Hounds & Jackals

Hounds & Jackals is a small independent house, built in evenings and weekends, that makes tabletop games, concept albums, illustrated books, theatrical magic, an interview series, and whatever else the next good idea turns out to need.

Why any of this exists

Play and imagination are not what people do with their spare time. They are how a person becomes more fully human, and a person who is playing, imagining, and paying attention alongside other people is doing something that is good for them.

That is the whole reason this house exists. Not mental illness, which needs clinical care. Mental health: thinking clearly, connecting with people, reflecting, recovering.

I am a psychiatrist. A career spent beside people at their most vulnerable, and beside them again when they had come through the worst of it, has taught me much of what I know about what helps a person hold together, and I make games and music and books because those are the things that helped, including the ones that helped me.

Built in, never announced

None of that appears on the surface of the work, and it is not supposed to. A game is a game, a song is a song, and a trick is a trick, made as well as it can be made and meant to be enjoyed for itself. Anything truer arrives afterwards, quietly, and belongs to whoever found it.

Where it actually lives

What it does instead is sit in the structure, which is easier to show than to argue. Five examples, from five different kinds of thing.

A board game. The Beast of Gévaudan is an eighteenth-century monster hunt. Its rules were built from a trauma model and then dressed as history. Fear tokens carry hypervigilance, avoidance, flashbacks and nightmares, and they penalise every roll you make, so a player feels the disruption rather than reads about it. None of that is stated during play, and there is a design guide in the back for anyone who wants to know why.

A card deck. The Mythodogical Deck is a real deck. You can play poker with it. Its four suits carry four dog deities from four different cultures, so it can also be used for a reading, and the guidebook is careful to say that the reading is reflection rather than fortune telling.

The Horror! campaign series. Three linked horror adventures for a table of players, run across several evenings each. The rule they run on is that fear is something you move people through, never something you inflict on them. So every one of them is built to end with everybody back in the kitchen with the lights on, and the way out is designed as carefully as the way in. That matters more across a trilogy, not less, because the weight accumulates.

A bar that does not exist. There are three of them across three different worlds, each with an album of its own, and they run on the same rule. Everyone drinking there is a lost soul, a monster, or an outcast, and none of them are welcome anywhere else. In the bar they get a seat, a drink, somebody to talk to, and a band. Most of them turn out to be decent underneath, which nobody outside the room ever finds out.

The songs are about loss, revenge, grief, and wanting love that is not coming, and nobody in them is offered a lesson. Music is the thing that works on everyone regardless of what they are, which is why a bar for the unwelcome has a house band rather than a notice board.

A cookbook. Every drink has a version without alcohol, prepared with the same ceremony, because that bar is for everyone.

None of those say anything about health while you are playing. All of them are about it.

Who makes it

Almost everything you can see or hear in a Hounds & Jackals project was made by somebody who was paid and is named for it: illustrators, composers, vocalists, mixing engineers, layout designers, cartographers, video editors, scattered across the world.

Every project goes to the person whose work actually suits it, rather than being bent to one house look. A gothic hall and a kaiju bar should not be drawn by the same pen. The people who make these things are a pack rather than a production line.

Where the money goes

A portion of everything this house makes goes to charity. The causes are ones I care about, and they change as life does.

For a sense of what that means in practice: the first project funded the training of a service puppy named Antoine, who is out there working. Another funded a second service puppy named Mysty, who graduated her training. Funds from various books are dedicated to various healthcare organisations.

What we are building

The plan is modest and long. A small constellation of people making things they love, supporting each other, and building, project by project, a room that more and more people are glad to find a seat in.