Category: Beowulf

Posted on

CHARACTER QUEUE: Cwenhild

Character Queue is a new series where we dive deep into our pregenerated characters that we made as part of our introduction to our BEOWULF:Age of Heroes roleplaying game. We were fortunate enough to fund sculpting and casting these characters, so not only do they appear in character sheet form but as professional miniatures as well.

So let’s explore our first character, Cwenhild:

“Cwenhild is a type of character I don’t feel we see a lot of in roleplaying games – a more mature woman of more generous proportions. Whereas in real life I see a lot of people who fit this general mould. It seems a shame that we don’t have many heroes of this broad type. Cwenhild has lived, raised a family, and lost a family. One hopes that through her vengeance-inspired adventures she might find some happiness!” – Jon Hodgson

Cwenhild, the Widow-Matron of the House

When her husband was slain, Cwenhild mourned for a year and then set about putting the affairs of her hall to rights. Ruling wisely and cautiously, she waited for her three sons to come of age and rule her lost husband’s kingdom. Yet, one by one they were taken: as they flowered into men so they were cut down by war or taken away by creatures left over from ancient times. Now she is alone, with no one else to fight the growing abundance of monsters that herald the end of days and the snuffing out of all good things.

But no straw-death for Cwenhil. No longer the spinning wheel nor the pots of the hearth for her. She has bade broken open the barrow and taken up her husband’s mail and his spear. Too long has she spent weeping and awaiting tidings at the edge of the battlefield. Now she will be the bringer of bad tidings to those who take sons and husbands.

Cwenhild is a traditionalist of the old ways. The evidence of the inevitable end of the world is all around her.

Available as a single STL file or as part of the precast miniatures set.

Play as Cwenhild in The Hermit’s Sanctuary, our ENnie-nominated introductory scenario for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, available for free (PDF version) or in print!

Posted on

Big Dice for Big Heroes

If you’re looking for the sort of 20-sided die that will impress your friends or for a stocking-stuffer for that special roleplayer in your life, our 31mm BEOWULF dice will do the trick. They’re 60% bigger than the standard d20 and come as a set of three. You can, of course, use them in any game that needs a twenty-sided die:

The Dice of a Hero

In BEOWULF, every character is a hero. And a hero deserves a big, chonky heroic die.

The Hero’s Die
The Old Ways Die
The Church Die

Wyrd Dice in BEOWULF: Age of Heroes

In our 5e-based duet adventure game BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, each character has a Wyrd, a special heroic fate that belongs to them. This ties into their alignment (do they believe in the Old Ways? Or the new Church?), inspiration, and advantage. When they roll with advantage one of the dice that they roll is their alignment die.

A roll with the Hero’s die and the Old Ways die. When the Hero rolls with advantage they add their alignment die. If they pick their alignment die to be the result they get inspiration. This allows a lucky hero to possibly roll with advantage several times in a row. And, being the only character in the game, they well may need that luck!

A less lucky result. BEOWULF heroes are allowed to pick which die they want to use when they roll with advantage. So a player could take the natural 1 this round and still gain inspiration for later use. A tough choice!

Adventure Awaits!

You can order these huge dice and/or BEOWULF Age of Heroes right now! We also have some awesome dice trays to keep the fun organised.

Posted on

BEOWULF – Alignments

BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is a new setting for one player and one GM for 5e. In this article we take a look at one of the changes we’ve made to base 5e- alignment.

Beowulf the poem is a study in contrasts when it comes to religion. Its visions of meadhalls, monsters, sea creatures and dragons remind us of pagan legends and make us think of great adventure novels. But Beowulf is given to thanking the Christian God for his good fortune and the poet tells us that Grendel (and his mother) are the kindred of Cain. So the poem blends both the Church and the Old Ways into a seamless whole.

Continue reading “BEOWULF – Alignments”
Posted on

BEOWULF: The Portent

Beowulf! A story as old as literature itself! Monsters! A hoard of dragon-guarded gold! Ancient magic swords! The very roots of fantasy adventure!

Beowulf! A lone hero leads their band to do battle against an ancient evil. In the game Beowulf: Age of Heroes YOU are the hero.

In this series of articles we’re taking a look at how we’ve adapted Beowulf to a 5e adventure setting with unique new rules, classes, and backgrounds. In this article we check out “The Portent”.

Continue reading “BEOWULF: The Portent”
Posted on

BEOWULF: Backgrounds

Every Hero in BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is human, from somewhere among the many lands that surround the Whale Road. They may be from nearby, Baltic-born and stern as the sea. They may be from strange lands to the south, with strange speech and tales no one has ever heard before. Each Hero comes to a life of adventure by a different path. Their background represents both their lineage and their life experience.

