AK talks through the process of rarefaction of BOOK OF HOURS' skill names (and, by extrapolation, wider BoH design) in our latest update.

"...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."

• 🎴 Major Arcana complete for the Lucid Tarot!
   
• 🐦 In-progress photos of model Caer Adar and 1920s radios
   
• 🤑 "You're in, and you're going to bloody love Treowen."
   
• ⚠ Important information on staying safe in heritage thresholds.

• The Bureau du Roi is Louis XV's extraordinary desk. It was designed and begun by the royal cabinet-maker Jean-Francois Oeben, but Oeben died three years in. It was finished six years later by Oeben's apprentice, Jean Henri Riesener… and only Riesener's name, not Oeben's, appears on the finished desk. Which is a little poignant, and more so when you learn that Riesener married Oeben's widow. Pictures here. See if you can guess where the secret compartment is.
   
• The Iron Dream, by Norman Spinrad, is a satire framing a fictional pulp SF novel, Lord of the Swastika, by Adolf Hitler. West Germany banned Dream in 1982 over concerns it promoted Nazism, but unbanned it in 1987 after being convinced it clearly didn't. Spinrad made a point of being rude about Hitler in the framing narrative, but the American Nazi Party, to his irritation, put the book on its recommended reading list anyway. Ursula Le Guin's 1973 review talks lucidly about the book and its angles.
   
• Gioachino Greco was a Calabrian chess master who travelled all round Europe beating pretty much everybody.  His manuscripts were adapted by Francis Beale into The royall game of chesse-play, which is a weird trove of phrase and detail. You can probably guess which modern piece was sometimes called 'the Amazon', but what about 'the Archer' and 'the Duke'?