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.
Our printer has kindly send us these photos of Trials of the Twin Seas and a|state Second Edition.
We’re absolutely delighted and very excited about getting our own hands on these beautiful books. Now we enter the most frustrating phase as we await the delivery. These were printed in Europe (we don’t print in China), and so the wait won’t be too long for UK and EU backers. US backers have a little while longer to wait while the books cross the Atlantic. A cruel fact of our round, ocean-covered planet of shipping imposition. But awesome books day is not too far away!
Late pledges for The Trials of the Twin Seas open very soon. You can pre-order the a|state book right now.
These come unbound, and allow us to check that everything has printed as anticipated. And it has. The paper stock is great, and we’re delighted how the whole thing has come together.
And now we just wait on the bound books being ready, along with the Table Towers – which is our unique reverse GMs Screen. It’s intended to be folded into a triangular tower which displays a bunch of useful information for everyone playing.
Since the books are almost here, we’ll be opening pre-orders on our additional accessories for a|state very soon! In the meantime you can grab these:
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.