First and foremost, every Hero has access to the same Ability bonuses as any other. Adding such modifiers allows you to customise your character but is not dependent on where they were born or what they look like. Similarly, you can roll on a table (or pick) a special quirk (benefit) that is personal to you. You make some other choices, such as your age, alignment and languages and every Hero gets to start with a Feat. You then choose a background, and start building a story of how your Hero came to be. We posit the existence of a Trader’s Tongue that the folk of the North Sea and Baltic use when making deals that has loan words from a variety of languages, so that everyone can understand one another.

Continue reading “BEOWULF: Backgrounds”
Posted on

BEOWULF – The Classes

BEOWULF: Age of Heroes is designed primarily as a duet game, with one gamemaster and one player. Thus when it came time to design the classes, we quickly resolved that the idea of class roles was something that wouldn’t quite work. It was okay for a player to choose a focus for their Hero’s class, because Followers (non-player characters that accompany the character and are able to temporarily aid them) can help support the player in weak areas. But every character needed to have a certain measure of toughness and some ability at combat. We decided to create just a single class, the Hero class, and use 5e’s subclasses to allow a player to choose a focus for their Hero. We ended up with six different subclasses. Each based around an Ability score.

Continue reading “BEOWULF – The Classes”
Posted on

Beowulf Designer​ Diary 1

We’ve seen a lot of excitement around our upcoming RPG projects – Ken Hite’s Hellenistika and BEOWULF. Today we present our first designer diary for BEOWULF!

Our designer diaries will be irregular updates on how things are progressing behind the scenes, what we’re working on, the challenges we’re facing and so on.


BEOWULF DESIGNER DIARY 1

About the story of Beowulf
For those that don’t know, Beowulf is one of the oldest recorded stories in Western literature. As such it’s right at the root of a lot of the kind of heroic stories we enjoy. In terms of events it’s very simple – Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, a people living in Southern Sweden, hears tell of problems in Denmark. A wonderful meadhall, Heorot, has been built there, but it’s been largely abandoned due to the malign influence of Grendel– a monster who has been killing the inhabitants. Beowulf being a heroic type resolves to slay the hellspawn of the haunted hall. And he does. After figuring out the monster’s weakness he abandons his traditional war-gear, wrestling the creature and ripping its arm off. Poor old Grendel limps off to die.

But things aren’t over. The victory comes with consequences! Grendel’s Mother presents another monstrous threat to happy life in Denmark. Never being one to shy away from great deeds Beowulf must also figure out how to defeat this new adversary. Which of course he does!

Time travels on, and Beowulf becomes a King of his people. Word comes to his meadhall that a great dragon has awoken after its hoard is disturbed by a thief… We won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t read it. But we strongly recommend that you do. Both Seamus Heaney and JRR Tolkien have made marvellous translations of Beowulf, and they’re well worth your time.

In addition to the heroic events and inevitable battling, there’s a lot of exciting “meta” stuff in the way the tale was recorded, and the accompanying glimpses we get into cultural details of Anglo-Saxon life. We love it!

BEOWULF the RPG setting

Taking our enthusiasm for Beowulf the Anglo-Saxon poem as our inspiration, we set out to make an exciting setting and set of additional/amended rules for 5thEdition. 

The world of Anglo-Saxon stories is something we’re all really interested in from a historical and fictional standpoint. We love the style of the stories, the way the world looks and feels, the arms and armour and so on. BEOWULF will feature all the feel, but it isn’t intended as strictly a historical treatise. It’s a strongly-flavoured “story book” world of heroic tales.

Heroes in BEOWULF will sail across a story book version of the world of roughly the 5thto 11thcenturies, solving mysteries and ridding kingdoms of monsters, just like Beowulf in the original tale.

Duet Play
The first “rules thing” we wanted to offer was really high quality duet play for 5thEdition. None of us have quite the time we’d like to play RPGs, and by making a great set of rules for just two people we can really help with that. So it is that BEOWULF is designed primarily for one gamesmaster and one player. 

That in turn led us to develop a really strong structure for duet play for both the player and the GM: we’ve been analysing what having just one player means for the 5thEdition rules, as well as the social side of play. The results of that work all come together really nicely in BEOWULF as a setting and ruleset. 

