Jack Fallows joins me for the first Meet Your Maker of 2026! They are the author, illustrator and puzzle designer of the narrative fantasy puzzle book, The Stormlamp Rituals: Volume 1. In this interview, you’ll learn about Jack’s creative process, the origins of what has now become The Stormlamp Rituals and how original plans to publish the book fell apart. They also touch on their puzzle tale The Light in the Mist, and why working to bring The Stormlamp Rituals to fruition with PostCurious is so special. Enjoy!
(Meet Your Maker is an interview series featuring creators of puzzle and mystery games and experiences from across the globe. We aim to shine a spotlight on both established creators and those who are just setting out on their journey. Stay tuned for more interviews coming soon.)
Can you tell me a little about yourself?
My name is Jack Fallows, and I’m a queer working-class artist from the north of England. My work primarily centres around using hybrid media to tell stories. I do this through games, illustration, prose, comics, poetry, models, assemblage, music, live events and lots of other things. I’m attracted to projects that express emotional depth and use strange perspectives to take people by surprise.
I’m probably best known in comics for my diary series Axolotl, in illustration for my work with bands and music promoters, and in the puzzle and escape room world for The Light in the Mist, the tarot puzzle tale I created with PostCurious. I consider myself a generalist, which is to say I’m less interested in maximising my proficiency in any given skill, and more interested in learning whatever skills I need to execute well on ideas I get excited about.
How did The Stormlamp Rituals come into being?
During the winter of 2016, I was developing the world and characters for a graphic novel about a young witch called Anna. That Christmas, I made a gift for an ex-partner, an illustrated envelope filled with loose pages of interlinking puzzles, based on the His Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman. It went over so well that I wanted to explore the format’s storytelling potential and decided the graphic novel should become a narrative puzzle series instead.
At first, it was very much about atmosphere and world-building, with each issue being its own kind of standalone mood piece. Honestly, I wasn’t really sure if anyone would be into it, so my aims were fairly modest in the beginning. Then the series was discovered by the escape room/puzzle scene, and I, in turn, discovered that the escape room/puzzle scene was a thing – a whole industry, in fact! It picked up a lot of momentum from there and became a monthly series, with 34 issues to date. The world, plot, characters and scope of the series have since expanded to fill almost ten years of my creative practice, alongside many other projects.
[Editor’s note: The Stormlamp Rituals was known in its original format as Cryptogram Puzzle Post.]
For those new to Anna’s world, can you set the scene?
Anna is a young witch on a personal journey that intersects with the shifting political tides of her world. It’s a world that looks not unlike our own did at the turn of the twentieth century, with the notable difference that it is touched by magic and connected to other planes of existence. I’ll leave it to the readers to explore the details of those mechanics, but the overall architecture is intended to be allegorical to a survival and recovery narrative, with Anna as the avatar.
How long did it take you to shape the story, and what were some of your inspirations?
All told, the very iterative and fluid storytelling process has been going on in one form or another since the winter of 2016, when I started to develop the graphic novel idea. From there, it’s been shaped a whole bunch by player feedback and by the editorial input of my long-time friend and collaborator Alexi Conman. I think it’s sustained my passion and interest for so long because it’s such a hybrid of things – illustration, prose, game mechanics, self-publishing, even bits of poetry, photography, model building and live events too. It’s easy to put one thing down and pick up another to keep myself interested and still maintain momentum.
For the same reason, however, there is an unimaginably huge list of things I would class as inspirations – books, films, comics, games, music, plays, etc. To name a few, the comics of Chris Ware and Geneviève Castrée, the films of Kubrick and Miyazaki, the music of Jason Molina, the poems of Donika Kelly and the immersive theatre events of Punchdrunk. Another key inspiration is the non-fiction book and short film ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’, which has directly influenced events, settings and characters in the series.
Was the plan for the story to play out over a set number of chapters, or was it built to run and run?
There was never a set number of chapters, and if I’m being honest, I’m still debating how many more there should be, and what their format should be, to complete Anna’s story! It was a very timid start for the series, and the first six or so envelopes were far more about building the world and the atmosphere than they were about hard narrative beats. This was partly to make sure people could get on board at any issue and still have everything they needed to understand the story and solve the puzzles.
Later, as the narrative potential became clear to me and I learned effective ways to use it, I got more ambitious with the storytelling. By the end of the first year, I already had a whole arc planned for the second year. I now know where I want things to wrap up, but not exactly how I’ll get there yet, or what other projects might emerge from the world once Anna’s story concludes.
The Stormlamp Rituals: Volume I is available now on Kickstarter. For those who have played previous iterations, is this the ‘definitive’ edition?
I cannot begin to express how Ultimate this version is compared to all of the others. So much has been added and edited, from updating old illustrations, smoothing out game mechanics, and reformatting pages to look prettier and read more easily. We’ve added masses of storytelling, new puzzles, a new hint system, a world map, photography, and collage – you name it! Those who have already played previous iterations will certainly recognise a lot of the content, but will have never experienced it in this way before. Holding a cohesive, 300-page hardback book, with a satchel envelope full of extras, is a real trip and feels like the natural crescendo of the series.
