BEOWULF. a|state. Maskwitches. Cold City:Hot War. FiveEvil
FiveEvil by Morgan Davie (a|state, Diceratops Presents, Doctor Who RPG) is 5th Edition completely dismembered and reimagined to deliver the horror genre. We’re neck deep in writing and play testing, but in honour of the upcoming Halloween weekend we present five things you WON’T do in FiveEvil:
Your character’s won’t get the chance to benefit from anything so predictable. When you act, the horror acts. Can you do the thing? Because the horror will also do its thing at the same time.
In today’s KING BEOWULF update, we talk about The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki. A huge influence on KING BEOWULF. In this instance the Penguin Classics Edition, translated by Jesse L Byock.
Let’s take a look at The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki!
This book was a big influence on the development of KING BEOWULF. I pulled it off the shelf at just the right time to turbo-charge where KING BEOWULF needed to go, and what it needed to address as a book. I had a lot of unformed questions, and King Hrolf was there to answer.
Continue reading “Stop! Kraki Time!”
Hello. Jon Here.
A few people have asked questions about this topic, and there are some heroes in the sorry tale which I would like to highlight. It also feels like a story that should be told definitively and in one place. So without further ado, the whole sorry tale of our missing Twin Seas pallet, in detail, for your reading pleasure. And once this story is told here, we can point to this post without having to retell the story. ever. again.
We’ve been remiss in not updating the blog!
It’s all going on over at the KING BEOWULF kickstarter! We funded in just 2 hours, and we’ve been smashing through stretch goals ever since!
The campaign is currently way over £14,000!
And check out this lovely graphics describing what happens in each season in a Kingdom game:
Check out the campaign video!
In KING BEOWULF you’ll found your kingdom, learning (or choosing) what class it has, you’ll raise a hall which gives it a background, you’ll recruit advisors who act as skills. And your kingdom enjoys a new ability score – Prosperity – made up from your Scires (pronounced “shires”), and each season you’ll get to choose what to do with the fruits of your people’s labour. Come winter you’ll need to prove that you’ve been a wise ruler as you pay out from your ring hoard to see your people through the cold months.
Read more in our free 4 page preview:
Sign up to be notified when the campaign goes live so you can get in early!
Find out more about KING BEOWULF here.
As you build your kingdom in KING BEOWULF you might well want a visual aid to help you. You might draw a map showing your various scires and their prosperity. You might download one of our maps, (should we fund on kickstarter!)
Or! You might want one of our KING BEOWULF map kits, which will be an add-on at the campaign. These sets will be printed in full colour, on 3mm MDF, laser cut into a beautiful set of tiles. Each tile represents a portion of your kingdom, and has a token slot which represents the prosperity of that particular scir (pronounced “shire” but with an older spelling).
We’ve chosen a really interesting shape that makes a strongly thematic map that you can build up in play. At the end of a session, just take a photo with your phone, and put the pieces away for next time!
Check out the prototype in progress, with bonus Jon waffling:
Find out more about KING BEOWULF here.
Sign up to be notified of the campaign launch here.
Learn more about BEOWULF here.
(Sign ups are open right now for the KING BEOWULF campaign, which launches on Tuesday 17th October)
When we first set about seriously nailing the aims of BEOWULF Age of Heroes, several themes came out:
To solve a problem for 5e players. We all liked 5e, but we knew “just another 5e book” wasn’t an option for us. It needed to identify something that players struggle with, and provide a solution. For BEOWULF, that’s duet play: the ability to have a satisfying 5e gaming session with one GM and one player. The delight in the voices of playtesters when they realised they need only find one other player to get a BEOWULF game going will stick with us forever!
We also wanted to make use of what we were good at: adapting source material, knowing a bunch about the early medieval period and the deep influences we learned about working on Tolkien games, as well as an aptitude for the kind of art Jon is known for.
KING BEOWULF is no different in this regard. We wanted to identify a problem and present an elegant solution, one which allows players to have more fun, and be more creative than ever before.
Continue reading “KING BEOWULF: on playability”Hey it’s Friday!
So we’re all hard at work on what is basically “Phase 2” (Or is it 3? Maybe it’s 3?) of Handiwork Games. We have a ton of great new books coming down the pipe – KING BEOWULF, FiveEvil, Maskwitches 2, a new title for a|state, The Burn for The Silver Road, some weird thing Jon is working on, and this, as yet unrevealed title.
Any guesses? (We have mentioned we’re doing this, but not very loudly just yet… and this is only half of the thing.)
Hope you’re getting some gaming done this weekend!
It’s National Poetry Day! Many of our BEOWULF Age of Heroes titles have poems penned by talented poet and story teller Dave Oliver of Rattlebox Theatre. Here are all of the poems from The Trials of the Twin Seas.
We’re now ready to publish the commercial licences for Jon Hodgson Backdrops Books.
If it’s something you think you’d benefit from, you can grab one here on our web store.
The commercial licence was something we offered during the Kickstarter campaign, and due to the runaway success of the project we’ve taken a little bit of time to hone the wording and make sure it’s the plain English, easy to understand document we wanted it to be.