Followers

The Beowulf of the story is a singular hero, just as the rules are for a single player, but Beowulf is not entirely alone in the story. Like so many heroes of legend he has his followers with him, occasionally chipping in to help when relevant to the story. (This is also true of Achilles’ Myrmidons, Jason’s Argonauts, Gilgamesh’s Enkidu and so on)

So with BEOWULF we are creating a special set of rules for the actions of a hero’s followers. And as far as we can tell it’s rather unique! Just like in the story of Beowulf, followers are on hand when you need them, but there’s no need to track them as if they were full non-player characters. They’re there when it matters, and they’re in the background when they don’t. 

Followers support the hero, and a hero will need to recruit help along the way as he or she tries to figure out any mystery he or she encounters.

Play beyond the session
Followers in BEOWULF also offer some unique additional features. We’re really keen to offer the chance to actively “play” betweensessions – The gamesmaster always has opportunities for fun in creating adventures, but in BEOWULF the playertoo can invest some time in enjoyable and rewarding game activity on their own between sessions. 

The exploits of followers becomes the focus between games, and that mechanically feeds into the next session. 

Challenges
Recently, we’ve spent a lotof time discussing what it means to lose a follower, and precisely how we want to pitch that. As something you’ll be invested in, and something more than a simple resource, we want the loss of a treasured follower to matter. The interactions with your band of followers matter. But we don’t want it to hobble your character mechanically beyond reason when a follower parts company with your hero. Indeed, we want the loss of valued followers to happen as part of the story of your hero.

We’re finding the balance between the loss of a follower being akin to the loss of a favourite magic item in a regular 5e game, or the loss of a whole level in a more old school game. Those are loose analogies, but they give you an idea of what we’re wrestling. The answer we’ve come up with relates to our core maxim when making BEOWULF – that you can lose in the short term to gain in the long term – and we’ll have more about that in a future diary.

Whither Multiplayer?
The way we’ve put BEOWULF together means that if you do want to play with a group you can! If you wish to assemble a team of heroes from across the world that have to come together to battle a threat too great for one hero you can totally do that! Followers fade much further into the background, and the group of heroes comes to the fore, replacing the need for followers to support their hero.

What’s next?
We’re finishing up our current round of rules polishing, and once that’s done we’ll be reaching out for more playtesters. That call will go out via the Handiwork Games newsletter, so be sure to sign up! You can find details on our website at www.handiwork.games

Posted on

Handiwork Games Launched!

Handiwork Games is a new tabletop games publisher based in Scotland, UK. Led by ex-Cubicle 7 Creative Director Jon Hodgson, Handiwork Games has launched with news of two RPG lines.

The first is a partnership with renowned RPG author, Ken Hite. Hellenistika is a fantasy ancient Greek setting for 5th Edition. With the tagline “LIVE FAST • LOVE WELL • LEAVE A GOOD-LOOKING MOSAIC” Hellenistika promises new classes, playable species and setting specific rules for 5e.

“From the Pillars of Herakles in the West to the Silken Cities of the East, from the isle of Hyperborea in the North to the Mountains of the Moon in the South, the world spreads before you, alive with gods and marvels.

The Great Conqueror lies dead and mummified in Alexandria, leaving the world to scheming kings and greedy cities … and to you, if you can seize it. Ancient magics lurk in Babylonian ziggurats and Egyptian pyramids. Carve your names into history with your weapons and your wits, and beat your fellow wonder-makers and mercenaries in the games of treasure, wine, and love.

Adventure across the “good parts version” of the Hellenistic Age, a time of swords and scrolls, heroes and cults, war elephants and deadly Amazons, griffins and dragons, piles of gold and robot guardians, super-ships and death-machines – and that’s before we put our fantastic spin on history!”

The second game in the line up is BEOWULF – a mythic setting again for 5e. Promising similarly tailored rules, BEOWULF stands out as being designed for two players – the GM and the Hero.

“One of the oldest recorded stories in Western Europe, Beowulf is an epic tale of hero against monster. And then the monster’s mother. And then a dragon.”

BEOWULF is a setting and rules set for 5th Edition, designed primarily for duet play – one GM and one player.


BEOWULF presents a host of new and specially adapted rules to create epic and thematic adventures for your lone hero and his or her companions. Explore Migration Era Europe and beyond, solve mysteries, and do battle with dreadful monsters.


With writing and rules design from hand-picked 5e and folklore geniuses, and with art from Jon Hodgson and friends, BEOWULF will be a thing of epic wonder.”

Known for his work at Cubicle 7 as creative director, his definitive Tolkien art on The One Ring RPG and as a successful freelance artist in his own right, Jon Hodgson oversaw a great deal of C7’s successful creative work, so when he announced his departure in early 2018 many were keen to know what he was moving on to do. It appears the plan was to launch his own games company.

Back to top

Privacy Policy Proudly powered by WordPress