The Adventure Overview series takes a look at the various adventures we’ve released for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes. We don’t spoil the adventure but we do tell you a little bit about the adventure setup and its themes.
The Witches and the Wyrm is the fourth adventure released for BEOWULF, following Horror at Herrogate. It was written by Jon Hodgson, and Jon, Scott Purdy and Paul Bourne provided the artwork. Editing/mechanical support was provided by Jacob Rodgers.
We encourage a progression for BEOWULF that allows a Hero to explore their newfound features for each new level, so it’s designed for heroes of levels 3 or 4.
The snake will not die and time does not turn properly. Three witches summon the Hero to do their bidding and conquer the defiant serpent. The Hero seems to step into some liminal space where the natural order of things has become broken because of the serpent’s refusal of the natural order of things.
5th Edition seems to be a hot topic right on social media and forums right now, and we’re seeing frequent reference to what a great implementation of 5e BEOWULF is, often paired with Adventures in Middle-earth, which we all worked on too! Which is really cool – thanks folks!
We’re continuing our experimentation with the 5e framework with our current series of Scenery Monsters over at www.handimonsters.com
Scenery Monsters are something adjacent to Lair Actions, but separated from a location, and expressed as a kind of lesser monster. Scenery Monsters are a stripped down kind of background creature that can spice up a location, without requiring the GM to deal with a whole stat block.
Scenery Monsters never make attack roll, have no hit points, and function a little more like traps, or obstacles, but embodied as creatures. Some can move around, some are static features, others are more abstracted.
One of the real strengths of the subscription model of Handimonsters is that we’ve been able to experiment with the core idea, and develop it week on week. Now that we’ve released a handful of Scenery Monsters we’re more able to cook down exactly how we design them to a list of questions:
• What is the saving throw the target makes, and how that can be interesting? For example, this week’s monster requires a Wisdom saving throw to avoid a condition. This means you can involve less able fighters as being key to resolving an encounter.
• What is the effect of failing the saving throw? We’ve avoided HP damage for the most part, favouring the infliction of conditions – disadvantage, poisoned or prone for example are all interesting conditions to wield during a battle, and can become a bit more interesting and varied than glancing at how many HP you have left.
• Why cant a PC run up to the Scenery Monster and do HP damage to it? Because Scenery Monsters don’t have a full stat block, and we don’t want the GM to track HP, this aspect needs to make sense, and be intuitive to the monster. We’ve used creatures that automatically flee, or become prone when approached. We’ve also used plant-like creatures that can’t be killed by attacking them with weapons. Any time a Scenery Monster would stand and fight toe to toe? It’s probably not a Scenery Monster.
• Why is “the attack” not an attack roll? Scenery Monsters do not make attack rolls. And this needs to make sense very quickly. It could be its “attack” is a barely-directed cloud of gas, or because it’s a volley of rubbish thrown very general direction by unskilled civilians. The “attack” of a Scenery Monster becomes more about the Player Characters’ resistance to it than skill in combat.
• If the monster doesn’t have HP, how is it overcome, or can it indeed be overcome? Sometimes it’s ok to deploy a creature that must just be avoided, or which makes a part of a location less favourable to traverse. But sometimes that can be an unsatisfying feature of an encounter. And we all know how some players want to attack everything. It is also important to give the players some kind of agency in being able to do something to affect the Scenery Monster. Shutting it down for a number of rounds is a nice outcome of specific actions on the part of the players.
We’re coming to the end of our first run of Scenery Monsters – and you can grab the entire back catalogue of all of our monsters when you sign up at www.handimonsters.com – but we’ll be back with more!
You can also get all of last year’s handimonsters in the 2022 Annual!
Hello everyone! We have some fantastic updates for you from the worlds of Jon Hodgson Maps, Handimonsters and BEOWULF!
BEOWULF NEWS
First up, let’s talk about the BEOWULF Annual 2022. This is a compilation of the Digital Packs and other bonus releases, all collected together for your convenience in a gorgeous print book.
