeing pockets of colour appear out of an inky blackness...



...or enjoy a few close-ups of my favourites below:







...and a final one for those pale-skinned dweebos like myself who pass all signs of melanin and go directly to BURN. We call upon your mercy, Flowermaker!



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 Sim. We've shared 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 which Cultist Sim characters I've chosen for the Page, Knight, Queen and King of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles...?

Teeny hotfix for lore upgrades