Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland is a psychedelic Mesolithic storytelling game. This standalone book brings your stories to Forgotten Doggerland – the land that lies drowned beneath the North Sea.
Powered The Silver Road rules, you’ll take the role of the Maskwitches who struggle against evil spirits spawned by troubles of the hunter-gather community you protect.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland had an incredibly successful kickstarter, raising more than £8,000 on just the first day! It was just a week long campaign, but you can grab a copy on our webstore right now!
The PDF version is also out now at DrivethruRPG, along with the first story scenario, The Meat Spoiler,
On our store you can get a Predestined Events Tracker, Maskwitches Dice, Knap Tokens and the Masks and Amulet Deck!
After the end of the last ice age, when the earth warmed and tides began to rise, the place 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 location to set the weird tales of the now-forgotten witches.
Written by Jon Hodgson, this standalone RPG is illustrated in conversation with the Midjourney AI. Maskwitches explores what this strange tool can do in partnership with an artist.
(Since this project was completed in mid 2022, we’ve decided to step back from Midjourney. You can read about that here. But the book remains a testament to an exciting moment when so-called “AI” image generation appeared to be on the brink of something truly interesting…)
We have created hundreds of evocative and unusual art pieces giving us a glimpse through the keyhole of time into a distant past imagined by a piece of very 21st century technology. The process of creating Maskwitches was an art piece in and of itself.
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.
Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland uses The Silver Road rules.
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.
“Our souls passing like thread through a needle, the agaric elk urine reveals the unseen enemies. Fumes from beneath the earth. The chattering hungry dead. Flukes from inside the body grown huge. Anti-people rising from sour soil. Things without outlines. The spirit of bad trees.”
In addition to the imagined Mesolithic 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 Doggerland events taking place in flashback, and significant objects and entities connected across the ages.
Maskwitches is presented in the same 21cm square format as The Silver Road, but is a 144 page perfect bound softcover and an accompanying hardcover edition.
Get a look at a timeline of the historical events surrounding Maskwitches here:
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“The Naming of Spirits” is a preview of some of the tools found in Maskwitches. In this instance all about naming spirits.
Please be aware that:
• there is a reference to child mortality early in the text.
• there are some anatomical words in there, which can make some frightening combinations. They are meant to be terrifying 10,000 year-old spirits from a largely alien world, of which the human beings of The Land are extremely frightened, so that is to be expected. But forewarned is forearmed.
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“Placing stilled thoughts and frozen rhythms into the very guts of the earth. Fixing thoughts in ochre and pitch and resin.
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. The rivers are too full of old songs. Spirits rise.
A sinuous weaving of grace in dark places. Navigating the sunless red insides of the earth.”
The Meat Spoiler is the first story scenario for Maskwitches and is out now in print and at DrivethruRPG.
Maskwitches author Jon chatted to Orlanth Rex’s Gaming Vexes Podcast about the game. Listen here.
The Maskwitches Soundtrack is out now on DrivethruRPG!
Maskwitches Resources
Download a predestined event sheet and an underlay for the Predestined Event Tracker here:
