A couple French-English dictionaries translate "La scellés" as "The seals", as in the kind that you put on agreements or documents, not the animals. That makes more than a little sense in the context of a pact with the Sun-In-Rags.
Edit: So in poetic logic, "Poppy Lascelles" could suggest the pair of concepts "Death" "agreement". A very apropos name.
edited by cliftonr on 12/25/2017
Adding this quickly because I keep forgetting to jot it down here for exploration:
The "red church" mentioned in the ‘Light through Stained Glass’ dream as the place of birth seems like a simple association to the Red Grail as governing birth.
However, there’s also a classic picaresque weird fantasy novel Peregrine: Primus by Avram Davidson, and "red church" brings it very strongly to mind, because in that book the phrase "red church" keeps coming up over and over. Indeed, it’s in the context of a disturbing secret cult who recite a passage, something like "In the red forest there is a red church; in the red church there stood a red altar; on the red altar there is a red knife. Take the red knife and cut red bread."
Now if that doesn’t sound like the Red Grail’s very own cannibal murder-cult, I don’t know what does.
(I seem to remember that passage might have actually come from some occult text; from Googling, I think it’s the pseudo-Albertus Magnus text which became part of Pennsylvania Deutsch hexerei.)
edited by cliftonr on 12/28/2017
Poor Alexis is having a hard winter. After his little fever, he and his girlfriend came down with the flu :p Naturally his thoughts have shifted to disease and illness and what they signify in the world.
A Foul and Pestilent Congregation of Vapours
I’ve been asked what Hour governs illness. There’s really no one answer to this - just as no one Hour governs places, or colour. The Mother of Ants deals with healing, of a sort, and the Crowned Growth functions in many respects like a disease, but in the Cultist Simulator setting, diseases would generally be the result of imbalances in the striving and flexing of the secret gods.
This doesn’t invalidate the germ theory of disease. Christopher Illopoly would tell you, for instance, that the striving of the Hours determines the outcome of battle by influencing the progress of armies, and that equally, a viral army that invades the body’s halls is still an army, or at least a horde. Illopoly would probably salt it with allusions and with faintly bitchy jokes about mutual friends, but that would be the gist of it.
The point of all this? Lottie and I have both had flu, which we’re now largely recovered from. If we’ve seemed quiet, partly that was the holidays, partly that was all the cytokines fucking us up. But we’re coming back to life, rather slowly, like Christmas tree lights flickering in the rain.
The effect on the schedule is minimal. We were mostly taking Christmas off anyway. But it may be that we decide to take a holiday a bit later in the year, to make up for this one being ravaged. We’ll keep you posted on the roadmap, but you can still expect to see another development build this month.
Anyway, I’m sure many of you have been suffering over the winter period! (those of you in the Southern hemisphere snickering from the golden sanctuary of your alternate climate: yeah yeah, your time will come). So let’s all of us hope for speedy recoveries, and I look forward to sharing with you the locations in the Mansus and the Bounds that I’m now working on: the Temple of the Wheel, the Peacock Door, the Salt Cell and the Worm Museum, among others.
edited by Anne Auclair on 1/5/2018
I’m still wondering about that spot within the Mansus which is labeled simply ‘Knives’. Maybe it’s just where the Sun keeps its kitchen knives, but it sounds a bit worrisome.
The Sun’s kitchen knives would probably be very worrisome.
As someone who occasionally peeks at Alexis’ twitter page, he’s got some interesting stuff over there. In particular he has a strange tendency to re-tweet pieces of artwork with some particularly… disturbing
undertones.
Take this beauty for example: [spoiler]
[/spoiler]
Say hello to The Raft of the Medusa. Quoting the tweet : "Gericault’s epic The Raft of the Medusa (1819) drove him to a nervous breakdown from which he died. It depicts the survivors of an actual shipwreck who were driven to cannibalism. For it Gericault studied severed heads & limbs. His last images were of the insane. He died at 33"
I wonder which Hour would have a particular interest in a horrific incident in which over 130 people either starved to death, resorted to cannibalism and brutally murdered each other, or drowned in the ocean?
I’m starting to think there’s a particular reason why your character can spend so much time painting in CS.
edited by Edward Warren on 1/10/2018
edited by Edward Warren on 1/13/2018
[quote=Lottie Bevan]Clockwork Cuckoo have been working hard for us, finishing off the icon requests we mentioned last update, as well as starting on a new batch of icons for this month. A lot of these new requests focus on the Magus role, including magic and rituals and ghoulies oh my! I couldn’t stop him, so Alexis wrote the commission notes, and they therefore include things like:
"A horrible assemblage of limbs, like the Isle of Man triskele crossed with Hellraiser"
and
"A flapping hairy clawed dancing thing like an animated empty bearskin caught in a hurricane"
And you lot are paying him to do this.[/quote]
If that’s not money well spent then I don’t know what is.