What benefits are there to backing now on Kickstarter?
First and foremost, you get the warm fuzzy feeling inside that comes with supporting the arts and giving life to the passion project of a lowly independent artist. The campaign will also be really fun to follow, with lots of extra puzzling along the way. You’ll get the book before anyone else, and there’ll be a backer-exclusive printed bonus puzzle and sticker pack. Then, depending on how much you want to pledge, we’ll have other rewards like being able to own original ink drawings from the book and more!
Your intricately beautiful artwork is front and centre. How did you develop this style?
Thank you! I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything consciously to push for a particular art style so much as it has naturally developed from the project’s format and process. When I’m working in comics, it’s usually about conveying movement and fluidity and pacing of action, to communicate specific moments of time passing. Often it’s about reducing, simplifying or distilling images into symbols so the information is conveyed clearly and directly. I’ve spent hours and hours drawing a single page of comics with the hope that the audience will glide over it in 15 seconds.
With Stormlamp, I’m inviting people to slow down and take a second look at what’s on the page. So rather than sequencing images, I’m placing a lot of storytelling into still, static illustrations. So I want these to be teeming with secrets and information. The ritual aspect of creating is also a big factor. A series as sprawling as this requires me to be a really good custodian of my own history and to consider consistency and world-building at every turn. So I like the drawing process to be meditative, deliberate, and ceremonial. I work entirely in pencil and ink until it’s time to scan and/or colour the images you see in Stormlamp. That analogue relationship to the work very much encourages my habit of going slowly blind with endless stippling and cross-hatching.
How long did it take you to design the cover?
It was not an easy process! So much of the time I spent on it was actually just in the initial deliberation stage. The ‘cover’ images I created for each of the separate issues/chapters in their envelope format established both a style and approach in my brain that was essentially useless for the cover of the hardback collection. So I had to unlearn that and start thinking outside of the box about what the cover needed to be effective.
I spent months gathering references, talking about it, and agonising over it in the shower or bed. How do I show people in one image what this thing – that I’m very close to, and invested in, and have been working on for so long – is about? Turns out, the answer was found in practice and not in theory. I sat down one day with the intention of ‘getting out the bad ideas’ – dozens of thumbnail sketches of different compositions had to be exorcised from my brain before I started circling on something that worked and felt right. From there, it was certainly iterative, and it went through probably four or five waves of refinement before the bolts were sufficiently tightened and I was happy to sign off on it.
Am I right that the book was originally due to be released by another publisher?
Yes, this is a saga I’m very glad is behind me now! I won’t name the publisher because I think, at their core, they were a team of very well-meaning and supportive people who just mismanaged their own demise. The abridged version of the story is that they reached out to me at the start of the first UK COVID lockdown, when everything felt quite uncertain in the world, and told me they had been following the self-published series for a while and wanted to offer me a publishing deal. This is something I had dreamt about since I was a little 13-year-old punk, self-publishing my first comics and zines. I was also starting to struggle managing both the artistic and business sides of the series, so it felt like very serendipitous timing.
I knew a huge amount of editorial changes needed to be done in order to make the first 18 issues work as a book, so I spent about a year and a half doing a massive overhaul of everything from writing to artwork to puzzle mechanics, adding a load of extra features as I went. This meant putting the series on ice while I worked on that, so I lost a lot of followers and momentum for the single issues, in what I thought was a calculated risk – i.e. things are going to be very quiet, but then the book will come out and reach a much bigger audience, and things will pick up again. However, when it finally came time to sign off on everything, they began effectively ghosting their artists/authors because they had fallen into financial hot water and weren’t sure how to proceed. This led to many months of uncertainty and legal grey area, not knowing how or if I’d get the rights back to the work. But at long last, they are no more, and my work is my own again!
What are the benefits of teaming up with PostCurious to publish The Stormlamp Rituals?
Besides being trusted friends and collaborators, they also represent the apex of the narrative puzzle medium for me. They are always pushing boundaries with how creative they can be with form and content, and create entirely unique experiences you won’t find anywhere else. As total nerds about puzzles themselves, they’ve got their finger firmly on the pulse of the scene; they know what’s good and what works, and each release is something they feel strongly is worth seeing in the world. It feels like both a dream come true and also like a strangely fated experience to have the book finally find a home under their imprint.
Are there any particular changes that Rita Orlov and her team suggested?
One thing that always made me slightly nervous about releasing the work with the previous publisher is that they weren’t actually a games publisher, so much as an art, narrative and occult publisher. So they gave me a lot of freedom to lead the mechanical side of things, and to find my own play testers, etc. However, I think that hands-off approach meant the version that would have come out with them wasn’t nearly as tight as it could have been.
