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2024 in Review

Jon here. 

So! 2024. What a year. It seems very few people we know have actively enjoyed it, but we persevere! I thought it might be nice to take a little ramble through what we’ve been up to in 2024, and share any arising thoughts along the way!

Matters Organisational 

You’d be quickly forgiven if none of this first section is of any interest to you. The structure and values of Handiwork Games is a core passion for me – the whole thing is an experiment in being small, high quality, and holding strong values on how we do things, hopefully without any preaching about that eclipsing the actual gaming titles.

Our team at Handiwork is comprised of 3 full timers, and 4 regular freelancers who work varying amounts from just a few very high quality minutes per month to giving us all of their spare time. We work with a range of other less regular freelancers as needed, but we didn’t need a lot of that kind of freelance help this year. 

Looking over the list of published titles below, it is interesting to consider just how much additional work was done in discussion, workshop, experimentation. Some of which will see the light in game form, some of which never will. 

I’m also interested in how we almost accidentally flattened our pay structure – when one of our team needed to work less hours for health reasons, we upped their pay so they could make ends meet on less hours, but their contribution remained huge. Funny how that works, eh? 

With CEO pay in the headlines, and an appropriate feeling of ill-ease around the widening gap between the people who do work and the people who tell them to do it, it’s good to know at Handiwork everyone’s pay is so close to equal. As CEO I earn 1.18 times our lowest paid full timer. That’s quite exciting, because I like to think what we make really shows a level of quality that comes with that. 

We also have a ridiculously flat company structure, and while I carry the can for decisions, and have the final say on direction, I’d like to think we don’t pay a lot of attention to “org charts” and hierarchy at Handiwork. We’re less “The Apprentice”, with rival teams and people working in fear of being told off or fired, and a lot more “The Repair Shop”. I profoundly believe that everyone who works here is an extremely committed and skilled maker of one kind or another, and are due fair and equitable treatment commensurate with that.

Those values were tested hard this year and while it’s been tough ultimately I’m glad of that process of testing, since this quiet experiment in treating people well continues to endure. These values are easy to talk about, and much harder to bring into the real world. 

On a personal level it was a very tough year. All of our team members have faced some very serious individual struggles, and we’ve done our best to accommodate those without adding drama. 

Sometimes that’s meant delaying projects, to the financial detriment of those projects, but I feel very strongly that the wellbeing of our team is our priority. If it takes a little longer, and makes a little less money as a result, then so be it. While we all want these highly desirable gamebook releases to come thick and fast, I don’t think that should come at the cost of creators’ wellbeing.  

We ended the year devastated by some really terrible health news, but nonetheless we drew some comfort from the fact we closed for a two week break in the best financial situation we’ve been in for a long time.

Various long term challenges have been meaningfully chipped away at in 2024. It’s so boring to even mention the theft of the pallet of all our US stock, but it still looms large in our finances. The downside of our small atelier approach is we’re financially exposed when things go wrong. There isn’t a large buffer of extra value we’ve extracted from the team to fend off the bad times. But we’re ok. 

We have some frustrating unfinished business with delivering US retailers some Kickstarter rewards and we are delighted to have a brand new helper working on that directly in 2025. 

Partnerships

This year we continued to work in collaboration with others, which is an important part of our making mission. 

We did a second Backdrops Kickstarter with help from Annie Norman of Bad Squiddo Games. It’s been great to work with Annie as someone who shares our values and commitment to quality work in small business. We also have a dangerously similar sense of humour. Uh oh. 

That backdrops Kickstarter was a heck of a challenge to deliver. For some reason a lot of supports we lined up with suppliers just crumbled when we leant on them. And I mean things like “getting printers to print some books they agreed to print and have printed many times before” or “having a packaging supplier actually deliver the packaging they have been paid to deliver”. Strange times, but from experience these clumps of unexpected issues do tend to gather around singular projects. But we have persevered and were almost done. 

We worked with Reisswitz Press/Two Fat Lardies to deliver art, graphics and layout on the mighty Midgard Heroic Battles by James Morris. The final book is something I hope everyone involved with is very proud of. I certainly think it’s a great book and a great set of rules. We actually stock it on our store. (Well, it’s about to sell out but…)

We made a bunch of really cool MDF floor plans with our friends at Warbases. I owe them an email to discuss some future plans. It’s really satisfying to be able to work with local manufacturers. When I started Handiwork I think I was a little naive about being able to establish local networks within Scotland, but that means the connections we have successfully made have been really important. 

We did a bunch of freelance art for our friends at Onyx Path, and we really must reconnect with them in 2025 – it’s never been the right moment in the hectic days of 2024

This year we made several animated Kickstarter videos for our friends at Nightfall Games and Word Forge Press. The SLA Borg video in particular was a favourite. Dave Allsop’s script and artwork, combined with Ian Finney’s incredible voice over work just shine in that video. It has a a very special energy that I’m delighted to have been able to capture. I very much enjoy working with Mark Rapson from Nightfall/Word Forge as he really lets us just get on with it. 

Working with Simon Proctor on a suite of web apps for Maskwitches has been a real highlight for me. It’s easy to start projects like this, but finding people who can work with us to meet our sometimes curious needs, (no, we don’t want to pay £20k for a phone app) while reliably delivering excellent results can be tricky. Simon has more than delivered, and I’m looking forward to sharing more of these web apps which are fun to use and show off some of the cool things found in Maskwitches. 

Translations

It’s impossible to know this from the outside looking in, but we have translation deals in many territories for our various games, with partners in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain all working on regionalising various titles. Progress has been slow from all our partners, but we choose to believe that means the work is high quality!

This year saw Cursed Ink successfully crowdfund BEOWULF in Spanish, and we’re really excited about seeing that one appear in the flesh!

