I wanted to write down just a couple thoughts about this mod, but I ended up having entirely too many thoughts on what turned out to be a more complex mod (or trio of mods, since it relies on the Scholarship mod and the follower mod) than I anticipated, so I wrote out a bit of a review. I did my best to keep it as concise as I could, but there's a lot to go over, even if I do my best to avoid any major spoilers for the plot. I won't discuss anything about the story post forming a cult. A TL;DR for this review is that it's good, better than I hoped it'd be, and that I did find a few things I could bring up for some constructive critique and suggestions, and liked this work enough I felt some thorough effort and feedback was warranted. If you're reading this because you wanted to see if someone was saying this mod is worth playing or not: stop reading this and go play it. It's good enough I felt inspired to write about how good it is (as well as some constructive critiques, which I feel should be read only after playing it, but I can't stop you). So, if you're willing to read, I wrote down my Very Substantial Treatise on Professor Lore here:

As of late, I've been rather enamored with Cultist Simulator. By which, I mean I finally decided to try it years after release a few weeks ago, and I've already netted over 200 hours. I still haven't seen everything the base game has to offer yet, but I decided I still wanted to check out the Workshop to see what some creative minds have come up with. And one of the top recommended mods was The Professor. Though it's actually a few mods, because it uses a couple other mods, because it makes use of a couple other ones.

At time of writing, I can't go into The Roost Machine, which is listed as a dependency, but actually isn't strictly required to play. When I tried playing with it, it caused some crashing and display bugs, but I let the mod author know. In any case, the content dependencies are The Author, which provides a way to use the Scholarship skill in the Work verb, and superjw2's Followers, which fleshes out Winter/Knock/Grail to 3 followers, and adds 3 followers and a pawn for Secret Histories. I'll cover these additional mods briefly before discussing the main mod itself, which has a LOT of content to cover.

To cover the Followers quickly: I never particularly felt I needed the extra followers for the base game Aspects, but it was nice to have them, and to have a nice even rectangular grid on my cult board. At least, until I sacrifice the Lantern pawn to Poppy. In any case, the portraits for the followers look pretty good. They match the overall aesthetic of the game very well, and critically, the mod relies heavily on the presence of the 3 Secret Histories followers (and pawn). That being said, I did find the third Winter cultist's cheerful smile to have a hilarious juxtaposition to his description when I brought him to Disciple. I couldn't exalt him on my play-through, but I almost want to do it again with a Winter cult just to see it.

The only other weird thing I noticed about the new Followers was that when they become disciple or higher, talking to them in the cult window causes the "I don't think we have anything to say to each other" text as if I was speaking to a prisoner. That should probably get looked at, but again, not a deal-breaker by any means. If I want to nit-pick, I can also point out there's a couple very minor grammatical errors in a few of the descriptions for the new followers. I'll step forward and volunteer that during my spare time, I'd be happy to review these and offer corrections if the author is interested.

About the Author mod: This allows the player to use their Scholarship skill in the Work verb, like I said. It allows slotting of Reason or Passion cards. Passion allows you to use influences much like painting; otherwise, I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between it and painting, but it did seem to be a bit more stable with its returns on income, and also occasionally gave an Erudition. Reason cards allow you to use books or lore as inspiration to write. This also generates Notoriety, unless you happen to have a position that makes it less suspicious, but produces an acceptable income and possibility of Erudition and/or Glimmering, just like poetry.

This is a welcome addition to the game, because it provides a secondary source of Erudition, much like Glimmering from painting, and it's also nice to be able to apply all of your skills to work one way or another. I think the only part of this that confused me is not entirely understanding if there's any benefit to using both Reason and Passion; it seems like it simply chooses one or the other depending on which is more prevalent, and breaks the tie arbitrarily if it's even. Also, I do think it might be nice if the mod also gave potential inspiration topics that weren't immediately suspicious. Regardless, The Professor makes heavy use of this skill.

In fact, while it's not centrally core to the gameplay loop for Professor, it was useful enough I actually felt encouraged to do something I never do in Cultist Simulator, which is to cast Reason's Glory. Prof naturally gets up to 7 reason, following Stag Door, and if I made it 8, I could repeatedly do scholarship activity with no waiting period while still keeping 4 Passion ready in case I need to launder Notoriety - aka, Paint with my Imagination skill. I was in the classroom about as often as Indiana Jones and it doesn't just provide Erudition and Glimmering, as I mentioned earlier - it also provides Occult Scraps and Furtive Truths. This massively reduces the number of times I had to spam The Wood / White Door to get the first tiers of basic expeditions in, and it was such a convenient time-saver, I absolutely seethed at the fact that I didn't use this to save time because I didn't try it until well after I'd done all the usual spam.

So, on to the mod proper. The mod opens the player with no stat cards or Funds, but Scholarship in Greek and Latin, as well as a Thesis paper to use initially in the Work slot. We are soon introduced to the unique job, which is lecturing as a Professor, and a Campus location to explore, and introduced to the Dead of the History Department of the university.