Woooooooo! This thread just got 20,000 views!
Um, how is that calculated anyway?
Investigations will be getting more complex.
Wait a minute, the Suppression Bureau actually cares about evidence?! They don’t just grab the most gossiped about person and declare "if ye float ye be a witch but if ye sink ye be human!"? The modern age is truly full of wonders :P
Hey, hey, here’s another couple of surreal pieces of art, this time with some interesting stories to go with them.
The first two are illustrations of Norwegian fairy tale "The Three Princesses of Whiteland".
In it, a boy is whisked away to the titular mysterious land and marries a princess. After being magicked home, he sets out to find his way back. Along the way he meets with several kings separately to ask if they know the way to Whiteland, among them the King of all the Beasts of the Wood. The Kings each give him pair of snowshoes to reach the others… And note how the setting sun is looming directly him in the background of the snowscape.
When he finally starts on the way back to Whiteland, he learns that his queen is set to marry another prince. He makes a deal with the North Wind, who then swoops up and carries away the other prince. The rightful prince remarries his queen and they live happily ever after. Again, note how the Prince-Killing Wind appears to come from the red setting sun in the second painting.
The last piece of art he posted is from "The Lassie and Her Godmother". A poor family gives their baby daughter to a mysterious beautiful woman. The woman takes the girl to a mysterious house and raises her there, but kicks her out after she discovers that The Sun, Moon, and Stars were living there as well and accidentally lets them out. Thrown out of the house and into The Wood, she eventually climbs a tree over some water and falls asleep.
Eventually a Prince comes along for a drink and spots her reflection. He finds her and takes her to his castle to be his queen. His mother objects, because she thinks this beautiful woman from the water might be a witch. He marries her anyway, but she’s later almost executed when her stepmother returns, smears her mouth with blood, and makes it look like she’s eaten her own children. The stepmother is finally revealed to have been the Virgin Mary the whole time.
I generalized in a few places, but it’s really spooky how these stories line up with what we know of the Hours. Anyway, it was fun to share with everyone.
If I’m having this much fun deciphering the mysteries of the twitter page, I can’t wait to play the actual game.
edited by Edward Warren on 1/21/2018
This makes me wonder when exactly the Sun was divided. Was Coseley writing about something that happened in the distant past or something that had happened much more recently? Also, what if the Sun had been divided into multiple entities - each aspect becoming its own independent personality, with the original correspondingly faded and diminished. For those who have quested after the Marvelous, consider how the King With a Hundred Hearts lost his curiosity, which became the heart of a sentient building in Spite.
Seems to be the Lesser-Horned Swastika Flatbear:
[b]Onwards. A belated insight about Illopoly’s not-so-mysterious inamorata, ‘Baldomera’:
[/b]St. Baldomer is, unsurprisingly in hindsight, the patron saint of locksmiths. Finally I, twig :locked: . Finally.
Back to speculation, and the Weather Factory Twitter page (O shapeless gods, how I hate Twitter…
I’m taking with a pinch of salt all that the reputedly-immortal Julian Coseley wrote, since his erstwhile protégé Hersault denounced him as a ‘Worm of Worms’, and we know that at some point, Worms (whatever they are) ‘learned to work people from the inside’. I wonder what became of Coseley in the end.
‘Even after the sun’s division, the mortal pawns of the Forge of Days recalled it fondly’ sounds rather like a snippet from Galmier’s report to Illopoly on the Long who live in Port Noon (the ‘letter’ - written from Noon’s Hotel Ciervo in 1932 - was recently put up on the Weather Factory’s twitter, but the text is in plain form here). Galmier writes:
"They always pay their respects to the Sun here. At dawn they’ll lift a glass of tea or a coffee-cup, and at sunset they will pour out a little wine. It’s not exactly a religious effect – it’s more like the due one owes an absent friend."
Coseley’s claim that ‘Even the Sunne can be divided, though it require the Forge of Dayes for its division’ (the insight from reading ‘The Six Letters on Necessity’) sounds to me as if C17 Coseley is saying it can be done, but not exactly admitting that it’s been done already. If he knows for a fact that it’s possible, he’s not telling.
…and where in the arcane spacetime of the Five Histories is Port Noon?)
This is still bugging me. The idea that there could be several routes into Port Noon and that the Hotel Ciervo/Kerisham is in some way the Stag Door’s particular connection, at least in England, is something I hadn’t considered; it seems a very good line of attack. But what niggles is this:
When the game begins using the no-legacy character, we get a date, and it’s January the 18th, 1920. At this point, the Player can already access 3 books written by Theresa Galmier (definitely then still alive, according to info from the Weather Factory site), and 3 by Christopher Illopoly (no data on him). The last of Galmier’s books that you can obtain in-game implies that by 1920, she’s already done more occult research than is compatible with sanity.
