Recently I read a fascinating thread on twitter about natural but incorrect assumptions about historical fact. I learned so much researching Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, and I so I shared a thread of my own amazing facts I learned through researching Maskwitches. I’d said on twitter these were all new to me, which wasn’t entirely true – but the specific applications of these factoid was often new.
With the longer form format available to us here on the blog, let’s unpack these a bit more, and also report some of the ensuing discussion, which was excellent!
a|state second edition is making its physical presence felt as copies make their way to backers, late pledgers, and pre-orderers around the world. (Our friends in the US will need to be the most patient, since your books need to complete their sea voyage).
Of course in the mean time the PDF is out, and looking great! All pre-orders come with a free copy of the PDF.
1: Spirits. Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland contains an extensive set of resources for naming spirits, the natural enemies of the Maskwitches. Using these resources I discovered this spirit is named The Creeper-Chewer. Be grateful that the dice did not roll up The Howling Penis Grinder, who is a much-feared spirit. You’re laughing now, but wait until you’re trying to light a fire at midnight in a freezing brackish fen while the Howling Penis Grinder promises, in a very loud voice, to kill you if you look at him out of the front of your eyes.
2: “a 10,000 year old spirit made of smoke and teeth and birch tar that wants to extinguish all human life by eating the souls of everyone you know. Because you made a peat bog angry.“
3: A temporary camp of people. The ordinary people of The Land do not make many permanent dwellings, though some exist.
4: The people of Forgotten Doggerland have dark skin, dark hair and bright green eyes. In this respect, they are unlike anyone alive today. Pale skin will not arrive in Northern Europe for thousands of years. It will first arrive with the idea of farming. The people of Forgotten Doggerland, or as they call it “The Land” are fishers, hunters, and gatherers.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is a psychedelic mesolithic setting for The Silver Road. You can pre-order it now:
Did you miss the Quickstarter for Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland? It ws easy to do, since it was only a week long! But have no fear – you can pre-order the books and the card deck here on the Handiwork Games web store right now!
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland has reached £14,000 and unlocked a new Silver Road setting to go with Maskwitches, penned by Malcolm Craig (Cold City, Hot War, a|state). It is called “The Burn”. All backers at a reward level will receive this in PDF. Very exciting!
At £16,000 we unlock another art print for everyone.
Which allows us, at £18,000, to open the Young Designer Fund, should we reach that level of funding. This will aim to find and commission an up and coming young RPG designer to write a scenario pack for Maskwitches or a new adjacent Silver Road setting, depending on what they’d prefer. This will be aimed at giving a new young talent an opportunity to reach a new audience and be involved with an established creative team. They will of course be paid properly for their work. We will publish the setting and share the proceeds with them.”
“The tools of ordinary people of the place we call Doggerland (most often simply called “The Land” by those who live there) are indistinguishable from ritual objects. The ability to change the future is a ritual function, and work done with tools is itself a spiritual affair.
Take for example a flint knife.
Its inception was in the invisible mind that imagined it. It was then birthed from an otherwise ordinary knuckle of flint, which could have rested unmoving in the ground or on a beach forever, but it was quickened by mind and other tools, themselves conduits for spiritual power that splits possibilities into probabilities and then certainties.
This cascade of events are not givens to the people of what we call Doggerland, and they hold the work of tools and tools themselves in high reverence.
All of their tools began as part of the landscape they inhabit: be they hand-chosen and knapped stones, carefully selected and carved wooden sticks, bunches of reeds, or tools made with animal sinew. The elevation of landscape into probability dividing magical implements is in itself significant.”
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is in the final stretch of its week-long Kickstarter campaign. Back it now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonhodgsonmaptiles2/maskwitches-of-forgotten-doggerland
The Silver Road + Free PDF
The Silver Road is an experimental, minimalist story-telling game for 3 to 5 players.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland has absolute astounded us by not only funding in under 5 minutes, but going on to reach almost £10,000 in funding overnight. We’re all absolutely stunned and incredibly humbled by your support. Thank you! Everything we do at Handiwork Games is a passion project that we care deeply about, but we never quite expected this curiously little project to strike such a chord!
We’ve released another preview of what you can expect to find in the Maskwitches book. We previously shared a timeline to give you the context of when things happen in the setting. Now we’re zooming right in to share the spirits name generator. As the titular Maskwitches your characters must protect the communities of Forgotten Doggerland form the threat of spirits that arise when disharmony or troubles affect the people. These ancient spirits are truly terrifying, and have names to match. Please be warned there’s some (relatively mild) mature material in the PDF, which some readers might find upsetting.
In discovering, exploring and journeying deep into a painting cave, Maskwitches may win secrets from the painted stories they make together. They may also gain both the understanding of new amulets and the knowledge of how to make new masks. They may also break masks and amulets. Their amulets and masks may be transformed.
Placing stilled thoughts and frozen rhythms into the very guts of the earth. Paintings are sight which stays. Fixing ideas to walls with ochre and pitch and resin allows those ideas to become both stronger and weaker. Vision halted, captured, and placed into the forever darkness. Secret signs hidden deep in the earth where seeds grow and bodies rot. The source of the past and the future growing outwards like roots spreading and dividing.
Stories told in paint here in the secret places deep under the ground are true, where the past and the future are connected and the painters and the painted become one.
Unseen designs carved into the winding ice tunnels of the great ice walls are melting. The thoughts stored there released forever. The rivers are too full of old songs. Spirits rise. An eel mask or a spider mask for the dark seeing and sinuous weaving of grace in dark places. Navigating the sunless red insides of the earth. Emerging from the stone birth canal reborn.
With a|state books on hand, and backer copies heading out right now, orders for all the accessories from the a|state second edition campaign will open very soon!
Let’s take a look at the a|state coins, made by our friends at Campaign Coins.
These are ideal to use in a game of The Three Coins, which is the story telling RPG played within The City, the setting of a|state. Games within games!
