Blog

Hello! Jon here! 2022 has certainly been an interesting year!

It has brought us lots of challenges as our little company grows. 

The stories that most impacted our year are not really mine to tell, but we faced a couple of very serious health issues in the team which were alarming to say the least. I think we’re all ending the year realising how much the team mean to one another, and there’s no way we could do what we do without every single team member. 

The rest of our challenges were the same old boring covid/global logistics/Brexit/UK-government-crashes-the-Pound boredom. I’ll spare you all that nonsense. Simply put, it’s tough to do business out of the UK right now. But it’s where we live, and so we’ll just keep trying!

We’ve certainly learned a lot in the process of overcoming the obstacles 2022 threw at us. 

There were of course some really great times too.

We experimented from January 2022 with a four-day working week for our full timers, and that was a great success. Due to some of the arising challenges I haven’t managed to remain on a four day week consistently, and the same has been true for Paul, but we’ve certainly recognised the benefits of it, and even the flexibility to shift back into five days when we need to has been useful. Productivity, when it comes to flat out creative jobs, is simply better on a 4 day week. Simple as that. Rest is good, and makes for better more creative work. 

In 2022 our second major RPG release, a|state second edition came out in pdf and then print! It’s another great looking book to add to our stable, and another thoughtful and innovative application of an existing system. It’s completely different to BEOWULF in so many ways, but there’s a common thread to these games. 

BEOWULF’s The Trials of the Twin Seas Kickstarter campaign was a rip-roaring success, and we’re in the process of getting those books out there right now. 

The Silver Road, In Knives In Spoons and Maskwitches all arrived in quick succession. It’s been lovely to see this curious side project grow such legs! 

We’re still boggled by how many people thought Maskwitches was worth their time. It’s a really unique and creative little project, and it’s heartening to see so many people backing it in the week long campaign. That will see a wider release in the new year, but stock will be limited as we move on from experimenting with AI generated imagery. I have some exciting plans for what we’ll develop Maskwitches art into, which will begin with some experiments for The Silver Road update. 

Right at the end of the year we opened the preorder for the Handimonsters Annual 2023, collecting the final batch of awesome monsters by Jacob, Gar and myself. It’s a jam packed little book, and it’s lovely to round off that project.

We had a very busy year in the Handiwork Studio, we illustrated and laid out a bunch of books for our friend Luke over at The DM Lair, and completed art and layout for Out of the Ashes for the mighty Paul Mitchener.

And of course, the whole time we’ve been working on some really cool and as yet unseen things. A bunch of new releases about to drop in the New Year. 

I’m very much looking forward to getting things really moving having had a nice rest over Christmas. 

We returned to the convention circuit this year. UK Games Expo was really good, and we enjoyed some clear financial benefits after being absent from shows for so long. It was really satisfying to meet so many people and sell so many books!

Tabletop Scotland was also great! It was lovely to host Tanya and their game, Be Seeing You. There’s something really special about being able to offer a bit of space at the last minute and see someone take that tiny boost and absolutely run with it. It’s what life is all about!

And that seems like a good place to end this little look back at some of our 2022. 

From all of us to all of you, we hope you have a happy and healthy New Years Eve, and we’re looking forward to seeing you again in 2023. 

As a special treat for reading this far, there’s 20% off almost* everything in the webstore for the next 24 hours when you spend £50 or over, with the code HNY23 at check out. 

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*pre-orders for Twin Seas and Maskwitches books and decks are excluded to be fair to those who have paid full price and are waiting for their books

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From everyone at Handiwork Games, we hope that you and yours have a peaceful festive period, however you choose to celebrate it.

Thank you for all your support over 2022. It’s been without doubt our most challenging year, but here we are at the end of it, with loads of great things happening at the start of 2023. We might do a review of the year for New Years. Or we might just enjoy a break!

If you’re at a loose end over Christmas Day, we have a friendly discord community which you’re welcome to pop into and say hi. Jon will be popping his head in through the day.

If you’d like to join up, point your browser at www.discord.me/handiworkgamers and it will generate you an invite.

Our webstore will remain open for orders over the Christmas break, but orders won’t be dispatched until we’re back in work at the beginning of January.

Handimonsters Annual 2023 is out now!

The second Handimonsters annual brings you a collection of 33 unique, 5e monsters to frighten challenge and delight your players!

Get the print book with free PDF:

https://handiwork.games/product/pre-order-handimonsters-annual-2023-free-pdf

Or grab just the PDF:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/420596/Handimonsters-Annual-2023?affiliate_id=267183

The Second Handimonsters Annual is a 48 page softcover book packed with new and unique monsters for your 5e games. The Floating Terror, The Mountain, The Mushroom Spider, The Pawg, The Skurrig and more!

Written by Jacob Rodgers, Jon Hodgson and Gareth Hanrahan, with art by Scott Purdy and Jon Hodgson. Layout by Paul Bourne.

