Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland will be an art book and sourcebook for a psychedelic Mesolithic setting for The Silver Road (as well as being a fine sourcebook for other RPGs)
The Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland use their masks and amulets to battle spirits from the land, arisen to embody problems faced by the fisher hunter gatherer community. By battling the spirits the community’s sickness can be healed.
In Spoons, In Knives is about to enter layout. After that we’ll be supporting The Silver Road with Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, a semi-psychedelic imaginary Ice Age setting, placing your stories in Forgotten Doggerland – the land that lies drowned beneath the North Sea.
At the end of the last ice age, what we now call Doggerland was subject to an unimaginably vast tidal wave, and was lost forever. We know precious little about this place, and as such it makes a marvellous place to set weird tales of the now-forgotten witches.
Written by Jon Hodgson, this setting book will be again illustrated with the Midjourney AI. We have created hundreds of weird art pieces, and this supplement will double as an art book for the setting.
In The Silver Road each character has two things they’re good at and two things they are bad at. In Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, these take the form of the masks the witches wear, and amulets they carry. Witches are able to trade and change their masks, making their characters’ identities extremely fluid.
There are several suggested modes of play offered, but the main one is that the players take the role of witches who respond to the problems of the hunter gatherer communities of Forgotten Doggerland. Problems which frequently manifest into strange and horrific creatures which much be defeated in ritualised magical warfare.
In addition to the imagined Ice Age setting, Maskwitches also presents a 1970s setting in the vein of the novels of Susan Cooper and Alan Garner to overlay the core setting, with Ice Age events taking place in flashback, and significant objects and entities connected across the ages.
Maskwitches will be presented in the same 21cm square format as The Silver Road, but is anticipated to be a considerably longer, and perfect bound softcover. We are currently looking at a limited edition of hardcover books. Anticipated release is August 2022.
The Silver Road is our experimental, minimalist storytelling game. We’re delighted with the response to this book, and we have a slate of settings to share with you.
The first two releases are: In Knives, In Spoons – a 1930s heavy industrial setting inspired by the likes of Peaky Blinders, and Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland – a surreal and psychedelic take on a lost ice age land and the people who live there.
In Spoons, In Knives
The foundries never stop pounding out knives to send all around the world. The finest tables are dressed with shining silverware from the dirtiest town on god’s good earth. The shipyards grow great hulks from iron skeletons like whales rotting backwards in an endless cacophony of rivets.
Great burning spark-breathed canyons of fire drawing our wire for the colonies and steel plates for the ships and needles for record players. Day after day spent in pouring and brazing and casting and smelting.
But at night the streets are alive with jazz music and young people fighting and dancing. Knives and heels flick in the moonlight. Lipstick and blood.
There are paydays and so there are bookies. There is duty owing on whisky and tobacco and cocaine and so there is smuggling. Betting on horses and dogs and cocks. Betting on which cockroach will climb the wall and which young man can batter the other the hardest.
The steam hammers and greed and lust and rage go round and round up and down without end.
In Spoons, In Knives takes us to an imagined 1930s, and the heart of Britain’s industrial centres – be they Birmingham, Sheffield, or Glasgow.
The Silver Road creates settings and stories through play, and everyone around the table has the power to shape the reality within the story. And so setting sourcebooks like In Spoons, In Knives present a grab bag of useful and inspiring setting “stuff”. We’ve organised these entries into groups of 6, so that any section can be used with dice rolls to randomly add detail and flavour to your story.
You’ll find ideas for characters, stories, details from within the turbulent world of 1930s industrial Britain. Will you play as a group of musicians, poets, orphans, foundry workers, nurses or a mix of unexpected companions thrown together by circumstance?
In Spoons, In Knives also contains an optional new “rule” (“rule” is a strange word for such a minimal game – “suggested procedure?”) for foreshadowing the next scene with the results of your dice rolls in the current scene. This allows the GM to do even less work during the game, and shares the organisational creative burden even wider.