The job pays well but is somewhat oppressive - it requires 75 seconds to return 2 Funds, and decays in 60 seconds, in a manner similar to "A Difficulty at Work" for Glover and Glover in the base game. 75 seconds for 2 Funds isn't a bad time / fund return - it's slightly better than doing a max tier Strength skill twice back to back with perfect timing, but it does tie up the Work slot for quite a while. This plus the rapid decay makes it difficult to manage things like Restlessness early on. If it does decay, it will eventually time out and fade entirely. However, it can be regained by pleading with a Passion. There's also a slot for assistance from a Dean, but it also excludes every Dean I encountered while playing the mod, so I'm not sure what the purpose of that is. In any case, if I ever had a brain lapse or just needed the slots, I never had difficulty regaining the professor job.

I'm actually not sure it's a necessary component for the job to decay at all. There's already a penalty for allowing another job in this mod to decay, and a rather permanent one at that, and the threat of losing access to the uni altogether actually restrains some of the potential for the mod. To go into that, I'll talk about The Campus next.

Exploring the Campus requires either a Health or a Follower. At the start this isn't really feasible, since the first stats actually granted are a single Health (and 2 Reason and 5 Funds), and considering how this Dean seems so excited to see you at the start, it's kind of funny to me he doesn't take you on a tour. But no worries; I typically begin a round of Cultist Simulator by immediately improving my Health so I don't die of disease in the first couple seasons, so this is a problem relatively quickly remedied. Relatively... that job decaying remains a real threat from the very beginning of the run, so manual labor wasn't really possible until I got a couple levels of Strength in, when I began to be able to weave that in once for an extra Vitality, and then painting for Glimmering. I didn't really feel comfortable doing it until I managed to get Sulochana to help hold my job for a minute. The trouble is, the results of exploring campus are somewhat limited. The total results are finding the new followers added by the Followers mod, 7 in all, as well as the Campus Library.

The library has an interesting mechanic to it. It pulls books from the same pool as Morland's, and it's free, with two caveats. One is that it takes double the time it takes to get a book from Morland's, and the other is you need "Permission" - which is slotted by the dean, who becomes exhausted afterward for another 60 seconds. It's a neat idea, and when I found Morland's, after I had some Funds built up, I would alternate between the two as needed. That is, unfortunately, the only new location that the Campus provides, despite its description stating that it is a "sprawling place, filled with unique individuals and hidden rooms". If you keep trying to explore it, it only gives Restlessness.

Now, here's where I come back to that whole "job decaying" thing. I suspect that if too much of the legacy relied on being able to access the campus, losing the campus via being fired would effectively make the game unwinnable, since the player is locked into a custom Temptation and cannot win the game via other means (at least, to my knowledge). The thought that springs to my mind is, if it didn't decay, there is potential for other locations that can be accessed via the Campus location and more that could be done to expand its functionality. As it stands, once the Campus Library has been discovered and all the new acquaintances have been met, The Campus becomes useless (unless you really want a reliable source of Restlessness), and the Campus Library has only a single optional use once all the books are exhausted.

I did find it kind of funny that the Dean has the "Annoyance" aspect, given that he's nothing but friendly - helps you get free books which contain forbidden occult lore (are we... sure about this guy's credentials?) and always allows you to get a Research Leave - which is a good way to buy more time with the lecturing job, giving you a much more generous amount of time to use your Scholarship skill to author a paper. Writing a paper while having this research leave grants protection from gaining Notoriety, and to my knowledge, there isn't a requirement that the paper is actually *good* - so you can easily do it from the moment you have the Scholarship skill any time you need.

This actually becomes more directly useful, however, because the fact that he is an Annoyance leaves him vulnerable to the same tactics as Mr. Alden from Glover and Glover. After disposing of him via your preferred method - Grail being the safest route - writing a good essay while on research leave can grant you his place. Becoming the Dean does have its perks - you're even given a card that says Dean's Perks. That card doesn't have much purpose. It can be used to access the Campus Library at will, but if you had, say, already exhausted the supply of books there, there's not really any point to that card.

Here I want to briefly circle back to that whole Scholarship job thing. I noted that having a career as a Professor is sufficient to nullify the Notoriety gained by doing Scholarship on forbidden lore. This works by using a magnet to pull in the Prof job if it's in "Research Leave" mode. However, I'm going to give my personal opinion that I don't necessarily think this tracks. When I perform the regular Professor job, I'm immediately told that I have to be subtle about splicing in any of my more "controversial ideas". This leads me to the rather sensible conclusion that the Suppression Bureau, which investigates even painters and issues propaganda to report strange dreams, probably doesn't want to hear about a professor lecturing students and infecting their minds with potentially mind-altering lore. We need the Dean's permission to get books related to it out, so we know that it's not typical for a professor to just have this information. So it seems counter-intuitive that a prof should get less scrutiny when writing a full-fledged scholarly paper on it. I think it would make more sense if this Notoriety-canceling power was a Dean perk instead; it would give a real incentive beyond just stacking cash to get that dean position, while also giving a rather unique challenge that the player would need to do something that carried risk to gain that Dean position in the first place.

(Cutting this in half; apparently it's long enough that Steam is complaining, so I'll add Part 2 in a reply.)