We will of course share more news when we have it to share!

Special Spotlight

This year saw the complete overhaul of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland. 2 years ago we decided to entirely sever all ties with using a fledgling web app which created “AI” images. Where it began as a fabulously broken widget that could remix these weird and frightening images, it quickly became obvious where it was heading, and that was not something we wanted to be involved in. At all. 

The idea of remaking what we’d already made, but with the ludicrously ambitious scope of using real props, sets and models seemed doomed to fail. It was just too ambitious at the outset. But we did it. All of our Silver Road and Maskwitches titles are now “reduxed” with ridiculously unique human-made imagery. I’m extremely proud of making that clean, decisive break, and hopefully making something that might inspire other human makers as a result. You don’t need so-called AI. You won’t find it involved in anything we make and sell. 

If we end all this tomorrow, Maskwitches will be one of the projects I’m most proud of because it was so wild in scope and ambition, and just so weird. And I think that’s quite emblematic of our entire endeavour here at Handiwork Games. 

Challenges 

2024 highlighted a few key challenges for us. 

We need more pairs of hands to help with logistical matters, and cleaning up loose ends at the ends of projects. Plans are underway here. 

It’s time to really refocus on having books in retail stores. While I would really prefer to build relationships with stores, and have done so with a small number of retailers, we need wider presence in stores worldwide.  I feel we have established a good name for quality games, and we can see from our own webstore that our titles hold their value over time. Plans are underway here also. 

Bandwidth and “brand cohesion”. In a world where social media is our primary way to connect with you, and social media to date thrives on pigeon-holing interests, we sometimes struggle because of our broad interests. We enjoy working on 5e, FitD and our own ridiculously minimalist indie storytelling stuff. We also make a range of really nice accessories. Social media doesn’t really like this, and would prefer us to do one easily pigeon-holed thing. We continue to resist, and hope to connect with as many folks with wide-ranging interests as we can. This might need to change, and we may need to split our presences somewhat. Don’t love that as an idea. 

Reaching more people! Without the help of licenses with pre-existing audiences, one of our biggest challenges is simply being seen in a very crowded field. Word of mouth remains the very best way to share what we do, and you can certainly help with that. 

Friends and Customers

Probably the biggest news in this front was the move away from Twitter to Bluesky. Frankly I never really liked Twitter, but it was a good source of traffic to our website. Bluesky is working out to be so much better for our style. I’ve made the choice to be there as “me”, rather than using a disembodied company voice. I think there’s still a place for that kind of voice on social media, but I’m a lot more comfortable being slightly less formal. And our varied output and weird interests are no impediment to traffic on Bluesky. We’ve quickly built a bigger following on Bluesky than we ever had on Twitter, and just as importantly I’ve really enjoyed making friends and connections there. 

Our Discord community contains to slowly grow. We’ve always focused on keeping that small and “genuine”, and we enjoy it as a place to informally chat. Feel free to join us there – it’s slow moving and friendly.  If you’d like to join up, point your browser at www.discord.me/handiworkgamers 

I wanted to shout out a handful of people who have been absolutely amazing supporters this year. There are too many names to mention, and please know that anyone who is a regular on our discord is basically family at this point. 

Matt Cutter has been AMAZING in Kickstarter comments this year. Thank you Matt. You are probably unaware of how many times your forcefully kind comments have lifted our spirits. Hey I’m not crying you’re crying. 

David Crowell has been an indefatigable supporter across social media, forums and the discord. Thanks David, we appreciate it a great deal. 

And the poster known as Vae, we’ve really noticed and appreciated your efforts in sharing our stuff. It’s so important, and we are really grateful. 

A huge thanks to everyone who’s joined us this year on social media, in buying our wares or chatting online!

Titles released

At the end of the day, we’re here to make games and accessories. The immortal phrase “but where’s the books?” always accompanies any small press endeavour. So what did we release this year? Quite a lot it turns out!

Freelance

  • Midgard (art, layout, graphic design)
  • 50 monsters for Paizo
  • 2 full length videos for Nightfall Games’ SLA Industries
  • 2 full length videos for Word Forge Games
  • Lots of illustration for OPP’s The World Below
  • Maps for Orbit Books
  • Lots of paintings for Flatland Games
  • Plus: Innumerable smaller illustration gigs for a variety of friends and clients. Probably really important jobs which I’ve probably rudely forgotten. 

The Future!

Here’s the exciting part. In 2025 we will be releasing:

  • FiveEvil Core Rulebook
  • FiveEvil: The Bunker by Malcolm Craig
  • FiveEvil: BEOWULF
  • FiveEvil: untitled scenario by Gar Hanrahan
  • Cold City: Hot War (these will be a slipcase featuring both books. They will also be available separately)
  • KING BEOWULF (it’s shaping up so well)
  • The Mapmakers Guide to The City for a|state (SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS)
  • 2 new Backdrop Books 
  • A story scenario for Maskwitches, (title to be confirmed once I settle on it)

We will also be working on:

  • The BEOWULF campaign (ooooh)
  • A yet to be announced BEOWULF spin off (ooooh)
  • More BEOWULF Digital Packs
  • A story scenario for The Burn
  • New Map Tiles, and a potential relaunch of the previous sets
  • An as yet unnamed Maskwitches title in a new era by a new author (ooooh)
  • Maskwitches 2: Against Stone Henge
  • A 9 year anniversary edition of The Forest Dragon by Rory Age 9. Now that he’ll be 18 can you believe it?
  • A yet to be announced collaboration with a friend-publisher of the team which could be AMAZING

So that’s it. Welcome to 2025. Let’s hope it’s a good one!

Jon Hodgson, Jan 1st 2025

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