This being a release for The Silver Road, this isn’t a dry history source book. All our Silver Road settings contain an element of surrealism, led by the curious artwork which we make with the Midjourney AI. Expect a feast of weird and wonderful imagery – the book will be the same 21cm square format as The Silver Road, and they will sit together beautifully on your shelf.
We anticipate In Spoons, In Knives in July 2022.
The Silver Road Version 1 + Free PDF
The Silver Road is an experimental, minimalist story-telling game for 3 to 5 players. This is version 1.
£9.99Original price was: £9.99.£4.99Current price is: £4.99.
Hello you! We’ve been fantastically busy getting a|state and The Trials of the Twin Seas through the print process. That’s all done and the presses are rolling. Which means we now have some time to catch you up on what’s coming up next at Handiwork Games. We sent this news out via our newsletter on Friday – if you missed that you also missed a web store discount voucher, so be sure to sign up here.
Trials of the Twin Seas Late Pledges
Late pledges for The Trials of the Twin Seas will open in July, and the PDF will launch soon too. Backers have the PDF already.
Trials of the Twin Seas is a collection of adventures for one GM and one Player in the epic early-medieval setting of BEOWULF Age of Heroes.
a|state Coins Arrive
We shot some video of the a|state coins and compass arriving. Check it out:
and the next episode of the a|state podcast is coming soon:
Upcoming titles
We’re working on some amazing new titles for you. First of all is a big one:
KING BEOWULF. In this high level supplement by Jacob Rodgers your Hero will be ruling whole kingdoms and controlling entire warbands as they face the challenges of the treasure-seat. This new hardcover will feature all the clever rules design and beautiful artwork you’ve come to expect from Handiwork Games!
We’re deep in the development process on this title, and will have plenty more info as we progress toward release. Check out the cover by Jon Hodgson:
In Spoons, In Knives. The first setting supplement for The Silver Road,
In Spoons, In Knives transports us to the 1930s, and the industrial heartland of the United Kingdom.
Filled with inspiration for 1930s gangland stories, struggles for community survival, or surreal supernatural stories against a backdrop of heavy industry and rising global tensions. Featuring more mind-being and creepy Midjourney artwork, and the same 21cm (8 inches) square format, In Spoons will sit handsomely next to The Silver Road rulebook.
Beyond that we’re currently working on The Maskwitches of Doggerland, another setting for The Silver Road – this time a psychedelic take on the lost ice-age territory of Doggerland, which now lies under the North Sea.
This one is quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and we can’t wait to tell you more about it.
Right now we’re laying out Digital Pack Nine for BEOWULF Age of Heroes, which will be released soon.
We’ll be looking at these titles in more detail this week on our social media, so be sure to give us a follow:
The game box itself slips into a pocket and the riff coins happily slide into the box.
It wasn’t designed specifically to be portable – it just is.
The Silver Road, our minimalist sorry-telling rpg and our newest release, is similarly portable. You need the eight inch square booklet while you learn the minimalist rules, and a six-sided dice. Having a dice for each player is ideal, but that’s no hardship. Your character fits easily on an index card or till receipt.
Like Bang and Twang, The Silver Road wasn’t specifically designed to be portable, but it really is. Clearly small games are something we like making!
If you happen to be in Birmingham at the beginning of June you can catch us at UK Games Expo. We’d love to see you, so swing by the booth for a chat!
The Silver Road is a minimalist story telling game. It’s setting-free, allowing you to bring your own, and is light enough to be incredibly versatile. The game was created under heavy influence of 1970s children’s books like Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, but it can happily work for any setting.
The Silver Road is an experimental game that thrives on player participation, group story telling, and creative narration to create stories together.
As a minimalist game there’s no tracking of numerical resources, and the rules are stripped down to the bare minimum of procedures.
The game uses one six-sided dice per player, and your character fits on an index card.
As written, The Silver Road is played with a GM but recent games without a GM work well with the right group.
