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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!

Hwaet!
The BEOWULF Annual 2024 collects all the written material from BEOWULF Digital Packs Fourteen to Seventeen, and the adventure The Serpent of Glinreddin into one handsome hoard of treasures!

Inside you’ll find:

• Old Ways temples and NPCs
• A guide to pre-Christian belief
• A guide to Followers in BEOWULF
• The Isle of the Warrior Woman
• Algaec the Troll
• Fisc-Wisc the River Troll of Plunnog
• The Serpent of Glinnredïn
And more!

The BEOWULF Annual 2024 is a must have for all players and GMs of BEOWULF Age of Adventures.

Morgan Davie is the creator of FiveEvil, and he’s got some things to share.

# GOOD PLAYTEST

Hi all! I am buzzing after a really great bit of FiveEvil play and I just wanted to share the good energy!

As you know there are five scenarios in the FiveEvil: Fiendish 5E Horror core book, and this is the book’s closer. If this was a horror film festival this would be the Closing Night Special Screening, a crowd pleasing epic to send everyone out on a high.

The scenario is called Big Screamin’ Demons. It has a different tone to the others in the book. While horror almost always works well with humour laced through it, and most (but not all!) of the other scenarios will surely lead to hilarious moments at your table as you play, this is the only one that actively leans into comedic tones. It’s still a horror film, but it plays big and wild and encourages the players to meet it at that level. (FiveEvil, it contains multitudes!)

Here’s the summary:

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BIG SCREAMIN’ DEMONS

You said you’d go to hell before you’d play with them again. Well, life is long and billionaires are rich and now you’re getting the band back together for a one-off payday that could change your life. One concert on a private island, you can manage that without going to hell. So long as hell doesn’t come to you instead…

Big Screamin’ Demons is an over-the-top horror rock opera with blood, guts, and monsters. It sets a big stage and then spills blood and guts all over it, with tongue in bloody cheek the whole time. Watch out, this one goes up to 11 on every single dial. Horns up! 

Genre: Raucous bloody monster horror

Size: 3-6 players

Duration: 1-3 sessions

Play this if you like: Evil Dead 2, Cabin in the Woods, Brain Dead

—

We didn’t use pregenerated characters for this test, making our own from scratch. The players first came up with their characters as members of a rock band whose most popular song is called Big Screamin’ Demons. (They named the band ‘Creative Indifference’ which made me laugh and laugh) and worked out their personalities and relationships, all out in public with lots of cross-collaboration. 

Then we jumped forward to the present day, 20 years on from the band’s acrimonious split, and everyone added another layer to their character to say where they had ended up. This layer was kept secret so they could discover what became of each other in play.

(Quick rules aside: FiveEvil characters have two descriptions, which are like a combination of 5E’s character class and background. Every scenario in the book is a demonstration of some of the different tools and options in the game, such as different ways of using descriptions. Here, one description is your present day life, and the other is your youth, lying dormant within you, ready to be reawakened… It works really well!)

With characters worked out, and some idea of why the band split up, we started to play. The game begins with all these middle-aged characters given an offer they can’t refuse to reunite for a special one-night concert on a private island. And I won’t go any further than that in terms of spoilers – there are some big twists and turns in here! 

What I can say is that we’re two sessions deep, one session to go, and I am loving it. The first session was good fun and also informative (I see how I can streamline a bunch of early stages in the scenario and add some space for more fun action, which is exactly what a good test run can show you). But the second session, oh my gosh, that was a ride! It delivered everything I hoped for as all that character setup came roaring to the front of the action, and the players had an amazing time riffing off each other, enjoying the horror as well as the comedy, and just generally seizing on everything the scenario was built to do and making it sing.

One more session will bring this run to an end, and I am so excited! I expect Big Screamin’ Demons is going to get played a lot. I can’t wait to hear the name you give your band! 

(This run is also the official end of FiveEvil playtesting! Extensive testing of all five scenarios over the last few years has been a huge part of the project, not just to make sure the scenarios all work well, but also to make sure the FiveEvil rules do their job. It’s been a long-running process and this is the very end of it, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has taken part along the way. One more session to go…)

Thanks to Mike, Barry, Paul, Stephan and Ziggy!

morgue

BEOWULF Digital Pack 17 is out now! We have the 11-page The Isle of the Warrior Woman by the renowned-for-his-redoubtableness Gareth Hanrahan which is just packed with stuff! AND an introduction to a new kind of BEOWULF adventure – the Trial.

We were delighted to be commissioned by Reisswitz Press to do the illustration, graphic design and layout for Midgard Heroic Battles, by James Morris.

We’ve worked with James in the past on his Warhammer Historical titles Age of Arthur and El Cid, so it was a delight to revisit the world of war-games in his company!

To be really clear: Midgard is a standalone war-game – it’s not a part of our own game lines. The book is full colour and soft back, coming in at 136 pages. Our stock is limited, so grab one now!

With Splinter Five now out we’d love to show you more close ups of the amazing art by Scott Purdy, but since it’s the final part of the scenario it’s all a bit spoilery. So let’s instead talk about the rules innovations that Morgue reveals in this final Splinter. 

Firstly there’s new uses for Desperation. Desperation replaces Inspiration in FiveEvil, and it works in reverse. You take on the debt of Desperation to do things you’d do with Inspiration, and you’ll have to pay it back later. In Splinter Five, Morgue outlines some more of the things you can do with Desperation.

When you’re really up against it, the temptation to take a desperation point, which you’ll have to shed later by enacting predefined parts of your character (or suffer more later), becomes *really* tempting. 

This gears *beautifully* into the rising DC via the Intensity mechanic, and creates this manic feel as things get worse and worse and your characters will take on these debts in order to survive. 

An other major reveal in Splinter Five is “the verge”. This is really smart. The verge is the imaginary space where monsters “live” before the PCs encounter them. It allows them to move in parallel to the players, making checks, existing fully, but without revealing themselves. It’s a neat way of framing things, and keeps unseen enemies in motion while the scenario is happening. It’s some cool stuff!

Lastly Morgue details Hunt Encounters: a structure for play when the PCs are being hunted: a common trope in horror scenarios and a very necessary set of rules. While you can freestyle such encounters, offering a mechanical structure really brings something to the tension, and again meshes gears beautifully with the Intensity mechanic.