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Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhmmmmmm! It’s Doggerland time.

“The tools of ordinary people of the place we call Doggerland (most often simply called “The Land” by those who live there) are indistinguishable from ritual objects. The ability to change the future is a ritual function, and work done with tools is itself a spiritual affair.

Take for example a flint knife.

Its inception was in the invisible mind that imagined it. It was then birthed from an otherwise ordinary knuckle of flint, which could have rested unmoving in the ground or on a beach forever, but it was quickened by mind and other tools, themselves conduits for spiritual power that splits possibilities into probabilities and then certainties.

This cascade of events are not givens to the people of what we call Doggerland, and they hold the work of tools and tools themselves in high reverence.

All of their tools began as part of the landscape they inhabit: be they hand-chosen and knapped stones, carefully selected and carved wooden sticks, bunches of reeds, or tools made with animal sinew. The elevation of landscape into probability dividing magical implements is in itself significant.”

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is in the final stretch of its week-long Kickstarter campaign. Back it now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonhodgsonmaptiles2/maskwitches-of-forgotten-doggerland

The Silver Road Version 1 + Free PDF

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.

Original price was: £9.99.Current price is: £4.99.
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Maskwitches smashes all expectations!

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.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonhodgsonmaptiles2/maskwitches-of-forgotten-doggerland/description
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Cave Painting in Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland

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.

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland – a standalone Mesolithic story game goes live on kickstarter today at 5pm UK time! Click the image to be notified when it goes live:

Click to be emailed when the campaign goes live!
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a|state coins coming soon

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!

Find out more about a|state.

Find out more about The Three Coins

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a|state books arrive!

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.

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Maskwitches and creative honesty

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.

Click to sign up
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The Dragon Warriors Deluxe Print Boxed Set

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

Dragon Warriors Deluxe Art Book and Prints Boxed Set

A boxed set of 8 signed art prints and a softcover art book.

£50.00
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A look at the prototype of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland

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:

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Maskwitches Material Culture

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!

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A Maskwitches Timeline

Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is an upcoming setting for The Silver Road story telling game.


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.