The Silver Road was written by Jon Hodgson (Writer on The One Ring 1e, Adventures in Middle-earth, BEOWULF Age of Heroes and the Terminator RPG) and illustrated by Mike Franchina (illustrator for Magic the Gathering and Blizzard)
The Silver Road is an experimental, minimalist story telling rpg we’re releasing tomorrow, the 24th of May, in both PDF and print. Its a 24-page, full-colour booklet with amazing art by Mike Franchina.
Jon Hodgson: If you’re a games designer (and who isn’t these days?) you’ll know it can be both complicated and interesting to sift through your influences and inspirations.
When I think about where The Silver Road came from, there are a few intriguingly awkward things to talk about in the mix. It’s probably not politic to talk about negatives. But let’s do it.
There are things I see in games which I personally don’t enjoy or think are “not good”, but which have a use in inspiring me to create something different. And I don’t like a mechanic or process I call “advanced coin flips”.
“Advanced coin flips” are where a mechanic adds lots of work to create a very limited result. We’ve all seen it – complicated dice mechanics where maybe you’re throwing a ton of dice which you then have to sort through, and ¾ of them don’t mean anything. For me, sorting through a bunch of dice isn’t all that much fun. I have to do a lot of work to get a result.
Likewise, rolling two dice and subtracting one from another – which manages to remove the intuitive and fun qualities of dice rolls, (“yay a six! Go again!”) and severely limits the outcomes, despite it being a lot of work for players.
Now sometimes, he says hedging his bets, this kind of mechanic is fun – when placed in the right context, and of course different people like different things. When we design somethign we have to make harder decisions than perhaps we would when just enjoying a game.
Most often, my thinking is that if you’re better off flipping coins for what amounts to a fifty fifty result? Then flip coins. Flipping multiple coins could make the basis for a really good game. (Ahem)
This kind of thinking was a big part of what inspired the experimental game that is The Silver Road, and all this stuff was floating around my brain while The Silver Road coalesced.
I was looking to remove as much “procedure” as possible, and explore how that changed the focus of play. I should qualify that with the idea that this was a starting point – it wasn’t rigorously adhered to once that ball got rolling. I was more keen to just see where that ball went once it was in motion.
The Silver Road, somewhat precociously and provocatively, does away with the very common, traditional RPG idea of rolling dice when your character is middling at something, and the likely outcome is somewhere broadly around 50/50. (Or 60/40 – I’m talking in very broad terms here)
This is pretty much accepted through most trad games as the meat of most die rolls, and to some degree the meat of “what you spend your time doing”. By comparison, The Silver Road is a mechanical vegan. (That’s a ridiculous sentence but sometimes arising thoughts can’t be denied)
Rather than focus on characters being middling in their abilities, and what happens being determined by die rolls around that middle ground, the Silver Road takes a different, more story-inspired approach. We’re not looking to somehow simulate “real life”. We’re looking to facilitate and inspire the kinds of things we see in stories.
In The Silver Road, your character is either good at things – meaning you will succeed, with a slim possibility of enduring some consequence, – or you’re bad at things, which means you have a very low chance of success and a high chance of consequences occurring.
A protagonist is at worst very likely to attempt something, struggle briefly, and then succeed.
It’s quite a shift of outlook and expectation, and we’ve found it to be a really interesting space to explore if you’re into this kind of thing. It is self consciously different and experimental.
In Silver Road, the content that the mechanics and procedures provide doesn’t come from undertaking a closely-matched probability test, aimed to tell you if your character can do a thing or not.
You’ll know ahead of time with some certainty that your character can do the thing. (With a little glimmer of risk that they can’t do the thing on this turn, but they will succeed on their next turn). Or perhaps that they almost certainly can’t do the thing. (With a similarly rare likelihood that they might fluke it).
The fun comes from describing how they do the thing, and how your fellow players interact, since there’s a high chance they will get an opportunity to add to your narration with a “but…”. (That’s a story for another blog).