But when she’s writing to Illopoly from Port Noon in some version of 1932, Galmier sounds lucid, though maybe a bit cocky. Perhaps she just made a good recovery over the 12+ years between publishing her last mad tome, and Illopoly is still her lover and colleague 1932. That would be…nice. Heartwarming. I don’t really buy it. I could be wrong.
And then there’s a mention of “this little port of sun and intrigue and eternity", relayed on the Weather Factory twitter, and a resonant phrase. Mild SMEN spoilers ahead for ‘Who is Salt?’, and a pre-emptive link to a Reddit AMA, since links don’t work in spoilers.
[spoiler]When he did his AMA, Alexis Kennedy mentioned that the finales of Seeking had still not been spoiled. This is kind-of true, as no-one’s plastered the three possible endings all over the place, but unique-phrase searches have brought each one up in Journals for a while, and at least one place collates them all. Anyhow, since the unique phrase “this little port of sun and intrigue and eternity” – from the ‘Who is Salt?’ ending – now appears in the Weather Factory’s Twitter, I reckon that’s a green light for anyone who hasn’t already done so to go a-Googling (NB: following this up will lead to the complete end text of ‘Who is Salt?’)
The place the player ends up in does sound a lot like Galmier’s description of Port Noon. And as they return, they recall their role as an agent or supporter of the White. So I was wrong about there being no connection between FL and CS at all: there is at least one, the White. But I don’t personally think that the White is either the Sun-in-Rags (whose given colours are red-and-gold, even though its Lore appears to be Winter) or the Door in the Eye (who always wears white). Hmmm.[/spoiler]
Thinking about it, do we actually know if "heights" are good and "depths" are bad?
[spoiler]
He sounds nice! And unexpectedly polite.
She’s some sort of primordial folk dancer. Also worth noting, she sounds legitimately happy! That is very rare in CS, where almost every character seems driven by some form of cosmic paranoia or quiet desperation. The Neoplatonists liked to argue that happiness came from keeping in harmony with the cosmic dance - I guess Clovette has taken such teachings literally.
Both sound good! But if only there was a way to combine the constructive power of the smith with the destructive power of the bomb maker…and reshape the world, if you will.
Is it just me, or does Tristan somehow seem even creepier than Victor? Those eyes. shivers[/spoiler]
edited by Anne Auclair on 1/25/2018
I’ve made my first post on the CS Steam forum. Naturally I start by asking about the most important thing ever.
Meanwhile, Lottie Bevan has posted an update with some very lovely art. CS really wouldn’t be the same game without Clockwork Cuckoo and Catherine Unger. They’ve helped to create a really unique look for it.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
On the Weather Factory blog, at the very end of the update, Alexis and Lottie just teased a new alpha release build in a week or so.
Beta, not Alpha :P The pre-Alpha was the grey box, the Alpha was the bare bones proof of concept, and the Beta is the game in its final stages of development.
In the spirit of the Scholar Build, I have transcribed all the lore text for evaluation, comparison, discussion, and speculation.
[spoiler]
Lantern
A Watchman’s Secret
It has been expressed like this: ‘Each Hour has its colour, but colour exists only where there is light.’
A Mansus-Glimpse
A snatch of poetry; a single memory of a certain house that all of us visit twice in our lives. A rite that opens the way to the Mansus must begin with this lore.
An Unmerciful Invocation
‘Mercy,’ saith the Watchman, ‘is found only in shadow.’
Study Text
There is a proverb among the practitioners of the invisible arts: ‘Glory visits the house without walls.’ I would like to know about glory.
Moth
A Barber’s Warning
A power of the Wood enjoys the separation of the lock from the scalp. For attention, burn it. For opportunity, bury it.
A Wood-Whisper
Lie awake, and listen. The wind speaks in the branches. The house cries out in its sleep. These are the roads that chaos ride.
An Ecdysiast’s Parable
The Ecdysiast’s Riddle is ‘hat may be lost?’ Each Ecdysiast’s Parable is an attempt to answer the Riddle.
Study Text
[Missing, for whatever reason.]
Knock
A Locksmith’s Secret
Sooner or later, every locksmith has the dream.
An Iguvine Rite
Every door in the Mansus requires its sacrifice before it will open. The Iguvine Rites proscribe the manner of the sacrifice.
A Consent of Wounds
To open certain Ways, one must first open oneself. This practice outlines that opening, in the name of the Mother of Ants.