Pre-orders open tomorrow Tuesday 19th December, with a copy of the PDF version absolutely free!

Gone to the Dogs took us to the Folly Hills Dog Track, introducing the track as a site of a whole bunch of troubles, a potential corner for your troublemakers and provided loads of material to help you run investigations in a|state second edition.

Now The Machine by Malcolm Craig and Morgan Davie brings us to Woebegone Crescent, where things are going badly wrong. It’s a ready-to-play struggle, which clearly shows you one way to play a|state second edition. It’s also a potential corner in which to base your troublemakers.

The Machine is packed with characters, locations and rumours to add enormous play value to your a|state game.

The Machine is in layout now, and will be initially released to backers of a|state second edition. It will then be available to buy on DrivethruRPG.

BEOWULF Trials of the Twin Seas roll out is progressing nicely, with a load more parcels to go out next week. Which means it’s time for us to open a general pre-order! If you’d like a copy of The Trials of the Twin Seas you’ll be able to place your pre-order on our site very soon! And of course you’ll get the PDF for free!

(Awesome helmet shown is by Wyrmwick Creations )

Jon speaking.

As you may know I’ve been a professional artist for a long time. At the beginning of 2022 I teamed up with another professional artist (Mike Franchina) to mess around with this obscure little image generator called Midjourney.

It was fascinating. I spent a LOT of time figuring out how it worked in practical terms.

And I came to understand the difference between the training images and the outputted images. That they don’t “touch”. There’s no collaging of pixel data – new images are generated based on mathematical training.

We lack proper words that reflect this process – but the AI is “looking” at images and making code from them. That code isn’t the images. And the code of thousands of images is recombined in such a way that what it spits out is a new image.

Due to the sophistication of the process you could be entirely forgiven for thinking Midjourney slices up images and rearranges “physical” parts of them. But that just isn’t what it does.

After a great deal of reading and experimentation I was satisfied that this was a new kind of thing, and no images were being reused in a sense that breaches current copyright.

Training an AI by “looking” at images doesn’t seem morally wrong to me, in the context of what Midjourney was. (Other AIs are available that do much more dubious things. It’s unfortunate we lump them all together.)

Fast forward a year, and the whole thing has exploded beyond all imagining, growing exponentially in popularity, and this once curious little experiment has become something else entirely. We’re now seeing how it is used by the mass of humans.

And as a result I have become increasingly uncomfortable with two things:

The nature of the data set that Midjourney learns from, and the apparent unwillingness to address it by the developers.
The way AI imagery is being used.

I think in many ways I see the Midjourney experiment as over. It’s much more like a flat out business now. It really wasn’t in the beginning. You couldn’t pay to be in the original beta version. What was once “what can this thing do?” Is now “this thing will make you an artist”.

That change is less and less palatable to me

For me, I was always interested in how weird and disturbing the output was. How strange and otherworldly it looked. I never had any interest in aping any artist’s style, and I very much saw AI imagery as additive – another strand or kind of image – never as a replacement. We certainly never attempted to hide that the imagery was machine generated. It was a feature of a games and art project.

When that replication of highly specific and individualised art styles became a thing I thought it was a really sad direction for AI imagery to go in, and missed (for me) the wonder of it. Whether that breaches current copyright law in debatable, and we’ll need to await the outcome of various law suits to know for sure. But it was a terrible direction for the thing to go in, and the strict adherence to copyright law is becoming increasingly beside the point.

I’ll confess my vexation at two things:

The poor use of langauge around how AI does what it does.
The results of people using it.

Both are disappointing, but it seems inevitable.

Due to the context of how AI imagery is both now used and received, we will, with some regret, start to close those projects down.

The upside to this is, we can replace all the Midjourney imagery with handmade art. That’s well within our powers, so Maskwitches and Silver Road as games won’t go away forever. But I think seeing the direction AI image generation has taken, it’s time to stop.

We’ll of course deliver everything we’ve promised in the Maskwitches kickstarter. And nothing will change for a little while. But the process of shifting geared in response to changing conditions is begun.

Tired of photographing your miniatures agains a boring blue board? Feel the photos you use make your miniatures and scenery look weird in your photos? Want more variety of distant scenery, with a style that actually complements your painting?

In this new download pack you’ll get 10 painted backdrops by Jon Hodgson, in A3 and A4 sizes. The images are delivered as PDFs for ease of printing.

Grab them now for just $4.99:

https://www.wargamevault.com/product/418198/Jon-Hodgson-Miniatures-Backdrops-Set-One

We have two sets of deals for this weekend:
At our web store get 50% off Jon Hodgson Map Tiles and Dice Trays, for this weekend only! Stock is limited, so don’t delay!
Meanwhile at DrivethruRPG, there’s a discount on loads of our fine titles, from BEOWULF, a|state, digital scenery and more!