The Silver Road Important Game Facts
24 pages long (plus cover)
21cm x 21cm full colour book (portable, loveable)
Rules-lite, minimalist story telling game (if you like rules this might not be for you)
You can grab a bunch of cool BEOWULF merchandise at Redbubble. We sporadically add new designs, so keep checking back. The various designs are available of a ton of different items, including large desk mats, art prints, drinking bottles, T shirts and loads more!
We’re off to the first big event we’ve attended since before the pandemic! UK Games expo is on in Birmingham from Friday 3rd of June until Sunday the 5th.
We’ll be there with a stand in the trade hall.
We’re in Hall 1, stand 228. That’s on the left hand side of the hall as you come in.
We’re bringing a curated selection of our favourite things. Here’s the planned list of what you’ll be able to grab at the booth.
a|state Second Edition: it’s not printed yet. The PDF is out now, and printing begins this week! Pre-orders are open now.
Trials of the Twin Seas: it’s not printed yet. The PDF is almost done though!
Map tiles. We’re due a reprint of several sets with only one or two copies in stock, Bringing along a less than complete range seems like a lot of weight to bring. You can get them on our web store.
Battle mats. They’re 36” square and once you’re dealing with more than a couple they weigh a ton. We’ll happily send you one through the post though!
BEOWULF inspiration mats. We’re down to just a couple left. We might bring those along in Jon’s suitcase but they won’t be “in stock” as such. We’re printing a new one for the Twin Seas campaign.
Posters: These are too tricky to transport and display well, and much easier for you to mail order than carry around Expo!
Jon will be be at the booth all weekend, with various helpers popping by too. We’d love to see you for a chat after such a long time away from shows, so please do swing by and tell us all about your adventures!
At Handiwork Games we all talk about games all the time. One strand of that chat for the longest time has been about indie, minimalist story games: the things we like, the things we don’t. The Three Coins for a|state grew out of that very conversation.
And suddenly out of that same chat the potential for an entire new game appeared.
(This is Jon writing by the way) While we waited for the Twin seas Kickstarter funds to arrive I had a bit of spare time, and so I started writing and testing.
The Silver Road is the result.
When playing The Silver Road, you and some friends can get together and tell stories.
This is an unashamedly minimalist story telling game. It has a simple core mechanic that is applied any time there’s uncertainty about what happens next.
For the most part in this game you’ll succeed in whatever you narrate your character is doing.
Even where you don’t succeed, if your character is good at doing the thing you’re attempting, you’ll succeed on your next turn.
The obstacles which you face in the game will have a chance to provide a consequence for your characters, which add to the story, and then they’re overcome, and the story moves on.
For a long time I’ve mentioned in passing that I tend to run games in a very loose way, and I thought it was about time I made that into something other than a slightly awkward confession. I like running a loose game where everyone throws in their contribution on what happens, and where we don’t get hung up too much on the finer points of system stuff.
And don’t get me wrong – get this – I can like several things at once. I do also enjoy it when we play crunchier games “properly”. I certainly don’t object to tracking arrows, and facing challenges based on the specifics of what my character owns and precisely how good they are at skills.
I also have a special place in my heart for very light games that rely much more on improvised creativity. And that’s The Silver Road.
I also wanted, as is our eternal mission, to make a beautiful thing.
The game is illustrated by Mike Franchina, an old friend and incredible artist. Each page has a unique illustration.
For this game Mike has made use of Midjourney, an AI art creation tool. It (in the hands of Mike) is brilliant at creating the kind of startlingly weird and evocative imagery you’ll find in The Silver Road.
We’ll release The Silver Road in PDF (and pre-order with free PDF) next week. We’re hoping to have some advance print copies of The Silver Road at UK Games Expo.
The Silver Road Important Game Facts
24 pages long (plus cover)
21cm x 21cm full colour book (portable, loveable)
Rules-lite, minimalist story telling game (if you like rules this might not be for you)
In Spoons, In Knives + Free PDFOriginal price was: £11.99.£5.99Current price is: £5.99.
The Silver Road Version 1 + Free PDFOriginal price was: £9.99.£4.99Current price is: £4.99.
