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. The new edition of the book will be the same 21cm square format as The Silver Road, and they will sit together beautifully on your shelf.
In Spoons, In Knives Redux Edition is out now in PDF with print and PDF pre-orders now open.
“Just picked up Handiwork Games latest master work. Silver Road was a great piece of work and they’ve followed it up with another masterpiece. ‘In Spoons, In Knives’ deals with the industrial UK in the 30’s. The art in both of these is incredibly evocative and I could hear the drop hammers pounding away as I skimmed through Spoons. Having worked in a foundry in my late teens I can feel the heat of the molten iron in the ladle when paging through the book. I highly recommend both Silver Road and In Spoons, In Knives to people who enjoy story telling aspects of roleplaying. If you’d like to do Peaky Blinders or Call the Midwife then In Spoons, In Knives this is the rpg to do that sort of game.”
– Nigel Clarke