So much of the feedback and suggested edits from Rita, the PC team, and their play testers has made me say “Oh, of course! That’s way better!”. To give just one example, there was an artefact of the envelope-based series that I was keeping intact in the version of the book that would have come out with the previous publisher, which was that each chapter had seven numbered pages (i-vii), so you knew there was a mechanical beat there to solve or choose. Having it pointed out to me that this wasn’t really necessary in the book format, and that we’d have way more space to let the art and text breathe if we did away with it, was kind of mind-blowing to me. It was something I was so conditioned to include as part of the fundamental DNA of the series that I would never have stopped to consider the benefits of removing it.
You worked with Rita before on The Light in the Mist. How did this tarot card puzzle tale come about?
I am disproportionately proud of the fact that Rita and I met on Tumblr during the early days of both PostCurious and Cryptogram Puzzle Post, based on our making similar work with a similar name. We met in person for the first time at Up The Game in the Netherlands in 2019 and got on really well, so we were keen to collaborate.
Rita reached out to see if I’d be up for creating some art for the Emerald Flame Kickstarter, and that was really fun, so we set our sights on a bigger project. I had been getting requests since the beginning of Cryptogram Puzzle Post to make a tarot deck, I guess because people liked the witchy artwork. Personally, I wasn’t that excited about undertaking all that work just to make a pretty-looking deck of cards when there are so many breathtaking tarot decks already in the world. So when Rita pitched the idea of a tarot deck that was also a story and a game and a formal art experiment, I was a lot more enthusiastic. The entire project ran alongside my editing of the book for the previous publisher, during the pandemic, entirely via video calls. A testament to our collaborative skills if there ever was one!
Given its success, has there been any talk of a spiritual sequel, in a similar format?
We do indeed have plans for a follow-up in the form of an oracle deck! This is very much still in the ideation stage, but is a loose concept we’ve picked up and tinkered with here and there when we get the chance between other projects. Hopefully, at some point in the near future, our schedules will align to allow for a full-blown dive into development, so watch this space.
What is a key lesson you’ve learned as you’ve refined the series?
Pretty early on, I realised I could either put out the envelope-based series monthly or do it well, but not both. So the release schedule definitely slowed down as I got the hang of what I was doing. Having an immaculate file management system and having formatting documents to keep everything consistent and save time is very useful. Having friends who love tedious repetitive tasks that I can pay to help assemble envelopes/zines is also very useful. I’ve learned that often the best way to go fast is to move slowly. There have been more instances than I’d like to admit where I’ve gotten work back from the printers only to discover a circle or dot is in the wrong place. This breaks the chain of puzzles, which is a very easy way to lose time, money and your mind! So, checking, double-checking, triple-checking, and play-testing is the general rule of thumb these days.
You run a Patreon account for fans of your work. For anyone interested, why might they want to subscribe?
Patreon is definitely the best way to support all of the work I make, from puzzle games to illustration, comics, music, poetry, miniatures, props, events, etc. I keep all my patrons up to date on all my happenings there, offer exclusive discounts and other promotions, behind-the-scenes process stuff, and I serialise the Stormlamp series as digital downloads and limited-edition zines. You also get a direct line to me and to our Discord server if you ever want to talk about art, games, or making in general.
It would mean the world to me to keep growing the community over there, as it really does help me out in a significant way as I continue trying to navigate the turbulence of being an artist during late-stage capitalism!
Do you have any other projects in the works?
I always have a healthy number of projects going on! I’m working on a second album with my band this summer, as well as some poetry and paintings that may end up becoming a zine and/or comic depending on how they develop. I have some commission work coming up, too.
I will also be staying fully engaged with The Stormlamp Rituals. There are another 18 chapters already written and drawn that require a similar editorial overhaul before they can become vol.2 of the series, but the wheels are already in motion. I have some harebrained ideas about what a vol.3 might look like (possibly not a book), but I’ll keep those under wraps for now as that’s a while off yet and I’m trying not to give PostCurious a heart attack.
Which games do you enjoy playing in your spare time?
I certainly spend more time designing games than playing them these days, which is something I’m trying to remedy! I like a good escape room, and recently visited Phantom Peak, which was incredible. I love video games like Monument Valley, I Am Dead and Gorogoa. This is extremely pedestrian, but I also do cryptic crosswords every day and love the puzzle books of Alex Bellos. Of course, I place all of the PostCurious releases on a high mantle, even if there are a couple I still need to play.
Finding ways to roll puzzles into one-shot RPG games is a favourite. I was recommended a system-agnostic campaign aid by Lauren at 20-Sided Store in NYC a couple of years back called ‘Electric Mangrove’. It takes the form of a 12” vinyl record where the gatefold becomes a DM screen, and the liner notes become the book for the setting/stats/world-building. Needless to say, that thing is directly in the middle of my Venn diagram of interests!
Thank you!
A huge thank you to Jack for their insightful answers. As you’ve discovered, the road to the release of The Stormlamp Rituals has been long and arduous, which makes it even more exciting that it is finally coming to fruition. I’m so excited for other puzzlers to get their hands on this unique and magical experience. If you haven’t read my review of the book, please do check it out; I’ve kept it spoiler-free.
To grab your own copy of The Stormlamp Rituals at a discounted price, you can do so here:
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