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!
If you’re an a|state backer then you’ll already have read in Friday’s update that a|state books have arrived! As have the limited edition books and the Table Tower. Check out the video to see more.
Our fulfilment partners are now working as fast as possible to get copies dispatched. Naturally copies heading further afield will take a little longer than copies sent to UK addresses!
We’ll also be adding more a|state items to our web store now that we have the books on hand.
Huh. Jon here again, talking about Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland. So a little while back I spent the evening making images of drums for Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland. But you know what? I’m not going to use them. Which is kinda interesting.
Long post is long.
It’s very complicated, and would require too many words for blog post that anyone will read to the end, but I have some concerns about Maskwitches cleaving too close to real world Siberian shamanism (and we could throw in some other religious practices that one might call “shamanism” too) as an influence.
There’s a line on that I don’t care to cross.
Troubling echoes can be created when we take a religious practice first witnessed and recorded by non-indigenous peoples a few hundred years ago, and uncritically project it back the best part of 10,000 years into a gleefully “historio-gonzo”-but-attempting-to-be-internally-credible, fantasy game.
I’m reading a reference work right now which specifically falls into this trap, and I don’t wish to echo that mistake.
As it was being made, “Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland” walked a very precise line as the project developed, and I needed to trust its direction. Underneath the clear glee I have in assembling its range of fairly wild influences, and revelling in assembling the parts that “feel right”, there is a very deep well of seriousness in both a moral compass on appropriate or acceptable appropriation, and an honest creative process.
Creatively, I went looking for these drums in a self conscious way, and of course I found them. They did not find me, unlike all the other ideas in the book so far. And so they just don’t belong. They were made in the wrong way.
And in terms of moral compass, they’re giving me some bad vibes. Too on the nose, too lazy, verging on the unpleasant end of ethnography.
Contrast these with the “witch-knives” that came out of nowhere, feel really right, but don’t… take from anyone? It’s a very fragile sensibility but it matters to me as the creator. Making “right” things requires those fine-tuned delicate aerials, I think.
These drum images are however still enjoyable. And may yet find a use. But not in the panopoly of the witches for this project.
I thought this kind of curation and careful backward step might prove mildly diverting for you. Also: cool drum pics bro.
We’re delighted to announce that we’re releasing a strictly limited edition boxed set of art prints and an art book celebrating the classic Brit RPG Dragon Warriors.
Jon, the owner of Handiwork Games, has a long association with Dragon Warriors, painting all the covers for the reissued edition that came out from James Wallis’ Magnum Opus Press in 2008. It was also the second table top RPG Jon ever played. So we have a lot of love for Dragon Warriors hereabouts.
The boxed set will contain eight signed A4 prints, beautifully printed on heavy paper stock. Inside the box will also be a softcover art book detailing some of the behind the scenes stories behind each painting, with contributions from Dave Morris, the creator of Dragon Warriors, Ian Sturrock, contributor to the new edition, and the owner of the current publisher, Serpent King Games, and more!
The edition is strictly limited to just 50 copies, and the pre-order is open now:
Dragon Warriors Deluxe Art Book and Prints Boxed Set
A boxed set of 8 signed art prints and a softcover art book.
£50.00Original price was: £50.00.£30.00Current price is: £30.00.
We took delivery of a prototype Maskwitches book. In this video Jon takes a look through the prototype which we filled with full page Doggerland art, in advance of the final text being ready. And after a lot of rambling about the various aspects of this setting and the art we’ve been making, there’s a surprise delivery!
You can sign up to be notified of the launch of the Maskwitches campaign here:
Some fabrics from Forgotten Doggerland. And a witchbag. Also a stranger from under the sea. It’s not real though. It’s just the psychic embodiment of the community’s lack of concern for the rising brine. So that’s fine, right? What harm could it do?
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). It’s coming to Kickstarter soon for a week long Quickstarter campaign!
While the game is a psychedelic fantasy version of the mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) period, it never hurts to put things in historical context. And so here is a section from the forthcoming book, detailing historical timeline of events before and after the setting of the game.
You can also add this 7 page preview to your DrivethruRPG library by downloading it here.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is about to go into layout. We anticipate a mini-kickstarter for the print book this month.
Hello – Jon here, writer of The Silver Road and its first supplement In Spoons, In Knives. In Spoons is now printed and in stock, all pre-orders have been dispatched and it’s now a regular purchase on our webstore, and from selected stockists.
“In Spoons, In Knives” the first supplement for The Silver Road came out recently in PDF, and the print book is on its way to us now. Let’s chat about the why of it all.
So why 1930s? Honest answer – I was experimenting with Midjourney AI, and catching up with the latest series of Peaky Blinders and listening to the music of PJ Harvey for the first time in a long time. All of these things clicked together, and Midjourney and I made some really cool images with a 1930s theme.
And I’ve wondered about something like a Peaky Blinders rpg for a while. I didn’t want us to go for a license (and not being funny, but we could credibly try – although I suspect someone else already has it…) and I certainly really enjoy those stories, but all my initial ideas for In Spoons were about making something broader, freer, and shorter, with a wider set of inspirations. Which would also work for The Silver Road. None of which quite matches up.
The Silver Road is a focused toolkit for group story telling, and that means that supplements work best when they take the form of inspirational material – curated by us to build towards a set of “feels” that you can take and run with. Rather than a more traditional/dry setting or “fixed” world book.
The industrial cities of the 1930s in the UK is a really great backdrop for this. There’s loads of “stuff” that works really well for Silver Road. There’s a pre-existing shared space there.
It’s also a time before a really huge upheaval. It’s the build up to the great clash of ideologies that expresses itself in WW2. But how does that build up play out for ordinary people?
I wanted to focus on industrial communities and their struggles. On outsider groups. Like the opposite of Downton Abbey. The Silver Road tells small stories in big settings well, I think. Focusing in on characters and their struggles. This all fits together.
One of the starting points for The Silver Road was those scary 1970s and 80s children’s books by Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Alan Garner. Imagining those feels in the 1930s just felt right. I can’t claim that’s necessarily a recognisable part of the book, but it’s a key influence and stepping stone. And one of the reasons there’s some spooky/supernatural stuff in there.
The 30s as an RPG period is understandably dominated by the venerable Call of Cthulhu. Oddly enough, that provides really fertile soil to grow other crops. I’m not interested in HPL at all, but the 30s isn’t irrevocably tied to his work, nor percentile systems. Call of Cthulhu can handle all that stuff very well indeed, freeing In Spoons, In Knives to look in a different direction both in terms of setting and system.
I think there are some brilliant, resonant stories to be told without any supernatural stuff. But there’s also opportunities for some great folk horror mixed with the Industrial Age and the dying of empire. For me, telling some stories about the forgotten gods of England being poisoned by industry, as a backdrop to some personal tales, is something I want to play. In Spoons, In Knives is really set up for that.
Oh and if you were hoping for an explanation of the title, check out the video.
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.