It has a variety of resources contained within, including new Followers, Gifts, and Burdens, advance on Hero creation, resources for magical items and weapons, plus much. much more!
We’re expecting stock to arrive with us this week, and we’ll share photos as soon as it arrives!
Get the full-colour perfect-bound book (with free PDF) here: here
We’re delighted to announce a new product for BEOWULF: The Trials of the Twin Seas. This adventure anthology will collect our digital adventure releases (including the Triple Serpent, see below) in a print edition. We’re going to use this opportunity to make additions and revisions to our adventures, so they’ll be improved and expanded from their original versions. We’ll bring the Trials of the Twin Seas to Kickstarter soon!
The Triple Serpent
Written by Gareth Hanrahan, the Triple Serpent is our final digital adventure that was unlocked during the original BEOWULF Kickstarter. It’s a complex adventure based on mythology from Gar’s native Ireland and we’re sure you will enjoy it!
If you’ve missed any of the already released BEOWULF adventures, grab them here.
Character Queue
Waelwulf was our latest Hero to be featured on Character Queue! With him, the series is coming to at least a pause, but we’ll have a new series of feature articles to reveal next week.
Handimonster News!
We’ve got some awesome fan feedback to check out, and then we want to remind everyone about the Handimonster Annual.
Scenery Monsters
Jared Rascher has an interesting analysis of our brand new scenery monsters over on Twitter. A creation of Jon’s imagination, scenery monsters come with simple mechanics and easy adjudication so you can some colour to a scene without a lot of overhead.
Handimonsters Annual 2022
Speaking of lots of material with low overhead, this book collects our Handimonsters output from the previous year, giving you a wide variety of 5e monsters.
You can order the full-colour perfect-bound book (with free PDF) from our website: here
We have a brand-new VTT scenery map pack to celebrate:
This set of bridge .png files can be arranged in any number of ways in the VTT platform of your choice, to create endlessly varied river crossings. There are long and short stone bridges, broken down stone bridges, rope bridges, wooden bridges, a ford and stepping stones.
These all work on a background that is compatible with the Northern Wilderness Construction set. There are tokens to create pebble banks, and grassy river banks, and two widths of river. In total there are 17 pngs of bridges and 13 tokens to create the scenery underlying your bridge. As a bonus there are also 4 premade maps using these assrts and some bonus items from the Northern Wilderness Construction set by way of example.
You’ll find new monsters, articles on building characters, new Followers, useful treasures, magical weapons, an example of combat, a sword name generator, things to see at sea, and more!
It will be available in PDF, and if you have already bought Digital Packs 1 to 8 on the day of release, you’ll get the PDF free.
What’s not included
We’ve been selective in what’s in the Annual, focusing on the written gaming content. There are things from the Digital Packs that are not included.
We haven’t added all the battle maps and tokens from the digital packs, since they don’t seem very useful printed in a US-letter-sized book.
The print and play story cards from pack eight aren’t in there either – again they don’t seem very useful printed in a book. No one wants 11 pages of cards to cut out of a book!
There’s no Digital Pack video content included, nor any of the form-fillable PDF character, follower or monster sheets.
And of course the atmospheric background music doesn’t print so well.
This means the digital packs are still well worth your time at the great price of just $2.99 each. Even if you grab the collected Annual!
Find out more about BEOWULF Age of Heroes for 5th Edition here.
The Three Ogre Brothers is the introductory scenario for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes. It’s a bit unusual as such scenarios go, since it’s a more complex situation than a typical BEOWULF adventure. But we wanted to give players a good result for their investment and also build off of The Hermit’s Sanctuary, our free adventure.
The adventure begins with a prologue, suggested by Jon, that sets the mood. The Ogre Lands were once the kingdoms of men, and rightfully belongs to them. The Hero meets the ghost of the dispossessed king and his slain sons in a church near to the starting location for the adventure.
To celebrate the release of Digital Pack Eight, heres 8 things about BEOWULF:
1: BEOWULF is an ENnie-award nominated setting and set of additional rules for 5e.
2: It’s aimed at making 5e shine for one player and one GM.