Study Text
These are incantations of unseaming, where the space between the words is as potent as the actual syllables.
Grail
A Red Secret
Some words are spelt correctly only when the proper ink is used.
A Megalesian Incantation
The Great Mother remembers.
A Delightful Sacrament
So pleasant upon the ear. One could listen over and over. These are the words that make sacrifice sweet.
Study Text
Certain words beg to be spoken. It is tempting to spend time in their consideration – tempting, and perhaps useful.
Forge
A Smith’s Secret
In five continents, smiths have whispered the same words to the iron. Murders have been known to whisper these words too. And adepts, of course. These words are spoken in ritual to inspire an unmerciful Change.
An Ardent Orison
When we watch a fire, what are we watching for? When we find it, these are the words it will speak: a word that sanctifies the change that comes when the seared skin peels.
A Shaping Chant
The proper words must be employed when the Change comes.
Study Text
Very few know that smiths and murderers speak the same prayers. I will examine those prayers.
Edge
A Knife’s Secret
When our ancestors’ forged swords, taught the arts of martial movement, spoke curses on the eve of battle – all these things shared certain patterns.
Chiliarch’s Lesson
This is the bone-deep story the thousandman learnt in antiquity, of blood and its exits. To speak it aloud is to hear the sword hiss.
An Operation of the Lion
A series of mystic exercises that requires both dedication and terror.
Study Text
All of the greatest struggles end in death. The lore of the knife holds the lessons of those struggles.
Heart
A Thunderous Secret
There are common sentiments in every thunderclap. Let us acknowledge them.
Words that Walk
The syllables of this formula are compelling. I find myself snapping my fingers to its rhythm. It desires not to cease.
Study Text
There are lessons the anatomist, the dancer and the shaman all learn.
Winter
A Sexton’s Secret
Certain knowledge, it is said, can be experienced only through the particular quality of silence. It has been suggested that one can only read such knowledge with one’s eyes closed, but only by mischievous commentators.
A White Ceremony
When I speak it, my lips don’t crisp with frost. Each time, this is surprising.
Study Text
These are the words which chill the air and drink the colour of my skin.
Secret History
An Occult Scrap
Secret histories are layered beneath the one we know, like the notes in rare wine. This is a detail from one of those histories.
A Furtive Truth
A detail smuggled in from an adjacent narrative. Don’t speak this where you may be overheard.
A Forgotten Chronicle
A story of a city without a gate, of a queen who was not born, of a war which was not fought.
Study Text
History is less certain than we are taught. I can learn from the study of its blurred edges.[/spoiler]
Also, here are the CS spreadsheet tabs that Alexis recently posted to twitter, for those who don’t want to hurt their eyes squinting.
[quote=CS Spreadsheet]Economy
The Hours
Overview
Roles Goals & Tiers
Ritual Architecture
Endgame Magic
Tools and Ingredients
Tomes
NPCs
Recruitment & Promotion
Investigators & Rivals
Prisoners
D-G Research
[3] Locations
Mansus Exploration
Legacies
Mundane Careers & Crises
Appetites[/quote]
lol, mundane careers & crises! As opposed to the other kinds ^_^
Looking at this list makes you realize just how big this game is. Like, Mansus exploration, endgame magic, ritual architecture, prisoners, appetites - none of these things have been implemented yet! The Scholar’s Build is essentially Sunless Sea with just Venderbight, Demeaux Island, and Whither (with maybe some bats).
.
edited by Anne Auclair on 1/30/2018
This is the Percussigant. It remembers fondly the flaying of Marsyas by the Mother of Mountains, and so it will not
will not
will not stop dancing.
‘Change me,’ says Ezeem, the Second Thirstly.
‘Change me. Change me. Change me harder.’
‘Now,’ Ezeem says, ‘my turn.’
‘The ascent is glass. The walls are knives. Each step is blood.’ The Dead who rest before a new-cracked mirror, who pass the Peacock Gate, who climb the Sharp Stair: they enter the service of the Sun-in-Rags.
From the Weather Factory twitter: Percussigant, Ezeem, the Sharp Stair.
.
edited by Anne Auclair on 1/30/2018
lol, I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me it’s always Leo who’s the first on the chopping block :P Neville is "sensitive to deeper matters" while Leo is merely "enthusiastic." There’s just no competition.
There are new books in this build (not sure how many, I’ve only found one so far - it was very interesting).
The Neville Build is a little more gritty than the Scholar’s Build. Like, the Scholar’s Build was like a patient between surgeries. Neville is more like a patient in the middle of surgery, open heart and everything. I’ve played four games so far, three of which have essentially crashed.
.
edited by Anne Auclair on 1/31/2018