3: The player takes on the role of the Hero class in the myths of the “dark ages”.
4: There are 6 subclasses, one for each ability score. So there are Strength Heroes, Dexterity Heroes, Charisma Heroes and so on.
5: Lone Heroes are bolstered by Followers – NPCs that work a little bit like spells, coming into the spotlight when they perform an action and then retreating into the background.
6: Digital Packs are packages of additional content for the game, including new material in PDF, music, useful VTT assets, new monsters, beautiful battle maps and more.
7: There is a whole series of adventures for BEOWULF Age of Heroes available in PDF.
8: You can start your Hero’s story for FREE with the full-length ENnie-Nominated Hermit’s Sanctuary adventure.
BEOWULF Digital Packs bring you fresh material monthly for your BEOWULF Age of Heroes games. In this eighth Digital Pack of bonus content for BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, we bring you:
A deck of 44 print and play Story Cards to inspire your adventures and NPCs, complete with instructions
2 battle maps
A set of VTT tokens
A PDF about Boundary Ghosts
A PDF adventure “Fragment” featuring a Boundary Ghost
The first Handimonsters Annuals arrived, and preorders went out – individually to the UK, and en masse to the US. They should arrive in the US next week, and be sent on to you. We’d originally planned to also print in the US, but (slightly bizarre?) changes to pricing on that specific size of book with our US printer meant a change of plan. Still, it’s barely a couple of days difference, so all good!
In our email newsletter this week we’ll take an exclusive look at the contents of the BEOWULF art book. You can subscribe to the newsletter here:
Upcoming
Releasing in the near future we have The Triple Serpent for BEOWULF Age of Heroes, and the BEOWULF Annual! We’ll have more news on those soon.
This Monday’s Handimonster is Barrow Moss, the first of our Scenery Monsters that bring a new twist to background monsters that don’t quite need their own stat block, but still make adventures more fun to run and challenging to play!
And lastly and perhaps most excitingly, we’ll have Hellenistika news too! We have a whole chapter on hand!
The Handimonsters Annual 2022 collects our last year’s releases of monsters into one fantastic print format! Here’s a little bit about one of the monsters and how it can be to be…
The Stonerooster was not an easy monster to bring forth, but I’m proud of the eventual approach that we used and just how unusual a monster it is. It began life and a monster drawn out by Scott, with (as far as I know), no particular asperations as to what it was capable of. The beast had these strange, hynoptic almost-style eyes, so that was some inspiration. But was also rather ugly and I wasn’t really sure what was going on there.
A bit of pondering and some snatches of old jazz standards had me thinking about rooster eggs and so I decided that could be a bit of fun. What if we have a creature so weird and magical that it really does lay (well, find) rooster eggs and they hatch?
But something we always keep in mind when making our games is that not everyone gets to splash out on all the bells and whistles. So we’re committed to making games that can be played just as effectively without the fancy stuff.
The inspiration mat and tokens from BEOWULF are fine examples of this. While we love the feeling we get from playing with the fancy versions, we began developing those tools with far more basic implements. And the BEOWULF inspiration pool that powers duet play in 5e works just fine with a piece of paper and some buttons (or in the above example a flower, an acorn and a groovy beach pebble. Cozy style!). Indeed, that’s how they began, long before we considered (admittedly incredibly beautiful, weighty and atmospheric) metal tokens and neoprene play mats.
And of course there’s a nice halfway house available as part of The Hermit’s Sanctuary in the form of a printable inspiration pool and tokens you can cut out and stick to board or coins.
Likewise, our heroic-sized Q-Workshop BEOWULF dice are a lovely thing to hold and roll, but you don’t need them to play – three (or even two) different coloured D20s work perfectly well.
Of course this all stems back to Bang and Twang, where the game comes with everything you need to play, but if you want to get fancy you can get a lovely set of metal coins to play with.
With all that in mind it seemed worthwhile taking a moment to mention if you’re playing any of our games with stuff you’ve made yourself, we’d really love to see it. And if you’re just using pencils and paper, you’re playing the real thing too.
